Compaq will not sell me an Alpha. I checked to make sure I wasn't on a list of known terrorists or something, but I still couldn't get one. I don't think Compaq wants to deal with individuals and small businesses, only giant government entities that buy in lots of 1000.
I've emailed their sales people, I've called their sales people, and I've filled out forms on the web. I have never, ever, not ever once been called or emailed by a Compaq sales person. I even once decided to lie and say I was interested in buying a loaded 4-way 833MHz ES-40, and I *still* didn't get anyone to call or email. I guess I would have bought four or five Compaqs by now for the businesses I've been buying for, if their sales people were alive, but instead we have all Intel stuff from VA.
I know you can get Alphas from API and others (not to mention Ebay), but WTF is up with Compaq? Are they just carrying the long DEC tradition of not actually selling anything?
I know you said "other than a Multia", but the Multia can be perfect if all you want is a taste of the architecture. For example, if you wish to simply learn to program Alpha assembly, you can pick up a Multia for under $100 and teach yourself. Those assembly optimizations will be more appreciated on the underpowered Multia:)
Also, the Multia makes an amazingly capable network appliance. Because of its 1 PCI and 2 PCMCIA slots, and its external SCSI bus, you can hang several networks and a lot of storage off of it, and use it to do almost everything. I had one hooked up to two ethernet segments and one wireless ethernet segment (via the PCMCIA slot), routing, NATing, and firewalling all of that traffic across a T1 line, and hosting the DNS, email, web, LDAP, and file service for a small company. Not bad for a machine I bought for $200!
Of course, the Multia is quite slow. It requires hours to compile the kernel. But as a first Alpha, it is a good choice.
God DAMN you are FUCKING BRILLIANT. Read the article and note that this is exactly what they are ALREADY DOING. There might still be time for you to GET A PATENT, though.
I don't see how you can draw that conclusion. My desktop computer has a 300W power supply, and four separate power supplies in its peripheral devices. My monitor consumes 140W, or more depending on how many USB peripherals are plugged in. Meanwhile, my VA Linux 1220 servers, fully loaded with CPUs, RAM, and hard drives, has a maximum power consumption of only 220W. Of course no monitor is ever attached.
I seriously doubt that servers use as much power as desktops. Even a decked out Compaq ES40 with 4 CPUs, 4 GB of RAM, and 12 disk drives has a maximum power consumption of only 1440W, and that machine could probably run thousands of regular web sites, mail for 1 million people, or an entire large internet business.
Good question, and I've been trying to find enough tech specs on the PBG4Ti to answer the question. The Apple comes with a 50Wh battery, while the Compaq Armada M700 comes with a 47.4Wh battery. Apple claims a battery life of five hours on a machine with a built-in DVD drive, 128 MB RAM, and a 15-inch display. Compaq claims 2.3 hours battery life with only the hard drive, 64 MB RAM, and a 14.1-inch display. I think a reasonably conclusion is that the Apple uses roughly half the power of the Compaq, if we assume that both companies are lying to the same degree.
Meanwhile, my Vaio PCG-Z505HS, which I am gladly rid of, ate its battery in 1 hour or less, with 128 MB of RAM, a 12.1" display, and no drives attached. Sony claims 1-2 hours battery life.
Looks like one allegation is that the underwriter illegally inflated the opening price of the stock. The irony here is that many of the people who participated in the IPO, a portion of whom were open-source contributors who were given a few hundred shares each, benefitted enormously by purchasing the stock at the IPO price, and selling it immediately at or near $300. It was a nice windfall for a lot of hackers that was apparently the result of some illegal back-room banking.
I sympathize with your views that these things are wasteful. I don't know why they can't just make the case out of a more common metal, or a plastic. I believe that they just think titanium looks neat-o, so they use it. Some people are wasteful.
However I think you are way off the mark on your power comments. The PowerBook and most other laptops practically sip electrical power. That is, they don't use a significant amount. If you want to go off on someone, try your neighbor who leaves the lights all over his house and his television on all the time, your friend who runs his dishwashing machine half-empty, the guy with the RWD Canyonero that contains more metal than 100,000,000 PowerBooks ever will, and people who hose off their driveway instead of using a broom. I think you can find a more worthy inefficiency target than people who use PowerBook computers.
