3 amps may sound like a lot for one device (given that most household circuits are in the 15-20 amp range), but for a computer, it's really not enough. Your average computer (that will be brought to a LAN, think high-end) draws 250 watts and has a 150-watt monitor attached. That's 400 watts, while 3 amps at 120v is only 360 watts. You're going to end up blowing a circuit over that. God help you if someone brings a dual-processor computer, especially an Athlon or dual P4-Xeon - those things suck 400+ watts, easily.
Interesting power-related story: I was at a LAN, and a friend brought his Back-UPS 500 (that I loaned to him a while back), to prevent power losses from affecting his computer (XP1900+ with a Radeon 9500, nothing special). Unfortunately, the 2 outlets coming off of it weren't enough, so he plugged a power strip into it. I think you can see where this is going, as people tend to daisy-chain the power strips. When the power finally did go out, there were 6 or so computers plugged into that poor little UPS (11 total into the 30-amp circuit, powering up the 12th blew it). It went SCREEEEEECCCCHHHHH as the "power out" and "battery low" indicators came on simultaneously, and nearly caught fire (the battery's side bulged out and it started smoking). Don't do that.
"Don't make me strap the bulk eraser to your head and stick you to the computer-room floor AGAIN!"
That can lead to some interesting conversations later on, though. Your best bet would be to build a (somewhat) working prototype and present it to all layers of management simultaneously - that way, no one person can kill the project. (Although when that happens, it's easier to know whose UTP cable should accidentally be connected to the variac and given a healthy dose of mains.) Be sure to make it beautiful as well as functional; don't let them think that the in-house software will be drab and boring or a pain to use. Try to go for a simple and elegant interface first.
Such a device does exist; it's called an LCD panel. Flicker-free, and crisper than (most) CRTs. Not prohibitively expensive, either - I bought a Dell Ultrasharp 1900FP (19" at 1280x1024) for $650 a while back. Looks great (screen and the case around it) and refreshes fast enough for gaming, plus it does analog and digital in.
Sure it can be. Along with lots of other components, including that goddamn Fax service that you'll never use, the Distributed Transaction Coordinator, COM+, and the Auto-Update service
Start, press Run.
In the Run dialog-box:
notepad C:\Winnt\INF\SysOC.inf
Do a search/replace. Search for the word "hide" (no quotes) and replace it with nothing (leave the replace box blank).
Save and quit.
Open up Add/Remove programs, hit Windows Components.
Voila! Remove the stuff you don't use.
I completely agree with you for Windows 2000. It gets a bad rap, being associated with other Windows
versions that are horrible {95,98,ME,NT4 - don't even get me started on NT4}, but it really has very few core problems. I use it every day (This post made from Win2k) and it never crashes unless I do something really stupid, like knock the network card from the back of the machine during an SMB file xfer op. Sure, individual programs crash sometimes, and Explorer will die occasionally (much less since I stopped using it as a webbrowser and started using Phoenix/Firebird), but the core OS keeps going through basically everything I can throw at it software-wise. (But not everything I could throw at it in hardware, especially when the computer consisted of a motherboard and cards sticking out of it sitting on my desk - no case.)
The refurbisher disassembles the battery pack, replaces the individual cells inside, and recalibrates/replaces any charging circuitry if cells sharing the originals' charging characteristics can not be found. A fairly simple proceedure.
Well, that nice aluminum skin makes for a good shield from outside interference. Inside, though, there's practically nothing in the way - all support members on modern planes are made from (thin) aluminum used sparingly, or carbon fiber / fiberglass. Most, if not all, of the deck support system on Boeing's newer 7x7 planes is made of carbon fiber, which doesn't do much to shield the avionics bay underneath from the cellular signals. Shielded cables also don't work well when they're 20 years old and have broken and been spliced in multiple places, degrading the shielding characteristics.
I agree with your comment about the Tyan board. My friend had an S2460 Tiger MP board that would ONLY accept a single 512mb RegDDR 266 stick from Crucial. (It probably would've taken a 1gb, but he was too poor at the time.) I told him that he should get rid of that board, but the problem solved itself - his power supply died and the resulting surge caught it on fire, burning its AGP slot, voltage regulators, northbridge, and few other miscellaneous chips into a ball of melted plastic and silicon. The RAM did survive, though, along with both CPUs and all expansion cards! Unfortunatly, the power supply was nice and melty, the CD burner burned its last, and his floppy drive took a hit for the team.
