You are quite right about this. I have built a few different prototype systems using VIA ~1GHz CPU's (I work at an embedded system development company) and usually they achieve about the same average speed (VIA processors are better at some things and poorer at others) as a PIII 600 or a new Celeron of similar clock speed. Having a special feature for encryption is of course nice _if_ you really need it but useless most of the time. Overall ultra low voltage Celerons and Pentium M's have more performance/Watt, which is what really counts when there must not be any moving parts in the system and heatsinking must therefore be structural.
Also, as other people have stated before me putting a nanoITX into the Mac Mini case is really stupid feature-wise. Apple has probably spent quite a lot of R&D money to produce such a compact and powerful unit, it is really in an altogether different class than some hobbyist hacks.
Would you happen to be using a motherboard with a VIA chipset? My old MB used a KT400 chipset. I didn't notice anything strange when using a Radeon 7200 on it but when I upgraded to a 9800Pro the speed I got was way slower than what it should have been. A couple of nights on tweaking and googling and I came to the conclusion that KT400 AGP support was s**t, especially with ATI video cards.
One more night of examining other motherboards and I decided to buy a mb based on nForce2Ultra chipset. After installing the new mb my actual FPS's almost doubled. Bying a new mb might seem a bit drastic but considering that it cost "only" ~120e vs. the 250e of the R9800Pro it seemed quite reasonable to me and I haven't regretted it.
Personally I will never use VIA's chipsets again if I have any other choices.
...Blah. Once someone leaks the inner workings of black holes your so-called heavy encryption is gone! If black holes only were based on open standards...
I work part-time for an embedded hardware manufacturer, and I've had a really bad experience about Xenarc displays. We got two pieces of some ~6" displays for a project, one of them didn't light up at all and the other one was somewhat funny looking. Being hardware guys we disassembled them of course.
The result: both of the displays had bent pins on chips and mauled PCB's. It seemed like someone had been intent on destroying the display internals with a screwdriver. In addition to that the working display showed an interesting fading pattern of something like Bubble-Bobble characters (the pattern appeared when TTL level control signal was cut off but backlight remained on). I googled a bit with the LCD panel partnumber and the only result I could find was some asian company selling really cheap panels recycled from some kind of gaming machines. Xenarc quality indeed.
The point isn't that they lost their precious wide-bandwidth network connection with other troops but rather that intelligence was not relayed to them _in any way_.
A combat unit on field is practically always connected to command with at least a conventional radio. The "practically" part comes from the possibility that effective radio jamming may interfere with radio communications during battle, but that is a very remote possibility given the use of frequency hopping radios and the probably nonexistant capabilities of iraqi electronic warfare troops. It should have not been so difficult to deliver the basic information (three brigades instead of one) to troops using age-old proven technologies.
It's a grim situation when you have to back to at least WWII to find parallels for what the USA is doing to the world right now, not to even mention colonial times...
In case you want to know more about silent PC systems www.silentpcreview.com is a great resource. I'm in no way affiliated with that site, I just think it has LOTS of good information about this subject:)
Somehow I fail to see how putting stuff into Compact Flash is somehow novel or newsworthy. CF can be used as a normal (if somewhat slow and with limited write cycles) hard drive regardless of the operating system or purpose. Industrial CF models can even be used in applications where reasonably low cost and resistance to vibration/shocks are important as long as the limited write cycle factor is taken into account when planning system swap usage etc..
Personally I've installed several flavors of Windows on CF's of different sizes . For example it is quite easy to run Win98 from a read-only CF using a ramdrive as the drive for the OS. The instructions for this can be found with some googling, and this idea has really been around for quite a while.
Overall my point is that there is nothing special in using a CF if it suits your needs. Having a how-to on how to do this on/. main page in 2004 only indicates that/. editors are happy posting news about linux tweaks regardless of the real value of these news.
I wonder if they couldn't have used VIA C3 or Eden processors instead of Transmeta ones to give the necessary boost to their handheld. VIA CPUs running at 1GHz are definately fast enough to make WinXP run smoothly (although not comparable to AMD or Intel processors running at the same Ghz), and still consume only 10W of power. It might even be possible to underclock (/undervolt) them to further decrease the heat output. The memory would be another problem, but they probably have a SO-DIMM slot inside anyway, so why not 512MB instead of 256?
