When you start mentioning things like skin cancer, you start sounding a bit hysterical. Are you *really* worried about a 0.00015% increase in risk of cancer? Honestly, you're several hundred times more likely to be a victim of terrorism than to get skin cancer from thee machines, and that risk is negligible.
You do realize that there's about 2.1 billion commercial airline trips taken every year? Even with your 0.00015% number (which I'm sure you pulled right out of your ass) that's over 3,000 cases of cancer a year. Which is more than the terrorists have managed to kill during any year, including 2001.
Fixing the video support would be nice. Winamp is still my preferred video player because it's about the only video player I've found with a good playlist editor (about the only other I've found is Zoomplayer). But the video player itself is a bit quirky. I can fix a lot of it by disabling the Winamp built-in support for things like MKV and Flash video and letting Winamp fall back on DirectShow, but it will still randomly choke on some files for no apparent reason.
Electric cars are zero emissions, in the same way your computer, smartphone, and dishwasher are also zero emissions. I don't see the need to twist words around as anyone who's somewhat intelligent will know that the electricity used to run the vehicles may come from a polluting source. Unless of course you have an agenda to push. But hey, let's not forget where the oil comes from either. Does that mean anyone who drives a gasoline car supports brutal middle-eastern regimes and terrorism?
I wouldn't call it a myth. German cars, especially VW, used be very reliable vehicles. They were also very simple vehicles, mostly air cooled, with very few options or fancy features to break. I don't know what happened, but it all pretty much went to shit in the mid-90's. Part of it might have been the transition to water-cooled, but the early water-cooled VW's weren't that problematic. Seems to be mostly cost-cutting, not paying attention to quality, failing to realize that people no longer wanted to have to tinker with their cars constantly, and over engineering things too much.
Kind of a shame because their vehicles are fun to drive and I like their styling. But the reliability (and the shitty dealer network to boot) keeps me away.
The most common way of doing a Dvorak keyboard is to take a qwerty keyboard and relabel the keys (or rearrange the keycaps if they come off), then tell the OS that it's a Dvorak keyboard. If you're a decent touch typist, you can skip the relabel part and touch type Dvorak on any standard qwerty keyboard after changing the layout in the OS. So you can standardize one keyboard, with both qwerty and Dvorak printed on them, and the users could switch between the layouts as they see fit.
The big problem with this is that Windows is pretty much broken with multiple keyboard layouts. I don't remember how it was in the 9x days, but Windows 2000 through Windows 7 has the keyboard layout as a per application setting, which is completely retarded (every application has it's own layout setting, and you can't set them all at once without changing the default layout and rebooting). Windows 8 finally made it a global setting (with the option to set it per-application if you really want to). Windows 10 kept that, but for some reason removed the ability to set a default layout(!!!) so it always boots up in qwerty, so you have to switch it on the log in screen, which doesn't apply to your session, so you have to switch it again once you log in.
I can only imagine how will this will actually work. First of all, I would imagine most "drivers" of autonomous cars aren't going to be paying as much attention to what is happening on the road as someone who is actively driving the car, so they are not likely to be prepared to be suddenly dumped into an emergency situation. Even if they are paying attention, there's still going to be the time needed for the driver to get their hands on the wheel, feet on the pedals, etc. And then you're going to have a driver that has potentially spent very little time actually driving a vehicle suddenly trying to handle an emergency situation, in a car they may have never actually driven before. It would be like a sudden quantum leap into an emergency situation behind the wheel of an unfamiliar car. Most people are going to wreck, even if they are an experience driver.
Quite likely we'd be better off letting the computer try to handle the situation best it could than hand the control over to the human.
There was a mobile Pentium MMX at 133 MHz. Slowest regular desktop processor was 166 MHz. There were also some overdrive MMX processors at various oddball speeds.
Hardly. I'd say things have only been significantly overclockable since about 2009 (with Nehalem), though I have seen some people have some pretty good luck with the Core 2 chips. Overclocking the netburst (Pentium 4) chips like the article you linked to is tricky business. Almost all of them are multiplier locked, so your only option is to overclock the FSB. Which also overclocks the PCI/AGP bus and memory along with the CPU. This limits your ability to overclock significantly because you can only go up until your weakest component falters. Besides, it seems those chips were run a lot closer to their limits (even more so on the AMD side).
Nowadays, buy an unlocked 'K' processor, and you can overclock it 10% no problem without even trying, and 20-25% with only a minimum of fuss.
