SMP Alphas need huge power supplies. We're talking 600W to 800W.
However, I've got all this running on a 250W power supply:
Two 450 MHz Pentium III CPUs
Quantum Atlas 10K (10K RPM Ultra160 SCSI drive)
Conner 2GB/4GB SCSI tape drive
Ricoh SCSI 2x2x6 CD-RW
Generic 24X SCSI CDROM
Maxtor 8.4GB EIDE hard drive
Western Digital 1.0GB EIDE hard drive
Tekram Ultra2 Wide SCSI controller
Matrox G400 AGP video card
SoundBlaster Live! Value
LinkSys EtherFast (10/100Mbs PCI Fast Ethernet)
Generic ISA NE2000 card
Now, that's a lot of junk in one computer, especially for a 250W power supply. I've never, ever had a single problem with this system in the 7 or 8 months that I've had it. It stays up for a month straight, at which time I lose electricity because of an electrical storm. However, I just bought a UPS for the computer, so it should stay up forever now.:)
My point is that the Pentium III doesn't require much power at all. Go ahead and stick two, four, or eight Pentium Pros or Xeons in your system. I doubt you'll need much power.
That's true. The Multia does have some limitations:
It has one PCI slot, used by a SCSI controller
The sound and video are integrated on the motherboard
There is room for only a 2.5" laptop hard drive
The power supply is insanely under-powered
Some systems come with no floppy, hard drive, or memory
The CPU is sometimes soldered onto the motherboard
It is possible to put a 3.5" hard drive in some Multias, but that would be a bad idea. The power supply is only 75W, if I remember correctly. Anything more powerful than a laptop hard drive would suck up too much power. Out of curiosity, I tried hooking up a Seagate Barracuda (7200 RPM, 50 pin Ultra Narrow) to a Multia's power supply, but the system couldn't handle it, of course.
I agree, buying a "real" motherboard and CPU would be a wise choice, but consider the benefits of the Multia:
Everything is integrated. You don't need to know anything about the Alpha architecture.
It's plug 'n' play, as long as you have memory, a hard drive, and floppy. These are easy to add, in case you didn't get them.
It uses industry standard parts (72 pin SIMMs, SCSI peripherals, etc). A lot of older Alpha hardware is proprietary.
They're available in bulk. It's not easy to find cheap Alpha workstations at your average web store.
Lots of people have Multias. If you have a question, someone can answer it.
Most of the add-ons that you would want for a Multia are obsolete hardware. They sell on ebay for under $50, sometimes under $20.
The Multia has two PCMCIA slots - pretty cool.
I admit, they're not for everyone, but for someone who doesn't want to spend lots of time learning about hardware, Alphas, and what is supported on the Alpha (ie, you can't put a GeForce on your Alpha), the Multia is a great little computer.
Every AMD 750 and Via KX133 motherboard supports the Athlon's 100 MHz DDR front side bus. DDR stands for "double data rate", which is chip-speak for "it transfers data effectively twice as fast". If you take an electrical engineering class (microprocessors, for example), you'll learn that data is transmitted on the bus only at certain times (defined by the clock).
For example, consider that the bus is on a 24 hour clock. The Pentium II with its 100 MHz bus transfers data at 12:00 noon. The Athlon, with it's 100 MHz DDR bus, transfers data at both 12:00 noon and 12:00 midnight.
Of course, if you want an entry level 64 bit Alpha workstation, you can get a Multia (or UDB, as they're sometimes called) on ebay for around $75-$150 (depending on how decked-out it is).
Many cheap Multias come with a soldered 166 MHz CPU, no floppy drive, and no hard drive. The more expensive ones (~$25 extra) have a socketed 166 or 233 MHz CPU, a floppy drive, and sometimes even a small hard drive (400 or 500MB).
These Multias run Alpha Linux just fine. They're around the speed of a Pentium 100 at integer computations, and a Pentium 200 at floating point.
You also might want to look at the 21164A, which is quite cheap these days. You can get a 533 MHz CPU, motherboard, and perhaps even a DIMM for around $500. This will be about the same speed (or a little faster) than a 450 MHz Pentium III at integer ops.
