Given that Bill Gates is a Democrat (despite the Republican Party being far more sympathetic to Microsoft), I doubt you'll see him posing with President Bush like he did with Blair. Pity the reality check the Clinton Justice Department whacked him with didn't take.
Gates has the arrogant paternalism that all too often comes with great wealth. Gotta look after the little people, y'know.
Every old Tandy CoCo user ought to recognize his name, at least the ones that ran OS-9. I'd get my employer to hire him but we're poor bastards.
Well, okay, OS-9 runs on a lot more than the old 6809 CoCo's, but that's what I ran it on. Pretty sweet to have a multiuser, realtime OS on a "toy" computer you picked up at Radio Shack.
A way to restore balance: you may be able to buy cool toys, but you won't have the experience points to use them with 100% effectiveness.
Well, it's not perfect, but the idea of a kiddie blindly firing his shiny new BFG-9000 amuses me...
I'd also make the really cool toys *really* expensive. Want that BFG? $100, please. Top-of-the-line armor? Another $75. Don't price things linearly. Well, maybe that's a bit much, but you get the idea.
I'll continue avoiding MMTSs (Massive Multiplayer Time Sinks) regardless...
Semi-real-world business model
on
Pay to Play
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
How about this: give the game itself away, letting players start out with a basic character/resource level for free. If players want, they could buy neat toys (armor, weapons, etc) from game-run "stores" with real money, but for the sake of play balancing the cost should be high relative to acquiring them the hard way, much like the "Build Now" button in Civ/Alpha Centauri/etc. Being able to buy the game's currency with real money is another strategy for games with appropriately elaborate economic models (Everquest)... actually, that's the simplest way of doing things in general, since it minimizes real-world currency transactions (overhead). The game should have an internal eBay-like auction market for items/currency trading, with the game taking an appropriate commission (3-5%). Just like the real world, money would be a substitute for time.
Maybe I'm just getting old and aware of the passage of time, but I've wound up whittling down the number of TV shows I watch to a select few and getting nearly all my news from online, my local newspaper, and a magazine. This despite the fact that I have a very nice satellite dish and HDTV PCI card. There's just too many other things I want to do. The TV stays off for many days of the week, and I don't miss it. (Darn the WB and UPN for making decent shows! Even Enterprise has gotten good lately.) What's disturbing is the contrast with the rest of my family, who despite lacking the technotoys I have spend far more time in front of the tube. It's unbelievable how much crap my brother watches.
If you have a SB Live! series soundcard in your system, remove it and see if that helps. If it does, buy something else. I went with a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz (which is also well supported by Linux).
I've yet to find any easy to understand table that clearly deliniates what the differences are between the various Athlons.
Athlon XP: Buy one. 20% less power draw clock-to-clock than its predecessor, has Intel SSE support (aka 3DNow! Pro), has better hardware prefetch to take better advantage of DDR SDRAMs bandwidth. Palamino core. AMD sold 4 million of them last quarter. 266MHz FSB.
Duron at 1GHz and higher: Same as Athlon XP but with 128K/64K L1/L2 cache instead of 128K/256K and 200MHz FSB. If you're strapped for cash, buy one.
Athlon: The old one. Thunderbird core. Being phased out. Consider if you're offered a good deal. Some are 266MHz FSB, some are 200MHz FSB.
Duron below 1GHz: Same as above but with 128K/64K L1/L2 cache and 200MHz FSB. Very, very inexpensive.
I have an Athlon XP 1800+ at home, paired with an Epox 8KHA+ KT266A motherboard. Highly, highly recommended.
Why haven't AMD gone with the MHz doesn't equal performance as they have done with the new XP/MP chips, as it would be assumed the market for these will be consumers who don't generally look at benchmark figures?
Because the Duron competes against the P3-based Celeron, not the P4 that runs far slower clock-to-clock than its predecessor. If Intel hadn't deliberately designed the P4 for clock speed at the expense of performence, AMD would not have needed their True Performence Initiative.
