You, sir, are a troll. Please inform me of how this "administration," by which I assume that you mean "President Bush" has to do with something that is a STATE MATTER.
NEWS FLASH -- Some local government somewhere passes a goofy law. Liberals blame President Bush. When asked, a liberal spokesman stated "Well, everything that we don't like is Bush's fault, even if he had nothing to do with it. I am a hockey fan, and I place this lack of a hockey season squarely on Bush's shoulder, just because it makes be feel better."
But at that time, they had roadblocks set up to ask everybody if they were carrying any fruits or veggies.
They should ask people if they have a brain. If they do, then turn around... This is just another reason why I would never want to move to California -- as if I needed another reason. Where else would politicans even think up something like this?
The sad news is that if this works, other states would follow.
Buy him a harmonica? They are pneumatic-powered. Now, all your friend has to do is to find a source of hot air.
Seriously. If knows how to play the harmonica, and he likes to hear harmonica music, then what is wrong with just playing the darned thing? Maybe he will screw up his performance occasionally. But who cares?
Or, he can mail hs Mac to me just before he leaves, and I will take care of getting it to him -- promise!
the real problem which is that album covers and cases have become cheap plastic "jewel boxes" rather than the more permanent cardboard with intricate artwork on it.
Ummm. Please explain this to me. If you are refering to those old "long boxes," I am glad that those have gone the way of the dinosaurs. If, on the other hand, you are contrasting CDs to records, I can, in a certain sense, agree with you. But that is a small price to pay for the ability to have in-car CD players.
I could be wrong, but I got the impression that with everything being in MP3 format, this encourages a smorgasboard approach. Instead of buying an entire album, you just buy one or two of the best songs. Or at least the songs played on the radio. The problem with this is that, in my opinion, I own some albums where the songs played on the radio were mediocre, and the best songs never got any airtime.
One side effect of this might be the eventual elimination of the album. A band could release a new song by itself every few months or so. Then, you do not even have the concept of an "album" as a collection of works. Instead, you get a continuous stream.
Of course, the example that you site is, in my opinion, one of the problems with internet music. I disagree with the way that the music industry runs. But they do provide one important service -- that of a gatekeeper. A lot of crap is indeed published. But computers have lowered the cost of entry to a garage, some intruments, and a computer with a CD burner. Now, anybody who wants to invest a few days can make their own album. In general, we now have access to a lot more quality stuff. We also have access to a lot, lot, lot more crap. It is hard to tell the wheat from the chaff in this case. At least if you walk into a music store, every album there must have been good enough for somebody at the record company to like it -- somebody who can get canned if they screw up too much.
To me, if all of the record companies were to go away, some new mechanism would have to be put into place to determine what type of music was "good." It is possible to rate software fairly. Most people would agree that Open Office is a great piece of software, especially considering the price. But two people could listen to one piece of music and disagree completely on its merits. So a simple "4 stars" rating of music would be entirely inadequate.
So, I guess that my point is that, even though it is easier to make an album, making too many may bring about their eventual downfall.
You have GOT to be kidding me!!!! Those things are loud and slow. And printing anything besides the built-in fonts is painfully slow! And if you want to do graphis, expect to wait a LOOOOONG time. The quality of 24-pin models is marginal, and 9-pin are aweful!
Possibly, but there is always a market for the finer quality items. Even though you can buy a Kias and Hyundais, you can still buy BMWs and Mercedes. And I replace printers far more often than I replace cars.
1) Programming for two or more processors is more work, and prone to more subtle and strange errors. 2) Most people only have one processor. You can draw the obvious conclusions.
Fact #1 can be dealt with by proper techniquie, training, and tools. Fact #2 is going to change due to the inability of AMD, Intel to deliver over 4GHz.
You can already buy PCI boards that will let you do this. It is just that software support is seriously lacking (non-existant).
My guess is that this would work wonderfully for certain classes of problems, and would be quite useful for things like finite element analysis, MPEG encoding, and the like. The main problem is that a FPGA takes a fair bit of time to load its configuration file. Obviously, you would not want to multitask between two different applications trying to use this FPGA. Otherwise, you will spend more time context-switching than you would actually working.
