Get a Lenovo TS140 for $219 (http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkServer-70A4000HUX-i3-4130-Computer/dp/B00F6EK9J2) - it uses ECC, is quiet, fairly low power, and has more than enough horsepower.
That comes with 4GB - throw in another 4GB for ~$55.
That's diskless. Throw in three WD Red 2TBs for under $100 each, and install the OS on a USB drive. That would give you a 4TB RAIDZ setup with one drive of parity. Closer to $600, but that's cheap for a system that actually has ECC RAM in it.
You won't be able to get away with an ARM system like RasPi as others have mentioned, but you might find a few semi-small x86 options.
Minnowboard has a 4.2" square board based on the Atom 640, but no IDE, and it's maybe $200. (http://www.minnowboard.org/technical-features/)
The best combination of cheap/small is probably Mini-ITX, at 6.7" square. An average mboard is maybe $50, plus a processor, RAM, power, and everything else. But you also won't have IDE, and you'll run into all of the usual driver support issues.
There are Nano, Pico, and Mobile-ITX, but you're going to raise the price almost exponentially with each jump down. Pico-ITX boards are at least $200-300.
It's a Toyota/BMW comparison. The Advantage is a mechanical keyboard, with Cherry Brown switches, while the Microsoft is membrane switches. There's a lot more tactile feel to the switches, and they keys themselves don't wear and fade like the MS one. It's slightly louder, but it's also not as mushy. It's fairly easy to take apart and clean, too.
The one big thing about the Advantage is that aside from the two key banks being completely split from each other, they are in "wells" that curve inward, and some of the most-used non-alpha keys (space, modifiers, enter, backspace) are on banks under your thumbs. It's a learning curve, and if you don't touch-type, it's a steep one. But it's a huge comfort difference.
I used to swear by the MS Naturals, and would burn through one a year. I switched to the Kinesis four years ago, and it still looks and feels almost brand new.
It's most likely that the three different platforms mentioned were developed and evangelized by three different teams at Samsung that never talked to each other. Each team probably thinks their solution is *the* solution.
When I worked at Samsung, divisions were heavily siloed, and often the first time you heard about what they were doing was when you saw it on a news site. Even within the same platform, teams were heavily divided. Our software dev outreach teams didn't even have a way to talk to the hardware design teams.
Does anyone remember when 486SX computers came and it was a big deal that you could later upgrade the processor to a 486DX computer, making them totally modular and cool, and then like ten seconds later, Intel came out with the Pentium with a completely different bus and the entire system was obsolete? That's about what this sounds like. The second you get in your hands the all-updatable 64-bit system, every phone moves to 128-bit chips and you're stuck with half as many pins on your plugs just to get your phone up to current technology.
... do nothing. It's not launched yet. I hate how every year at CES, all of these vaporware or half-ass products are announced and demoed, and everybody acts like they are on the shelves as we speak. You won't ever see 90% of this crap.
They have conductors so people won't get stuck in the doors and dragged to their deaths.
They could make the doors automatic, and re-open when someone or one of their body parts is in the way of a door closing, which they do now, but without the conductor there to yell at people to get the hell in or out of the car, the trains would never, ever leave the station. There will always be that one last person trying to get in.
MSFT stock went from 56.125 on 1/14/00 (the day Ballmer took charge) to 49.125 on 1/28/00, and has not broken the 40s since then.
AAPL was at 381.82 the week (9/30/11) before Jobs' death ( on 10/5/11) and went as low as 369.80 two days after his death, before jumping back up to 422.00 by 10/14/11. Aside from the 11/25/11 363.57 price, it has remained above the price it was at his death since then.
$2.80 of the $27.95. Even if you completely remove it, you're still talking about a $22.32 ebook. And if you're going through a distributor, you aren't completely removing it - they still take a cut.
From http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-costs.html (Slightly old)... Based on a list price of $27.95 - $3.55 - Pre-preduction - This amount covers editors, graphic designers, and the like - $2.83 - Printing - Ink, glue, paper, etc - $2.00 - Marketing - Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping galleys to journalists - $2.80 - Wholesaler - The take of the middlemen who handle distribution for publishers - $4.19 - Author Royalties - A bestseller like Grisham will net about 15% in royalties, lesser known authors get less. Subtract the author's agent fees and self-employment taxes from that, too. - $12.58 - profit for the retailer.
In the case of an ebook, you're removing the $2.83 in printing.