In this case, two wrongs DO make a right. At least AMD's "wrong" is just marketing fluff rather than deliberately misdesigned engineering.
First, if you're going to insist on a REA-type federal approach, at least insist that a hard time limit be imposed on the agency. The REA hung around until 1994, and even then was assimilated into a similar government agency. Bureaucracies don't ever put themselves out of work.
Second, does it really take that much money to get started? And that cost is continuously dropping, especially with the help of open source projects. Isn't it likely that this problem can be solved within the next several years without government intervention? I'll bet on private initiative and creativity (hmm, solar powered WiFi relays anyone?) to get the job done.
Besides, if taxes weren't so damn high more individuals would be able to finance such initiatives. It would be far easier to bootstrap ventures if, say, we didn't have 1-1/2 months per year of labor confiscated by the Socialist Security system.
These, or higher-speed commercial point-to-point transmitters, seem like a neat way to set up a wireless backbone for a (community) wireless network. Then you just hang WiFi transmitters off the backbone access points. Actually, I'd want something a bit faster than 10Mbps for a backbone (aggregate multiple transmitters?), but you get the idea. I'm not sure it'd be superior to using the new 802.11a 5GHz gear for such a backbone, but in either case, you avoid dealing with the local telco monopoly, which is always a Good Thing.
Maybe put small caching proxy servers at the access points backed up by a big one at the end of the network? Or just the latter. If you're liable to wind up with a Linux box at the access points anyhow...
I've already got a cable modem and I'm lazy, so I'll let someone else run with this:-).
Re:What's wrong with Live!?
on
Testing the Audigy
·
· Score: 4, Flamebait
What's wrong with the Live!? It pollutes the PCI bus with noise, which is why it's a frequent source of PCI DMA I/O corruption, particularly (but not exclusively) on VIA chipset boards. I've found the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz to be an excellent, trouble-free replacement, and best of all Red Hat Linux autoconfigures it (zero human intervention required). See the SCFAQ on VIA Hardware.
I couldn't figure out why my HDTV card was locking up every hour or so on my KT133 board, nor why WinXP was crashing frequently on my KT266 board. Removing the Live!'s fixed both systems. I didn't bother attempting a Live! on my new KT266A.
So, if all we need to do is speed up the melting of the ice caps on Mars, we just drop a few nuclear-powered heaters, let them wander around the caps for a few decades, and assuming the new atmosphere stays put we'll have a habitable environment? There has to be more to it than that, but if the issues could be worked out...
By the time the atmosphere is properly cooked we should be able to transport people to Mars in significant numbers (hundreds, thousands). Give priority to people (the new pioneers!) who want to raise large families, and in a century or two Mars could have a fairly substantial human population.
Possible side effect: Mars could wind up very Catholic;-).
(Sorry, I've been waiting weeks for a chance to use that line...)
Re:Defn: recession of nationalism, tribalism, cont
on
Defining Globalism
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· Score: 2
Thus why I said "leftist" and not "liberal". Leftist is fairly narrow.
Defn: recession of nationalism, tribalism, control
on
Defining Globalism
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· Score: 2
All of which are good things.
Control being the issue the leftists are up in arms about. It's pretty hard to maintain control over people and groups of people (ie, businesses) when they have the option to walk away from power-hungry governments. You can't just throw up a Berlin Wall or Iron Curtain anymore. If governments don't play nice with their people, their best and brightest will walk.
Globalisation is a natural counterweight to tribalism. Playing "us" vs. "them" games becomes increasingly difficult when everyone works with people from all over the world. And darn, there goes that control again. bin Laden is cranky about that.
Same goes with the abuses of nationalism. We're seeing a partial remission of nationalism after the 9/11 attacks, with the move towards unification of the civilized world against barbaric tribalists. The positive side of nationalism, the unification of a people against a common enemy (red white and blue everywhere!), has surged nicely, and that's good.
