As the other posters have stated, the C3 processor used in the AOL/Lindows/Microtel desktop is based on the Cyrix processor (x86 compatible, et al) which was purchased by Via a while back. The problem with the Cyrix processors is that the FPU is what holds back the processor dramatically. If you check out some of the reviews on the web (Tom's, Anand, etc.) the older processors had the FPU operating at half of the processor's speed. I don't remember if the newer versions of the processors still have that handicap or not. Otherwise, the processor does run cool compared to any desktop processor made by Intel or AMD.
The bit about the article that kind of tweaked me out was:
Via's new C3 processor is cool -- literally. Not only is it faster than the AMD in the older Lindows, but Via claims that it's very, very, very energy efficient.
My question is how can a 800Mhz C3 actually be faster than an 850Mhz AMD Duron. Although the C3 has more L2 cache (256 or 512KB compared to 64KB on the Duron) but the Duron does have a larger L1 cache (128KB... I don't remember the exact L1 size for the C3). Unless if they used a crappy chipset and video chipset in the Duron setup and improved it in the C3... an AMD Duron should be able to whip the C3... primarily in FPU intensive operations.
That I definitely understand as I also fall into that category... somewhat:)
I think iSCSI wouls be a nice solution for those who can't spend a whole lot of greens or quids... even if he needed special NICs (I think those NICs offload some of the processing onto a chip on the NIC rather than pelt the system processor) they aren't as expensive as 2Gb/s Fibre Channel adapters.
I'm currently running my personal website and mail server on an older Compaq iPaq desktop computer. It has a P3-500Mhz processor (CuMine), 8GB 5400RPM hard drive, CD-ROM, and 256MB of RAM. The reason why I bought it was the fact that it was one of the smallest desktops on the market, it wasn't too expensive, very quiet, and doesn't produce too much heat. I wrote an article that has a quick overview of how I got FreeBSD to run on the machine.
The machine doesn't spin down it's hard drive or throttle the processor speed, but it's power draw while idle is probably within the 50-65W range as the power supply can provide a max of 90W. You can probably find quite a few of the first or second gen machines on eBay or other used hardware sites.
I also have an older Gateway 2000 machine (P5-200 MMX) with 160MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive running FreeBSD as my firewall at home. It's a bit overkill, but hey... it was given to me... the only thing I had to do was to clean it up, pull out the floppy drive (with the drive in, there was only a 2mm gap between the drive and the CPU's fan... not good!). Doing a make world on the machine is slow, but I'm able to pump around 40Mbps through the machine without any problems.
Another option is to check out some of the older IBM desktops that IBM is selling as refurbished machines. The specs on some of them are P2-300/350, 64MB of RAM and a basic hard drive. In most cases, you can slap in at least another hard drive, more SDRAM, and keep the processor as-is and have a fairly decent, small and fairly low power machine.
Other options include looking at the Mini-ITX machines or the VIA Eden platform as other have mentioned. Check out the Seagate ATA hard drives if you are looking for quiet hard drives. I have two Seagate Barracuda IV 40GB hard drives in a machine at work... all I have to say is that the power supply fan is louder than the drive. I can barely hear the drive seeking. I wish I could say the same for this 10K RPM SCSI hard drive I have at home:)
The only downside of iSCSI is the fact that Gigabit Ethernet will give you a maximum burst rate of 125MBytes/sec (+/- 5MB/s), but that is without the overhead of the TCP/IP protocol and the fact that you may have other devices sharing the bandwidth on the same PCI bus. Of course, good Gig Ethernet NICs and switches aren't as expensive as FC switches and host bus adapters. 10Gig Ethernet will definitely provide a lot of available for iSCSI, but getting 10Gig Ethernet NICs and switches capable of 10Gig Ethernet isn't exactly cheap.
Fibre Channel is expensive, but at least you get more of the 1Gb/s or 2Gb/s bandwidth than you would with Ethernet + TCP/IP overhead.
Now what would be nice is a "SAN" or shared storage unit that can support multiple Serial Attached SCSI channels:) Of course, SA-SCSI isn't available just yet.
I remember seeing a while back that a company had a storage device for Macs that allowed several users attach to the device using FireWire and the supplied software to access the drives in the unit. I can't remember who made it or what it was called... but a Google search can probably bring up a couple of hits.
I'm not sure if I have seen any PC-oriented FireWire SAN solutions though as FireWire hasn't really been something you would see in a lot of computers until recently.
I did find a couple when doing a search for "FireWire Network Storage":
News.com is running an article on a study that KPMG did... in which they state that the ??AA need to embrace downloadable music and videos and to stop/reduce using copy protections to thwart piracy.
