You can't just plug in "a lot of USB ethernet controllers" because the XBox controller ports, albiet USB, are not a USB connection. You need a converter, and THEN the controller. And when all is said and done, you'd left with a crappy 11Mbit of USB Ethernet speeds whereas the onboard controller (e100) is actually very good.
I'm not whining - I really don't give a crap either way. But this isn't a solution by any means.
" I have never got a reliable gigabyte network going were i could sustain a true 1000 speed"
Yea. Although you can use the best Cat 5e or Cat 6 cable out there, with the consumer-grade gigabit over copper they put in machines and the $90 switches at CompUSA, it's pretty bad.
We've got an Extreme 7i at the office for our non-fiber servers (Fiber is still the only route if you truely need gigabit with no nonsense) and it performs very well. But the switch is several thousand dollars and the Intel NICs in the servers are at least $500 a pop - nevermind the 4-port NICs. Cheaper then fiber, much more realistic speeds then consumer grade stuff, but still not cheap by any measure.
I'm waiting to find some decent gigabit cards like the 3c905's were for 100mbit. And at a decent price.
As far as someone creating a 3rd party 3Com driver for x64, maybe it wouldn't be impossible porting a linux kernel module to Windows but it wouldn't exactly be a direct port.. And OSS drivers for Windows are - well, I've never seen any.
But there's plenty of support for the cards in Linux/AMD64. Your hardware doesn't automatically become obsolete just because the vendor or Microsoft decides you're not worth supporting. (obviously, support for things can and do become depricated in Linux too, but not as arbitrarily, and since the code is available it makes it easy for some decent kernel hacker to update anything to work with the new version.)
But back to the topic;
"If the nics and all had thier own processing power then the already established system bus would be all that is needed for comunications to that device."
On the server NIC's we have, there is still only one chip on the things. They are both the DSP and the processor in the same chip. While the boards look moderately more complex then a $5 linksys 10/100 board, I think it's mostly because the server NIC doesn't integrate all those little capacitors and stuff in order to produce a cleaner signal.
I think the whole reason that many controllers now utilize the main CPU to do processing is simply because it's cheaper, and it's possible. Like you said, the CPU was never fast enough to handle these tasks in the past. It's cheaper because the controller card chips are much more simple. But I still maintain that they don't necessarily make the physical side of things less complex =)
No, sorry, that doesn't work. This software has become so ambuiguous that it's not just for professionals anymore. Office, Photoshop, etc.
They charge a shit load because they know people WILL pay if they use it for work. They take advantage of the fact that businesses pay big bucks for the software.
Because of the popularity of Photoshop, Office, and other software like that, there's just hardly any viable competition. Of course, OpenOffice has come to the rescue on the office side, but Gimp for Windows just doesn't compare to Photoshop.
"and is a major factor in why it is so widely pirated."
I tend to disagree - I think the reason so much software is pirated is because of the retarded prices. $600 for a copy of Office 2003 Pro non-upgrade? $1000+ for the Adobe CS package, or hundreds and hundreds more for each individually? $300 for Windows XP?
The only mainstream software out there that's resonably priced is games. Sure, $50 might seem like a lot for a single game, but for a game like Half Life 2 - it took those guys a long time and a crap load of development to get it shipped.
I understand the the audience is different, but really, unless you pirate software you gotta be rich to own anything besides Works, the OS that came on your PC, and some browser.
Just wait until Microsoft and Friends (TM) go and really lock down their software. It *can* be done fairly effectively if you're shitty about it, like how games are now a days (check out Steam, you'll frigging hate it.) Microsoft isn't going to get nicer, so it's going to happen. Wait 'til I tell my mom that the new printer she got only works with Windows whatever, and it costs $299 for the upgrade.. We'll see people seeking alternatives pretty furiously if and when it happens.
