Yep. Did you get a look at the thin tube steel he made the cart out of? That kind of stuff you can bend over your knee. I'd make a real cart to begin with, or even better get one of those old Honda Odyssey four-wheel RV things (not the new soccer-mom Odyssey - see here) with the full roll cage and work from there.
And his newer verison with the high-mounted engine? Where's the reinforcement? If he's lucky the engine won't bend that tube forward and snap his legs off like a mouse trap. But only if he's lucky.
Don't even get me started on the brakes. OK, he can use a lathe - but machinist != engineer...
Interesting! I wonder how many CE users will decide that they prefer the Palm interface and how many will feel that their purchase of a CE device is validated when they see the two OSs side-by-side?
To be honest PalmOS is looking a bit dated now, but it still does everything very well. I feel good about it running so nicely on a 16MHz platform.
Nethack is winnable - it's not even that hard. I see it as an exercise in self-control. You have to concentrate on every single move or you will do something stupid, and not all the +3 blessed gray dragon scale mails in Yendor will save you. You could just think of it as good training for life in general. Never stop thinking, because the moment you start hitting keys before you know what they're going to do things go downhill.
Actually the Apple Cube is an example of how not to build a computer without a fan. If you dismantle one (as I did) you'll find a mount for an 80mm fan! It seems like it was designed with a fan in mind and then someone worked out that it would run without one - or else they hoped it would work without a fan but were prepared to be disappointed. I don't think they tested it well enough before release.
Now for the article - basically it sucked. The CPU cooler should have been a Noise Control "Silverado" - check out Tom's Hardware for a comparison showing absolutely silent operation using blower-type fans as well as excellent performance. You have to mail-order it from Germany but it is worth it. The Zalman coolers are cheaper, but very expensive for the performance they give!
Using a SilentDrive enclosure with a 7200RPM drive is a little risky, heat-wise. You can get equivalent results by mounting the hard drives using rubber grommets. Remove the metal-to-metal contact between the drive and the case and you'll be amazed at how much noise you don't hear. I had to make a custom drive cage to fit the grommets in. The drive chassis should still be earthed to the case however, using a wire.
Insulation does not give great improvement over a plain metal case. I went through using DynaMat Extreme for very little gain. Still, now I know.
My experience with the unmodified G4 450MHz Cube was that on warm days (it's only San Francisco!) the Cube would sometimes mysteriously freeze. Dismantling and adding a very quiet 80mm fan solved that problem. Apple almost got it right.
The biggest gains are to use larger diameter fans that run slower (Panaflo L1A series), unobstructed air paths (stamped fan grilles should be cut out!) and rubber-mounted drives (in that order).
Are there also categories for systems administrators?
Like...
Life's Lance Corporal: Makes sure that nobody uses any software or operating system other than that used approved by the CTO. Zealously enforces the use of anti-virus software on every boot. In marketing, his tread is greeted with trembling... in engineering, with stifled laughter.
Just a Sad Bastard: Has such a pathetic life that he needs to reaffirm his own cleverness by making lists categorizing those sheep-like lusers. Not quite competent, but it's too difficult to fire him because he won't tell anyone else the root passwords of the systems he controls.
It's great that IBM has a group that makes sure the company's machines work with Linux. What can that group do to stop irritating practises like the "recovery partition" on the X20? This kind of strategy presumes that nobody will every want to repartition their disk.
The X20 laptop ships with roughly 1G of recovery information (a drive image) in a reserved partition. Including a copy on CD-ROM is not standard! One figure I have heard for the cost of such a CD is $38, if you need to order one from IBM at a later date.
Can you also clarify whether this is the case with the T and A-series machines?
They still haven't addressed the biggest problem with the model -
MY data is one SOMEONE ELSE's machine.
Even if you have a local backup that introduces issues with consistency. And just who is reading your work? Why will people suddenly trust a third party to provide their environment? It didn't work for Sun in the 90s (which although Petreley mentions MS fought, was not a failure because of MS opposition) and it won't work for MS now - in fact this could be the undoing of Microsoft. We have huge, cheap hard drives, great technology like IMAP, and software that works. I can't see the compelling advantage.