You might be removing some of the wholesaling cost, but you might be using Ingram to do your wholesaling if you're a big company. If you're self-publishing, you might be using something like BookBaby or Smashwords. Yes, you can go to KDP and register your own book yourself, but if you're selling in multiple places or selling multiple books, you're going to use a middle-man to handle cataloging, recordkeeping, and listing things in multiple places. If it's more than $2.80 in headaches, you use a distributor.
Marketing, pre-production, royalties all don't change. (Or they get squeezed, and you get exactly what's going on right now, which is authors complaining "they don't pay us or market us or do a good job editing us like the good old days.")
As for that $12.58 of supposed profit, here's the interesting thing - Amazon doesn't sell books at list price. John Grisham's new book, The Racketeer, is an example. List price: $28.95. Yours for only $19.81 in paper.
I'm not saying that ebook prices should be equal to the price of a printed book, but removing the printing doesn't suddenly make a book cost a dollar or even five dollars.
I can't see how the manufacturer is making any money off of the bugs I ran into
They make money by making new phones. Period. If you're holding the phone in your hand, the only way they can make more money from you is to get you to buy another phone.
Yes, I know there are other ways through services, selling apps, customer loyalty, blah blah blah. But the real way is to sell you another phone.
I worked at Samsung. They gave out insanely large bonuses to workers in Korea on phone teams every time a phone shipped. They did not give out bonuses when you did a carrier update. Number of phones shipped is a huge metric, and one they wanted to always raise. Selling the most phones in X region for Y period is a big deal. Fixing bugs in a phone that already shipped isn't.
To add to this problem, workers are paid overtime for hours above a given amount in Korea; they don't have the same concept as the US of a salaried worker that makes a set wage if they work banker's hours or are in startup mode. And when told they need to ship a phone in a year with a team of a hundred, they take great pride in saying they can do it in in 9 months with 50 people. But then everyone works 80 hours a week, and racks up huge amounts of overtime, plus gets that big bonus. And the extra hours and added stress are why you'll find so many bone-headed mistakes in their phones.
If you dropped a wrench on a PDP machine, you're probably going to need to buy a new wrench.
Re:The "Home Computer Museum"...
on
First Computers
·
· Score: 1
I also spent many long nights (when I probably should have been chasing girls or experimenting with various low-grade drugs) typing in programs from Compute! and Compute!s Gazzette. I remember they had this checksum program, so when you typed a line, it somehow hashed it, and then printed out a couple of hex characters that you compared to numbers in the right margin to make sure it was correct.
The thing about that was you could conceivably enter a line wrong and transpose some characters, but still get the correct checksum. I remember spending the good part of a summer typing in a game that was a quest-based adventure game about sailing around the cape of Africa in search of gold or something. Most of the game was simulator-type stuff, but some involved hunting whales or fighting natives that were all ASCII-animated with those splendid Commodore high-ASCII codes for colors and weird blocks. I got correct checksums throughout the program, but some of the animation sequences were completely dorked up because of bad lines.
My favorite Compute's Gazzette program was called TurboTape. It replaced the venerable Commodore tapeloading routine, which was originally written for the PET and actually saved two complete copies of your program, plus a buttload of checksum and header info, to make sure it went to a standard tape player with a volume control. Since the Datasette was hard-wired and much more reliable, the TurboTape routine had a completely different algorithm for saving. With that program, you could save on tape faster than on a 1541 drive (which isn't saying much...)
Re:The "Home Computer Museum"...
on
First Computers
·
· Score: 1
eBay wasn't doing much business back in 1984....
It's nice to see the Aquarius stuff on there now, though. It's made me almost think about getting another one. I did pick up a replacement C-64 on eBay about five years ago, and I was happy to find out that Omega Race was just as fun to play as I remembered.
Actually seeing peripherals like the printer and modem reminded me of the original Aquarius box. It had black stickers over several parts of the box, presumably to cover up vaporware or unavailable peripherals advertized on the package. I carefully peeled back the stickers and found ads for a super-expansion pack (not the Mini Expander) that sat under the main unit, held disk drives and had a real keyboard! I guess this never came out, though.
Re:The "Home Computer Museum"...
on
First Computers
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I also got started on an Aquarius, after a lot of time on Apple II's at school. I got mine in January of 84 for my birthday, at a time when Mattel was going under and liquidating the machines at toy stores. I got the main unit, the mini-expander, four games, and two joysticks for about $100.
