And now I shall type for 20 seconds, becuause Slashdot won't let me submit the comment in just two or three seconds. It really sucks that I type quickly, but those are the breaks. I think that it must be twenty seconds by now, so I shall submit the comment. Wish me well.
Buy a Seagate Cheetah X15. I just bought a second generation 36GB X15 on ebay for $260. I always buy SCSI peripherals for my high performance systems and EIDE for my cheap-ass game systems.
My X15 can transfer 50MB/s rather easily. If you put that in an SMP workstation with a SCSI RAID host adapter, you should see some truly monstrous transfer rates. Don't forget adequate cooling. You can never have too many fans. I'd recommend an Antec case. They're very, very nice.
I haven't yet been able to afford the SCSI RAID host adapter that I want. Seeing as how they start at around $400 new, I might have to settle for a used one off ebay. Oh well.
Dr. Raymond Stantz: Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything. You've never been in the private sector. They expect *results*.
If you just want to get on the web, check your e-mail, and perhaps play some music, then why do you have a computer? Sell your PC and buy a PDA or cell phone.
Why do operating systems require so much memory? They don't. You can get onto the internet with a 486DX/33, 340MB IDE hard drive, 16MB RAM, 14" VGA monitor, Windows 95 (or Linux 1.x), and 14.4Kbps modem. Floppy drive optional.
In fact, about two or three years ago, I bought a system like that for $50 ($25 for the 486 PC and $25 for the VGA monitor). I used it as a web server, after I dug up a USRobotics Courier v.34ter (33.6K) external modem. I upgraded the flash ROM on the Courier to support 56Kbps, got a dial-up account at a local ISP, and installed RedHat 5.2 (the oldest RedHat CD I could find after searching for five minutes). The CDROM, one of the hard drives, a serial port, and some other miscellaneous hardware failed after a while, but it kept chugging on, until I finally replaced it with a DEC Multia.
Why do operating systems today use so much RAM? Because of the User Experience. If you want to have a bunch of services (or daemons) running in the background, you're going to need lots of RAM. Do you want your applications to load quickly? Well, one option you have at your disposal is to partially load the application at bootup, then keep that portion in memory permanently. That eats up a lot of memory. Maybe you don't use the application so often, but you don't want it to take five minutes or more to load. Well, you can cache frequently accessed data, the directory structure, extended attributes, etc. Depending on how efficient your cache is, you can get away using small amounts or huge amounts of RAM. Of course, the law of diminishing returns applies here, as well.
Speaking of efficiency, take a look at the programs written for MS DOS in the early 1980s. Most of them were written in assembler. When people started using higher level languages, the memory footprint increased (tremendously, in some cases, where inexperienced programmers did not optimize their code at all, allowing that faster processors and more memory would cover up their experience). When developers use object oriented, interpreted, high level languages, the memory footprint explodes and the execution speed becomes unbearable, except under the fastest processors. Try running a large Java application on your 486/33 or Pentium 75. I bet it won't run too quickly.
Why does the operating system provide all these services, features, and user experience goodies? Because users want the operating system to do so. If you don't, then try using a real-time, microkernel based operating system. QNX is an example of this. MSDOS, a glorified program loader, is a somewhat decent example of a minimalist kernel distributed with the bare minimum of tools necessary to boot up a PC. It probably couldn't even boot up some modern PCs, given that it is a 16 bit real-mode app, and we're pushing the boundaries of 32 bit computing.
In short, features suck up bandwidth, speed, and memory. You can't run XP on a 486, because it preloads IE6 (and other apps) into memory at bootup, caches everything, runs as resolutions unsupported by your Trident 8900C video card, and has so many things popping up, sliding away, and running in the background, your poor 486 processor and ISA video card would be unable to keep up.
Nobody said you had to upgrade beyond your 486/33 and MSDOS 6.x. It still works just fine, I'm sure, and you'll probably notice that WordPerfect for DOS loads up extremely quickly.... much faster than Office XP does.
Why do people upgrade? They want programs to have talking, dancing paper clips. WordPefect for DOS doesn't even have a single wizard, just a text help screen.
Actually you can dip your fingers/hand in LN2 without hurting yourself. I used to do it every time to amuse/bemuse visitors who came to our laboratory. Just make sure you're not wearing a ring or other jewellery.