But that's where "trusted computing" and DRM comes in. Microsoft knows it wants to lock the hell out of your computer, and they know when they do it, it's going to piss off a LOT of people. So, they're doing everything they can to lock free software out before it happens. I dunno, maybe I'm seeing conspiracies here that aren't, but it just seems too obvious to me to dismiss.
But offloading processing to the CPU isn't really making anything more simple at all from a hardware perspective, like he suggests. Whether or not the NIC has a dedicated processor instead of a simple DSP is moot; it still has to hook into the bus, power, etc much in the way that dedicated processor would. You still need the supporting hardware, even if it's more simple internally.
So the mainboards aren't going to get cheaper as he suggests. If anything, they've been getting a lot more expensive because all the companies are really cramming a lot of stuff on them now. So even if the integrated NIC, modem, USB controllers, and SATA raid controllers are all CPU hogs, it doesn't matter because the boards are still very complicated and expensive to produce.
Ohh, ps. If you're planning on using Windows XP x64 edition, you can't use the 3c905a/b/c. Unsupported. 3Com has no drivers and does not plan to make any. It sucks, because I have about 20 3c905b's that I used to give to friends when they'd bring their computers over (so that 25GB copy wouldn't take fifteen hours.) They're good cards. This is just yet another example of why OSS operating systems are a good frickin' idea.
Oh well, I still have plenty of machines that will work with them.
Other processors come close. And they got more stuff on board, like memory controllers and multimedia extensions.
Again, it's not a 1:1 battle for the least watts of heat like it's not a 1:1 battle for more Mhz. There's other factors.
I think the Pentium 3.. erm.. Pentium M is a fine chip and I always liked the P3 more then the P4. P4 turned me off from the start with it's lackluster performance and expensive Rambus RAM. Pentium 3's continued to beat the P4 in performance for some time until the P4's got into the 2.0+ Ghz range.
AMD has never let me down with any of their chips, way back to the 486DX4 to the K6 to the Athlons and beyond. I see lots of promise on their mobile lines; and after feeling jaded from the Pentium 4 launch I'm not holding my breath for the Pentium-M.
You don't have to put them next to the bed - and if you do for whatever reason, you can turn them off at night.
I'm basically just pointing out that it's silly to have all this outrage from people over loud PC's when they simply aren't. Unless you have this crazy overclocked contraption or bleeding-edge "shouldn't have been released" video cards or CPU's, it won't make any noise. The hard drive will wear out after a couple years and start to whine, but they're cheap enough to replace every year.
Google maps uses a blending/fade from one set of images to another. My area is full of these seams - they line up pretty good but some of them show views during the summer and others were taken in the winter or fall time.
Terraserver, when they went from simply demonstrating the capabilities of SQL7 to actually maintaining it, they added new images. When they did this, they basically just plopped them in - there's obvious cuts in the map where the two sets line up. I haven't used the MSN images thing yet but when I used Terraserver back in '99 it was all black and white. They may have improved it since then.
The images look great in color on Google maps though, especially the summertime sets.
You "realize" it takes "a lot more" electricity to run A/C than heat ?
Why, exactly, would that be ?
Because I didn't fill in the blanks for you. I have gas heat, and it's pretty cheap to burn gas. The electric fans push the heated air into the house.
The combined price of gas and electric during the winter is a fraction of the summertime - about 1/5 to 1/5 the price.
The heat differential is much greater during the winter months. Speaking in fahrenheit, it's often 20 degrees outside - and we heat to about 70 degrees. That's a 50 degree difference. In the summer, we usually set the AC for 75 and it's normally 80 - 95 degrees outside. That's only a 20 degree difference.
Perhaps we could replace the windows with super-duper two way heat exchange windows and install some space age insulation. The house was built in 1995 and it's got your normal construction found in houses around here.
I don't know how the folks down south can afford it.
While I'd LIKE to have a huge battery life in my notebook, it's not all that important to me. I use a notebook for all my work; at the office and when I got home I take it with me. I have a docking station at the office and a power supply at home that I sometimes take with me when I'm on call and I'm going to be away for the weekend or something.
