I got blasted on here when I said that Intel was finally doing something right by lowering prices and finally competing with instead of stagnating. Now it seems that Intel is shooting themselves in the foot. Their management does something right, then they get laid off before they can reap the fruits of it. Sounds like what the management at HP is saying now about getting rid of their CEO a coupld years ago. They didn't like that she wanted to buy Compaq, thinking it was a bad idea. Well, it seems that today it wasn't such a bad idea.
oh well, I supposed Intel hasn't really changed at all, and actually discourages it.
So what does it say when an old, moldy apple (AMD XP-M 2800+) performs at the same speed as a freshly picked apple (T2400)?
To me it sounds like Intel finally found a good way to compete against all the new apples from AMD with their new apples. Since there hasn't been much real innovation from either company for a few years, instead putting larger caches and dual cores on the same old, moldy cores they are already using, Intel found a way to get the same performance in fewer clock cycles for a single core, and as a great side effect, the processor runs a lot cooler.
That sounds like good competition to me. It also sounds like a not a terrible comparison to me.
Geez, talk about having to connect the dots and read between all the lines for others to understand!
It's not such a terrible comparison. The T2400 is not a 64-bit chip, so comparing it with an AMD 64-bit chip is useless. I'm comparing mobile to mobile. And since I'm not made of money, I can only compare what I've got. Also, since neither chipmaker has had any real innovation for a while, the only thing they can do is put more CPU's on one die. Therefore, the older generation isn't that much different than the current generation. So I figured a Mobile AMD XP compared to a T2400 meant for a laptop was a fair comparison.
If you don't agree, that's fine, but it's a fair comparison to me.
I have been a big fan of AMD since I bought an Athlon XP 1700+. It's very easy to overclock when you buy the right one (not limited). I've owned an XP 2500+ (running like a 2800+), and a laptop with a XP-M 2800+. I just bought a laptop recently with an Intel T2400 core duo. I compared running programs side-by-side on both laptops, and for single-processor tasks, the T2400 is about 5% faster. However, it runs MUCH cooler than the XP-M, and therefore the fan doesn't run as fast and so is quieter.
And with Intel making the prices very competitive, they are doing something right. Personally I am very happy to see that there is real competition between the two big CPU chip makers. This is where the real innovation comes from.
If ABC forces me to watch the commercials on their channels, then they damned well better make sure that EVERY SINGLE ONE is unique and is NEVER repeated...on ANYONE ELSE'S CHANNEL!
I *DO* watch commercials on my TiVo, but I also fast forward through them (30-second skip). If I see a commercial I haven't seen 10,000 times before, and it seems like something interesting, I will back up and watch the commercial. Once I have seen that commercial, I will fast forward through it on ALL channels because I already know what the commercial says.
If they force me to watch all commercials, I'll be looking for hacks to fix this new bug.
...and if they don't secure their network the next time they're caught, notify their ISP and have their account suspended. Don't arrest wardrivers for third degree felonies when it's the fault of the knowingly-unsecured wireless network owner to secure it.
In 1979 "The Logical Song" by SuperTramp was my theme...and I was 14.
So what is so new about this? Some doctor needs to be published and put a name to this thing.
When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
a miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees well they'd be singing so happily,
joyfully, playfully watching me.
But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible,
logical, responsible, practical.
Then they showed me a world where I could be so dependible,
clinical, intellectual, cynical.
There are times when all the world's asleep,
the questions run so deep, for such a simple man.
Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned?
I know it sounds absurd, please tell me who I am? ...
This isn't about not maturing, but wishing that he wasn't forced to mature so young,
and wanting to go back to a simpler time.
Today kids are kept from learning a lot of things that would get them ready for adulthood.
I mean please...removing swings and other equipment from playgrounds because they're too dangerous?
In an effort to shield children from anything dangerous while they grow up, parents and other adults
fail to prepare children for the real world. And any public institution (read schools) that doesn't
conform to this complete "safety" policy for children get sued out of existence or can't afford insurance.
Growing up, I thought my generation would be smart enough to avoid the dumb things my parents' generation
did to shield us kids from life. Unfortunately my generation is screwing it up even worse.
