You do realize that that the primary differences between Pro and Home are some networking options, a few admin tools, and SMP support, right? The only reason Home seems to have more problems is the fact that it's what comes on OEM systems and is what the most clueless part of your user base is going to be using.
The guy obviously wasn't that bright, but I actually agree with him on the AV thing. I've seen programs like NAV cause conflicts with other software enough times that I'll take my chances. I still do a scan every 3-4 months, but I come up clean every time. As long as you're careful about what you download and install, there's not much to worry about, so I'll do without the added overhead of AV in the background, thanks.:)
One of my main systems (for gaming, mostly) is a Windows XP box. Check my comment history in this thread and you'll see that I've already posted an excerpt from the system info showing that the original install date was from last June - ie: when the machine was built. It's a *little* slower than it was on a fresh install, but it's still completely stable.
I prefer X and Linux myself as well, but Win2k/XP only have problems if you manage the system poorly.
You're about the 15,000th person I've seen that thinks Win2K and XP are somehow fundamentally different. They're the same basic core OS, only XP has a slightly newer and a different GUI by default. Just because it defaults to the Playskool UI does NOT mean it is in any way less stable.
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600] (C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.
C:\Documents and Settings\Slacker>systeminfo
Host Name: CHAOTIC OS Name: Microsoft Windows XP Professional OS Version: 5.1.2600 Service Pack 2, v.2096 Build 2600 OS Manufacturer: Microsoft Corporation OS Configuration: Standalone Workstation OS Build Type: Uniprocessor Free Registered Owner: Slacker Registered Organization: Chaotic Design Product ID: xxxxx-xxx-xxxxx-xxxxx Original Install Date: 6/9/2003, 5:13:39 PM
Running completely stable, spyware/virus scans done about once every 3 months and they always come up clean, except for a couple of cookies from the rare times I'm forced to use IE for a site.
This box is used for LAN gaming and gets software installed, uninstalled, and updated on it constantly, so it's not like the software configuration is set in stone.
Keeping a Windows box running stable and clean is NOT that hard these days if you don't install every cute little widget you find on the web.
You've pretty much just said what I was trying to in a far more eloquent way than I could've managed having been awake for about 45 mins. I wish I could give the modpoints that were used on me to you.:)
That said, I did know what I was doing and could do it by hand, but for silly things like solving a quadratic for the 56th time where the only thing that changed was the values of A, B, and C, I saw no point in working out the entire problem each and every time.
Point is, the other kids may have needed it, but I didn't need to do a problem 12 dozen times to understand it, but the teachers expected me to do it just the same. That gets me off an a whole different tangent about teachers not identifying the differing needs of students, but I'll save that for another time.:)
TI's models are designed to suit different needs, the TI-82, TI-83, and now TI-84 are aimed mainly at High School level maths, though the 83 is generally considered the best calculator TI makes for doing statistics work. The TI-84 is just a revamp over the TI-83, just like the TI-83 was to the TI-82 before it.
Bought, not stole. And yes, the Apple that invented things like Expose and the iPod, and pushed technologies like Firewire, Wifi, and USB years before their PC counterparts.
I see Longhorn as a threat more from an interoperability standpoint, personally. For example, we're just now starting to get to a semi-usable point with the NTFS filesystem. Longhorn will use WinFS, which is essentially NTFS with a database layer on top of it. Which means Linux will need to reverse engineer in support. Again.
If Microsoft follows through with many of the changes they've announced for Longhorn, it essentially means Linux would be set back to square one as far as being able to work together with a Windows system on several fronts. Nothing MS haven't done in the past, but the thing that makes this particularly dangerous for us is the fact that they're going all the changes are much lower level this time.
This is the reason I've always been unable to decide if I agree with the Mono project philosophically or not. On one hand, I do feel that trying to play catch up with a language implementation where MS is making up the rules cheapens Linux to an extent. On the other, Microsoft is pushing.NET hard with enterprise developers, and if it starts to get strong uptake without Linux support, it would essentially gurantee a stronger uptake of Windows on the server side, which is also bad. It's a catch 22 type situation, really.
I don't see the point you're trying to make. DVDs may not explicitly state that you have to do X or Y, but with CSS encryption combined with the DMCA, they might as well.
I think DVD Jon's being totally consistent here - if you pay to listen/watch/whatever something, you should have the right to do so on whatever platform or medium you choose, and not be limited by some artificial restriction imposed on you by the media companies.
