There aren't that many multiprocessor Opteron platforms for Microsoft to test on. Yours is probably one of them, and in the unlikely event that you do have problems it'll probably be a BIOS issue that Tyan can quickly fix. Meanwhile, your 32-bit OS will run better than it would on a Xeon platform.
I think it's good that we find out about Abu Ghraib. There is a fine line between keeping information secret to promote security and keeping information secret to deny culpability.
Except that in the case of your example, the abusers at Abu Ghraib were already being prosecuted (or on their way there) when CBS decided to hand the Islamofascists a steaming pile of Grade A propaganda. Next time such a situation is discovered they're going to cover it up, if they have any brains at least. If they still get caught, they'll blame Dan Rather (or one of his fellow travelers) with considerable justification.
Honestly, were journalists like this during WWII? I don't think FDR would have tolerated what CBS did.
As to the P2P leaks site: he did it right. There's enough there to get proper attention but nothing that will cause direct harm. Now, whether the reaction to the site will be constructive or not will be interesting to see.
HP has rigged the BIOS in their notebooks to reject "unapproved" miniPCI wireless cards. They claim the FCC made them do it (it's in their hardware guide IIRC, page 8-1) because the card and antenna have to be approved as a set. So I've been stuck with this Linux-hostile Broadcom card and can't use the Linux-friendly Atheros card I went through a great deal of trouble to hunt down (and is for sale on eBay).
With this rule change, will HP remove this restriction from their BIOS? No, please, stop laughing...
FWIW, it's just HP/Compaq and some IBM notebooks that do this, so HP's excuse seems rather weak to me.
because all they're doing is substituting SBC/etc's marketing and accounting weasles for their own. It's the same network, they just give you an additional point of failure for no significant benefit.
Cell phone companies have their own networks. Cable companies doing telephone service have their own network. Reselling a regulated monopoly's service and calling it "choice" is a joke.
Hey AT&T: take your $billions and build us fiber-to-the-home (or close as you can) high-speed Internet access. THAT I'd pay for. But you've probably pissed away too much cash to do that at this point and were never smart enough to begin with.
Athlon 64 CPU (highest speed that fits price limit) ASUS motherboard (K8V or A8V depending on which CPU you picked) 1GB Corsair PC3200C2 RAM BFG GeForceFX 6800GT video card (wherever you can find one) WD 10K RPM SATA drive, or Seagate or Hitachi 7200RPM SATA drive, use the ASUS's onboard Promise SATA controller (not the VIA SATA) Thermalright heatsink (Alpha and Zalman CNPS7000A-AlCu are good too), Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound Pioneer DVD burner Audigy 2ZS soundcard (optional) Floppy drive (or not?) Altec-Lansing analog headset (optional, 500-series I think) Lian-Li V1200 case (or other V1xxx series) Seasonic Super Tornado 400W high-efficiency power supply (see Silicon Acoustics)
I think that's everything. Try to squeeze in an Athlon 64 3500+ 939-pin CPU so you can use the dual-channel A8V motherboard but it's not too big of a deal if you can't (I'm running a 3200+ on a K8V Deluxe).
Anyhow, that'll get you a kickass 64-bit Linux box. I'm running 64-bit UT2004 on slightly older hardware with great success so I have high hopes for Doom 3, though I'll probably want to get a 6800 series card anyhow.
The 2GHz Athlon 64 3200+ will perform at least as well as a 3.2GHz Pentium 4, and will burn less power doing so (especially compared to the new Prescott-core P4). The Athlon 64's go up to 3800+.
I'm hoping that id releases a 64-bit Linux build of Doom3 like Epic has done with UT2004. I've been having lots of fun playing UT on my Athlon 64 3200+ desktop with BFG GeForceFX 5900XTOC under 64-bit Fedora Core 2. Frame rate just isn't a problem at 1280x1024 res. nVidia has done an outstanding job with their latest Linux drivers. You can still play 32-bit games under 64-bit Linux (I tested Wolfenstein:ET), but you get that nice performence boost with true 64-bit binaries (due to having twice as many registers available in AMD64 mode as much as anything else).
Yeah, this one. Pity it uses an ATI video chip (which lacks the OUTSTANDING 64-bit Linux drivers nVidia has), but at least they used the best one (128MB Radeon 9700). And pity about the Broadcom wireless and wired network chips, but at least it's 802.11g and gigabit, respectively. Other than those two complaints, if you want to make TiBook owners drool, this is the notebook to get. (No, I don't have one. Having played 64-bit UT2004 on my desktop I'm holding out for a proper AMD64 nVidia notebook.)