You can get a simple FPGA for only a buck or two, now. Decent ones are $10. It would not cost too much to add them to a mobo. All you need is for somebody to come up with a decent programming framework (which is far from trivial).
The fact is, everyone knew about the Steam aspect of this before the game ever shipped.
So, HL2 was only offered on sale over the internet? They only advertised in gaming mags that reviewed HL2?
Gee. That's funny. I though that I remembered seeing HL2 boxed sitting in Best Buy, where they do not ask you how much you have read about the game before agreeing to sell you a copy. Come to think of it, I believe that they even let NON-GEEKS and AVERAGE PEOPLE in Best Buy! How could they do that! To think that they sell items to people who might not have read 20 articles on an item before buying it!
I do agree that most people knew about it. But I bet that a fair amount of sales was also to people who just saw a pretty box on the top slot of the bestseller end-cap.
I must disagree with you. Simply having an internet is a requirement. His internet allows him to post on/.. He clearly has one. Internet registration SHOULD simply consist of: COMPUTER: "Hello. I am registering this serial number XYZZY". STEAM: "OK. Thank you. Would you like a patch?" COMPUTER: "Not enough bandwidth. No thank you." STEAM: "No online play allowed then. Enjoy your single-player game! Please upgrade in the future."
That is perfectly reasonable, and it the "standard" in the industry. Begin force-fed 50MB before you can even begin a single-player game is not very customer-friendly -- especially if you have no idea that this is going to happen. And some mother might pick up the latest and neatest game for her kid, without really understanding what is involved. Not everybody reads/..
Bzzzt. Wrong. Thank you for playing. I have a master's degree in electrical engineering. What are your qualifications?
Think of a MOSFET transistor as a door, but you can only pull on it to open it, you can't push it shut (an enhancement-type MOSFET). If you can only pull very weakly on the door to open it, you use a weaker spring to pull the door shut. At some point, the door will not shut entirely.
At 5V, the leakage current is essentially zero and can be ignored. You have no problems at 3.3 and 2.5. But once you start getting around 1V or 1.5V, you have to start worrying about these things.
I am not a silicon guy (I am a VHDL guy), so I do not know how much lower voltage can get, but I do know that we are already having problems in this area, even at 1.5V. Will we ever see 1.0V processors? Maybe. Maybe not. Will we ever see 0.5V processor? Nope. Not with silicon.
What's more, the chips cost less and they use a fraction as much power.
In theory, I agree with you about the benefits of the Pentium M. However, in general, the "M" version are more expensive. Newegg lists the cheapest M at around $215. You can get a large selection of P4s at this price (not including celerons). So the price argument flies right out the window.
But they ARE nice chips. Intel should re-engineer ALL of their chips to be more like the M.
But, as the voltage levels drop, the leakage current through the transistors increases. At some point, dropping the voltage does not reduce the power. I think that we are pretty close to this point already.
Re:Not just developing countries
on
The Sub-$100 Laptop?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Like this will happen! Keep dreaming. This is about the third or fourth "sub-$100" computer that I have seen over the past three or four years. Guess how many I have seen over at CompUSA?
To be sure, this is a noble idea. But the track record in this area is awful so far. I shall be quite surprised if one actually succeeds.
Chips keep getting cheaper. This much is true. But the problem is that there is plenty of money to be made in DDR and DDR2. So, even if you imagine that old-fashioned EDO should be dirt-cheap, nobody is still making it -- precisely because it is so dirt cheap.
And hard drives are more of the same. You still have the same voice-coil head actuation unit. You still have the same number of screws. A drive 1/2 the size of the ones at Best Buy is not 1/2 as cheap.
I certianly hope that this does succeed, but I am not holding my breath.
Umm. I think that it is reasonable to expect ANYTHING to run at 100%. If a power supply can provide 400W, then it should live up to it. A current limit is reasonable if set at 105% or more, but not at 99%.
Yet, at the same time it is still a useful numer (assuming that the power supply can actually output 100% of its rated power).
