I was able to use the nVidia drivers under 32-bit Fedora by compiling a plain 2.6.6rc2 kernel (using/usr/src/lin*/configs/kernel*.config copied to.config as a starting point) and using the minion.de patches (hmm, might not have been necessary for 32-bit...). For 64-bit FC2T3, no kernel recompilation is required but the minion.de patch definitely is. UT2004 ran under both (UT needs patching to keep it from segfaulting at random but that's a separate issue that I haven't tackled yet). More here.
FC2 Test 2 had problems, but Test 3 appears to be pretty solid.
I'd like to see nVidia release updated drivers regardless. They'll have to soon, what with the GeForce 6800 series launch.
According to IRS data from the 2001 tax year, 3.8 percent of the 18.2 million business tax returns filed that year reported taxable income of $200,000 or more. The top tax bracket last year kicked in at $311,950 of taxable income.
Okay, so nearly 700,000 businesses have $200,000+ in taxable income and they don't say how many of those hit the $311,950 threshold. I'm told that 500,000 do. The Democrat you quoted is trying to drown out my stat with a bunch of irrelevant ones.
While I'm sure that not all of the 500,000 small business owners get most of their income from their businesses, the vast majority of them surely do and cutting the top tax rate (and taxes for every other small business!) surely contributed to the higher employment numbers that were released today. Don't let class-warfare demagougery get in the way of good economic policy.
Athlon 64's are THE gaming CPU. 3000+ to 3400+. Heat isn't a problem. UT2004, Far Cry, etc. have 64-bit editions coming out and WinXP 64-bit is alledged to ship when SP2 does (late June). Fedora Core 1 for AMD64 runs with the "idle=poll" kernel option workaround (HP has been alerted and will fix this in the BIOS).
The 15.4" 1680x1050 widescreen is stunning.
The 802.11g wireless range is extremely impressive thanks to the two antenna panels behind the screen.
Bluetooth works well with Microsoft's keyboard/mouse kit. Buy AA NiMH rechargable batteries for at least the mouse, you'll need them.
Quadspeed DVD burners are available, but DVD-ROM/CD-RW was the best available when I bought.
Only 4200RPM drives are offered, but swapping in a 7200RPM Hitachi 60GB drive was trivial. They include a full WinXP Home CD and separate driver and application CDs. The drivers install in 1 shot. VERY nice.
The 12-cell battery, combined with AMD PowerNow!, make for excellent battery life.
Cluestick-beating-worthy offense: they used a nVidia GeForce 440 Go 64MB video chip. On what is marketed as a gaming notebook. And it's not on a separate card so you can't upgrade. ARGH!!! This chip is fine for strategy games but it's not up to playing UT2004 at full detail.
Memory: buy from HP, buy Micron-based SODIMMs (Crucial.com is sending out Infineon-based SODIMMs lately that DO NOT WORK on Athlon 64 notebooks when paired with a second SODIMM, nor do Corsair SODIMMs), or buy from somewhere you can easily return memory to. Kingston is supposed to work. I'm working with HP to run this down. More here. You can get to the SODIMM slot that's under the keyboard with minor effort when you know how (see the previous link).
In summary: GREAT notebook for getting work done, will be great for Linux once the BIOS is fixed and it's workable now, so-so for gaming. Serious gamers will probably want eMachines' notebooks instead, or wait for Athlon 64 notebooks from ASUS, Acer, etc. If you want thin-and-light, the Athlon 64 2700+ 1.2V 35W CPU (see page 20 here) looks ideal, if there are any OEMs out there with enough brains to use it.
Two-thirds of the people in the top tax bracket (500,000 of 750,000) are small business owners. In America, most small businesses are pass-through entities (sole proprietors, partnerships, most LLCs) where the owners pay their business taxes on their personal tax returns. Cutting the top bracket tax rate gave an immediate boost to half a million small businesses which they can then use for hiring and general expansion.
Figuring out how to comply with the federal tax code is a big enough mess without adding the complication of a corporate tax return, thus why the pass-through forms are preferred. If we really gave a damn about helping small business we'd pass the Flat Tax, making tax compliance very easy and ending a hell of a lot of corruption that comes from Big Business buying favorable tax code rules from Congress (which the Democrats are more than happy to sell them; why do you think Big Business gives 50-50 to each party but small business owners are overwhelmingly Republican?).
1) Ban all granting of monopolies to broadband service companies. This does mean pulling rank over state and local governments, but the Democrats have tortured the Interstate Commerce Clause a lot worse than this.