So now people with Linux boxes can play their legit iTMS songs on their Linux boxes. Personally, I'm not bothered by this. There are other, easier ways for people to pirate music if they really have their heart set to it, so opening up a way for people to use something they've paid for in a way they see fit, while it may technically violate the license, is nothing I see worth getting up in arms over.
The connection was originally 10Mb, which is why he wasn't caught. It was an upgrade to a faster, 100Mb connection that eventually *did* cause him to be noticed. Either way, he was apparently able to move a lot over the old connection before the machine was found. I might also add that he had the machine IN the University's data center, it's not like he was some kiddie running a DC++ hub from his dorm room.
It depends. At the school I go to, there was a kid busted for running a warez server which had apparently been up for some time. From what I understand, the reason he was caught was because the school upgraded their connection - while in the past it was common for the bandwidth to be maxed out at all hours of the day, suddenly the extra bandwidth allowed them to notice suspicious spikes in activity that shouldn't have been there.
True, there are other things that an admin can watch for, but many schools simply don't have the budget to pay someone to constantly monitor all traffic in and out.
That may be the case, but prices have *already* jumped somewhere in the range of 40-60% in the past 2 or 3 weeks. That's pretty significant and pretty real in my book.
MADWIFI is indeed for Atheros based cards, but the Atheros chipset is for 802.11g - the DWL-520 is an 802.11b card.
Which chipset he needs depends on the exact revision, I know they used both Prism2 and acx100 chipset in that line. Also found this link which is for the Rev. E specifically which may be of some help.
Funny thing : I have a P3 450 sitting on the other side of the room from me, running Slackware 9.1 with a - get this - Creative Soundblaster in it. And it works. Makes me wonder if his VM was configured properly, because if he was testing using a 'vanilla Soundblaster,' it should have worked.
Win 95 with it's bastardized implementation of a spatial explorer is optimal in UI design? Win95 is lighter than newer vesrions of Windows, but that's about the only thing I can find in its favor. MacOS 9 definitely had some great features that even System X is still missing, so no arguments there, but UI design in general has come a good way since 95.
If you want a GUI that takes a lot of the paradigms of Classic MacOS and builds on them, you really should try out a Gnome based distro. Gnome 2.6 has been nothing but impressive to me from a UI standpoint, and it continues to get better with every release.
Depends on the model. I've got an Audigy 2 that refuses to install the drivers available from Creative's site unless you have the original CD-ROM that came with the card. Stupid and a pain, but that's what it does. If you look at some of the other comments, you'll see this is par for the course for Creative.
No way the P4 is faster clock for clock than the P3. The Pentium M, which takes the basic core of the P3, adds in some new instructions from the P4, and gets some new features of its own *destroys* the P4 in IPC.
Intel has made major improvements in their branch prediction, but the fact remains with a huge pipeline that keeps getting bigger (ie: Prescot), every single branch mispredict you hit is going to hurt you dearly compared to processors with shorter pipelines. (At this point, the P3's pipeline is almost half the length of Prescot).
Intel's done work to make improvements in the P4's IPC, sure, but they've focused their efforts more on ramping up clockspeed than anything. Even Intel seems to recognize this is a poor long-term strategy, with the move to Pentium-M as their flagship CPU coming in the near future.
Agreed on pretty much all points. My personal limit's closer to $200 and my 9600 Pro's only about 6 months old, so I can wait.;)
And no argument on the FX series cards being complete dogs - I'd owned nothing but nVidia from the TNT2 and had to go ATI this past generation just because the difference in the quality of the cards was so great. My experience this time hasn't been nearly as bad as my last ATI experience (with various flavors of the Rage), but it's been far from flawless. As long as the new NV40 based cards are at least in the same ballpark as the R420 -which the FX series wasn't- I'll be going nVidia simply because it gets old having to wait for a bimonthly driver update to be able to play a new game properly.
Side note: if you skipped Far Cry and have any interest whatsoever in good FPS single player, I'd recommend checking it out. It's been a long time since I've been this impressed with a game (probably the original Half-Life) and has actually disinterested me to a point with Half-Life 2.
What you're forgetting is the fact that when some of NV40's specs were released a month or two ago, sources at ATI were acting rather uncomfortably surprised at the news that NV40 would feature 16 texture pipelines. R420 will feature 12, which is an immediate bottleneck for it in comparison.
