Look at the source. As I've pointed out to the BBC (several times) it's full of junk. about 30% of it is useless white space. Then there's the overly long URLs, comments (why!). In total it could be about 20K smaller. Or to put it another way, the pictures could be bigger and you'd notice little difference in download time.
I even offered to fix it for them (i have the scripts here) but finally got redirected to their "careers" page... nothing like being proactive is there... hmmm....
So, i gave up and wrote my own rss->html front end in PHP instead. It's still a WIP, I have a newer version that aggregates feeds and organises by pub date. I'll stick it up soon and _yes_ I will opensource it.
as you've probably guessed the bit after url= is user definable.
mode=whore... anyone looking for an HTML/PHP/PERL/XML/SVG/C++/ASM etc coder?;-D
Nice list, did a little more research.
on
Email Turns 34
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
purely out of boredom I went through the top 10 and with a little help from the wayback machine (which doesn't go far enough back!) here's my results.
SYMBOLICS.COM - dead, well... it's there but is not much more a place holder BBN.COM - blimey! it works! THINK.COM - 1/2 dead. links to the oracle "think" project but the original site would've been Thinking Machines Corp Lisp Boxen... miss you guys! MCC.COM - dead, 100% dead. DEC.COM - links to HP - effectively dead REALLY miss you guys! NORTHROP.COM - dead (merged with grumman) XEROX.COM - still going strong. SRI.COM - seems to still be going & the same org HP.COM - now part of the hp/compaq/dec mega corp BELLCORE.COM - dead, redirects to telcordia
Well, 20 years is a long old time in.com land innit. 6 out of the top 10 have basically vanished and been replaced. hey hoe.
The early bird may catch the first worm but he'll still be hungry by dinner time. or something...
Hmmm, Having been hacking PHP for a while now I can say that it is an absolute breeze to do some of the things you are asking (PDF, XML etc). The "trick" with PHP is to go and search for relevant libaries. I started creating dynamic sites in PERL but, for once, PERL didn't really do the trick for me. Mostly I didn't like the tight binding between Apache and PERL for session management. In fact, dare I say it, PERL is starting to look a little long in the tooth.
PHP is good but can't easily create Java style servlets, I'll probably be proved wrong though! So session->session comms are a bit hairy. However, combined with MySQL a lot of problems go away.
However, I do take your point about off-brand databases and mainframe interfaces. Yes, that sort of thing is probably considerably easier in Java than PHP.
is to consolidate the IM machine but let everyone keep their _old_ interface.
it is removal of a known and understood interface that worries them not the underlying mechanism of message transfer which could be ethernet or telegraph as far as the user is concerned. they just want it to work. oh... and they want to keep their user icons too.
maybe 1/2 the reason there are so many IM apps is because it is the sort of program that is the first useful network app written by a noob!
"computer 1:hi this is computer 1" "computer 2:HI! this is computer 2!!!"
and so the script was written for IM/IRCers everywhere;-)
I haven't played many violent games in years. I prefer stuff like Mr Driller.
It does make me want to throw breaks around and go apeshit with a pneumatic drill... which is a big problem to the guys digging holes to fix the sewers outside my house.......
The problem, as far as net music/radio/whatever is concerned is PUBLICITY. You may put music on your site (hell, I do) but if nobody knows it's there then you're just having fun.. which I am!
Maybe the bigger problem is that the audience (or maybe the majority of the audience) of music listeners have come to accept it as a passive medium. That's to say it is not something they actually go out and find it is something that finds them. Record companies spend an absolute fortune on marketing and advertising to the extent that they pay cereal manufacturers to bundle stuff.
The only fly in the ointment is that given the innevitable buy-outs/convergence etc that will occur in web broadcasting I suspect that the "neo-patronage system" you talk of will rather resemble the current music industry (given 10years or so) with the only difference being the distro system...
Penultimately, although music is not "physical" (or at least the digital interpretation thereof) performance is. At least in London there's been a lot more live music activity in the last few years than I've known for a long ol' time.
One final point about webcasts/mp3 sales over the net is that they don't appeal to everyone (actually very few people)... why? cos' as Zapper said "people like to own stuff"... like CDs/box sets etc...