I've used all sorts of different RAM in many systems:
My SGI Indy is using old 72-pin SIMMs that I found on my (carpeted, read: static-inducing) floor under my desk.
My SparcStation 20 uses RAM that was shipped to me rattling about in a cardboard box without any packaging material whatsoever.
My K6-2/400 used crappy no-name (not even a brand to be found on the chips themselves) 256mb PC100 DIMMS
My Athlon TBird-1.4 used the cheapest no-name crap DDR RAM I could find on Pricewatch - 512mb of it - but at least Infineon's name was printed on the chips.
My Athlon XP1800+ used just about the cheapest RAM possible (I bought it from NewEgg instead of some other vendor for about $2 more) with no names on the modules or chips.
A Dual Athlon MP2000+ server I built uses no-name Reg. DDR266 / 512mb from a Pricewatch low-baller.
My current P4/2.4 uses 256mb DDR266 by OCZ Systems, and not because of the brand recognition (who the hell are they?) - it was super-cheap. I bet if I removed the RAMsink on it, the chips would be nameless.
None of these systems have ever had memory problems. They rarely, if ever, crash (or at least they didn't crash when I had them - some have passed on into the hands of friends). Maybe I'm just one really lucky bastard when it comes to RAM, but I've never had any problems buying the cheapest shit memory so that I could save a few bucks.
Also, somehow, I have managed never to kill a component with static electricity. The worst that's happened is that I rebooted my Atari 800 by zapping it right on the motherboard while it was running. In fact, the only component that I've ever bought or installed that didn't work was a Sun Creator3d framebuffer - the only component I've ever used an anti-static wristband to install (because there was a free one in the box) and it was DOA with big vertical lines running through the picture at regular intervals (4 pixels). Well, that and two Fibre Channel drives that exploded, but that's because I was hot-swapping them and shoved the power connector into the (worn-down, self-installed) receptacle backwards.
They didn't actually damage the hardware. The CD contained invalid data that would confuse the Mac's BIOS bootloader when it tried to read the CD-ROM drive, making it crash. Since Macs don't have an eject button on the drive that could be used to remove the CD, and the trick of holding down the mouse button while booting sometimes didn't work, it would appear to have damaged the machine - though simply removing the CD would "fix" it.
Intel's coalition developed it, and helped to push it, but the real kick-in-the-pants to the USB standard was the iMac. Suddenly, there was a computer that could ONLY use USB devices. A whole market opened up for stuff that was previously SCSI / Serial / Parallel before: scanners, printers, digital camera interfaces, even floppy drives. Of course, it was in the manufacturers' best interests to also allow these devices to run on Windows machines - they wanted to target 99% of the market, not 3%. Thus the USB revolution began.
A similar thing happened with Firewire. If memory serves, Apple opened the licensing to anyone who wanted to use it in a device for something like $1/port. It didn't really take off, though, until Apple showed people how they could get a DV bridge or a DV camera, hook it up to their computer through Firewire/i.Link/IEEE1394 (take your pick, Apple/Sony/everyone else) and screw with their home movies, then burn them to a DVD (Superdrive). Suddenly, everyone wanted Firewire on their new "digital hub" computer, and similar product ideas popped up all over the PC market. Firewire became standard, and other products started to use it, such as external hard drives (especially since most computers nowadays have no SCSI port), scanners, and camera interfaces.
Take this with a grain of salt, as the events are somewhat hazy in my mind and are probably out of order.
Damnit, I liked 3dfx. I still run a Voodoo3 3000 AGP with 16mb of texture memory on my craptastic PC. It gets 20 FPS in 1024x768x16bit Quake 3. 3dfx technology powers my favorite arcade game - Hydro Thunder. Its death was unfortunate, as they had some great technology for their time (and some truely asinine leadership).
Sadly, I never knew SonicBlue. Never wanted or bought any of their products.
Re:Patent how to plug one bit into another???!
on
Beige Box Apple Clone?
·
· Score: 0, Funny
I can think of at least 4 different ways to plug a Socket CPU in, or 2 different ways to insert a slot CPU or PCI card. However, as most first-time computer builders quickly learn, only one way will result in a working system...