The fact is, I'm always where there's power available. I don't need to use the machine on an airplane for 6 hours. I don't need to use my computer on a park bench all day.
Most of the guys I work with do the same thing. Our machines don't have the best battery life but it's good enough for the long meetings or logging in to check e-mail from the road. That extra two or three hours time on the battery just wouldn't matter.
I'd rather have a really powerful notebook that I can use as a desktop replacement for work that I can take home with me then a slower unit that has longer batttery life.
Let's all just take a step back here and think about this for a minute.
While servers and rooms full of servers are definately loud as hell, they're found in closed rooms at work. If you have one of these loud-ass servers at home, I do not feel bad for you.
So, you work with computers huh? So does everyone else, pretty much. If you think that your PC is somehow louder then the drouning noise of a busy office, you need to seek help. If you need your workplace to be as silent as the vacume of space, you need to seek help. Workplaces are noisy for the most part, and your PC under the desk is a tiny little part of it. I currently work in a small room with 5 desks and 8 PC's and I can't hear any of them - even when I'm the only one here.
Got a computer next to your bed? Why! This one baffles me. "I couldn't sleep at night because my PC was TOO LOUD!! Sure, it was six inches from my face..." Them move the damned thing! Don't put it in your bedroom, for goodness sakes.
Don't want a vacume cleaner sounding computer? Easy! Don't buy the latest contraption from nVidia, or the loudest fan from UberC00lCompany. It's that simple.
It really sounds retarded when some of you complain and bitch about loud computers when the vast majority of them are almost silent these days.
Gosh, then how come my electric bill is $400 a month during the summer?
I realize it takes a lot more electricity to run A/C then heat, but it's a small house with two air conditioners. Billing people $400/mo to stay cool during the summer is ridiculous.
Electricity is way too expensive. If it's not the power itself, it's "line fees" and "transmission fees" and don't forget any other fees they want to charge us this month.
It might not be the power generators that are over charging; maybe it's the local companies (although Narraganset Electric is my only choice) but it doesn't matter. We get robbed.
I wish they'd put up more nuclear plants.. so much more efficient, so much better on the environment. Did you know that an averag coal plant generates more radioactivity then the largest nuclear plants?
Yea that line was great. I'd love to see an experiment where Microsoft sells "Microsoft Windows Garbage" to see if it has a negative impact on sales.
I'm guessing they chose "Vista" so people couldn't tag it on their products too. Easier to sue for a whole word then it is just two letters; just like how Intel couldn't trademark "586" so they went with Pentium.
When Windows XP came out, all of a sudden we saw a crap load of products with XP on the end including the Athlon XP from AMD.
I'm not sure why they'd want to stop it but it's Microsoft so who knows.
My first machine was a C64, then a 8086, then an 8088, then a 386sx (skipped the 286, although the 386sx is a 386DX on a 286 board) then a 486SX 2, then a Pentium 75, to the DX4 120 (AMD), then a Pentium 133, then a Pentium 166MMX (the Miracle 166 chip ran great at 300Mhz) and so on..
The 386sx boards were SO simple that the biggest surface area on the board were the ISA slots.
So you're going to tell me that everything is loaded onto the CPU now - what AMD and Intel CPU's have built in Ethernet, Sound, Video, Serial, USB, PCI? Ohh wait - NONE OF THEM. It's all duties of the mainboard now, and the more shit that gets crammed into these things the more expensive they will be.
For a long time you could get a really nice mainboard for less then $100. Now, if you want a really nice board you'll be dishing out $200. Is it because there's less demand? No. Is it because the parts are more expensive to make now? Nope. It's because they do a lot more now in standard configurations and they require a lot of engineering.
Take a look at the video on Toms Hardware about the Gigabyte factory tour.
Your observations are ignorant of the technology. Winmodems? All they offloaded was the encoding software to make them cheaper to produce - you still need the rest of the modem parts. TV Tuner? You were using an overlay on the old card, and your new one probably doesn't. Overlays are great for slow machines but you can't do shit with the video. Bus-fed video allows you to record, edit, etc.