Works fine for me. Best of all it's passively cooled. It sits in an old P3/866 which is also passively cooled. Actually not a bad machine for a load of stuff pulled out of a skip after the company I was at went tits up.
Aye. I was just rounding numbers to make life a little easier for myself! I hadn't really considered how much impact the atmosphere would make though. That's a lot of extra noise to get through.
I've had this argument before and we never came to a sensible conclusion. Personally I still think that high bandwidth satellite data transfer has much merit as long as you can get the satellites up there cheaply enough.
A geostationary orbit is about 35,000km up. lets call that 50,000km as we might not be right underneath it. Light travels at 300,000km/s so the travel time for a message is ~166ms. multiply by 4 (a->sat, sat->b, b->sat, sat->a) gives ~666ms, the latency of the beast;-).
OK, not the greatest but pinging slashdot gives me an average of 349ms from London,UK so it's not as good but then not terrible either.
I wouldn't want to carry out interactive surgery or try and play a concert with remote players (latency kills live music!) but for just getting hold of and/or disseminating info it's not too bad.
If the satellite were to be placed in a far lower orbit then latency numbers will drop. I believe this requires spin stabilisers and some sort of engine to keep the satellite from plummeting to Earth though.
I can't say I'm an expert in satellite orbits and I can't find any more details on the proposed orbit of this project. Anyone care to help me out?
This was published by the Inq a coupla years ago after the RIAA went batshitloco on the great American consumer. It was written by me to make a point or 2.
Subject: Music Piracy....
Hi there - I'll try and make this quick... I have work to do too you know!
1 - People pirate music because it is easy and "natural". To the industry sharing == piracy to the individual NOT sharing == miserable bastard.
2 - If I knew cash from music sales was actually going to the artist(s) I would be far happier buying it - if I can I will buy DIRECT from an artist (e.g. at a gig, from their OWN webshite etc).
3 - If CD's were cheaper I'd buy more - I do not like paying 15 quid for a CD. TBH I do most of my music shopping at places like SelectaDisc (Berrick Street for those in the know in Soho) - cheap with an excellent range - older CDs and back catalogue items can be had for 5 to 10 quid - GUESS WHAT!!! When I go into this shop I don't buy 1 CD at 15.99 I buy 3,4 or 5 CD's at 5 to 10 pounds each - yes I know that adds to more more but the encouragement to buy provided by impulse purchase prices is incredible! Plus I know I have a good few hours of listening to do.
4 - There is now an enormous back catalogue of music - I may be a 30 something Goth but at the Prism Multimedia shop up the road I can buy Johnny Cash's greatest hits for 3.99 - now that is amazing value.. so I bought it - and some Elvis and some Little Richard (I likes me rock n' roll) - The back catalogue problem is obviously a huge one for record companies (an increasingly dead concept) these (often dead) artists are cutting into the sales of modern artists (usually living but in the case of Girls Aloud I have yet to come to a conclusion). Classical music has an even bigger problem here as the works are often the same (e.g. Messiah) performed by different artists. Once a classic recording has been made (with good fidelity) why go back and do the same thing again? There are reasons but few that encourage sales.
Penultimately to back up some of these assertions it is interesting to witness the rise and rise of "alternative" (bogus phrase) music such as Metal, Death Metal, Goth, Techno, Garage House etc. More music is produced but to a smaller audience - the total audience is growing however.
Ultimately - there are a lot of artists and I suspect the days of 1,2,3 million selling singles have pretty much gone. There are now more artists, more genres and more listeners - artists can not expect to sell as many records as the Beatles but then consumers have more choice. Warhol was right - many more artists well have 15 minutes of fame. That still means there are 35064 fame slots per year.... nice!
So... where was the InterWeb in all of this? It is a cheap and convenient way of getting music to customers in places you would never imagine sending a CD to without a huge P&P markup.
If modern music lacks anything it is credibility and style - you can't buy class you know.....
30/04/2003.
That was then, this is now. What's changed? TBH I've never been a huge fan of p2p style networks. Frankly it seems that most people out there are just serous kleptomaniacs or will simply copy, copy, copy because they have a fat pipe and a fast machine. A little pointless in my opinion as they are not discussing, criticising or in anyway taking part in the collective experience of listening to music.
