Have you considered LCDs? I do believe that their cables can go longer than VGA cables, but I may be mistaken there. You also have the bonus of less heat, and no CRT monitor whine too.
It's been my impression that Dell is slightly above the real bottom feeders like eMachines and Compaq. Atleast the cheapest Dell offers a free upgrade to 256MB of ram, and actually uses 333Mhz DDR ram (even if it's shared). Sure beats the peice of crap Compaqs with 128MB of SDRAM and Intel Extreme graphics. Of course, they still aren't that great, most of them are slow as hell and their case design is terrible in terms of upgrades. But atleast they are somewhat useful, unlike the eMachines that are ready to be trashed the instant you take them out of the box.
And as for the whitebox computers from the small makers, many of them are pretty good - but I have seen a fair share of crap from them too (ooh look, we got this box of power supplies for $3.50 each! woohoo!)
It is very painfully slow. But the 12mbps (about 1.5 mb/s) is fast enough to serve up MPEG2 and DiVX.
For example, I have 3:40 MPEG2 music video that's 132MB. 3:40 is 220 seconds, so to serve it up I need atleast 600k/s, which is less than half the speed of USB 1.1. So it's good enough in this case.
Besides, he's using the drive to store media files. You don't need speed for that at all. Sure, it might be a little tedious copying 1TB of data over to the drive, but once that data is there he'll be fine. Heck, my USB 2.0 external can serve up MPEG2's and DiVX movies just fine when hooked to a USB 1.1 port.
I don't know about most people, but I don't like using a keyboard layout that was designed only to keep typewriters from jamming.
To me Dvorak just makes sense. Put the most commonly used keys on the homerow, instead things like g, j, k and;. Vowels on one side, on the homerow. Constanants on the other. Contrary to what one of those articles says, Dvorak is designed to keep alternating from the left to right hand - which should obvious to anyone who looks at the layout.
Also, it seems that many of the people who knock Dvorak haven't used it much, or not at all. I make less errors. Dvorak does have it's gremlins (my two gripes mainly have to do with the placement of the y and f keys, and I don't know why Dvorak placed m and w next to each other either), but much better than Qwerty. Also, my hands feel much less tired after a day of typing. Whenever I use Qwerty now, it feels like my hands spend all their time dancing all over the place instead of hitting the keys. But YMMV.
As for the studies, how about something like this? http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.html
Or go here and do your own comparisions: http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvo rak/comparePage.html
Probably because Microsoft still supports Windows ME for the time being, and since 98SE is so simular the patch works for it too. Once Microsoft stops supporting ME (I think that date is coming up fast), there probably won't be any new patches for 98SE or ME.
I say the cheapest and easiest way to backup against drive failure is Raid 1. With disk drives under $1/gig, that makes Raid 1 less than $2/gig. It's cheap, it's easy, especially with many motherboards supporting it. It would be ten times easier for most people if Windows 2000/XP Pro supported software mirroring, but it seems someone at Redmond decided you had to fork out the $$$ for 2000 Server if you wanted that.
For external backup, the cheapest and easiest route I say is an external USB 2.0/Firewire hard drive. With ~200 Gigs of external storage running a little more than $200, it's cheap, easy, fast, compact and pretty reliable.
Seriously, this box should have gigabit ethernet, USB2.0 and/or firewire. That would rock. But they are trying to use off-the-shelf components and as far as I know there is no mini-ITX board with those features. Atleast not a cheap one.
The best part about NAT is that I can hook up a freshly reinstalled Windows computer to it with no firewalls like Zonealarm on it, it picks up an IP and is hooked up to the internet immediately. And I don't have to worry about it instantly getting 0wn3d by MSBlaster, etc. Giving me plenty of time to download service packs, patches, drivers, software, etc. I suppose it can be done with another computer and CD-Rs, but this way is so much easier.
Also, I can have file shares open between different computers on the NATed (natted? NATted?) network, allowing for easy sharing of files. If each computer was hooked directly to the internet there would be no way I'd have ports 135-139 open for Windows file shares!