I've got a Compaq luggable in my bedroom. I've got a Commodore 64 in my basement. And I might be able to dig up an original Tandy CoCo given enough time.
I've also got a desktop 386, two 486/33s, and a Sun 4/110. Unfortunately, I sold my AST 286 and Amiga 1000. I don't know what happened to my NCR 386DX/16 (yes, a 386DX/16!), Laser 128, or Vic 20.
I know this isn't a popular viewpoint, but I believe Napster is a bad thing, because:
I don't like having my bandwidth affected by warez/napster kiddies expanding their collections
Napster gives the mp3 format a horrible name. It's like if everyone started saying (and believing) that PKZIP is only used by warez kiddies. Back 10 years ago, when I was a DOS user, I liked PKZIP a lot. I would have been pissed off if I thought the format had the potential to be regulated or something.
Napster can be used for legal purposes, but... why? There are already better tools. Napster's sole purpose in life is to make piracy easy. It's like saying that I can use my lockpicks as chopsticks, so they're not "tools of the trade".
If you want to sample the music before you buy it, then go to the music store and use the listening stations. Duh!
If you can't afford the music, then can you afford a copyright violation suit? I don't think so. This is exceptionally funny to me, because of all the raving GNU fanatics on Slashdot. If anyone (Abit, Be, etc) violates the GPL even just a little bit, you go ballistic. But it's okay to violate someone else's copyright. I have no especial love for copyrights, but you have to recognize the irony here.
I don't think people who pirate software or music are degenerates or anything. I just wish they wouldn't suck up all my bandwidth and then defend their actions with horribly flimsy excuses like "I wouldn't buy it anyways". I used to pirate software back in the 80s, but I knew what I was doing was bad karma. I didn't try to rationalize it to myself... I was just greedy for more Commodore 64 games.:)
A Celeron is not really a gaming platform, especially with 64MB RAM and an ancient video card. You want a Pentium III or Athlon with something like a TNT2 Ultra, Voodoo3, or Matrox G400. I'd suggest the G400 if you're a Linux user. Plenty fast enough for games, plus it works great under XF86. Won't cost more than $150. If you're buying $50 games, you can afford a $150 video card.
Yeah, the Pentium III is expensive, but you don't get high performance from a $35 CPU.
I think you mean something like "grandsword" or "greatsword", which do commonly appear in English.
I can't read Japenese or Chinese, unfortunately, but even I know of the existence of Samurai swords. It would be silly to assert that there was no sword called the daikatana in feudal Japan when so many history books talk of it, referring to it with that name.
I'll trust the scholars on this on, rather than Slashdot posters.
Perhaps it's an attempt to make games difficult again, rather than the simplistic pieces of crap that are on the market today.
Granted, I dislike games that don't let you save. But how many times have you won a FPS without ever saving the game? How many times have you won a FPS by saving the game every 30 seconds? There's a huge difference, isn't there? Perhaps that's what this is supposed to reflect.
I don't agree with the concept, but I think maybe it's a step in the right direction. Games are becoming way too easy these days. You only get a day or two of play out of some of them. I remember when it used to take a month of all-nighters to solve a game...
I'm not trying to post flamebait here, but what has id done besides Doom clones for the past few years? id really seems to be lacking for design these days. I'm not slamming id or saying they suck. I'm just saying that the design of their games hasn't exactly been earthshattering lately.
I respect Romero, even if he is an egotistical dork. Carmack is great, but I think id might need an infusion of ideas and imagination sometime soon, or they'll fall from the top.
Commander Keen: Nice little game, imaginative. Wolf 3D: Cool game, imaginative. Doom: Very cool, imaginative. Quake: Doom on steroids. Quake II: Doom on steroids. Quake III: Doom on steroids.
Ummm...
Disclaimer: I haven't even looked at Daikatana, because I knew it would suck worse than anything in the history of computer gaming.
GTK? GTK is slow on a dual processor Pentium III with 256MB of RAM. And we're talking about the fastest card supported by XF86 here, a Matrox G400.
My computer should be blazingly fast. But it's not. GTK apps are sluggish. KDE/QT apps aren't so much better, but they do seem less sluggish.