2) Stop forcing the telcos to share their networks, but mandate network interoperability. The latter is redundant since it's part of the definition of the Internet, but the average journalist and politician doesn't know that so it's best to specify. After this, the telcos will have to put up or shut up about building proper broadband networks, and if they don't, someone else will hopefully come in and kick their ass.
3) Put the DOJ on the short leash over their trying to block community-run broadband. So long as local governments don't grant themselves a monopoly or do anything else blatantly anticompetitive, leave them alone.
Basically, get the frickin' lawyers out of the way and let the usual process of Darwinian natural selection begin.
Sen. Leahy thinks that using Windows Explorer to browse around a shared Windows file server and read publically shared documents is hacking. At least, it is when those documents are highly embarrassing to the Democratic Party. In all fairness, his Republican counterpart (Sen. Hatch) is just as clueless, though at least Hatch means well. Leahy's vicious.
I really don't think the politicians are going to be of much help here. Keep them out of the loop and keep them from making RFID countermeasures illegal.
The new No Execute (NX) bit in AMD64 CPUs is used by Microsoft's upcoming Windows XP Service Pack 2 to neutralize buffer overflow attacks, arguably the largest class of self-executing Windows worms. Intel's upcoming x86-64 clone attempt lacks this feature. (Itanium has it, for the three of you that have one.)
The Cool 'n' Quiet feature of the AMD64 line drops power consumption dramatically while the PC is idle. 800MHz @ 1.25V currently, lower than that with the upcoming CG stepping. Even at full CPU load an Athlon 64 is going to burn less power than an equivalent Intel P4 CPU, especially a Prescott-core P4. CnQ is helping to keep my electric bill reasonable.
Finally, if the newbies plan on keeping their PC for several years, having an AMD64 compliant CPU is a good idea given the minimal incremental cost since it sure looks like the instruction set is taking over, what with Intel's capitulation and all.
Okay, so the few hundred $ machine can be ditched and replaced without much damage when and if needed, but it's something to keep in mind.
FWIW, my Athlon 64 3200+, three 7200RPM IDE HDs, GeForceFX 5700 Ultra, DVD, several 80mm fans, VG191 flat panel, and printer on standby burn 140W according to my UPS while the CPU is in Cool 'n' Quiet mode. The upcoming CG revision Athlon 64 will do even better. Using a Seasonic Super Tornado high-efficiency power supply helps quite a bit too. My last electric bill was $35, and that's with an Athlon 1700+ two HD box running 24x7 in addition to the workstation running most of the day.
Anyhow, yeah, a P4 makes no sense for that ASUS box, or much of anything else IMHO (grin). A Pentium-M would make sense if someone absolutely must be an Intel fanboy.
HP's new zv5000z Athlon 64 desktop replacement notebook is similar to the eMachines M6805, but you can get a higher-resolution widescreen, Bluetooth, a 12-cell battery, and assorted other goodies. You can't get a DVD burner (just a DVD-ROM/CD-RW), and HDs are only 4200RPM, but it has a midrange nVidia graphics chip that should be far better supported under Linux than the high-end ATI chip eMachines uses. Go to Best Buy (store, they're not on the website), do the build-to-order thing, and they'll give you a $150 rebate on top of HP's $100 rebate thru Saturday. There will be prebuilt models in the stores in a month or two. The price is near or BETTER than eMachines.
Ann Arbor IT Zone 330 E. Liberty Ann Arbor, MI 48104 Description
It seems broadband will cure whatever ails you. Economic developers for villages and states claim it's essential for business growth. Comcast and SBC claim their broadband offerings will transform your Internet experience. A Carnegie-Mellon professor promises 100 megabits/second to 100 million homes.
Yet there isn't even a universally accepted definition of "broadband." You may have a semi-fat pipe to your house, but we still don't have end-to-end quality of service. Universities invest billions in campus networks but struggle to keep MP3 downloads from consuming all the bandwidth. This talk explores the crosscurrents and pitfalls in the quest for universal broadband.
Presenter Bio
Richard Wiggins is an author and speaker specializing in Internet topics.
Wiggins writes for national publications such as New Media, Searcher, and Internet World. He serves on the editorial board of First Monday, a peer reviewed e-journal about the Internet.
He is author of the first book on Web publishing, The Internet for Everyone: A Guide for Users and Provider (McGraw-Hill, 1995) and is writing a new book called A Guide to the Literature of the Internet (Libraries Unlimited, 2000).
Wiggins is executive producer and co-host with Charles Severance of a television program, "North Coast Digital," which explores Internet topics as well as broader coverage of digital developments. Wiggins and Severance previously hosted "Internet: TCI" and "Nothin' But Net," seen on cable systems in Michigan and in various systems across the United States.