Actually, it's more like the college freshman mentality. When they are in high school, many (not all obviously) live at home, and thus their parents keep tabs on them, so they don't get too wild. But now they are 18-19 years old, and when they go to college they are suddenly away from home for the first time, and all they want to do is PARTY!!!! They drink, screw, party, smoke, whatever. They don't care because they think they are invincible and it's not like they are spending their own money anyway. And then reality hits, and they either shape up (not likely), or flunk out (very likely). Perhaps a few manage to stay around as business majors or something else equally lame.
Learning is more of the mentality of the college seniors and juniors who are taking some serious classes that need dedication and effort. They have either learned from their wilder years, or were smart enough in the first place to take things seriously. Many of these people are also spending their own money (or are taking out loans they will have to pay back), so they want to get it right the first time.
But anyway, I don't what any of this has to do with file sharing anyway. File sharing and P2P is easy enough and widespread enough that all kinds of people do it from all ages and backgrounds. It doesn't take a lot of knowledge of computers. Sure, a lot of swapping goes on in college, but so does everywhere else.
Atleast your neighbor could sell his business and walk away with money in his hand. Small companies are bought and sold all the time, for real money. It won't shake up the trucking industry.
At the very least he has the two rigs, which in and of themselves have value as physical objects - unlike the paper assets that many of these rich CEOs have.
I have a 114GiB "120GB" drive. That puts it at about 122GB. So bonus I guess. It seems now that manufacturers are playing a little more loose with the numbers, and are just rounding off. 120GB drives from different manufacturers can vary by 3 or 4GB or more.
I seem to recall a while back I had some IBM "80GB" drives that once formatted were 82.6GiB. I was pretty impressed that the drive was bigger than 80GB no matter which definition you used. Too bad they were flaky drives though.
Who's to say his first computer had to be new? Or even close to new? Computers back in the 1980's were expensive, and a 6 year old kid is not going to be able to buy one. To get a 7 year old hand-me-down that was probably still worth a couple hundred bucks would of been pretty nice.
How long before something like this will be hacked? (I'm assuming it exists here) They say that if you try to open it, etc - bad things will happen. I wonder if they have 'case-open' type switches to detect if one was to try to pop it open. That could be interesting, pop open the case and the next time it has access to the internet it sends the Corporate Police(tm) after your ass for DMCA violations or whatnot.
Perhaps it won't have to be opened. They say it will be effectively controlled over the internet, even to the point that it calls home to get a key before letting you run a game. Privacy issues aside, I wonder how long before someone has it thinking it's talking to the Infinium servers when in reality it's talking to the Linux box accross the hall?
Unless you have an expensive HDTV set or rig up a computer monitor, all that resolution is going to do nothing for you. Which will be the case for like 98% of console buyers in the next 10 years.
HDTV's are expensive - people are not buying them. And if I'm going to rig the thing up to my 19" CRT and play it in front of the computer (like hell I'm hauling the 80lb CRT to the living room!), I might as well use the PC that's attached to it instead.
And when was the last time you saw a Compaq with: - High-performance nVidia video card - High-performance Intel motherboard - Dolby Digital(TM) 7.1 Surround Sound
Maybe they are out there, but the current crop I have seen at Best Buy are the fast processor, old motherboard with obsolete chipset, 128MB Ram, Intel Xtreme graphics variety.
I never really cared about the Final Fantasy games after they moved off of the Nintendo myself either. At times they just seemed like CG movies where you could take limited control of the characters for a little while. Though maybe I had just gotten older, and the magic of the games was gone. Though sometimes I wonder how well the FF7+ line of games would of done an their own without the momentum from FF1-FF6 to push them along.
On the other hand, the engineers at Honda spent a lot of time with the aerodynamics of the Civic, making sure it handled OK at high speeds, that the car was stable and predictable. And at the same time reducing drag to improve on the speed and economy of the vehicle. Then some Riceboy comes along and throws one of those stupid-ass wings on the back and screws it all up. At best, those wings just slow the car down and make it burn more fuel. However, I bet many of those wings screw up the steering and make the car unstable at high speeds, not that many of those posers actually can actually get their modified economy cars up to those speeds.
It's probably not all that trivial. It seems pretty easy to mess with a plane's electronics, but in order to have a serious attack you would need to disable/harm the electronics to the point where the plane would crash.