Your thinkpad a21p also weighs 7.5 pounds, and does not have built-in ethernet. I love my built-in ethernet on my Vaio z505. Ethernet is rpetty much required these days: anyone who doesn't have it built into their laptop computer is going to have to shell out for a cardbus card to get it. The PowerBook (and the vaio) are also jammed full of industry-standard ports like infrared, ieee-1394, and USB.
Eh, those of us who use Unix with XFree86 can just use the program "xclipboard" to create arbitrary numbers of different clipboards, save their content to disk, and edit them in place before pasting.
You can see the giant case fan in this shot:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/media/313.jpg
Bet it makes a ton of noise. Will people really use this thing for watching DVD movies, if it has a whirring fan on all the time? I can hear the transport motors in my oldest CD player, and it bugs the hell out of me. Home theater gear with fans would drive me berserk.
Re:Freedom to innovate... new interfaces?
on
First Looks At XBox
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· Score: 2
Wow that's even more stupid than I expected. I cannot think of a single advantage to a USB port with a non-standard physical connector. I guess they don't wan't people making a knock-off Xbaux? But some Taiwanese company will start making USBXbox physical adapters for $0.85, and whatever reason they could possibly have had for using non-standard connectors will be moot.
I think the hard drive in this console is a really truly bad idea. After that box gets yanked off the top of the TV once or forty times, the hard drive is going to stop working. These boxes aren't targetted at the same people who buy laptop computers, and they shouldn't be built like laptop computers.
Oh, it's much worse than that at Hunter's Point, San Francisco. The Navy just this week announced it's plans to completely clean up the radioactive waste at the site. Nobody had ever heard the first thing about there being radioactive waste there before.
Re:Will GTK become Yet Another X?
on
GTK+ without X!
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· Score: 2
You understated it. X runs perfectly well on my pentium 60, as well as my Multia, the ass-slowest Alpha machine you can buy. X is even acceptable on my AT&T Safari laptop (386sx-20), after the swapping is over. I don't know why people complain about X being bloated/slow/whatever. It certainly runs on hadrware I wouldn't dare to load Windows 2000 on.
Great, GCC with Altivec code. When I was running LinuxPPC 2000 on a G4, I was told that Linux couldn't use the Altivec unit because the kernel didn't understand how to save and restore the registers properly. Is this fixed, if so in what kernel revision, and if not, how does an Altivec-aware GCC help Linux?
The local police already have this capability, as part of their frightening arms build-up of the 1990s. Certain large cities (L.A., etc.) have a low-power EMP weapon which is on what amounts to a very fast electric radio-controlled car. The theory is that, during a car chase, the RC car is run up under the criminal's engine bay and the EMP weapon is fired, disabling the ignition system. I don't know if this has ever actually been used.
So, if you are a criminal, get a low-rider with mechanical distributor ignition:)
Let me be more specific. According to my manuals, the RAMDAC on the Millenium II is 250 MHz, while the RAMDAC on the second head of the G400 is only 135MHz. The main RAMDAC of the G400 is 360 MHz.
This means that the best mode I could get from the second head of the G400 with a vertical refresh > 70Hz would be 1360x1020. The Millenium II can do 1800x1350, giving me 75% more pixels on the screen. Thanks to whoever wrote this modeline calculator.
I have the multihead model, but I haven't tried to use both outputs. My understanding is that the second head of the G400 1) can only be used with the Matrox binary drivers, and 2) won't acheive the resolution and refresh that I desire. I don't mind burning a PCI slot for the trusty Millenium II.
I agree. I use a G400 with a Millenium II PCI in a dual-head configuration. These cards are completely supported, from 2d to multi-head, to direct 3d rendering. As a bonus, the Matrox cards are the only cards with hardware acceleration for the Render extension in XFree86 4.0.2.
I'm getting pretty tired of programmers claiming that their time is worth more than CPU power. A CPU is a magnificent human achievement, and each one is the result of millions of hours spent by engineers electrical and mechnical, mathematicians, technicians, and line laborers to bring you the power of using the most inefficient RPC mechanism ever devised. The amount of human effort required to make a fast CPU is orders of magnitude larger than the marginal effort expended to understand CORBA as well as SOAP.
