Socket 754 was kept around for a long time as a budget/mobile socket, but AMD really didn't do anything with it. If you bought into Socket 754 early on, by the end of its life you could still only get a single core Sempron or Athlon 64 for it. At least with Socket 939, you could move up to an Athlon X2 with some faster clock speeds. Not saying that 939 lived a long life or anything, but I found that people who bought into Socket 754 seemed a bit more ticked off than those that bought into Socket 939.
Besides, if you're only going to go by which was discontinued first, Socket A beats *both* Socket 754 and Socket 939 due to the still in production Geode NX.
If it's the one I'm thinking of, it dates back to the Classic days and thus didn't have to deal with any of that pesky Admin/non-Admin stuff as it happily wiped your drive.
The reason why gold (or precious metals in general) became the standard for money is that they have the best properties for money. Most things that people think of that have intrinsic value don't have good properties for money. Food and water don't have a good value to size/weight ratio, so you'll need a lot of it to make a large purchase and you can't "save" much because food spoils. Animals like horses or chickens aren't easily divisible so small purchases are not easily done, plus you have to take care of them costing you money just to store your money. Something like firewood is at least easily divisible and stores well, but it isn't really practical to carry enough firewood around with you to make your daily purchases. Land has value and can be divided into small plots if needed, but can't be moved, and no one really wants to have small pieces of land spread out all over town, and so on.
With that said, I can think of a few things that would make a good currency in a post-apocalyptic society due to their intrinsic value, durability, and ability to store well. Ammunition is one of them.
As far as I remember, Socket 939 had a longer and more useful life than Socket 754 that preceded it. I remember helping someone build a Sempron 3400 on a Socket 754, then a bit later when they wanted to upgrade there wasn't really any place to go.
Of course, the worst lemon in somewhat recently history had to be Intel's Socket 423, of which I have an example. Expensive Rambus memory, 100Mhz FSB, and Intel only produced CPUs for it for a year, only supporting P4's up to 2.0Ghz.
erm, that and the BMW is made to much higher standards, has 10's of millions of RnD put into it and has superior materials used in it. you aren't suggesting a BMW is the same as a KIA, are you?
No, if you reread his post, he's asking why doesn't Kia style their cars to look more like BMW? It's not making the sheetmetal/plastic of a Kia look like a more expensive car would actually add much to the cost. Or go look at Hyundai, who has a car that looks a lot like a Mercedes, and another that looks a lot like an Accord.
Keep in mind that XP requires activation, so unless something changes, you'll only be able to install XP so long as Microsoft keeps the activation servers alive. To make matters worse, too many hardware changes may require a reactivation, which could make nursing along old hardware running XP that much more challenging. Of course, companies with a VLK may have an easier time with it, but otherwise you could be screwed in a few years if you want XP.
I'm running XP in a VM without network access, and yes indeed, I do not need, and do not use, a virus checker.
Then what do you do with XP? Unless all your files and work only move in one direction (out of the VM and never into it), then you should run a virus scanner.
I have an ATI 3650 in AGP here, and I would advise caution when buying them. First problem is, that ATI doesn't officially support this GPU on the AGP bus, so you can't use the official drivers with the card. You can either try ATI's unsupported "AGP Hotfix" drivers which may or may not work depending on how they hacked the GPU onto the AGP bus, or you have to use the manufacturer's (such as Sapphire or whoever actually built the thing) drivers which can be horribly out of date.
Anyway, the problem I had with the ATI 3650 AGP is that playing video, I got horrible tearing artifacts. It was usually between 1/2 to 2/3 the way down the bottom of the screen, and was really noticable. Interestingly though, it seemed to be a driver issue as I got the same artifacts using my old video card (ATI 9600Pro) with the AGP Hotfix drivers. I tried several versions of the drivers, both the latest, older versions, and the manufacturer's drivers and they all had the same problem. I eventually had to use a driver cleaner program to wipe out the drivers and install a regular version that supported my old 9600Pro to get the tearing to go away. I also couldn't get the hardware acceleration (the Unified Video Decoder) to work either using the AGP hotfix drivers, which was the reason I bought the thing. So I just went back to the ATI 9600Pro for now and the fancypants ATI 3650 is sitting on my desk.