What remains to be seen is whether the people living in nation-states that have resisted joining the civilized world (say, your average dictatorship that uses anti-American propaganda to unite their citizens against an external "enemy" to deflect criticism from their own incompetence and illegitimacy) will be able to change the course of their nations, or even learn that that would be a Very Good Idea. And does the civilized world have the confidence to help them?
I've been wanting to upgrade my aging Toshiba Satellite, but so far every Athlon notebook I've found uses some lame graphics chip rather than nVidia or ATI Radeon series chips. And no SXGA+ or UXGA res screens either. Has anyone found one? Maybe we'll see them early next year when the 130nm Mobile Athlons come out?
Maybe Micron will build one. Their new Athlon/nForce desktops look sweet, definite Dell-killers.
Forbes covered this two months ago. Basically, because too many providers are splitting up too little bandwidth, cell phone coverage sucks. It's high time the FCC got out of the way and let the stronger players acquire the weaker. Maybe service will improve to the point where I'd actually consider buying a cell phone.
On a related note, I have no sympathy for the companies that overpaid for spectrum licenses nor the greedy Feds who thought they had a chance in hell of collecting all those $billions. Golly, who pays for those license fees? Can you say massive tax on users?
Does that include the high-end power supplies like the 400W Silencer? Because mine, driving a 1.4GHz Athlon Thunderbird, keeps the 5V and 3.3V rails within 1% of perfect, which is rather unusual AFAIK. I can believe that the cheaper supplies are rebadged Sparkle models (as others have reported), but not the high end and speciality ones. I'm not quite willing to crack open mine to find out, though.
I'd also be surprised if they didn't outsource their case production. I have bought midtower cases from them and they're solid, well-designed, no-nonsense cases. Had I known more about these nice aluminum cases I'd have gone with one of those instead, though.
1) Faster propulsion, and if that means nuclear powered engines, so be it.
1a) Develop heavy lift capability.
2) Develop tech necessary for colonization, and use the moon as a testbed.
3) Do thorough study of the moon, manned study if necessary (probably is), in particular to find all water and mineable metals that may be there. Not to bring back to Earth, but so we won't need to transport them from Earth.
4) Especially if #3 allows for the construction of spacecraft hulls, when 1-3 are done, head to Mars. Use tech from #1a to transport the machinery to equip the craft.
Umm, because memory bandwidth is independent of the number of CPUs you have?
If you're running tasks/benchmarks that aren't CPU bound, multiple CPUs won't do you any good. If you're running multithreaded apps or multiple single-thread apps, multiple CPUs are a Good Thing, and two AthlonMP 1800+ CPUs will outrun a single AthlonXP 1800+ on a KT266A motherboard. Linux kernel compiles, fr'instance.
Newer Netgear NICs are using NatSemi chips (we had fun hunting down driver support for the 2.2.x kernel used by Red Hat 7.0, looks like 2.4.x includes support).
Hmm, lsmod says I have tulip and eepro100 drivers loaded... Red Hat's kudzu displayed a company name for the Linksys card chip that I didn't recognize, maybe they're just the one who bought DECs networking ops? Dunno. Oh well, it works, I'm happy.
Arctic Silver II is still a good idea. Even if you don't care about dropping your CPU core temp a few degrees, it's electrically nonconductive, so if any compound happens to dribble out from under the CPU it won't short out anything.
Disagree on 3Com. Too many mutations, bad quality control, and they were one of the last companies to support Linux. The Comcast tech who replaced my dead cable modem a few weeks ago (lightning strike) said he's had lots of trouble with 3Com NICs but the Linksys cards (I forget the chip they use but it's not one of the ones you listed) have been solid, and there's a penguin logo on the Linksys retail boxes. Intel cards are solid too; just gives me a warm fuzzy to see the Intel NIC as the default choice when doing kernel compiles.
1) Don't put case fans on the motherboard power connectors unless you have to. Keeping mb voltage levels stable is hard enough without two extra 80mm fans adding stress. CPU fans should be connected to the mb so the fan RPM can be monitored (dead CPU fan == bad news).