I put a Mobile Athlon 64 3200+ (62W) in my ASUS K8V Deluxe motherboard, replacing a standard 3200+ desktop chip. It works exactly as you'd expect. Getting a heatsink to fit was tricky since the notebook chips are "lidless" (no aluminum lid protecting the core), but Zalman's CNPS7000A-AlCu (don't use the all-copper version, it's twice the weight) fit. Alpha's didn't. Just be real careful not to overtighten the screws. Supposedly the lidless CPUs can be cooled better but that lid was put there for a reason.
That said, you can undervolt most of the Athlon 64's quite a bit. I've used ClockGen under WinXP to undervolt the DTR 3200+ in my notebook to 1.3V @ 2GHz, down from the standard 1.5V. Perfectly stable. See here, and check silentpcreview.com (which got me started on all this).
Anyone know how to manually set core voltage levels under 64-bit Linux? Then verify that I didn't push things too far?
Or to pretty much anywhere in America besides the People's State of California.
I almost headed out to Silicon Valley during the boom, but after considering that state taxes are literally double what they are here in Michigan, the cost of housing is 2+ times as much, traffic is worse, people expect you to work way longer hours, and federal taxes are going to bite down hard on that extra marginal income, I figured: what's the point?
Plus I never did get the hang of Spanish...
Oh yeah, the weather. Well, there are a lot of states that have better weather than Michigan, so there.
For 64-bit Fedora Core 2, we were not able to install NVIDIA's graphics driver with the default kernel. Thus, their 64-bit tests must be omitted from the benchmark.
If you install the updated FC2 kernel (any of them from the past month or two), nVidia's new 64-bit drivers install without trouble. I've been playing 64-bit UT2004 and tested 32-bit Wolfenstein:ET on my Athlon 64 3200+ box w/BFG GeForceFX 5900XTOC and suffice it to say that nVidia has done an OUTSTANDING job on their new drivers. I can't compare the 64-bit Linux version of UT2004 to the Windows version because I wiped Windows XP from the machine. If games don't run under Linux, well, I shouldn't waste time playing them anyhow. (I trust that Doom 3 will have a 64-bit Linux build?)
it seems that North Korea and Iran heard it as "We'll invade you if we don't like you unless you have nukes, so you better get some if you want to keep your country"
You think they didn't already know that? Iran and NK have had their nuclear programs going for way, way longer than Bush has been in office. Remember how the Clinton Administration stupidly agreed to give NK two light-water nuclear reactors in exchange for their promise to stop developing nuclear warheads? We now know they never stopped, and the largesse we gave them just helped prop up their tottering government.
NK has 10,000+ hardened artillery tubes pointed at the SK capital and SK (a fellow democracy) doesn't want us to invade NK. Iranian dissidents mostly don't want us to invade Iran, and they're getting very close to bringing that government down peacefully (Iran is at the same point the Soviets were in their final years). Iraqi dissidents mostly wanted us to knock off Saddam (Kurds and Shias more than Sunnis of course), something that our left-wing media tends not to report (some journalists had to be given a police escort away from a crowd of Iraqi immigrants celebrating the fall of Baghdad here in Michigan, they've been at least as pissed about the biased media coverage as hard-core right-wingers like me). Out of the three nations, taking care of Iraq made the most sense, and it has proven instructive to our enemies. It would be nice if the former Soviet useful idiots would get a clue and stop undermining us though.
He's not build the cruise missile to sell to anyone, but rather, to prove to ignorant governments that anyone with enough money and expertise could do the very same.
President Bush has already gotten the hint. It's what the Iraq war was really about. Sooner or later, pretty much any hostile regime with enough talent and/or wealth (more the latter than the former) will be able to build all sorts of toys that we really, REALLY don't want them to have, especially if there's even a slim chance that they'll hand them over to the type of people who think it's a good idea to drive jumbo jets into buildings. Changing one regime in the middle of the worst neighborhood and hoping like hell the domino theory kicks in was the best available option.
Remember kids, America built nuclear bombs with 1940's technology.
The F3200 uses the 128MB Radeon 9700, and I've found a few other notebooks using that same GPU... but I'd much prefer a GeForce 5700 for Linux compatibility. ATI hasn't released 64-bit Linux drivers yet, not even in beta. You can find a list of Athlon 64 notebooks here, but several of them aren't available in America (ASUS has a particularly nice one but the cowards won't stand up to Intel marketing and sell it here).