How will this kind of scheme avoid the same kind of pitfalls that plague nationalized health schemes? I'm not saying that this is a bad move, only that there is a place for competition, and we all benefit from it. For example, does anyone believe Pac Bell would be selling flat-rate DSL if they weren't being forced to fight for customers by other providers?
The point is that both CD and MP3 sources were played using some good equipment, allowing a superior source (if there was one) to sound better - and to most people they sounded about the same. What I am trying to say is that when someone is not sitting in front of perfectly aligned speakers or using nice cans it is is even less likely that they will tell the difference between CD or MP3.
That person playing tunes while typing in Word is most likely playing either the CD or the MP3 through a Soundblaster... urgh.
A good MP3 doesn't have to be big. The --r3mix option for LAME gives great results using VBR and they're just not that much bigger. Not that size matters much in the days of 30G drives for $100. Flash is also getting bigger and cheaper, it's only a matter of time. I'm puzzled by the emphasis on size when comparing MP3 or Ogg or other codecs, but then again all my MP3s live on big dedicated partitions or the Hango Personal Jukebox.
Please don't take it personally - I wasn't trying to make you out as a foolish "audiophile", but there are plenty out there.
MP3 is not MP3 - you can make good ones and bad ones, and it's easier to make a bad one than a good one, especially if you use many of the commercial all-in-one ripper/encoders. r3mix.net (http://www.r3mix.net if you like cut & paste) has some very interesting analyses of various MP3 codecs, and a link to a series of tests conducted by German magazine C't involving 300 listeners. Bottom line is, at high-enough bitrates most people can't hear the difference between CD and MP3. Now imagine how often people will pick the difference
- in less than ideal listening conditions - like through a Soundblaster card, or even the best "PC Speakers"
- using better options with better encoders (like LAME) (Fraunhofer "high quality" settings can be worse than "low quality"!)
- using the newer "Pro" standard
"But I can always tell the difference!"
Sure you can? Have you had someone prepare good MP3s for you and done a real blind test? Until then you only think you can tell. This is the point where fools stop reading - that is, "audiophiles" who think they know everything. As the Insanely Audiophile story showed, some people just like to spend money regardless of necessity.
"Ogg is better because..."
Great, choose it for your own recordings. The rest of the world, including me, will use what works everywhere - I won't be throwing away my mp3-only portable. I don't actually care how idealogically pure a codec is. Nobody says content protection is to come, only that it is possible. And even if it becomes possible that doesn't mean every MP3 (pro or otherwise) will become protected, only the ones you get from certain sources. If you're interested in creating copies of CDs you own, no problem. If you want to be a pirate, you're SOL and I have no sympathy. Enjoy your Ogg.
Once you accept the quality is there, you may as well make archival-quality MP3s of every CD you have and store those CDs somewhere where they won't take up so much space. Or, keep the CDs close by your CD player and enjoy great sound at work too.
You're right - $5000 can get you great sound. But you can have it for less too. The biggest ticket item in many setups is the speakers. I don't have a house, but an apartment, and there's no room for dedicated listening space and all that triangular arranging. I get superb sound from some mid-range ($3000) components (CD & Amp) and a pair of Sennheiser 600s. Awesome headphones! Comfortable too.
Did you know that there was a guy with a cold in the audience of the Deutsche Grammophon recording of Bernstein conducting Beethoven's 9th in D minor? Neither did I until I got the Sennheisers...
Your choice affects what you will do. Do you like being a tech? Then spend your time being the best you can be. Do you like meetings, buzzwords and ties? An MBA is in your future!
This may look like a joke, but I'm serious. And it isn't intentionally disrespectful to MBAs - I mean they must like that stuff or they wouldn't do it, right? Go with what you like.