Also, at least in good ol' London Tan(sic), a lot more small, independent record shops have opened up and these are very appealing to me and to others. HOORAY! Sadly Prism Multimedia has shut down... but been replaced by another cheapo cd store so I ain't complaining yet.
LASTLY... SHAMELESS PLUG!!! If you want to download some music that the copyright holder is happy to have you sharing, discussing, p2ping then TRY MY WEBSITE!;-D www.burnttoys.co.uk - all sorts of stuff from sc
a complete irrelevance. Pluto doesn't care, I don't care, only the categorisers actually care.
There's so much variance in objects in the solar system it's difficult to even come up with a definition of what a planet is although a popular definition is "large enough for it to form a sphere". This means that many satellites also become planets.
The best way to describe these objects is size, density, distance(s) from sun, orbital period, rotation period/direction etc... "planet" is a single word that expresses very little. Most common single words turn out to be quite abstract in their definitions!
Having said that - this is a very, very interesting little planet. Isn't it about time that we built a sizeable, nuclear powered, ion drive probe filled with instruments and hires telescopes and sent it hurtling off through the solar system with enough juice for say 50 years complete with a big transmitter to get the data back?
AFAIAK the BIG-N are still sitting around on a substantial pile of cash (billions)... i think they should've bought Sega when they had the chance but what do I know!
Congratulations! I've got the VGN-T1XP. The _only_ complaint I have is that the internal HD is only 40gig and stuffed full of crud bundled apps I never use (Works for example). My storage needs are handled by an external 300 gig USB2 hard drive and audio (i'm a musician of sorts) by a Firewire M-Audio box which is very nice. I just copy over what I need when I go off somewhere with it.
It cost me an arm and a leg but I can't say I regret spending the cash. This thing is so tiny I stick it in my handbag and no one even knows I've got a computer with me!
Sorry for the fanboyism but it's the best PC i've ever owned and I've owned plenty!
Oh i believe it. It's probably a difference in the hard drives and/or graphics chipsets. I suspect mostly the harddrive.
The Intel ULV CPU's are quite fab though. Not exactly speed demons (compared to FX57 et al) but they sure do the job for me. They barely need cooling at all. I'm no Intel fanboy. My tower system is an AMD system and it's great, just a little loud despite my attempts to quieten it.
If you're not a total performance junky but like me just want to get on with computing (audio/music/image editing/perl/html/asm etc) then buy a thin and light or ultraportable laptop like sony T or S series. Many laptops are very quiet and the "centrino" based systems even more so (yeah, Intel's done a good job on those CPUs)
I can barely hear it. Failing that you will just have to spend a small fortune on low noise fans etc all of which cost more, usually due to the enormous size of the things. TBH I can't the stand drone PC's make it sends me to sleep, so does the whirr of air cons. I can't stand working in offices. Hence, I work at home! Those places literally knock me out. My old tower system has low noise components (PSU/cpu fan/fanless video card) but it is still very audible to me.
When Itanium was up and coming it was expensive. This in itself is _not_ a problem for Intel as up till then they'd been making a bucket of cash on every x86 CPU they sold. I imagine they thought they could do the same with Itanium.
However, AMD began to challenge in their cash cow (x86) and the clock rate race started. Itanium would never be able to compete on clock speed but the battle lines were drawn. Ever since Intel has pumped oodles of cash into getting the P4 as fast as possible. Unfortuantely the P4 really isn't that great as a CPU, but it keeps up (with a bit of kicking) and I guess that will do.
Also AMD realised there was no immediate reason to push the 64bit desktop (no software!) and so just didn't bother to compete on that ground at all, this probably saved them a fortune and gave them a few years break to re-equip x86 with 64bit addressing. Which TBH isn't that hard as there are so many operation modes on x86 anyway! 1 more isn't gonna kill it! They did do it very elegantly though. AMD have built the worlds first truely defacto 64bit CPU... well... for the next 10 years anyway.