Outside of the antiquated graphics chip the zv5000z is a pretty nice notebook. I swapped out the slow 4200RPM HD for a 7200RPM one (easy and made a HUGE diff), wireless range is excellent, the 1680x1050 res widescreen is stunning (you can get 1920x1200 res now), the 12-cell battery gives about 4 hours of moderate use (web surfing and what not), I've been unable to get it to overheat (unlike my previous two notebooks), very well built notebook. Fedora Core 2 installs easily, though I had to do a little manual editing of xorg.conf for the 1680x1050 res. The problems are really dumb things that could be easily fixed if HP cared: there should be a 5400RPM and/or 7200RPM HD option, HP should either force Broadcom to release their wireless drivers or switch to Atheros, they rigged their BIOS to reject non-HP miniPCI cards (bastards! IBM does this too but no one else), K8 Errata #93 isn't patched in the BIOS, it's insanely picky about memory (likes Micron chips, otherwise you'd better buy PC3200 grade memory and hope for the best)... and the new BIOS that they're shipping that still isn't on the support webpage might fix a couple of those problems. The notebook is built by Compal and shipped directly from Shanghai via FedEx. Bluetooth is neat too, I haven't figured out how to configure it properly under Linux but it shows up as a standard USB Bluetooth device so I know I can eventually get it to work (got it to find my mouse, but Linux Bluetooth support hasn't been made user-friendly yet). Overall, with the exception of the evil Broadcom wireless and weak GPU it makes a pretty slick Linux notebook.
eMachines was my second choice. I wanted the upgrade options HP had and really wanted a nVidia graphics chip, and hoped the old GeForce 440 wouldn't be as bad as it turned out to be. (Think GeForce 440MX desktop graphics.) Sure, it beats integrated video, but... geeze.
It sounds like Gateway bought eMachines for their management. I'd expect Gateway to become like eMachines rather than the other way around. That bodes well for AMD. We should be seeing lots of new product launches from everyone as the back-to-school season ramps up and the new AMD 90nm chips start hitting the market.
AMD's current 35W Athlon 64 2800+ (used in the Acer Ferarri 3200 notebook) is getting close, and from the leaked roadmap AMD will be down to 25W with the new 90nm chips that will be available later this year. AMD's main problem is, as usual, marketing weasles who swear up and down that customers don't want AMD chips, even when we beat them over the head and scream SELL ME A PROPER ATHLON 64 NOTEBOOK! Acer and eMachines have done a pretty good job, HP would have if they hadn't stupidly used a 3-year-old nVidia video chip in their AMD64 notebooks (marketing weasles at work again)...
The AMD chips have far better power management than Intel has too. My HP zv5000z has a DTR Athlon 64 3200+. It slows down by 400MHz and lowers the core voltage from 1.5V to 1.3V when unplugged, whichs cuts power consumption almost in half. Heat exhaust under full CPU load is barely warm. The DTR line is the least efficient, Mobile and Low-Voltage Athlon 64's would do better. Beats the heck out of Intel SpeedStep.
According to at least one tester. The higher latency overwhelms the bandwidth advantage. Given that AMD already had a big latency advantage with their 64-bit chips and the higher cost of DDR2, I don't see the big deal. Pushing DDR2 isn't as bad as pushing RDRAM, but...
RAID? That's nice, just about every high-end AMD board has a SATA RAID controller from Promise, Silicon Image, etc.
The audio is kinda neat, if there are Linux drivers. I doubt it's as good as a proper card but you can't argue with the price.
Anyone who buys Intel's "Extreme" integrated graphics to play current games is in for an extreme disappointment.
Seasonic Super series power supplies. My UPS load meter registered a ~15% drop in PC power consumption after I switched to these from Antec. Highly, highly recommended.
Also, use AMD 64-bit CPUs and set/sys/devices/systsem/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_sets peed to match the power/performence balance you think is best. See the Athlon 64 Processor Power and Thermal Data Sheet. For example, a current top-of-the-line Athlon 64 3800+ burns 89W at 1.5V at maximum (better than Intel, but still a lot). If you lower the clock speed by 200MHz, the chip burns 72W @ 1.4V, another 200MHz lower burns 53W @ 1.3V, and another 200MHz lower burns 39W @ 1.2V. You can cut it all the way back to 22W max, 1000MHz @ 1.1V. With the current Fedora Core 2 kernel and a power management daemon like powernowd the speed will be adjusted automagically, but if you want to run Folding @ Home without excessively spiking your electric bill it's nice to set a fixed speed manually.
The Mobile Athlon 64 3200+ (62W @ 1.4V max) is interesting if you really want to limit power consumption. I put one in my ASUS K8V Deluxe motherboard (Zalman CNPS7000A-AlCu heatsink, be VERY careful not to overtighten it and crack the unprotected core as there's no protective aluminum lid like on the desktop CPUs, not all heatsinks will fit). Drop 200MHz and get 46W, another 200MHz gets 34W, and at 800MHz a mere 13W. Given that the new Prescott-core Pentium 4's burns well north of 100W, this is pretty neat. Note that since AMD's transistors have a MUCH lower leakage level than Intel's (20% versus 50%) your idle power consumption at any clock rate is going to be pretty low. Things will get even better when the new 90nm chips come out in a few months.
