nForce4 chipsets for the Athlon 64's do NOT have integrated graphics, not yet at least. I don't think any of the other chipset mfg's do either. On board video is different on the AMD K8's than other processors, the onchip memory controller is great for the CPU, but it makes shared memory slower for the integrated graphics (ATI has a dedicated frame buffer in this new chipset to more than offset this problem).
So, yes, this ATI chipset could be just the ticket for getting Athlon64's into OEM models - you know, the mass market jobs that corp's tend to buy. Decent video for office apps and good prices, when compared to a system with a separate graphics card.
As another poster has pointed out, the store does not "make" 1500 on her. Retail clothing margins are pretty good, or very,very good if it's a designer label. But, like any retailer, there are a lot of costs involved, staff, utilities, rent, etc. But worse than, say, an electronics or furniture store, the inventory is metaphorically perishable - it's fashion - to the non-/. world, clothes aren't worth much in inventory after one season (about 4 months if you're lucky).
You are right, returns are to be expected. Unlike another poster, they are not required by law. AFAIK, the laws generally say that you must sell and provide functional merchandise that will last a reasonable amount of time. Buying and then trying to return an item because (very loose paraphrase of article) "I was stupid and bought a coat that that looks just like the one I already have at home" is not a good reason for a return. Now, no retailer will completely refuse returns, any retailer like that won't be one for long if the policies are too tight, however, there are limits.
For that matter, there are many business where you have to be picky about customers. In technology, you can have consulting clients that nitpick for hours over minor details, software users who refuse to read manuals or upgrade from unsupported operating systems, etc.
At the end of the day, a few customers will fall through the cracks in any policy. It happens. Really, if she was that "good" of a customer, the staff would probably recognize her as such, and have overridden any flag on her account - since they didn't, I suspect we're only getting the shoppers side of the story.
I would hope that any 1 year old in CS would know this kind of stuff. I would also hope that that one year old would find better things to do than learn how to do another "Hello World" program... like try to save the world or something. =)
I second this idea. It's easy. Probably quicker than a Linux solution. Possibly more featureful and reliable - I don't know how feature compatible rdesktop is with MS's client, but I would guess that it can't map local printers or do stream sound.
More importantly, it sidesteps the problems of drivers! Granted, this won't be a big deal if they are all identical, all plug and play hardware. It depends on the gear, P133's are right around the time when plug and play finally started working properly for PCI.
FWIW, LiveCD's tend to require a lot of ram for the disc cache. Plus they're slower to boot. You'll probably be best with something that installs (Ghosts!) to the HD.
I'm sitting in front of a late 70's Kenwood amp and some similarly aged 7 inch speakers. They're older than I am, yet they sound much better than most computer speakers I find at the houses of friends and family. They should sound decent, since they cost more than my entire computer in inflation adjusted dollars! Let's face it, regular amplifier and speaker technology hasn't really changed that much over the years.
I'm sure at the higher end of PC sound systems, things are different, but in the low and medium ranges, old fashioned amps and speakers work just fine.
FWIW, my amp does double duty as a good monitor stand. Plus, I like having a real metal case rather than more plastic on my desk.
IANA Design Engineer, but I would guess that knockoffs wouldn't be that big of a problem. I think that most of the driver work is done by the chipset manufacturer. OEM's don't need to do a whole lot of customization - hence the million and one nVidia video card brands that are available. For instance, I've seen some devices get all of their branding from an.ini file that comes with the install file. Since the Chinese mfg's still need to buy a chipset, and the chipset guys are the primary targets for the driver release (I think), I don't see too much of a problem.
I highly doubt that this has anything to do with security. It's all about price, and MS making sure that just in case these little things take off, Linux won't on them.
The cheapest WinXP for OEM's like Dell is probably ~$50 (hand waving). A friend of mine who develops POS software once mentioned that they were looking at WinCE licenses. They were only a few bucks per device. Yes, OSS would be "cheaper", but WinCE isn't particularly expensive.