I've played around with Dillo a bit, but right now, it doesn't have all of the features that I like. Maybe in time, that will improve.
For me, I find Opera 6 crashing usually after 15-20 minutes of use... and it doesn't always save all of the preference changes that I would make during a session. The preference dialog is just as cluttered as IE5 on the Mac.
I haven't really used the Tabs part of Opera a whole lot...
I actually modify the port's Makefile to disable parts that I don't need, switch --disable-optimize to --enable-optimize (or something to that effect).
I already have -O2 and -p3 set as make options in/etc/make.conf on my FreeBSD laptop. It does make it a tad faster... the problem is that it slows down over time (the machine I run it on is a P3-800 laptop with 384MB of RAM) and it occurs while running it under WindowMaker or KDE3.
It's definitely not as bad as OpenOffice.org and StarOffice 5.2 (the former as a native package and the latter running under the Linux ABI).
Have you looked into standalone devices that can copy the data from one drive to another at the bit level? It may be expensive, but depending on the scale of the project, how many man hours it would take to find a working solution, and implementing it... you could end up justifying the price of such a device.
I'm not sure how well it would work... but it's probably an option for you.
The only problem there could be the fact that the machines are too old or have odd hardware that are unable to run Mac OS X. If the machines are the pizza box style PowerPC Macs or ones that are non-PCI based, then Mac OS 8.x/9.x might be the only Mac OS that will run on the machine.
I think a native release of Opera 6.x for FreeBSD and the recent announcement of Pheonix would add two nice lighter weight [graphical] web browsers to FreeBSD. I've been using Mozilla 1.0 and 1.1 under FreeBSD (along with the Java 1.3.1 JDK, using both the regular and the Linux ports of JDK 1.3.1) and it runs fine... with the exception that it can get quite sluggish.
Running the Linux version of Opera 6 on FreeBSD is faster than the native build of Mozilla, but getting the plug-ins to work has been a bit of a hit and miss.
Now what would be great would be a native version of the Macromedia Flash plug-in for FreeBSD:)
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based server seller donated the technology to the OpenSSL project, a programming group that makes an open-source version of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption system.
... that and an unrestricted version of Solaris 9 for x86 (unrestricted meaning that it can be purchased/downloaded and used on non-Sun hardware) that supports more more hardware than what Solaris 8 supports.
Although I use and keep up with the BSD side of things, but I think this affects the entire open source community as a whole, including xBSD, Linux, Apache+SSL, and gobs of other software that utilizes SSL for security.
Nonetheless, it is great to see Sun contributing back to the community.
This does bring up one question in my mind though... could this be used in SSL acceleration cards to improve the effiency of the SSL 'processor' (i.e.: keep the same performance level while reducing the amount of power necessary)?
I have the MS Trackball Explorer and I mapped the two aux buttons for Copy (C-c) and Paste (C-v). In the more recent version of the IntelliPoint software, there is a setting to allow "program-specific button settings". In my case, for Winamp, the two buttons are keyed for Prev/Next. You can probably fiddle around with the settings to your liking.
Each e-Card has two sets of dots... one running on the bottom and on the right-hand side of the card. Each set of dots can hold so many kilobytes of data. There was some information in the latest issue of Nintendo Power and probably can be found at nintendo.com.
There is some ROM and Flash on the reader which is used to store the "OS" and the game data read from each of the cards respectively. Some games can fit on 2-3 cards whereas some games can take up 6+ cards.
My guess is that the dots are arranged in a certain way and using a certain dye type to reduce/eliminate the ease of duplicating cards using copiers or printers... who knows. Each game goes for around $5-10 so it's not too expensive compared to GTA-3 or Halo.
The idea of using the cards is also to trade stuff with friends for use in games (like Pokemon and the next Zelda game for the GC).
That's exactly what I am using at work as a DNS caching, internal CVSup mirror of FreeBSD's RELENG_4 and Ports source directories, device monitoring, and syslog server. All running off of a Compaq Proliant 2500 (single PPro 200 w/ 256K cache, 480MB of RAM, 5x 4GB SCSI hard drives in RAID-5). It used to also run a web, mail and SFTP server for the Tech team, but it got moved onto a different machine with more HD space (that new machine is running both PostgreSQL and MySQL for testing).
Even then, the server was still very responsive and more stable than what it used to handle: Exchange 5.5, NT4 + BDC, WINS, DHCP, SQL Server 6.5 and IIS 4.0. It gives me shivers just thinking about that.