Overall it would seem that this is a product that does not have a clear target market, and therefore it is also somewhat difficult to believe that it would become popular.
Sorry to disappoint you with this, but it really doesn't work that way... While the temperatures would be quite about the same as in this refrigerator the terrible weather would kill any computer in a few seconds;)
Seriously though, often in winter when I have had to melt my freezer / refrigerator I've just put the foodstuffs in a box on the windowsill and opened the ventilation window. Everything stays frozen for at least long enough to to get the extra ice out of the freezer. I'm saying this as a Finn of course:)
Actually current PC/104 and PC/104+ systems are commonly based on the Geode processor that was originally developed by Cyrix for low-end laptops. Geode design was then bought by National Semiconductors and most recently by AMD.
Most recent versions of the Geode chip are roughly equivalent to low-end Pentiums, so it's really a far cry from 386s. New developments in the field are PC/104 CPU modules using the most recent VIA processors, which are quite a bit more powerful than the Geodes are.
No wonder you have no love for PC/104 if you're so prejudiced that you don't even bother reading the specs of PC/104+, which has a PCI bus.
For example the system you are talking about can be achieved using only 2 PC/104 boards (+1 board for power), with standard 2,5" HDD if you don't like SSDs. I know because I was just testing such a system yesterday, and you'll find the boards too by browsing the web a bit. And oh wait, you'll also get an 300Mhz processor with that system.
Aww, my first thought reading the linked article was "this guy doesn't have a real girlfriend". Or the girlfriend might be underage, not to mention the author himself.
Seriously, I strongly suspect the appeal power of Pikmin or Super Monkey Ball to my girlfriend... The article seems to view women more as docile animals than the fierce creatures they really are;)
Re:Optical Communications to Keep Bombs Away
on
Optical Cellphones
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"Directional signalling means much less interference, and therefore much less consumption of precious spectrum, and less need for those pesky and expensive cell towers."
Yea, instead you will have those small, cheap orbital satellites!
Seriously, one of the most significant benefits of low frequency radio communications in battlefield is that radios work through foliage, small terrain obstacles etc.. I wouldn't want to be the "optical radio" guy trying to get a clear shot at some satellite when in a dense forest.
With current equipment it is impossible to pinpoint well placed & planned radio positions (perhaps using directional antennas) with means of radio intelligence. The main use of radio intelligence is to get an approximate idea of enemy formations etc., not to send artillery shells on the poor fellow pushing transmit button.
In near future (20+ years) it will probably be possible for _US_ to have enough accurate systems to pinpoint enemy transmitters, but even then there won't be enough artillery to put out all those grunts when the action begins and hundreds of radios will start screaming on different frequencies.
Using homing missiles for killing grunts with radios would be horrible overkill (and an expensive one), and probably it wouldn't even work as radio transmission are kept as short as possible. Not to mention the deflections of radio waves etc. that would probably send the homing missile of course at some stage.
All in all, I don't believe optical communications using satellites will be a viable option in near future battlefield communications. Perhaps when Raczak's Roughnecks get to the field...
(Recommended reading: Starship Troopers by Heinlein;))
As I understand it (doing part-time work at an embedded computer manufacturer) the regular DOS isn't commonly used in embedded systems. A more advanced solution is Datalight's ROM-DOS, which is basically a DOS with some improvements.
People are indeed unbeliavably greedy for getting maximum packets calculated in their name. I work at a medium-sized special PC-board manufacturing & design company, and the less technical (more managing) staff bought a Linux firewall machine "hardened" with mysterious proprietary software for about 3500$.
When we proceeded to put it in working condition we noticed (among quite a few other things) that the computer shop guy who had preinstalled Linux & IPchains & that mysterious software had also installed Seti@Home! The installation was of course under his name, and the program was scheduled to run via crontab... Way to go for a trusty firewall machine!
Needless to say, that machine wasn't deployed as planned.