Yeah, I used to dip my hands in hydrochloric acid. It's perfectly safe, and it amused the people who came by my lab.
Or, rephrased, with a measure of good manners: Today's computers are fast enough for average home use. Not just some computers - everything you're likely to buy new is going to get the job done.
Does that really surprise anybody?
Is that really true? Can a 2GHz PC with only 128MB RAM really compare with a 600MHz PC with 1GB RAM? Amazingly enough, I've seen brand new computers with almost no RAM installed at all. I wonder if this is some screwy cost-saving measure?
You can squeeze out a little more performance with more memory on the graphics card. Also, games that come out in the future will use all that memory. Never mind that you wouldn't be caught dead using a two year old video card when those games finally come out...
Yeah, I'm not so sure that consumer systems really need to be faster than 300 MHz, maybe 600 MHz at max. If you're a gamer, programmer, or power user, then, yeah, you'll want to have as much processing power as possible. For a long time, my dad was sadled with a 450 MHz Pentium II, which slowed down his compiles monstrously. After much complaining, the company finally bought him a new Pentium 4. Unfortunately, I think it was a low-end Pentium 4, but it's still lightyears better than his ancient Pentium II. I would have pushed for a dual Xeon, myself.
I just recently bought a Tyan Tiger MPX and two 1.2 GHz Athlon MPs. I didn't want to spend the big bucks on 1.5 or 1.6 GHz Athlon MPs, since I'd probably see very little speed improvement over the incremental speed bumps -- not to mention saving myself over $100 on each processor.
I'm surprised you got moderated as "overrated". What Kyle said is actually rather insightful (and something that I've believed about Van for a loooong time).
Van is just a fanboy with a website. He doesn't do his own research, conduct any tests, or even say anything moderately interesting. It's like giving the pulpit to a slashdot poster during a congressional hearing on the constitutionality of the DMCA. "IT SUXORS!!! DOWN WIT DCMA!!!!111"
Hey, not that long ago, I ran a web server on an i486DX/33 with 20MB RAM (16MB + 4MB) and a 320MB hard drive. It served static pages through a 56k dial-up link. It worked just fine, even when half the hardware in the machine failed. It just enough to get the job done, and that's all you really need, right?
Too bad that I had to throw all my 486s in the trash when I moved. They were great fun to play with.
Well, it's nowhere near as nice as pressing "alt-f4" or "control-v", for instance. I've still got Wordstar keystrokes memorized, and I use them all the time in editors and word processors. After twenty years or so, my fingers automatically go for "control-k" whenever I want to do something. Much better than moving the mouse to some obscure pop-up menu. Well, IMHO.
I'm a couple months from hitting 30, and I've had bad eyesight since forever. I almost went blind in one of my eyes when I was five. Perhaps because of this, my hand/eye coordination isn't so hot. This means that having oversized buttons or selection areas really makes my life a lot easier.
I can't really say that I find pie menus to be revolutionary or fantasically useful, but they are a million times better than the eight point font text links that I have to click on all the time. Luckily, Mozilla grabbed a Konqueror feature that allows you to override the minimum font size on a page. Right now, I have it set really high, but it's still a pain in the ass.
One day, you too will have bad eyesight, even if it takes another 20-30 years for you to experience the annoyances that I'm facing. I don't think you'll really appreciate alternative user interfaces until then. I know I didn't, back when I could sit down at my computer without wearing glasses.
Anyways, if we can dumb down user interfaces enough so that everything is self-evident, it will help more people get involved with computers. My six year old nephew gets confused rather easily when he sees too many options available to him. If he could browse the web as easily as he reads a book, I bet he'd be taking high school courses by the time he was ten.
I was just thinking about this, because I saw the price of the ipaq and thought - at first - "Wow, that's a cheap price." Then, I thought, "Well, actually, couldn't I do everything it can do with my old P233MMX?" Then I thought, "Uhh, wait, my minitower isn't exactly portable."
Neither makes any noise, both support Linux/NT4, and both have minor expansion capabilities. The laptop is more portable, but the Multia is more powerful.
You know what would be really cool? An old iBook. Those things would be plenty fast enough for any job, plus you could run OS X on it. Then, if you wanted to take your music with you, you could. If you wanted to use it as a workstation, no problem. Or, if you wanted to stream music across the network, that'd work fine, too. You could even do it wireless using AirPort.