I did try the card in another old computer of mine (P4 1.5Ghz) for kicks and I did not have the tearing problems. Searching the internet it seemed thet generally those who was having problems like mine were also running a AMD Socket A systems (I have an old Sempron on an nForce2 board) whereas the people who did not have as many problems were running Intel systems of some sort, so it may be some kind of chipset/compatibility issue or maybe something to do with the driver assuming that the CPU has SSE2?
Anyway, I did notice that in the latest Catalyst release, ATI says they addressed some video tearing issues, but they haven't made an AGP hotfix of that release (yet?) so I don't know if it will resolve my problems.
I would second the ATI 9250 recommendation. I have a few in service and they work fine. The GPU is fairly old and mature, it seems the bugs have pretty much all been worked out at this point. They also have pretty good support in Linux using the open drivers. I would tend to stay away from the never GPU's on the PCI (and AGP) buses, as they tend to be low volume products and don't tend to be tested well in older hardware and the vendors don't seem to care about bugs with them either.
I play videos full screen on a 1600x1200 monitor just fine using an ATI 9250 with 256MB on the PCI bus. It even works fine off of an external 1394 drive (using a PCI 1394 adaptor card) with the sound being piped out through a SB Live (also on the PCI bus).
That's not true. Remember back when Intel/AMD were pushing 1Ghz and Apple was still messing around back at 400-450Mhz and couldn't even ship a 500Mhz PowerMac? Apple likes to say they made multi-CPU machines mainstream, but the fact of the matter was that they had to go dual-CPU as a single G4 was way too weak to be competitive.
When was the last time that you tracked down a bug in your software to the About box?
It's pretty common for the About box to have a largish picture or logo in it or to even do things like have scrolling text. Nowadays, this isn't much of a problem, but back when that 200k bitmap you're trying to display was a significant portion of your total system memory, sometimes things could get more interesting.
I imagine your storage problem will be solved the same way they treat propane vehicles. Bring out a small auxiliary tank, hook it up, start it up, and drive it off. This is what they do right now when a propane powered bus runs out of fuel somewhere rather than calling out the tow truck. I also wouldn't worry about the room filling up with explosive hydrogen gas either. Hydrogen is lighter than air, and with any slow leak the gas will quickly escape and not build up. It's not like propane that's heavier than air and can accumulate in a closed space.
I would say that a photograph of a blue sky, unlike the blue sky itself, has very low entropy. Think about it, you basically have all these pixels carefully aligned in a gradient that spans a large portion of the photograph. You have a lot of order there, and any perturbation is immediately obvious. This is different from a photo of something like a forest, where the pixels are arranged more randomly and the "patterns" (such as a group of pixels that make up an individual tree) are more local to a small area of the photograph.
The problem is that they all seem to feel like they need to put the flashlight-bright blue LEDs in everything. I've seen red LEDs that are just as bright, but I generally don't see them used as status indicators, so why are blue LEDs different?
On the other hand, you can run the other two on generic PC hardware, which means that the only reason you'd have to have a Mac is if developing for the Mac is important to you.
I thought all of this was pretty obvious, but apparently not...
So, in other words it's intuitive and easy to have basic functionality change behavior depending on how Apple thinks the application should be used? I prefer things to just behave consistently so I don't have to think about it.
A 10 year old S-Series is going to have air bags, crumple zones, safety glass, and seatbelts. We're talking about a car that was made 10 years ago, not a Model T or something from the 80's (though the car from the 80's is still going to have seatbelts, safety glass, and something that resembles a crumple zone) so you can knock off the hyperbole. If well maintained, it should also meed emissions in most every state, and probably drives better than the Toyota Yaris (which feels and drives like a Geo Metro if you ask me).
Really? I've tried the "it will pay for itself in energy costs" calculations before, and I've found it just doesn't work out. According to the kill-a-watt, my computer (the box only) currently draws about 150-180W of power depending on the load (it's an old-school Athlon with dual video cards and 3 harddrives). That means it costs me roughly 1.5 cents per hour to run. That sounds bad, but that's about 36 cents a day, or about $132 a year to run, assuming I run it 24/7 (which I don't). So even if I was to upgrade, it would probably be about a year to pay off if I went with the absolute cheapest stuff I could find, to well over a decade for something more like what I would want without being excessive. So electricity must be really expensive where you are for something like that to pay off that quickly. Generally I've found that it's almost always cheaper just to keep what you have so long as it's still useful and keep using it instead of upgrading to less power-hungry components with the goal to save money.