I think a lot of it has to do with the emphasis on power usage. The chip is supposed to have a TDP of 75W. Sure, it will run at 4.2GHz just fine, but you have to crank up the voltage a bit and now it exceeds 75W. So they sell it as a 3.8GHz chip because it can run at that speed and meet the power requirements. If it was 10 years ago, it would be sold as 4.4GHz chip with a TDP of 130W, because MHz was king and a lot less attention was given to the power usage.
Because of this, with most chips nowadays you'll get a pretty good overclock just fine, so long as you've got a decent cooler on it.
I assumed they were also counting the XB-70 Valkyrie which was the next generation bomber that was intended to replace the B-52, but never made it past the prototype stage.
My third biggest cringe is people hanging on by their hands for more than 30 seconds. People in *really* good shape can hold on for 60 seconds (try it some time), but unless you are an elite climber you won't get past the minute mark. Viz: the scientists in the 1997 movie "Batman and Robin".
Actually, the kind of people who can hang on the longest are usually the small, scrawny types that don't really have the raw strength or not even particularly fit, but are pretty strong compared to their body weight. Muscle mass is actually pretty heavy, so the big muscular guys actually can't hold on as nearly long as, say, a young gymnast.
It's always amazed me how terrible the Intel coolers have been after Socket 478. Pain in the ass to install correctly, and they tend work themselves loose. What really amazes me is that they've stuck with the same crappy design now for almost a decade.
Even more interesting, this would allow airplanes to be reconfigured quickly. A passenger plane could become a cargo plane in a few minutes just by sliding out the passenger compartment and sliding in a cargo one. They could also have different passenger compartments with different seating configurations, and also compartments that are part passenger part cargo for those legs where the plane would otherwise fly with most of the seats empty. Hopefully benefits like this would get the attention of the airlines.
I assume most OSes would shit themselves if the boot drive suddenly went read only. I would also guess most wouldn't boot up either once you tried rebooting. You'd better hope that you think of trying a live CD or something before you power cycle the computer.
Would it suddenly go read-only in the middle of a write? Hello data corruption! Most file system repair tools attempt to repair the file system in-place. You'd have to dd the data off the drive, then attempt to repair the file system. Ugh.
Well, my question is who needs that kind of storage on a SSD on their home computer? I'm sure some people do, but I assume the vast majority of people buying 5TB hard drives are filling them up with a bunch of media files that don't need fast access speeds. I have a 6TB hard drive and I wouldn't dream of replacing it with SSDs at this time because it would cost a fortune and the only time the speed would come in handy would be the initial copy of the data to the drive. Otherwise, the drive is plenty fast for what I use it for.
Now, if SSDs drop in price like the article suggests then things might change. A large media drive might be the perfect use for the newer, low number of write cycles flash memory that's starting to hit the market (the idea being that once data is written to the drive it's typically not ever deleted and the space reused).
Related to Claws Mail is Sylpheed which is the project that Claws Mail originally forked from. Haven't used it, but I'm pretty happy with Claws Mail (granted, I use it as email client only, no calender or anything like that).
If you have a 32-bit machine, you're pretty much locked out of Windows 10 anyway. Windows 10 (and Windows 8) requires the CPU support the NX bit, which only a handful of 32 bit CPU's support.
I got a Thinkpad R60, so it's slightly older than the Z61t (which for $5 is bargain!). The Windows 10 upgrade mostly worked. The issues I ran into was 1) Would not install off of a USB flash drive and 2) No drivers for the graphics card (ATI Radeon X1400) in Windows 10. I solved 1 by burning to DVD to install, and 2 by installing the Vista x64 (!) driver which Windows 10 didn't seem to have a problem with. I'd say Windows 10 is faster than Windows 7. The big problem with Windows 7 now is that Microsoft won't do another service pack and there's just so many updates now that Windows update will bring an older computer to its knees for a considerable amount of time whenever it does an update check. Which was my main motivation for taking Microsoft up on their free Windows 10 offer for this particular computer. Still, not bad for a computer that I bought before Vista was released. Runs pretty good - Core 2 Duo 2Ghz, 3GB of ram (chipset limitation, I actually have 4GB physically installed), and a 120GB SSD (which is speed limited by the SATA1 interface).
That's my thought. Depending on what you want to do, you could likely get away just fine with a free or very cheap used computer. Pretty much anything made in the last 10 years will run a Linux desktop just fine, and depending on what it is you could even go older.
Unless you're trying to game on Linux or are doing some serious number crunching or something, the Linux box would probably be pretty cheap. Or even free, since hand-me-down PCs can run pretty much any Linux desktop satisfactory.