2) We've had IBM Ultrastar SCSI drives break down within weaks on our server at work (emphasis on drives, plural). Granted, this is under a severely punishing workload, but Seagates have been more reliable. Under saner workloads the IBM drives are probably fine.
3) SB Live! series cards are bad news on Athlon systems (as ESR found out), especially if you have other heavy DMA I/O tasks on the PCI bus. They've fixed this with the Audigy, but it doesn't have Linux support yet (AFAIK?). The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz is supported; that's what I replaced my Live! X-Gamer with. Now my AccessDTV HDTV PCI card doesn't cause BSODs (Win2000 SP2). Recommended.
4) Modem? Got cable modem. Don't need no steenkin' POTS modem:-)
5) Microsoft Intellimouse Optical. Scratch off the name if you must, but they're GREAT!
6) Word is that the Tyan Thunder motherboard likes Corsair memory best. Dunno why, the board's just picky.
7) An ultimate system should have Sony's 24" widescreen FD Trinitron. Wish I had $2K to spare to buy one. 1080i HDTV would look great on it.
8) Get a tube of Arctic Silver II thermal compound for the CPU heatsinks. Yes, it matters.
For a cheaper config: substitute a Tyan Tiger MP motherboard, PCP&C 400W Silencer (no need for an oddball power connector), IDE drives, and an Ethernet card (Intel or Linksys, I have one of each in my Linux server). Note that faster Athlon MPs are supposed to be announced next week (Tuesday?).
For a way cheaper config: as above, but with a VIA KT266A uniprocessor motherboard (I have a Shuttle mb inbound; newegg.com was out of the Epox 8KHA+ boards that were my first choice) and Athlon XP CPU.
I'm a PCP&C fan too. Antec's no slouch either, but my Silencer 400W keeps the 5V and 3.3V rails hooked up to my 1.4GHz Athlon Thunderbird within 1% of perfect, which is pretty impressive. Dead-on commentary on the P4. It pained me to spec a P4 for a new engineer because Dell refuses to sell Athlons and stopped selling P3 desktops.
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Given that Bill Gates is a Democrat (despite the Republican Party being far more sympathetic to Microsoft), I doubt you'll see him posing with President Bush like he did with Blair. Pity the reality check the Clinton Justice Department whacked him with didn't take.
Gates has the arrogant paternalism that all too often comes with great wealth. Gotta look after the little people, y'know.
Speaking of recognizing ... aren't you the TUBBS guy?
Yup, that's me.
Every old Tandy CoCo user ought to recognize his name, at least the ones that ran OS-9. I'd get my employer to hire him but we're poor bastards.
Well, okay, OS-9 runs on a lot more than the old 6809 CoCo's, but that's what I ran it on. Pretty sweet to have a multiuser, realtime OS on a "toy" computer you picked up at Radio Shack.
A way to restore balance: you may be able to buy cool toys, but you won't have the experience points to use them with 100% effectiveness.
Well, it's not perfect, but the idea of a kiddie blindly firing his shiny new BFG-9000 amuses me...
I'd also make the really cool toys *really* expensive. Want that BFG? $100, please. Top-of-the-line armor? Another $75. Don't price things linearly. Well, maybe that's a bit much, but you get the idea.
I'll continue avoiding MMTSs (Massive Multiplayer Time Sinks) regardless...
How about this: give the game itself away, letting players start out with a basic character/resource level for free. If players want, they could buy neat toys (armor, weapons, etc) from game-run "stores" with real money, but for the sake of play balancing the cost should be high relative to acquiring them the hard way, much like the "Build Now" button in Civ/Alpha Centauri/etc. Being able to buy the game's currency with real money is another strategy for games with appropriately elaborate economic models (Everquest)... actually, that's the simplest way of doing things in general, since it minimizes real-world currency transactions (overhead). The game should have an internal eBay-like auction market for items/currency trading, with the game taking an appropriate commission (3-5%). Just like the real world, money would be a substitute for time.
PayPal could have fun with this.
