Oh I wasn't bragging - I was just pointing out that at the $400 price point there are PLENTY of used machines out there that will overwhelmingly meet the individual needs of a prospective buyer.
I thought I wanted to get a Netbook, but in reality what I wanted was a nice $350 multi-media capable 17" laptop with enough horsepower run multiple virtual machines in VMware when I want, and portable 'enough' to take with me on trips as a portable desktop replacement - including playing the occasional game of STALKER or MS FlightSim 2004, and jacking into the 'net via Wifi when I want to get caught up online.
A used laptop is really hard to beat with respect to usability / price. That's all I was saying.
I was seriously considering one of the new 1.6GHz Atom based Netbooks. The one with 1G of memory and either the 16G flash drive or the 120G IDE would run me $400~$450 new (including a legit license of XP, so I could reinstall that after playing with Linux on it to see which I liked better.)
Ended up finding a used Dell Precision M90 on Craigslist for $350 - machine was owned by an engineer that took very good care of his hardware, so this 1 year old machine ($2,600 new - dual core CPU, 2G RAM, 7200rpm hard drive, GigE NIC, Quatro FX 1500 video card, wifi, 17" LCD on a magnesium alloy frame, license for XP Pro) looks brand new. Battery holds a charge for an easy 2 hours. For $100 less than the cost of a new 9" Netbook.
Not exactly something I can carry in a small bag, but if the notion strikes me I can design a new Space Shuttle on it using SolidWorks or AutoCAD Inventor. Not bad for roughly the same money, maybe a little less than the Eee was only six months ago.
Internet capable means - wifi - a screen big enough to view most web pages - a keyboard good enough to type this post on or do email (not type a doctoral thesis) - a lightweight'ish operating system that runs Firefox and maybe Adobe Reader and plays flash for YouTube. And if we're feeling generous, a VPN client with a TermServer client.
Basically a device I can bring with me to let me jack into the 'net from wherever I happen to be (catch a wifi signal pretty much anywhere) to bridge the gap from meatspace to cyberspace.
$300 on the high end. 'Disposable income' level on the low end.
Or for that matter - the ultimate netbook for a given individual is pretty much ANY nice used laptop less than three years old.
I was seriously considering one of the new 1.6GHz Atom based Netbooks. The one with 1G of memory and either the 16G flash drive or the 120G IDE would run me $400~$450 new (including a legit license of XP, so I could reinstall that after playing with Linux on it to see which I liked better.)
Ended up finding a used Dell Precision M90 on Craigslist for $350 - machine was owned by an engineer that took very good care of his hardware, so this 1 year old machine ($2,600 new - dual core CPU, 2G RAM, 7200rpm hard drive, GigE NIC, Quatro FX 1500 video card, wifi, 17" LCD on a magnesium alloy frame, license for XP Pro) looks brand new. Battery holds a charge for an easy 2 hours. For 1/4th less than the cost of a new 9" Netbook.
Granted, this specific machine is a monster - I'm guessing 4kg including the 130 watt power brick, and 17" laptops aren't exactly small in size either - but it is a LOT of machine for the money.
Good clean used hardware - it's amazing the deals that are out there to be had.
I hate to point this out, but the most amazing era of technical prosperity and growth (the tech boom, circa about 1998~2001) happened using computers that were less powerful than the machine in question.
In both 1999 and 2000 I was issued a new laptops, the one I got in 1999 was top of the line - it was a Pentium II running at 366MHz with a 6G hard drive. Maybe 128M of memory.
These 900MHz Celeron based machines are 3x more powerful than the best machine I had during the tech boom, and the work I did on that machine was billed out at $160 an hour towards commercial ventures (insurance, business to business e-commerce, real time systems processing fraud prevention AI, etc.)
So - I'm guessing they're plenty fast enough for kids to learn to program in any number of computer languages, interact with the system at the command line, and do just about any thing in an educational setting that would promote their understanding of computers. To tell the truth they would probably be MORE beneficial to the students if they couldn't run IM, couldn't reach myspace / facebook / youtube, couldn't play games and couldn't display.jpgs (no pr0n for youts - pr0n : not yours.)
Look up from the keyboard. Higher. Now look around. See all the computer manuals? Those are books. Your books. You arrange them in a certain order. You know the material contained within. You occasionally loan them out to your friends, and you get them back and put them exactly where they belong.
It's not that other people are getting 'free money' that's on his nerves. It's where this 'free money' is coming from - guess what, it's coming out of his ass in the form of an extra $5,000 worth of income taxes next April 15th. Mine too. Yours too.