I owned a Mackie 1604VLZ at one point in the not-so-distant past, and I have just one question - how do you plan to stuff it into 4U of space? It usually occupies (without the XLR10 expansion unit, which adds 2U) about 10U of space on the front of a rack, or sits on top. (Unless of course you're storing it in a drawer, but that'd obviously be a huge hassle.)
Further speeding up the Dell entry is new gigabit Ethernet and USB 2.0 support.
A common and unfortunate misconception, as far as I've seen. Sorry, guys, but USB 2.0 and gigE do not make a PC faster, just like Airport Extreme and Firewire 800 give the Mac no added advantage. This goes hand in hand with the whole Intel marketing gimmick about the P4 "Making the internet faster!" It drives me nuts. </rant>
Seriously, though, I could care less about this article. If the computer I choose to buy is half as fast as a similarly-priced Dell workstation, so be it. I don't mind one bit. If I choose to buy a PC because I want to have faster render times in Premiere and a host of other apps, fine. If I choose to buy a Mac because I want to use a UNIX-based OS that has good commercial app support (like Bryce and Photoshop), that's my choice. In fact, I have both - a PC for games and renderfarming, and a Mac for day-to-day work. I'm not significantly biased either way. Each type of machine has its place. Let the PCs do what they're good at (raw power, more apps, games especially), and let the Macs do what they do best (elegance in form and function, and having a nice shiny stable OS).
I mod this article (-1, clue police will be dispatched)
A good 2-pass VBR DivX 5.0 video stream with 256kbps MP3 audio (stereo, because I don't have surround sound) is just as good to me as a DVD. I recently ripped (my copy, that I own) Shaft 2000. The resulting file is about 1 GB and looks just like the original DVD, with only a bit of quality lost in the audio department (because of the 5.1 to stereo conversion). Sure, it takes about 12 hours for my Athlon XP2000+ to process, but the end result looks great.
I had a Powerbook G3/400 - a fairly old machine by today's standards, but it ran OSX 10.2 just fine. A bit slow, but not too horrible. The only time I EVER got a Kernel Panic, or a beachball-of-death, was after I installed some bad RAM. It would only happen when a particularly CPU and RAM-intensive application was going, like a Bryce5 render, but it did happen. Once I removed the new RAM (eBay is not to always be trusted for critical parts, I suppose), it worked perfectly.
The same can be said for a lot of Windows crashes, though - software isn't always to blame. I use Windows 2000 right now, and it's perfectly stable. It hasn't crashed once since I installed it that was a fault of its own (it blue-screened when I accidentally pulled the IDE cable to the swap/primary boot drive, in the middle of a VirtualDub repack, but that's to be expected - and yes, the filesystem survived).
I've seen similarly configured machines ready to crash at a moment's notice, though - my experience is that even the most stable operating systems {Win2k (don't flame me), Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, IRIX} - all of which I've used - can have their images seriously compromised by a bit of faulty hardware. We come to blame it on the software manufacturer most of the time, but you must stop and think for awhile - just which company made the cheapest RAM that went in your HPaq? Who supplied the least expensive bulk CPU purchase, which may or may not have actually passed quality control? Which chipset maker promised to shave $0.50 off the cost of each machine in return for using their shoddy product? All computers can have these problems, and we chalk it up to errors in the software - whether it be Windows 2000 or Mac OS X. If you want your box to last, be it an iMac or a Dual Athlon, just buy quality components. Your OEM RAM may work perfectly - mine does in my XP2000+ - but don't count on it, and look at your hardware as well as your software if you experience random crashes. Not even Apple, with their complete control of the hardware platform, is immune, as someone else makes the RAM, a second company makes the hard drive, and so on. Even the lowly IDE cable could be at fault - the manufacturer could've gone for the $0.04 version instead of the $0.10 quality cable.
Bottom line - don't chalk a crash up to a software issue when it's just as likely to be a hardware failure. Use and love SiSoft Sandra's burnin wizard and 3dmark (at the same time - set for normal burnin with a looping test, then engage 3dmark. If it doesn't die on you, your box is probably stable). Know the power of Memtst86. I'm sure that there are comparable alternitives for Mac, Linux, and just about any other platform you can think of.
