Nice approach IMHO. I'd like to see something like this as it might bring the players prices down (or the capacities up).
I mean, how much power do you need to keep two (four?) 512MB DIMMS alive. Could a reasonable battery last for a week or so without being plugged in?
For me a week (minus playtime) would be enough. If it runs dead, well, reloading >1G takes a while even over firewire. But so be it.
If I can have a 4GB player for the price of four 512MB DIMMS plus maybe 100. I'll go for it.
No need to be upgradable (would only make the device bigger and heavier), just sell them equipped with 64M (low-end) up to 4GB.
Oh, while you're at it, make sure it plays ogg and if it could run off standard rechargables it'd be just great.;)
But maybe it's technically a lot more difficult to use standard (or notebook) DIMMS in a device like that than I'm aware of. If anybody knows more, please enlighten me.
I'm with you. Linux will be for my mom and dad when I can give them a CD and let them figure out the rest on their own.
Ideally it would be something like knoppix that doesn't even need to be installed to hdd. If the bootable-distro guys can get their hardware detection straight (at least for the hardware that DOES have drivers available) and make the desktop do sensible things (e.g. display menu "scan, copy or fax?" when usb scanner is plugged in/turned on) it could be even easier for mom&pop to get along with it than with windoze.
Wanna work? Just boot the CD.
If you want to save settings and documents, use a usb memory stick.
Mom&Pop could have a stick where their documents, and ALL config settings (incl. detected hardware, preferred window manager, icon layout, desktop-background-color, address book etc.) are stored.
Mom&Pop would be able to carry their whole personal computing environment (incl. files) around by taking only the BootCD + stick with them.
At that point it would become interesting to the.biz-people who do a lot of travelling. Need to get work done at a hotel? No problem, just find a PC (any PC!), insert stick, insert disc, feel at home.
I think knoppix and others are working towards that direction and I hope they will soon bring it to a point where you can really just give the CD to someone and it will work. It will not allow them to download and install stuff from the internet (or a CD) but for the average mom&pop&.biz that's not necessary. They want OpenOffice, Mozilla, E-Mail, Fax, Printer/Scanner/Camera support, Onlinebanking, simple Image/Photo Manipulation, sync'ing with their mobile devices, CD/DVD writing, Sound playback.
And they don't want to use their brain for it. They don't want to have a zillion blinking icons in their tray that they have no idea what it's all about. They don't want to be worried about Viruses/Worms. They don't want their PC to slow down and become unstable after 3 months. They don't want to search for their windows CD when they plug in their new webcam.
Give them something that "just works" and they'll never ask for windows again.
In another thread I read something along these lines:
BSD is one of the oldest and most influencing branches of UNIX. Almost every other relevant OS (including windows) contains BSD code. MacOS X is based on BSD.
So even if BSD was "dying" (as in nobody using it anymore?) a lot of its goodness will live on under the hood in other OS'.
feed, load the broadcast queue with that number in there 20 times and press send. mostly black takes up almost no memory and transmission time but will wipe out their toner in minutes.
I doubt anyone with a 1-800 faxline puts an old fashioned fax machine behind it.
Your fax is most likely being received by a computer and that one will most likely not output any incoming fax straight to the printer.
Probably the fax software is even smart enough to compute black/white ratio on incoming faxes and weed out the "all-black" pages before a human will even look at them.
A friend of a friend told me that a friend of his cousin has, for the above reasons, developed the habit to just send back an A4-hardcopy (6on1) of the linux kernel headers instead of black pages.
I wonder if that cousin's friend could get sue'd by the spammer for sending "unrelated stuff" to the spammers 1-800?
Well, first off, yes, the recent incarnations of bayesian filters usually take domain names (esp. ip-addresses) into account.
Second, sorry, but it is actually very easy for spammers to obfuscate or just switch the domains for their links/images.
On a sidenote: I also think the bayesian filters are a tiny bit overhyped these days. I'm using bogofilter for my own E-Mail for a couple months now but even though I put some effort into tweaking it (50MB spam/40MB legit corpse) I still occassionally get false negatives AND positives.
Prolly I'm not smart enough or bogofilter doesn't do the latest and greatest twist on its calculations but after living with it for quite some time now I must say that it hasn't made the situation so much better for me. Actually I think my spam/ham-ratio is still the same (about 2 spams/week slip through) as before when I was using a pretty simple procmail keyword-filter recipe. And procmail didn't give me false positives...
Probably you shouldn't judge java only by its reference implementation of a servlet engine (tomcat). There are much faster beasts available that also do away with the load problems your tomcat might be expiriencing.