Intel already have the Pentium M but don't seem to be sure on how to sell it. It has very good IPC stats but a low clock rate. Oh well. Everyone's gone to some sort of PR value... even Intel... kinda... dual and quad core are going to help confuse the PR ratings considerably.
ditto... 3dfx/nv/vl/3dlabs et al...
on
SGI Faces Bankruptcy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I worked at Videologic when 3dfx were in their ascendency (comprising a lot of SGI engineers). We were producing some fine graphics chips (yup, the dreamcast STILL looks damn good to me;-) and so were they, nVidia were giving us the TNT and TNT2 and _STILL_ SGI were trying to charge mega-bucks for performance that could be got straight from the shelf at a fraction of the price & AGP was just around the corner. 3DLabs (worked there too!) whose chips _are_ very good at geometry - a corner stone of 3D rendering - started making serious efforts on windows drivers... and the game was over for SGI
Yup, they should've done graphics cards. At one time they had all the knowledge they needed but i guess someone high up the company didn't like the competition or cut throat margins so decided not to. A lot of engineers jumped ship to nVidia or 3dfx, I guess they realised the money was goning to be elsewhere.
3D software ended up running OGL or DX under Windows using cheap 3D hardware. Since then few have considered SGI.
So... who killed SGI? Lack of "vision" really causing engineers to jump ship when they soppted opportunities elsewhere. Let's not forget that althhough 3dfx are gone and the.com boom is over a lot of people still made a lot of money in share option trading at that time.
my sony vaio (xp-sp2) came preconfigured by sony (masses of crap on it i'll just _NEVER_ use!). i got it home and switched it on and the wifi was enabled and auto connected to my neighbours wifi access point. i did nufink guv! i've been pimping connections left, right and center ever since! naught ol' me;-)
i'm getting a router in my place soon too. i'll doubtless leave it open to the net for others to use too. i'll barely use a fraction of the available bandwidth so why not let others use it too? (asides any legal argument). is it _morally_ wrong to allow others to use your connection?
TBH if the host network was open (no key/encryption) then they are just asking to be "used". it's not so much about leaving the door unlocked on your house as leaving all your possessions on the side of the road by a sign that says "free, please consume".
I dunno about the _wrong_ set of instruments after all there's an enormous number of restrictions on what they can send (mostly weight I suspect) but it is a shame that they didn't take a MARSIS style detector and Huygens was necessarily (weight again) restricted in its scope. Nevermind! I just hope they send another probe (or cluster of probes - or even titan aeroplane) next time. It is a truely fascinating world in our solar system. Then again so are Europa, Callisto and Triton.
I suspect they were deliberatley conservative with the Huygens probe.. after all they didn't know if it would sink into the surface when it got there.
These unmanned missions do truely rock. Altoughit's nice to send people out in to space these probes can stay out there a long, long time. I believe Cassini has another 39 Titan flybys to complete yet. That's a lot of data. I'm looking forward to it!
JVM is not complex at all. Any reasonable emulator coder could lash one up in no time. Getting it fast is another matter but JVM is designed to be implemented in silicon and as (a form of) stack machine is not to difficult to implement in a small amount of silicon.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the source. As I've pointed out to the BBC (several times) it's full of junk. about 30% of it is useless white space. Then there's the overly long URLs, comments (why!). In total it could be about 20K smaller. Or to put it another way, the pictures could be bigger and you'd notice little difference in download time.
s rss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page /rss.xml
;-D
I even offered to fix it for them (i have the scripts here) but finally got redirected to their "careers" page... nothing like being proactive is there... hmmm....
So, i gave up and wrote my own rss->html front end in PHP instead. It's still a WIP, I have a newer version that aggregates feeds and organises by pub date. I'll stick it up soon and _yes_ I will opensource it.
http://www.burnttoys.co.uk/rss.php?url=http://new
as you've probably guessed the bit after url= is user definable.
mode=whore... anyone looking for an HTML/PHP/PERL/XML/SVG/C++/ASM etc coder?
purely out of boredom I went through the top 10 and with a little help from the wayback machine (which doesn't go far enough back!) here's my results.
.com land innit. 6 out of the top 10 have basically vanished and been replaced. hey hoe.
SYMBOLICS.COM - dead, well... it's there but is not much more a place holder
BBN.COM - blimey! it works!