It's no wonder so many people have "psychological neoteny" but I doubt the explanation is as simple as TFA says.
I second this! I have X10 attached to my cable modem. Whenever my cable company messes up my link, all I have to do is tell my remote control to turn the modem off and back on, and I'm usually back on in about a minute. Plus, it's easy to perform ISO layer 1 security on my home network if something happens that looks fishy (unplug it!).
I'd like to use it more, but just about all the lights in my house are flourescent (power savers, y'know), and the X10 light switches don't like that. If only they had one that works with those lights, or there was an appliance module that looks like a light switch.
And, while I don't use it this way, it's not bad at home security (a do-it-yourself house alarm), and since it's a standard, what I *DO* use as a house alarm flashes all my X10 lamps when the alarm goes off since it has that feature built in.
This is what made the FDIV bug so insidious. If you only bought one brand of computer in your lab (or in your home), which even today is a very common practice, you would always get the same results, never thinking anything is wrong. If you published your results (financial, scientific) or were responsible for something critical (space launches, health care), you could lose millions of dollars, any scientific credibility, expensive equipment, or even cause peoples' deaths. Even if the possibility of this error even mattering was remote, the uneasiness of whether your computer was reliable is too great for most people to tolerate.
In order to work around the FDIV bug, you had to rewrite your software for a Mac, or to run it on older PC's, or disable the FPU. What is the point of buying the fastest PC of the day if you have to rerun it again on slower PC's, or to run on another platform? Why not just use the slower PC or the other platform all the time? This is the crux of why most people wanted their FDIV bug fixed. It didn't matter that the it was a miniscule problem. It's that you couldn't rely on your PC.
At least with the AMD problem you can run the same software on two AMD PC's of the same brand (again, a very common practice) at the same time and compare the results. If something starts diverging, then you know something is wrong. Run it on three PC's at the same time, and you can overcome any discrepancies...just let the erroneous PC rest a while before resuming. Better yet...use good coding practice and check the results along the way (I'm not completely sure what "checking" is required to avoid the problem).
Then you REALLY need to get new MBA textbooks, since the one you have been reading is too politically correct to be useful. Here is a link from the guy who discovered the bug which includes a timeline (I can't believe his FAQ is still online!)...
Pay close attention to questions 9, 10, and 11. It explains what REALLY happened, and the author's opinions on the matter, which to my memory are quite accurate. How do I know? At the time I owned a Gateway Pentium 90 that I could use the Windows calculator on to verify the bug. So once Intel announced the recall, I called to get mine replaced. The box they shipped the replacement in was about 12" x 12" x 8" and very overpadded...way larger than the boxes they ship processors in now for sale. I had to replace my Pentium, box it up and send it back to Intel, and I had to give them my credit card number so that they could bill me $500 ($600?) if I failed to return the old CPU.
There is a HUGE difference between this AMD problem and the FDIV bug. The FDIV bug, once found, was one of those "1,2, BANG" bugs (do step 1, then step 2 and BANG, the bug is there). With this AMD bug, you have to do the same operation many times before you see the problem, and then the problem is random (only if it overheats enough). Another possible solution to this is to use better heat sinks. This AMD problem isn't 1,2,BANG. Bugs that are of this nature are orders of magnitude harder to find and characterize.
But you're right, since Intel blundered so badly on their handling of he FDIV bug, everyone else learned from it.
Bummer. I thought I was good at 31, since their "top performers" were shown at 32. Of course, I got tired of the test near the end and made several mistakes....and on one of the tests I didn't hear anything!
They are talking about using a Sterling engine in their product. Actually, so that there is little vibration from the engine, they are combining 4 of them together, in series, so the vibrations cancel out. However, they claim to have a patent on a "Wobble Yoke" that connects the four pistons together onto a single rotating shaft. This sounds just like a crank shaft on a regular engine. How can that be patented?
Telecom rooms are FULL of DC-only equipment. Telephone switches, MUX's, etc., have been running on 48V DC power for decades. It's about time this idea has been brought to the IT space, since more and more of this equipment sits right next to the DC equipment in telecom companies' switch rooms.