The games weren't bad - I had a D&D Treasure of Tarmin game that was pretty fun, and we spent hours trying to get through it. The basic was mediocre, and you could do the most rudimentary stuff, plus there were high ascii characters of little dudes running and other rough graphics. But that chicklet keyboard really sucked, and so did the total lack of memory. (4K minus screen memory and other buffers = 1.7K free!) The worst problem was that absolutely no peripherals were available, especially not in Elkhart, Indiana, and with no tape drive or disk, why bother entering in programs that you'll lose when you power off? There also wasn't much documentation as far as a memory map or anything more advanced, just 10 Print "hello" sort of stuff.
By next Christmas, I begged my parents to get me a Commodore 64, and that worked out much better. I had a best friend who was seriously into trading disks and he had pretty much every game out there, plus I got a subscription to Compute's Gazzette and had lots of stuff to type in (and save.)
What's funny is that the Aquarius actually outperformed the Commodore 64 in bubble sorts! I guess the processor ran faster because it had so little memory to manage...
>> nitpick, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut have very little deep frying. Can't think of any off-hand at Taco Bell.
All of the hard shells and chips at Taco Bell are fried in oil at each restaurant. Same with tortillas, salad bowls, etc. They do it in the morning before the store opens. At least they did for the few months I worked there in... well, a while ago.
The stamper for MS CDs has the holographic logo in it. You can't make a copy of the stamper, so it prevents a duplication plant from making a duplicate of the master and selling it off.
US currency has a lot of anti-counterfit measures built in - the fibers in the paper, the strip telling the denomination, an ink that looks different under different kinds of light, and microprinting. Also, the hidden strip reacts to light in different ways for different denominations. And as for bleaching one dollar bills and printing hundreds - guess what? The new one dollar bills have just been printed and are being released into circulation as we speak...
Slashdot Mirror
This generation doesn't know how to shoe horses. And they're terrible with cave drawings.
Get a Lenovo TS140 for $219 (http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkServer-70A4000HUX-i3-4130-Computer/dp/B00F6EK9J2) - it uses ECC, is quiet, fairly low power, and has more than enough horsepower.
That comes with 4GB - throw in another 4GB for ~$55.
That's diskless. Throw in three WD Red 2TBs for under $100 each, and install the OS on a USB drive. That would give you a 4TB RAIDZ setup with one drive of parity. Closer to $600, but that's cheap for a system that actually has ECC RAM in it.
Worth noting that the Ubuntu repo still has the 6.0.1 version, which has critical security issues, and the developer can't get it removed or updated.
http://www.webupd8.org/2014/10...
You won't be able to get away with an ARM system like RasPi as others have mentioned, but you might find a few semi-small x86 options.
Minnowboard has a 4.2" square board based on the Atom 640, but no IDE, and it's maybe $200. (http://www.minnowboard.org/technical-features/)
The best combination of cheap/small is probably Mini-ITX, at 6.7" square. An average mboard is maybe $50, plus a processor, RAM, power, and everything else. But you also won't have IDE, and you'll run into all of the usual driver support issues.
There are Nano, Pico, and Mobile-ITX, but you're going to raise the price almost exponentially with each jump down. Pico-ITX boards are at least $200-300.
It's a Toyota/BMW comparison. The Advantage is a mechanical keyboard, with Cherry Brown switches, while the Microsoft is membrane switches. There's a lot more tactile feel to the switches, and they keys themselves don't wear and fade like the MS one. It's slightly louder, but it's also not as mushy. It's fairly easy to take apart and clean, too.
The one big thing about the Advantage is that aside from the two key banks being completely split from each other, they are in "wells" that curve inward, and some of the most-used non-alpha keys (space, modifiers, enter, backspace) are on banks under your thumbs. It's a learning curve, and if you don't touch-type, it's a steep one. But it's a huge comfort difference.
I used to swear by the MS Naturals, and would burn through one a year. I switched to the Kinesis four years ago, and it still looks and feels almost brand new.
It's most likely that the three different platforms mentioned were developed and evangelized by three different teams at Samsung that never talked to each other. Each team probably thinks their solution is *the* solution.
When I worked at Samsung, divisions were heavily siloed, and often the first time you heard about what they were doing was when you saw it on a news site. Even within the same platform, teams were heavily divided. Our software dev outreach teams didn't even have a way to talk to the hardware design teams.