If the government gives me $100 in 'free money' - as you say that really doesn't concern you personally. Unless they dip right into your checking account and take it right out of your pocket to give it to me. Then it's something for you to get pissed about.
My perspective on the subject - rather than memory that's 10% faster and cost twice as much, just buy twice as much of the regular stuff.
1G of regular reliable memory is going to result in a computer that is a TON faster than a machine using 512M of the gold plated memory running with four nanoseconds less latency (or whatever.)
Or possibly just as good (in parallel) - post on CL looking for a roommate. Take your time finding a good one and Voila! it's almost like free money.
Granted you have to tone your living habits just a touch (ie, no more walking around the house in your underware, no more crazy sex in the kitchen) but honestly - $700 a month net (that's rent and 1/2 the bills) is the same as a $12,000 raise at work (before taxes). You can buy a LOT of stuff for that $8,400 per year, and honestly you don't have to do anything even remotely resembling work to do it.
I'm not saying it's for everybody - but if you have room in your house, well $8,400 a year net is a pretty good chunk of change with which to finance home upgrades (or toys.)
Spend some time playing with vmware - I think you will be pleasantly surprised with just how close it is to running on the bare metal.
The only thing I don't use virtualization for is playing games that rely on frames per second - other than that, I honestly doubt you could tell the difference (and funny thing is - some things run FASTER - backup and recovery of the entire machine is as simple as copying some files from one hard drive (your backup set of vm files) to another. I can have a complete restore in about 5 minutes, and I can dupe a machine in about 6 minutes.)
250MB/s saturates a single SATA channel, but it's not the peak throughput. I read a few weeks ago about a guy that RAID'ed six iRAM's together (it wasn't pretty - took a second motherboard and wires were everywhere) and the 24G of space he had (or whatever it was) blasted through the 600MB/s mark and scared the hell out of the 700MB/s mark.
Based on what I read, and of that what I can still recall. Not exactly a scalable solution, but it shows what's possible.
According to the TFA, it's multi-process, multi-threaded. That in and of itself is enough to get my interest. The days of having FireFox clocked / crashed because some flash or javascript went ape-shit on one of the 20 different tabs you have open... are over. And yes, it happened to me today on eBay while I was opening up a bunch of auctions looking at cars - some worthless POS put a monster flash based gadget in his auction and brought my entire browser to its knees.
They were making a point. They didn't just want this guy to stop the anti-government propaganda, they wanted to make an example out of him.
I am not going to say I support what happened, but DAMN I have to admit I admire the efficiency with which they handled it. The American government would have spent a million dollars in legal fees parading the guy in front of a heavily publicized year long trial on all sorts of bullshit charges, making stuff up along the way. Like that shoe-bomber a few years ago - Richard Reid. Spend a million dollars on his trial, and another million dollars keeping him locked up for the rest of his life. I hate to say it, but the US could have had these same Russian cops take this guy for a ride downtown and spent that $2M on feeding hungry children.
Know what would totally suck? To have happen to the US in 2010 what happened to the USSR in 1990. Overextended government spending on the military, bad fiscal policy, corrupt government destroying the entire country (I'm talking about not just the folks in DC - but at the state level. Look at MA - $25B to build a three mile tunnel under the city to the airport? WTF?) coupled with a massive spread between the 'haves' and the 'have nots' that continues to grow. A massive chunk of the entire country has thrown fiscal conservatism to the wind and cashed out their future in the real estate ponzi scheme... shit.
That said, how many of you envisioned that scene from Pulp Fiction about this web-master just riding along in the back seat of the car with two cops, asks some stupid question and one of the cops turns around to answer when the car hits a bump and BLAM! shoots this guy in the face accidentally. "Oh shit I just shot Marvin in the face!"
I wouldn't be so quick to attribute this one to malice, given it could easily be explained by stupidity. Unless the guy was also a spammer - in which case yea, they whacked him on purpose.
Spend 15 years in Federal PMITA prison, give up your ability to vote, buy a firearm, get a 'real' job, continue increasing your skill set for 15 years, and lose 15 years worth of keeping current in tech - and get back to us.
If you're 30 now, +15 is 45. Imagine seeing fresh air / daylight for the first time at 45 with no appreciable job skills, no money, no contacts to help you get your life back on track. The next 25 years will be spent living pretty much hand to mouth without the ability to get ahead of the game - all the while looking back at who you ~could have been~ had it not been for that one incident, that one day that got out of control. The 15 years behind bars is just the beginning of the punishment.