Maybe I'm just getting old and aware of the passage of time, but I've wound up whittling down the number of TV shows I watch to a select few and getting nearly all my news from online, my local newspaper, and a magazine. This despite the fact that I have a very nice satellite dish and HDTV PCI card. There's just too many other things I want to do. The TV stays off for many days of the week, and I don't miss it. (Darn the WB and UPN for making decent shows! Even Enterprise has gotten good lately.) What's disturbing is the contrast with the rest of my family, who despite lacking the technotoys I have spend far more time in front of the tube. It's unbelievable how much crap my brother watches.
This from a guy who's not very sociable.
Now, take my Internet feed away and I'm going to hurt somebody...
If you have a SB Live! series soundcard in your system, remove it and see if that helps. If it does, buy something else. I went with a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz (which is also well supported by Linux).
Very, VERY common problem.
I've yet to find any easy to understand table that clearly deliniates what the differences are between the various Athlons.
Athlon XP: Buy one. 20% less power draw clock-to-clock than its predecessor, has Intel SSE support (aka 3DNow! Pro), has better hardware prefetch to take better advantage of DDR SDRAMs bandwidth. Palamino core. AMD sold 4 million of them last quarter. 266MHz FSB.
Duron at 1GHz and higher: Same as Athlon XP but with 128K/64K L1/L2 cache instead of 128K/256K and 200MHz FSB. If you're strapped for cash, buy one.
Athlon: The old one. Thunderbird core. Being phased out. Consider if you're offered a good deal. Some are 266MHz FSB, some are 200MHz FSB.
Duron below 1GHz: Same as above but with 128K/64K L1/L2 cache and 200MHz FSB. Very, very inexpensive.
I have an Athlon XP 1800+ at home, paired with an Epox 8KHA+ KT266A motherboard. Highly, highly recommended.
Why haven't AMD gone with the MHz doesn't equal performance as they have done with the new XP/MP chips, as it would be assumed the market for these will be consumers who don't generally look at benchmark figures?
Because the Duron competes against the P3-based Celeron, not the P4 that runs far slower clock-to-clock than its predecessor. If Intel hadn't deliberately designed the P4 for clock speed at the expense of performence, AMD would not have needed their True Performence Initiative.
In this case, two wrongs DO make a right. At least AMD's "wrong" is just marketing fluff rather than deliberately misdesigned engineering.
Read "The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky" to answer your question.
First, if you're going to insist on a REA-type federal approach, at least insist that a hard time limit be imposed on the agency. The REA hung around until 1994, and even then was assimilated into a similar government agency. Bureaucracies don't ever put themselves out of work.
Second, does it really take that much money to get started? And that cost is continuously dropping, especially with the help of open source projects. Isn't it likely that this problem can be solved within the next several years without government intervention? I'll bet on private initiative and creativity (hmm, solar powered WiFi relays anyone?) to get the job done.
Besides, if taxes weren't so damn high more individuals would be able to finance such initiatives. It would be far easier to bootstrap ventures if, say, we didn't have 1-1/2 months per year of labor confiscated by the Socialist Security system.
These, or higher-speed commercial point-to-point transmitters, seem like a neat way to set up a wireless backbone for a (community) wireless network. Then you just hang WiFi transmitters off the backbone access points. Actually, I'd want something a bit faster than 10Mbps for a backbone (aggregate multiple transmitters?), but you get the idea. I'm not sure it'd be superior to using the new 802.11a 5GHz gear for such a backbone, but in either case, you avoid dealing with the local telco monopoly, which is always a Good Thing.
:-).
Maybe put small caching proxy servers at the access points backed up by a big one at the end of the network? Or just the latter. If you're liable to wind up with a Linux box at the access points anyhow...
I've already got a cable modem and I'm lazy, so I'll let someone else run with this
What's wrong with the Live!? It pollutes the PCI bus with noise, which is why it's a frequent source of PCI DMA I/O corruption, particularly (but not exclusively) on VIA chipset boards. I've found the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz to be an excellent, trouble-free replacement, and best of all Red Hat Linux autoconfigures it (zero human intervention required). See the SCFAQ on VIA Hardware.
