The thing you gotta remember when thinking about these kinds of systems is that they are specialized to do only a few things. Even then, they usually have tons of support hardware to actually do the hard work.
For example, I have a cisco 2514 router. Its main processor is a 68030 (think Mac LC series or around there). Do you think that this processor does all the work in this device? Nah. It just tells the chips that do the actual work what to do.
The same idea could go for the computer in your car. If the sensors can only read in X samples per second... why waste the money on a computer that can read in X^2 samples/sec.
NASA isn't doing the "big dick" contest with computers. They are building these things on a budget to do a task and do it well. If they need a computer that has a 1bit bus and a clock speed of 1hz, then so be it.
Of course, it helps that your workstation at work is a 1 GHz Pentium III, while your home machine is a Celeron 500. But hey, hardware's cheap, isn't it?
Hardware is cheap, this is true. That is why the two machines in question are both quite nice (win box is a 1.33 tbird, linux box is a dual pIII 933). The windows box is even at a slight disadvantage in that it only has 512meg ram vs the 1g in the linux box. If anything that part speaks well of MS.
True. But can't you do that with an X Server on Windows instead? That way, you can run thousands more applications than you can with Linux alone.
Wait, so you are telling me that I can take my windows box and display its apps on my linux box? BZZZZT, Wrong answer. An X Server just displays what is thrown at it. Its actually kinda backwards in that the server sits and displays while the client does the work.
Try again troll-man... or you could grow a set and actually log in.:)
Of course, I wouldn't expect users of X-Windows to know anything about "speed" anyway.
Fine, I'll bite.... I run 2k at home and linux at work. I see no differences in how fast windows are drawn, refreshed, or whatnot.
I will counter your trollosity by pointing out the wonderful feature of X windows where I can throw remote windows around with a simple command line argument. Its neat having 30 some-odd machines put their load monitors up on one desktop. Now go away or I shall turn you into a newt!
I stand corrected on the faster part then. I've had very limited experence with RDC due to my lack of a copy of terminal server:)
Sound wise this sounds backwards. Personally I would remote control the little box and have it play sounds and whatnot to my stereo. If it xfered its sound output to the box I was controling from then what good would it be sitting in my AV cabnet?
Or perhaps its just my lack of food speaking... I'm hungry.
I originally didn't see the little PCI riser card in there. Throw a video in card in there (or tv tuner) and have an IR reciever plopped off the serial port and this thing could be a tivo wanna-be. Oh now I'm really thinking of how cool this box could be. As others mentioned it can also have a DVD drive in there to play disks.
Unlike the tivo too, you could upgrade the HD just by chaining one (or more) off the firewire port. Hmm, are there any good USB or firewire video capture devices? Of course they would need to be linux compatable so that makes it even harder.
Of course you can substitute "tivo" with your favorite digital recording preference
With my usage patterns this thing wouldn't be too good as a my main box, but with that kind of footprint it would make a great little rackable box or as the main post said, some sort of AV component. Heh, I have drive enclosures that are bigger than this thing, I love it.
We also could use something like that here at work in the labs. Our existing dell boxes take up a huge amount of space. We could cram these things under the o-scopes or something.
If I had the money I would get one just so I could play around with it:)
My pump is by far the quietest noise producing part of my computer. I say it this way because if I claimed that it was the quietest part then someone would start going off about how my NIC is making so much noise that it is louder than my pump yadda yadda yadda.
My point is these things are damn quiet. My home pc is watercooled and it cost me around $80 total. I am watercooling my dual tbird box and that cost me around $140 to do.
Why you ask? I didn't want to hear some CPU fans blaring away. Instead I have 120mm fan(s) on the radiator. Do I overclock? Not the server (or the home box for right now). I just wanted quiet.
The only reason I haven't tried out ext3 is because its lack of being in the kernel. I just don't feel like dicking around with patches and whatnot (they never seem to work right for me). I would love to see this make it into the kernel sometime soon so I can toy around with/use it.
The problem is that these are specific to not just the laptop brand, but sometimes even specific models.
