If you're reinstalling Windows on a yearly basis, you're doing something wrong. It's true that I did have random registry corruption problems in Windows 95/98 (where the easiest solution was to reinstall and start over). Those days are long gone, and I've got several Windows machines I use daily that run just fine that predate Slackware 10 - which isn't even that old... I still see NT4 machines chugging along.
Still, just the fact it has "2GB capacity" means it has at least one memory slot. I find that rather surprising, as at that price point, I would expect the ram to be soldered directly to the board and no upgrade capacity at all.
Well, part of the reason for that many students won't read the manual to learn how to use it, and the teacher isn't going to learn how to do everything on every model of calculator. So instead, the school standardizes on a certain model, then they teach the kids how to solve problems using that specific calculator.
Besides, $90 wasn't that bad. I found the calculator to be a great help, it was fun to program, it kept me entertained for endless boring hours of high school. My TI-85 served me well for my 4 years of high school, and my 5 years of college (though granted it was a lot less useful in college as the math I was doing exceeded its capabilities). And after years of banging around in my backpack and my pockets, it still works flawlessly today.
That exact attitude part of what's wrong with the college system right now. Ever looked at a bill for a semester of college? There is a huge list of fees, $35 here, $150 there, $85 for this, $75 for that, etc. Each one doesn't sound like much, but add them all up and it's a significant amount of the total cost.
Because it's a laptop screen, and not a regular monitor? When was the last time you've seen someone use a hood on a laptop? (yes, I know they exist, but they aren't common)
Re:What the world needs ...
on
Less Is Moore
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· Score: 1
We more-or-less got enough computing power for most things with the introduction of the PIII 1GHz CPU. You might not agree with this, but it's at least approximately true. A computer outfitted with that processor and reasonable RAM browses the web just fine, plays MP3s, reads email, shows videos from YouTube, etc. It doesn't do everything that you might want, but it does a lot.
I've got a PIII 1Ghz sitting here with 512MB of ram, and the reason I got it is that it was replaced by it's previous owner because it couldn't play streaming video from the web. Granted, that's probably more to do with the fact that Flash sucks, but that's the way it is. I'll probably be replacing my main computer soon (AMD Sempron 3000) because it can't decode HD resolution h.264 files in real-time. I've noticed that the "minimum" people seem to accept likes to move a lot. If you ask people now what kind of hardware you need for a decent Windows XP experience, they'll probably quote you something significantly more powerful than that P3 with 512MB of ram, ignoring the fact that was a pretty decent machine when XP was released.
It seems unlikely that you'd lose all the copies, as you've spread them around pretty well. The biggest danger to me seems to be that some file you don't often look at would get corrupted, deleted, overwritten, or something without you realizing something happened to it. If I understand your system right, if it took you more than two months to find out something bad happened, it would have propagated to all your drives by then and the original file would be lost. You might want to consider writing burning everything to DVDs every once in a while, or dump it all to tape or another drive that is stored and never rotated back in.
I've always wondered why disk caches are always so small. Why hasn't some disk manufacturer gone and put a 1GB cache on the drive? We're talking something like $15 of memory, and it doesn't even need to be very fast. Even if the memory was useless, it's not like it stopped the graphics card manufacturers from putting 256MB of memory on my Radeon 9250 in order to try and stand out.
"since 1998, there has been steady cooling." is a troll? The fact is we are getting cooler over the past half decade (or more).
Why 1998? Is it because 1998 was an unusually warm year, making it an outlier? It's may be true to say that 1998 is the warmest year on record, but to use that to imply that the climate is now cooling off is simply wrong.
Yeah, but that's part of his point. You have so many people recording something that even if only a small fraction of the stuff survives, you'll still have tons of copies. It's like if 10 million people recorded Reagan's inauguration on their VHS/Betamax machines back in 1980. Even if only only a fraction of a percent of these recordings survive by being transfered to new media, we'd still have hundreds if not thousands of copies.