I couldn't figure out why my HDTV card was locking up every hour or so on my KT133 board, nor why WinXP was crashing frequently on my KT266 board. Removing the Live!'s fixed both systems. I didn't bother attempting a Live! on my new KT266A.
So, if all we need to do is speed up the melting of the ice caps on Mars, we just drop a few nuclear-powered heaters, let them wander around the caps for a few decades, and assuming the new atmosphere stays put we'll have a habitable environment? There has to be more to it than that, but if the issues could be worked out...
;-).
By the time the atmosphere is properly cooked we should be able to transport people to Mars in significant numbers (hundreds, thousands). Give priority to people (the new pioneers!) who want to raise large families, and in a century or two Mars could have a fairly substantial human population.
Possible side effect: Mars could wind up very Catholic
(Sorry, I've been waiting weeks for a chance to use that line...)
Thus why I said "leftist" and not "liberal". Leftist is fairly narrow.
All of which are good things.
Control being the issue the leftists are up in arms about. It's pretty hard to maintain control over people and groups of people (ie, businesses) when they have the option to walk away from power-hungry governments. You can't just throw up a Berlin Wall or Iron Curtain anymore. If governments don't play nice with their people, their best and brightest will walk.
Globalisation is a natural counterweight to tribalism. Playing "us" vs. "them" games becomes increasingly difficult when everyone works with people from all over the world. And darn, there goes that control again. bin Laden is cranky about that.
Same goes with the abuses of nationalism. We're seeing a partial remission of nationalism after the 9/11 attacks, with the move towards unification of the civilized world against barbaric tribalists. The positive side of nationalism, the unification of a people against a common enemy (red white and blue everywhere!), has surged nicely, and that's good.
What remains to be seen is whether the people living in nation-states that have resisted joining the civilized world (say, your average dictatorship that uses anti-American propaganda to unite their citizens against an external "enemy" to deflect criticism from their own incompetence and illegitimacy) will be able to change the course of their nations, or even learn that that would be a Very Good Idea. And does the civilized world have the confidence to help them?
I've been wanting to upgrade my aging Toshiba Satellite, but so far every Athlon notebook I've found uses some lame graphics chip rather than nVidia or ATI Radeon series chips. And no SXGA+ or UXGA res screens either. Has anyone found one? Maybe we'll see them early next year when the 130nm Mobile Athlons come out?
Maybe Micron will build one. Their new Athlon/nForce desktops look sweet, definite Dell-killers.
Forbes covered this two months ago. Basically, because too many providers are splitting up too little bandwidth, cell phone coverage sucks. It's high time the FCC got out of the way and let the stronger players acquire the weaker. Maybe service will improve to the point where I'd actually consider buying a cell phone.
On a related note, I have no sympathy for the companies that overpaid for spectrum licenses nor the greedy Feds who thought they had a chance in hell of collecting all those $billions. Golly, who pays for those license fees? Can you say massive tax on users?
What chip are you running your OS on? I bet its an Intel chip, or an intel-clone (AMD)
If the Athlon was an Intel clone, it wouldn't kick the P4's ass.
Does that include the high-end power supplies like the 400W Silencer? Because mine, driving a 1.4GHz Athlon Thunderbird, keeps the 5V and 3.3V rails within 1% of perfect, which is rather unusual AFAIK. I can believe that the cheaper supplies are rebadged Sparkle models (as others have reported), but not the high end and speciality ones. I'm not quite willing to crack open mine to find out, though.
I'd also be surprised if they didn't outsource their case production. I have bought midtower cases from them and they're solid, well-designed, no-nonsense cases. Had I known more about these nice aluminum cases I'd have gone with one of those instead, though.
1) Faster propulsion, and if that means nuclear powered engines, so be it.
1a) Develop heavy lift capability.
2) Develop tech necessary for colonization, and use the moon as a testbed.
3) Do thorough study of the moon, manned study if necessary (probably is), in particular to find all water and mineable metals that may be there. Not to bring back to Earth, but so we won't need to transport them from Earth.