Wiggins has interviewed numerous Internet pioneers, including Vint Cerf (inventor of Internet Protocol), Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the Web), David Lytel (first White House Webmaster), Brewster Kahle (WAIS, Alexa), Michael Mauldin (Lycos), Larry Wall (PERL), and Sherry Turkle (MIT professor and author).
(I wasn't sure if this is related enough to the topic at hand to post, but since at least one/. editor is allegedly here in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor, what the heck...)
Actually, it's our dysfunctional tax system that's at fault for companies moving their HQs to the Caymans/etc. IIRC, American companies pay American taxes on foreign sales (and/or operations?), while most other tax systems don't tax foreign sales. By moving their HQ offshore, the company only pays American taxes on American sales. Anyhow, eliminate this double-tax and companies will stay put in America.
Damn, wish I could find the article I'm thinking of. I suspect I've mangled something here.
from Comcast's perspective because IIRC Disney also owns ESPN. ESPN and the Disney Channel are the two most expensive basic cable channel groups, responsible for much of the annual cost increase in cable rates. If Comcast owns Disney then the "cost" of Disney's channels is suddenly a much smaller problem.
I "solved" this problem by going with the $10/mo economy cable TV plan, which has broadcast networks and not much else. Heck, and even that's only because I have a Comcast cable modem. Up yours, Mickey Mouse!
'Ya know, that's wonderful, but let's be rational about this. 3,000 deaths... a staggering number, right? However, it is hardly the most tragic thing ever to happen...
OK, so if the Twin Towers had been at their full capacity of 50,000 people and the buildings fell right away rather than giving time for people to evacuate, you'd have been OK with the war? Maybe if the buildings were of more traditional construction and had toppled rather than collapsed straight down, taking out a few blocks and a couple hundred thousand people, would that satisfy you? Which, BTW, is what the plan was when the WTC was first bombed in 1993.
When it comes to terrorists, it's the thought that counts. They're going to keep coming after us with whatever bombs/germs/sharp pointy objects they can get their hands on. We can sit around and airily declare that losing a city block or two now and then is the cost of living, or we can give the military a hunting license. President Bush chose the latter approach.
High Risk as in it's not likely they'll be able to make it work, but it'll be Really Cool (in their opinion) if they can.
Re:Does AMD have anything to compete with Centrino
on
AMD Back in the Black
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Centrino: marketing-speak for a Pentium-M CPU (Pentium 3 on steroids), Intel chipset, obsolete Intel 802.11b WiFi chip, and $300 million ad campaign.
AMD: Mobile Athlon 64, variety of chipset vendors, variety of 802.11g chip vendors, no Centrino marketing tax. Thus you can buy eMachines Athlon 64 3000+ widescreen notebooks with high-end video chips from Best Buy for $1300 after the usual rebates. If you're reading Slashdot you'll get great battery life; if you're playing UT2004 you won't, but you'll get better performence than the Pentium-M can deliver.
to cool their new Prescott blast furnaces. An Intel D875PBZ w/Prescott 3.2GHz burns 69W more power at maximum load than an ASUS K8V Deluxe w/Athlon 64 3400+, and lacks the Cool 'n' Quiet power-saving modes of the AMD chip. The Prescott burns 61W more than its Northwood predecessor. Comparing an ASUS P4 board to an Athlon 3200+ the results are even worse! AMD's upcoming desktop Athlon 64 CG core will increase that gap (.pdf file, see page 9).
Good grief, California should ban these things before they overload the power grid, between the power wasted by the chips themselves and the additional air conditioning they'll require. All this for performence that's rarely better and frequently worse!
Really? I can hear mine, the Seasonic Super Tornado 400W version. I bought a Seasonic Super Silencer 400W too for my other PC and it's definitely quieter, mostly because it moves a lot less air. If you've already got good case cooling then you might as well get the Silencer.
The Tornado isn't all THAT loud, but it's very noticible, even when my Athlon 64 is running in Cool and Quiet mode (800MHz @ 1.275V).
Great thing: they're both high-efficiency power supplies. About 15%-20% less power consumption according to my APC SmartUPS's load meter. Less waste heat in the AC-to-DC conversion process. Especially for machines that run 24x7 they are well worth the money.
You are correct. I won't hazard a guess as to what premiums would be in your situation, other than a fraction of what your employer is paying for the usual traditional coverage or HMO/PPO. I have a separate $500/year deductable for prescriptions.