The "IO cards" now are the same as they were in the past but because the rest of the computer has advanced enough, many of them send their data through the processor allowing you to actually DO something with it. And just because most mainboards now integrate everything onto the board instead of forcing you to buy expansion cards for evertything, don't think for a minute they aren't expansion cards. They still "plug" into the PCI bus. Meanwhile, the CPU is still just that- a CPU. AMD recently took the memory controller and put it on the CPU, and some bus functions. But Intel doesn't, and the rest of the machine is business as usuall - no different then an 8086 in basic design.
"BTW since all most of the controllers are on CPU, I expect motherboard prices will decrease since there is not much to remain on them."
There's a lot of stuff on the boards and there's a lot of engineering that goes into making them. Just because the memory controller and PCI express controller are on the CPU doesn't really make the mainboard any less complex.
Don't expect prices to drop at all. And about the solder to the board thing - hell no. There's very rarely ever a defect with a CPU, but mainboards attach directly to all sorts of equipment and power. It's a buffer zone between the cpu and everything else. And mainboards aren't infallable - they die.
Plus, I've been able to upgrade JUST the mainboard, or JUST the CPU in the past to get real big jumps in performance or features without spending a lot of cash. If everything was integrated you could never do that.
I said about 8 times "as long as what you're doing isn't illegal."
If you're so far gone that you think people as a general rule don't understand you can't kill people for the fuck of it, you're the one that needs to be locked up; in the mental hospital.
We don't need an informed interview or real person fielding questions for Microsoft - because we know what the real truth is and we don't need them to tell us.
Plus, they never would say "We hate OSS, we want to crush all competition, die."
Anything you pay for is not a priviledge. A lot of our tax money goes to keeping the roads running, and a lot of our tax money goes to paying those police that watch them.
It's a basic human service, roads, and it IS a right. We need to drive to live in many parts of the US, and many parts of the world. Shit, we all pay for them.
I couldn't get to work, get to the store, get anywhere without a car. There's no good public transportation where I live or work, and the only places to work are in driving distance, not walking distance.
Obviously, if you do something wrong, you can have your right to drive restricted - just like if you mugged someone you'd have your right to freedom restricted.
Traffic violations aren't just "code violations." When you pay a ticket, you are pleading guilty and paying the required fine. If you don't want to plead guilty, you go to court and face a judge. If the violation was serious enough, you might even face a jury. This sounds curiously similar to any other crime - and it's because they are any other crime.
Your examples don't even support your claim that traffic violations aren't crimes.
"A female employee gets pregnant. She can't work around the toxic cleaning solutions. Fine. OSHA comes in and orders the business closed until changes are made, fines them, and orders them to pay temporary lost wages. No crime was committed, they weren't hauled off to jail, nothing."
Even if this were to happen - if there was some reason that OSHA came in and closed the business it would be because they were doing something ILLEGAL. They were found guilty as a matter of evidence and fined for it. They COULD go to court and fight it. Just because nobody went to jail doesn't mean it wasn't a crime.
"We have grown accustomed to thinking everything is a right."
Assuming for a moment that you live in the US or the UK, your freedom is a right. Anything that you want to do, outside the line of what is illegal, is your right to do. It IS your right to get married if you want to. It IS your right to collect welfare if you want to. We can do whatever we want as long as it's not illegal.
As soon as everyone thinks like you - that our lives are simply priviledges given out by someone in charge - we will indeed have lost our freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't just plug in "a lot of USB ethernet controllers" because the XBox controller ports, albiet USB, are not a USB connection. You need a converter, and THEN the controller. And when all is said and done, you'd left with a crappy 11Mbit of USB Ethernet speeds whereas the onboard controller (e100) is actually very good.
I'm not whining - I really don't give a crap either way. But this isn't a solution by any means.