Oh I dunno - between having his geek parents name him after a file system, then being set up for the murder of his wife... this poor fucker just can't seek to catch a break.
You have the answer right there in black and white - and it's not the answer you thought it was...
I got my present job through someone... The connections I made at that users group have gotten me the job...
Sitting at home haxoring F/OSS in your underware isn't going to help anyone's long term career. Interacting with other people, contributing to a common goal in a collaborative fashion where you establish yourself in the minds of influential people as someone that delivers quality work - THIS is what opens up long term career options and opportunities.
As much as it has been forever - it's not what you know. It's who you know. So get out there and meet some people.
I believe the only part you left out was that the first person to 'buy' the 10,000 shares at $100 per share buys it 'on margin' meaning he doesn't actually pay the $1MM for the 10,000 shares - he may only pay 10% (ie, $100,000) in order to control those shares - and since he doesn't actually own 100% of the shares the brokerage is able to play some funny games with the shares, letting someone else sell him those shares without actually having them to sell.
Or something like that. Basically it's a shell game with three shells and only one pea - and nobody really has the pea under their shell.
Ahhh the days when software freely traveled the Fido network, available to anyone with a USR Dual Standard or Courier v.32bis connected to his machine. When the lowly v.22 guys were harassed for taking up too much time, plodding along at a mind-numbing 120cps (that's bytes per second, back then measured in characters per second) and the absolute bottom dwellers, the 30 cps (300 baud) v.21 and Bell 103 users had their lines unceremoniously pulled so 'real users' could get 'real work' done as 'reasonable speeds.'
Ahem. As Symbolset says - You kids get off my lawn.
Maybe if we coupled the hydrogen with some carbon atoms, made chains that were eight carbons long with a bunch of hydrogens hanging off the carbons. Maybe throw in a bunch of three or four carbon chains with hydrogens hanging off them and mix it all up, come up with a liquid that has a very low boiling point, is easily vaporized or converted into a mist to increase its surface area, with a propensity to combine with the oxygen in the air in that form if ignited by spark (in a highly reactive manner giving off heat and explosive force, which we could use to power the vehicle.)
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody want my opinion on the matter?
Oh I wasn't bragging - I was just pointing out that at the $400 price point there are PLENTY of used machines out there that will overwhelmingly meet the individual needs of a prospective buyer.
I thought I wanted to get a Netbook, but in reality what I wanted was a nice $350 multi-media capable 17" laptop with enough horsepower run multiple virtual machines in VMware when I want, and portable 'enough' to take with me on trips as a portable desktop replacement - including playing the occasional game of STALKER or MS FlightSim 2004, and jacking into the 'net via Wifi when I want to get caught up online.
A used laptop is really hard to beat with respect to usability / price. That's all I was saying.
I was seriously considering one of the new 1.6GHz Atom based Netbooks. The one with 1G of memory and either the 16G flash drive or the 120G IDE would run me $400~$450 new (including a legit license of XP, so I could reinstall that after playing with Linux on it to see which I liked better.)
Ended up finding a used Dell Precision M90 on Craigslist for $350 - machine was owned by an engineer that took very good care of his hardware, so this 1 year old machine ($2,600 new - dual core CPU, 2G RAM, 7200rpm hard drive, GigE NIC, Quatro FX 1500 video card, wifi, 17" LCD on a magnesium alloy frame, license for XP Pro) looks brand new. Battery holds a charge for an easy 2 hours. For $100 less than the cost of a new 9" Netbook.
Not exactly something I can carry in a small bag, but if the notion strikes me I can design a new Space Shuttle on it using SolidWorks or AutoCAD Inventor. Not bad for roughly the same money, maybe a little less than the Eee was only six months ago.
This.
Netbook = Internet capable mini notebook.
Internet capable means
- wifi
- a screen big enough to view most web pages
- a keyboard good enough to type this post on or do email (not type a doctoral thesis)
- a lightweight'ish operating system that runs Firefox and maybe Adobe Reader and plays flash for YouTube. And if we're feeling generous, a VPN client with a TermServer client.
Basically a device I can bring with me to let me jack into the 'net from wherever I happen to be (catch a wifi signal pretty much anywhere) to bridge the gap from meatspace to cyberspace.
$300 on the high end.
'Disposable income' level on the low end.
Or for that matter - the ultimate netbook for a given individual is pretty much ANY nice used laptop less than three years old.
I was seriously considering one of the new 1.6GHz Atom based Netbooks. The one with 1G of memory and either the 16G flash drive or the 120G IDE would run me $400~$450 new (including a legit license of XP, so I could reinstall that after playing with Linux on it to see which I liked better.)