Yes, ATI has had some lead time with this, but I think it's obvious that you're rather naive in the field of chip design if you think ATI has time to counter. It's FAR too late in the development cycle to radically alter the architechture - which is what the addition of another 4 pipelines would be. It's also worth noting that the NV40 is actually running at a *slower* clock rate than the 5950 (400MHz and 475MHz respectively) so it should still have a good bit of headroom for the future.
To finish it up, the press release stated availability within 45 days - nVidia has learned its lesson with the FX. This time they have a solid architechture that's on time, actually extremely impressive, and generally ready to kick some ass. I currently own an ATI card, but unless ATI pulls some *serious* magic out of their hat that I don't foresee coming, my next purchase will be an nVidia.
You must have never tried to install ATI's drivers under Linux - it's a complete nightmare, whereas nVidia's drivers are a simple shell script that takes about 15 seconds to run.
Even on the Windows front, ATI still has serious issues with IQ in new games with just about every major release. DX: IW, Far Cry, and (most painfully) Call of Duty all had issues at launch with ATI cards that took a Catalyst update to fix. Call of Duty was causing full system crashes in some cases because of it; pretty serious stuff.
I love my 9600Pro, but dealing with these types of things with every new game gets old, and if the NV40 is anywhere near competitive with R420 (unlike R300 vs NV30) I'll be going back to nVidia this round just to be rid of the driver problems.
I own two systems with Biostar NForce2 boards, a 3rd with a Gigabyte NForce2 board, have built systems with both Asus and MSI NF2 boards for friends, and every one of them except the MSI has been rock solid - and I chalk that up to being an MSI problem more than anything. I've had nothing but headaches with MSI optical drives and other components in the past, so it doesn't surprise me that their mainboards would be flakey.
The Asus is a decent board, but I found Gigabyte's offering to be far more impressive for about the same money, and for cheap boards, the Biostars have been incredible, for a $50 board, they really can't be beat. I've had one running 24/7 for the past year totally stable and the second one's been running for about 3 months now as a home server.
The server's running Slackware and everything I've bothered to test works fine. Newer kernel revisions have ethernet support built-in, so that's no longer an issue if that's what you're worried about.
So the short version of this now long answer - at this point I wouldn't even consider anything other than an NF2 board when building an AMD system. They're just that good.
Not particularly, every place else I've seen has been charging over $100 for them, so you did fine.
My Target had 3 when I bought mine - I had no clue what they were when I got it. I went back a couple days later to grab the others as potential gifts/fleaBay material and they were already gone.:(
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You do realize that that the primary differences between Pro and Home are some networking options, a few admin tools, and SMP support, right? The only reason Home seems to have more problems is the fact that it's what comes on OEM systems and is what the most clueless part of your user base is going to be using.
The guy obviously wasn't that bright, but I actually agree with him on the AV thing. I've seen programs like NAV cause conflicts with other software enough times that I'll take my chances. I still do a scan every 3-4 months, but I come up clean every time. As long as you're careful about what you download and install, there's not much to worry about, so I'll do without the added overhead of AV in the background, thanks. :)
One of my main systems (for gaming, mostly) is a Windows XP box. Check my comment history in this thread and you'll see that I've already posted an excerpt from the system info showing that the original install date was from last June - ie: when the machine was built. It's a *little* slower than it was on a fresh install, but it's still completely stable.
I prefer X and Linux myself as well, but Win2k/XP only have problems if you manage the system poorly.
You're about the 15,000th person I've seen that thinks Win2K and XP are somehow fundamentally different. They're the same basic core OS, only XP has a slightly newer and a different GUI by default. Just because it defaults to the Playskool UI does NOT mean it is in any way less stable.
This box is used for LAN gaming and gets software installed, uninstalled, and updated on it constantly, so it's not like the software configuration is set in stone.
Keeping a Windows box running stable and clean is NOT that hard these days if you don't install every cute little widget you find on the web.
You've pretty much just said what I was trying to in a far more eloquent way than I could've managed having been awake for about 45 mins. I wish I could give the modpoints that were used on me to you. :)
It was a joke, lighten up. :)
:)
That said, I did know what I was doing and could do it by hand, but for silly things like solving a quadratic for the 56th time where the only thing that changed was the values of A, B, and C, I saw no point in working out the entire problem each and every time.
Point is, the other kids may have needed it, but I didn't need to do a problem 12 dozen times to understand it, but the teachers expected me to do it just the same. That gets me off an a whole different tangent about teachers not identifying the differing needs of students, but I'll save that for another time.