And if it's been known for years that viewership is at its lowest in the summer, then why in the hell did ANYONE chose February as the cutover month years ago?!?
Probably because if someone's TV stopped working in Febuary, they'd do something about it. If it went out in June, they might go outside instead.
Many of the cable companies are using the DTV switchover and resulting confusion to do some eliminating of analog cable. While there are practical reasons to do this (an analog cable chanel uses more bandwidth than a digital one), it's pretty much just a money-grab.
Some pass through the analog signal when turned off. So all it would take is to hook it up, and never actually turn it on. I can see some people doing exactly that.
I smell a new law coming! Camera Phones with video capabilities can only be used on bikes with baseball cards in the spokes! This will protect everybody!
Great, now how am I supposed to fit a bike with baseball cards into a changing room?
That seems unlikely, since the 'Celeron-A' of the time was a different design than the Pentium II, and no model was ever released for a 100Mhz FSB. So the famous Celeron 300A wasn't a cut-down example of some other processor (unlike almost all other Celerons), it was just an unusually easy to overclock processor that happened to be a budget model.
OP is probably right - 3GHz is probably about the practical limit of what CPUs can run at for everyday use. Speeds higher than that so far seem to increase heat too much to be useful for most applications.
You can buy dual-core Wolfdales right now that have a TDP of 65W and clock in at over 3Ghz. That's very reasonable. If they were to make a single-core version it would run at around 30-35W and would still get more done than yesterday's 3 Ghz P4's. Ditto for the 3Ghz mobile Core 2 processors.
There was a planned manned Venus mission using Apollo technology. It would have been a fly-by, with only a few hours of time near Venus and over a year of travel time for three men. Other than to say we did it, there wasn't much of a point of doing it instead of unmanned probes, which is likely why it got cancelled.
While it's probably a bit out of the scope of the time capsule project, what about trying to presever a computer that is delibrately over-engineered? A random Dell probably won't last 50 years, but what about something like a Panasonic Toughbook?
Most every PC I've come across with a bad BIOS battery will run once you've configured the BIOS and will hold the settings until you turn it off again. The best bet would be pull the battery off the motherboard (to prevent corrosion when it leaks), pack the computer with a note on how to configure the BIOS and what kind of battery needed to retain the settings and the specifications for it. They'll probably be able to get a CR2032 in 50 years, as it's an extremely common type of battery, and even if they aren't, I've find motherboards extremely tolerant anyway - anything 1.8-3.5V or so that they can jam in there will hold the settings.
Except it's not the "Enter" key, it's the "Return" key on the Mac, unless I suppose you're using a PC keyboard on your Mac. It really makes no sense at all.
Granted, F2 isn't much better. It's not intuitive, but it does fit in with the original idea behind the function keys in the first place. The worst part about it is that it's all too easy to hit F1 by accident.
Explorer will often go off to the network for various reasons and lock up the task bar if the remote host doesn't exist or won't let you login.
Going into Folder Options, and finding the "Launch Explorer Windows in a seperate process" helps this one a lot. You'll still have Explorer windows randomly stop responding for minutes at a time, but it won't affect the other windows or things like the taskbar. Apparently turning this on uses more resources though, so you may not want to do it on really low end systems (like ones with only 256MB of ram).
It'n not suprisdng that you noticed that it seemingly did nothing. Back in the day, a lot of cases would have a turbo button, but a lot of system boards did not have a connector for it. The result was a button that did nothing on a many whitebox PCs. Typically there was a corresponding LED, so one way to see if it worked was to see if the LED changed state with the button, though that wasn't reliable either depending on how it was wired up.
The purpose of the button was to slow down the PC so that software hardcoded to run properly on the original 4.77Mhz IBM PC (typically games) would run correctly on faster hardware. Though even then, it didn't work well - it would often clock the CPU to some other speed than 4.77Mhz (8Mhz seemed pretty common), and even if it clocked it to the right speed a 286/386/486 at 4.77Mhz was considerably more powerful than the 8088 so stuff still didn't work right.