" I have never got a reliable gigabyte network going were i could sustain a true 1000 speed"
Yea. Although you can use the best Cat 5e or Cat 6 cable out there, with the consumer-grade gigabit over copper they put in machines and the $90 switches at CompUSA, it's pretty bad.
We've got an Extreme 7i at the office for our non-fiber servers (Fiber is still the only route if you truely need gigabit with no nonsense) and it performs very well. But the switch is several thousand dollars and the Intel NICs in the servers are at least $500 a pop - nevermind the 4-port NICs. Cheaper then fiber, much more realistic speeds then consumer grade stuff, but still not cheap by any measure.
I'm waiting to find some decent gigabit cards like the 3c905's were for 100mbit. And at a decent price.
As far as someone creating a 3rd party 3Com driver for x64, maybe it wouldn't be impossible porting a linux kernel module to Windows but it wouldn't exactly be a direct port.. And OSS drivers for Windows are - well, I've never seen any.
But there's plenty of support for the cards in Linux/AMD64. Your hardware doesn't automatically become obsolete just because the vendor or Microsoft decides you're not worth supporting. (obviously, support for things can and do become depricated in Linux too, but not as arbitrarily, and since the code is available it makes it easy for some decent kernel hacker to update anything to work with the new version.)
But back to the topic;
"If the nics and all had thier own processing power then the already established system bus would be all that is needed for comunications to that device."
On the server NIC's we have, there is still only one chip on the things. They are both the DSP and the processor in the same chip. While the boards look moderately more complex then a $5 linksys 10/100 board, I think it's mostly because the server NIC doesn't integrate all those little capacitors and stuff in order to produce a cleaner signal.
I think the whole reason that many controllers now utilize the main CPU to do processing is simply because it's cheaper, and it's possible. Like you said, the CPU was never fast enough to handle these tasks in the past. It's cheaper because the controller card chips are much more simple. But I still maintain that they don't necessarily make the physical side of things less complex =)
No, sorry, that doesn't work. This software has become so ambuiguous that it's not just for professionals anymore. Office, Photoshop, etc.
They charge a shit load because they know people WILL pay if they use it for work. They take advantage of the fact that businesses pay big bucks for the software.
Because of the popularity of Photoshop, Office, and other software like that, there's just hardly any viable competition. Of course, OpenOffice has come to the rescue on the office side, but Gimp for Windows just doesn't compare to Photoshop.
Because the rationale is justifying $50 versus $500.
I think you meant "Well, you can blame Microsoft, but it's a business world."
Because I sure as hell can blame them for this shit.
Yea but everyone else's machines are compatible with one another...
"and is a major factor in why it is so widely pirated."
I tend to disagree - I think the reason so much software is pirated is because of the retarded prices. $600 for a copy of Office 2003 Pro non-upgrade? $1000+ for the Adobe CS package, or hundreds and hundreds more for each individually? $300 for Windows XP?
The only mainstream software out there that's resonably priced is games. Sure, $50 might seem like a lot for a single game, but for a game like Half Life 2 - it took those guys a long time and a crap load of development to get it shipped.
I understand the the audience is different, but really, unless you pirate software you gotta be rich to own anything besides Works, the OS that came on your PC, and some browser.
Just wait until Microsoft and Friends (TM) go and really lock down their software. It *can* be done fairly effectively if you're shitty about it, like how games are now a days (check out Steam, you'll frigging hate it.) Microsoft isn't going to get nicer, so it's going to happen. Wait 'til I tell my mom that the new printer she got only works with Windows whatever, and it costs $299 for the upgrade.. We'll see people seeking alternatives pretty furiously if and when it happens.
But that's where "trusted computing" and DRM comes in. Microsoft knows it wants to lock the hell out of your computer, and they know when they do it, it's going to piss off a LOT of people. So, they're doing everything they can to lock free software out before it happens. I dunno, maybe I'm seeing conspiracies here that aren't, but it just seems too obvious to me to dismiss.
You're right, and I definately understand that.