As far as "slow", these newer Geode processors now run on the good ol'Athlon core (I think). For 'net and office apps, 366MHz is plenty.
Personally, I'd find a way to drop the hard drive off the parts list - that's probably the most expensive and failure prone part of this thing. You could probably squeeze WinCE plus a Works suite into 256MB flash. Use small thumb drives for work files.
What if a single State decided to dedicate one of their seats to the random draw? IIRC, the individual States have a lot of authority over how elections are run. Would you need a constitutional ammendment if a few states wanted to implement something like this? FWIW, I find the idea of a random draw for a seat very interesting.
Please excuse any gross misunderstandings, being a Canadian, my US political knowledge is a shade weak.
I know nothing about how much money, time and resources are required to design a graphics card or layout an FPGA. However, my uneducated initial reaction is that this would be very tough to pull off financially. I'm afraid that most of the posts on/. and KernelTrap aren't particularly enlightening either. The variations on "if it's cheap and plays Doom III", and "I'll buy one, maybe two, then another one in 3 years" really aren't helping to make a business decision.
My view, is if there were ways to play off the FPGA and the openness angles to find some niche markets that could foot the development bill and provide some manufacturing volume, there might be a way to pull this off. Later, as the design improves, the bill of materials goes down with volume, and Moore's Law helps performance, the design will make more sense for more and more mainstream markets.
What niches? Well, I don't know. A semi-cheap, semi-standard way to get an FPGA must be useful for someone. Maybe include special video processing functions that enable dirt cheap embedded CPU's to do motion detection? Maybe an all purpose, programable co-processor for HPC apps that happens to render a GUI as well?
Where does the cross platformness that a fully open source driver and known design have the most benefit? Heavy industrial tools? Science? Interactive TV? Security? My bet is on some sort of embedded market.
Then there are creative financing options that might be useful, things like preorders, sponsorships, bounties. Maybe not starting with a fully open license, i.e. split out the driver core like nVidia, but have a contract with someone like the FSF to open source the complete driver when a certain volume has been achieved.
I use both UltraVNC and RealVNC at work and around the house.
UltraVNC is miles ahead of the others when used with the video driver on Windows on a broadband or better connection. It is smooth, very usable for most office applications. Personally, I find file transfer to be useful too. The client side has some nice GUI touches for fullscreen mode - a little control bar that is very similar to the one in Remote Desktop.
On the other hand, RealVNC is the "gold standard". The stable releases are extremely stable. Of note, in version 4, there is a nice GUI for limiting remote access by IP address.
It is worth emphasizing that there is a vast difference between RealVNC on Linux and on Windows. Because of the nature of OSS, on Linux, VNC doesn't need to screen scrape. On Windows, w/o a special video driver (a la UltraVNC), VNC is generally stuck with a high-tech version of screen scapeing - it's slow, innacurate, and generally unpleasant for "work", but still incredibly valuable for the flexibilty of remote access.
Moz works fine. Whatever version of Moz was current about a year ago (when I started w/AdSense) also worked. FWIW, Adwords works fine too.
I don't think AdSense uses popups - at least I don't get any. Possibly an overly conservative cookie permissions? But that would affect IE too, all other things being equal.
My home province, British Columbia, Canada, is currently going through a unique, citizen based review of our provincial electoral process. About 160 people were chosen randomly from the either the voters or the residents list (I can't recall which) to take part in debates and forums which will lead to recommendations on how we elect our provincial reps. I think that these recommendations will then feed directly into a referrandum by the general population.
We currently use a first-past-the-post system for our provincial elections, just like most (?) US elections. The early feedback from the group pretty much rejects FPTP as an fully representative and ideal system. It looks like BC will sooner or later have a referrandum to switch to either a Single Transferable Votes or a "mixed" format of elections. True, there are many cynics who doubt that politicians will allow the recommendations to ever be followed through to a vote or law. However, whether they are or not, it's quite an interesting experiment.
Again, these are regular folks with regular jobs, not academics and not politicians.