When I swap out a drive like that, I generally put the old drives up on a shelf and don't repurpose them right away. If infant mortality strikes, I'll put the old drive back in and be running again quickly. I also always do the full format - it takes a few hours but all the drives I've had that suffered from infant mortality problems failed before getting through the format.
It's not just a Minnesota thing. People all the time say they are going to "Chicago" or "Dallas" or "Pittsburgh" when they really mean some random suburb next to the city. The most reason people do this is because everyone knows where Kansas City is, but not where Overland Park is, so saying Kansas City seems a lot more glamorous and unambigious.
On the other hand, I've really seen some people get steamed when St. Paul (the other "twin city") gets refered to as Minneapolis.
Funny you mention groceries. If someone is to give me a gift card, I prefer a grocery store as I will use it fairly quickly to get something I need. I hate gift cards to a place like Best Buy/Circuit City as I don't like shopping in those places, and I'm stuck trying to find item(s) that will ring up slightly more than the gift card is worth (so I use it up while not giving too much of *my* money to the bastards).
The problem with cash is that if I give you a gift of $50, and you give me a gift of $50, then we really didn't exchange anything. If I give you a gift of $50, and you give me a gift of $70, then effectively you gave me a gift of $20 and I gave you nothing. But if we exchange gift cards, then you have a gift card to Store X and I have a gift card to Store Y and thus we exchanged something. It's all about the psycology.
I really think gift giving for the holidays really should go back to being for the kids.
Probably your best bet would be to stick a RTG in it to keep it warm, combined with the ability to retract into a cocoon of sorts to protect and keep warm things like the solar cells (if you still needed them), robotic arms, and other instruments. Assuming you can keep it warm enough to keep the CO2 off of it, I think it would probably do just fine as you wouldn't have to really worry about liquids getting in and fouling things up.
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And get modded down.
Socket 754 was kept around for a long time as a budget/mobile socket, but AMD really didn't do anything with it. If you bought into Socket 754 early on, by the end of its life you could still only get a single core Sempron or Athlon 64 for it. At least with Socket 939, you could move up to an Athlon X2 with some faster clock speeds. Not saying that 939 lived a long life or anything, but I found that people who bought into Socket 754 seemed a bit more ticked off than those that bought into Socket 939.
Besides, if you're only going to go by which was discontinued first, Socket A beats *both* Socket 754 and Socket 939 due to the still in production Geode NX.
If it's the one I'm thinking of, it dates back to the Classic days and thus didn't have to deal with any of that pesky Admin/non-Admin stuff as it happily wiped your drive.
The reason why gold (or precious metals in general) became the standard for money is that they have the best properties for money. Most things that people think of that have intrinsic value don't have good properties for money. Food and water don't have a good value to size/weight ratio, so you'll need a lot of it to make a large purchase and you can't "save" much because food spoils. Animals like horses or chickens aren't easily divisible so small purchases are not easily done, plus you have to take care of them costing you money just to store your money. Something like firewood is at least easily divisible and stores well, but it isn't really practical to carry enough firewood around with you to make your daily purchases. Land has value and can be divided into small plots if needed, but can't be moved, and no one really wants to have small pieces of land spread out all over town, and so on.
With that said, I can think of a few things that would make a good currency in a post-apocalyptic society due to their intrinsic value, durability, and ability to store well. Ammunition is one of them.
As far as I remember, Socket 939 had a longer and more useful life than Socket 754 that preceded it. I remember helping someone build a Sempron 3400 on a Socket 754, then a bit later when they wanted to upgrade there wasn't really any place to go.
Of course, the worst lemon in somewhat recently history had to be Intel's Socket 423, of which I have an example. Expensive Rambus memory, 100Mhz FSB, and Intel only produced CPUs for it for a year, only supporting P4's up to 2.0Ghz.
erm, that and the BMW is made to much higher standards, has 10's of millions of RnD put into it and has superior materials used in it. you aren't suggesting a BMW is the same as a KIA, are you?