Yes it can... The game will run using the Linux Compatibility Layer. For more information, check out this page. Looking at the end of the page, you will find the following paragraph:
The Linux version will run under FreeBSD but both the Linux and FreeBSD versions require hardware graphics acceleration. The only supported graphics acceleration is 3dfx though others may work.
Also check out the different Q3 ports available within the FreeBSD ports collection under the games/ section. Wanna check? Go to freshports.org/games or go to their search page and search for "q3".
Slashdot Mirror
The bit about the article that kind of tweaked me out was:
My question is how can a 800Mhz C3 actually be faster than an 850Mhz AMD Duron. Although the C3 has more L2 cache (256 or 512KB compared to 64KB on the Duron) but the Duron does have a larger L1 cache (128KB... I don't remember the exact L1 size for the C3). Unless if they used a crappy chipset and video chipset in the Duron setup and improved it in the C3... an AMD Duron should be able to whip the C3... primarily in FPU intensive operations.That I definitely understand as I also fall into that category... somewhat :)
I think iSCSI wouls be a nice solution for those who can't spend a whole lot of greens or quids... even if he needed special NICs (I think those NICs offload some of the processing onto a chip on the NIC rather than pelt the system processor) they aren't as expensive as 2Gb/s Fibre Channel adapters.
The machine doesn't spin down it's hard drive or throttle the processor speed, but it's power draw while idle is probably within the 50-65W range as the power supply can provide a max of 90W. You can probably find quite a few of the first or second gen machines on eBay or other used hardware sites.
I also have an older Gateway 2000 machine (P5-200 MMX) with 160MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive running FreeBSD as my firewall at home. It's a bit overkill, but hey... it was given to me... the only thing I had to do was to clean it up, pull out the floppy drive (with the drive in, there was only a 2mm gap between the drive and the CPU's fan... not good!). Doing a make world on the machine is slow, but I'm able to pump around 40Mbps through the machine without any problems.
Another option is to check out some of the older IBM desktops that IBM is selling as refurbished machines. The specs on some of them are P2-300/350, 64MB of RAM and a basic hard drive. In most cases, you can slap in at least another hard drive, more SDRAM, and keep the processor as-is and have a fairly decent, small and fairly low power machine.
Other options include looking at the Mini-ITX machines or the VIA Eden platform as other have mentioned. Check out the Seagate ATA hard drives if you are looking for quiet hard drives. I have two Seagate Barracuda IV 40GB hard drives in a machine at work... all I have to say is that the power supply fan is louder than the drive. I can barely hear the drive seeking. I wish I could say the same for this 10K RPM SCSI hard drive I have at home :)
Yep... the same guys that have a site that renders pathetically in Mozilla :)
1 3>
It doesn't look like CNet linked to the KPMG research article that can be found at:
<rot13>jjj.xczt.pbz/arjf/vaqrk.nfc?pvq=659</rot
The only downside of iSCSI is the fact that Gigabit Ethernet will give you a maximum burst rate of 125MBytes/sec (+/- 5MB/s), but that is without the overhead of the TCP/IP protocol and the fact that you may have other devices sharing the bandwidth on the same PCI bus. Of course, good Gig Ethernet NICs and switches aren't as expensive as FC switches and host bus adapters. 10Gig Ethernet will definitely provide a lot of available for iSCSI, but getting 10Gig Ethernet NICs and switches capable of 10Gig Ethernet isn't exactly cheap.
:) Of course, SA-SCSI isn't available just yet.
Fibre Channel is expensive, but at least you get more of the 1Gb/s or 2Gb/s bandwidth than you would with Ethernet + TCP/IP overhead.
Now what would be nice is a "SAN" or shared storage unit that can support multiple Serial Attached SCSI channels
Thanks... that was the one I was thinking of. The Network Computing article had mentioned it.
I'm not sure if I have seen any PC-oriented FireWire SAN solutions though as FireWire hasn't really been something you would see in a lot of computers until recently.
I did find a couple when doing a search for "FireWire Network Storage":
http://www.adept.net.au/1394/nas.shtml
http://www.networkcomputing.com/1118/1118sp3.html (this is probably what I was thinking of)
http://www.turnover.com/news/mdm/firenas.html
News.com is running an article on a study that KPMG did... in which they state that the ??AA need to embrace downloadable music and videos and to stop/reduce using copy protections to thwart piracy.
I've played around with Dillo a bit, but right now, it doesn't have all of the features that I like. Maybe in time, that will improve.
For me, I find Opera 6 crashing usually after 15-20 minutes of use... and it doesn't always save all of the preference changes that I would make during a session. The preference dialog is just as cluttered as IE5 on the Mac.
