Doesn't it cost about the same for them to make a 'cheap chip' as it would an expensive one?
Not necessarily. Chip manufacturing costs are mostly about die size. How many chips can you fit on a single wafer? It's also about yield. That is how many chips per wafer will run at the speed you're shooting for? If you have a small die size, and a lower ghz goal you're going to get a lot of functional chips per wafer. That translates into lower costs.
Nvidia can certainly design a chip that takes up less die size by simply eliminating some processing units. I'm sure there's a few other tricks as well to reduce die size at the expense of performance.
Some people report no problems with upgrading, others report many problems.
Fedora and Redhat have never been intended to be forever upgraded like Debian or Ubuntu have, so it's always a little risky. If you're talking about a production level machine that's doing critical work you rely on every day, I wouldn't trust an upgrade at all. If it's just your desktop where you store some MP3s or whatever, it's not a big deal to try the upgrade.
And I used to use a Commodore 64 with a 1mhz processor. People used to drive cars without power brakes, electric start, etc. What's your point? That you can use the 10 year old software designed for the 10 year old computer? I guess, but the world has moved on since then. Can you learn how to program and about networks on a 10 year old computer? Sure. Are most of those kids going to be interested in that? Hell no.
Really I think you're going to have two problems. The first is simply getting machines with ancient (windows 95/98/ME) operating systems on them. Getting legal modern Windows operating systems is either going to be expensive, or the hardware you have simply won't run it. (Driver issues, low memory, etc). Honestly I'd really avoid going down the route of using any Windows OS before Windows 2000. 95/98/ME are really dinosaurs these days, and no one should be giving away machines with them on it.
So, while other people are telling you to run Windows because it's standard and it's what kids will encounter, I'm going to tell you to run Linux because it's cheap, will support most of the hardware, has drivers built in that will auto-detect, etc. Ultimately you really want to only be supporting one operating system. The best OS for that job is going to be Linux. It's really no fun trying to hunt down what video card each of the 10 different machines you have sitting around.
Honestly for kids 14-21 the OS doesn't really matter for what they should be using the machine for. I assume that's schoolwork, research, etc. You might get some complaints that game X or special software package Y doesn't run on the computer, but that sounds pretty minor. They'll be able to figure out Windows computers once they've used linux, so I don't see many problems of converting if that ever became an issue. Computers are ultimately a tool, and unless you're going to be a tool-maker or tool-supporter, the choice of the tool doesn't really matter. To make an analogy just get them familiar with using hammers, screwdrivers, and saws and don't worry about which brand it is.
The second problem is getting broken hardware. There's a few things that can help you here. I'd first look at memtest86 to test the memory. Let it run for a few hours and see if there's errors. Secondly I'd run some CPU thrashing tests. Many people seem to like Prime95 from mersenne.org, and run the torture test. Other programs like the distributed.net client will also stress the CPU. Finally I'd get familiar with smartctl on linux. This program will access the SMART monitoring that's built into hard drives made in the last 5 or 6 years. From this you can tell if the HD is junk, or soon to be junk.
You're going to get a lot of Junk. And by junk I mean computers with 64 megs of ram and a 233 megahertz processor. It's hard to tell you where the line exists, since I don't know what kids are going to do with these computers. Cannabalize components, but don't be afraid to just throw stuff out, or maybe turn these components into a class where kids get to "build their own computer".
um most people EXPECT to know where a reviewed item can be purchased.
That's funny. I don't see any links or ads for reviewed products in Consumer Reports. I also don't see any ads for where I can see a movie right in the middle of a movie review. The link to OWC is an advertisement. I'm not even saying there's something wrong with that, but if you don't see what it is, you're blind.
That's why he applied in his father's name - he put in a fradulent application and it was accepted.
Nope, it's not quite that insane. He used his fathers address, but he used his own name (and presumably correct SS#). If you look close you can even see his name (Rob Cockerham) on the application. Learn to read more carefully next time, lest you miss-inform a huge number of people.
Dude. Read the last 3 paragraphs. He's not exactly recommending you go buy this thing, just the opposite, he giving less pricy alternatives.