Well, anyways, that was my brainstorm. Lots of people say that you should never buy a used laptop, because they fall apart in several days or are always missing critical parts, like the battery. That's probably true, but everything in life is a chance. I've never gotten screwed too badly on eBay.
p.s. my definition of portable might be different than yours. Get a Sony DiscMan if you want to go jogging with your music.
Actually, he said that gcc is broken and can't deal with 64 bit values (long long) on a 32 bit system. Sounds like the problem is with gcc, not Intel.
I spent $120 on a 64 bit workstation years ago. I don't know why everyone is still using these crappy Intel boxes. Get yourself at least a Multia. Geez.
Unfortunately, most programmers, researchers, and other professional types take an interest in the Linux kernel itself, leaving the more boring stuff (like userland tools) to the hobbyists. I can't count the number of times I've cursed something written in-house by RedHat, Mandrake, etc, because it was written so poorly, it bombed when I accidentally hit the return key, escape, F10, etc. The two major times I have reason to run a program written by a Linux distribution is during installation and post-configuration. I dread both of these times when I'm installing Linux, because I know that no distribution is going to hire a real programmer to write these programs for them. They end up writing quick and dirty hacks in an unmaintainable scripting language, then rush the product through a beta test period. Ugh.
The only thing you can do when you install Windows is click "next" repeatedly. It's infuriating, but at least it never bombs on me, like the Linux installation programs do. If I had a choice between a fancy, configurable install program and a barebones install program, I'd definitely go for the fancy, configurable one... the first time. After that, I'd stay as far away from it as possible. More features = more bugs, and you do NOT want bugs in your install program.
It would also help if RedHat, Mandrake, et al hired real programmers, rather than spending all their money on managers and suits. One programmer with twenty years of experience is worth a hundred suits.
Slashdot Mirror
Americans aren't short.
And now I shall type for 20 seconds, becuause Slashdot won't let me submit the comment in just two or three seconds. It really sucks that I type quickly, but those are the breaks. I think that it must be twenty seconds by now, so I shall submit the comment. Wish me well.
Buy a Seagate Cheetah X15. I just bought a second generation 36GB X15 on ebay for $260. I always buy SCSI peripherals for my high performance systems and EIDE for my cheap-ass game systems.
My X15 can transfer 50MB/s rather easily. If you put that in an SMP workstation with a SCSI RAID host adapter, you should see some truly monstrous transfer rates. Don't forget adequate cooling. You can never have too many fans. I'd recommend an Antec case. They're very, very nice.
I haven't yet been able to afford the SCSI RAID host adapter that I want. Seeing as how they start at around $400 new, I might have to settle for a used one off ebay. Oh well.
It's a good thing that this story linked to the CNN front page, because I couldn't remember what the URL is! Thanks, Slashdot.
Dr. Raymond Stantz: Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything. You've never been in the private sector. They expect *results*.
Would that make Linus the soul of the kernel? Nyarlinusthotep?
If you just want to get on the web, check your e-mail, and perhaps play some music, then why do you have a computer? Sell your PC and buy a PDA or cell phone.
Why do operating systems require so much memory? They don't. You can get onto the internet with a 486DX/33, 340MB IDE hard drive, 16MB RAM, 14" VGA monitor, Windows 95 (or Linux 1.x), and 14.4Kbps modem. Floppy drive optional.
In fact, about two or three years ago, I bought a system like that for $50 ($25 for the 486 PC and $25 for the VGA monitor). I used it as a web server, after I dug up a USRobotics Courier v.34ter (33.6K) external modem. I upgraded the flash ROM on the Courier to support 56Kbps, got a dial-up account at a local ISP, and installed RedHat 5.2 (the oldest RedHat CD I could find after searching for five minutes). The CDROM, one of the hard drives, a serial port, and some other miscellaneous hardware failed after a while, but it kept chugging on, until I finally replaced it with a DEC Multia.