THINK.COM - 1/2 dead. links to the oracle "think" project but the original site would've been Thinking Machines Corp Lisp Boxen... miss you guys!
MCC.COM - dead, 100% dead.
DEC.COM - links to HP - effectively dead REALLY miss you guys!
NORTHROP.COM - dead (merged with grumman)
XEROX.COM - still going strong.
SRI.COM - seems to still be going & the same org
HP.COM - now part of the hp/compaq/dec mega corp
BELLCORE.COM - dead, redirects to telcordia
Well, 20 years is a long old time in
The early bird may catch the first worm but he'll still be hungry by dinner time. or something...
i clearly have! cheers. i'll go and have another hunt around.
Hmmm, Having been hacking PHP for a while now I can say that it is an absolute breeze to do some of the things you are asking (PDF, XML etc). The "trick" with PHP is to go and search for relevant libaries. I started creating dynamic sites in PERL but, for once, PERL didn't really do the trick for me. Mostly I didn't like the tight binding between Apache and PERL for session management. In fact, dare I say it, PERL is starting to look a little long in the tooth.
PHP is good but can't easily create Java style servlets, I'll probably be proved wrong though! So session->session comms are a bit hairy. However, combined with MySQL a lot of problems go away.
However, I do take your point about off-brand databases and mainframe interfaces. Yes, that sort of thing is probably considerably easier in Java than PHP.
is to consolidate the IM machine but let everyone keep their _old_ interface.
;-)
it is removal of a known and understood interface that worries them not the underlying mechanism of message transfer which could be ethernet or telegraph as far as the user is concerned. they just want it to work. oh... and they want to keep their user icons too.
maybe 1/2 the reason there are so many IM apps is because it is the sort of program that is the first useful network app written by a noob!
"computer 1:hi this is computer 1"
"computer 2:HI! this is computer 2!!!"
and so the script was written for IM/IRCers everywhere
I haven't played many violent games in years. I prefer stuff like Mr Driller.
It does make me want to throw breaks around and go apeshit with a pneumatic drill... which is a big problem to the guys digging holes to fix the sewers outside my house.......
The problem, as far as net music/radio/whatever is concerned is PUBLICITY. You may put music on your site (hell, I do) but if nobody knows it's there then you're just having fun.. which I am! Maybe the bigger problem is that the audience (or maybe the majority of the audience) of music listeners have come to accept it as a passive medium. That's to say it is not something they actually go out and find it is something that finds them. Record companies spend an absolute fortune on marketing and advertising to the extent that they pay cereal manufacturers to bundle stuff. The only fly in the ointment is that given the innevitable buy-outs/convergence etc that will occur in web broadcasting I suspect that the "neo-patronage system" you talk of will rather resemble the current music industry (given 10years or so) with the only difference being the distro system... Penultimately, although music is not "physical" (or at least the digital interpretation thereof) performance is. At least in London there's been a lot more live music activity in the last few years than I've known for a long ol' time. One final point about webcasts/mp3 sales over the net is that they don't appeal to everyone (actually very few people)... why? cos' as Zapper said "people like to own stuff"... like CDs/box sets etc...
Works fine for me. Best of all it's passively cooled. It sits in an old P3/866 which is also passively cooled. Actually not a bad machine for a load of stuff pulled out of a skip after the company I was at went tits up.
;-D I didn't fancy writing 6 forever!
Aye. I was just rounding numbers to make life a little easier for myself! I hadn't really considered how much impact the atmosphere would make though. That's a lot of extra noise to get through.
wow... you must be so utterly bored...
I've had this argument before and we never came to a sensible conclusion. Personally I still think that high bandwidth satellite data transfer has much merit as long as you can get the satellites up there cheaply enough.
;-).
A geostationary orbit is about 35,000km up. lets call that 50,000km as we might not be right underneath it. Light travels at 300,000km/s so the travel time for a message is ~166ms. multiply by 4 (a->sat, sat->b, b->sat, sat->a) gives ~666ms, the latency of the beast
OK, not the greatest but pinging slashdot gives me an average of 349ms from London,UK so it's not as good but then not terrible either.