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If you're reinstalling Windows on a yearly basis, you're doing something wrong. It's true that I did have random registry corruption problems in Windows 95/98 (where the easiest solution was to reinstall and start over). Those days are long gone, and I've got several Windows machines I use daily that run just fine that predate Slackware 10 - which isn't even that old... I still see NT4 machines chugging along.
Still, just the fact it has "2GB capacity" means it has at least one memory slot. I find that rather surprising, as at that price point, I would expect the ram to be soldered directly to the board and no upgrade capacity at all.
Well, part of the reason for that many students won't read the manual to learn how to use it, and the teacher isn't going to learn how to do everything on every model of calculator. So instead, the school standardizes on a certain model, then they teach the kids how to solve problems using that specific calculator.
Besides, $90 wasn't that bad. I found the calculator to be a great help, it was fun to program, it kept me entertained for endless boring hours of high school. My TI-85 served me well for my 4 years of high school, and my 5 years of college (though granted it was a lot less useful in college as the math I was doing exceeded its capabilities). And after years of banging around in my backpack and my pockets, it still works flawlessly today.
That exact attitude part of what's wrong with the college system right now. Ever looked at a bill for a semester of college? There is a huge list of fees, $35 here, $150 there, $85 for this, $75 for that, etc. Each one doesn't sound like much, but add them all up and it's a significant amount of the total cost.
My point is that I'm tired of the whole 'lying with statistics' thing that people like to pull in reference to the unusually hot year we had in 1998.
Because it's a laptop screen, and not a regular monitor? When was the last time you've seen someone use a hood on a laptop? (yes, I know they exist, but they aren't common)
We more-or-less got enough computing power for most things with the introduction of the PIII 1GHz CPU. You might not agree with this, but it's at least approximately true. A computer outfitted with that processor and reasonable RAM browses the web just fine, plays MP3s, reads email, shows videos from YouTube, etc. It doesn't do everything that you might want, but it does a lot.
I've got a PIII 1Ghz sitting here with 512MB of ram, and the reason I got it is that it was replaced by it's previous owner because it couldn't play streaming video from the web. Granted, that's probably more to do with the fact that Flash sucks, but that's the way it is. I'll probably be replacing my main computer soon (AMD Sempron 3000) because it can't decode HD resolution h.264 files in real-time. I've noticed that the "minimum" people seem to accept likes to move a lot. If you ask people now what kind of hardware you need for a decent Windows XP experience, they'll probably quote you something significantly more powerful than that P3 with 512MB of ram, ignoring the fact that was a pretty decent machine when XP was released.
Even by that chart, we've only been cooling since 2005, and are still (on average) warmer than we were before 1998.
It seems unlikely that you'd lose all the copies, as you've spread them around pretty well. The biggest danger to me seems to be that some file you don't often look at would get corrupted, deleted, overwritten, or something without you realizing something happened to it. If I understand your system right, if it took you more than two months to find out something bad happened, it would have propagated to all your drives by then and the original file would be lost. You might want to consider writing burning everything to DVDs every once in a while, or dump it all to tape or another drive that is stored and never rotated back in.
I've always wondered why disk caches are always so small. Why hasn't some disk manufacturer gone and put a 1GB cache on the drive? We're talking something like $15 of memory, and it doesn't even need to be very fast. Even if the memory was useless, it's not like it stopped the graphics card manufacturers from putting 256MB of memory on my Radeon 9250 in order to try and stand out.
Why 1998? Is it because 1998 was an unusually warm year, making it an outlier? It's may be true to say that 1998 is the warmest year on record, but to use that to imply that the climate is now cooling off is simply wrong.
You may find this random chart off of Google handy:
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/t1975.jpg
Yeah, but that's part of his point. You have so many people recording something that even if only a small fraction of the stuff survives, you'll still have tons of copies. It's like if 10 million people recorded Reagan's inauguration on their VHS/Betamax machines back in 1980. Even if only only a fraction of a percent of these recordings survive by being transfered to new media, we'd still have hundreds if not thousands of copies.