I haven't really used the Tabs part of Opera a whole lot...
I actually modify the port's Makefile to disable parts that I don't need, switch --disable-optimize to --enable-optimize (or something to that effect).
/etc/make.conf on my FreeBSD laptop. It does make it a tad faster... the problem is that it slows down over time (the machine I run it on is a P3-800 laptop with 384MB of RAM) and it occurs while running it under WindowMaker or KDE3.
I already have -O2 and -p3 set as make options in
It's definitely not as bad as OpenOffice.org and StarOffice 5.2 (the former as a native package and the latter running under the Linux ABI).
Have you looked into standalone devices that can copy the data from one drive to another at the bit level? It may be expensive, but depending on the scale of the project, how many man hours it would take to find a working solution, and implementing it... you could end up justifying the price of such a device.
I'm not sure how well it would work... but it's probably an option for you.
The only problem there could be the fact that the machines are too old or have odd hardware that are unable to run Mac OS X. If the machines are the pizza box style PowerPC Macs or ones that are non-PCI based, then Mac OS 8.x/9.x might be the only Mac OS that will run on the machine.
I think a native release of Opera 6.x for FreeBSD and the recent announcement of Pheonix would add two nice lighter weight [graphical] web browsers to FreeBSD. I've been using Mozilla 1.0 and 1.1 under FreeBSD (along with the Java 1.3.1 JDK, using both the regular and the Linux ports of JDK 1.3.1) and it runs fine... with the exception that it can get quite sluggish.
:)
Running the Linux version of Opera 6 on FreeBSD is faster than the native build of Mozilla, but getting the plug-ins to work has been a bit of a hit and miss.
Now what would be great would be a native version of the Macromedia Flash plug-in for FreeBSD
I also know some places that teach Unix using AIX rather than Solaris or Linux.
Blockquoth the News.com article
I know that OpenSSH is maintained and developed primarily by OpenBSD developers, but I thought that OpenSSL was separate from OpenBSD.
... that and an unrestricted version of Solaris 9 for x86 (unrestricted meaning that it can be purchased/downloaded and used on non-Sun hardware) that supports more more hardware than what Solaris 8 supports.
Although I use and keep up with the BSD side of things, but I think this affects the entire open source community as a whole, including xBSD, Linux, Apache+SSL, and gobs of other software that utilizes SSL for security.
Nonetheless, it is great to see Sun contributing back to the community.
This does bring up one question in my mind though... could this be used in SSL acceleration cards to improve the effiency of the SSL 'processor' (i.e.: keep the same performance level while reducing the amount of power necessary)?
I have the MS Trackball Explorer and I mapped the two aux buttons for Copy (C-c) and Paste (C-v). In the more recent version of the IntelliPoint software, there is a setting to allow "program-specific button settings". In my case, for Winamp, the two buttons are keyed for Prev/Next. You can probably fiddle around with the settings to your liking.
Each e-Card has two sets of dots... one running on the bottom and on the right-hand side of the card. Each set of dots can hold so many kilobytes of data. There was some information in the latest issue of Nintendo Power and probably can be found at nintendo.com.
There is some ROM and Flash on the reader which is used to store the "OS" and the game data read from each of the cards respectively. Some games can fit on 2-3 cards whereas some games can take up 6+ cards.
My guess is that the dots are arranged in a certain way and using a certain dye type to reduce/eliminate the ease of duplicating cards using copiers or printers... who knows. Each game goes for around $5-10 so it's not too expensive compared to GTA-3 or Halo.
The idea of using the cards is also to trade stuff with friends for use in games (like Pokemon and the next Zelda game for the GC).
That's exactly what I am using at work as a DNS caching, internal CVSup mirror of FreeBSD's RELENG_4 and Ports source directories, device monitoring, and syslog server. All running off of a Compaq Proliant 2500 (single PPro 200 w/ 256K cache, 480MB of RAM, 5x 4GB SCSI hard drives in RAID-5). It used to also run a web, mail and SFTP server for the Tech team, but it got moved onto a different machine with more HD space (that new machine is running both PostgreSQL and MySQL for testing).
Even then, the server was still very responsive and more stable than what it used to handle: Exchange 5.5, NT4 + BDC, WINS, DHCP, SQL Server 6.5 and IIS 4.0. It gives me shivers just thinking about that.
The G4 processor is based on the PowerPC architecture and not the MIPS architecture... both have roots on the RISC side of the fence.
Just pitting nicks.
Almost... it's part of the Ports collection, which can be included with the base install or the Ports data can be pulled down via CVSup.
Just picking nits...