AMD isn't behind - in almost every benchmark except Quake, an AMD Athlon 1.4GHz comfortably beats a Pentium IV 1.5GHz. This isn't some Steve Jobs reality-distortion photoshop-only benchmark, this is reality. And if you go further and compare prices, you'd have to be nuts (or an IT manager, or a SMP devotee) to buy PIII or PIV right now.
AMD is well on track to become chipzilla. The Athlon IV (Palomino) will cement its place as number 1 - Intel confusing the market and undermining the PIV with a PIII like this will only hasten their own relegation to second place.
Intoducing artificial competition for it's own sake is ludicrous
So it is. In this case it is necessary because the administration of.org.au is staggeringly inefficient, and costs for other domains are too high.
News corporation is the name of the company
I can walk into an office of the Australian Securities Commission and hand over a form registering my business as "Cars Pty. Ltd." - now what is wrong with me having cars.com.au? The rules for.com.au domains are only useful so long as the rules for business names are the same. It's the same idea that if I get a passport in someone else's name I'm going to have no trouble getting a fake library card too.
I don't think you understand the issues at all. The thing about Australia is, it's a foreign country - don't try to map your knowledge of how things are done in the US. While it works sometimes, it's risky.
Elz is, and always was, a bureaucrat, and never a very efficient one. Yes, he prevented companies from buying up "toothpaste.com.au" (unless of course they could produce a certificate of business registration for Toothpaste Pty. Ltd. - hardly a serious obstacle!) but he also held back Australian business for years. Getting a domain from Elz meant jumping through his arbitrary hoops and then waiting MONTHS for processing. For why? To satisfy one man's ideas about what a revolution that no one man was supposed to own or control.
While we saw a lot of useless or even counter-productive "e-businesses" in Silicon Valley, it is only relatively recently that it has been possible to do something as simple as going to buy "commodity" from "commodity".com.au.
I'm the consumer. I want a service - if I have to use a search engine to send flowers to my Grandmother, or to find a place to buy a network card, what the fuck do I care about Elz' sense of fair play? It does Australia no good (nor the internet as a global entity) if the easiest choice for me to make is to go to pricewatch and from there to some US site that is happy to ship.
You could look at it that way, but you could just as easily look at it as an anti-fraud law.
Whereas some SPAM says "University Degrees!" a lot of it says "have you decided if you're going?" or "are you still mad at me?" or "information you requested". The first two are trying to make me thing the mail comes from a friend, the last is just a blatant lie. All are fraudulent.
Of course all hide their origin, except the ones that can't. I've never used dogdoo.com but I've felt like it, when I got one of those make.money.fast style SPAMs with addresses that were in the white pages.
Did you know that the Apple Cinema Display also works just fine on a PC, or with Linux?
The Hercules Prophet II adapter with DVI out and a DVI monitor are a great combination in Windows or your favorite free OS! Haven't tried a Prophet III yet, but it should work.
Even if you can only get the ADC version (current model) Dr.Bott have an adapter made for people with older G4 Macs that will turn it back into a DVI/USB/Power device. Or, Gefen have a DVI-ADC box that includes the power supply.
Well for a start, Nero comes from ahead.de - and since they're not in the US (.de is Deutschland) I imagine it will be somewhat difficult for US courts and the RIAA to control what they do or publish.
The cost of the board isn't the only problem. For most people hoping to get SMP Athlons this will mean changing to a WTX case and the special power supply mentioned in the articles. Some ATX cases might be big enough, but not many. There's another $3-500 right there.
If some company comes up with a SMP Athlon board no bigger than say, the ABIT VP6 SMP PIII board using a standard ATX power supply that might be the one that sells in volume. But I've not even seen a rumor of an ABIT/ASUS/FIC/Iwill board yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Algorithms in C -- Sedgewick
TAOCP is sometimes overkill. This one is a lot more portable.
("I will call him mini-me!" - Don Knuth)
Yep. Did you get a look at the thin tube steel he made the cart out of? That kind of stuff you can bend over your knee. I'd make a real cart to begin with, or even better get one of those old Honda Odyssey four-wheel RV things (not the new soccer-mom Odyssey - see here) with the full roll cage and work from there.