Actually, I found that Intel had their "Application Accelerator" that opened up win2k to the whole drive...even on my PIII 866 machine. I had to preformat the drive to full size before reinstalling Win2k from scratch. W2K didn't like the drive at first (saw it as 127Gig) until I installed the accelerator. Now all is good on the file server. And since Circuit City had a 160Gig drive for $40 after rebates, I have lots of space (320Gig)!
BTW, the only reason I have Win2K on the server (I used to use Linux) is because I have TivoToGo installed, and it's not a Linux application. Also, it is too picky on where the copied files are stored...only local drives can be used, not network shares. Now all I need is a MPEG to VOB converter and I've can truly have a digital VCR.
Of course, I could go out and buy a Humax TiVo, but where's the fun in that?
I just recently went through the same exercise, trying to get a good, usable Linux distro on a Thinkpad 600 (PII, 266MHz, 96Meg RAM, 1.4Gig drive, MediaMagic 256??? video). I tried Mandrake 10.1, Mandriva 2006, Fedora Core 3 and 4, Slax 5.0.7 (and KillBill 5.0.6), DSL 2.2b, Gentoo 2005, SimplyMEPIS 3.4-3, and Knoppix 4.0.2. I wasn't interested in fighting with any distro to get them to install and be usable, but I was willing to get around some roadblocks to get them to install. That one thing made me exclude several of the distros because they were too much of a pain to get installed, let alone to run. That included Fedora Core 3 and 4, Gentoo, and SimplyMEPIS. It turns out that 1.4Gigs is just too small for those distros.
I got Mandrake 10.1 and Mandriva 2006 to install, but I had to manually partition the drive to just have swap and root...the automatic partitions left too little space for an install to work. I trimmed out anything I didn't need to run (I wanted an Internet machine...OpenOffice was not an option here due to disk space). These distros installed just fine, and they actually ran usably with KDE 3.2/3.4. Of course, patience is called for, but I was pleased how well a heavy GUI ran on this laptop.
I then decided to go small, since Mand-rake/-riva left too little space on the drive. I tried DSL, but couldn't get it to remain stable on the hard drive...installing gnucach failed, and synaptics trashed working modules such that the thing wouldn't boot afterwards. It turns out this was a learning curve problem on my part, but I got frustrated with it. I then tried Slax. As a LiveCD it is fantastic...it is obviously meant to run from a CD. I couldn't find an easy way to get it working from the hard drive though. After a few attempts, I gave up. The best I can say is to use a hard drive as file storage and boot Slax from a CD (3" will work well).
I then went back to DSL. After the previous few tries, I learned a lot about the distro and how finicky it is about how you do things. It is very easy to trip up. But I have settled on DSL for the laptop...it boots fast, recognizes the Zonet USB ethernet dongle, even through a USB hub, and runs Firefox reasonably well, even with Adblock, Noia theme, and FasterFox running. Now if only I could get my DeskJet 648C working...hpilj(?) is not compiled into the ghostscript so it won't work. I am not sure I want to fight with that for fear of trashing the install again.
Sorry, but I stopped there, and didn't try a full Knoppix install. Oh, and by the way, SystemRescueCD is my friend, but it won't boot on a Dell Inspiron 2650 (ide-floppy locks up). I use that to make backups of my machines (works like Ghost and Partition Magic). It has made me fear less the trashing of the DSL install.
Now if only my file server (PIII 866, 384Meg, 160Gig) would recognize large hard drives (BIOS doesn't, and Intel doesn't have a BIOS version that does)..yes, the 160Gig looks like a 127Gig to this machine. All the backups are filling up the drive!
Why should I pay $50 for a game that doesn't install? I just purchased Civilization IV for $39.90 from BestBuy...they are having a sale on it this week. I didn't want to pay $50 for it, but $40 was OK. HOWEVER, when I got the dumb thing home, I got a "DefaultFeature Catastrophic error" on disc 2 when I went to install it. I called the ever so helpful support line. Someone actually answered the phone! And he was helpful...as well as he could be. Apparently there is a bad disc on disc 2 on a whole lot of packages, because this guy said they have been getting a lot of calls about this recently. The only solution is to go back to the store and swap it out. I'll be taking a laptop with me to make sure what I swap out actually installs.
Talk about bad quality control!!! Why should I pay more for crap like this?