I've even gone so far as to recompile XF86 with pgcc, using maximal, Pentium Pro optimizations.
X is slow, GTK is slow, and Linux is fast. It's somewhat annoying. Usually I don't mind it, because I think GUIs are for dorks who never learned the command line. But it's hard to play anything more graphical than NetHack using the console...
Here I am again replying to people 7 hours after they post a comment. I don't know why I bother.
Overclocking is one of the few "geek" pasttimes (actually a rather new one) that will not trickle out into the mainstream as other techs
Overclocking is not new. People were overclocking the 80286 to 20MHz back 15 years ago.
It's reassuring, in a way, that overclockers can be assured of strictly non-mainstream fellows among their ranks.
Oh, give me a break. You just learned how to overlock a year or two ago with your Abit motherboard and its SoftMenu. It's not even really "hacking" any more... back fifteen years ago, you had to desolder chips on the motherboard, buy new crystals to set the clock generator, etc. These guys were doing stuff that was truly like a gearhead messing with his hotrod. What you are doing is going into a BIOS and pressing enter once or twice.
I'll start off right now saying this system doesn't have a monitor or integrated flat screen or anything else like that. However, it is infinitely better than an i-opener, at around the same price.
You might have heard of the DEC Alpha. It's a 64 bit architecure supported by Linux and FreeBSD. The models are numbered thusly:
21064 - About the speed of a mid-range Pentium
21164 - The speed of a low-end PIII or Athlon
21264 - As much as twice as fast as Intel's best
21364 - Not released yet. Rumored to be insanely fast
There are some tweaks to the above CPUs, like the 21066 and the 21164PC. These are usually slightly modified Alphas, sometimes with more cache or workstation-bound, rather than servers.
The ultimate in low-end Alphas is the Multia, also called the Universal Desktop Box (UDB). The Multia uses a 21066 running at either 166 MHz or 233 MHz. The speed is comparable to a Pentium 75 or 100 in integer performance, and around a 200 MHz Pentium in floating point.
The Multia comes in a slimline case about the size of a laptop. It's got everything integrated on the motherboard: two megabyte high, performance PCI video; 44 pin 2.5" laptop IDE interface; fast SCSI-2 (10MB/s) internal and external connectors; decent quality sound chip, capable of good MP3 playback; two external PCMCIA slots; two serial and one parallel port; floppy drive; and optional internal 340MB or 540MB SCSI-2 hard drive. It also optionally comes with two 72 pin parity SIMMs (they must be installed in pairs, and there are four slots). The memory is JEDEC standard, which means you can use normal, PC SIMMs, but they must be true parity (ie, x36 SIMMs).
You can get a complete 166 MHz Multia, with 24MB RAM (dual 12MB modules), 320/540MB hard drive, case, and everything else mentioned above on eBay for between $100 and $200, depending on how many people have bid on it. It's quite easy to find them complete for $120, but you might want to settle for buying a barebones system (no hard drive, no memory) for $75 to $120, if you already have an external hard drive and/or parity SIMMS.
I bought mine new in the box for $120 shipped. It didn't come with memory, hard drive, or floppy disk. Unfortunately, the Multia floppy disk seems to be incompatible with normal 3.5" floppy disks, so I had to buy one for $40. Yeah, that's overpriced, but I decided to waste a few dollars getting a floppy now than search hard for one and save money later.
You can get 4.5GB SCSI-2 hard drives on eBay for less than $100, external SCSI-2 enclosures for less than $50, and external SCSI-2 CDROMs for less than $25. This is if you wish to have a standalone workstation. The Multia will work just fine as a diskless client or even headless.
I bought a 14" SVGA monitor at a computer show for $25, and it works great with the Multia. The Multia supports up to 1280x1024, which is much more than my old SVGA monitor can do. Incidentally, it's a DEC monitor.:)
I'm not sure how to do the 10" LCD screen, but I'm sure you could come up with something if you looked on eBay. In fact, I did see a 10" LCD screen on eBay a little while ago, but it required a proprietary ISA controller card. Someone has to be manufacturing these things if Netpliance is using them, though.
If you need more info, you can go to the AlphaLinux web page, which has incredible amounts of info on DEC Alphas and Multias. If you wish, you can also e-mail me at mkracht@aye.net .