No need to go to orbit. You just need to head to international waters (~200 miles). Outside of various international treaties, it's pretty much a free for all. Though, IANAL also...
Just a guess, how about a half-gig of RAM?
There had to be some sort of upper and lower limits to how much hard drive space a game was allowed use on an Xbox? Perhaps the lower limit is now in the realm of what would be reasonable with cheap (i.e. last generation) RAM?
IMHO, the reason port forwarding is important, is that a big percentage of P2P users do not have ports forwarded. eMule and BT, like most other programs can NOT establish connections between two users who are behind NAT's without port forwards. There are tricks like sending coordinated UDP packets to each others router, but that's a bad hack that is increasingly unusable as routers get more secure in their default modes. Also, there is Universal Plug and Play, but I don't have much experience with that. Anyway, take control of your half of the connection, and you will gain the ability to share files with everyone and generally get stuff faster.
FWIW, I think eMule and BT are both excellent. BT for really quick releases; eMule for older, libraries of files.
I was about to post this question "Can retail stores, radio stations, and other groups that buy for-profit broadcast rights use stuff downloaded from these online vendords?"
Reading the parent post, it seems like the answer is "Yes". Remember, KCTL is a radio station - they're paying royalties annually through some sort of professional license. Similarly, stores that play RIAA owned music are supposed to buy licenses as well - ~ CAD 40/mo in Canada. I don't think RIAA cares how they get the "media" so to speak.
Whether or not the Russian site is illegal for non-Russians who "import" the music over the Internet... I have no idea, nor am I a lawyer.
Do you get that little pop up about "not enough virtual memory, increasing swap file size" or something to that effect? Once you're past the minimum virtual memory size, Windows does something to increase the swap file size.
I haven't properly tested or researched this, so YMMV, but several times now, that process has slowed my PC to a crawl - during AND after the increase.
Though, that shouldn't have anything to do with a disk defrag...
Well there are only a half-dozen or so chipset manufacturers. So, it wouldn't be that unreasonable for a bug in one device to be present in another.
On a related note, I heard a rumor that some newer DVDs took advantage few different chipset fact and sent bad firmware updates to disable devices that were not properly licensed (i.e. region free) - take this with a big grain of salt...
It's not quite what you are asking for, but parity files are great. PAR's have become a mandatory part of USENET binary groups. Plus, the crazy-magic math that is involved in PARs to recreate missing chunks of files can do wonders with damaged media - particularly the newer PAR2 algorithms. I run my little home data backups through it, and I feel pretty comfortable with it.
Somewhere there is webpage and graphics of someone testing PAR2 data recovery by using a felt pen to blot out chunks of a CD, and then recovering it with some sort of ISO maker plus the PAR software. I can't find the link, unfortunately.
the PAR site
I just signed up for a VPS account a few days ago. It's FAR more power than I really need for my web hosting, so I was planning to setup a little Linux VNC login for myself. This would be great since most of the time I'm sitting in front of a Windows box, so I can get the best of both worlds. NX would be even better, though I doubt that I would be able to burn through my 50GB of traffic allotment with VNC...
Yep. I use g4u every now and then. It's great because it's so simple. An FTP server is trivial to setup on any platform (try FileZilla Server if you're on Windows) and the little boot disk supports the vast majority of network cards. I tried the Knoppix thing once, but I got frustrated trying to get Samba working... I can't remember the exact problem, just that it wasn't worth playing around with it.
I'm pretty sure it's not $20. You'll note that on your 2nd link, it states:
2. Royalties of 4%, with a minimum royalty of US $4, will be charged for a DVD-Video player, DVD-ROM drive, DVD-Audio player, or DVD-Multi player, or any combination thereof.
Which with todays manufacturing costs, effectively means that the royalties are at the minimum $4 USD level - which happens to correspond to what others with some knowledge of such things have told me in the past.
How "important" in the grand Hubble scheme of things is this particular imaging device? I assume there are other tools on board Hubble that are still functional, i.e. Hubble isn't space junk yet.