There's a couple of reasons. One, we don't have anywhere near the population density of Europe. Two, the politicians and FCC bureaucrats who "deregulated" the telecom market didn't know WTF they were doing. Instead of saying "Anyone who wants to can build a network", they forced the telcos to lease their networks to other companies at regulated rates who then merely market DSL service. Yes, sometimes that works well (see Speakeasy), but for the most part it just doesn't encourage the telcos to spend $billions on hardware that the politicians then force them to lease to competitors. For some reason cable TV companies were mostly left alone, but newcomers (and the bankers/investors who'd finance them) are scared of getting the telco treatment, so nothing much gets done.
There's been lots of talk of the need to fix this in Forbes and nationalreview.com, but the Republicans in office haven't made it a priority and even if they did the Democrats would filibuster the legislation.
I'm not sure which is worse, the telecom mess or the "deregulation" of the California electricity market, where the power companies (who became power distributors, not actually owning most of the generating capacity) naively assumed that the state politicians wouldn't block EVERY ATTEMPT to build new power plants for an entire decade during a population boom. Price, meet Supply and Demand.
...but majorly you know some of the computers will break and students will drag them down to the university computer shop and therefore it helps if you limit what most people are using to a few brands.
They're Dells. It's pretty much a given that they're going to break. A lot. Though I suppose Dell's outsourcing of tech support to Indians is much easier when the Indians are already on campus...
Anyhow, if I was a university IT admin, I'd be mandating Athlon 64 machines just so I'd have a few less Windows worms clogging my network once Microsoft ships WinXP Service Pack 2 (adds support for the NX bit, No eXecute, which AMD64 series chips have and Intel 32-bit chips don't, stops buffer overrun attacks). Plus they'd put less of a load on the university power grid than the Prescott-core Pentium 4 "Blast Furnace Edition", even before enabling power management.
FWIW, 64-bit Fedora doesn't require a kernel recompile to use the nVidia closed-source drivers, but you do need the driver patch from minion.de. You'll also need to add "alias char-major-195 nvidia" to/etc/modprobe.conf, or modprobe nvidia manually. Don't forget to make the usual changes to/etc/X11/xorg.conf. Anyhow, I've been running 64-bit UT2004 under FC2 Test 3 for a while now and it works great, after getting the beta version mentioned here (hopefully there will be an official UT2004 upgrade soon?).
It's great to see x86_64 Linux on equal footing with 32-bit x86 Linux. If you've been waiting for an excuse to switch over to AMD64, now's the time.
Universities could collect, say, a $5 per student course fee for an official license for the e-book. O'Reilly or Amazon or someone new could handle distribution and payment collection. There would be no copy protection or other annoyances, paying students could download (and keep) the complete books and everyone could view them online. Payment would largely be on the honor system. It would be useful to have a single, organized site to distribute the books.
The course fee approach would be very efficient and still provide a nice recurring revenue stream. Overhead in general would be minimal.
The biggest potential flaw: are professors and administrators honest enough to collect and pay the course fees?
I think this system would fit academia extremely well.
1) Buy an Athlon 64 PC 2) Enable PowerNow! power management 3) Buy a power supply with a variable-speed fan (I recommend this one) and enable CPU fan speed control on the motherboard (Q-Fan in ASUS's BIOS, IIRC).
When you're just reading Slashdot, the CPU runs at 800MHz and power consumption drops waaay down. When you're playing UT2004, the CPU runs flat out and the fans speed up. It works extremely well.
What you have to remember is that the Athlon 64 series has very good power management, far better than Intel SpeedStep. When you're not doing anything stressful (say, reading Slashdot), the CPU slows and the core voltage drops down. The desktop Athlon 64's drop to 800MHz, my notebook says it's at 318MHz right now. If you need processing power that'll stomp a Pentium-M, it'll do that too. Oh, and you can run 64-bit Linux. And have the NX bit for neutralizing buffer overrun attacks in Windows XP SP2.
The heat output of my HP zv5000z Athlon 64 3200+ notebook with the CPU maxed out is fairly impressive but I've yet to be able to get it to overheat. (The Compaq r3000z is equivalent.) You can get 1920x1200 res screens for them now too. Pity HP used Linux-hostile Broadcom wireless cards and rigged their BIOS to explicitly reject non-HP wireless miniPCI cards (dumb!), but what can y'do (IBM and Dell do too, eMachines doesn't).
Anyhow, if I could get a mid-to-lightweight notebook with a low-voltage Athlon 64 2700+, top-of-the-line screen, Atheros WiFi (very Linux friendly), and GeForce 5700 Mobile, I'd probably upgrade again. The zv5000z's GeForce 440 is fine for getting work done and strategy games but woefully inadequate for UT2004. (Are you listening HP?)
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There aren't that many multiprocessor Opteron platforms for Microsoft to test on. Yours is probably one of them, and in the unlikely event that you do have problems it'll probably be a BIOS issue that Tyan can quickly fix. Meanwhile, your 32-bit OS will run better than it would on a Xeon platform.