I would imagine that the power supply companies actually measure current motherboards to determine how much power is needed on the +5 and +3.3 rails. Nobody would ever sell a power supply rated at 400W, but with 300W on +5/3.3 and 100W on +12. I bet that if you were to compare the specification for a $10 and a $100 supply, that they would be very similar. The only difference would be how well they live up to the specifications (and maybe a noise or bling difference).
A) OS X took me all of 1 hour to fully understand, including the command line.
More expensive. If you already have a PC, you cannot install OS X on it. It requires a new computer. And a high-end Mac is more expensive than a high-end PC. The new Mini has eroded some of the price complaints, but the mini is not perfect for everybody.
b) I can download mandrake or Suse for the costs of bandwidth and a couple of blank cd's.
This one wins in price, but NOT in ease of use. If you are lucky, then everything goes well. But it is also possible that your NIC, graphics card, win-modem, printer, or sound card might have problems. And if you DO have problems, it is not as simple as going to the manufacturer's web site and downloading the latest driver. Somebody who has never even used a command prompt is in deep trouble if the hardware auto-detect goes bad.
c) Linux has never crashed and took out the system on me.(I have had programs crash, but recovery is easier than windows )
And this has what to do with either cost or ease-of-use agruments? I have seldom had WinXP crash. And if it does, hit reset and start again. A PITA to be sure, but simple enough for anybody to do.
d) OS X has crashed only once during a login. (my font files got trashed)
See above.
e) I reboot windows machines every couple of days, losing work. Very frequently we are filling out orders for customers with cash in their hands when they crash and we have to start over.
See above.
If I could get rid of windows completely, it would be great. All I am waiting for is some games. That or a PowerPC chip that can emulate a P4.
By buying the games that run on XP, you are supporting the industry. As long as you buy XP games, the developers are under no pressure to write for other platforms.
The color is not a characteristic of the board. All boards are a sort of yellow-tan in color (well, there are some materials that are closer to dark brown). The color that you see comes from the soldermask that is applied to the top and bottom of the board. So, the color of the soldermask is usually green, but it could be any color the manufacturer wants if they want to pay for it. So, it is simply a fashion statement, and there is no technical reason to choose one color over the other.
From the way that I understand it, a VM would not help. The chip would have its own crypto key embedded in it (or maybe more than one).
Let me put it this way... All good encryption algorithms are open -- you can examine the spec and the implementation as much as you want. But you still need the key in order to get the scrambled data out.
This means that you can examine this chip as much as you want. As long as it does not give up its keys, it should still be secure. Then your computer can be trusted to not do nasty things -- like watch a movie on an unapproved OS.
Slashdot Mirror
You, sir, are a troll. Please inform me of how this "administration," by which I assume that you mean "President Bush" has to do with something that is a STATE MATTER.
NEWS FLASH -- Some local government somewhere passes a goofy law. Liberals blame President Bush. When asked, a liberal spokesman stated "Well, everything that we don't like is Bush's fault, even if he had nothing to do with it. I am a hockey fan, and I place this lack of a hockey season squarely on Bush's shoulder, just because it makes be feel better."
This is just another reason why I would never want to move to California -- as if I needed another reason. Where else would politicans even think up something like this?
The sad news is that if this works, other states would follow.
If it WAS just a case of only one virus, then you would have a point. One event does not make a trend.
But, since there are several companies making anti-virus software for Windows, I think that this qualifies as a trend...
Buy him a harmonica? They are pneumatic-powered. Now, all your friend has to do is to find a source of hot air.
Seriously. If knows how to play the harmonica, and he likes to hear harmonica music, then what is wrong with just playing the darned thing? Maybe he will screw up his performance occasionally. But who cares?
Or, he can mail hs Mac to me just before he leaves, and I will take care of getting it to him -- promise!
What would happen if you sent a package there via a shipping method that requires a signature?
I could be wrong, but I got the impression that with everything being in MP3 format, this encourages a smorgasboard approach. Instead of buying an entire album, you just buy one or two of the best songs. Or at least the songs played on the radio. The problem with this is that, in my opinion, I own some albums where the songs played on the radio were mediocre, and the best songs never got any airtime.