Why do operating systems today use so much RAM? Because of the User Experience. If you want to have a bunch of services (or daemons) running in the background, you're going to need lots of RAM. Do you want your applications to load quickly? Well, one option you have at your disposal is to partially load the application at bootup, then keep that portion in memory permanently. That eats up a lot of memory. Maybe you don't use the application so often, but you don't want it to take five minutes or more to load. Well, you can cache frequently accessed data, the directory structure, extended attributes, etc. Depending on how efficient your cache is, you can get away using small amounts or huge amounts of RAM. Of course, the law of diminishing returns applies here, as well.
Speaking of efficiency, take a look at the programs written for MS DOS in the early 1980s. Most of them were written in assembler. When people started using higher level languages, the memory footprint increased (tremendously, in some cases, where inexperienced programmers did not optimize their code at all, allowing that faster processors and more memory would cover up their experience). When developers use object oriented, interpreted, high level languages, the memory footprint explodes and the execution speed becomes unbearable, except under the fastest processors. Try running a large Java application on your 486/33 or Pentium 75. I bet it won't run too quickly.
Why does the operating system provide all these services, features, and user experience goodies? Because users want the operating system to do so. If you don't, then try using a real-time, microkernel based operating system. QNX is an example of this. MSDOS, a glorified program loader, is a somewhat decent example of a minimalist kernel distributed with the bare minimum of tools necessary to boot up a PC. It probably couldn't even boot up some modern PCs, given that it is a 16 bit real-mode app, and we're pushing the boundaries of 32 bit computing.
In short, features suck up bandwidth, speed, and memory. You can't run XP on a 486, because it preloads IE6 (and other apps) into memory at bootup, caches everything, runs as resolutions unsupported by your Trident 8900C video card, and has so many things popping up, sliding away, and running in the background, your poor 486 processor and ISA video card would be unable to keep up.
Nobody said you had to upgrade beyond your 486/33 and MSDOS 6.x. It still works just fine, I'm sure, and you'll probably notice that WordPerfect for DOS loads up extremely quickly.... much faster than Office XP does.
Why do people upgrade? They want programs to have talking, dancing paper clips. WordPefect for DOS doesn't even have a single wizard, just a text help screen.
That's not 'interesting'. That's illegal and stupid.
Slashdot sucks.
Your tin foil hat is on too tight.
...needs to be fired.
I've never before seen someone troll for "informative". What does it feel like to be such a whore? Does your mother know? Are you proud of it?
Yeah, I used to dip my hands in hydrochloric acid. It's perfectly safe, and it amused the people who came by my lab.
Is that really true? Can a 2GHz PC with only 128MB RAM really compare with a 600MHz PC with 1GB RAM? Amazingly enough, I've seen brand new computers with almost no RAM installed at all. I wonder if this is some screwy cost-saving measure?
You can squeeze out a little more performance with more memory on the graphics card. Also, games that come out in the future will use all that memory. Never mind that you wouldn't be caught dead using a two year old video card when those games finally come out...
Yeah, I'm not so sure that consumer systems really need to be faster than 300 MHz, maybe 600 MHz at max. If you're a gamer, programmer, or power user, then, yeah, you'll want to have as much processing power as possible. For a long time, my dad was sadled with a 450 MHz Pentium II, which slowed down his compiles monstrously. After much complaining, the company finally bought him a new Pentium 4. Unfortunately, I think it was a low-end Pentium 4, but it's still lightyears better than his ancient Pentium II. I would have pushed for a dual Xeon, myself.
I just recently bought a Tyan Tiger MPX and two 1.2 GHz Athlon MPs. I didn't want to spend the big bucks on 1.5 or 1.6 GHz Athlon MPs, since I'd probably see very little speed improvement over the incremental speed bumps -- not to mention saving myself over $100 on each processor.
I'm surprised you got moderated as "overrated". What Kyle said is actually rather insightful (and something that I've believed about Van for a loooong time).
Van is just a fanboy with a website. He doesn't do his own research, conduct any tests, or even say anything moderately interesting. It's like giving the pulpit to a slashdot poster during a congressional hearing on the constitutionality of the DMCA. "IT SUXORS!!! DOWN WIT DCMA!!!!111"
You're right. They do need permission.
Hey, not that long ago, I ran a web server on an i486DX/33 with 20MB RAM (16MB + 4MB) and a 320MB hard drive. It served static pages through a 56k dial-up link. It worked just fine, even when half the hardware in the machine failed. It just enough to get the job done, and that's all you really need, right?