I don't think catastrophic coverage premiums are moving up as fast as full coverage, but I won't know until the next semiannual bill comes. Hopefully I won't ever have to use the insurance. I like not having to deal with a middleman when paying for my allergy shots (that "preexisting condition" did hike my premiums slightly) and what not. It's educational to see what things really cost.
Since you're employed you're probably best off with what you've got, but if you ever get downsized or go independent keep catastrophic insurance in mind.
That's the root of our problem. Fascist zoning laws restricting supply mixed with the mortgage interest deduction artifically goosing McMansion demand have sent housing costs soaring. Take a look at the big home building company stocks. There's no way they should be able to make the $megabucks they're making in a free-market system that's actually working. It isn't their doing, they're just taking advantage of the system other people set up.
There's no technical reason why cheap, high-density housing couldn't be built. If we're going to keep importing over a MILLION immigrants a year it'd be a good idea to have an economical way to expand the housing stock.
Anyhow, so long as a decent home is a 6-figure investment, competing with overseas labor making 1/10th our wages doesn't look very plausible. Though last I knew Japan has this problem worse than we do.
Or maybe I'll just live in a VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER! (ducking)
Keep in mind, however that we also have to pay for our own health care
Buy catastrophic health insurance. I'm paying $75/mo for a $2,000 deductable. Basically, I pay cash for routine medical expenses, no paperwork to speak of, but if I get hit by a truck the insurance kicks in and I won't lose my home. Alternatively, you can pay a few $hundred per month for the pretense that the insurance company pays for everything. Remember, the point of insurance is to cover you in case something unexpected happens. If it's expected, insuring it is an expensive waste of time.
There are Medical Savings Account plans if you have significant recurring expenses that you want to tax deduct. Really, the tax angle is the only reason why insurance is usually employer-paid.
Like this one. Best Buy sells them for $1299 after rebates. They're getting some mentions on the Fedora Test List. It's amazing how much hardware you can get for semi-cheap when you're not paying the Centrino marketing tax. Besides, 32-bit CPUs are so last century.
Though you'll still need a NDIS wrapper to get the Broadcom 802.11g chip to work, or beat Broadcom with cluebats until they cough up the Linux driver they've apparently already written. Darn.
I'm going to stick with my desktop for now, but if I come up with an excuse to buy a notebook that's what I'll get.
I'd go with a Seasonic Super Silencer 400 power supply, Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 HDs, Pabst hand-balanced fans, and fan isolators. I also put a Zalman ZM80C-HP heatpipe cooler and fan on my GeForceFX 5700 Ultra.
The nice thing about that power supply is that it's high-efficiency, meaning less waste heat in the AC to DC conversion process. That also means lower power consumption, which my APC SmartUPS's load meter confirms. Less waste heat means less work for the cooling fans.
The Seasonic Super Tornado power supplies have a 120mm fan instead of an 80mm fan. They are noticibly louder but move about 3x as much air. In that Antec case with its 120mm case fans you just don't need the Tornado.
Unfortunately, I couldn't test it out on my Athlon 64 desktop, because WinXP refuses to install a specialized processor driver on non-laptops.
Not true, but you may need a BIOS upgrade first. I had to upgrade my ASUS K8V from 1002 to 1004 before I could install the Cool and Quiet drivers. Now the ASUS power meter display shows I'm running 800MHz @ 1.275V.
IIRC, the Voodoo laptop does have a bigger battery than the eMachines, but it's also a little heavier and way more expensive. If I were in the market for a laptop today I'd definitely buy the eMachines, preferably the M6807 model that has a DVD burner for +$100.
Running at full CPU load, an Athlon 64 3200+ uses less power than an Intel P4 3.2GHz. Furthermore, with AMD's Cool and Quiet power management enabled the Athlon 64 CPU slows down to 800MHz and drops to 1.275v when you don't need much CPU performence, ie, while I'm typing this message. ASUS has a nifty little program that displays the current CPU speed and core voltage on my desktop.
AMD CPU power requirements are expected to drop substantially when they switch to 90nm in the second half of this year. OTOH, Intel's prototype 90nm Tejas CPU burns up 150 watts.
AMD chips haven't used more electricity than Intel chips for years. Pay attention.
BTW, Athlon 64 notebooks are out. $1,550 for a widescreen 64-bit notebook! I'm going to stick with my Athlon 64 desktop, at least until I come up with an excuse to buy a portable. Really, I am...