Probably because if someone's TV stopped working in Febuary, they'd do something about it. If it went out in June, they might go outside instead.
Many of the cable companies are using the DTV switchover and resulting confusion to do some eliminating of analog cable. While there are practical reasons to do this (an analog cable chanel uses more bandwidth than a digital one), it's pretty much just a money-grab.
Some pass through the analog signal when turned off. So all it would take is to hook it up, and never actually turn it on. I can see some people doing exactly that.
Great, now how am I supposed to fit a bike with baseball cards into a changing room?
That seems unlikely, since the 'Celeron-A' of the time was a different design than the Pentium II, and no model was ever released for a 100Mhz FSB. So the famous Celeron 300A wasn't a cut-down example of some other processor (unlike almost all other Celerons), it was just an unusually easy to overclock processor that happened to be a budget model.
OP is probably right - 3GHz is probably about the practical limit of what CPUs can run at for everyday use. Speeds higher than that so far seem to increase heat too much to be useful for most applications.
You can buy dual-core Wolfdales right now that have a TDP of 65W and clock in at over 3Ghz. That's very reasonable. If they were to make a single-core version it would run at around 30-35W and would still get more done than yesterday's 3 Ghz P4's. Ditto for the 3Ghz mobile Core 2 processors.
There was a planned manned Venus mission using Apollo technology. It would have been a fly-by, with only a few hours of time near Venus and over a year of travel time for three men. Other than to say we did it, there wasn't much of a point of doing it instead of unmanned probes, which is likely why it got cancelled.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Venus_Flyby
While it's probably a bit out of the scope of the time capsule project, what about trying to presever a computer that is delibrately over-engineered? A random Dell probably won't last 50 years, but what about something like a Panasonic Toughbook?
Most every PC I've come across with a bad BIOS battery will run once you've configured the BIOS and will hold the settings until you turn it off again. The best bet would be pull the battery off the motherboard (to prevent corrosion when it leaks), pack the computer with a note on how to configure the BIOS and what kind of battery needed to retain the settings and the specifications for it. They'll probably be able to get a CR2032 in 50 years, as it's an extremely common type of battery, and even if they aren't, I've find motherboards extremely tolerant anyway - anything 1.8-3.5V or so that they can jam in there will hold the settings.
Except it's not the "Enter" key, it's the "Return" key on the Mac, unless I suppose you're using a PC keyboard on your Mac. It really makes no sense at all.
Granted, F2 isn't much better. It's not intuitive, but it does fit in with the original idea behind the function keys in the first place. The worst part about it is that it's all too easy to hit F1 by accident.
Going into Folder Options, and finding the "Launch Explorer Windows in a seperate process" helps this one a lot. You'll still have Explorer windows randomly stop responding for minutes at a time, but it won't affect the other windows or things like the taskbar. Apparently turning this on uses more resources though, so you may not want to do it on really low end systems (like ones with only 256MB of ram).
It'n not suprisdng that you noticed that it seemingly did nothing. Back in the day, a lot of cases would have a turbo button, but a lot of system boards did not have a connector for it. The result was a button that did nothing on a many whitebox PCs. Typically there was a corresponding LED, so one way to see if it worked was to see if the LED changed state with the button, though that wasn't reliable either depending on how it was wired up.
The purpose of the button was to slow down the PC so that software hardcoded to run properly on the original 4.77Mhz IBM PC (typically games) would run correctly on faster hardware. Though even then, it didn't work well - it would often clock the CPU to some other speed than 4.77Mhz (8Mhz seemed pretty common), and even if it clocked it to the right speed a 286/386/486 at 4.77Mhz was considerably more powerful than the 8088 so stuff still didn't work right.
Not to mention mice and other critters if the cars manage to sit there long enough.