1. CO2 levels up 27% over a long period of time...the same period of time where the population of humanity increased x000%. Seems to me that a human population increase so drastic would have caused a bigger impact on CO2 levels since our lungs produce it. And that's before taking into account the industrial revolution.
2. Methane levels up 130%. So stop farting. But seriously, what caused this? cows? industry?
3. Study claims that greenhouse gasses increased dramatically in the past 1000 years than any time before (back to 650000 years). Isn't the industrial revolution only about 150 years old?
Dvorak is not exaclty wrong here. Look at Doom...Doom 3 is just like Doom 2 with much better graphics and different weapons. Otherwise it's the same thing, and Doom 2 was much like Doom. Quake is like Doom. Quake 2 and 3 are like Doom.
Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, Conquest, etc. are all the same. Zoo Tycoon, RollerCoaster tycoon (1, 2, 3), etc. are all the same. Diablo (1,2), the Sims (numerous), GTA (numerous), NFL, NHL, baseball.
There are very few new games...most are updates of old game ideas. The only thing that is keeping the video games industry afloat is how impressive each generation of video cards becomes. Once that slows down, people are not going to keep buying rehashes of the same old games.
And as for the movie industry...how many more Star Trek movies do you want to see? How many moe Star Wars movies? How many more Friday the 13th's, or I know what you did...still...and again. Even Pixar realized they were getting stale and hired new writers for the Incredibles.
What the gaming industry needs is some new genre's for video games...something not already done and being milked for all they're worth.
I have a CS degree, but since I graduated, a new major started...comp. Engr (CE). Then they decided to move EE into CE (or vice versa). Then they decided to merge CS with the EE college. So now there's EE, and CE, but not CS. So CS as a major is declining because they don't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, you missed it. How soon people forget...
5 5
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/08/12592
I got blasted on here when I said that Intel was finally doing something right by lowering prices and finally competing with instead of stagnating. Now it seems that Intel is shooting themselves in the foot. Their management does something right, then they get laid off before they can reap the fruits of it. Sounds like what the management at HP is saying now about getting rid of their CEO a coupld years ago. They didn't like that she wanted to buy Compaq, thinking it was a bad idea. Well, it seems that today it wasn't such a bad idea.
oh well, I supposed Intel hasn't really changed at all, and actually discourages it.
So what does it say when an old, moldy apple (AMD XP-M 2800+) performs at the same speed as a freshly picked apple (T2400)?
To me it sounds like Intel finally found a good way to compete against all the new apples from AMD with their new apples. Since there hasn't been much real innovation from either company for a few years, instead putting larger caches and dual cores on the same old, moldy cores they are already using, Intel found a way to get the same performance in fewer clock cycles for a single core, and as a great side effect, the processor runs a lot cooler.
That sounds like good competition to me. It also sounds like a not a terrible comparison to me.
Geez, talk about having to connect the dots and read between all the lines for others to understand!
OK, if I'm so wrong, tell me why this:
m odel1=269&chart=65&model2=321
http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&
This shows that an Athlon XP 3200+ Barton runs faster than a Pentium D 940 Pressler 3200 for Lame MP3 encoding.
In my original post I said that I was comparing with an application that only used one processor on the T2400.
Again I say that my comparison is not so terrible.
It's not such a terrible comparison. The T2400 is not a 64-bit chip, so comparing it with an AMD 64-bit chip is useless. I'm comparing mobile to mobile. And since I'm not made of money, I can only compare what I've got. Also, since neither chipmaker has had any real innovation for a while, the only thing they can do is put more CPU's on one die. Therefore, the older generation isn't that much different than the current generation. So I figured a Mobile AMD XP compared to a T2400 meant for a laptop was a fair comparison.
If you don't agree, that's fine, but it's a fair comparison to me.
I have been a big fan of AMD since I bought an Athlon XP 1700+. It's very easy to overclock when you buy the right one (not limited). I've owned an XP 2500+ (running like a 2800+), and a laptop with a XP-M 2800+. I just bought a laptop recently with an Intel T2400 core duo. I compared running programs side-by-side on both laptops, and for single-processor tasks, the T2400 is about 5% faster. However, it runs MUCH cooler than the XP-M, and therefore the fan doesn't run as fast and so is quieter.