Well, there's a link to Other World Computing (the only link in the article). So while it may not be a great endorsement of this device, the article is CERTAINLY an advertisement for OWC.
and partly because I can't figure out what the Postgre part is supposed to stand for. It's not a word, it doesn't sound like an acronym, is it the creator's name?
Umm.. what? You seriously choose products based upon the name? I understand the whole initial appeal factor of a name, but shouldn't you seriously try to get past the name thing? What the hell does MySQL mean anyway?
I understand people make dumb choices based upon nonsensical things. I guess what shocks me is you're actually trying to defend your own practice of doing this as if it's a good way to judge a product.
They are two seperate issues. There's absolutely no reason you can't do WPA or even the full 802.11i with a 802.11b only chipset. The reason you don't see a lot of vendor support for WPA on old 802.11b chipsets is simply because vendors are lazy and don't want to backport the WPA support to older, largely abandoned chipsets.
I'd agree with you only in some cases. Obviously no religion should be allowed to sacrifice people during its religious practices. The US government can say polygamy isn't allowed (or at least the government won't recognize multiple marriages). But on the other hand the Supreme Court has ruled that the use of Peyote by the Native American church is religious expression that can't be regulated by the government. Peyote is otherwise illegal. It's a mixed bag, but it's pretty clear that regulation of religious practices isn't always constitutional.
Falun Gong is a rung away from Scientology on the crazy ladder to spiritual enlightenment.
I don't doubt you're right, though I don't really know much about Falun Gong. It doesn't really matter though, since religious repression is religious opression no matter how crazy the religion is. It's funny you mention Scientology though, since they're involved in trying to squelch criticism of their religion through threatening lawsuits against anyone that is critical of them.
Obviously the key to making a documentary is to make it about the business and controversy surrounding it, not the actual tedious gold farming itself. From what it looks like from the preview, the film maker hasn't accomplished this. Where's the interviews with the people pissed off about the practice? Where's the interviews with the people who buy the product? How about an interview with the game maker?
I don't play the online RPGs, but I'd certainly be interested in a well made documentary about gold farmers. This doesn't appear to be that though.
I'm sorry if we're all a little skeptical about how great the Chinese government is, but Tianamen Square was only 16 1/2 years ago, and this guy only died 30 years ago. Supression of Falun Gong followers continues today.
Anyway, you're making too much from one paranoid post by one person. China is certainly better than it was during Mao, and it's no Soviet Russia. But it's not a free country either.
I guess I fail to see the irony here. A Chinese blogger posts a vaguely worded story meant to imply that the government shut him down, and the media reports it, and corrects the error the next day. How is this "proving a point"? The news media get things terribly wrong without anyone helping them all the time. I guess this guy has never seen an episode of The Daily Show.
As a media hoaxer, he really needs to learn a thing or two. There's been some very big media hoaxes over the years, though I can't remember anything recent. Everyone knows the War of the Worlds radio hoax by Orson Wells of course.
If it's a spy satellite, why would they make a press release about the thing in the first place? I don't recall any announcements by the NSA or NRO about the latest Keyhole satellite launches.
The article is pretty light on details, but maybe it has some way of determining how many fish of a certain species are in an area of the sea? One of the biggest problems in over-fishing has got to be just determining the health of fish population in different parts of the ocean. If governments and scientists could get definitive information that something is over-fished, then it's much easier to get international bans on fishing in that part of the ocean.
I don't know if that's what this thing can do. It'd be nice if there were more information about how this satellite works.
I missed it in the article. The resolution is 5.3 meters, which is about 17.4 feet. You could probbably tell something was a house, but not much better than that. This thing would make a very poor spy satellite.
I think our good friends at the NRO are going to get some competition from... ahem... "friends and allies"
You should stop being so paranoid. Where in the article does it say that it has a high resolving power? It's my understanding that you need large mirrors to get a good angular resolution. Large mirrors don't fit so well in a micro-satellite. This this is designed to have extremely good color vision, not the high angular resolution you want for a spy satellite. It'd be interesting to know the angular resolution of this thing, but my guess is that it's going to be fairly large.