Also, one nice thing about the fact that almost every Intel CPU has a GPU integrated into it the past few years means you can take your old gaming rig, pull out the graphics card, and have a good enough, low power, well supported GPU for your Linux desktop.
Recently I dumpster-dlved an Alienware computer. From the date codes I deduced it was built very late in 2003, so it wasn't like it was a major find. It had an Intel branded 875P board, a socket 478 P4 2.8GHz, a nVidia FX5600, and a 420W Enlight power supply. In terms of quality I couldn't really complain (it all still worked too), but not really what I would have considered a high end gaming machine 12 years ago. Really nice case though, which got repurposed as a Slackware box running a much more modern Sandy Bridge i7.
- SSD: $150. That's currently about a 512GB drive. - HDD: $100. That's currently about a 2TB drive. Use this as a slow bulk storage space and a place to put the swap partition so it doesn't wear-level your SSD to its grave.
Seriously? First, that's going to kill a lot of the gains you get from having the SSD (In Windows, that is), and secondly it's going to take a long time to wear-level a SSD from the page file. Besides it'll mostly likely die of other reasons first (*cough*firmwarebugs*cough). If you're really worried get a cheap under $40 one and put your swap file on that.
You might also consider buying a larger SSD as games nowadays chew through storage pretty quickly. Ditto for Windows. You can always store the games on the HDD but then you lose the advantage of having it in the first place. (though granted I do all my gaming on a PC that still pure HDD so you'll likely be fine)
- Windows: $140. Get the Pro version. Always.
Why? There's almost no difference between Pro and Home except for a few things that they use to sock it to businesses (like the ability to join domains) that are absolutely of no use on a gaming PC. Well, I suppose with Windows 10 you have the ability to defer updates, which is nice. Though I'd seriously consider buying Windows 8.1 because 1) It's faster than both 7 and 10, 2) It doesn't have the Windows 10 spyware, 3) You can defer updates, and 4) If you're just using it as a launcher for your games the Metro interface won't matter. Be sure to let it update to Windows 10 (so that you reserve your free copy in case you ever want to use it), then roll it back to Windows 8.1 and use that.
Most commodity desktops aren't going to take too well to a adding decent GPU. Assuming you can actually get one that can physically fit the GPU in the case, the power supply will almost certainly not be adequate, and depending on how propriety it is, not easily upgraded. I would assume any gamer that's on a budget would build their own, unless they have the money and don't mind plopping it down for a high end prebuilt system (Alienware, etc.).
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You do realize that there's about 2.1 billion commercial airline trips taken every year? Even with your 0.00015% number (which I'm sure you pulled right out of your ass) that's over 3,000 cases of cancer a year. Which is more than the terrorists have managed to kill during any year, including 2001.
Fixing the video support would be nice. Winamp is still my preferred video player because it's about the only video player I've found with a good playlist editor (about the only other I've found is Zoomplayer). But the video player itself is a bit quirky. I can fix a lot of it by disabling the Winamp built-in support for things like MKV and Flash video and letting Winamp fall back on DirectShow, but it will still randomly choke on some files for no apparent reason.
Electric cars are zero emissions, in the same way your computer, smartphone, and dishwasher are also zero emissions. I don't see the need to twist words around as anyone who's somewhat intelligent will know that the electricity used to run the vehicles may come from a polluting source. Unless of course you have an agenda to push. But hey, let's not forget where the oil comes from either. Does that mean anyone who drives a gasoline car supports brutal middle-eastern regimes and terrorism?
I wouldn't call it a myth. German cars, especially VW, used be very reliable vehicles. They were also very simple vehicles, mostly air cooled, with very few options or fancy features to break. I don't know what happened, but it all pretty much went to shit in the mid-90's. Part of it might have been the transition to water-cooled, but the early water-cooled VW's weren't that problematic. Seems to be mostly cost-cutting, not paying attention to quality, failing to realize that people no longer wanted to have to tinker with their cars constantly, and over engineering things too much.
Kind of a shame because their vehicles are fun to drive and I like their styling. But the reliability (and the shitty dealer network to boot) keeps me away.
You do realize that ReactOS relies heavily on Wine to implement a lot of the compatibility for the Windows API, right?
Well, I'm pretty sure it's capable of clearing its own orbit. So Death Planet it is.