And with Intel making the prices very competitive, they are doing something right. Personally I am very happy to see that there is real competition between the two big CPU chip makers. This is where the real innovation comes from.
If ABC forces me to watch the commercials on their channels, then they damned well better make sure that EVERY SINGLE ONE is unique and is NEVER repeated...on ANYONE ELSE'S CHANNEL!
I *DO* watch commercials on my TiVo, but I also fast forward through them (30-second skip). If I see a commercial I haven't seen 10,000 times before, and it seems like something interesting, I will back up and watch the commercial. Once I have seen that commercial, I will fast forward through it on ALL channels because I already know what the commercial says.
If they force me to watch all commercials, I'll be looking for hacks to fix this new bug.
...and if they don't secure their network the next time they're caught, notify their ISP and have their account suspended. Don't arrest wardrivers for third degree felonies when it's the fault of the knowingly-unsecured wireless network owner to secure it.
In 1979 "The Logical Song" by SuperTramp was my theme...and I was 14.
...
So what is so new about this? Some doctor needs to be published and put a name to this thing.
When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
a miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees well they'd be singing so happily,
joyfully, playfully watching me.
But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible,
logical, responsible, practical.
Then they showed me a world where I could be so dependible,
clinical, intellectual, cynical.
There are times when all the world's asleep,
the questions run so deep, for such a simple man.
Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned?
I know it sounds absurd, please tell me who I am?
This isn't about not maturing, but wishing that he wasn't forced to mature so young,
and wanting to go back to a simpler time.
Today kids are kept from learning a lot of things that would get them ready for adulthood.
I mean please...removing swings and other equipment from playgrounds because they're too dangerous?
http://kutv.com/health/local_story_086170456.html
In an effort to shield children from anything dangerous while they grow up, parents and other adults
fail to prepare children for the real world. And any public institution (read schools) that doesn't
conform to this complete "safety" policy for children get sued out of existence or can't afford insurance.
Growing up, I thought my generation would be smart enough to avoid the dumb things my parents' generation
did to shield us kids from life. Unfortunately my generation is screwing it up even worse.
It's no wonder so many people have "psychological neoteny" but I doubt the explanation is as simple as TFA says.
I second this! I have X10 attached to my cable modem. Whenever my cable company messes up my link, all I have to do is tell my remote control to turn the modem off and back on, and I'm usually back on in about a minute. Plus, it's easy to perform ISO layer 1 security on my home network if something happens that looks fishy (unplug it!).
I'd like to use it more, but just about all the lights in my house are flourescent (power savers, y'know), and the X10 light switches don't like that. If only they had one that works with those lights, or there was an appliance module that looks like a light switch.
And, while I don't use it this way, it's not bad at home security (a do-it-yourself house alarm), and since it's a standard, what I *DO* use as a house alarm flashes all my X10 lamps when the alarm goes off since it has that feature built in.
This is what made the FDIV bug so insidious. If you only bought one brand of computer in your lab (or in your home), which even today is a very common practice, you would always get the same results, never thinking anything is wrong. If you published your results (financial, scientific) or were responsible for something critical (space launches, health care), you could lose millions of dollars, any scientific credibility, expensive equipment, or even cause peoples' deaths. Even if the possibility of this error even mattering was remote, the uneasiness of whether your computer was reliable is too great for most people to tolerate.
In order to work around the FDIV bug, you had to rewrite your software for a Mac, or to run it on older PC's, or disable the FPU. What is the point of buying the fastest PC of the day if you have to rerun it again on slower PC's, or to run on another platform? Why not just use the slower PC or the other platform all the time? This is the crux of why most people wanted their FDIV bug fixed. It didn't matter that the it was a miniscule problem. It's that you couldn't rely on your PC.
At least with the AMD problem you can run the same software on two AMD PC's of the same brand (again, a very common practice) at the same time and compare the results. If something starts diverging, then you know something is wrong. Run it on three PC's at the same time, and you can overcome any discrepancies...just let the erroneous PC rest a while before resuming. Better yet...use good coding practice and check the results along the way (I'm not completely sure what "checking" is required to avoid the problem).