Also, the Ion engine is designed to keep the thing in orbit, not change the orbit. Ion engines provide small amounts of thrust over long periods of time. Just the kind of thing you'd want to maintain an orbit, but it wouldn't be very good at changing the orbit quickly. Maybe if you had several months to wait for an orbit change. The spy satellite users usually don't have the luxury of waiting that long for changing orbits.
Dick Durbin I know nothing about, but Lieberman and Hillary are probbably the two WORST democratic senators out their. Lieberman is a Democrat in name only. Hillary teams up with scum like Rick Santorum. She's certainly winning no votes on the Democrats side, and I seriously doubt she's fooling any Republican moderates. Keep it up Democrats, and you'll lose to an actual moderate like Mccain, and not a pretend one like yourselves.
Ughh... now you're only further feeding my deep sense of Fear and Loathing. I never quite knew what Hunter Thompson was talking about until this President. Now I feel it more every day when I read the news.
You can almost always blame across-the-board cost of living increases on the guys printing the money. Across-the-board prices don't go up unless the money supply goes up. Don't blame your boss for not being able to compensate for these mistakes made by the central banks.
Blame schmame. Who cares who's to blame? The central bank doesn't give anyone a raise, but your boss does. Inflation is here to stay, and your problem with a small inflation rate doesn't make it go away. Expenses will go up, and the vast majority of workers will expect cost of living increases. Maybe not ever year, but over the long run yes.
(oh, BTW the inflation rate is not largely an effect of the amount of currency printed, but largely controlled by the prime interest rate, among other things)
The peace deal seems to have worked by buying off key figures with promises of power, and sidelining hardliners. We've corrupted the IRA leadership. They're too comfortable now, in their influential political positions. Too respectable. Can't be associated with semi-literate hardmen any more, oh no..
Strange, I thought the peace process worked because the Irish economy is booming. Who wants to be a terrorist when you've got a well paying job? Leadership can't make people do things they don't want to do.
Then Slashdot is becoming more like a "real" news source every day. It's no secret that news sources get sent articles by PR firms all the time. Lazy reporters will write a story about it. The best article I've seen about "submarine PR" is here.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't it cost about the same for them to make a 'cheap chip' as it would an expensive one?
Not necessarily. Chip manufacturing costs are mostly about die size. How many chips can you fit on a single wafer? It's also about yield. That is how many chips per wafer will run at the speed you're shooting for? If you have a small die size, and a lower ghz goal you're going to get a lot of functional chips per wafer. That translates into lower costs.
Nvidia can certainly design a chip that takes up less die size by simply eliminating some processing units. I'm sure there's a few other tricks as well to reduce die size at the expense of performance.
Some people report no problems with upgrading, others report many problems.
Fedora and Redhat have never been intended to be forever upgraded like Debian or Ubuntu have, so it's always a little risky. If you're talking about a production level machine that's doing critical work you rely on every day, I wouldn't trust an upgrade at all. If it's just your desktop where you store some MP3s or whatever, it's not a big deal to try the upgrade.
And I used to use a Commodore 64 with a 1mhz processor. People used to drive cars without power brakes, electric start, etc. What's your point? That you can use the 10 year old software designed for the 10 year old computer? I guess, but the world has moved on since then. Can you learn how to program and about networks on a 10 year old computer? Sure. Are most of those kids going to be interested in that? Hell no.
Really I think you're going to have two problems. The first is simply getting machines with ancient (windows 95/98/ME) operating systems on them. Getting legal modern Windows operating systems is either going to be expensive, or the hardware you have simply won't run it. (Driver issues, low memory, etc). Honestly I'd really avoid going down the route of using any Windows OS before Windows 2000. 95/98/ME are really dinosaurs these days, and no one should be giving away machines with them on it.
So, while other people are telling you to run Windows because it's standard and it's what kids will encounter, I'm going to tell you to run Linux because it's cheap, will support most of the hardware, has drivers built in that will auto-detect, etc. Ultimately you really want to only be supporting one operating system. The best OS for that job is going to be Linux. It's really no fun trying to hunt down what video card each of the 10 different machines you have sitting around.