One side effect of this might be the eventual elimination of the album. A band could release a new song by itself every few months or so. Then, you do not even have the concept of an "album" as a collection of works. Instead, you get a continuous stream.
Of course, the example that you site is, in my opinion, one of the problems with internet music. I disagree with the way that the music industry runs. But they do provide one important service -- that of a gatekeeper. A lot of crap is indeed published. But computers have lowered the cost of entry to a garage, some intruments, and a computer with a CD burner. Now, anybody who wants to invest a few days can make their own album. In general, we now have access to a lot more quality stuff. We also have access to a lot, lot, lot more crap. It is hard to tell the wheat from the chaff in this case. At least if you walk into a music store, every album there must have been good enough for somebody at the record company to like it -- somebody who can get canned if they screw up too much.
To me, if all of the record companies were to go away, some new mechanism would have to be put into place to determine what type of music was "good." It is possible to rate software fairly. Most people would agree that Open Office is a great piece of software, especially considering the price. But two people could listen to one piece of music and disagree completely on its merits. So a simple "4 stars" rating of music would be entirely inadequate.
So, I guess that my point is that, even though it is easier to make an album, making too many may bring about their eventual downfall.
You have GOT to be kidding me!!!! Those things are loud and slow. And printing anything besides the built-in fonts is painfully slow! And if you want to do graphis, expect to wait a LOOOOONG time. The quality of 24-pin models is marginal, and 9-pin are aweful!
Possibly, but there is always a market for the finer quality items. Even though you can buy a Kias and Hyundais, you can still buy BMWs and Mercedes. And I replace printers far more often than I replace cars.
There are two fundamental truths:
1) Programming for two or more processors is more work, and prone to more subtle and strange errors.
2) Most people only have one processor.
You can draw the obvious conclusions.
Fact #1 can be dealt with by proper techniquie, training, and tools.
Fact #2 is going to change due to the inability of AMD, Intel to deliver over 4GHz.
You can already buy PCI boards that will let you do this. It is just that software support is seriously lacking (non-existant).
My guess is that this would work wonderfully for certain classes of problems, and would be quite useful for things like finite element analysis, MPEG encoding, and the like. The main problem is that a FPGA takes a fair bit of time to load its configuration file. Obviously, you would not want to multitask between two different applications trying to use this FPGA. Otherwise, you will spend more time context-switching than you would actually working.
You can get a simple FPGA for only a buck or two, now. Decent ones are $10. It would not cost too much to add them to a mobo. All you need is for somebody to come up with a decent programming framework (which is far from trivial).
Where do you find these dumpsters? Right now my 2nd computer is a Celeron 466.
I only buy genuine Sorny, Panaphonic, and MagnetBox.
As it turns out, Anandtech mentioned this today.
ANANDTECH ARTICLE
Gee. That's funny. I though that I remembered seeing HL2 boxed sitting in Best Buy, where they do not ask you how much you have read about the game before agreeing to sell you a copy. Come to think of it, I believe that they even let NON-GEEKS and AVERAGE PEOPLE in Best Buy! How could they do that! To think that they sell items to people who might not have read 20 articles on an item before buying it!
I do agree that most people knew about it. But I bet that a fair amount of sales was also to people who just saw a pretty box on the top slot of the bestseller end-cap.
I must disagree with you. Simply having an internet is a requirement. His internet allows him to post on /.. He clearly has one. Internet registration SHOULD simply consist of:
/..
COMPUTER: "Hello. I am registering this serial number XYZZY".
STEAM: "OK. Thank you. Would you like a patch?"
COMPUTER: "Not enough bandwidth. No thank you."
STEAM: "No online play allowed then. Enjoy your single-player game! Please upgrade in the future."
That is perfectly reasonable, and it the "standard" in the industry. Begin force-fed 50MB before you can even begin a single-player game is not very customer-friendly -- especially if you have no idea that this is going to happen. And some mother might pick up the latest and neatest game for her kid, without really understanding what is involved. Not everybody reads
Bzzzt. Wrong. Thank you for playing. I have a master's degree in electrical engineering. What are your qualifications?