No, if you reread his post, he's asking why doesn't Kia style their cars to look more like BMW? It's not making the sheetmetal/plastic of a Kia look like a more expensive car would actually add much to the cost. Or go look at Hyundai, who has a car that looks a lot like a Mercedes, and another that looks a lot like an Accord.
Keep in mind that XP requires activation, so unless something changes, you'll only be able to install XP so long as Microsoft keeps the activation servers alive. To make matters worse, too many hardware changes may require a reactivation, which could make nursing along old hardware running XP that much more challenging. Of course, companies with a VLK may have an easier time with it, but otherwise you could be screwed in a few years if you want XP.
I'm running XP in a VM without network access, and yes indeed, I do not need, and do not use, a virus checker.
Then what do you do with XP? Unless all your files and work only move in one direction (out of the VM and never into it), then you should run a virus scanner.
Is your son offering to fly an attack on Dell HQ? If not, the JAG attorney probably has more potential for resolving this problem.
Yeah, but I can tell you right now which one would be more satisfying.
I have an ATI 3650 in AGP here, and I would advise caution when buying them. First problem is, that ATI doesn't officially support this GPU on the AGP bus, so you can't use the official drivers with the card. You can either try ATI's unsupported "AGP Hotfix" drivers which may or may not work depending on how they hacked the GPU onto the AGP bus, or you have to use the manufacturer's (such as Sapphire or whoever actually built the thing) drivers which can be horribly out of date.
Anyway, the problem I had with the ATI 3650 AGP is that playing video, I got horrible tearing artifacts. It was usually between 1/2 to 2/3 the way down the bottom of the screen, and was really noticable. Interestingly though, it seemed to be a driver issue as I got the same artifacts using my old video card (ATI 9600Pro) with the AGP Hotfix drivers. I tried several versions of the drivers, both the latest, older versions, and the manufacturer's drivers and they all had the same problem. I eventually had to use a driver cleaner program to wipe out the drivers and install a regular version that supported my old 9600Pro to get the tearing to go away. I also couldn't get the hardware acceleration (the Unified Video Decoder) to work either using the AGP hotfix drivers, which was the reason I bought the thing. So I just went back to the ATI 9600Pro for now and the fancypants ATI 3650 is sitting on my desk.
I did try the card in another old computer of mine (P4 1.5Ghz) for kicks and I did not have the tearing problems. Searching the internet it seemed thet generally those who was having problems like mine were also running a AMD Socket A systems (I have an old Sempron on an nForce2 board) whereas the people who did not have as many problems were running Intel systems of some sort, so it may be some kind of chipset/compatibility issue or maybe something to do with the driver assuming that the CPU has SSE2?
Anyway, I did notice that in the latest Catalyst release, ATI says they addressed some video tearing issues, but they haven't made an AGP hotfix of that release (yet?) so I don't know if it will resolve my problems.
I would second the ATI 9250 recommendation. I have a few in service and they work fine. The GPU is fairly old and mature, it seems the bugs have pretty much all been worked out at this point. They also have pretty good support in Linux using the open drivers. I would tend to stay away from the never GPU's on the PCI (and AGP) buses, as they tend to be low volume products and don't tend to be tested well in older hardware and the vendors don't seem to care about bugs with them either.
I play videos full screen on a 1600x1200 monitor just fine using an ATI 9250 with 256MB on the PCI bus. It even works fine off of an external 1394 drive (using a PCI 1394 adaptor card) with the sound being piped out through a SB Live (also on the PCI bus).
That's not true. Remember back when Intel/AMD were pushing 1Ghz and Apple was still messing around back at 400-450Mhz and couldn't even ship a 500Mhz PowerMac? Apple likes to say they made multi-CPU machines mainstream, but the fact of the matter was that they had to go dual-CPU as a single G4 was way too weak to be competitive.
When was the last time that you tracked down a bug in your software to the About box?
It's pretty common for the About box to have a largish picture or logo in it or to even do things like have scrolling text. Nowadays, this isn't much of a problem, but back when that 200k bitmap you're trying to display was a significant portion of your total system memory, sometimes things could get more interesting.