Perhaps they are already trying? They bring the device on the airplane, turn it on, and when it fails to do anything significant they just pack it up, and try again another day. You probably won't hear about an attack like this until a plane crashes because of it (and sadly, nothing will likely be done about this problem until lives are lost).
Re:Where will this insanity end?
on
Memory Activity LEDs
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I still have an old 286-12 made by a company called Everex that has an orange LED display on the front that tells what head and track the hard disk is on. It also works for the floppy disk drives too. During the POST it goes through messages telling what the computers is doing (DMA OK, FLPY OK, etc). The display came in handy multiple times for troubleshooting, and at the same time still looks cool. Makes it real easy to see when the disk drive needs a defraging too.
It would be neat to get it going on a newer computer, but I don't think it is possible. The display is connected by a ribbon cable to the motherboard. The floppy and hard disk controllers are on a seperate 16 bit expansion card. The display still works if I swap out the conrollers, leading me to believe it's some function of the chipset. There is also the problem with any newer computer the numbers would whiz by way to fast to read though.
Likewise, SETI seems to run ok as long as the computer has 32MB of ram. A work unit will take 5-10 days most likely.
But as another poster mentioned, unless these computers need to be on for some other reason, I would just pull the plug on them as the results vs. power used is just so low it's not worth it.
I don't know how big of a data packet the program needs and how often it needs to retreive one from the server, but if it's big enough that alone may be too much for the dial up users anyway.
Most OSes halt the CPU when it is not in use. This is to save power and to reduce heat output. However, with a program like SETI, the CPU is kept at 100% all the time - and with most modern processors this can be a difference of 30W or more in average power use. Not to mention the extra power that is used to keep the computer cool and for pulling that heat out of your house (if you use air conditioning).
It won't matter though for 486's (no HLT command), or if you use Windows 98 or ME - the two newest x86 OSes I can think of that don't halt the CPU when idle.
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Have you considered LCDs? I do believe that their cables can go longer than VGA cables, but I may be mistaken there. You also have the bonus of less heat, and no CRT monitor whine too.
It's been my impression that Dell is slightly above the real bottom feeders like eMachines and Compaq. Atleast the cheapest Dell offers a free upgrade to 256MB of ram, and actually uses 333Mhz DDR ram (even if it's shared). Sure beats the peice of crap Compaqs with 128MB of SDRAM and Intel Extreme graphics. Of course, they still aren't that great, most of them are slow as hell and their case design is terrible in terms of upgrades. But atleast they are somewhat useful, unlike the eMachines that are ready to be trashed the instant you take them out of the box.
And as for the whitebox computers from the small makers, many of them are pretty good - but I have seen a fair share of crap from them too (ooh look, we got this box of power supplies for $3.50 each! woohoo!)
It is very painfully slow. But the 12mbps (about 1.5 mb/s) is fast enough to serve up MPEG2 and DiVX.
For example, I have 3:40 MPEG2 music video that's 132MB. 3:40 is 220 seconds, so to serve it up I need atleast 600k/s, which is less than half the speed of USB 1.1. So it's good enough in this case.
Besides, he's using the drive to store media files. You don't need speed for that at all. Sure, it might be a little tedious copying 1TB of data over to the drive, but once that data is there he'll be fine. Heck, my USB 2.0 external can serve up MPEG2's and DiVX movies just fine when hooked to a USB 1.1 port.
I don't know about most people, but I don't like using a keyboard layout that was designed only to keep typewriters from jamming.
;. Vowels on one side, on the homerow. Constanants on the other. Contrary to what one of those articles says, Dvorak is designed to keep alternating from the left to right hand - which should obvious to anyone who looks at the layout.
o rak/comparePage .html
To me Dvorak just makes sense. Put the most commonly used keys on the homerow, instead things like g, j, k and
Also, it seems that many of the people who knock Dvorak haven't used it much, or not at all. I make less errors. Dvorak does have it's gremlins (my two gripes mainly have to do with the placement of the y and f keys, and I don't know why Dvorak placed m and w next to each other either), but much better than Qwerty. Also, my hands feel much less tired after a day of typing. Whenever I use Qwerty now, it feels like my hands spend all their time dancing all over the place instead of hitting the keys. But YMMV.