Too bad that I had to throw all my 486s in the trash when I moved. They were great fun to play with.
Well, it's nowhere near as nice as pressing "alt-f4" or "control-v", for instance. I've still got Wordstar keystrokes memorized, and I use them all the time in editors and word processors. After twenty years or so, my fingers automatically go for "control-k" whenever I want to do something. Much better than moving the mouse to some obscure pop-up menu. Well, IMHO.
I'm a couple months from hitting 30, and I've had bad eyesight since forever. I almost went blind in one of my eyes when I was five. Perhaps because of this, my hand/eye coordination isn't so hot. This means that having oversized buttons or selection areas really makes my life a lot easier.
I can't really say that I find pie menus to be revolutionary or fantasically useful, but they are a million times better than the eight point font text links that I have to click on all the time. Luckily, Mozilla grabbed a Konqueror feature that allows you to override the minimum font size on a page. Right now, I have it set really high, but it's still a pain in the ass.
One day, you too will have bad eyesight, even if it takes another 20-30 years for you to experience the annoyances that I'm facing. I don't think you'll really appreciate alternative user interfaces until then. I know I didn't, back when I could sit down at my computer without wearing glasses.
Anyways, if we can dumb down user interfaces enough so that everything is self-evident, it will help more people get involved with computers. My six year old nephew gets confused rather easily when he sees too many options available to him. If he could browse the web as easily as he reads a book, I bet he'd be taking high school courses by the time he was ten.
That's not true at all. The Celeron is Intel's low-cost chip, not the Pentium line.
Well, parking a Porsche in the poor side of town... and leaving the keys in the ignition would be enticement.
I was just thinking about this, because I saw the price of the ipaq and thought - at first - "Wow, that's a cheap price." Then, I thought, "Well, actually, couldn't I do everything it can do with my old P233MMX?" Then I thought, "Uhh, wait, my minitower isn't exactly portable."
So, here's my solution: buy a used laptop for between $250 and $700, or buy a Multia for between $50 and $100.
Neither makes any noise, both support Linux/NT4, and both have minor expansion capabilities. The laptop is more portable, but the Multia is more powerful.
You know what would be really cool? An old iBook. Those things would be plenty fast enough for any job, plus you could run OS X on it. Then, if you wanted to take your music with you, you could. If you wanted to use it as a workstation, no problem. Or, if you wanted to stream music across the network, that'd work fine, too. You could even do it wireless using AirPort.
Well, anyways, that was my brainstorm. Lots of people say that you should never buy a used laptop, because they fall apart in several days or are always missing critical parts, like the battery. That's probably true, but everything in life is a chance. I've never gotten screwed too badly on eBay.
p.s. my definition of portable might be different than yours. Get a Sony DiscMan if you want to go jogging with your music.
You forgot about running it under bochs.
Lalalalalala. Waiting twenty seconds. Lalalalalala.
Actually, he said that gcc is broken and can't deal with 64 bit values (long long) on a 32 bit system. Sounds like the problem is with gcc, not Intel.
I spent $120 on a 64 bit workstation years ago. I don't know why everyone is still using these crappy Intel boxes. Get yourself at least a Multia. Geez.
Unfortunately, most programmers, researchers, and other professional types take an interest in the Linux kernel itself, leaving the more boring stuff (like userland tools) to the hobbyists. I can't count the number of times I've cursed something written in-house by RedHat, Mandrake, etc, because it was written so poorly, it bombed when I accidentally hit the return key, escape, F10, etc. The two major times I have reason to run a program written by a Linux distribution is during installation and post-configuration. I dread both of these times when I'm installing Linux, because I know that no distribution is going to hire a real programmer to write these programs for them. They end up writing quick and dirty hacks in an unmaintainable scripting language, then rush the product through a beta test period. Ugh.
The only thing you can do when you install Windows is click "next" repeatedly. It's infuriating, but at least it never bombs on me, like the Linux installation programs do. If I had a choice between a fancy, configurable install program and a barebones install program, I'd definitely go for the fancy, configurable one... the first time. After that, I'd stay as far away from it as possible. More features = more bugs, and you do NOT want bugs in your install program.
It would also help if RedHat, Mandrake, et al hired real programmers, rather than spending all their money on managers and suits. One programmer with twenty years of experience is worth a hundred suits.