Then you REALLY need to get new MBA textbooks, since the one you have been reading is too politically correct to be useful. Here is a link from the guy who discovered the bug which includes a timeline (I can't believe his FAQ is still online!)...
http://www.trnicely.net/pentbug/pentbug.html/
Pay close attention to questions 9, 10, and 11. It explains what REALLY happened, and the author's opinions on the matter, which to my memory are quite accurate. How do I know? At the time I owned a Gateway Pentium 90 that I could use the Windows calculator on to verify the bug. So once Intel announced the recall, I called to get mine replaced. The box they shipped the replacement in was about 12" x 12" x 8" and very overpadded...way larger than the boxes they ship processors in now for sale. I had to replace my Pentium, box it up and send it back to Intel, and I had to give them my credit card number so that they could bill me $500 ($600?) if I failed to return the old CPU.
There is a HUGE difference between this AMD problem and the FDIV bug. The FDIV bug, once found, was one of those "1,2, BANG" bugs (do step 1, then step 2 and BANG, the bug is there). With this AMD bug, you have to do the same operation many times before you see the problem, and then the problem is random (only if it overheats enough). Another possible solution to this is to use better heat sinks. This AMD problem isn't 1,2,BANG. Bugs that are of this nature are orders of magnitude harder to find and characterize.
But you're right, since Intel blundered so badly on their handling of he FDIV bug, everyone else learned from it.
Bummer. I thought I was good at 31, since their "top performers" were shown at 32. Of course, I got tired of the test near the end and made several mistakes....and on one of the tests I didn't hear anything!
They are talking about using a Sterling engine in their product. Actually, so that there is little vibration from the engine, they are combining 4 of them together, in series, so the vibrations cancel out. However, they claim to have a patent on a "Wobble Yoke" that connects the four pistons together onto a single rotating shaft. This sounds just like a crank shaft on a regular engine. How can that be patented?
Telecom rooms are FULL of DC-only equipment. Telephone switches, MUX's, etc., have been running on 48V DC power for decades. It's about time this idea has been brought to the IT space, since more and more of this equipment sits right next to the DC equipment in telecom companies' switch rooms.
Actually, I found that Intel had their "Application Accelerator" that opened up win2k to the whole drive...even on my PIII 866 machine. I had to preformat the drive to full size before reinstalling Win2k from scratch. W2K didn't like the drive at first (saw it as 127Gig) until I installed the accelerator. Now all is good on the file server. And since Circuit City had a 160Gig drive for $40 after rebates, I have lots of space (320Gig)!
BTW, the only reason I have Win2K on the server (I used to use Linux) is because I have TivoToGo installed, and it's not a Linux application. Also, it is too picky on where the copied files are stored...only local drives can be used, not network shares. Now all I need is a MPEG to VOB converter and I've can truly have a digital VCR.
Of course, I could go out and buy a Humax TiVo, but where's the fun in that?
I just recently went through the same exercise, trying to get a good, usable Linux distro on a Thinkpad 600 (PII, 266MHz, 96Meg RAM, 1.4Gig drive, MediaMagic 256??? video). I tried Mandrake 10.1, Mandriva 2006, Fedora Core 3 and 4, Slax 5.0.7 (and KillBill 5.0.6), DSL 2.2b, Gentoo 2005, SimplyMEPIS 3.4-3, and Knoppix 4.0.2. I wasn't interested in fighting with any distro to get them to install and be usable, but I was willing to get around some roadblocks to get them to install. That one thing made me exclude several of the distros because they were too much of a pain to get installed, let alone to run. That included Fedora Core 3 and 4, Gentoo, and SimplyMEPIS. It turns out that 1.4Gigs is just too small for those distros.
I got Mandrake 10.1 and Mandriva 2006 to install, but I had to manually partition the drive to just have swap and root...the automatic partitions left too little space for an install to work. I trimmed out anything I didn't need to run (I wanted an Internet machine...OpenOffice was not an option here due to disk space). These distros installed just fine, and they actually ran usably with KDE 3.2/3.4. Of course, patience is called for, but I was pleased how well a heavy GUI ran on this laptop.