And expensive crypto-computation should ofcourse be done in native code but that doesn't imply that your whole app must be native. Maybe a bit more evaluation could have saved you a lot of time.
100.000 simultanous users seems a lot (depending on your application) but I doubt java comes with a builtin bottleneck that you couldn't work around by just rewriting only the code causing the bottleneck in native C or even asm.
What were you trying to do that would've required to throw "lots of hardware" at to make it work? Just curious because that "server side stuff" you mention is where java usually shines, so what funky things were you doing?
Why did they completely leave out the VIA EPIA cpus? These seem to be a very interesting alternative especially for those who use their PC primarily for "e-mail and word processing".
Am I really learning how to analyze facts? I dont think so. I am learning how to write university papers and theorize based on incomplete information. I am learning how to make a lot of wasted time look like a lot of work.
It's all about the figures. They need a way to "objectively" measure your skill level and progress. The only way for them to do that is by forcing you to play by their formal rules and measure how successful you were in doing so.
The BT works like a charme for me. Even tho my upload-rate is capped at 10kb/s I'm getting ~95kb/s straight D/L (from 40 sources).
Make sure you're using a good/recent client (e.g. the original BT Python Client or the excellent mldonkey)
Also make sure your Firewall is not blocking the BT ports: 6881-6889,6969 TCP. If you're running your BT downloader behind NAT you might have to forward these ports. Remember how BT works: If other downloaders can't connect to you they will slow YOUR download down to a very low rate (or just refuse to send you anything). That's the magic mechanism that keeps BT from being clogged down by freeloaders.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice approach IMHO.
;)
I'd like to see something like this as it might bring the players prices down (or the capacities up).
I mean, how much power do you need to keep two (four?) 512MB DIMMS alive. Could a reasonable battery last for a week or so without being plugged in?
For me a week (minus playtime) would be enough.
If it runs dead, well, reloading >1G takes a while even over firewire. But so be it.
If I can have a 4GB player for the price of four 512MB DIMMS plus maybe 100. I'll go for it.
No need to be upgradable (would only make the device bigger and heavier), just sell them equipped with 64M (low-end) up to 4GB.
Oh, while you're at it, make sure it plays ogg and if it could run off standard rechargables it'd be just great.
But maybe it's technically a lot more difficult to use standard (or notebook) DIMMS in a device like that than I'm aware of. If anybody knows more, please enlighten me.
I'm with you.
.biz-people who do a lot of travelling.
Linux will be for my mom and dad when I can give them a CD and let them figure out the rest on their own.
Ideally it would be something like knoppix that doesn't even need to be installed to hdd.
If the bootable-distro guys can get their hardware detection straight (at least for the hardware that DOES have drivers available) and make the desktop do sensible things (e.g. display menu "scan, copy or fax?" when usb scanner is plugged in/turned on) it could be even easier for mom&pop to get along with it than with windoze.
Wanna work? Just boot the CD.
If you want to save settings and documents, use a usb memory stick.
Mom&Pop could have a stick where their documents, and ALL config settings (incl. detected hardware, preferred window manager, icon layout, desktop-background-color, address book etc.) are stored.
Mom&Pop would be able to carry their whole personal computing environment (incl. files) around by taking only the BootCD + stick with them.
At that point it would become interesting to the
Need to get work done at a hotel?
No problem, just find a PC (any PC!), insert stick, insert disc, feel at home.
I think knoppix and others are working towards that direction and I hope they will soon bring it to a point where you can really just give the CD to someone and it will work. It will not allow them to download and install stuff from the internet (or a CD) but for the average mom&pop&.biz that's not necessary. They want OpenOffice, Mozilla, E-Mail, Fax, Printer/Scanner/Camera support, Onlinebanking, simple Image/Photo Manipulation, sync'ing with their mobile devices, CD/DVD writing, Sound playback.
And they don't want to use their brain for it. They don't want to have a zillion blinking icons in their tray that they have no idea what it's all about. They don't want to be worried about Viruses/Worms. They don't want their PC to slow down and become unstable after 3 months.
They don't want to search for their windows CD when they plug in their new webcam.
Give them something that "just works" and they'll never ask for windows again.
In another thread I read something along these lines:
BSD is one of the oldest and most influencing branches of UNIX. Almost every other relevant OS (including windows) contains BSD code. MacOS X is based on BSD.
So even if BSD was "dying" (as in nobody using it anymore?) a lot of its goodness will live on under the hood in other OS'.