A plug for one sony laptop may not work on another sony laptop for example. Compatable replacements from other companies usually cost quite a bit (granted usually not as much as a "real" one from the true vendor)
They should at least send the replacement out before they get the faulty one back. Well, nobody ever claimed they were thinking clearly...
I had a d-link switch once that had a major meltdown. The brick got so hot is discolored the powerstrip it was plugged into. Not to mention the funny smell in the room and slight haze from the switch itself:)
That was fun to explain to tech support.... Techie: "What do the lights do when it turns on"
Me: nothing, it won't turn on... all the smoke came out of it and I can't get it back in.
I guess I know why it was so cheap:) (dss-5+ old style POS.. v2.0 is much better, smaller power brick and no fan in the unit)
Also, a warning. If you choose to install 1 Gb or so of ECC, registered memory, then booting takes a long time. There's some kind of POST that occurs for this kind of memory that delays my boot by like 30 seconds.
I too have this board and love it. I have a gig of ram but I decided to just turn off the ECC option so it boots faster (and has a higher memory bandwidth if I remember right).
It uses the four screw holes present on all socket A motherboards.
BZZZZZZT
this board does NOT have these holes. I purchased all my watercooling gear with the assumption that it had them but imagine my surprise when it showed up and I tried to build it.
(plug) BeCooling (http://www.aquastealth.com) (/plug) is the place where I got all my cooling gear.He was nice enough to exchange my clips to the more "standard" socket-lug version
I'll assume you didn't know about the "mounting holes" around each socket. AMD motherboards and heat sinks actually mount the heatsink to the montherboard, so your heatsink can't damage the motherboard.
Too bad this board dosen't have these holes.
I'm serious.. I bought the damn thing and all my watercooling gear only to find out that I needed to buy different clips for the waterblocks because the holes aren't there. At least the place I got my stuff from [(plug) BeCooling http://www.aquastealth.com (/plug)] was nice enough to take it back for credit.
Anyone every try and return software because they didn't agree with the EULA? I can just see the arguement you would get in because its been opened and thus can only be exchanged for the same product.
Well, I have mine disabled because I my computer is watercooled. It was really annoying to be forced to put extra fans in my box just so they would make the cpu fan headers think I have a heatsync fan going.
A BIOS update gave me the option to kill that "feature" so I'm back to running nice and quiet. the only noise my computer makes now is 2 120mm fans running around 7 volts on the radiator. (Those new seagate 'cuda IV drives are nice)
Slashdot Mirror
(yes, it was a joke)
-paul
For example, I have a cisco 2514 router. Its main processor is a 68030 (think Mac LC series or around there). Do you think that this processor does all the work in this device? Nah. It just tells the chips that do the actual work what to do.
The same idea could go for the computer in your car. If the sensors can only read in X samples per second... why waste the money on a computer that can read in X^2 samples/sec.
NASA isn't doing the "big dick" contest with computers. They are building these things on a budget to do a task and do it well. If they need a computer that has a 1bit bus and a clock speed of 1hz, then so be it.
end rant.
"Music, Pictures, Video
Intel Takes Technology Beyond the Processor"
Hardware is cheap, this is true. That is why the two machines in question are both quite nice (win box is a 1.33 tbird, linux box is a dual pIII 933). The windows box is even at a slight disadvantage in that it only has 512meg ram vs the 1g in the linux box. If anything that part speaks well of MS.
True. But can't you do that with an X Server on Windows instead? That way, you can run thousands more applications than you can with Linux alone.
Wait, so you are telling me that I can take my windows box and display its apps on my linux box? BZZZZT, Wrong answer. An X Server just displays what is thrown at it. Its actually kinda backwards in that the server sits and displays while the client does the work.
Try again troll-man... or you could grow a set and actually log in. :)
Perhaps calling it a digial video recorder would be a more accurate term.
yes, but for tivo like functionality you would also need video in... thus the use of the PCI slot :)
Fine, I'll bite.... I run 2k at home and linux at work. I see no differences in how fast windows are drawn, refreshed, or whatnot.
I will counter your trollosity by pointing out the wonderful feature of X windows where I can throw remote windows around with a simple command line argument. Its neat having 30 some-odd machines put their load monitors up on one desktop. Now go away or I shall turn you into a newt!