But offloading processing to the CPU isn't really making anything more simple at all from a hardware perspective, like he suggests. Whether or not the NIC has a dedicated processor instead of a simple DSP is moot; it still has to hook into the bus, power, etc much in the way that dedicated processor would. You still need the supporting hardware, even if it's more simple internally.
So the mainboards aren't going to get cheaper as he suggests. If anything, they've been getting a lot more expensive because all the companies are really cramming a lot of stuff on them now. So even if the integrated NIC, modem, USB controllers, and SATA raid controllers are all CPU hogs, it doesn't matter because the boards are still very complicated and expensive to produce.
Ohh, ps. If you're planning on using Windows XP x64 edition, you can't use the 3c905a/b/c. Unsupported. 3Com has no drivers and does not plan to make any. It sucks, because I have about 20 3c905b's that I used to give to friends when they'd bring their computers over (so that 25GB copy wouldn't take fifteen hours.) They're good cards. This is just yet another example of why OSS operating systems are a good frickin' idea.
Oh well, I still have plenty of machines that will work with them.
"Again, no significant blending."
Uhh, okay man. Have fun with that.
"i'm sorry .... so sorry. it had to be done."
No it didn't.
What are you, 10?
Other processors come close. And they got more stuff on board, like memory controllers and multimedia extensions.
Again, it's not a 1:1 battle for the least watts of heat like it's not a 1:1 battle for more Mhz. There's other factors.
I think the Pentium 3.. erm.. Pentium M is a fine chip and I always liked the P3 more then the P4. P4 turned me off from the start with it's lackluster performance and expensive Rambus RAM. Pentium 3's continued to beat the P4 in performance for some time until the P4's got into the 2.0+ Ghz range.
AMD has never let me down with any of their chips, way back to the 486DX4 to the K6 to the Athlons and beyond. I see lots of promise on their mobile lines; and after feeling jaded from the Pentium 4 launch I'm not holding my breath for the Pentium-M.
I don't know about the censoring- I haven't looked around enough to notice any either way - but this is what the seams look like around where I live.
. 872109,-71.389257&spn=0.005502,0.009234&t=k&hl=en
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Pawtucket,+RI&ll=41
It looks like the images on the left are from a newer satellite - they're a lot more clear.
Yea, the only time battery life will change the way I use my notebook is if the battery lasts for at least a week of heavy use.
10 years would be nice =)
You don't have to put them next to the bed - and if you do for whatever reason, you can turn them off at night.
I'm basically just pointing out that it's silly to have all this outrage from people over loud PC's when they simply aren't. Unless you have this crazy overclocked contraption or bleeding-edge "shouldn't have been released" video cards or CPU's, it won't make any noise. The hard drive will wear out after a couple years and start to whine, but they're cheap enough to replace every year.
Google maps uses a blending/fade from one set of images to another. My area is full of these seams - they line up pretty good but some of them show views during the summer and others were taken in the winter or fall time.
Terraserver, when they went from simply demonstrating the capabilities of SQL7 to actually maintaining it, they added new images. When they did this, they basically just plopped them in - there's obvious cuts in the map where the two sets line up. I haven't used the MSN images thing yet but when I used Terraserver back in '99 it was all black and white. They may have improved it since then.
The images look great in color on Google maps though, especially the summertime sets.
Why, exactly, would that be ?
Because I didn't fill in the blanks for you. I have gas heat, and it's pretty cheap to burn gas. The electric fans push the heated air into the house.
The combined price of gas and electric during the winter is a fraction of the summertime - about 1/5 to 1/5 the price.
The heat differential is much greater during the winter months. Speaking in fahrenheit, it's often 20 degrees outside - and we heat to about 70 degrees. That's a 50 degree difference. In the summer, we usually set the AC for 75 and it's normally 80 - 95 degrees outside. That's only a 20 degree difference.
Perhaps we could replace the windows with super-duper two way heat exchange windows and install some space age insulation. The house was built in 1995 and it's got your normal construction found in houses around here.