Slashdot Mirror
nForce4 chipsets for the Athlon 64's do NOT have integrated graphics, not yet at least. I don't think any of the other chipset mfg's do either. On board video is different on the AMD K8's than other processors, the onchip memory controller is great for the CPU, but it makes shared memory slower for the integrated graphics (ATI has a dedicated frame buffer in this new chipset to more than offset this problem).
So, yes, this ATI chipset could be just the ticket for getting Athlon64's into OEM models - you know, the mass market jobs that corp's tend to buy. Decent video for office apps and good prices, when compared to a system with a separate graphics card.
As another poster has pointed out, the store does not "make" 1500 on her. Retail clothing margins are pretty good, or very,very good if it's a designer label. But, like any retailer, there are a lot of costs involved, staff, utilities, rent, etc. But worse than, say, an electronics or furniture store, the inventory is metaphorically perishable - it's fashion - to the non-/. world, clothes aren't worth much in inventory after one season (about 4 months if you're lucky).
You are right, returns are to be expected. Unlike another poster, they are not required by law. AFAIK, the laws generally say that you must sell and provide functional merchandise that will last a reasonable amount of time. Buying and then trying to return an item because (very loose paraphrase of article) "I was stupid and bought a coat that that looks just like the one I already have at home" is not a good reason for a return. Now, no retailer will completely refuse returns, any retailer like that won't be one for long if the policies are too tight, however, there are limits.
For that matter, there are many business where you have to be picky about customers. In technology, you can have consulting clients that nitpick for hours over minor details, software users who refuse to read manuals or upgrade from unsupported operating systems, etc.
At the end of the day, a few customers will fall through the cracks in any policy. It happens. Really, if she was that "good" of a customer, the staff would probably recognize her as such, and have overridden any flag on her account - since they didn't, I suspect we're only getting the shoppers side of the story.
I would hope that any 1 year old in CS would know this kind of stuff. I would also hope that that one year old would find better things to do than learn how to do another "Hello World" program... like try to save the world or something. =)
I second this idea. It's easy. Probably quicker than a Linux solution. Possibly more featureful and reliable - I don't know how feature compatible rdesktop is with MS's client, but I would guess that it can't map local printers or do stream sound.
More importantly, it sidesteps the problems of drivers! Granted, this won't be a big deal if they are all identical, all plug and play hardware. It depends on the gear, P133's are right around the time when plug and play finally started working properly for PCI.
FWIW, LiveCD's tend to require a lot of ram for the disc cache. Plus they're slower to boot. You'll probably be best with something that installs (Ghosts!) to the HD.
I agree!
I'm sitting in front of a late 70's Kenwood amp and some similarly aged 7 inch speakers. They're older than I am, yet they sound much better than most computer speakers I find at the houses of friends and family. They should sound decent, since they cost more than my entire computer in inflation adjusted dollars! Let's face it, regular amplifier and speaker technology hasn't really changed that much over the years.
I'm sure at the higher end of PC sound systems, things are different, but in the low and medium ranges, old fashioned amps and speakers work just fine.
FWIW, my amp does double duty as a good monitor stand. Plus, I like having a real metal case rather than more plastic on my desk.
IANA Design Engineer, but I would guess that knockoffs wouldn't be that big of a problem. I think that most of the driver work is done by the chipset manufacturer. OEM's don't need to do a whole lot of customization - hence the million and one nVidia video card brands that are available. For instance, I've seen some devices get all of their branding from an .ini file that comes with the install file. Since the Chinese mfg's still need to buy a chipset, and the chipset guys are the primary targets for the driver release (I think), I don't see too much of a problem.
I highly doubt that this has anything to do with security. It's all about price, and MS making sure that just in case these little things take off, Linux won't on them.
The cheapest WinXP for OEM's like Dell is probably ~$50 (hand waving). A friend of mine who develops POS software once mentioned that they were looking at WinCE licenses. They were only a few bucks per device. Yes, OSS would be "cheaper", but WinCE isn't particularly expensive.