Worst case, switch to Linux. (Best case?)
I think it's good that we find out about Abu Ghraib. There is a fine line between keeping information secret to promote security and keeping information secret to deny culpability.
Except that in the case of your example, the abusers at Abu Ghraib were already being prosecuted (or on their way there) when CBS decided to hand the Islamofascists a steaming pile of Grade A propaganda. Next time such a situation is discovered they're going to cover it up, if they have any brains at least. If they still get caught, they'll blame Dan Rather (or one of his fellow travelers) with considerable justification.
Honestly, were journalists like this during WWII? I don't think FDR would have tolerated what CBS did.
As to the P2P leaks site: he did it right. There's enough there to get proper attention but nothing that will cause direct harm. Now, whether the reaction to the site will be constructive or not will be interesting to see.
HP has rigged the BIOS in their notebooks to reject "unapproved" miniPCI wireless cards. They claim the FCC made them do it (it's in their hardware guide IIRC, page 8-1) because the card and antenna have to be approved as a set. So I've been stuck with this Linux-hostile Broadcom card and can't use the Linux-friendly Atheros card I went through a great deal of trouble to hunt down (and is for sale on eBay).
With this rule change, will HP remove this restriction from their BIOS? No, please, stop laughing...
FWIW, it's just HP/Compaq and some IBM notebooks that do this, so HP's excuse seems rather weak to me.
because all they're doing is substituting SBC/etc's marketing and accounting weasles for their own. It's the same network, they just give you an additional point of failure for no significant benefit.
Cell phone companies have their own networks. Cable companies doing telephone service have their own network. Reselling a regulated monopoly's service and calling it "choice" is a joke.
Hey AT&T: take your $billions and build us fiber-to-the-home (or close as you can) high-speed Internet access. THAT I'd pay for. But you've probably pissed away too much cash to do that at this point and were never smart enough to begin with.
Off the top of my head:
Athlon 64 CPU (highest speed that fits price limit)
ASUS motherboard (K8V or A8V depending on which CPU you picked)
1GB Corsair PC3200C2 RAM
BFG GeForceFX 6800GT video card (wherever you can find one)
WD 10K RPM SATA drive, or Seagate or Hitachi 7200RPM SATA drive, use the ASUS's onboard Promise SATA controller (not the VIA SATA)
Thermalright heatsink (Alpha and Zalman CNPS7000A-AlCu are good too), Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound
Pioneer DVD burner
Audigy 2ZS soundcard (optional)
Floppy drive (or not?)
Altec-Lansing analog headset (optional, 500-series I think)
Lian-Li V1200 case (or other V1xxx series)
Seasonic Super Tornado 400W high-efficiency power supply (see Silicon Acoustics)
I think that's everything. Try to squeeze in an Athlon 64 3500+ 939-pin CPU so you can use the dual-channel A8V motherboard but it's not too big of a deal if you can't (I'm running a 3200+ on a K8V Deluxe).
Anyhow, that'll get you a kickass 64-bit Linux box. I'm running 64-bit UT2004 on slightly older hardware with great success so I have high hopes for Doom 3, though I'll probably want to get a 6800 series card anyhow.
The 2GHz Athlon 64 3200+ will perform at least as well as a 3.2GHz Pentium 4, and will burn less power doing so (especially compared to the new Prescott-core P4). The Athlon 64's go up to 3800+.
I'm hoping that id releases a 64-bit Linux build of Doom3 like Epic has done with UT2004. I've been having lots of fun playing UT on my Athlon 64 3200+ desktop with BFG GeForceFX 5900XTOC under 64-bit Fedora Core 2. Frame rate just isn't a problem at 1280x1024 res. nVidia has done an outstanding job with their latest Linux drivers. You can still play 32-bit games under 64-bit Linux (I tested Wolfenstein:ET), but you get that nice performence boost with true 64-bit binaries (due to having twice as many registers available in AMD64 mode as much as anything else).
Yeah, this one. Pity it uses an ATI video chip (which lacks the OUTSTANDING 64-bit Linux drivers nVidia has), but at least they used the best one (128MB Radeon 9700). And pity about the Broadcom wireless and wired network chips, but at least it's 802.11g and gigabit, respectively. Other than those two complaints, if you want to make TiBook owners drool, this is the notebook to get. (No, I don't have one. Having played 64-bit UT2004 on my desktop I'm holding out for a proper AMD64 nVidia notebook.)
I put a Mobile Athlon 64 3200+ (62W) in my ASUS K8V Deluxe motherboard, replacing a standard 3200+ desktop chip. It works exactly as you'd expect. Getting a heatsink to fit was tricky since the notebook chips are "lidless" (no aluminum lid protecting the core), but Zalman's CNPS7000A-AlCu (don't use the all-copper version, it's twice the weight) fit. Alpha's didn't. Just be real careful not to overtighten the screws. Supposedly the lidless CPUs can be cooled better but that lid was put there for a reason.