"A" and "B" cells were first developed for use in military radios sometime in the past (WW2 or
before, I think). They needed to have two batteries for some reason, so they called them "A" and "B". Neither size is in use anymore - single-A cells were too strangely shaped to be useful, and B cells supplied some other voltage that wasn't commonly needed, so they faded out of demand (this is, of course, if memory serves me correctly - take it with a fist-sized grain of salt).
Having a faster bus come out on the market won't help you much anyway - (using your example) you wouldn't overclock your DDR400 bus to DDR533 to take advantage of the faster speed, you'd buy a CPU and board that supported it. This works in the same manner as current Athlons: faster RAM (333 or 400) won't help when you have a bus that's still 266 (or 333).
Nope - no Battlefield for the Mac. And as for the mac being too slow, Battlefield has one of the highest system requirement sets I've ever seen for a game - it NEEDS a Radeon 8500 / GF3 to be even remotely playable (no i810 for you), and a 2ghz P4 or AMD XP2000+ is required to run it to where the AI is usable (and it still consumes 25% of the CPU for that alone) - when you have a slower processor, the bots (of which there can be 50+ in a game, easily) just stand around until they're Panzerschrenked, which still happens on my Athlon XP2000+ gaming machine. It's hard on networks, too - 32kbps upstream per player is required to run a server! I'd love for there to be an optimized Mac port, but as the engine uses only Direct3d, it probably won't happen. It'd probably run just fine on a dualie Mac - one CPU for the AI, one for everything else...
Anyways, I remember the "rumors" of a MS Windows Release for PPC and I also remember "rumors" of Mac OS for x86. Kinda makes you wonder what behind closed doors meeting took place to kill these projects.
A Mac OS X for x86 does exist - it was available to beta testers until RC1 or RC2, when it was simply put back indoors. All of the OS X stuff obviously was crossplatform - it probably still is.
Windows 2000 for the PPC was killed off, but NT 4 for the PPC exists. Too bad it doesn't have drivers for any Mac hardware, and that it was designed to run on IBM's PPC workstations.
The main reason that I know of, preventing PPC on X86 emulation, is that PPC has so many more registers than X86. Most of them would have to be mapped to memory, instead of using on-CPU registers. This would slow down any program using lots of registers (all of them?) by a HUGE amount.
What I'm thinking (and this would take a performance hit, obviously, but it would still work) is that they could emulate some common video card (like a Voodoo3) that specs are openly available for, and just translate the hardware instructions for it into OpenGL calls for the host OS. No endian-ness problems if you're not just copying the instructions from one card to another.
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3 amps may sound like a lot for one device (given that most household circuits are in the 15-20 amp range), but for a computer, it's really not enough. Your average computer (that will be brought to a LAN, think high-end) draws 250 watts and has a 150-watt monitor attached. That's 400 watts, while 3 amps at 120v is only 360 watts. You're going to end up blowing a circuit over that. God help you if someone brings a dual-processor computer, especially an Athlon or dual P4-Xeon - those things suck 400+ watts, easily.
Interesting power-related story: I was at a LAN, and a friend brought his Back-UPS 500 (that I loaned to him a while back), to prevent power losses from affecting his computer (XP1900+ with a Radeon 9500, nothing special). Unfortunately, the 2 outlets coming off of it weren't enough, so he plugged a power strip into it. I think you can see where this is going, as people tend to daisy-chain the power strips. When the power finally did go out, there were 6 or so computers plugged into that poor little UPS (11 total into the 30-amp circuit, powering up the 12th blew it). It went SCREEEEEECCCCHHHHH as the "power out" and "battery low" indicators came on simultaneously, and nearly caught fire (the battery's side bulged out and it started smoking). Don't do that.
"Don't make me strap the bulk eraser to your head and stick you to the computer-room floor AGAIN!"
That can lead to some interesting conversations later on, though. Your best bet would be to build a (somewhat) working prototype and present it to all layers of management simultaneously - that way, no one person can kill the project. (Although when that happens, it's easier to know whose UTP cable should accidentally be connected to the variac and given a healthy dose of mains.) Be sure to make it beautiful as well as functional; don't let them think that the in-house software will be drab and boring or a pain to use. Try to go for a simple and elegant interface first.