Sound wise this sounds backwards. Personally I would remote control the little box and have it play sounds and whatnot to my stereo. If it xfered its sound output to the box I was controling from then what good would it be sitting in my AV cabnet?
Or perhaps its just my lack of food speaking... I'm hungry.
I originally didn't see the little PCI riser card in there. Throw a video in card in there (or tv tuner) and have an IR reciever plopped off the serial port and this thing could be a tivo wanna-be. Oh now I'm really thinking of how cool this box could be. As others mentioned it can also have a DVD drive in there to play disks.
Unlike the tivo too, you could upgrade the HD just by chaining one (or more) off the firewire port. Hmm, are there any good USB or firewire video capture devices? Of course they would need to be linux compatable so that makes it even harder.
Of course you can substitute "tivo" with your favorite digital recording preference
So you mean like VNC, except slower and more expensive? :)
We also could use something like that here at work in the labs. Our existing dell boxes take up a huge amount of space. We could cram these things under the o-scopes or something.
If I had the money I would get one just so I could play around with it :)
oh yeah, all those alpha chips run so cool... don't forget the PA-RISC chips too :)
(take this light-heartedly, I agree with you. Just pointing out some toasty RISC chips)
-paul
My point is these things are damn quiet. My home pc is watercooled and it cost me around $80 total. I am watercooling my dual tbird box and that cost me around $140 to do.
Why you ask? I didn't want to hear some CPU fans blaring away. Instead I have 120mm fan(s) on the radiator. Do I overclock? Not the server (or the home box for right now). I just wanted quiet.
Where I got my stuff
-paul
A plug for one sony laptop may not work on another sony laptop for example. Compatable replacements from other companies usually cost quite a bit (granted usually not as much as a "real" one from the true vendor)
They should at least send the replacement out before they get the faulty one back. Well, nobody ever claimed they were thinking clearly...
oh well, back to work for me
-paul
That was fun to explain to tech support....
Techie: "What do the lights do when it turns on"
Me: nothing, it won't turn on... all the smoke came out of it and I can't get it back in.
I guess I know why it was so cheap :)
(dss-5+ old style POS.. v2.0 is much better, smaller power brick and no fan in the unit)
-paul
I too have this board and love it. I have a gig of ram but I decided to just turn off the ECC option so it boots faster (and has a higher memory bandwidth if I remember right).
-paul
BZZZZZZT
this board does NOT have these holes. I purchased all my watercooling gear with the assumption that it had them but imagine my surprise when it showed up and I tried to build it.
(plug) BeCooling (http://www.aquastealth.com) (/plug) is the place where I got all my cooling gear.He was nice enough to exchange my clips to the more "standard" socket-lug version
-paul
Too bad this board dosen't have these holes.
I'm serious.. I bought the damn thing and all my watercooling gear only to find out that I needed to buy different clips for the waterblocks because the holes aren't there. At least the place I got my stuff from [(plug) BeCooling http://www.aquastealth.com (/plug)] was nice enough to take it back for credit.
-paul
I have 2 dual tyan boxes both with via chipsets (one PIII box, and one this board with 1.2mps in it).
They are rock solid in linux.
-paul
wrong board... this is not the s2462, this is the s2460.
It is pretty much a totally different design.
Anyone every try and return software because they didn't agree with the EULA? I can just see the arguement you would get in because its been opened and thus can only be exchanged for the same product.
What a shitty catch 22.
-paul
meatbarn.com
A BIOS update gave me the option to kill that "feature" so I'm back to running nice and quiet. the only noise my computer makes now is 2 120mm fans running around 7 volts on the radiator. (Those new seagate 'cuda IV drives are nice)
-paul
Isn't there something like this where they throw a bootloader or something right in the flash on the mobo?
/.
I vaguely remember this from
could just be that I have yet to have my coffee
-paul
meatbarn.com
I'd like to see a headline from Intel (and AMD for that matter) stating "10 Watt power consumption reduction in 1 gig chip!".
Actually, the jump from stock tbird to MP tbird did just that. They knocked about 10 watts off of how much heat is produces.
-paul
meatbarn.com