That said, you can undervolt most of the Athlon 64's quite a bit. I've used ClockGen under WinXP to undervolt the DTR 3200+ in my notebook to 1.3V @ 2GHz, down from the standard 1.5V. Perfectly stable. See here, and check silentpcreview.com (which got me started on all this).
Anyone know how to manually set core voltage levels under 64-bit Linux? Then verify that I didn't push things too far?
Or to pretty much anywhere in America besides the People's State of California.
I almost headed out to Silicon Valley during the boom, but after considering that state taxes are literally double what they are here in Michigan, the cost of housing is 2+ times as much, traffic is worse, people expect you to work way longer hours, and federal taxes are going to bite down hard on that extra marginal income, I figured: what's the point?
Plus I never did get the hang of Spanish...
Oh yeah, the weather. Well, there are a lot of states that have better weather than Michigan, so there.
For 64-bit Fedora Core 2, we were not able to install NVIDIA's graphics driver with the default kernel. Thus, their 64-bit tests must be omitted from the benchmark.
If you install the updated FC2 kernel (any of them from the past month or two), nVidia's new 64-bit drivers install without trouble. I've been playing 64-bit UT2004 and tested 32-bit Wolfenstein:ET on my Athlon 64 3200+ box w/BFG GeForceFX 5900XTOC and suffice it to say that nVidia has done an OUTSTANDING job on their new drivers. I can't compare the 64-bit Linux version of UT2004 to the Windows version because I wiped Windows XP from the machine. If games don't run under Linux, well, I shouldn't waste time playing them anyhow. (I trust that Doom 3 will have a 64-bit Linux build?)
it seems that North Korea and Iran heard it as "We'll invade you if we don't like you unless you have nukes, so you better get some if you want to keep your country"
You think they didn't already know that? Iran and NK have had their nuclear programs going for way, way longer than Bush has been in office. Remember how the Clinton Administration stupidly agreed to give NK two light-water nuclear reactors in exchange for their promise to stop developing nuclear warheads? We now know they never stopped, and the largesse we gave them just helped prop up their tottering government.
NK has 10,000+ hardened artillery tubes pointed at the SK capital and SK (a fellow democracy) doesn't want us to invade NK. Iranian dissidents mostly don't want us to invade Iran, and they're getting very close to bringing that government down peacefully (Iran is at the same point the Soviets were in their final years). Iraqi dissidents mostly wanted us to knock off Saddam (Kurds and Shias more than Sunnis of course), something that our left-wing media tends not to report (some journalists had to be given a police escort away from a crowd of Iraqi immigrants celebrating the fall of Baghdad here in Michigan, they've been at least as pissed about the biased media coverage as hard-core right-wingers like me). Out of the three nations, taking care of Iraq made the most sense, and it has proven instructive to our enemies. It would be nice if the former Soviet useful idiots would get a clue and stop undermining us though.
He's not build the cruise missile to sell to anyone, but rather, to prove to ignorant governments that anyone with enough money and expertise could do the very same.
President Bush has already gotten the hint. It's what the Iraq war was really about. Sooner or later, pretty much any hostile regime with enough talent and/or wealth (more the latter than the former) will be able to build all sorts of toys that we really, REALLY don't want them to have, especially if there's even a slim chance that they'll hand them over to the type of people who think it's a good idea to drive jumbo jets into buildings. Changing one regime in the middle of the worst neighborhood and hoping like hell the domino theory kicks in was the best available option.
Remember kids, America built nuclear bombs with 1940's technology.
The F3200 uses the 128MB Radeon 9700, and I've found a few other notebooks using that same GPU... but I'd much prefer a GeForce 5700 for Linux compatibility. ATI hasn't released 64-bit Linux drivers yet, not even in beta. You can find a list of Athlon 64 notebooks here, but several of them aren't available in America (ASUS has a particularly nice one but the cowards won't stand up to Intel marketing and sell it here).
Outside of the antiquated graphics chip the zv5000z is a pretty nice notebook. I swapped out the slow 4200RPM HD for a 7200RPM one (easy and made a HUGE diff), wireless range is excellent, the 1680x1050 res widescreen is stunning (you can get 1920x1200 res now), the 12-cell battery gives about 4 hours of moderate use (web surfing and what not), I've been unable to get it to overheat (unlike my previous two notebooks), very well built notebook. Fedora Core 2 installs easily, though I had to do a little manual editing of xorg.conf for the 1680x1050 res. The problems are really dumb things that could be easily fixed if HP cared: there should be a 5400RPM and/or 7200RPM HD option, HP should either force Broadcom to release their wireless drivers or switch to Atheros, they rigged their BIOS to reject non-HP miniPCI cards (bastards! IBM does this too but no one else), K8 Errata #93 isn't patched in the BIOS, it's insanely picky about memory (likes Micron chips, otherwise you'd better buy PC3200 grade memory and hope for the best)... and the new BIOS that they're shipping that still isn't on the support webpage might fix a couple of those problems. The notebook is built by Compal and shipped directly from Shanghai via FedEx. Bluetooth is neat too, I haven't figured out how to configure it properly under Linux but it shows up as a standard USB Bluetooth device so I know I can eventually get it to work (got it to find my mouse, but Linux Bluetooth support hasn't been made user-friendly yet). Overall, with the exception of the evil Broadcom wireless and weak GPU it makes a pretty slick Linux notebook.