Slashdot Mirror
I was able to use the nVidia drivers under 32-bit Fedora by compiling a plain 2.6.6rc2 kernel (using /usr/src/lin*/configs/kernel*.config copied to .config as a starting point) and using the minion.de patches (hmm, might not have been necessary for 32-bit...). For 64-bit FC2T3, no kernel recompilation is required but the minion.de patch definitely is. UT2004 ran under both (UT needs patching to keep it from segfaulting at random but that's a separate issue that I haven't tackled yet). More here.
FC2 Test 2 had problems, but Test 3 appears to be pretty solid.
I'd like to see nVidia release updated drivers regardless. They'll have to soon, what with the GeForce 6800 series launch.
According to IRS data from the 2001 tax year, 3.8 percent of the 18.2 million business tax returns filed that year reported taxable income of $200,000 or more. The top tax bracket last year kicked in at $311,950 of taxable income.
Okay, so nearly 700,000 businesses have $200,000+ in taxable income and they don't say how many of those hit the $311,950 threshold. I'm told that 500,000 do. The Democrat you quoted is trying to drown out my stat with a bunch of irrelevant ones.
While I'm sure that not all of the 500,000 small business owners get most of their income from their businesses, the vast majority of them surely do and cutting the top tax rate (and taxes for every other small business!) surely contributed to the higher employment numbers that were released today. Don't let class-warfare demagougery get in the way of good economic policy.
Short review:
Athlon 64's are THE gaming CPU. 3000+ to 3400+. Heat isn't a problem. UT2004, Far Cry, etc. have 64-bit editions coming out and WinXP 64-bit is alledged to ship when SP2 does (late June). Fedora Core 1 for AMD64 runs with the "idle=poll" kernel option workaround (HP has been alerted and will fix this in the BIOS).
The 15.4" 1680x1050 widescreen is stunning.
The 802.11g wireless range is extremely impressive thanks to the two antenna panels behind the screen.
Bluetooth works well with Microsoft's keyboard/mouse kit. Buy AA NiMH rechargable batteries for at least the mouse, you'll need them.
Quadspeed DVD burners are available, but DVD-ROM/CD-RW was the best available when I bought.
Only 4200RPM drives are offered, but swapping in a 7200RPM Hitachi 60GB drive was trivial. They include a full WinXP Home CD and separate driver and application CDs. The drivers install in 1 shot. VERY nice.
The 12-cell battery, combined with AMD PowerNow!, make for excellent battery life.
Cluestick-beating-worthy offense: they used a nVidia GeForce 440 Go 64MB video chip. On what is marketed as a gaming notebook. And it's not on a separate card so you can't upgrade. ARGH!!! This chip is fine for strategy games but it's not up to playing UT2004 at full detail.
Memory: buy from HP, buy Micron-based SODIMMs (Crucial.com is sending out Infineon-based SODIMMs lately that DO NOT WORK on Athlon 64 notebooks when paired with a second SODIMM, nor do Corsair SODIMMs), or buy from somewhere you can easily return memory to. Kingston is supposed to work. I'm working with HP to run this down. More here. You can get to the SODIMM slot that's under the keyboard with minor effort when you know how (see the previous link).
In summary: GREAT notebook for getting work done, will be great for Linux once the BIOS is fixed and it's workable now, so-so for gaming. Serious gamers will probably want eMachines' notebooks instead, or wait for Athlon 64 notebooks from ASUS, Acer, etc. If you want thin-and-light, the Athlon 64 2700+ 1.2V 35W CPU (see page 20 here) looks ideal, if there are any OEMs out there with enough brains to use it.
Two-thirds of the people in the top tax bracket (500,000 of 750,000) are small business owners. In America, most small businesses are pass-through entities (sole proprietors, partnerships, most LLCs) where the owners pay their business taxes on their personal tax returns. Cutting the top bracket tax rate gave an immediate boost to half a million small businesses which they can then use for hiring and general expansion.
Figuring out how to comply with the federal tax code is a big enough mess without adding the complication of a corporate tax return, thus why the pass-through forms are preferred. If we really gave a damn about helping small business we'd pass the Flat Tax, making tax compliance very easy and ending a hell of a lot of corruption that comes from Big Business buying favorable tax code rules from Congress (which the Democrats are more than happy to sell them; why do you think Big Business gives 50-50 to each party but small business owners are overwhelmingly Republican?).
Most new jobs come from small businesses (80%?).
if this trial ballon of his goes anywhere:
1) Ban all granting of monopolies to broadband service companies. This does mean pulling rank over state and local governments, but the Democrats have tortured the Interstate Commerce Clause a lot worse than this.