Think of a MOSFET transistor as a door, but you can only pull on it to open it, you can't push it shut (an enhancement-type MOSFET). If you can only pull very weakly on the door to open it, you use a weaker spring to pull the door shut. At some point, the door will not shut entirely.
At 5V, the leakage current is essentially zero and can be ignored. You have no problems at 3.3 and 2.5. But once you start getting around 1V or 1.5V, you have to start worrying about these things.
I am not a silicon guy (I am a VHDL guy), so I do not know how much lower voltage can get, but I do know that we are already having problems in this area, even at 1.5V. Will we ever see 1.0V processors? Maybe. Maybe not. Will we ever see 0.5V processor? Nope. Not with silicon.
But they ARE nice chips. Intel should re-engineer ALL of their chips to be more like the M.
But, as the voltage levels drop, the leakage current through the transistors increases. At some point, dropping the voltage does not reduce the power. I think that we are pretty close to this point already.
Like this will happen! Keep dreaming. This is about the third or fourth "sub-$100" computer that I have seen over the past three or four years. Guess how many I have seen over at CompUSA?
To be sure, this is a noble idea. But the track record in this area is awful so far. I shall be quite surprised if one actually succeeds.
Chips keep getting cheaper. This much is true. But the problem is that there is plenty of money to be made in DDR and DDR2. So, even if you imagine that old-fashioned EDO should be dirt-cheap, nobody is still making it -- precisely because it is so dirt cheap.
And hard drives are more of the same. You still have the same voice-coil head actuation unit. You still have the same number of screws. A drive 1/2 the size of the ones at Best Buy is not 1/2 as cheap.
I certianly hope that this does succeed, but I am not holding my breath.
Umm. I think that it is reasonable to expect ANYTHING to run at 100%. If a power supply can provide 400W, then it should live up to it. A current limit is reasonable if set at 105% or more, but not at 99%.
Yet, at the same time it is still a useful numer (assuming that the power supply can actually output 100% of its rated power).
I would imagine that the power supply companies actually measure current motherboards to determine how much power is needed on the +5 and +3.3 rails. Nobody would ever sell a power supply rated at 400W, but with 300W on +5/3.3 and 100W on +12. I bet that if you were to compare the specification for a $10 and a $100 supply, that they would be very similar. The only difference would be how well they live up to the specifications (and maybe a noise or bling difference).
More expensive. If you already have a PC, you cannot install OS X on it. It requires a new computer. And a high-end Mac is more expensive than a high-end PC. The new Mini has eroded some of the price complaints, but the mini is not perfect for everybody.
This one wins in price, but NOT in ease of use. If you are lucky, then everything goes well. But it is also possible that your NIC, graphics card, win-modem, printer, or sound card might have problems. And if you DO have problems, it is not as simple as going to the manufacturer's web site and downloading the latest driver. Somebody who has never even used a command prompt is in deep trouble if the hardware auto-detect goes bad.
And this has what to do with either cost or ease-of-use agruments? I have seldom had WinXP crash. And if it does, hit reset and start again. A PITA to be sure, but simple enough for anybody to do.
See above.
See above.
By buying the games that run on XP, you are supporting the industry. As long as you buy XP games, the developers are under no pressure to write for other platforms.
The color is not a characteristic of the board. All boards are a sort of yellow-tan in color (well, there are some materials that are closer to dark brown). The color that you see comes from the soldermask that is applied to the top and bottom of the board. So, the color of the soldermask is usually green, but it could be any color the manufacturer wants if they want to pay for it. So, it is simply a fashion statement, and there is no technical reason to choose one color over the other.
From the way that I understand it, a VM would not help. The chip would have its own crypto key embedded in it (or maybe more than one).
Let me put it this way... All good encryption algorithms are open -- you can examine the spec and the implementation as much as you want. But you still need the key in order to get the scrambled data out.
This means that you can examine this chip as much as you want. As long as it does not give up its keys, it should still be secure. Then your computer can be trusted to not do nasty things -- like watch a movie on an unapproved OS.