You might want to consider what they are selling here. Marketers abuse the language horribly. If I have to pay money, even if it's for shipping, it's not "free". If it involves me handing over information, or wasting my time it's not "free" either, even if no money changes hands. If I have to call and cancel, that's a "further obligation" as far as I'm concerned. If I'm automatically signed up for something that I will be billed for, that's not a "trial".
What these companies need to do is advertise something along the lines of "sign up for our service and get your first month free", as that's what they are actually selling. Calling that a "free trial" instead is a lie, even if it legal in the fine print.
Lastly, it's up to the company to decide how they want to sell their product. If they don't want free loaders, then they should change their business model. Taking a hostile approach to your customers and scamming them is not the answer.
10,000 years ago the world population was maybe a few million, so it wasn't a big deal. Now, with around 6.8 billion people on this world to feed, we're dependent on the climate basically staying similar to what it is today to support our population. Any big change, no matter what causes it - or for that matter, whether it causes warming or cooling, will result in disaster.
Man, some of you Mac people are annoying twits. First of all, if you did a little Googling yourself, you might find out that NeXTSTEP is based upon BSD. It's not a bad thing, but you're basically carrying forward a bunch of baggage that's decades old. Hardly the redo-from-scratch the OP was talking about.
Secondly, OSX has carried several things forward since the original Mac OS from the 80's. The most obvious thing is the menu bar at the top of the (main) screen, something that worked great on a 9" monitor but doesn't make sense in the days on multiple 20"+ screens. Other annoyances (for me at least) is applications that stay open even when you close all the windows and lack of a maximize feature.
So what I'm saying is that OSX is not something created new, from scratch, under some new paradigm using what we've learned from the past 50 years of computing, despite what you might think. It's actually quite the opposite - Apple turned to some tried-and-true technologies after their attempt to create something new from scratch (aka Copland) didn't work out for them.
i686? A lot of distributions are still compiled for i386. Ubuntu comes to mind, but the same with others like Debian. I suppose it allows for them to run on just about any PC built in the last 20 years, but how many people are trying to run modern, full featured distributions like Ubuntu on anything slower than a P2 nowadays?
OSX is anything but that. It's built upon BSD, which is based on the Unix's from the 70's and 80's. The clunky (imho) interface is derived from the original Mac OS which was designed to be used on a 9" monochrome screen. It may be pretty spiffy, but the paradigms behind it are decades old. If we had to do over from scratch here in 2009, I don't think we'd end up with OSX again.
The closest thing I can think of to a completely new architecture combining the best of what is out there with new paradigms designed for modern PCs was BeOS.
The P4 kind of has a bad rep as a power hog, but the truth of the matter is that unless it's the Prescott model, the P4 2.4Ghz and the Core 2 Duo chips draw about the same amount of power, which is about 60-70W. The Atom draws a lot less, but won't be as powerful which may or may not be an issue depending on what you're trying to do with it. I'm not sure if Microtik takes advantage of dual core chips anyway.
Interesting idea, but you would have figure out a way to get the needed network ports. I don't think a netbook would work because most (all?) lack expansion card slots leaving USB Ethernet adapters as your only option which would be slow. I suppose an old laptop could work as you could utilize the PCMCIA slots, and if you're clever the firewire port if so equipped.
I don't know about the VIA chips, but you should be able to handle that kind of traffic on a Pentium III without too much trouble. Here's what m0n0wall has to say about it:
I've hit over 60mbps on a P3 600Mhz / 64MB* using Intel NICs. At that point, things like what NICs you're using is going to start making a big difference.
*m0n0wall really doesn't care much about ram you have. It'll run equally as well on 64MB as it will 512MB.
Hardware costs are pretty much free for a PC that can serve as a router. Just yesterday I pulled a Compaq Presario with an Athlon XP 1900+ and 1GB of ram out of the trash. Works fine, minus no harddisk, but draws over 100W at idle so probably not a good router candidate.
I have an old P3-600E running as a router. I picked this particular one out of the scrap pile because the 2nd generation slotted P3's are pretty low power processors (all under 20W). I have it turn off the HDD when not needed, which is most of the time. It draws about 30W with the 2 dual NIC Intel ethernet cards I put in it. which is not bad. I figure it's costing me about $20 a year to run in electricity, well worth it for the flexibility it gives me.
I don't know if farming is the worst - shipping is pretty bad too. Did you know that the 15 largest container ships pump more sulfur oxides into the air than all the cars in the world combined?
On the other hand, you won't find bacteria at the poles or at the tops of the highest mountains, despite bacteria literally having billions of years to adapt to those environments. I don't think that something will be able to adapt to a process like this, at least in any time frame humans would be concerned with.
In fact, if you took Ubuntu and modified it, then tried to resell or distribute it as "Ubuntu" and not under some other name, you would be at the wrong end of a lawsuit.
The only real way you could get into trouble would be to call your modified software "Ubuntu" or include some of the logos and artwork, since that is trademarked. Otherwise, you could get into trouble if you didn't distribute the source code for your changes, due to the GPL. Otherwise, you can pretty much modify Ubuntu however you want and redistribute the changes.