Such a device does exist; it's called an LCD panel. Flicker-free, and crisper than (most) CRTs. Not prohibitively expensive, either - I bought a Dell Ultrasharp 1900FP (19" at 1280x1024) for $650 a while back. Looks great (screen and the case around it) and refreshes fast enough for gaming, plus it does analog and digital in.
Sure it can be. Along with lots of other components, including that goddamn Fax service that you'll never use, the Distributed Transaction Coordinator, COM+, and the Auto-Update service
Start, press Run.
In the Run dialog-box:
notepad C:\Winnt\INF\SysOC.inf
Do a search/replace. Search for the word "hide" (no quotes) and replace it with nothing (leave the replace box blank).
Save and quit.
Open up Add/Remove programs, hit Windows Components.
Voila! Remove the stuff you don't use.
I completely agree with you for Windows 2000. It gets a bad rap, being associated with other Windows versions that are horrible {95,98,ME,NT4 - don't even get me started on NT4}, but it really has very few core problems. I use it every day (This post made from Win2k) and it never crashes unless I do something really stupid, like knock the network card from the back of the machine during an SMB file xfer op. Sure, individual programs crash sometimes, and Explorer will die occasionally (much less since I stopped using it as a webbrowser and started using Phoenix/Firebird), but the core OS keeps going through basically everything I can throw at it software-wise. (But not everything I could throw at it in hardware, especially when the computer consisted of a motherboard and cards sticking out of it sitting on my desk - no case.)
The refurbisher disassembles the battery pack, replaces the individual cells inside, and recalibrates/replaces any charging circuitry if cells sharing the originals' charging characteristics can not be found. A fairly simple proceedure.
Well, that nice aluminum skin makes for a good shield from outside interference. Inside, though, there's practically nothing in the way - all support members on modern planes are made from (thin) aluminum used sparingly, or carbon fiber / fiberglass. Most, if not all, of the deck support system on Boeing's newer 7x7 planes is made of carbon fiber, which doesn't do much to shield the avionics bay underneath from the cellular signals. Shielded cables also don't work well when they're 20 years old and have broken and been spliced in multiple places, degrading the shielding characteristics.
I agree with your comment about the Tyan board. My friend had an S2460 Tiger MP board that would ONLY accept a single 512mb RegDDR 266 stick from Crucial. (It probably would've taken a 1gb, but he was too poor at the time.) I told him that he should get rid of that board, but the problem solved itself - his power supply died and the resulting surge caught it on fire, burning its AGP slot, voltage regulators, northbridge, and few other miscellaneous chips into a ball of melted plastic and silicon. The RAM did survive, though, along with both CPUs and all expansion cards! Unfortunatly, the power supply was nice and melty, the CD burner burned its last, and his floppy drive took a hit for the team.
I've used all sorts of different RAM in many systems:
My SGI Indy is using old 72-pin SIMMs that I found on my (carpeted, read: static-inducing) floor under my desk.
My SparcStation 20 uses RAM that was shipped to me rattling about in a cardboard box without any packaging material whatsoever.
My K6-2/400 used crappy no-name (not even a brand to be found on the chips themselves) 256mb PC100 DIMMS
My Athlon TBird-1.4 used the cheapest no-name crap DDR RAM I could find on Pricewatch - 512mb of it - but at least Infineon's name was printed on the chips.
My Athlon XP1800+ used just about the cheapest RAM possible (I bought it from NewEgg instead of some other vendor for about $2 more) with no names on the modules or chips.
A Dual Athlon MP2000+ server I built uses no-name Reg. DDR266 / 512mb from a Pricewatch low-baller.
My current P4/2.4 uses 256mb DDR266 by OCZ Systems, and not because of the brand recognition (who the hell are they?) - it was super-cheap. I bet if I removed the RAMsink on it, the chips would be nameless.
None of these systems have ever had memory problems. They rarely, if ever, crash (or at least they didn't crash when I had them - some have passed on into the hands of friends). Maybe I'm just one really lucky bastard when it comes to RAM, but I've never had any problems buying the cheapest shit memory so that I could save a few bucks.
Also, somehow, I have managed never to kill a component with static electricity. The worst that's happened is that I rebooted my Atari 800 by zapping it right on the motherboard while it was running. In fact, the only component that I've ever bought or installed that didn't work was a Sun Creator3d framebuffer - the only component I've ever used an anti-static wristband to install (because there was a free one in the box) and it was DOA with big vertical lines running through the picture at regular intervals (4 pixels). Well, that and two Fibre Channel drives that exploded, but that's because I was hot-swapping them and shoved the power connector into the (worn-down, self-installed) receptacle backwards.