As far as "slow", these newer Geode processors now run on the good ol'Athlon core (I think). For 'net and office apps, 366MHz is plenty.
Personally, I'd find a way to drop the hard drive off the parts list - that's probably the most expensive and failure prone part of this thing. You could probably squeeze WinCE plus a Works suite into 256MB flash. Use small thumb drives for work files.
What if a single State decided to dedicate one of their seats to the random draw? IIRC, the individual States have a lot of authority over how elections are run. Would you need a constitutional ammendment if a few states wanted to implement something like this? FWIW, I find the idea of a random draw for a seat very interesting.
Please excuse any gross misunderstandings, being a Canadian, my US political knowledge is a shade weak.
I know nothing about how much money, time and resources are required to design a graphics card or layout an FPGA. However, my uneducated initial reaction is that this would be very tough to pull off financially. I'm afraid that most of the posts on /. and KernelTrap aren't particularly enlightening either. The variations on "if it's cheap and plays Doom III", and "I'll buy one, maybe two, then another one in 3 years" really aren't helping to make a business decision.
My view, is if there were ways to play off the FPGA and the openness angles to find some niche markets that could foot the development bill and provide some manufacturing volume, there might be a way to pull this off. Later, as the design improves, the bill of materials goes down with volume, and Moore's Law helps performance, the design will make more sense for more and more mainstream markets.
What niches? Well, I don't know. A semi-cheap, semi-standard way to get an FPGA must be useful for someone. Maybe include special video processing functions that enable dirt cheap embedded CPU's to do motion detection? Maybe an all purpose, programable co-processor for HPC apps that happens to render a GUI as well?
Where does the cross platformness that a fully open source driver and known design have the most benefit? Heavy industrial tools? Science? Interactive TV? Security? My bet is on some sort of embedded market.
Then there are creative financing options that might be useful, things like preorders, sponsorships, bounties. Maybe not starting with a fully open license, i.e. split out the driver core like nVidia, but have a contract with someone like the FSF to open source the complete driver when a certain volume has been achieved.
Anyway, I've probably done enough uneducated rambling...
I use both UltraVNC and RealVNC at work and around the house.
UltraVNC is miles ahead of the others when used with the video driver on Windows on a broadband or better connection. It is smooth, very usable for most office applications. Personally, I find file transfer to be useful too. The client side has some nice GUI touches for fullscreen mode - a little control bar that is very similar to the one in Remote Desktop.
On the other hand, RealVNC is the "gold standard". The stable releases are extremely stable. Of note, in version 4, there is a nice GUI for limiting remote access by IP address.
It is worth emphasizing that there is a vast difference between RealVNC on Linux and on Windows. Because of the nature of OSS, on Linux, VNC doesn't need to screen scrape. On Windows, w/o a special video driver (a la UltraVNC), VNC is generally stuck with a high-tech version of screen scapeing - it's slow, innacurate, and generally unpleasant for "work", but still incredibly valuable for the flexibilty of remote access.
Personally, I'd like to use any old cheap USB keyboard! (OK, it wouldn't be that portable, but still... for occational use it would be good).
Moz works fine. Whatever version of Moz was current about a year ago (when I started w/AdSense) also worked. FWIW, Adwords works fine too.
I don't think AdSense uses popups - at least I don't get any. Possibly an overly conservative cookie permissions? But that would affect IE too, all other things being equal.
My home province, British Columbia, Canada, is currently going through a unique, citizen based review of our provincial electoral process. About 160 people were chosen randomly from the either the voters or the residents list (I can't recall which) to take part in debates and forums which will lead to recommendations on how we elect our provincial reps. I think that these recommendations will then feed directly into a referrandum by the general population.