And his newer verison with the high-mounted engine? Where's the reinforcement? If he's lucky the engine won't bend that tube forward and snap his legs off like a mouse trap. But only if he's lucky.
Don't even get me started on the brakes. OK, he can use a lathe - but machinist != engineer...
That's not so. When a fat chick in stockings walks by you look, right? It's the sound of thighs rubbing :-)
Interesting! I wonder how many CE users will decide that they prefer the Palm interface and how many will feel that their purchase of a CE device is validated when they see the two OSs side-by-side?
To be honest PalmOS is looking a bit dated now, but it still does everything very well. I feel good about it running so nicely on a 16MHz platform.
Nethack is winnable - it's not even that hard. I see it as an exercise in self-control. You have to concentrate on every single move or you will do something stupid, and not all the +3 blessed gray dragon scale mails in Yendor will save you. You could just think of it as good training for life in general. Never stop thinking, because the moment you start hitting keys before you know what they're going to do things go downhill.
It's not chance - Papst fans are marketed as "EBM Industries" here and can be found at Newark Electronics.
Actually the Apple Cube is an example of how not to build a computer without a fan. If you dismantle one (as I did) you'll find a mount for an 80mm fan! It seems like it was designed with a fan in mind and then someone worked out that it would run without one - or else they hoped it would work without a fan but were prepared to be disappointed. I don't think they tested it well enough before release.
Now for the article - basically it sucked. The CPU cooler should have been a Noise Control "Silverado" - check out Tom's Hardware for a comparison showing absolutely silent operation using blower-type fans as well as excellent performance. You have to mail-order it from Germany but it is worth it. The Zalman coolers are cheaper, but very expensive for the performance they give!
Using a SilentDrive enclosure with a 7200RPM drive is a little risky, heat-wise. You can get equivalent results by mounting the hard drives using rubber grommets. Remove the metal-to-metal contact between the drive and the case and you'll be amazed at how much noise you don't hear. I had to make a custom drive cage to fit the grommets in. The drive chassis should still be earthed to the case however, using a wire.
Insulation does not give great improvement over a plain metal case. I went through using DynaMat Extreme for very little gain. Still, now I know.
My experience with the unmodified G4 450MHz Cube was that on warm days (it's only San Francisco!) the Cube would sometimes mysteriously freeze. Dismantling and adding a very quiet 80mm fan solved that problem. Apple almost got it right.
The biggest gains are to use larger diameter fans that run slower (Panaflo L1A series), unobstructed air paths (stamped fan grilles should be cut out!) and rubber-mounted drives (in that order).
Are there also categories for systems administrators?
Like...
Life's Lance Corporal: Makes sure that nobody uses any software or operating system other than that used approved by the CTO. Zealously enforces the use of anti-virus software on every boot. In marketing, his tread is greeted with trembling... in engineering, with stifled laughter.
Just a Sad Bastard: Has such a pathetic life that he needs to reaffirm his own cleverness by making lists categorizing those sheep-like lusers. Not quite competent, but it's too difficult to fire him because he won't tell anyone else the root passwords of the systems he controls.
:-)
Any more?
It's great that IBM has a group that makes sure the company's machines work with Linux. What can that group do to stop irritating practises like the "recovery partition" on the X20? This kind of strategy presumes that nobody will every want to repartition their disk.
The X20 laptop ships with roughly 1G of recovery information (a drive image) in a reserved partition. Including a copy on CD-ROM is not standard! One figure I have heard for the cost of such a CD is $38, if you need to order one from IBM at a later date.
Can you also clarify whether this is the case with the T and A-series machines?
They still haven't addressed the biggest problem with the model -
MY data is one SOMEONE ELSE's machine.
Even if you have a local backup that introduces issues with consistency. And just who is reading your work? Why will people suddenly trust a third party to provide their environment? It didn't work for Sun in the 90s (which although Petreley mentions MS fought, was not a failure because of MS opposition) and it won't work for MS now - in fact this could be the undoing of Microsoft. We have huge, cheap hard drives, great technology like IMAP, and software that works. I can't see the compelling advantage.