They didn't actually damage the hardware. The CD contained invalid data that would confuse the Mac's BIOS bootloader when it tried to read the CD-ROM drive, making it crash. Since Macs don't have an eject button on the drive that could be used to remove the CD, and the trick of holding down the mouse button while booting sometimes didn't work, it would appear to have damaged the machine - though simply removing the CD would "fix" it.
Shake is actually $5,000 only on OS X - $10,000 on all other platforms (Linux, Win32, and IRIX [i think]).
Intel's coalition developed it, and helped to push it, but the real kick-in-the-pants to the USB standard was the iMac. Suddenly, there was a computer that could ONLY use USB devices. A whole market opened up for stuff that was previously SCSI / Serial / Parallel before: scanners, printers, digital camera interfaces, even floppy drives. Of course, it was in the manufacturers' best interests to also allow these devices to run on Windows machines - they wanted to target 99% of the market, not 3%. Thus the USB revolution began.
A similar thing happened with Firewire. If memory serves, Apple opened the licensing to anyone who wanted to use it in a device for something like $1/port. It didn't really take off, though, until Apple showed people how they could get a DV bridge or a DV camera, hook it up to their computer through Firewire/i.Link/IEEE1394 (take your pick, Apple/Sony/everyone else) and screw with their home movies, then burn them to a DVD (Superdrive). Suddenly, everyone wanted Firewire on their new "digital hub" computer, and similar product ideas popped up all over the PC market. Firewire became standard, and other products started to use it, such as external hard drives (especially since most computers nowadays have no SCSI port), scanners, and camera interfaces.
Take this with a grain of salt, as the events are somewhat hazy in my mind and are probably out of order.
Damnit, I liked 3dfx. I still run a Voodoo3 3000 AGP with 16mb of texture memory on my craptastic PC. It gets 20 FPS in 1024x768x16bit Quake 3. 3dfx technology powers my favorite arcade game - Hydro Thunder. Its death was unfortunate, as they had some great technology for their time (and some truely asinine leadership).
Sadly, I never knew SonicBlue. Never wanted or bought any of their products.
I can think of at least 4 different ways to plug a Socket CPU in, or 2 different ways to insert a slot CPU or PCI card. However, as most first-time computer builders quickly learn, only one way will result in a working system...
A common and unfortunate misconception, as far as I've seen. Sorry, guys, but USB 2.0 and gigE do not make a PC faster, just like Airport Extreme and Firewire 800 give the Mac no added advantage. This goes hand in hand with the whole Intel marketing gimmick about the P4 "Making the internet faster!" It drives me nuts. </rant>
Seriously, though, I could care less about this article. If the computer I choose to buy is half as fast as a similarly-priced Dell workstation, so be it. I don't mind one bit. If I choose to buy a PC because I want to have faster render times in Premiere and a host of other apps, fine. If I choose to buy a Mac because I want to use a UNIX-based OS that has good commercial app support (like Bryce and Photoshop), that's my choice. In fact, I have both - a PC for games and renderfarming, and a Mac for day-to-day work. I'm not significantly biased either way. Each type of machine has its place. Let the PCs do what they're good at (raw power, more apps, games especially), and let the Macs do what they do best (elegance in form and function, and having a nice shiny stable OS).
I mod this article (-1, clue police will be dispatched)
A good 2-pass VBR DivX 5.0 video stream with 256kbps MP3 audio (stereo, because I don't have surround sound) is just as good to me as a DVD. I recently ripped (my copy, that I own) Shaft 2000. The resulting file is about 1 GB and looks just like the original DVD, with only a bit of quality lost in the audio department (because of the 5.1 to stereo conversion). Sure, it takes about 12 hours for my Athlon XP2000+ to process, but the end result looks great.
I had a Powerbook G3/400 - a fairly old machine by today's standards, but it ran OSX 10.2 just fine. A bit slow, but not too horrible. The only time I EVER got a Kernel Panic, or a beachball-of-death, was after I installed some bad RAM. It would only happen when a particularly CPU and RAM-intensive application was going, like a Bryce5 render, but it did happen. Once I removed the new RAM (eBay is not to always be trusted for critical parts, I suppose), it worked perfectly.