Ended up finding a used Dell Precision M90 on Craigslist for $350 - machine was owned by an engineer that took very good care of his hardware, so this 1 year old machine ($2,600 new - dual core CPU, 2G RAM, 7200rpm hard drive, GigE NIC, Quatro FX 1500 video card, wifi, 17" LCD on a magnesium alloy frame, license for XP Pro) looks brand new. Battery holds a charge for an easy 2 hours. For 1/4th less than the cost of a new 9" Netbook.
Granted, this specific machine is a monster - I'm guessing 4kg including the 130 watt power brick, and 17" laptops aren't exactly small in size either - but it is a LOT of machine for the money.
Good clean used hardware - it's amazing the deals that are out there to be had.
I hate to point this out, but the most amazing era of technical prosperity and growth (the tech boom, circa about 1998~2001) happened using computers that were less powerful than the machine in question.
In both 1999 and 2000 I was issued a new laptops, the one I got in 1999 was top of the line - it was a Pentium II running at 366MHz with a 6G hard drive. Maybe 128M of memory.
These 900MHz Celeron based machines are 3x more powerful than the best machine I had during the tech boom, and the work I did on that machine was billed out at $160 an hour towards commercial ventures (insurance, business to business e-commerce, real time systems processing fraud prevention AI, etc.)
So - I'm guessing they're plenty fast enough for kids to learn to program in any number of computer languages, interact with the system at the command line, and do just about any thing in an educational setting that would promote their understanding of computers. To tell the truth they would probably be MORE beneficial to the students if they couldn't run IM, couldn't reach myspace / facebook / youtube, couldn't play games and couldn't display .jpgs (no pr0n for youts - pr0n : not yours.)
Look up from the keyboard. Higher. Now look around.
See all the computer manuals? Those are books. Your books.
You arrange them in a certain order. You know the material contained within. You occasionally loan them out to your friends, and you get them back and put them exactly where they belong.
That makes you a libertarian.
It's not that other people are getting 'free money' that's on his nerves. It's where this 'free money' is coming from - guess what, it's coming out of his ass in the form of an extra $5,000 worth of income taxes next April 15th. Mine too. Yours too.
If the government gives me $100 in 'free money' - as you say that really doesn't concern you personally. Unless they dip right into your checking account and take it right out of your pocket to give it to me. Then it's something for you to get pissed about.
Make sense now?
My perspective on the subject - rather than memory that's 10% faster and cost twice as much, just buy twice as much of the regular stuff.
1G of regular reliable memory is going to result in a computer that is a TON faster than a machine using 512M of the gold plated memory running with four nanoseconds less latency (or whatever.)
And by regular stuff, I mean Crucial or Kingston.
I'm standing by, just in case...
Or possibly just as good (in parallel) - post on CL looking for a roommate. Take your time finding a good one and Voila! it's almost like free money.
Granted you have to tone your living habits just a touch (ie, no more walking around the house in your underware, no more crazy sex in the kitchen) but honestly - $700 a month net (that's rent and 1/2 the bills) is the same as a $12,000 raise at work (before taxes). You can buy a LOT of stuff for that $8,400 per year, and honestly you don't have to do anything even remotely resembling work to do it.
I'm not saying it's for everybody - but if you have room in your house, well $8,400 a year net is a pretty good chunk of change with which to finance home upgrades (or toys.)
Spend some time playing with vmware - I think you will be pleasantly surprised with just how close it is to running on the bare metal.
The only thing I don't use virtualization for is playing games that rely on frames per second - other than that, I honestly doubt you could tell the difference (and funny thing is - some things run FASTER - backup and recovery of the entire machine is as simple as copying some files from one hard drive (your backup set of vm files) to another. I can have a complete restore in about 5 minutes, and I can dupe a machine in about 6 minutes.)
250MB/s saturates a single SATA channel, but it's not the peak throughput. I read a few weeks ago about a guy that RAID'ed six iRAM's together (it wasn't pretty - took a second motherboard and wires were everywhere) and the 24G of space he had (or whatever it was) blasted through the 600MB/s mark and scared the hell out of the 700MB/s mark.
Based on what I read, and of that what I can still recall. Not exactly a scalable solution, but it shows what's possible.
You're new here, aren't you?
According to the TFA, it's multi-process, multi-threaded. ... are over. And yes, it happened to me today on eBay while I was opening up a bunch of auctions looking at cars - some worthless POS put a monster flash based gadget in his auction and brought my entire browser to its knees.
That in and of itself is enough to get my interest.