The only US coin to be made out of zinc is the cent. The quarter, half, dime, and nickel are made out of copper-nickel alloys. The dollar coin contains small amounts of both nickel and zinc but is primarily copper and manganese.
From a toxicity standpoint, the cent is the most dangerous as stomach acid easily dissolves the metal which leads to zinc poisoning. The others are fairly harmless, provided they don't get stuck somewhere.
Perhaps not enough data? I had assumed that they must have stopped selling laptops in the United States because I had not seen a new one since about the time the mobile P4 2.0Ghz was common. However, I looked up their website and they have several models listed. I agree - at least the stuff I have run across has been very solid.
The other thing to keep in mind is that it appears that they did not try to separate the Thinkpads from the other laptops Lenovo sells, like the Ideapad. The non-Thinkpad Lenovos are OK, but not nearly as nice as the Thinkpad line - I'm sure they are dragging the numbers down a bit.
I found that the power draw from a CRT depends on both the refresh and the resolution, with faster refresh rates and higher resolutions drawing more power. For example, my 19" Trinitron draws about 100W at 1360x1024 at 85Hz, but 800x600 at 60Hz is about 65W or so. Since most CRT TVs are SD sets, that means 486 lines of resolution at 30Hz, so the power draw can be fairly low when compared to computer monitors. On my 13" Daewoo TV, I measure about 30W draw, though you can tack on an extra 7W for the DTV converter box.
You can haul a lot of stuff into a hatchback. I remember hauling the old 60-70's style console TVs in a Geo Metro. Kind of a bummer that the hatchback is not popular in the states, must be too practical.
Calling an LCD with an LED backlight an "LED TV" is just the TV manufacturers intentionally trying to confuse people by making them think their cheap LCDs are like the mega-expensive OLED TVs. It may not be a huge deal now that the number of OLED TVs on the market is small, but it's only going to get worse if the real LED TVs become commonplace.
Well, if you'll settle for yesterday's hardware (or in other words what we have today), at least for a while you'll have a near-endless supply of cheap/free used computers to play with as nearly everyone will have one sitting around they'll be wanting to unload. On the other hand, this could end up hurting the new PC business even further if most of the remaining PC users decide they'll settle for a used Core 2 system at 1/10 the cost.
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You might want to consider what they are selling here. Marketers abuse the language horribly. If I have to pay money, even if it's for shipping, it's not "free". If it involves me handing over information, or wasting my time it's not "free" either, even if no money changes hands. If I have to call and cancel, that's a "further obligation" as far as I'm concerned. If I'm automatically signed up for something that I will be billed for, that's not a "trial".
What these companies need to do is advertise something along the lines of "sign up for our service and get your first month free", as that's what they are actually selling. Calling that a "free trial" instead is a lie, even if it legal in the fine print.
Lastly, it's up to the company to decide how they want to sell their product. If they don't want free loaders, then they should change their business model. Taking a hostile approach to your customers and scamming them is not the answer.
Except they know your shipping address.
10,000 years ago the world population was maybe a few million, so it wasn't a big deal. Now, with around 6.8 billion people on this world to feed, we're dependent on the climate basically staying similar to what it is today to support our population. Any big change, no matter what causes it - or for that matter, whether it causes warming or cooling, will result in disaster.
I'm going to call BS on the AMD power numbers. I have a Phenom II X4 system and the whole computer doesn't even draw that amount of power.
Man, some of you Mac people are annoying twits. First of all, if you did a little Googling yourself, you might find out that NeXTSTEP is based upon BSD. It's not a bad thing, but you're basically carrying forward a bunch of baggage that's decades old. Hardly the redo-from-scratch the OP was talking about.
Secondly, OSX has carried several things forward since the original Mac OS from the 80's. The most obvious thing is the menu bar at the top of the (main) screen, something that worked great on a 9" monitor but doesn't make sense in the days on multiple 20"+ screens. Other annoyances (for me at least) is applications that stay open even when you close all the windows and lack of a maximize feature.
So what I'm saying is that OSX is not something created new, from scratch, under some new paradigm using what we've learned from the past 50 years of computing, despite what you might think. It's actually quite the opposite - Apple turned to some tried-and-true technologies after their attempt to create something new from scratch (aka Copland) didn't work out for them.
i686? A lot of distributions are still compiled for i386. Ubuntu comes to mind, but the same with others like Debian. I suppose it allows for them to run on just about any PC built in the last 20 years, but how many people are trying to run modern, full featured distributions like Ubuntu on anything slower than a P2 nowadays?
OSX is anything but that. It's built upon BSD, which is based on the Unix's from the 70's and 80's. The clunky (imho) interface is derived from the original Mac OS which was designed to be used on a 9" monochrome screen. It may be pretty spiffy, but the paradigms behind it are decades old. If we had to do over from scratch here in 2009, I don't think we'd end up with OSX again.
The closest thing I can think of to a completely new architecture combining the best of what is out there with new paradigms designed for modern PCs was BeOS.