Honestly for kids 14-21 the OS doesn't really matter for what they should be using the machine for. I assume that's schoolwork, research, etc. You might get some complaints that game X or special software package Y doesn't run on the computer, but that sounds pretty minor. They'll be able to figure out Windows computers once they've used linux, so I don't see many problems of converting if that ever became an issue. Computers are ultimately a tool, and unless you're going to be a tool-maker or tool-supporter, the choice of the tool doesn't really matter. To make an analogy just get them familiar with using hammers, screwdrivers, and saws and don't worry about which brand it is.
The second problem is getting broken hardware. There's a few things that can help you here. I'd first look at memtest86 to test the memory. Let it run for a few hours and see if there's errors. Secondly I'd run some CPU thrashing tests. Many people seem to like Prime95 from mersenne.org, and run the torture test. Other programs like the distributed.net client will also stress the CPU. Finally I'd get familiar with smartctl on linux. This program will access the SMART monitoring that's built into hard drives made in the last 5 or 6 years. From this you can tell if the HD is junk, or soon to be junk.
You're going to get a lot of Junk. And by junk I mean computers with 64 megs of ram and a 233 megahertz processor. It's hard to tell you where the line exists, since I don't know what kids are going to do with these computers. Cannabalize components, but don't be afraid to just throw stuff out, or maybe turn these components into a class where kids get to "build their own computer".
um most people EXPECT to know where a reviewed item can be purchased.
That's funny. I don't see any links or ads for reviewed products in Consumer Reports. I also don't see any ads for where I can see a movie right in the middle of a movie review. The link to OWC is an advertisement. I'm not even saying there's something wrong with that, but if you don't see what it is, you're blind.
Since when is an acknowledgment attached to a rather negative review an advertisement?
I guess since time began. OWC is a retailer, not a hardware producer.
That's why he applied in his father's name - he put in a fradulent application and it was accepted.
Nope, it's not quite that insane. He used his fathers address, but he used his own name (and presumably correct SS#). If you look close you can even see his name (Rob Cockerham) on the application. Learn to read more carefully next time, lest you miss-inform a huge number of people.
Dude. Read the last 3 paragraphs. He's not exactly recommending you go buy this thing, just the opposite, he giving less pricy alternatives.
Well, there's a link to Other World Computing (the only link in the article). So while it may not be a great endorsement of this device, the article is CERTAINLY an advertisement for OWC.
and partly because I can't figure out what the Postgre part is supposed to stand for. It's not a word, it doesn't sound like an acronym, is it the creator's name?
Umm.. what? You seriously choose products based upon the name? I understand the whole initial appeal factor of a name, but shouldn't you seriously try to get past the name thing? What the hell does MySQL mean anyway?
I understand people make dumb choices based upon nonsensical things. I guess what shocks me is you're actually trying to defend your own practice of doing this as if it's a good way to judge a product.
They are two seperate issues. There's absolutely no reason you can't do WPA or even the full 802.11i with a 802.11b only chipset. The reason you don't see a lot of vendor support for WPA on old 802.11b chipsets is simply because vendors are lazy and don't want to backport the WPA support to older, largely abandoned chipsets.
Huh. I always thought it was protected by religious freedom. It's quite sad that it's not.
I'd agree with you only in some cases. Obviously no religion should be allowed to sacrifice people during its religious practices. The US government can say polygamy isn't allowed (or at least the government won't recognize multiple marriages). But on the other hand the Supreme Court has ruled that the use of Peyote by the Native American church is religious expression that can't be regulated by the government. Peyote is otherwise illegal. It's a mixed bag, but it's pretty clear that regulation of religious practices isn't always constitutional.
Falun Gong is a rung away from Scientology on the crazy ladder to spiritual enlightenment.
I don't doubt you're right, though I don't really know much about Falun Gong. It doesn't really matter though, since religious repression is religious opression no matter how crazy the religion is. It's funny you mention Scientology though, since they're involved in trying to squelch criticism of their religion through threatening lawsuits against anyone that is critical of them.
Obviously the key to making a documentary is to make it about the business and controversy surrounding it, not the actual tedious gold farming itself. From what it looks like from the preview, the film maker hasn't accomplished this. Where's the interviews with the people pissed off about the practice? Where's the interviews with the people who buy the product? How about an interview with the game maker?
I don't play the online RPGs, but I'd certainly be interested in a well made documentary about gold farmers. This doesn't appear to be that though.