> You can make Mercedes profit if you sell VW volume.
Too bad VW doesn't make Mercedes profit selling VW volume, or this would be a great analogy.
Does anyone remember when 486SX computers came and it was a big deal that you could later upgrade the processor to a 486DX computer, making them totally modular and cool, and then like ten seconds later, Intel came out with the Pentium with a completely different bus and the entire system was obsolete? That's about what this sounds like. The second you get in your hands the all-updatable 64-bit system, every phone moves to 128-bit chips and you're stuck with half as many pins on your plugs just to get your phone up to current technology.
... do nothing. It's not launched yet. I hate how every year at CES, all of these vaporware or half-ass products are announced and demoed, and everybody acts like they are on the shelves as we speak. You won't ever see 90% of this crap.
Yes, they can automatically be unlocked in an emergency.
They have conductors so people won't get stuck in the doors and dragged to their deaths.
They could make the doors automatic, and re-open when someone or one of their body parts is in the way of a door closing, which they do now, but without the conductor there to yell at people to get the hell in or out of the car, the trains would never, ever leave the station. There will always be that one last person trying to get in.
MSFT stock went from 56.125 on 1/14/00 (the day Ballmer took charge) to 49.125 on 1/28/00, and has not broken the 40s since then.
AAPL was at 381.82 the week (9/30/11) before Jobs' death ( on 10/5/11) and went as low as 369.80 two days after his death, before jumping back up to 422.00 by 10/14/11. Aside from the 11/25/11 363.57 price, it has remained above the price it was at his death since then.
$2.80 of the $27.95. Even if you completely remove it, you're still talking about a $22.32 ebook. And if you're going through a distributor, you aren't completely removing it - they still take a cut.
From http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-costs.html (Slightly old)...
Based on a list price of $27.95
- $3.55 - Pre-preduction - This amount covers editors, graphic designers, and the like
- $2.83 - Printing - Ink, glue, paper, etc
- $2.00 - Marketing - Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping galleys to journalists
- $2.80 - Wholesaler - The take of the middlemen who handle distribution for publishers
- $4.19 - Author Royalties - A bestseller like Grisham will net about 15% in royalties, lesser known authors get less. Subtract the author's agent fees and self-employment taxes from that, too.
- $12.58 - profit for the retailer.
In the case of an ebook, you're removing the $2.83 in printing.
You might be removing some of the wholesaling cost, but you might be using Ingram to do your wholesaling if you're a big company. If you're self-publishing, you might be using something like BookBaby or Smashwords. Yes, you can go to KDP and register your own book yourself, but if you're selling in multiple places or selling multiple books, you're going to use a middle-man to handle cataloging, recordkeeping, and listing things in multiple places. If it's more than $2.80 in headaches, you use a distributor.
Marketing, pre-production, royalties all don't change. (Or they get squeezed, and you get exactly what's going on right now, which is authors complaining "they don't pay us or market us or do a good job editing us like the good old days.")
As for that $12.58 of supposed profit, here's the interesting thing - Amazon doesn't sell books at list price. John Grisham's new book, The Racketeer, is an example. List price: $28.95. Yours for only $19.81 in paper.
I'm not saying that ebook prices should be equal to the price of a printed book, but removing the printing doesn't suddenly make a book cost a dollar or even five dollars.
I can't see how the manufacturer is making any money off of the bugs I ran into
They make money by making new phones. Period. If you're holding the phone in your hand, the only way they can make more money from you is to get you to buy another phone.
Yes, I know there are other ways through services, selling apps, customer loyalty, blah blah blah. But the real way is to sell you another phone.
I worked at Samsung. They gave out insanely large bonuses to workers in Korea on phone teams every time a phone shipped. They did not give out bonuses when you did a carrier update. Number of phones shipped is a huge metric, and one they wanted to always raise. Selling the most phones in X region for Y period is a big deal. Fixing bugs in a phone that already shipped isn't.
To add to this problem, workers are paid overtime for hours above a given amount in Korea; they don't have the same concept as the US of a salaried worker that makes a set wage if they work banker's hours or are in startup mode. And when told they need to ship a phone in a year with a team of a hundred, they take great pride in saying they can do it in in 9 months with 50 people. But then everyone works 80 hours a week, and racks up huge amounts of overtime, plus gets that big bonus. And the extra hours and added stress are why you'll find so many bone-headed mistakes in their phones.