Doing more with less is a good philosophy for a sustainable human existance. SOAP is the opposite. SOAP does the same shit and uses more resources in the process.
Think for a minute on my point. What if you could reduce the number of computers in use in the world by half, and along with that reduce the amount of energy and human effort needed to design, build, and operate those computers, simply by using more efficient software? Would that still pale next to the awesome value of your personal time?
On what horribly broken network are your CORBA calls taking 100ms? Across the public internet at peak time, perhaps, but with CORBA calls using OmniORB on a 100mbps local network I get echo responses in about 1ms.
Soap uses HTTP to send XML-encoded instance and method calls on remotely defined objects and receive return values
The above is what turns me off of SOAP, XML-RPC, and the like. The actual implementation is impossibly inefficient. To make a SOAP call, one's software must build an XML document and an HTTP request, and send them together. To handle a SOAP request, the software must not only handle the HTTP protocol, but also build a DOM tree from the request body and act on the nodes of that tree. This is a serious abuse of CPU power, and not the way to build a performant system.
I like systems that are easy for programmers, but I also like those systems to have advanced, efficient, performant implementations. The two goals need not conflict.
Look at the build ID on the Mozilla screenshot. The build of Mozilla they are using is from October 10, 2000. It is probably the M18 release of Mozilla. Any Mozilla follower will tell you that today's release is light years ahead of M18, and even NN 6.0.
Slashdot Mirror
I've emailed their sales people, I've called their sales people, and I've filled out forms on the web. I have never, ever, not ever once been called or emailed by a Compaq sales person. I even once decided to lie and say I was interested in buying a loaded 4-way 833MHz ES-40, and I *still* didn't get anyone to call or email. I guess I would have bought four or five Compaqs by now for the businesses I've been buying for, if their sales people were alive, but instead we have all Intel stuff from VA.
I know you can get Alphas from API and others (not to mention Ebay), but WTF is up with Compaq? Are they just carrying the long DEC tradition of not actually selling anything?
Also, the Multia makes an amazingly capable network appliance. Because of its 1 PCI and 2 PCMCIA slots, and its external SCSI bus, you can hang several networks and a lot of storage off of it, and use it to do almost everything. I had one hooked up to two ethernet segments and one wireless ethernet segment (via the PCMCIA slot), routing, NATing, and firewalling all of that traffic across a T1 line, and hosting the DNS, email, web, LDAP, and file service for a small company. Not bad for a machine I bought for $200!
Of course, the Multia is quite slow. It requires hours to compile the kernel. But as a first Alpha, it is a good choice.
God DAMN you are FUCKING BRILLIANT. Read the article and note that this is exactly what they are ALREADY DOING. There might still be time for you to GET A PATENT, though.
You can use the GNU tools to make a .so from the .a
I seriously doubt that servers use as much power as desktops. Even a decked out Compaq ES40 with 4 CPUs, 4 GB of RAM, and 12 disk drives has a maximum power consumption of only 1440W, and that machine could probably run thousands of regular web sites, mail for 1 million people, or an entire large internet business.
Meanwhile, my Vaio PCG-Z505HS, which I am gladly rid of, ate its battery in 1 hour or less, with 128 MB of RAM, a 12.1" display, and no drives attached. Sony claims 1-2 hours battery life.
Nukes and most other weapons won't arm until they are either 1) reasonably close to their target, or 2) reasonably far from the launch site.
Looks like one allegation is that the underwriter illegally inflated the opening price of the stock. The irony here is that many of the people who participated in the IPO, a portion of whom were open-source contributors who were given a few hundred shares each, benefitted enormously by purchasing the stock at the IPO price, and selling it immediately at or near $300. It was a nice windfall for a lot of hackers that was apparently the result of some illegal back-room banking.
However I think you are way off the mark on your power comments. The PowerBook and most other laptops practically sip electrical power. That is, they don't use a significant amount. If you want to go off on someone, try your neighbor who leaves the lights all over his house and his television on all the time, your friend who runs his dishwashing machine half-empty, the guy with the RWD Canyonero that contains more metal than 100,000,000 PowerBooks ever will, and people who hose off their driveway instead of using a broom. I think you can find a more worthy inefficiency target than people who use PowerBook computers.