As for the studies, how about something like this?
http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.html
Or go here and do your own comparisions:
http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dv
Probably because Microsoft still supports Windows ME for the time being, and since 98SE is so simular the patch works for it too. Once Microsoft stops supporting ME (I think that date is coming up fast), there probably won't be any new patches for 98SE or ME.
Most people don't backup at all it seems.
I say the cheapest and easiest way to backup against drive failure is Raid 1. With disk drives under $1/gig, that makes Raid 1 less than $2/gig. It's cheap, it's easy, especially with many motherboards supporting it. It would be ten times easier for most people if Windows 2000/XP Pro supported software mirroring, but it seems someone at Redmond decided you had to fork out the $$$ for 2000 Server if you wanted that.
For external backup, the cheapest and easiest route I say is an external USB 2.0/Firewire hard drive. With ~200 Gigs of external storage running a little more than $200, it's cheap, easy, fast, compact and pretty reliable.
Cost, cost, and cost.
Seriously, this box should have gigabit ethernet, USB2.0 and/or firewire. That would rock. But they are trying to use off-the-shelf components and as far as I know there is no mini-ITX board with those features. Atleast not a cheap one.
The best part about NAT is that I can hook up a freshly reinstalled Windows computer to it with no firewalls like Zonealarm on it, it picks up an IP and is hooked up to the internet immediately. And I don't have to worry about it instantly getting 0wn3d by MSBlaster, etc. Giving me plenty of time to download service packs, patches, drivers, software, etc. I suppose it can be done with another computer and CD-Rs, but this way is so much easier.
Also, I can have file shares open between different computers on the NATed (natted? NATted?) network, allowing for easy sharing of files. If each computer was hooked directly to the internet there would be no way I'd have ports 135-139 open for Windows file shares!
What college did you go to? Seriously.
Actually, it's more like the college freshman mentality. When they are in high school, many (not all obviously) live at home, and thus their parents keep tabs on them, so they don't get too wild. But now they are 18-19 years old, and when they go to college they are suddenly away from home for the first time, and all they want to do is PARTY!!!! They drink, screw, party, smoke, whatever. They don't care because they think they are invincible and it's not like they are spending their own money anyway. And then reality hits, and they either shape up (not likely), or flunk out (very likely). Perhaps a few manage to stay around as business majors or something else equally lame.
Learning is more of the mentality of the college seniors and juniors who are taking some serious classes that need dedication and effort. They have either learned from their wilder years, or were smart enough in the first place to take things seriously. Many of these people are also spending their own money (or are taking out loans they will have to pay back), so they want to get it right the first time.
But anyway, I don't what any of this has to do with file sharing anyway. File sharing and P2P is easy enough and widespread enough that all kinds of people do it from all ages and backgrounds. It doesn't take a lot of knowledge of computers. Sure, a lot of swapping goes on in college, but so does everywhere else.
Atleast your neighbor could sell his business and walk away with money in his hand. Small companies are bought and sold all the time, for real money. It won't shake up the trucking industry.
At the very least he has the two rigs, which in and of themselves have value as physical objects - unlike the paper assets that many of these rich CEOs have.
I have a 114GiB "120GB" drive. That puts it at about 122GB. So bonus I guess. It seems now that manufacturers are playing a little more loose with the numbers, and are just rounding off. 120GB drives from different manufacturers can vary by 3 or 4GB or more.
I seem to recall a while back I had some IBM "80GB" drives that once formatted were 82.6GiB. I was pretty impressed that the drive was bigger than 80GB no matter which definition you used. Too bad they were flaky drives though.
Who's to say his first computer had to be new? Or even close to new? Computers back in the 1980's were expensive, and a 6 year old kid is not going to be able to buy one. To get a 7 year old hand-me-down that was probably still worth a couple hundred bucks would of been pretty nice.
How long before something like this will be hacked? (I'm assuming it exists here) They say that if you try to open it, etc - bad things will happen. I wonder if they have 'case-open' type switches to detect if one was to try to pop it open. That could be interesting, pop open the case and the next time it has access to the internet it sends the Corporate Police(tm) after your ass for DMCA violations or whatnot.