I don't know how the folks down south can afford it.
While I'd LIKE to have a huge battery life in my notebook, it's not all that important to me. I use a notebook for all my work; at the office and when I got home I take it with me. I have a docking station at the office and a power supply at home that I sometimes take with me when I'm on call and I'm going to be away for the weekend or something.
The fact is, I'm always where there's power available. I don't need to use the machine on an airplane for 6 hours. I don't need to use my computer on a park bench all day.
Most of the guys I work with do the same thing. Our machines don't have the best battery life but it's good enough for the long meetings or logging in to check e-mail from the road. That extra two or three hours time on the battery just wouldn't matter.
I'd rather have a really powerful notebook that I can use as a desktop replacement for work that I can take home with me then a slower unit that has longer batttery life.
I'm not the only one that feels this way.
Let's all just take a step back here and think about this for a minute.
While servers and rooms full of servers are definately loud as hell, they're found in closed rooms at work. If you have one of these loud-ass servers at home, I do not feel bad for you.
So, you work with computers huh? So does everyone else, pretty much. If you think that your PC is somehow louder then the drouning noise of a busy office, you need to seek help. If you need your workplace to be as silent as the vacume of space, you need to seek help. Workplaces are noisy for the most part, and your PC under the desk is a tiny little part of it. I currently work in a small room with 5 desks and 8 PC's and I can't hear any of them - even when I'm the only one here.
Got a computer next to your bed? Why! This one baffles me. "I couldn't sleep at night because my PC was TOO LOUD!! Sure, it was six inches from my face..." Them move the damned thing! Don't put it in your bedroom, for goodness sakes.
Don't want a vacume cleaner sounding computer? Easy! Don't buy the latest contraption from nVidia, or the loudest fan from UberC00lCompany. It's that simple.
It really sounds retarded when some of you complain and bitch about loud computers when the vast majority of them are almost silent these days.
Gosh, then how come my electric bill is $400 a month during the summer?
I realize it takes a lot more electricity to run A/C then heat, but it's a small house with two air conditioners. Billing people $400/mo to stay cool during the summer is ridiculous.
Electricity is way too expensive. If it's not the power itself, it's "line fees" and "transmission fees" and don't forget any other fees they want to charge us this month.
It might not be the power generators that are over charging; maybe it's the local companies (although Narraganset Electric is my only choice) but it doesn't matter. We get robbed.
I wish they'd put up more nuclear plants.. so much more efficient, so much better on the environment. Did you know that an averag coal plant generates more radioactivity then the largest nuclear plants?
Anyways..
Yea that line was great. I'd love to see an experiment where Microsoft sells "Microsoft Windows Garbage" to see if it has a negative impact on sales.
I'm guessing they chose "Vista" so people couldn't tag it on their products too. Easier to sue for a whole word then it is just two letters; just like how Intel couldn't trademark "586" so they went with Pentium.
When Windows XP came out, all of a sudden we saw a crap load of products with XP on the end including the Athlon XP from AMD.
I'm not sure why they'd want to stop it but it's Microsoft so who knows.
I clearly what?
My first machine was a C64, then a 8086, then an 8088, then a 386sx (skipped the 286, although the 386sx is a 386DX on a 286 board) then a 486SX 2, then a Pentium 75, to the DX4 120 (AMD), then a Pentium 133, then a Pentium 166MMX (the Miracle 166 chip ran great at 300Mhz) and so on..
The 386sx boards were SO simple that the biggest surface area on the board were the ISA slots.
So you're going to tell me that everything is loaded onto the CPU now - what AMD and Intel CPU's have built in Ethernet, Sound, Video, Serial, USB, PCI? Ohh wait - NONE OF THEM. It's all duties of the mainboard now, and the more shit that gets crammed into these things the more expensive they will be.
For a long time you could get a really nice mainboard for less then $100. Now, if you want a really nice board you'll be dishing out $200. Is it because there's less demand? No. Is it because the parts are more expensive to make now? Nope. It's because they do a lot more now in standard configurations and they require a lot of engineering.