eMachines was my second choice. I wanted the upgrade options HP had and really wanted a nVidia graphics chip, and hoped the old GeForce 440 wouldn't be as bad as it turned out to be. (Think GeForce 440MX desktop graphics.) Sure, it beats integrated video, but... geeze.
It sounds like Gateway bought eMachines for their management. I'd expect Gateway to become like eMachines rather than the other way around. That bodes well for AMD. We should be seeing lots of new product launches from everyone as the back-to-school season ramps up and the new AMD 90nm chips start hitting the market.
AMD's current 35W Athlon 64 2800+ (used in the Acer Ferarri 3200 notebook) is getting close, and from the leaked roadmap AMD will be down to 25W with the new 90nm chips that will be available later this year. AMD's main problem is, as usual, marketing weasles who swear up and down that customers don't want AMD chips, even when we beat them over the head and scream SELL ME A PROPER ATHLON 64 NOTEBOOK! Acer and eMachines have done a pretty good job, HP would have if they hadn't stupidly used a 3-year-old nVidia video chip in their AMD64 notebooks (marketing weasles at work again)...
The AMD chips have far better power management than Intel has too. My HP zv5000z has a DTR Athlon 64 3200+. It slows down by 400MHz and lowers the core voltage from 1.5V to 1.3V when unplugged, whichs cuts power consumption almost in half. Heat exhaust under full CPU load is barely warm. The DTR line is the least efficient, Mobile and Low-Voltage Athlon 64's would do better. Beats the heck out of Intel SpeedStep.
Ditto everything else you said.
Heh.
According to at least one tester. The higher latency overwhelms the bandwidth advantage. Given that AMD already had a big latency advantage with their 64-bit chips and the higher cost of DDR2, I don't see the big deal. Pushing DDR2 isn't as bad as pushing RDRAM, but...
RAID? That's nice, just about every high-end AMD board has a SATA RAID controller from Promise, Silicon Image, etc.
The audio is kinda neat, if there are Linux drivers. I doubt it's as good as a proper card but you can't argue with the price.
Anyone who buys Intel's "Extreme" integrated graphics to play current games is in for an extreme disappointment.
Wireless? (Cough!)...
On balance, all this hype over a chipset translates into Intel shouting "Pay no attention to our inferior CPUs!"...
Seasonic Super series power supplies. My UPS load meter registered a ~15% drop in PC power consumption after I switched to these from Antec. Highly, highly recommended.
/sys/devices/systsem/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_sets peed to match the power/performence balance you think is best. See the Athlon 64 Processor Power and Thermal Data Sheet. For example, a current top-of-the-line Athlon 64 3800+ burns 89W at 1.5V at maximum (better than Intel, but still a lot). If you lower the clock speed by 200MHz, the chip burns 72W @ 1.4V, another 200MHz lower burns 53W @ 1.3V, and another 200MHz lower burns 39W @ 1.2V. You can cut it all the way back to 22W max, 1000MHz @ 1.1V. With the current Fedora Core 2 kernel and a power management daemon like powernowd the speed will be adjusted automagically, but if you want to run Folding @ Home without excessively spiking your electric bill it's nice to set a fixed speed manually.
Also, use AMD 64-bit CPUs and set
The Mobile Athlon 64 3200+ (62W @ 1.4V max) is interesting if you really want to limit power consumption. I put one in my ASUS K8V Deluxe motherboard (Zalman CNPS7000A-AlCu heatsink, be VERY careful not to overtighten it and crack the unprotected core as there's no protective aluminum lid like on the desktop CPUs, not all heatsinks will fit). Drop 200MHz and get 46W, another 200MHz gets 34W, and at 800MHz a mere 13W. Given that the new Prescott-core Pentium 4's burns well north of 100W, this is pretty neat. Note that since AMD's transistors have a MUCH lower leakage level than Intel's (20% versus 50%) your idle power consumption at any clock rate is going to be pretty low. Things will get even better when the new 90nm chips come out in a few months.