I'm sorry if we're all a little skeptical about how great the Chinese government is, but Tianamen Square was only 16 1/2 years ago, and this guy only died 30 years ago. Supression of Falun Gong followers continues today.
Anyway, you're making too much from one paranoid post by one person. China is certainly better than it was during Mao, and it's no Soviet Russia. But it's not a free country either.
I guess I fail to see the irony here. A Chinese blogger posts a vaguely worded story meant to imply that the government shut him down, and the media reports it, and corrects the error the next day. How is this "proving a point"? The news media get things terribly wrong without anyone helping them all the time. I guess this guy has never seen an episode of The Daily Show.
As a media hoaxer, he really needs to learn a thing or two. There's been some very big media hoaxes over the years, though I can't remember anything recent. Everyone knows the War of the Worlds radio hoax by Orson Wells of course.
If it's a spy satellite, why would they make a press release about the thing in the first place? I don't recall any announcements by the NSA or NRO about the latest Keyhole satellite launches.
The article is pretty light on details, but maybe it has some way of determining how many fish of a certain species are in an area of the sea? One of the biggest problems in over-fishing has got to be just determining the health of fish population in different parts of the ocean. If governments and scientists could get definitive information that something is over-fished, then it's much easier to get international bans on fishing in that part of the ocean.
I don't know if that's what this thing can do. It'd be nice if there were more information about how this satellite works.
I missed it in the article. The resolution is 5.3 meters, which is about 17.4 feet. You could probbably tell something was a house, but not much better than that. This thing would make a very poor spy satellite.
I think our good friends at the NRO are going to get some competition from... ahem... "friends and allies"
You should stop being so paranoid. Where in the article does it say that it has a high resolving power? It's my understanding that you need large mirrors to get a good angular resolution. Large mirrors don't fit so well in a micro-satellite. This this is designed to have extremely good color vision, not the high angular resolution you want for a spy satellite. It'd be interesting to know the angular resolution of this thing, but my guess is that it's going to be fairly large.
Also, the Ion engine is designed to keep the thing in orbit, not change the orbit. Ion engines provide small amounts of thrust over long periods of time. Just the kind of thing you'd want to maintain an orbit, but it wouldn't be very good at changing the orbit quickly. Maybe if you had several months to wait for an orbit change. The spy satellite users usually don't have the luxury of waiting that long for changing orbits.
Dick Durbin I know nothing about, but Lieberman and Hillary are probbably the two WORST democratic senators out their. Lieberman is a Democrat in name only. Hillary teams up with scum like Rick Santorum. She's certainly winning no votes on the Democrats side, and I seriously doubt she's fooling any Republican moderates. Keep it up Democrats, and you'll lose to an actual moderate like Mccain, and not a pretend one like yourselves.
Ughh... now you're only further feeding my deep sense of Fear and Loathing. I never quite knew what Hunter Thompson was talking about until this President. Now I feel it more every day when I read the news.
You can almost always blame across-the-board cost of living increases on the guys printing the money. Across-the-board prices don't go up unless the money supply goes up. Don't blame your boss for not being able to compensate for these mistakes made by the central banks.
Blame schmame. Who cares who's to blame? The central bank doesn't give anyone a raise, but your boss does. Inflation is here to stay, and your problem with a small inflation rate doesn't make it go away. Expenses will go up, and the vast majority of workers will expect cost of living increases. Maybe not ever year, but over the long run yes.
(oh, BTW the inflation rate is not largely an effect of the amount of currency printed, but largely controlled by the prime interest rate, among other things)
The peace deal seems to have worked by buying off key figures with promises of power, and sidelining hardliners. We've corrupted the IRA leadership. They're too comfortable now, in their influential political positions. Too respectable. Can't be associated with semi-literate hardmen any more, oh no..
Strange, I thought the peace process worked because the Irish economy is booming. Who wants to be a terrorist when you've got a well paying job? Leadership can't make people do things they don't want to do.
Then Slashdot is becoming more like a "real" news source every day. It's no secret that news sources get sent articles by PR firms all the time. Lazy reporters will write a story about it. The best article I've seen about "submarine PR" is here.