TI's models are designed to suit different needs, the TI-82, TI-83, and now TI-84 are aimed mainly at High School level maths, though the 83 is generally considered the best calculator TI makes for doing statistics work. The TI-84 is just a revamp over the TI-83, just like the TI-83 was to the TI-82 before it.
And if the smart kid is anything like I was, they've already written a few TI BASIC apps to do all the work for them anyway. ;)
Bought, not stole. And yes, the Apple that invented things like Expose and the iPod, and pushed technologies like Firewire, Wifi, and USB years before their PC counterparts.
I see Longhorn as a threat more from an interoperability standpoint, personally. For example, we're just now starting to get to a semi-usable point with the NTFS filesystem. Longhorn will use WinFS, which is essentially NTFS with a database layer on top of it. Which means Linux will need to reverse engineer in support. Again.
.NET hard with enterprise developers, and if it starts to get strong uptake without Linux support, it would essentially gurantee a stronger uptake of Windows on the server side, which is also bad. It's a catch 22 type situation, really.
If Microsoft follows through with many of the changes they've announced for Longhorn, it essentially means Linux would be set back to square one as far as being able to work together with a Windows system on several fronts. Nothing MS haven't done in the past, but the thing that makes this particularly dangerous for us is the fact that they're going all the changes are much lower level this time.
This is the reason I've always been unable to decide if I agree with the Mono project philosophically or not. On one hand, I do feel that trying to play catch up with a language implementation where MS is making up the rules cheapens Linux to an extent. On the other, Microsoft is pushing
I don't see the point you're trying to make. DVDs may not explicitly state that you have to do X or Y, but with CSS encryption combined with the DMCA, they might as well.
I think DVD Jon's being totally consistent here - if you pay to listen/watch/whatever something, you should have the right to do so on whatever platform or medium you choose, and not be limited by some artificial restriction imposed on you by the media companies.
So now people with Linux boxes can play their legit iTMS songs on their Linux boxes. Personally, I'm not bothered by this. There are other, easier ways for people to pirate music if they really have their heart set to it, so opening up a way for people to use something they've paid for in a way they see fit, while it may technically violate the license, is nothing I see worth getting up in arms over.
The connection was originally 10Mb, which is why he wasn't caught. It was an upgrade to a faster, 100Mb connection that eventually *did* cause him to be noticed. Either way, he was apparently able to move a lot over the old connection before the machine was found. I might also add that he had the machine IN the University's data center, it's not like he was some kiddie running a DC++ hub from his dorm room.
It depends. At the school I go to, there was a kid busted for running a warez server which had apparently been up for some time. From what I understand, the reason he was caught was because the school upgraded their connection - while in the past it was common for the bandwidth to be maxed out at all hours of the day, suddenly the extra bandwidth allowed them to notice suspicious spikes in activity that shouldn't have been there.
True, there are other things that an admin can watch for, but many schools simply don't have the budget to pay someone to constantly monitor all traffic in and out.
That may be the case, but prices have *already* jumped somewhere in the range of 40-60% in the past 2 or 3 weeks. That's pretty significant and pretty real in my book.
MADWIFI is indeed for Atheros based cards, but the Atheros chipset is for 802.11g - the DWL-520 is an 802.11b card.
Which chipset he needs depends on the exact revision, I know they used both Prism2 and acx100 chipset in that line. Also found this link which is for the Rev. E specifically which may be of some help.
HTH.
Funny thing : I have a P3 450 sitting on the other side of the room from me, running Slackware 9.1 with a - get this - Creative Soundblaster in it. And it works. Makes me wonder if his VM was configured properly, because if he was testing using a 'vanilla Soundblaster,' it should have worked.
Win 95 with it's bastardized implementation of a spatial explorer is optimal in UI design? Win95 is lighter than newer vesrions of Windows, but that's about the only thing I can find in its favor. MacOS 9 definitely had some great features that even System X is still missing, so no arguments there, but UI design in general has come a good way since 95.
If you want a GUI that takes a lot of the paradigms of Classic MacOS and builds on them, you really should try out a Gnome based distro. Gnome 2.6 has been nothing but impressive to me from a UI standpoint, and it continues to get better with every release.
Depends on the model. I've got an Audigy 2 that refuses to install the drivers available from Creative's site unless you have the original CD-ROM that came with the card. Stupid and a pain, but that's what it does. If you look at some of the other comments, you'll see this is par for the course for Creative.