I hope this information is of use, and I hope someone sees it so long after the story is posted...
The Microsofties need a foot in the door among the Bush crowd so that their calls to a Bush White House are answered. Hiring one of the candidate's consultants as their own consultant is a time-honored method to do so. Now they just need a similar friend from the Gore team.
I'm sure that Gore will play along. He's always been an insider and team-player. I have no great love for the man, but he at least has token opinions on issues important to me: technology, the environment, and Twisted Sister. He's a closet Twisted Sister fan, ya know.
That actually sounds like a sound interpretation of Corel's stock problem.
I never really paid any attention to Cowpland, because he's never said anything interesting. Corel seems like a decent enough company, and they've been around since forever (not as long as Apple or Microsoft, but anything over ten years is "forever" in the computer business).
Imagine if IBM bought Corel. That would be really cool. IBM has a very pro-Linux agenda right now, they have good management, a well-known and respected CEO, and loads of resources to dedicate to any good projects that Corel has going (WINE, Corel Linux, Wordperfect Office, etc).
Another decent candidate to buy Corel would be SGI. They don't have the resources or market valuation of IBM (nor a famous CEO, though they used to, until he got bored), but SGI seems to have something of a vision and market respectability.
I can't really think of too many other people that would want or even really care about a has-been, also-ran Microsoft competitor.
Star Trek has always been "raygun popsci", as you call it. Transporter buffers, rayguns (oops... phasers), warp drives, humans with funny ears (oh, that's supposed to be an alien race?), etc.
The Matrix and Star Wars both had better acting than Star Trek (though Mark Hamill and William Shatner are quite a match), and The Matrix was quite a bit more intellectual.
Well, if you look at composing music as a mathematical exercise, then it's not really all that creative.
If you look at it as exercising your imagination and creating original works, it's creative as hell. But some people compose really dry, boring music that sounds like a calculus theorum. That's not so creative.
Get what I'm saying?
Writing code isn't very creative, IMHO. But, then, I never said anything about sitting there, brainstorming ideas for your project.
Why would there be any sort of correlation between mental illness and programming? It's usually the creative types that suffer depression or bipolar disorder.
Programming, in my opinion, isn't really a very creative activity. It's much more logical, structured, and rote.
I'm bipolar, and when I go into a manic phase, the first thing I usually do is spend money on new computer toys or write. I usually find myself unable to program when I'm manic. It requires too much concentration.
The guy who wrote that linked piece about being bipolar sounds schitzophrenic, not bipolar. Bipolars don't hear voices or think the CIA is bugging their telephone. That's much more severe than bipolar disorder...
Sure, brute processing power will win out every time. However, if I pit a 500MhzG4 against an Athlon/Xeon at 500Mhz, which would win out?
In brute processing terms, from the benchmarks that I have personally witnessed, the G4 wins out everytime.
Ummm... you're comparing obsolete PC hardware (AMD doesn't even manufacture 500 MHz chips any more) to the top-of-the-line Apple/Motorola hardware.
That's a pretty sad comparison. Are you awake that you can buy a 700 MHz Athlon for around $250 from any good online store? The 800 MHz Athlon is only $500, and it's available in large quantities.
Multiprocessor Intel motherboards are very easy to find (Asus, Tyan, Supermicro, and Iwill all make very high quality dual BX and GX boards). I'd like to see your 500 MHz G4 supercomputer compete again a quad processor 600 MHz Xeon/2MB cache.
Apple hardware is not that good, nor is it all that fast. Apple uses deceptive benchmarks.
Slashdot Mirror
However, I've got all this running on a 250W power supply:
Now, that's a lot of junk in one computer, especially for a 250W power supply. I've never, ever had a single problem with this system in the 7 or 8 months that I've had it. It stays up for a month straight, at which time I lose electricity because of an electrical storm. However, I just bought a UPS for the computer, so it should stay up forever now.
My point is that the Pentium III doesn't require much power at all. Go ahead and stick two, four, or eight Pentium Pros or Xeons in your system. I doubt you'll need much power.
That wouldn't make sense to anyone but an electrical engineer or hardware enthusiast.