2) Stop forcing the telcos to share their networks, but mandate network interoperability. The latter is redundant since it's part of the definition of the Internet, but the average journalist and politician doesn't know that so it's best to specify. After this, the telcos will have to put up or shut up about building proper broadband networks, and if they don't, someone else will hopefully come in and kick their ass.
3) Put the DOJ on the short leash over their trying to block community-run broadband. So long as local governments don't grant themselves a monopoly or do anything else blatantly anticompetitive, leave them alone.
Basically, get the frickin' lawyers out of the way and let the usual process of Darwinian natural selection begin.
Sen. Leahy thinks that using Windows Explorer to browse around a shared Windows file server and read publically shared documents is hacking. At least, it is when those documents are highly embarrassing to the Democratic Party. In all fairness, his Republican counterpart (Sen. Hatch) is just as clueless, though at least Hatch means well. Leahy's vicious.
I really don't think the politicians are going to be of much help here. Keep them out of the loop and keep them from making RFID countermeasures illegal.
The new No Execute (NX) bit in AMD64 CPUs is used by Microsoft's upcoming Windows XP Service Pack 2 to neutralize buffer overflow attacks, arguably the largest class of self-executing Windows worms. Intel's upcoming x86-64 clone attempt lacks this feature. (Itanium has it, for the three of you that have one.)
The Cool 'n' Quiet feature of the AMD64 line drops power consumption dramatically while the PC is idle. 800MHz @ 1.25V currently, lower than that with the upcoming CG stepping. Even at full CPU load an Athlon 64 is going to burn less power than an equivalent Intel P4 CPU, especially a Prescott-core P4. CnQ is helping to keep my electric bill reasonable.
Finally, if the newbies plan on keeping their PC for several years, having an AMD64 compliant CPU is a good idea given the minimal incremental cost since it sure looks like the instruction set is taking over, what with Intel's capitulation and all.
Okay, so the few hundred $ machine can be ditched and replaced without much damage when and if needed, but it's something to keep in mind.
FWIW, my Athlon 64 3200+, three 7200RPM IDE HDs, GeForceFX 5700 Ultra, DVD, several 80mm fans, VG191 flat panel, and printer on standby burn 140W according to my UPS while the CPU is in Cool 'n' Quiet mode. The upcoming CG revision Athlon 64 will do even better. Using a Seasonic Super Tornado high-efficiency power supply helps quite a bit too. My last electric bill was $35, and that's with an Athlon 1700+ two HD box running 24x7 in addition to the workstation running most of the day.
Anyhow, yeah, a P4 makes no sense for that ASUS box, or much of anything else IMHO (grin). A Pentium-M would make sense if someone absolutely must be an Intel fanboy.
HP's new zv5000z Athlon 64 desktop replacement notebook is similar to the eMachines M6805, but you can get a higher-resolution widescreen, Bluetooth, a 12-cell battery, and assorted other goodies. You can't get a DVD burner (just a DVD-ROM/CD-RW), and HDs are only 4200RPM, but it has a midrange nVidia graphics chip that should be far better supported under Linux than the high-end ATI chip eMachines uses. Go to Best Buy (store, they're not on the website), do the build-to-order thing, and they'll give you a $150 rebate on top of HP's $100 rebate thru Saturday. There will be prebuilt models in the stores in a month or two. The price is near or BETTER than eMachines.
See HP.com for the usual propaganda.
Naturally, I have to take a midterm that night:
/. editor is allegedly here in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor, what the heck...)
The Quixotic Quest for Universal Broadband
Rich Wiggins
Overview and Bio
Wednesday, March 3, 2004 7:30 PM - 10:00 PM
Ann Arbor IT Zone
330 E. Liberty
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Description
It seems broadband will cure whatever ails you. Economic developers for villages and states claim it's essential for business growth. Comcast and SBC claim their broadband offerings will transform your Internet experience. A Carnegie-Mellon professor promises 100 megabits/second to 100 million homes.
Yet there isn't even a universally accepted definition of "broadband." You may have a semi-fat pipe to your house, but we still don't have end-to-end quality of service. Universities invest billions in campus networks but struggle to keep MP3 downloads from consuming all the bandwidth. This talk explores the crosscurrents and pitfalls in the quest for universal broadband.
Presenter Bio
Richard Wiggins is an author and speaker specializing in Internet topics.
Wiggins writes for national publications such as New Media, Searcher, and Internet World. He serves on the editorial board of First Monday, a peer reviewed e-journal about the Internet.
He is author of the first book on Web publishing, The Internet for Everyone: A Guide for Users and Provider (McGraw-Hill, 1995) and is writing a new book called A Guide to the Literature of the Internet (Libraries Unlimited, 2000).