The most common way of doing a Dvorak keyboard is to take a qwerty keyboard and relabel the keys (or rearrange the keycaps if they come off), then tell the OS that it's a Dvorak keyboard. If you're a decent touch typist, you can skip the relabel part and touch type Dvorak on any standard qwerty keyboard after changing the layout in the OS. So you can standardize one keyboard, with both qwerty and Dvorak printed on them, and the users could switch between the layouts as they see fit.
The big problem with this is that Windows is pretty much broken with multiple keyboard layouts. I don't remember how it was in the 9x days, but Windows 2000 through Windows 7 has the keyboard layout as a per application setting, which is completely retarded (every application has it's own layout setting, and you can't set them all at once without changing the default layout and rebooting). Windows 8 finally made it a global setting (with the option to set it per-application if you really want to). Windows 10 kept that, but for some reason removed the ability to set a default layout(!!!) so it always boots up in qwerty, so you have to switch it on the log in screen, which doesn't apply to your session, so you have to switch it again once you log in.
I can only imagine how will this will actually work. First of all, I would imagine most "drivers" of autonomous cars aren't going to be paying as much attention to what is happening on the road as someone who is actively driving the car, so they are not likely to be prepared to be suddenly dumped into an emergency situation. Even if they are paying attention, there's still going to be the time needed for the driver to get their hands on the wheel, feet on the pedals, etc. And then you're going to have a driver that has potentially spent very little time actually driving a vehicle suddenly trying to handle an emergency situation, in a car they may have never actually driven before. It would be like a sudden quantum leap into an emergency situation behind the wheel of an unfamiliar car. Most people are going to wreck, even if they are an experience driver.
Quite likely we'd be better off letting the computer try to handle the situation best it could than hand the control over to the human.
There was a mobile Pentium MMX at 133 MHz. Slowest regular desktop processor was 166 MHz. There were also some overdrive MMX processors at various oddball speeds.
Hardly. I'd say things have only been significantly overclockable since about 2009 (with Nehalem), though I have seen some people have some pretty good luck with the Core 2 chips. Overclocking the netburst (Pentium 4) chips like the article you linked to is tricky business. Almost all of them are multiplier locked, so your only option is to overclock the FSB. Which also overclocks the PCI/AGP bus and memory along with the CPU. This limits your ability to overclock significantly because you can only go up until your weakest component falters. Besides, it seems those chips were run a lot closer to their limits (even more so on the AMD side).
Nowadays, buy an unlocked 'K' processor, and you can overclock it 10% no problem without even trying, and 20-25% with only a minimum of fuss.
I think a lot of it has to do with the emphasis on power usage. The chip is supposed to have a TDP of 75W. Sure, it will run at 4.2GHz just fine, but you have to crank up the voltage a bit and now it exceeds 75W. So they sell it as a 3.8GHz chip because it can run at that speed and meet the power requirements. If it was 10 years ago, it would be sold as 4.4GHz chip with a TDP of 130W, because MHz was king and a lot less attention was given to the power usage.
Because of this, with most chips nowadays you'll get a pretty good overclock just fine, so long as you've got a decent cooler on it.
I assumed they were also counting the XB-70 Valkyrie which was the next generation bomber that was intended to replace the B-52, but never made it past the prototype stage.
Actually, the kind of people who can hang on the longest are usually the small, scrawny types that don't really have the raw strength or not even particularly fit, but are pretty strong compared to their body weight. Muscle mass is actually pretty heavy, so the big muscular guys actually can't hold on as nearly long as, say, a young gymnast.
It's always amazed me how terrible the Intel coolers have been after Socket 478. Pain in the ass to install correctly, and they tend work themselves loose. What really amazes me is that they've stuck with the same crappy design now for almost a decade.
Even more interesting, this would allow airplanes to be reconfigured quickly. A passenger plane could become a cargo plane in a few minutes just by sliding out the passenger compartment and sliding in a cargo one. They could also have different passenger compartments with different seating configurations, and also compartments that are part passenger part cargo for those legs where the plane would otherwise fly with most of the seats empty. Hopefully benefits like this would get the attention of the airlines.
I assume most OSes would shit themselves if the boot drive suddenly went read only. I would also guess most wouldn't boot up either once you tried rebooting. You'd better hope that you think of trying a live CD or something before you power cycle the computer.
Would it suddenly go read-only in the middle of a write? Hello data corruption! Most file system repair tools attempt to repair the file system in-place. You'd have to dd the data off the drive, then attempt to repair the file system. Ugh.