Perhaps it won't have to be opened. They say it will be effectively controlled over the internet, even to the point that it calls home to get a key before letting you run a game. Privacy issues aside, I wonder how long before someone has it thinking it's talking to the Infinium servers when in reality it's talking to the Linux box accross the hall?
Unless you have an expensive HDTV set or rig up a computer monitor, all that resolution is going to do nothing for you. Which will be the case for like 98% of console buyers in the next 10 years.
HDTV's are expensive - people are not buying them. And if I'm going to rig the thing up to my 19" CRT and play it in front of the computer (like hell I'm hauling the 80lb CRT to the living room!), I might as well use the PC that's attached to it instead.
And when was the last time you saw a Compaq with:
- High-performance nVidia video card
- High-performance Intel motherboard
- Dolby Digital(TM) 7.1 Surround Sound
Maybe they are out there, but the current crop I have seen at Best Buy are the fast processor, old motherboard with obsolete chipset, 128MB Ram, Intel Xtreme graphics variety.
I never really cared about the Final Fantasy games after they moved off of the Nintendo myself either. At times they just seemed like CG movies where you could take limited control of the characters for a little while. Though maybe I had just gotten older, and the magic of the games was gone. Though sometimes I wonder how well the FF7+ line of games would of done an their own without the momentum from FF1-FF6 to push them along.
Verizon!=Verisign, they just have simular names that's all.
On the other hand, the engineers at Honda spent a lot of time with the aerodynamics of the Civic, making sure it handled OK at high speeds, that the car was stable and predictable. And at the same time reducing drag to improve on the speed and economy of the vehicle. Then some Riceboy comes along and throws one of those stupid-ass wings on the back and screws it all up. At best, those wings just slow the car down and make it burn more fuel. However, I bet many of those wings screw up the steering and make the car unstable at high speeds, not that many of those posers actually can actually get their modified economy cars up to those speeds.
It's probably not all that trivial. It seems pretty easy to mess with a plane's electronics, but in order to have a serious attack you would need to disable/harm the electronics to the point where the plane would crash.
Perhaps they are already trying? They bring the device on the airplane, turn it on, and when it fails to do anything significant they just pack it up, and try again another day. You probably won't hear about an attack like this until a plane crashes because of it (and sadly, nothing will likely be done about this problem until lives are lost).
I still have an old 286-12 made by a company called Everex that has an orange LED display on the front that tells what head and track the hard disk is on. It also works for the floppy disk drives too. During the POST it goes through messages telling what the computers is doing (DMA OK, FLPY OK, etc). The display came in handy multiple times for troubleshooting, and at the same time still looks cool. Makes it real easy to see when the disk drive needs a defraging too.
It would be neat to get it going on a newer computer, but I don't think it is possible. The display is connected by a ribbon cable to the motherboard. The floppy and hard disk controllers are on a seperate 16 bit expansion card. The display still works if I swap out the conrollers, leading me to believe it's some function of the chipset. There is also the problem with any newer computer the numbers would whiz by way to fast to read though.
Likewise, SETI seems to run ok as long as the computer has 32MB of ram. A work unit will take 5-10 days most likely.
But as another poster mentioned, unless these computers need to be on for some other reason, I would just pull the plug on them as the results vs. power used is just so low it's not worth it.
I don't know how big of a data packet the program needs and how often it needs to retreive one from the server, but if it's big enough that alone may be too much for the dial up users anyway.
Most OSes halt the CPU when it is not in use. This is to save power and to reduce heat output. However, with a program like SETI, the CPU is kept at 100% all the time - and with most modern processors this can be a difference of 30W or more in average power use. Not to mention the extra power that is used to keep the computer cool and for pulling that heat out of your house (if you use air conditioning).
It won't matter though for 486's (no HLT command), or if you use Windows 98 or ME - the two newest
x86 OSes I can think of that don't halt the CPU when idle.
Maybe I should configure an autoresponder that responds to the message from Norton AV that tells the person how to turn off the autoresponse?
*ducks*