The P4 kind of has a bad rep as a power hog, but the truth of the matter is that unless it's the Prescott model, the P4 2.4Ghz and the Core 2 Duo chips draw about the same amount of power, which is about 60-70W. The Atom draws a lot less, but won't be as powerful which may or may not be an issue depending on what you're trying to do with it. I'm not sure if Microtik takes advantage of dual core chips anyway.
Interesting idea, but you would have figure out a way to get the needed network ports. I don't think a netbook would work because most (all?) lack expansion card slots leaving USB Ethernet adapters as your only option which would be slow. I suppose an old laptop could work as you could utilize the PCMCIA slots, and if you're clever the firewire port if so equipped.
I don't know about the VIA chips, but you should be able to handle that kind of traffic on a Pentium III without too much trouble. Here's what m0n0wall has to say about it:
http://doc.m0n0.ch/handbook/hardware-sizing.html
I've hit over 60mbps on a P3 600Mhz / 64MB* using Intel NICs. At that point, things like what NICs you're using is going to start making a big difference.
*m0n0wall really doesn't care much about ram you have. It'll run equally as well on 64MB as it will 512MB.
Hardware costs are pretty much free for a PC that can serve as a router. Just yesterday I pulled a Compaq Presario with an Athlon XP 1900+ and 1GB of ram out of the trash. Works fine, minus no harddisk, but draws over 100W at idle so probably not a good router candidate.
I have an old P3-600E running as a router. I picked this particular one out of the scrap pile because the 2nd generation slotted P3's are pretty low power processors (all under 20W). I have it turn off the HDD when not needed, which is most of the time. It draws about 30W with the 2 dual NIC Intel ethernet cards I put in it. which is not bad. I figure it's costing me about $20 a year to run in electricity, well worth it for the flexibility it gives me.
I don't know if farming is the worst - shipping is pretty bad too. Did you know that the 15 largest container ships pump more sulfur oxides into the air than all the cars in the world combined?
On the other hand, you won't find bacteria at the poles or at the tops of the highest mountains, despite bacteria literally having billions of years to adapt to those environments. I don't think that something will be able to adapt to a process like this, at least in any time frame humans would be concerned with.
Whoops, sorry - I misread your post.
Still, I have to wonder about some like Mythbuntu or "Ubuntu Christian Edition".
You mean like this?
http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=All&origin=All&basedon=Ubuntu&desktop=All&architecture=All&status=Active
The only real way you could get into trouble would be to call your modified software "Ubuntu" or include some of the logos and artwork, since that is trademarked. Otherwise, you could get into trouble if you didn't distribute the source code for your changes, due to the GPL. Otherwise, you can pretty much modify Ubuntu however you want and redistribute the changes.
Is that any better than a busload of people heading full speed for the Grand Canyon chanting "Go for it! Go for it!"?
The only US coin to be made out of zinc is the cent. The quarter, half, dime, and nickel are made out of copper-nickel alloys. The dollar coin contains small amounts of both nickel and zinc but is primarily copper and manganese.
From a toxicity standpoint, the cent is the most dangerous as stomach acid easily dissolves the metal which leads to zinc poisoning. The others are fairly harmless, provided they don't get stuck somewhere.
No wonder. I thought I sensed a few less 1's out there.
Perhaps not enough data? I had assumed that they must have stopped selling laptops in the United States because I had not seen a new one since about the time the mobile P4 2.0Ghz was common. However, I looked up their website and they have several models listed. I agree - at least the stuff I have run across has been very solid.
The other thing to keep in mind is that it appears that they did not try to separate the Thinkpads from the other laptops Lenovo sells, like the Ideapad. The non-Thinkpad Lenovos are OK, but not nearly as nice as the Thinkpad line - I'm sure they are dragging the numbers down a bit.
I found that the power draw from a CRT depends on both the refresh and the resolution, with faster refresh rates and higher resolutions drawing more power. For example, my 19" Trinitron draws about 100W at 1360x1024 at 85Hz, but 800x600 at 60Hz is about 65W or so. Since most CRT TVs are SD sets, that means 486 lines of resolution at 30Hz, so the power draw can be fairly low when compared to computer monitors. On my 13" Daewoo TV, I measure about 30W draw, though you can tack on an extra 7W for the DTV converter box.
You can haul a lot of stuff into a hatchback. I remember hauling the old 60-70's style console TVs in a Geo Metro. Kind of a bummer that the hatchback is not popular in the states, must be too practical.
Calling an LCD with an LED backlight an "LED TV" is just the TV manufacturers intentionally trying to confuse people by making them think their cheap LCDs are like the mega-expensive OLED TVs. It may not be a huge deal now that the number of OLED TVs on the market is small, but it's only going to get worse if the real LED TVs become commonplace.
Except that's not the source code for OS X and all the software components for a Mac. It doesn't even contain source for the kernel. Try again.
Well, if you'll settle for yesterday's hardware (or in other words what we have today), at least for a while you'll have a near-endless supply of cheap/free used computers to play with as nearly everyone will have one sitting around they'll be wanting to unload. On the other hand, this could end up hurting the new PC business even further if most of the remaining PC users decide they'll settle for a used Core 2 system at 1/10 the cost.