Use jargon if you want, but it doesn't help explain complex subjects to people who are genuinely interested in learning more.
It is possible to put a 3.5" hard drive in some Multias, but that would be a bad idea. The power supply is only 75W, if I remember correctly. Anything more powerful than a laptop hard drive would suck up too much power. Out of curiosity, I tried hooking up a Seagate Barracuda (7200 RPM, 50 pin Ultra Narrow) to a Multia's power supply, but the system couldn't handle it, of course.
I agree, buying a "real" motherboard and CPU would be a wise choice, but consider the benefits of the Multia:
I admit, they're not for everyone, but for someone who doesn't want to spend lots of time learning about hardware, Alphas, and what is supported on the Alpha (ie, you can't put a GeForce on your Alpha), the Multia is a great little computer.
Every AMD 750 and Via KX133 motherboard supports the Athlon's 100 MHz DDR front side bus. DDR stands for "double data rate", which is chip-speak for "it transfers data effectively twice as fast". If you take an electrical engineering class (microprocessors, for example), you'll learn that data is transmitted on the bus only at certain times (defined by the clock).
For example, consider that the bus is on a 24 hour clock. The Pentium II with its 100 MHz bus transfers data at 12:00 noon. The Athlon, with it's 100 MHz DDR bus, transfers data at both 12:00 noon and 12:00 midnight.
I hope that explains it.
Many cheap Multias come with a soldered 166 MHz CPU, no floppy drive, and no hard drive. The more expensive ones (~$25 extra) have a socketed 166 or 233 MHz CPU, a floppy drive, and sometimes even a small hard drive (400 or 500MB).
These Multias run Alpha Linux just fine. They're around the speed of a Pentium 100 at integer computations, and a Pentium 200 at floating point.
You also might want to look at the 21164A, which is quite cheap these days. You can get a 533 MHz CPU, motherboard, and perhaps even a DIMM for around $500. This will be about the same speed (or a little faster) than a 450 MHz Pentium III at integer ops.
I've got a Compaq luggable in my bedroom. I've got a Commodore 64 in my basement. And I might be able to dig up an original Tandy CoCo given enough time.
:)
I've also got a desktop 386, two 486/33s, and a Sun 4/110. Unfortunately, I sold my AST 286 and Amiga 1000. I don't know what happened to my NCR 386DX/16 (yes, a 386DX/16!), Laser 128, or Vic 20.
I want to start my own museum.
That was very interesting.
I'm surprised it hasn't been moderated up.
Of course, I think most of us know that intelligence agencies are not our friend. If they were, they wouldn't be spying on us.
That's just what they want you to think.
Never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line!
I don't think people who pirate software or music are degenerates or anything. I just wish they wouldn't suck up all my bandwidth and then defend their actions with horribly flimsy excuses like "I wouldn't buy it anyways". I used to pirate software back in the 80s, but I knew what I was doing was bad karma. I didn't try to rationalize it to myself... I was just greedy for more Commodore 64 games.
A Celeron is not really a gaming platform, especially with 64MB RAM and an ancient video card. You want a Pentium III or Athlon with something like a TNT2 Ultra, Voodoo3, or Matrox G400. I'd suggest the G400 if you're a Linux user. Plenty fast enough for games, plus it works great under XF86. Won't cost more than $150. If you're buying $50 games, you can afford a $150 video card.
Yeah, the Pentium III is expensive, but you don't get high performance from a $35 CPU.
I think you mean something like "grandsword" or "greatsword", which do commonly appear in English.
I can't read Japenese or Chinese, unfortunately, but even I know of the existence of Samurai swords. It would be silly to assert that there was no sword called the daikatana in feudal Japan when so many history books talk of it, referring to it with that name.
I'll trust the scholars on this on, rather than Slashdot posters.
Perhaps it's an attempt to make games difficult again, rather than the simplistic pieces of crap that are on the market today.
Granted, I dislike games that don't let you save. But how many times have you won a FPS without ever saving the game? How many times have you won a FPS by saving the game every 30 seconds? There's a huge difference, isn't there? Perhaps that's what this is supposed to reflect.