It is if your software can only address 640K. You don't add 8 gigs of RAM to your 8088 PC.
If you dropped a wrench on a PDP machine, you're probably going to need to buy a new wrench.
I also spent many long nights (when I probably should have been chasing girls or experimenting with various low-grade drugs) typing in programs from Compute! and Compute!s Gazzette. I remember they had this checksum program, so when you typed a line, it somehow hashed it, and then printed out a couple of hex characters that you compared to numbers in the right margin to make sure it was correct.
The thing about that was you could conceivably enter a line wrong and transpose some characters, but still get the correct checksum. I remember spending the good part of a summer typing in a game that was a quest-based adventure game about sailing around the cape of Africa in search of gold or something. Most of the game was simulator-type stuff, but some involved hunting whales or fighting natives that were all ASCII-animated with those splendid Commodore high-ASCII codes for colors and weird blocks. I got correct checksums throughout the program, but some of the animation sequences were completely dorked up because of bad lines.
My favorite Compute's Gazzette program was called TurboTape. It replaced the venerable Commodore tapeloading routine, which was originally written for the PET and actually saved two complete copies of your program, plus a buttload of checksum and header info, to make sure it went to a standard tape player with a volume control. Since the Datasette was hard-wired and much more reliable, the TurboTape routine had a completely different algorithm for saving. With that program, you could save on tape faster than on a 1541 drive (which isn't saying much...)
eBay wasn't doing much business back in 1984....
It's nice to see the Aquarius stuff on there now, though. It's made me almost think about getting another one. I did pick up a replacement C-64 on eBay about five years ago, and I was happy to find out that Omega Race was just as fun to play as I remembered.
Actually seeing peripherals like the printer and modem reminded me of the original Aquarius box. It had black stickers over several parts of the box, presumably to cover up vaporware or unavailable peripherals advertized on the package. I carefully peeled back the stickers and found ads for a super-expansion pack (not the Mini Expander) that sat under the main unit, held disk drives and had a real keyboard! I guess this never came out, though.
I also got started on an Aquarius, after a lot of time on Apple II's at school. I got mine in January of 84 for my birthday, at a time when Mattel was going under and liquidating the machines at toy stores. I got the main unit, the mini-expander, four games, and two joysticks for about $100.
The games weren't bad - I had a D&D Treasure of Tarmin game that was pretty fun, and we spent hours trying to get through it. The basic was mediocre, and you could do the most rudimentary stuff, plus there were high ascii characters of little dudes running and other rough graphics. But that chicklet keyboard really sucked, and so did the total lack of memory. (4K minus screen memory and other buffers = 1.7K free!) The worst problem was that absolutely no peripherals were available, especially not in Elkhart, Indiana, and with no tape drive or disk, why bother entering in programs that you'll lose when you power off? There also wasn't much documentation as far as a memory map or anything more advanced, just 10 Print "hello" sort of stuff.
By next Christmas, I begged my parents to get me a Commodore 64, and that worked out much better. I had a best friend who was seriously into trading disks and he had pretty much every game out there, plus I got a subscription to Compute's Gazzette and had lots of stuff to type in (and save.)
What's funny is that the Aquarius actually outperformed the Commodore 64 in bubble sorts! I guess the processor ran faster because it had so little memory to manage...
-Jon
This guy tosses Commander Taco's Salad!
>> nitpick, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut have very little deep frying. Can't think of any off-hand at Taco Bell.
All of the hard shells and chips at Taco Bell are fried in oil at each restaurant. Same with tortillas, salad bowls, etc. They do it in the morning before the store opens. At least they did for the few months I worked there in... well, a while ago.
-Jon
The stamper for MS CDs has the holographic logo in it. You can't make a copy of the stamper, so it prevents a duplication plant from making a duplicate of the master and selling it off.
-J
US currency has a lot of anti-counterfit measures built in - the fibers in the paper, the strip telling the denomination, an ink that looks different under different kinds of light, and microprinting. Also, the hidden strip reacts to light in different ways for different denominations. And as for bleaching one dollar bills and printing hundreds - guess what? The new one dollar bills have just been printed and are being released into circulation as we speak...
Imagine you're about to go in for major surgery and someone tells you the doctor's going to be using something called a light-saber.
That doesn't scare me. What would scare me is if he put on a helmet with a face shield before he started cutting me...
-J