How will this kind of scheme avoid the same kind of pitfalls that plague nationalized health schemes? I'm not saying that this is a bad move, only that there is a place for competition, and we all benefit from it. For example, does anyone believe Pac Bell would be selling flat-rate DSL if they weren't being forced to fight for customers by other providers?
I bet he wishes he sold it last August then...
The point is that both CD and MP3 sources were played using some good equipment, allowing a superior source (if there was one) to sound better - and to most people they sounded about the same. What I am trying to say is that when someone is not sitting in front of perfectly aligned speakers or using nice cans it is is even less likely that they will tell the difference between CD or MP3.
That person playing tunes while typing in Word is most likely playing either the CD or the MP3 through a Soundblaster... urgh.
A good MP3 doesn't have to be big. The --r3mix option for LAME gives great results using VBR and they're just not that much bigger. Not that size matters much in the days of 30G drives for $100. Flash is also getting bigger and cheaper, it's only a matter of time. I'm puzzled by the emphasis on size when comparing MP3 or Ogg or other codecs, but then again all my MP3s live on big dedicated partitions or the Hango Personal Jukebox.
Please don't take it personally - I wasn't trying to make you out as a foolish "audiophile", but there are plenty out there.
MP3 is not MP3 - you can make good ones and bad ones, and it's easier to make a bad one than a good one, especially if you use many of the commercial all-in-one ripper/encoders. r3mix.net (http://www.r3mix.net if you like cut & paste) has some very interesting analyses of various MP3 codecs, and a link to a series of tests conducted by German magazine C't involving 300 listeners. Bottom line is, at high-enough bitrates most people can't hear the difference between CD and MP3. Now imagine how often people will pick the difference
- in less than ideal listening conditions - like through a Soundblaster card, or even the best "PC Speakers"
- using better options with better encoders (like LAME) (Fraunhofer "high quality" settings can be worse than "low quality"!)
- using the newer "Pro" standard
"But I can always tell the difference!"
Sure you can? Have you had someone prepare good MP3s for you and done a real blind test? Until then you only think you can tell. This is the point where fools stop reading - that is, "audiophiles" who think they know everything. As the Insanely Audiophile story showed, some people just like to spend money regardless of necessity.
"Ogg is better because..."
Great, choose it for your own recordings. The rest of the world, including me, will use what works everywhere - I won't be throwing away my mp3-only portable. I don't actually care how idealogically pure a codec is. Nobody says content protection is to come, only that it is possible. And even if it becomes possible that doesn't mean every MP3 (pro or otherwise) will become protected, only the ones you get from certain sources. If you're interested in creating copies of CDs you own, no problem. If you want to be a pirate, you're SOL and I have no sympathy. Enjoy your Ogg.
Once you accept the quality is there, you may as well make archival-quality MP3s of every CD you have and store those CDs somewhere where they won't take up so much space. Or, keep the CDs close by your CD player and enjoy great sound at work too.
Give us the details, what were the speakers?
Also, have you heard the MFSL remaster of DSOTM? What do you think?
You're right - $5000 can get you great sound. But you can have it for less too. The biggest ticket item in many setups is the speakers. I don't have a house, but an apartment, and there's no room for dedicated listening space and all that triangular arranging. I get superb sound from some mid-range ($3000) components (CD & Amp) and a pair of Sennheiser 600s. Awesome headphones! Comfortable too.
Did you know that there was a guy with a cold in the audience of the Deutsche Grammophon recording of Bernstein conducting Beethoven's 9th in D minor? Neither did I until I got the Sennheisers...
Your choice affects what you will do. Do you like being a tech? Then spend your time being the best you can be. Do you like meetings, buzzwords and ties? An MBA is in your future!
This may look like a joke, but I'm serious. And it isn't intentionally disrespectful to MBAs - I mean they must like that stuff or they wouldn't do it, right? Go with what you like.