No way the P4 is faster clock for clock than the P3. The Pentium M, which takes the basic core of the P3, adds in some new instructions from the P4, and gets some new features of its own *destroys* the P4 in IPC.
Intel has made major improvements in their branch prediction, but the fact remains with a huge pipeline that keeps getting bigger (ie: Prescot), every single branch mispredict you hit is going to hurt you dearly compared to processors with shorter pipelines. (At this point, the P3's pipeline is almost half the length of Prescot).
Intel's done work to make improvements in the P4's IPC, sure, but they've focused their efforts more on ramping up clockspeed than anything. Even Intel seems to recognize this is a poor long-term strategy, with the move to Pentium-M as their flagship CPU coming in the near future.
Agreed on pretty much all points. My personal limit's closer to $200 and my 9600 Pro's only about 6 months old, so I can wait. ;)
And no argument on the FX series cards being complete dogs - I'd owned nothing but nVidia from the TNT2 and had to go ATI this past generation just because the difference in the quality of the cards was so great. My experience this time hasn't been nearly as bad as my last ATI experience (with various flavors of the Rage), but it's been far from flawless. As long as the new NV40 based cards are at least in the same ballpark as the R420 -which the FX series wasn't- I'll be going nVidia simply because it gets old having to wait for a bimonthly driver update to be able to play a new game properly.
Side note: if you skipped Far Cry and have any interest whatsoever in good FPS single player, I'd recommend checking it out. It's been a long time since I've been this impressed with a game (probably the original Half-Life) and has actually disinterested me to a point with Half-Life 2.
What you're forgetting is the fact that when some of NV40's specs were released a month or two ago, sources at ATI were acting rather uncomfortably surprised at the news that NV40 would feature 16 texture pipelines. R420 will feature 12, which is an immediate bottleneck for it in comparison.
Yes, ATI has had some lead time with this, but I think it's obvious that you're rather naive in the field of chip design if you think ATI has time to counter. It's FAR too late in the development cycle to radically alter the architechture - which is what the addition of another 4 pipelines would be. It's also worth noting that the NV40 is actually running at a *slower* clock rate than the 5950 (400MHz and 475MHz respectively) so it should still have a good bit of headroom for the future.
To finish it up, the press release stated availability within 45 days - nVidia has learned its lesson with the FX. This time they have a solid architechture that's on time, actually extremely impressive, and generally ready to kick some ass. I currently own an ATI card, but unless ATI pulls some *serious* magic out of their hat that I don't foresee coming, my next purchase will be an nVidia.
You must have never tried to install ATI's drivers under Linux - it's a complete nightmare, whereas nVidia's drivers are a simple shell script that takes about 15 seconds to run.
Even on the Windows front, ATI still has serious issues with IQ in new games with just about every major release. DX: IW, Far Cry, and (most painfully) Call of Duty all had issues at launch with ATI cards that took a Catalyst update to fix. Call of Duty was causing full system crashes in some cases because of it; pretty serious stuff.
I love my 9600Pro, but dealing with these types of things with every new game gets old, and if the NV40 is anywhere near competitive with R420 (unlike R300 vs NV30) I'll be going back to nVidia this round just to be rid of the driver problems.
I own two systems with Biostar NForce2 boards, a 3rd with a Gigabyte NForce2 board, have built systems with both Asus and MSI NF2 boards for friends, and every one of them except the MSI has been rock solid - and I chalk that up to being an MSI problem more than anything. I've had nothing but headaches with MSI optical drives and other components in the past, so it doesn't surprise me that their mainboards would be flakey.
The Asus is a decent board, but I found Gigabyte's offering to be far more impressive for about the same money, and for cheap boards, the Biostars have been incredible, for a $50 board, they really can't be beat. I've had one running 24/7 for the past year totally stable and the second one's been running for about 3 months now as a home server.
The server's running Slackware and everything I've bothered to test works fine. Newer kernel revisions have ethernet support built-in, so that's no longer an issue if that's what you're worried about.
So the short version of this now long answer - at this point I wouldn't even consider anything other than an NF2 board when building an AMD system. They're just that good.
Not particularly, every place else I've seen has been charging over $100 for them, so you did fine.
:(
My Target had 3 when I bought mine - I had no clue what they were when I got it. I went back a couple days later to grab the others as potential gifts/fleaBay material and they were already gone.