I then decided to go small, since Mand-rake/-riva left too little space on the drive. I tried DSL, but couldn't get it to remain stable on the hard drive...installing gnucach failed, and synaptics trashed working modules such that the thing wouldn't boot afterwards. It turns out this was a learning curve problem on my part, but I got frustrated with it. I then tried Slax. As a LiveCD it is fantastic...it is obviously meant to run from a CD. I couldn't find an easy way to get it working from the hard drive though. After a few attempts, I gave up. The best I can say is to use a hard drive as file storage and boot Slax from a CD (3" will work well).
I then went back to DSL. After the previous few tries, I learned a lot about the distro and how finicky it is about how you do things. It is very easy to trip up. But I have settled on DSL for the laptop...it boots fast, recognizes the Zonet USB ethernet dongle, even through a USB hub, and runs Firefox reasonably well, even with Adblock, Noia theme, and FasterFox running. Now if only I could get my DeskJet 648C working...hpilj(?) is not compiled into the ghostscript so it won't work. I am not sure I want to fight with that for fear of trashing the install again.
Sorry, but I stopped there, and didn't try a full Knoppix install. Oh, and by the way, SystemRescueCD is my friend, but it won't boot on a Dell Inspiron 2650 (ide-floppy locks up). I use that to make backups of my machines (works like Ghost and Partition Magic). It has made me fear less the trashing of the DSL install.
Now if only my file server (PIII 866, 384Meg, 160Gig) would recognize large hard drives (BIOS doesn't, and Intel doesn't have a BIOS version that does)..yes, the 160Gig looks like a 127Gig to this machine. All the backups are filling up the drive!
Why should I pay $50 for a game that doesn't install? I just purchased Civilization IV for $39.90 from BestBuy...they are having a sale on it this week. I didn't want to pay $50 for it, but $40 was OK. HOWEVER, when I got the dumb thing home, I got a "DefaultFeature Catastrophic error" on disc 2 when I went to install it. I called the ever so helpful support line. Someone actually answered the phone! And he was helpful...as well as he could be. Apparently there is a bad disc on disc 2 on a whole lot of packages, because this guy said they have been getting a lot of calls about this recently. The only solution is to go back to the store and swap it out. I'll be taking a laptop with me to make sure what I swap out actually installs.
Talk about bad quality control!!! Why should I pay more for crap like this?
1. CO2 levels up 27% over a long period of time...the same period of time where the population of humanity increased x000%. Seems to me that a human population increase so drastic would have caused a bigger impact on CO2 levels since our lungs produce it. And that's before taking into account the industrial revolution.
2. Methane levels up 130%. So stop farting. But seriously, what caused this? cows? industry?
3. Study claims that greenhouse gasses increased dramatically in the past 1000 years than any time before (back to 650000 years). Isn't the industrial revolution only about 150 years old?
Lexmark Toner Cartridges
Three words: Embrace and extend.
Dvorak is not exaclty wrong here. Look at Doom...Doom 3 is just like Doom 2 with much better graphics and different weapons. Otherwise it's the same thing, and Doom 2 was much like Doom. Quake is like Doom. Quake 2 and 3 are like Doom.
Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, Conquest, etc. are all the same. Zoo Tycoon, RollerCoaster tycoon (1, 2, 3), etc. are all the same. Diablo (1,2), the Sims (numerous), GTA (numerous), NFL, NHL, baseball.
There are very few new games...most are updates of old game ideas. The only thing that is keeping the video games industry afloat is how impressive each generation of video cards becomes. Once that slows down, people are not going to keep buying rehashes of the same old games.
And as for the movie industry...how many more Star Trek movies do you want to see? How many moe Star Wars movies? How many more Friday the 13th's, or I know what you did...still...and again. Even Pixar realized they were getting stale and hired new writers for the Incredibles.
What the gaming industry needs is some new genre's for video games...something not already done and being milked for all they're worth.
And don't forget the maxim that seems to be prevalent everywhere, even though everyone "knows" this shouldn't be....
"There's never enough time to do it right, but always enough money to do it twice."
I have a CS degree, but since I graduated, a new major started...comp. Engr (CE). Then they decided to move EE into CE (or vice versa). Then they decided to merge CS with the EE college. So now there's EE, and CE, but not CS. So CS as a major is declining because they don't exist.