We currently use a first-past-the-post system for our provincial elections, just like most (?) US elections. The early feedback from the group pretty much rejects FPTP as an fully representative and ideal system. It looks like BC will sooner or later have a referrandum to switch to either a Single Transferable Votes or a "mixed" format of elections. True, there are many cynics who doubt that politicians will allow the recommendations to ever be followed through to a vote or law. However, whether they are or not, it's quite an interesting experiment.
Again, these are regular folks with regular jobs, not academics and not politicians.
Some info: Citizens Assembly
Anyone know if this exploit can be done when the user is using a Windows Limited account?
No need to go to orbit. You just need to head to international waters (~200 miles). Outside of various international treaties, it's pretty much a free for all.
Though, IANAL also...
Just a guess, how about a half-gig of RAM?
There had to be some sort of upper and lower limits to how much hard drive space a game was allowed use on an Xbox? Perhaps the lower limit is now in the realm of what would be reasonable with cheap (i.e. last generation) RAM?
IMHO, the reason port forwarding is important, is that a big percentage of P2P users do not have ports forwarded. eMule and BT, like most other programs can NOT establish connections between two users who are behind NAT's without port forwards. There are tricks like sending coordinated UDP packets to each others router, but that's a bad hack that is increasingly unusable as routers get more secure in their default modes. Also, there is Universal Plug and Play, but I don't have much experience with that.
Anyway, take control of your half of the connection, and you will gain the ability to share files with everyone and generally get stuff faster.
FWIW, I think eMule and BT are both excellent. BT for really quick releases; eMule for older, libraries of files.
I was about to post this question "Can retail stores, radio stations, and other groups that buy for-profit broadcast rights use stuff downloaded from these online vendords?"
Reading the parent post, it seems like the answer is "Yes". Remember, KCTL is a radio station - they're paying royalties annually through some sort of professional license. Similarly, stores that play RIAA owned music are supposed to buy licenses as well - ~ CAD 40/mo in Canada. I don't think RIAA cares how they get the "media" so to speak.
Whether or not the Russian site is illegal for non-Russians who "import" the music over the Internet... I have no idea, nor am I a lawyer.
Do you get that little pop up about "not enough virtual memory, increasing swap file size" or something to that effect? Once you're past the minimum virtual memory size, Windows does something to increase the swap file size.
I haven't properly tested or researched this, so YMMV, but several times now, that process has slowed my PC to a crawl - during AND after the increase.
Though, that shouldn't have anything to do with a disk defrag...
Well there are only a half-dozen or so chipset manufacturers. So, it wouldn't be that unreasonable for a bug in one device to be present in another.
On a related note, I heard a rumor that some newer DVDs took advantage few different chipset fact and sent bad firmware updates to disable devices that were not properly licensed (i.e. region free) - take this with a big grain of salt...
It's not quite what you are asking for, but parity files are great. PAR's have become a mandatory part of USENET binary groups. Plus, the crazy-magic math that is involved in PARs to recreate missing chunks of files can do wonders with damaged media - particularly the newer PAR2 algorithms. I run my little home data backups through it, and I feel pretty comfortable with it.
Somewhere there is webpage and graphics of someone testing PAR2 data recovery by using a felt pen to blot out chunks of a CD, and then recovering it with some sort of ISO maker plus the PAR software. I can't find the link, unfortunately.
the PAR site
I just signed up for a VPS account a few days ago. It's FAR more power than I really need for my web hosting, so I was planning to setup a little Linux VNC login for myself. This would be great since most of the time I'm sitting in front of a Windows box, so I can get the best of both worlds. NX would be even better, though I doubt that I would be able to burn through my 50GB of traffic allotment with VNC...
Yep. I use g4u every now and then. It's great because it's so simple. An FTP server is trivial to setup on any platform (try FileZilla Server if you're on Windows) and the little boot disk supports the vast majority of network cards. I tried the Knoppix thing once, but I got frustrated trying to get Samba working... I can't remember the exact problem, just that it wasn't worth playing around with it.
How "important" in the grand Hubble scheme of things is this particular imaging device? I assume there are other tools on board Hubble that are still functional, i.e. Hubble isn't space junk yet.