Well, my question is who needs that kind of storage on a SSD on their home computer? I'm sure some people do, but I assume the vast majority of people buying 5TB hard drives are filling them up with a bunch of media files that don't need fast access speeds. I have a 6TB hard drive and I wouldn't dream of replacing it with SSDs at this time because it would cost a fortune and the only time the speed would come in handy would be the initial copy of the data to the drive. Otherwise, the drive is plenty fast for what I use it for.
Now, if SSDs drop in price like the article suggests then things might change. A large media drive might be the perfect use for the newer, low number of write cycles flash memory that's starting to hit the market (the idea being that once data is written to the drive it's typically not ever deleted and the space reused).
Related to Claws Mail is Sylpheed which is the project that Claws Mail originally forked from. Haven't used it, but I'm pretty happy with Claws Mail (granted, I use it as email client only, no calender or anything like that).
If you have a 32-bit machine, you're pretty much locked out of Windows 10 anyway. Windows 10 (and Windows 8) requires the CPU support the NX bit, which only a handful of 32 bit CPU's support.
I got a Thinkpad R60, so it's slightly older than the Z61t (which for $5 is bargain!). The Windows 10 upgrade mostly worked. The issues I ran into was 1) Would not install off of a USB flash drive and 2) No drivers for the graphics card (ATI Radeon X1400) in Windows 10. I solved 1 by burning to DVD to install, and 2 by installing the Vista x64 (!) driver which Windows 10 didn't seem to have a problem with. I'd say Windows 10 is faster than Windows 7. The big problem with Windows 7 now is that Microsoft won't do another service pack and there's just so many updates now that Windows update will bring an older computer to its knees for a considerable amount of time whenever it does an update check. Which was my main motivation for taking Microsoft up on their free Windows 10 offer for this particular computer. Still, not bad for a computer that I bought before Vista was released. Runs pretty good - Core 2 Duo 2Ghz, 3GB of ram (chipset limitation, I actually have 4GB physically installed), and a 120GB SSD (which is speed limited by the SATA1 interface).
That's my thought. Depending on what you want to do, you could likely get away just fine with a free or very cheap used computer. Pretty much anything made in the last 10 years will run a Linux desktop just fine, and depending on what it is you could even go older.
Unless you're trying to game on Linux or are doing some serious number crunching or something, the Linux box would probably be pretty cheap. Or even free, since hand-me-down PCs can run pretty much any Linux desktop satisfactory.
Also, one nice thing about the fact that almost every Intel CPU has a GPU integrated into it the past few years means you can take your old gaming rig, pull out the graphics card, and have a good enough, low power, well supported GPU for your Linux desktop.
Recently I dumpster-dlved an Alienware computer. From the date codes I deduced it was built very late in 2003, so it wasn't like it was a major find. It had an Intel branded 875P board, a socket 478 P4 2.8GHz, a nVidia FX5600, and a 420W Enlight power supply. In terms of quality I couldn't really complain (it all still worked too), but not really what I would have considered a high end gaming machine 12 years ago. Really nice case though, which got repurposed as a Slackware box running a much more modern Sandy Bridge i7.
Seriously? First, that's going to kill a lot of the gains you get from having the SSD (In Windows, that is), and secondly it's going to take a long time to wear-level a SSD from the page file. Besides it'll mostly likely die of other reasons first (*cough*firmwarebugs*cough). If you're really worried get a cheap under $40 one and put your swap file on that.
You might also consider buying a larger SSD as games nowadays chew through storage pretty quickly. Ditto for Windows. You can always store the games on the HDD but then you lose the advantage of having it in the first place. (though granted I do all my gaming on a PC that still pure HDD so you'll likely be fine)
Why? There's almost no difference between Pro and Home except for a few things that they use to sock it to businesses (like the ability to join domains) that are absolutely of no use on a gaming PC. Well, I suppose with Windows 10 you have the ability to defer updates, which is nice. Though I'd seriously consider buying Windows 8.1 because 1) It's faster than both 7 and 10, 2) It doesn't have the Windows 10 spyware, 3) You can defer updates, and 4) If you're just using it as a launcher for your games the Metro interface won't matter. Be sure to let it update to Windows 10 (so that you reserve your free copy in case you ever want to use it), then roll it back to Windows 8.1 and use that.
Most commodity desktops aren't going to take too well to a adding decent GPU. Assuming you can actually get one that can physically fit the GPU in the case, the power supply will almost certainly not be adequate, and depending on how propriety it is, not easily upgraded. I would assume any gamer that's on a budget would build their own, unless they have the money and don't mind plopping it down for a high end prebuilt system (Alienware, etc.).