I don't agree with the concept, but I think maybe it's a step in the right direction. Games are becoming way too easy these days. You only get a day or two of play out of some of them. I remember when it used to take a month of all-nighters to solve a game...
I'm not trying to post flamebait here, but what has id done besides Doom clones for the past few years? id really seems to be lacking for design these days. I'm not slamming id or saying they suck. I'm just saying that the design of their games hasn't exactly been earthshattering lately.
I respect Romero, even if he is an egotistical dork. Carmack is great, but I think id might need an infusion of ideas and imagination sometime soon, or they'll fall from the top.
Commander Keen: Nice little game, imaginative.
Wolf 3D: Cool game, imaginative.
Doom: Very cool, imaginative.
Quake: Doom on steroids.
Quake II: Doom on steroids.
Quake III: Doom on steroids.
Ummm...
Disclaimer: I haven't even looked at Daikatana, because I knew it would suck worse than anything in the history of computer gaming.
Apple hardware is way expensive.
:)
I wish someone else would make PowerPC stuff. What the hell are IBM and Motorola doing with all their chips? Are they just selling them to Apple?
There's got to be a better solution here. If I have to design the motherboard and CPU myself, it could take decades.
GTK? GTK is slow on a dual processor Pentium III with 256MB of RAM. And we're talking about the fastest card supported by XF86 here, a Matrox G400.
My computer should be blazingly fast. But it's not. GTK apps are sluggish. KDE/QT apps aren't so much better, but they do seem less sluggish.
I've even gone so far as to recompile XF86 with pgcc, using maximal, Pentium Pro optimizations.
X is slow, GTK is slow, and Linux is fast. It's somewhat annoying. Usually I don't mind it, because I think GUIs are for dorks who never learned the command line. But it's hard to play anything more graphical than NetHack using the console...
...but I didn't inhale!
Overclocking is not new. People were overclocking the 80286 to 20MHz back 15 years ago.
Oh, give me a break. You just learned how to overlock a year or two ago with your Abit motherboard and its SoftMenu. It's not even really "hacking" any more... back fifteen years ago, you had to desolder chips on the motherboard, buy new crystals to set the clock generator, etc. These guys were doing stuff that was truly like a gearhead messing with his hotrod. What you are doing is going into a BIOS and pressing enter once or twice.
My ex-girlfriend can do that...
You might have heard of the DEC Alpha. It's a 64 bit architecure supported by Linux and FreeBSD. The models are numbered thusly:
There are some tweaks to the above CPUs, like the 21066 and the 21164PC. These are usually slightly modified Alphas, sometimes with more cache or workstation-bound, rather than servers.
The ultimate in low-end Alphas is the Multia, also called the Universal Desktop Box (UDB). The Multia uses a 21066 running at either 166 MHz or 233 MHz. The speed is comparable to a Pentium 75 or 100 in integer performance, and around a 200 MHz Pentium in floating point.
The Multia comes in a slimline case about the size of a laptop. It's got everything integrated on the motherboard: two megabyte high, performance PCI video; 44 pin 2.5" laptop IDE interface; fast SCSI-2 (10MB/s) internal and external connectors; decent quality sound chip, capable of good MP3 playback; two external PCMCIA slots; two serial and one parallel port; floppy drive; and optional internal 340MB or 540MB SCSI-2 hard drive. It also optionally comes with two 72 pin parity SIMMs (they must be installed in pairs, and there are four slots). The memory is JEDEC standard, which means you can use normal, PC SIMMs, but they must be true parity (ie, x36 SIMMs).
You can get a complete 166 MHz Multia, with 24MB RAM (dual 12MB modules), 320/540MB hard drive, case, and everything else mentioned above on eBay for between $100 and $200, depending on how many people have bid on it. It's quite easy to find them complete for $120, but you might want to settle for buying a barebones system (no hard drive, no memory) for $75 to $120, if you already have an external hard drive and/or parity SIMMS.
I bought mine new in the box for $120 shipped. It didn't come with memory, hard drive, or floppy disk. Unfortunately, the Multia floppy disk seems to be incompatible with normal 3.5" floppy disks, so I had to buy one for $40. Yeah, that's overpriced, but I decided to waste a few dollars getting a floppy now than search hard for one and save money later.