The same can be said for a lot of Windows crashes, though - software isn't always to blame. I use Windows 2000 right now, and it's perfectly stable. It hasn't crashed once since I installed it that was a fault of its own (it blue-screened when I accidentally pulled the IDE cable to the swap/primary boot drive, in the middle of a VirtualDub repack, but that's to be expected - and yes, the filesystem survived).
I've seen similarly configured machines ready to crash at a moment's notice, though - my experience is that even the most stable operating systems {Win2k (don't flame me), Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, IRIX} - all of which I've used - can have their images seriously compromised by a bit of faulty hardware. We come to blame it on the software manufacturer most of the time, but you must stop and think for awhile - just which company made the cheapest RAM that went in your HPaq? Who supplied the least expensive bulk CPU purchase, which may or may not have actually passed quality control? Which chipset maker promised to shave $0.50 off the cost of each machine in return for using their shoddy product? All computers can have these problems, and we chalk it up to errors in the software - whether it be Windows 2000 or Mac OS X. If you want your box to last, be it an iMac or a Dual Athlon, just buy quality components. Your OEM RAM may work perfectly - mine does in my XP2000+ - but don't count on it, and look at your hardware as well as your software if you experience random crashes. Not even Apple, with their complete control of the hardware platform, is immune, as someone else makes the RAM, a second company makes the hard drive, and so on. Even the lowly IDE cable could be at fault - the manufacturer could've gone for the $0.04 version instead of the $0.10 quality cable.
Bottom line - don't chalk a crash up to a software issue when it's just as likely to be a hardware failure. Use and love SiSoft Sandra's burnin wizard and 3dmark (at the same time - set for normal burnin with a looping test, then engage 3dmark. If it doesn't die on you, your box is probably stable). Know the power of Memtst86. I'm sure that there are comparable alternitives for Mac, Linux, and just about any other platform you can think of.
If they ban its fuel, you can bet they'd also ban those little shot-bottles of vodka; the fuel source currently being discussed is alcohol (methanol).
"A" and "B" cells were first developed for use in military radios sometime in the past (WW2 or before, I think). They needed to have two batteries for some reason, so they called them "A" and "B". Neither size is in use anymore - single-A cells were too strangely shaped to be useful, and B cells supplied some other voltage that wasn't commonly needed, so they faded out of demand (this is, of course, if memory serves me correctly - take it with a fist-sized grain of salt).
Having a faster bus come out on the market won't help you much anyway - (using your example) you wouldn't overclock your DDR400 bus to DDR533 to take advantage of the faster speed, you'd buy a CPU and board that supported it. This works in the same manner as current Athlons: faster RAM (333 or 400) won't help when you have a bus that's still 266 (or 333).
Nope - no Battlefield for the Mac. And as for the mac being too slow, Battlefield has one of the highest system requirement sets I've ever seen for a game - it NEEDS a Radeon 8500 / GF3 to be even remotely playable (no i810 for you), and a 2ghz P4 or AMD XP2000+ is required to run it to where the AI is usable (and it still consumes 25% of the CPU for that alone) - when you have a slower processor, the bots (of which there can be 50+ in a game, easily) just stand around until they're Panzerschrenked, which still happens on my Athlon XP2000+ gaming machine. It's hard on networks, too - 32kbps upstream per player is required to run a server! I'd love for there to be an optimized Mac port, but as the engine uses only Direct3d, it probably won't happen. It'd probably run just fine on a dualie Mac - one CPU for the AI, one for everything else...
Windows 2000 for the PPC was killed off, but NT 4 for the PPC exists. Too bad it doesn't have drivers for any Mac hardware, and that it was designed to run on IBM's PPC workstations.
The main reason that I know of, preventing PPC on X86 emulation, is that PPC has so many more registers than X86. Most of them would have to be mapped to memory, instead of using on-CPU registers. This would slow down any program using lots of registers (all of them?) by a HUGE amount.
What I'm thinking (and this would take a performance hit, obviously, but it would still work) is that they could emulate some common video card (like a Voodoo3) that specs are openly available for, and just translate the hardware instructions for it into OpenGL calls for the host OS. No endian-ness problems if you're not just copying the instructions from one card to another.