4) Especially if #3 allows for the construction of spacecraft hulls, when 1-3 are done, head to Mars. Use tech from #1a to transport the machinery to equip the craft.
Umm, because memory bandwidth is independent of the number of CPUs you have?
If you're running tasks/benchmarks that aren't CPU bound, multiple CPUs won't do you any good. If you're running multithreaded apps or multiple single-thread apps, multiple CPUs are a Good Thing, and two AthlonMP 1800+ CPUs will outrun a single AthlonXP 1800+ on a KT266A motherboard. Linux kernel compiles, fr'instance.
Newer Netgear NICs are using NatSemi chips (we had fun hunting down driver support for the 2.2.x kernel used by Red Hat 7.0, looks like 2.4.x includes support).
Hmm, lsmod says I have tulip and eepro100 drivers loaded... Red Hat's kudzu displayed a company name for the Linksys card chip that I didn't recognize, maybe they're just the one who bought DECs networking ops? Dunno. Oh well, it works, I'm happy.
Arctic Silver II is still a good idea. Even if you don't care about dropping your CPU core temp a few degrees, it's electrically nonconductive, so if any compound happens to dribble out from under the CPU it won't short out anything.
Disagree on 3Com. Too many mutations, bad quality control, and they were one of the last companies to support Linux. The Comcast tech who replaced my dead cable modem a few weeks ago (lightning strike) said he's had lots of trouble with 3Com NICs but the Linksys cards (I forget the chip they use but it's not one of the ones you listed) have been solid, and there's a penguin logo on the Linksys retail boxes. Intel cards are solid too; just gives me a warm fuzzy to see the Intel NIC as the default choice when doing kernel compiles.
1) Don't put case fans on the motherboard power connectors unless you have to. Keeping mb voltage levels stable is hard enough without two extra 80mm fans adding stress. CPU fans should be connected to the mb so the fan RPM can be monitored (dead CPU fan == bad news).
:-)
2) We've had IBM Ultrastar SCSI drives break down within weaks on our server at work (emphasis on drives, plural). Granted, this is under a severely punishing workload, but Seagates have been more reliable. Under saner workloads the IBM drives are probably fine.
3) SB Live! series cards are bad news on Athlon systems (as ESR found out), especially if you have other heavy DMA I/O tasks on the PCI bus. They've fixed this with the Audigy, but it doesn't have Linux support yet (AFAIK?). The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz is supported; that's what I replaced my Live! X-Gamer with. Now my AccessDTV HDTV PCI card doesn't cause BSODs (Win2000 SP2). Recommended.
4) Modem? Got cable modem. Don't need no steenkin' POTS modem
5) Microsoft Intellimouse Optical. Scratch off the name if you must, but they're GREAT!
6) Word is that the Tyan Thunder motherboard likes Corsair memory best. Dunno why, the board's just picky.
7) An ultimate system should have Sony's 24" widescreen FD Trinitron. Wish I had $2K to spare to buy one. 1080i HDTV would look great on it.
8) Get a tube of Arctic Silver II thermal compound for the CPU heatsinks. Yes, it matters.
For a cheaper config: substitute a Tyan Tiger MP motherboard, PCP&C 400W Silencer (no need for an oddball power connector), IDE drives, and an Ethernet card (Intel or Linksys, I have one of each in my Linux server). Note that faster Athlon MPs are supposed to be announced next week (Tuesday?).
For a way cheaper config: as above, but with a VIA KT266A uniprocessor motherboard (I have a Shuttle mb inbound; newegg.com was out of the Epox 8KHA+ boards that were my first choice) and Athlon XP CPU.
I'm a PCP&C fan too. Antec's no slouch either, but my Silencer 400W keeps the 5V and 3.3V rails hooked up to my 1.4GHz Athlon Thunderbird within 1% of perfect, which is pretty impressive. Dead-on commentary on the P4. It pained me to spec a P4 for a new engineer because Dell refuses to sell Athlons and stopped selling P3 desktops.