I imagine your storage problem will be solved the same way they treat propane vehicles. Bring out a small auxiliary tank, hook it up, start it up, and drive it off. This is what they do right now when a propane powered bus runs out of fuel somewhere rather than calling out the tow truck. I also wouldn't worry about the room filling up with explosive hydrogen gas either. Hydrogen is lighter than air, and with any slow leak the gas will quickly escape and not build up. It's not like propane that's heavier than air and can accumulate in a closed space.
I would say that a photograph of a blue sky, unlike the blue sky itself, has very low entropy. Think about it, you basically have all these pixels carefully aligned in a gradient that spans a large portion of the photograph. You have a lot of order there, and any perturbation is immediately obvious. This is different from a photo of something like a forest, where the pixels are arranged more randomly and the "patterns" (such as a group of pixels that make up an individual tree) are more local to a small area of the photograph.
The problem is that they all seem to feel like they need to put the flashlight-bright blue LEDs in everything. I've seen red LEDs that are just as bright, but I generally don't see them used as status indicators, so why are blue LEDs different?
On the other hand, you can run the other two on generic PC hardware, which means that the only reason you'd have to have a Mac is if developing for the Mac is important to you.
I thought all of this was pretty obvious, but apparently not...
So, in other words it's intuitive and easy to have basic functionality change behavior depending on how Apple thinks the application should be used? I prefer things to just behave consistently so I don't have to think about it.
A 10 year old S-Series is going to have air bags, crumple zones, safety glass, and seatbelts. We're talking about a car that was made 10 years ago, not a Model T or something from the 80's (though the car from the 80's is still going to have seatbelts, safety glass, and something that resembles a crumple zone) so you can knock off the hyperbole. If well maintained, it should also meed emissions in most every state, and probably drives better than the Toyota Yaris (which feels and drives like a Geo Metro if you ask me).
Really? I've tried the "it will pay for itself in energy costs" calculations before, and I've found it just doesn't work out. According to the kill-a-watt, my computer (the box only) currently draws about 150-180W of power depending on the load (it's an old-school Athlon with dual video cards and 3 harddrives). That means it costs me roughly 1.5 cents per hour to run. That sounds bad, but that's about 36 cents a day, or about $132 a year to run, assuming I run it 24/7 (which I don't). So even if I was to upgrade, it would probably be about a year to pay off if I went with the absolute cheapest stuff I could find, to well over a decade for something more like what I would want without being excessive. So electricity must be really expensive where you are for something like that to pay off that quickly. Generally I've found that it's almost always cheaper just to keep what you have so long as it's still useful and keep using it instead of upgrading to less power-hungry components with the goal to save money.
When I swap out a drive like that, I generally put the old drives up on a shelf and don't repurpose them right away. If infant mortality strikes, I'll put the old drive back in and be running again quickly. I also always do the full format - it takes a few hours but all the drives I've had that suffered from infant mortality problems failed before getting through the format.
It's not just a Minnesota thing. People all the time say they are going to "Chicago" or "Dallas" or "Pittsburgh" when they really mean some random suburb next to the city. The most reason people do this is because everyone knows where Kansas City is, but not where Overland Park is, so saying Kansas City seems a lot more glamorous and unambigious.
On the other hand, I've really seen some people get steamed when St. Paul (the other "twin city") gets refered to as Minneapolis.
Funny you mention groceries. If someone is to give me a gift card, I prefer a grocery store as I will use it fairly quickly to get something I need. I hate gift cards to a place like Best Buy/Circuit City as I don't like shopping in those places, and I'm stuck trying to find item(s) that will ring up slightly more than the gift card is worth (so I use it up while not giving too much of *my* money to the bastards).
The problem with cash is that if I give you a gift of $50, and you give me a gift of $50, then we really didn't exchange anything. If I give you a gift of $50, and you give me a gift of $70, then effectively you gave me a gift of $20 and I gave you nothing. But if we exchange gift cards, then you have a gift card to Store X and I have a gift card to Store Y and thus we exchanged something. It's all about the psycology.
I really think gift giving for the holidays really should go back to being for the kids.
Probably your best bet would be to stick a RTG in it to keep it warm, combined with the ability to retract into a cocoon of sorts to protect and keep warm things like the solar cells (if you still needed them), robotic arms, and other instruments. Assuming you can keep it warm enough to keep the CO2 off of it, I think it would probably do just fine as you wouldn't have to really worry about liquids getting in and fouling things up.