Take a look at the video on Toms Hardware about the Gigabyte factory tour.
Your observations are ignorant of the technology. Winmodems? All they offloaded was the encoding software to make them cheaper to produce - you still need the rest of the modem parts. TV Tuner? You were using an overlay on the old card, and your new one probably doesn't. Overlays are great for slow machines but you can't do shit with the video. Bus-fed video allows you to record, edit, etc.
The "IO cards" now are the same as they were in the past but because the rest of the computer has advanced enough, many of them send their data through the processor allowing you to actually DO something with it. And just because most mainboards now integrate everything onto the board instead of forcing you to buy expansion cards for evertything, don't think for a minute they aren't expansion cards. They still "plug" into the PCI bus. Meanwhile, the CPU is still just that- a CPU. AMD recently took the memory controller and put it on the CPU, and some bus functions. But Intel doesn't, and the rest of the machine is business as usuall - no different then an 8086 in basic design.
"BTW since all most of the controllers are on CPU, I expect motherboard prices will decrease since there is not much to remain on them."
There's a lot of stuff on the boards and there's a lot of engineering that goes into making them. Just because the memory controller and PCI express controller are on the CPU doesn't really make the mainboard any less complex.
Don't expect prices to drop at all. And about the solder to the board thing - hell no. There's very rarely ever a defect with a CPU, but mainboards attach directly to all sorts of equipment and power. It's a buffer zone between the cpu and everything else. And mainboards aren't infallable - they die.
Plus, I've been able to upgrade JUST the mainboard, or JUST the CPU in the past to get real big jumps in performance or features without spending a lot of cash. If everything was integrated you could never do that.
What do you mean, that's what people don't get?
I said about 8 times "as long as what you're doing isn't illegal."
If you're so far gone that you think people as a general rule don't understand you can't kill people for the fuck of it, you're the one that needs to be locked up; in the mental hospital.
We don't need an informed interview or real person fielding questions for Microsoft - because we know what the real truth is and we don't need them to tell us.
Plus, they never would say "We hate OSS, we want to crush all competition, die."
Anything you pay for is not a priviledge. A lot of our tax money goes to keeping the roads running, and a lot of our tax money goes to paying those police that watch them.
It's a basic human service, roads, and it IS a right. We need to drive to live in many parts of the US, and many parts of the world. Shit, we all pay for them.
I couldn't get to work, get to the store, get anywhere without a car. There's no good public transportation where I live or work, and the only places to work are in driving distance, not walking distance.
Obviously, if you do something wrong, you can have your right to drive restricted - just like if you mugged someone you'd have your right to freedom restricted.
Traffic violations aren't just "code violations." When you pay a ticket, you are pleading guilty and paying the required fine. If you don't want to plead guilty, you go to court and face a judge. If the violation was serious enough, you might even face a jury. This sounds curiously similar to any other crime - and it's because they are any other crime.
Your examples don't even support your claim that traffic violations aren't crimes.
"A female employee gets pregnant. She can't work around the toxic cleaning solutions. Fine. OSHA comes in and orders the business closed until changes are made, fines them, and orders them to pay temporary lost wages. No crime was committed, they weren't hauled off to jail, nothing."
Even if this were to happen - if there was some reason that OSHA came in and closed the business it would be because they were doing something ILLEGAL. They were found guilty as a matter of evidence and fined for it. They COULD go to court and fight it. Just because nobody went to jail doesn't mean it wasn't a crime.
"We have grown accustomed to thinking everything is a right."
Assuming for a moment that you live in the US or the UK, your freedom is a right. Anything that you want to do, outside the line of what is illegal, is your right to do. It IS your right to get married if you want to. It IS your right to collect welfare if you want to. We can do whatever we want as long as it's not illegal.
As soon as everyone thinks like you - that our lives are simply priviledges given out by someone in charge - we will indeed have lost our freedom.