Wiggins is executive producer and co-host with Charles Severance of a television program, "North Coast Digital," which explores Internet topics as well as broader coverage of digital developments. Wiggins and Severance previously hosted "Internet: TCI" and "Nothin' But Net," seen on cable systems in Michigan and in various systems across the United States.
Wiggins has interviewed numerous Internet pioneers, including Vint Cerf (inventor of Internet Protocol), Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the Web), David Lytel (first White House Webmaster), Brewster Kahle (WAIS, Alexa), Michael Mauldin (Lycos), Larry Wall (PERL), and Sherry Turkle (MIT professor and author).
(I wasn't sure if this is related enough to the topic at hand to post, but since at least one
Actually, it's our dysfunctional tax system that's at fault for companies moving their HQs to the Caymans/etc. IIRC, American companies pay American taxes on foreign sales (and/or operations?), while most other tax systems don't tax foreign sales. By moving their HQ offshore, the company only pays American taxes on American sales. Anyhow, eliminate this double-tax and companies will stay put in America.
Damn, wish I could find the article I'm thinking of. I suspect I've mangled something here.
from Comcast's perspective because IIRC Disney also owns ESPN. ESPN and the Disney Channel are the two most expensive basic cable channel groups, responsible for much of the annual cost increase in cable rates. If Comcast owns Disney then the "cost" of Disney's channels is suddenly a much smaller problem.
I "solved" this problem by going with the $10/mo economy cable TV plan, which has broadcast networks and not much else. Heck, and even that's only because I have a Comcast cable modem. Up yours, Mickey Mouse!
'Ya know, that's wonderful, but let's be rational about this. 3,000 deaths... a staggering number, right? However, it is hardly the most tragic thing ever to happen...
OK, so if the Twin Towers had been at their full capacity of 50,000 people and the buildings fell right away rather than giving time for people to evacuate, you'd have been OK with the war? Maybe if the buildings were of more traditional construction and had toppled rather than collapsed straight down, taking out a few blocks and a couple hundred thousand people, would that satisfy you? Which, BTW, is what the plan was when the WTC was first bombed in 1993.
When it comes to terrorists, it's the thought that counts. They're going to keep coming after us with whatever bombs/germs/sharp pointy objects they can get their hands on. We can sit around and airily declare that losing a city block or two now and then is the cost of living, or we can give the military a hunting license. President Bush chose the latter approach.
High Risk as in 'Public Backlash'?
High Risk as in it's not likely they'll be able to make it work, but it'll be Really Cool (in their opinion) if they can.
Centrino: marketing-speak for a Pentium-M CPU (Pentium 3 on steroids), Intel chipset, obsolete Intel 802.11b WiFi chip, and $300 million ad campaign.
AMD: Mobile Athlon 64, variety of chipset vendors, variety of 802.11g chip vendors, no Centrino marketing tax. Thus you can buy eMachines Athlon 64 3000+ widescreen notebooks with high-end video chips from Best Buy for $1300 after the usual rebates. If you're reading Slashdot you'll get great battery life; if you're playing UT2004 you won't, but you'll get better performence than the Pentium-M can deliver.
It's time to put up or shut up on your "maybe we have a x86-64 chip too" FUD.
to cool their new Prescott blast furnaces. An Intel D875PBZ w/Prescott 3.2GHz burns 69W more power at maximum load than an ASUS K8V Deluxe w/Athlon 64 3400+, and lacks the Cool 'n' Quiet power-saving modes of the AMD chip. The Prescott burns 61W more than its Northwood predecessor. Comparing an ASUS P4 board to an Athlon 3200+ the results are even worse! AMD's upcoming desktop Athlon 64 CG core will increase that gap (.pdf file, see page 9).
Good grief, California should ban these things before they overload the power grid, between the power wasted by the chips themselves and the additional air conditioning they'll require. All this for performence that's rarely better and frequently worse!
BTX: Big Thermal eXhaust
Really? I can hear mine, the Seasonic Super Tornado 400W version. I bought a Seasonic Super Silencer 400W too for my other PC and it's definitely quieter, mostly because it moves a lot less air. If you've already got good case cooling then you might as well get the Silencer.
The Tornado isn't all THAT loud, but it's very noticible, even when my Athlon 64 is running in Cool and Quiet mode (800MHz @ 1.275V).
Great thing: they're both high-efficiency power supplies. About 15%-20% less power consumption according to my APC SmartUPS's load meter. Less waste heat in the AC-to-DC conversion process. Especially for machines that run 24x7 they are well worth the money.