They call it evolution. It's a Good Thing.
Third or fourth?
There are many more.
Don't tell me you missed the Animatrix!
Porno Graffitti
Sounds like everyday radio-pop to me, could be any language.
Aeh, was soll der scheiss?
They should go for the real deal. Might be a tad bit more expensive than 20k, though. Anyone know a figure?
This is what you do:
First you realize why everybody calls it "slowaris".
Then you realize your power bill has doubled.
Then you put it on eBay.
Can someone please hit a switch and hit unlock the half-size baseball bats for us?
Was it already in ALL UPPERCASE back in 1920?
feed, load the broadcast queue with that number in there 20 times and press send. mostly black takes up almost no memory and transmission time but will wipe out their toner in minutes.
I doubt anyone with a 1-800 faxline puts an old fashioned fax machine behind it.
Your fax is most likely being received by a computer and that one will most likely not output any incoming fax straight to the printer.
Probably the fax software is even smart enough to compute black/white ratio on incoming faxes and weed out the "all-black" pages before a human will even look at them.
A friend of a friend told me that a friend of his cousin has, for the above reasons, developed the habit to just send back an A4-hardcopy (6on1) of the linux kernel headers instead of black pages.
I wonder if that cousin's friend could get sue'd by the spammer for sending "unrelated stuff" to the spammers 1-800?
Well, first off, yes, the recent incarnations of bayesian filters usually take domain names (esp. ip-addresses) into account.
Second, sorry, but it is actually very easy for spammers to obfuscate or just switch the domains for their links/images.
On a sidenote: I also think the bayesian filters are a tiny bit overhyped these days. I'm using bogofilter for my own E-Mail for a couple months now but even though I put some effort into tweaking it (50MB spam/40MB legit corpse) I still occassionally get false negatives AND positives.
Prolly I'm not smart enough or bogofilter doesn't do the latest and greatest twist on its calculations but after living with it for quite some time now I must say that it hasn't made the situation so much better for me.
Actually I think my spam/ham-ratio is still the same (about 2 spams/week slip through) as before when I was using a pretty simple procmail keyword-filter recipe. And procmail didn't give me false positives...
Whats really surprising is that the platform of choice recently for a fax server seems to be winblows server 2003...
Really? Whats wrong with HylaFAX?
Looks quite promising to me even though I haven't tried it, yet.
I haven't seen the movie you're talking about but a really nice one about the same subject is Memento. Recommended.
I like ArmyOps even better. Yes, it's propaganda crap but technically it's a really good shooter.
Hey I once had a Heathkit! (beat me for the model number, though)
Made a nice serial console back then.
I ditched it for a color screen.
Uh, what was the question again?
Linux?
I don't know, but he seems very frustrated.
Probably you shouldn't judge java only by its reference implementation of a servlet engine (tomcat). There are much faster beasts available that also do away with the load problems your tomcat might be expiriencing.
And expensive crypto-computation should ofcourse be done in native code but that doesn't imply that your whole app must be native. Maybe a bit more evaluation could have saved you a lot of time.
100.000 simultanous users seems a lot (depending on your application) but I doubt java comes with a builtin bottleneck that you couldn't work around by just rewriting only the code causing the bottleneck in native C or even asm.
What were you trying to do that would've required to throw "lots of hardware" at to make it work?
Just curious because that "server side stuff" you mention is where java usually shines, so what funky things were you doing?
Why did they completely leave out the VIA EPIA cpus?
These seem to be a very interesting alternative especially for those who use their PC primarily for "e-mail and word processing".
And for everyone who would like a silent PC.
Excellent article.
Am I really learning how to analyze facts? I dont think so. I am learning how to write university papers and theorize based on incomplete information. I am learning how to make a lot of wasted time look like a lot of work.
It's all about the figures. They need a way to "objectively" measure your skill level and progress.
The only way for them to do that is by forcing you to play by their formal rules and measure how successful you were in doing so.
The BT works like a charme for me. Even tho my upload-rate is capped at 10kb/s I'm getting ~95kb/s straight D/L (from 40 sources).
Make sure you're using a good/recent client (e.g. the original BT Python Client or the excellent mldonkey)
Also make sure your Firewall is not blocking the BT ports: 6881-6889,6969 TCP. If you're running your BT downloader behind NAT you might have to forward these ports. Remember how BT works: If other downloaders can't connect to you they will slow YOUR download down to a very low rate (or just refuse to send you anything). That's the magic mechanism that keeps BT from being clogged down by freeloaders.
Here comes the obligatory screenshot.