Slashdot Mirror
You are quite right about this. I have built a few different prototype systems using VIA ~1GHz CPU's (I work at an embedded system development company) and usually they achieve about the same average speed (VIA processors are better at some things and poorer at others) as a PIII 600 or a new Celeron of similar clock speed. Having a special feature for encryption is of course nice _if_ you really need it but useless most of the time. Overall ultra low voltage Celerons and Pentium M's have more performance/Watt, which is what really counts when there must not be any moving parts in the system and heatsinking must therefore be structural.
Also, as other people have stated before me putting a nanoITX into the Mac Mini case is really stupid feature-wise. Apple has probably spent quite a lot of R&D money to produce such a compact and powerful unit, it is really in an altogether different class than some hobbyist hacks.
Would you happen to be using a motherboard with a VIA chipset? My old MB used a KT400 chipset. I didn't notice anything strange when using a Radeon 7200 on it but when I upgraded to a 9800Pro the speed I got was way slower than what it should have been. A couple of nights on tweaking and googling and I came to the conclusion that KT400 AGP support was s**t, especially with ATI video cards.
One more night of examining other motherboards and I decided to buy a mb based on nForce2Ultra chipset. After installing the new mb my actual FPS's almost doubled. Bying a new mb might seem a bit drastic but considering that it cost "only" ~120e vs. the 250e of the R9800Pro it seemed quite reasonable to me and I haven't regretted it.
Personally I will never use VIA's chipsets again if I have any other choices.
...Blah. Once someone leaks the inner workings of black holes your so-called heavy encryption is gone! If black holes only were based on open standards...
;)
I work part-time for an embedded hardware manufacturer, and I've had a really bad experience about Xenarc displays. We got two pieces of some ~6" displays for a project, one of them didn't light up at all and the other one was somewhat funny looking. Being hardware guys we disassembled them of course.
The result: both of the displays had bent pins on chips and mauled PCB's. It seemed like someone had been intent on destroying the display internals with a screwdriver. In addition to that the working display showed an interesting fading pattern of something like Bubble-Bobble characters (the pattern appeared when TTL level control signal was cut off but backlight remained on). I googled a bit with the LCD panel partnumber and the only result I could find was some asian company selling really cheap panels recycled from some kind of gaming machines. Xenarc quality indeed.
The point isn't that they lost their precious wide-bandwidth network connection with other troops but rather that intelligence was not relayed to them _in any way_.
A combat unit on field is practically always connected to command with at least a conventional radio. The "practically" part comes from the possibility that effective radio jamming may interfere with radio communications during battle, but that is a very remote possibility given the use of frequency hopping radios and the probably nonexistant capabilities of iraqi electronic warfare troops. It should have not been so difficult to deliver the basic information (three brigades instead of one) to troops using age-old proven technologies.
It's a grim situation when you have to back to at least WWII to find parallels for what the USA is doing to the world right now, not to even mention colonial times...
In case you want to know more about silent PC systems www.silentpcreview.com is a great resource. I'm in no way affiliated with that site, I just think it has LOTS of good information about this subject :)
Somehow I fail to see how putting stuff into Compact Flash is somehow novel or newsworthy. CF can be used as a normal (if somewhat slow and with limited write cycles) hard drive regardless of the operating system or purpose. Industrial CF models can even be used in applications where reasonably low cost and resistance to vibration/shocks are important as long as the limited write cycle factor is taken into account when planning system swap usage etc..
/. main page in 2004 only indicates that /. editors are happy posting news about linux tweaks regardless of the real value of these news.
Personally I've installed several flavors of Windows on CF's of different sizes . For example it is quite easy to run Win98 from a read-only CF using a ramdrive as the drive for the OS. The instructions for this can be found with some googling, and this idea has really been around for quite a while.
Overall my point is that there is nothing special in using a CF if it suits your needs. Having a how-to on how to do this on
Now mod me whereever for saying this.
I wonder if they couldn't have used VIA C3 or Eden processors instead of Transmeta ones to give the necessary boost to their handheld. VIA CPUs running at 1GHz are definately fast enough to make WinXP run smoothly (although not comparable to AMD or Intel processors running at the same Ghz), and still consume only 10W of power. It might even be possible to underclock (/undervolt) them to further decrease the heat output. The memory would be another problem, but they probably have a SO-DIMM slot inside anyway, so why not 512MB instead of 256?
Overall it would seem that this is a product that does not have a clear target market, and therefore it is also somewhat difficult to believe that it would become popular.