You are correct. I won't hazard a guess as to what premiums would be in your situation, other than a fraction of what your employer is paying for the usual traditional coverage or HMO/PPO. I have a separate $500/year deductable for prescriptions.
I don't think catastrophic coverage premiums are moving up as fast as full coverage, but I won't know until the next semiannual bill comes. Hopefully I won't ever have to use the insurance. I like not having to deal with a middleman when paying for my allergy shots (that "preexisting condition" did hike my premiums slightly) and what not. It's educational to see what things really cost.
Since you're employed you're probably best off with what you've got, but if you ever get downsized or go independent keep catastrophic insurance in mind.
That's the root of our problem. Fascist zoning laws restricting supply mixed with the mortgage interest deduction artifically goosing McMansion demand have sent housing costs soaring. Take a look at the big home building company stocks. There's no way they should be able to make the $megabucks they're making in a free-market system that's actually working. It isn't their doing, they're just taking advantage of the system other people set up.
There's no technical reason why cheap, high-density housing couldn't be built. If we're going to keep importing over a MILLION immigrants a year it'd be a good idea to have an economical way to expand the housing stock.
Anyhow, so long as a decent home is a 6-figure investment, competing with overseas labor making 1/10th our wages doesn't look very plausible. Though last I knew Japan has this problem worse than we do.
Or maybe I'll just live in a VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER! (ducking)
Keep in mind, however that we also have to pay for our own health care
Buy catastrophic health insurance. I'm paying $75/mo for a $2,000 deductable. Basically, I pay cash for routine medical expenses, no paperwork to speak of, but if I get hit by a truck the insurance kicks in and I won't lose my home. Alternatively, you can pay a few $hundred per month for the pretense that the insurance company pays for everything. Remember, the point of insurance is to cover you in case something unexpected happens. If it's expected, insuring it is an expensive waste of time.
There are Medical Savings Account plans if you have significant recurring expenses that you want to tax deduct. Really, the tax angle is the only reason why insurance is usually employer-paid.
Like this one. Best Buy sells them for $1299 after rebates. They're getting some mentions on the Fedora Test List. It's amazing how much hardware you can get for semi-cheap when you're not paying the Centrino marketing tax. Besides, 32-bit CPUs are so last century.
Though you'll still need a NDIS wrapper to get the Broadcom 802.11g chip to work, or beat Broadcom with cluebats until they cough up the Linux driver they've apparently already written. Darn.
I'm going to stick with my desktop for now, but if I come up with an excuse to buy a notebook that's what I'll get.
I'd go with a Seasonic Super Silencer 400 power supply, Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 HDs, Pabst hand-balanced fans, and fan isolators. I also put a Zalman ZM80C-HP heatpipe cooler and fan on my GeForceFX 5700 Ultra.
The nice thing about that power supply is that it's high-efficiency, meaning less waste heat in the AC to DC conversion process. That also means lower power consumption, which my APC SmartUPS's load meter confirms. Less waste heat means less work for the cooling fans.
The Seasonic Super Tornado power supplies have a 120mm fan instead of an 80mm fan. They are noticibly louder but move about 3x as much air. In that Antec case with its 120mm case fans you just don't need the Tornado.
Unfortunately, I couldn't test it out on my Athlon 64 desktop, because WinXP refuses to install a specialized processor driver on non-laptops.
Not true, but you may need a BIOS upgrade first. I had to upgrade my ASUS K8V from 1002 to 1004 before I could install the Cool and Quiet drivers. Now the ASUS power meter display shows I'm running 800MHz @ 1.275V.
IIRC, the Voodoo laptop does have a bigger battery than the eMachines, but it's also a little heavier and way more expensive. If I were in the market for a laptop today I'd definitely buy the eMachines, preferably the M6807 model that has a DVD burner for +$100.
Running at full CPU load, an Athlon 64 3200+ uses less power than an Intel P4 3.2GHz. Furthermore, with AMD's Cool and Quiet power management enabled the Athlon 64 CPU slows down to 800MHz and drops to 1.275v when you don't need much CPU performence, ie, while I'm typing this message. ASUS has a nifty little program that displays the current CPU speed and core voltage on my desktop.
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AMD CPU power requirements are expected to drop substantially when they switch to 90nm in the second half of this year. OTOH, Intel's prototype 90nm Tejas CPU burns up 150 watts
AMD chips haven't used more electricity than Intel chips for years. Pay attention.
BTW, Athlon 64 notebooks are out. $1,550 for a widescreen 64-bit notebook! I'm going to stick with my Athlon 64 desktop, at least until I come up with an excuse to buy a portable. Really, I am...