The days of having FireFox clocked / crashed because some flash or javascript went ape-shit on one of the 20 different tabs you have open
They were making a point. They didn't just want this guy to stop the anti-government propaganda, they wanted to make an example out of him.
I am not going to say I support what happened, but DAMN I have to admit I admire the efficiency with which they handled it. The American government would have spent a million dollars in legal fees parading the guy in front of a heavily publicized year long trial on all sorts of bullshit charges, making stuff up along the way. Like that shoe-bomber a few years ago - Richard Reid. Spend a million dollars on his trial, and another million dollars keeping him locked up for the rest of his life. I hate to say it, but the US could have had these same Russian cops take this guy for a ride downtown and spent that $2M on feeding hungry children.
Know what would totally suck? ... shit.
To have happen to the US in 2010 what happened to the USSR in 1990. Overextended government spending on the military, bad fiscal policy, corrupt government destroying the entire country (I'm talking about not just the folks in DC - but at the state level. Look at MA - $25B to build a three mile tunnel under the city to the airport? WTF?) coupled with a massive spread between the 'haves' and the 'have nots' that continues to grow. A massive chunk of the entire country has thrown fiscal conservatism to the wind and cashed out their future in the real estate ponzi scheme
That said, how many of you envisioned that scene from Pulp Fiction about this web-master just riding along in the back seat of the car with two cops, asks some stupid question and one of the cops turns around to answer when the car hits a bump and BLAM! shoots this guy in the face accidentally. "Oh shit I just shot Marvin in the face!"
I wouldn't be so quick to attribute this one to malice, given it could easily be explained by stupidity. Unless the guy was also a spammer - in which case yea, they whacked him on purpose.
The way I see it, it's a win-win situation (for us)
It's good to see your heart's in the right place.
Spend 15 years in Federal PMITA prison, give up your ability to vote, buy a firearm, get a 'real' job, continue increasing your skill set for 15 years, and lose 15 years worth of keeping current in tech - and get back to us.
If you're 30 now, +15 is 45. Imagine seeing fresh air / daylight for the first time at 45 with no appreciable job skills, no money, no contacts to help you get your life back on track. The next 25 years will be spent living pretty much hand to mouth without the ability to get ahead of the game - all the while looking back at who you ~could have been~ had it not been for that one incident, that one day that got out of control. The 15 years behind bars is just the beginning of the punishment.
I think 15 years is plenty.
Oh I dunno - between having his geek parents name him after a file system, then being set up for the murder of his wife ... this poor fucker just can't seek to catch a break.
If they choose not to decide, they still have made a choice.
You have the answer right there in black and white - and it's not the answer you thought it was ...
I got my present job through someone ... ...
The connections I made at that users group have gotten me the job
Sitting at home haxoring F/OSS in your underware isn't going to help anyone's long term career.
Interacting with other people, contributing to a common goal in a collaborative fashion where you establish yourself in the minds of influential people as someone that delivers quality work - THIS is what opens up long term career options and opportunities.
As much as it has been forever - it's not what you know. It's who you know. So get out there and meet some people.
I believe the only part you left out was that the first person to 'buy' the 10,000 shares at $100 per share buys it 'on margin' meaning he doesn't actually pay the $1MM for the 10,000 shares - he may only pay 10% (ie, $100,000) in order to control those shares - and since he doesn't actually own 100% of the shares the brokerage is able to play some funny games with the shares, letting someone else sell him those shares without actually having them to sell.
Or something like that. Basically it's a shell game with three shells and only one pea - and nobody really has the pea under their shell.
Ahhh the days when software freely traveled the Fido network, available to anyone with a USR Dual Standard or Courier v.32bis connected to his machine. When the lowly v.22 guys were harassed for taking up too much time, plodding along at a mind-numbing 120cps (that's bytes per second, back then measured in characters per second) and the absolute bottom dwellers, the 30 cps (300 baud) v.21 and Bell 103 users had their lines unceremoniously pulled so 'real users' could get 'real work' done as 'reasonable speeds.'
Ahem. As Symbolset says - You kids get off my lawn.
Maybe if we coupled the hydrogen with some carbon atoms, made chains that were eight carbons long with a bunch of hydrogens hanging off the carbons. Maybe throw in a bunch of three or four carbon chains with hydrogens hanging off them and mix it all up, come up with a liquid that has a very low boiling point, is easily vaporized or converted into a mist to increase its surface area, with a propensity to combine with the oxygen in the air in that form if ignited by spark (in a highly reactive manner giving off heat and explosive force, which we could use to power the vehicle.)
Naw, that would never work.