Your thinkpad a21p also weighs 7.5 pounds, and does not have built-in ethernet. I love my built-in ethernet on my Vaio z505. Ethernet is rpetty much required these days: anyone who doesn't have it built into their laptop computer is going to have to shell out for a cardbus card to get it. The PowerBook (and the vaio) are also jammed full of industry-standard ports like infrared, ieee-1394, and USB.
Eh, those of us who use Unix with XFree86 can just use the program "xclipboard" to create arbitrary numbers of different clipboards, save their content to disk, and edit them in place before pasting.
You can see the giant case fan in this shot: http://www.theregister.co.uk/media/313.jpg Bet it makes a ton of noise. Will people really use this thing for watching DVD movies, if it has a whirring fan on all the time? I can hear the transport motors in my oldest CD player, and it bugs the hell out of me. Home theater gear with fans would drive me berserk.
Wow that's even more stupid than I expected. I cannot think of a single advantage to a USB port with a non-standard physical connector. I guess they don't wan't people making a knock-off Xbaux? But some Taiwanese company will start making USBXbox physical adapters for $0.85, and whatever reason they could possibly have had for using non-standard connectors will be moot.
I think the hard drive in this console is a really truly bad idea. After that box gets yanked off the top of the TV once or forty times, the hard drive is going to stop working. These boxes aren't targetted at the same people who buy laptop computers, and they shouldn't be built like laptop computers.
Full story here
You understated it. X runs perfectly well on my pentium 60, as well as my Multia, the ass-slowest Alpha machine you can buy. X is even acceptable on my AT&T Safari laptop (386sx-20), after the swapping is over. I don't know why people complain about X being bloated/slow/whatever. It certainly runs on hadrware I wouldn't dare to load Windows 2000 on.
Great, GCC with Altivec code. When I was running LinuxPPC 2000 on a G4, I was told that Linux couldn't use the Altivec unit because the kernel didn't understand how to save and restore the registers properly. Is this fixed, if so in what kernel revision, and if not, how does an Altivec-aware GCC help Linux?
So, if you are a criminal, get a low-rider with mechanical distributor ignition :)
This means that the best mode I could get from the second head of the G400 with a vertical refresh > 70Hz would be 1360x1020. The Millenium II can do 1800x1350, giving me 75% more pixels on the screen. Thanks to whoever wrote this modeline calculator.
I have the multihead model, but I haven't tried to use both outputs. My understanding is that the second head of the G400 1) can only be used with the Matrox binary drivers, and 2) won't acheive the resolution and refresh that I desire. I don't mind burning a PCI slot for the trusty Millenium II.
I agree. I use a G400 with a Millenium II PCI in a dual-head configuration. These cards are completely supported, from 2d to multi-head, to direct 3d rendering. As a bonus, the Matrox cards are the only cards with hardware acceleration for the Render extension in XFree86 4.0.2.
Doing more with less is a good philosophy for a sustainable human existance. SOAP is the opposite. SOAP does the same shit and uses more resources in the process.
Think for a minute on my point. What if you could reduce the number of computers in use in the world by half, and along with that reduce the amount of energy and human effort needed to design, build, and operate those computers, simply by using more efficient software? Would that still pale next to the awesome value of your personal time?
On what horribly broken network are your CORBA calls taking 100ms? Across the public internet at peak time, perhaps, but with CORBA calls using OmniORB on a 100mbps local network I get echo responses in about 1ms.
The above is what turns me off of SOAP, XML-RPC, and the like. The actual implementation is impossibly inefficient. To make a SOAP call, one's software must build an XML document and an HTTP request, and send them together. To handle a SOAP request, the software must not only handle the HTTP protocol, but also build a DOM tree from the request body and act on the nodes of that tree. This is a serious abuse of CPU power, and not the way to build a performant system.
I like systems that are easy for programmers, but I also like those systems to have advanced, efficient, performant implementations. The two goals need not conflict.
Look at the build ID on the Mozilla screenshot. The build of Mozilla they are using is from October 10, 2000. It is probably the M18 release of Mozilla. Any Mozilla follower will tell you that today's release is light years ahead of M18, and even NN 6.0.