I have a IBM Thinkpad with a 500 mhz p3. The best thing I ever did was add a 256 meg stick of ram to the 64 it came with. A co-worker of mine recently asked me to check something out on his brand new Dell Laptop with a mobile p4 and 128 megs of ram. It just didn't perform as well as my Thinkpad.
Another myth is that xp & 2000 are bloated. They definitely need more RAM, and like faster processors, but I really like them. MS word 2000 runs like a champ.
I dual boot the laptop with rh7.3 and it's come a long way, too.
Gaming/compiling, etc are a different thing, but for everything else, tweak your old hardware.
It is feasable to do this stuff, and do it well. It's the "well" part that'll get you. However, if they get it right the first time, It would sell... in fact, I'd buy something like this.
Yes, as an earlier poster said "computers" do this now, but nobody really knows how to integrate their computer into the home entertainment situation, except those who are really technicaly proficient.
People are so desperate for halfway decent connectivity that they're putting together their own solutions. (witness the rash of articles about neighborhood co-op type setups.) Some might call it enginuity, but I call it desperation.
It seems like a failure of the free market system when poeple have to roll their own telco/isp.
I suspect average folks will to continue to innovate where the big corporations have failed to innovate and give customers what they really want. That's the big story behind the riaa/mp3 thing in my mind; the music industry can't realize that people love mp3's and space shifting. People will find a way to do these things, whether big corporations want them to or not.
I used to drive through both those towns regularly. Nice country--glad to see there's a few nerds up there. Sheetz rules central pa like wawa rules the mid-atlantic
Absolutely! AOL needs to flex some muscle. Their browser product is so stale looking and dated. If it looked a little better, people might stop defecting for other services. I hear their subscription rate is less than impressive lately.
With their enormous base, they could turn the tables and get customers to e-mail webmasters.
As of now, it looks like they're rolling over.
Lots of pretty good ideas here. I do this for an elementary school. Some of the older educational software intended to be used as 1 cdrom per workstation can work over a network just fine. Either copy it to an app server, or use a cdrom tower. Newer titles are harder. Sometimes there's an init file on your windows workstation(I forget; i'm at home) that sets cdrom to "d". You can change this to another mapped drive.
In my experience, you'll have to use 3-4 different methods, and tinker a little bit, but you'll get it eventually.
Personally, I don't handle cdroms properly all the time, so It's hard to expect kids to do so. And yes, you could burn yourself extra copies for the inevitable scratched/broke cdrom
These xxAA punks are going to screw up the computer and home electronics industry. The whole idea of buying a stereo/music/computer for my personal enjoyment makes me shiver, because it might not be usable for a long time, and it might not play nice with other stuff.
It's this big maze of incompatabilities that will scare people away from buying consumer electronics. Once those shiny discs stop working in one device, only working part of the time, the average consumer is going to be pissed. All they'll say is that these "things used to work fine, now I've got to get a new key or something."
Suddenly my out-of-date electronics are looking really cool!
Slashdot Mirror
I have a IBM Thinkpad with a 500 mhz p3. The best thing I ever did was add a 256 meg stick of ram to the 64 it came with. A co-worker of mine recently asked me to check something out on his brand new Dell Laptop with a mobile p4 and 128 megs of ram. It just didn't perform as well as my Thinkpad. Another myth is that xp & 2000 are bloated. They definitely need more RAM, and like faster processors, but I really like them. MS word 2000 runs like a champ. I dual boot the laptop with rh7.3 and it's come a long way, too. Gaming/compiling, etc are a different thing, but for everything else, tweak your old hardware.
It is feasable to do this stuff, and do it well. It's the "well" part that'll get you. However, if they get it right the first time, It would sell... in fact, I'd buy something like this. Yes, as an earlier poster said "computers" do this now, but nobody really knows how to integrate their computer into the home entertainment situation, except those who are really technicaly proficient.
My favorite part was jumping across the aligator's backs! That game was so addictive.
People are so desperate for halfway decent connectivity that they're putting together their own solutions. (witness the rash of articles about neighborhood co-op type setups.) Some might call it enginuity, but I call it desperation.
It seems like a failure of the free market system when poeple have to roll their own telco/isp.
I suspect average folks will to continue to innovate where the big corporations have failed to innovate and give customers what they really want. That's the big story behind the riaa/mp3 thing in my mind; the music industry can't realize that people love mp3's and space shifting. People will find a way to do these things, whether big corporations want them to or not.
slashdotter displays alarmed look and says to the bartender..."I thought those were open source beer & wings!?"
I used to drive through both those towns regularly. Nice country--glad to see there's a few nerds up there. Sheetz rules central pa like wawa rules the mid-atlantic
Absolutely! AOL needs to flex some muscle. Their browser product is so stale looking and dated. If it looked a little better, people might stop defecting for other services. I hear their subscription rate is less than impressive lately. With their enormous base, they could turn the tables and get customers to e-mail webmasters. As of now, it looks like they're rolling over.
Lots of pretty good ideas here. I do this for an elementary school. Some of the older educational software intended to be used as 1 cdrom per workstation can work over a network just fine. Either copy it to an app server, or use a cdrom tower. Newer titles are harder. Sometimes there's an init file on your windows workstation(I forget; i'm at home) that sets cdrom to "d". You can change this to another mapped drive. In my experience, you'll have to use 3-4 different methods, and tinker a little bit, but you'll get it eventually. Personally, I don't handle cdroms properly all the time, so It's hard to expect kids to do so. And yes, you could burn yourself extra copies for the inevitable scratched/broke cdrom
These xxAA punks are going to screw up the computer and home electronics industry. The whole idea of buying a stereo/music/computer for my personal enjoyment makes me shiver, because it might not be usable for a long time, and it might not play nice with other stuff. It's this big maze of incompatabilities that will scare people away from buying consumer electronics. Once those shiny discs stop working in one device, only working part of the time, the average consumer is going to be pissed. All they'll say is that these "things used to work fine, now I've got to get a new key or something." Suddenly my out-of-date electronics are looking really cool!