Sorry to disappoint you with this, but it really doesn't work that way... While the temperatures would be quite about the same as in this refrigerator the terrible weather would kill any computer in a few seconds ;)
:)
Seriously though, often in winter when I have had to melt my freezer / refrigerator I've just put the foodstuffs in a box on the windowsill and opened the ventilation window. Everything stays frozen for at least long enough to to get the extra ice out of the freezer. I'm saying this as a Finn of course
...as if having a CPU running at -100C would save them from server meltdown when the full brunt of brutal slashdotting hits them!!
Muahahahaaa.. <manical laughter echoing in the dungeon>
This guy is an insidious troll. Check out his previous postings and mod him for what he is!
Actually current PC/104 and PC/104+ systems are commonly based on the Geode processor that was originally developed by Cyrix for low-end laptops. Geode design was then bought by National Semiconductors and most recently by AMD.
Most recent versions of the Geode chip are roughly equivalent to low-end Pentiums, so it's really a far cry from 386s. New developments in the field are PC/104 CPU modules using the most recent VIA processors, which are quite a bit more powerful than the Geodes are.
This is by far the fastest slashdotting I've seen, there were only 2 comments and the site was already down!
/. article readers has truly risen ;)
Either their puny server is smoldering below an office table or the percentage of
No wonder you have no love for PC/104 if you're so prejudiced that you don't even bother reading the specs of PC/104+, which has a PCI bus.
For example the system you are talking about can be achieved using only 2 PC/104 boards (+1 board for power), with standard 2,5" HDD if you don't like SSDs. I know because I was just testing such a system yesterday, and you'll find the boards too by browsing the web a bit. And oh wait, you'll also get an 300Mhz processor with that system.
Aww, my first thought reading the linked article was "this guy doesn't have a real girlfriend". Or the girlfriend might be underage, not to mention the author himself.
;)
Seriously, I strongly suspect the appeal power of Pikmin or Super Monkey Ball to my girlfriend... The article seems to view women more as docile animals than the fierce creatures they really are
...who mistakenly read the url as www.scam.com ;)
"Directional signalling means much less interference, and therefore much less consumption of precious spectrum, and less need for those pesky and expensive cell towers." Yea, instead you will have those small, cheap orbital satellites! Seriously, one of the most significant benefits of low frequency radio communications in battlefield is that radios work through foliage, small terrain obstacles etc.. I wouldn't want to be the "optical radio" guy trying to get a clear shot at some satellite when in a dense forest. With current equipment it is impossible to pinpoint well placed & planned radio positions (perhaps using directional antennas) with means of radio intelligence. The main use of radio intelligence is to get an approximate idea of enemy formations etc., not to send artillery shells on the poor fellow pushing transmit button. In near future (20+ years) it will probably be possible for _US_ to have enough accurate systems to pinpoint enemy transmitters, but even then there won't be enough artillery to put out all those grunts when the action begins and hundreds of radios will start screaming on different frequencies. Using homing missiles for killing grunts with radios would be horrible overkill (and an expensive one), and probably it wouldn't even work as radio transmission are kept as short as possible. Not to mention the deflections of radio waves etc. that would probably send the homing missile of course at some stage. All in all, I don't believe optical communications using satellites will be a viable option in near future battlefield communications. Perhaps when Raczak's Roughnecks get to the field... (Recommended reading: Starship Troopers by Heinlein ;))
As I understand it (doing part-time work at an embedded computer manufacturer) the regular DOS isn't commonly used in embedded systems. A more advanced solution is Datalight's ROM-DOS, which is basically a DOS with some improvements.
People are indeed unbeliavably greedy for getting maximum packets calculated in their name. I work at a medium-sized special PC-board manufacturing & design company, and the less technical (more managing) staff bought a Linux firewall machine "hardened" with mysterious proprietary software for about 3500$.
When we proceeded to put it in working condition we noticed (among quite a few other things) that the computer shop guy who had preinstalled Linux & IPchains & that mysterious software had also installed Seti@Home! The installation was of course under his name, and the program was scheduled to run via crontab... Way to go for a trusty firewall machine!
Needless to say, that machine wasn't deployed as planned.