There's a couple of reasons. One, we don't have anywhere near the population density of Europe. Two, the politicians and FCC bureaucrats who "deregulated" the telecom market didn't know WTF they were doing. Instead of saying "Anyone who wants to can build a network", they forced the telcos to lease their networks to other companies at regulated rates who then merely market DSL service. Yes, sometimes that works well (see Speakeasy), but for the most part it just doesn't encourage the telcos to spend $billions on hardware that the politicians then force them to lease to competitors. For some reason cable TV companies were mostly left alone, but newcomers (and the bankers/investors who'd finance them) are scared of getting the telco treatment, so nothing much gets done.
There's been lots of talk of the need to fix this in Forbes and nationalreview.com, but the Republicans in office haven't made it a priority and even if they did the Democrats would filibuster the legislation.
I'm not sure which is worse, the telecom mess or the "deregulation" of the California electricity market, where the power companies (who became power distributors, not actually owning most of the generating capacity) naively assumed that the state politicians wouldn't block EVERY ATTEMPT to build new power plants for an entire decade during a population boom. Price, meet Supply and Demand.
...but majorly you know some of the computers will break and students will drag them down to the university computer shop and therefore it helps if you limit what most people are using to a few brands.
They're Dells. It's pretty much a given that they're going to break. A lot. Though I suppose Dell's outsourcing of tech support to Indians is much easier when the Indians are already on campus...
Anyhow, if I was a university IT admin, I'd be mandating Athlon 64 machines just so I'd have a few less Windows worms clogging my network once Microsoft ships WinXP Service Pack 2 (adds support for the NX bit, No eXecute, which AMD64 series chips have and Intel 32-bit chips don't, stops buffer overrun attacks). Plus they'd put less of a load on the university power grid than the Prescott-core Pentium 4 "Blast Furnace Edition", even before enabling power management.
Caffeine is actually benefical, it can help reduce asthma attacks, it helps prevent stone formation...
Then maybe it's a good thing that Keith Richards didn't have these energy drinks available to him.
Yes. Both my Promise and VIA SATA controllers are recognized, though I'm only using the Promise one. The SATA drive is my boot drive no less.
FWIW, 64-bit Fedora doesn't require a kernel recompile to use the nVidia closed-source drivers, but you do need the driver patch from minion.de. You'll also need to add "alias char-major-195 nvidia" to /etc/modprobe.conf, or modprobe nvidia manually. Don't forget to make the usual changes to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Anyhow, I've been running 64-bit UT2004 under FC2 Test 3 for a while now and it works great, after getting the beta version mentioned here (hopefully there will be an official UT2004 upgrade soon?).
It's great to see x86_64 Linux on equal footing with 32-bit x86 Linux. If you've been waiting for an excuse to switch over to AMD64, now's the time.
Universities could collect, say, a $5 per student course fee for an official license for the e-book. O'Reilly or Amazon or someone new could handle distribution and payment collection. There would be no copy protection or other annoyances, paying students could download (and keep) the complete books and everyone could view them online. Payment would largely be on the honor system. It would be useful to have a single, organized site to distribute the books.
The course fee approach would be very efficient and still provide a nice recurring revenue stream. Overhead in general would be minimal.
The biggest potential flaw: are professors and administrators honest enough to collect and pay the course fees?
I think this system would fit academia extremely well.
Or do the next best thing:
1) Buy an Athlon 64 PC
2) Enable PowerNow! power management
3) Buy a power supply with a variable-speed fan (I recommend this one) and enable CPU fan speed control on the motherboard (Q-Fan in ASUS's BIOS, IIRC).
When you're just reading Slashdot, the CPU runs at 800MHz and power consumption drops waaay down. When you're playing UT2004, the CPU runs flat out and the fans speed up. It works extremely well.
What you have to remember is that the Athlon 64 series has very good power management, far better than Intel SpeedStep. When you're not doing anything stressful (say, reading Slashdot), the CPU slows and the core voltage drops down. The desktop Athlon 64's drop to 800MHz, my notebook says it's at 318MHz right now. If you need processing power that'll stomp a Pentium-M, it'll do that too. Oh, and you can run 64-bit Linux. And have the NX bit for neutralizing buffer overrun attacks in Windows XP SP2.
The heat output of my HP zv5000z Athlon 64 3200+ notebook with the CPU maxed out is fairly impressive but I've yet to be able to get it to overheat. (The Compaq r3000z is equivalent.) You can get 1920x1200 res screens for them now too. Pity HP used Linux-hostile Broadcom wireless cards and rigged their BIOS to explicitly reject non-HP wireless miniPCI cards (dumb!), but what can y'do (IBM and Dell do too, eMachines doesn't).
Anyhow, if I could get a mid-to-lightweight notebook with a low-voltage Athlon 64 2700+, top-of-the-line screen, Atheros WiFi (very Linux friendly), and GeForce 5700 Mobile, I'd probably upgrade again. The zv5000z's GeForce 440 is fine for getting work done and strategy games but woefully inadequate for UT2004. (Are you listening HP?)