You can get 4.5GB SCSI-2 hard drives on eBay for less than $100, external SCSI-2 enclosures for less than $50, and external SCSI-2 CDROMs for less than $25. This is if you wish to have a standalone workstation. The Multia will work just fine as a diskless client or even headless.
I bought a 14" SVGA monitor at a computer show for $25, and it works great with the Multia. The Multia supports up to 1280x1024, which is much more than my old SVGA monitor can do. Incidentally, it's a DEC monitor. :)
I'm not sure how to do the 10" LCD screen, but I'm sure you could come up with something if you looked on eBay. In fact, I did see a 10" LCD screen on eBay a little while ago, but it required a proprietary ISA controller card. Someone has to be manufacturing these things if Netpliance is using them, though.
If you need more info, you can go to the AlphaLinux web page, which has incredible amounts of info on DEC Alphas and Multias. If you wish, you can also e-mail me at mkracht@aye.net .
I hope this information is of use, and I hope someone sees it so long after the story is posted...
I'm sure that Gore will play along. He's always been an insider and team-player. I have no great love for the man, but he at least has token opinions on issues important to me: technology, the environment, and Twisted Sister. He's a closet Twisted Sister fan, ya know.
Someone hacked your account, eh?
That actually sounds like a sound interpretation of Corel's stock problem.
I never really paid any attention to Cowpland, because he's never said anything interesting. Corel seems like a decent enough company, and they've been around since forever (not as long as Apple or Microsoft, but anything over ten years is "forever" in the computer business).
Imagine if IBM bought Corel. That would be really cool. IBM has a very pro-Linux agenda right now, they have good management, a well-known and respected CEO, and loads of resources to dedicate to any good projects that Corel has going (WINE, Corel Linux, Wordperfect Office, etc).
Another decent candidate to buy Corel would be SGI. They don't have the resources or market valuation of IBM (nor a famous CEO, though they used to, until he got bored), but SGI seems to have something of a vision and market respectability.
I can't really think of too many other people that would want or even really care about a has-been, also-ran Microsoft competitor.
Though, I used to think the same about Borland...
Are you crazy?
Star Trek has always been "raygun popsci", as you call it. Transporter buffers, rayguns (oops... phasers), warp drives, humans with funny ears (oh, that's supposed to be an alien race?), etc.
The Matrix and Star Wars both had better acting than Star Trek (though Mark Hamill and William Shatner are quite a match), and The Matrix was quite a bit more intellectual.
Well, if you look at composing music as a mathematical exercise, then it's not really all that creative.
If you look at it as exercising your imagination and creating original works, it's creative as hell. But some people compose really dry, boring music that sounds like a calculus theorum. That's not so creative.
Get what I'm saying?
Writing code isn't very creative, IMHO. But, then, I never said anything about sitting there, brainstorming ideas for your project.
Why would there be any sort of correlation between mental illness and programming? It's usually the creative types that suffer depression or bipolar disorder.
Programming, in my opinion, isn't really a very creative activity. It's much more logical, structured, and rote.
I'm bipolar, and when I go into a manic phase, the first thing I usually do is spend money on new computer toys or write. I usually find myself unable to program when I'm manic. It requires too much concentration.
The guy who wrote that linked piece about being bipolar sounds schitzophrenic, not bipolar. Bipolars don't hear voices or think the CIA is bugging their telephone. That's much more severe than bipolar disorder...
Ummm... you're comparing obsolete PC hardware (AMD doesn't even manufacture 500 MHz chips any more) to the top-of-the-line Apple/Motorola hardware.
That's a pretty sad comparison. Are you awake that you can buy a 700 MHz Athlon for around $250 from any good online store? The 800 MHz Athlon is only $500, and it's available in large quantities.
Multiprocessor Intel motherboards are very easy to find (Asus, Tyan, Supermicro, and Iwill all make very high quality dual BX and GX boards). I'd like to see your 500 MHz G4 supercomputer compete again a quad processor 600 MHz Xeon/2MB cache.
Apple hardware is not that good, nor is it all that fast. Apple uses deceptive benchmarks.