AMD isn't behind - in almost every benchmark except Quake, an AMD Athlon 1.4GHz comfortably beats a Pentium IV 1.5GHz. This isn't some Steve Jobs reality-distortion photoshop-only benchmark, this is reality. And if you go further and compare prices, you'd have to be nuts (or an IT manager, or a SMP devotee) to buy PIII or PIV right now.
AMD is well on track to become chipzilla. The Athlon IV (Palomino) will cement its place as number 1 - Intel confusing the market and undermining the PIV with a PIII like this will only hasten their own relegation to second place.
Intoducing artificial competition for it's own sake is ludicrous
.org.au is staggeringly inefficient, and costs for other domains are too high.
.com.au domains are only useful so long as the rules for business names are the same. It's the same idea that if I get a passport in someone else's name I'm going to have no trouble getting a fake library card too.
So it is. In this case it is necessary because the administration of
News corporation is the name of the company
I can walk into an office of the Australian Securities Commission and hand over a form registering my business as "Cars Pty. Ltd." - now what is wrong with me having cars.com.au? The rules for
I don't think you understand the issues at all. The thing about Australia is, it's a foreign country - don't try to map your knowledge of how things are done in the US. While it works sometimes, it's risky.
Elz is, and always was, a bureaucrat, and never a very efficient one. Yes, he prevented companies from buying up "toothpaste.com.au" (unless of course they could produce a certificate of business registration for Toothpaste Pty. Ltd. - hardly a serious obstacle!) but he also held back Australian business for years. Getting a domain from Elz meant jumping through his arbitrary hoops and then waiting MONTHS for processing. For why? To satisfy one man's ideas about what a revolution that no one man was supposed to own or control.
While we saw a lot of useless or even counter-productive "e-businesses" in Silicon Valley, it is only relatively recently that it has been possible to do something as simple as going to buy "commodity" from "commodity".com.au.
I'm the consumer. I want a service - if I have to use a search engine to send flowers to my Grandmother, or to find a place to buy a network card, what the fuck do I care about Elz' sense of fair play? It does Australia no good (nor the internet as a global entity) if the easiest choice for me to make is to go to pricewatch and from there to some US site that is happy to ship.
You could look at it that way, but you could just as easily look at it as an anti-fraud law.
Whereas some SPAM says "University Degrees!" a lot of it says "have you decided if you're going?" or "are you still mad at me?" or "information you requested". The first two are trying to make me thing the mail comes from a friend, the last is just a blatant lie. All are fraudulent.
Of course all hide their origin, except the ones that can't. I've never used dogdoo.com but I've felt like it, when I got one of those make.money.fast style SPAMs with addresses that were in the white pages.
Did you know that the Apple Cinema Display also works just fine on a PC, or with Linux?
The Hercules Prophet II adapter with DVI out and a DVI monitor are a great combination in Windows or your favorite free OS! Haven't tried a Prophet III yet, but it should work.
Even if you can only get the ADC version (current model) Dr.Bott have an adapter made for people with older G4 Macs that will turn it back into a DVI/USB/Power device. Or, Gefen have a DVI-ADC box that includes the power supply.
RIAA: Listen up. I tried to buy that CD the other day when I have 30 minutes to kill, and could not get it at K-mart.
Sorry Frank, the Taste Police got there before you. In fact, all of Las Vegas is scheduled for removal later this year.
If you must have it and you want an easy way, try amazon or cdnow.
Well for a start, Nero comes from ahead.de - and since they're not in the US (.de is Deutschland) I imagine it will be somewhat difficult for US courts and the RIAA to control what they do or publish.
The cost of the board isn't the only problem. For most people hoping to get SMP Athlons this will mean changing to a WTX case and the special power supply mentioned in the articles. Some ATX cases might be big enough, but not many. There's another $3-500 right there.
If some company comes up with a SMP Athlon board no bigger than say, the ABIT VP6 SMP PIII board using a standard ATX power supply that might be the one that sells in volume. But I've not even seen a rumor of an ABIT/ASUS/FIC/Iwill board yet.