I wouldn't want to carry out interactive surgery or try and play a concert with remote players (latency kills live music!) but for just getting hold of and/or disseminating info it's not too bad.
If the satellite were to be placed in a far lower orbit then latency numbers will drop. I believe this requires spin stabilisers and some sort of engine to keep the satellite from plummeting to Earth though.
I can't say I'm an expert in satellite orbits and I can't find any more details on the proposed orbit of this project. Anyone care to help me out?
direct link http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9250
;-D www.burnttoys.co.uk - all sorts of stuff from sc
This was published by the Inq a coupla years ago after the RIAA went batshitloco on the great American consumer. It was written by me to make a point or 2.
Subject: Music Piracy....
Hi there - I'll try and make this quick... I have work to do too you know!
1 - People pirate music because it is easy and "natural". To the industry sharing == piracy to the individual NOT sharing == miserable bastard.
2 - If I knew cash from music sales was actually going to the artist(s) I would be far happier buying it - if I can I will buy DIRECT from an artist (e.g. at a gig, from their OWN webshite etc).
3 - If CD's were cheaper I'd buy more - I do not like paying 15 quid for a CD. TBH I do most of my music shopping at places like SelectaDisc (Berrick Street for those in the know in Soho) - cheap with an excellent range - older CDs and back catalogue items can be had for 5 to 10 quid - GUESS WHAT!!! When I go into this shop I don't buy 1 CD at 15.99 I buy 3,4 or 5 CD's at 5 to 10 pounds each - yes I know that adds to more more but the encouragement to buy provided by impulse purchase prices is incredible! Plus I know I have a good few hours of listening to do.
4 - There is now an enormous back catalogue of music - I may be a 30 something Goth but at the Prism Multimedia shop up the road I can buy Johnny Cash's greatest hits for 3.99 - now that is amazing value.. so I bought it - and some Elvis and some Little Richard (I likes me rock n' roll) - The back catalogue problem is obviously a huge one for record companies (an increasingly dead concept) these (often dead) artists are cutting into the sales of modern artists (usually living but in the case of Girls Aloud I have yet to come to a conclusion). Classical music has an even bigger problem here as the works are often the same (e.g. Messiah) performed by different artists. Once a classic recording has been made (with good fidelity) why go back and do the same thing again? There are reasons but few that encourage sales.
Penultimately to back up some of these assertions it is interesting to witness the rise and rise of "alternative" (bogus phrase) music such as Metal, Death Metal, Goth, Techno, Garage House etc. More music is produced but to a smaller audience - the total audience is growing however.
Ultimately - there are a lot of artists and I suspect the days of 1,2,3 million selling singles have pretty much gone. There are now more artists, more genres and more listeners - artists can not expect to sell as many records as the Beatles but then consumers have more choice. Warhol was right - many more artists well have 15 minutes of fame. That still means there are 35064 fame slots per year.... nice!
So... where was the InterWeb in all of this? It is a cheap and convenient way of getting music to customers in places you would never imagine sending a CD to without a huge P&P markup.
If modern music lacks anything it is credibility and style - you can't buy class you know.....
30/04/2003.
That was then, this is now. What's changed? TBH I've never been a huge fan of p2p style networks. Frankly it seems that most people out there are just serous kleptomaniacs or will simply copy, copy, copy because they have a fat pipe and a fast machine. A little pointless in my opinion as they are not discussing, criticising or in anyway taking part in the collective experience of listening to music.
Also, at least in good ol' London Tan(sic), a lot more small, independent record shops have opened up and these are very appealing to me and to others. HOORAY! Sadly Prism Multimedia has shut down... but been replaced by another cheapo cd store so I ain't complaining yet.
LASTLY... SHAMELESS PLUG!!! If you want to download some music that the copyright holder is happy to have you sharing, discussing, p2ping then TRY MY WEBSITE!
a complete irrelevance. Pluto doesn't care, I don't care, only the categorisers actually care.
There's so much variance in objects in the solar system it's difficult to even come up with a definition of what a planet is although a popular definition is "large enough for it to form a sphere". This means that many satellites also become planets.
The best way to describe these objects is size, density, distance(s) from sun, orbital period, rotation period/direction etc... "planet" is a single word that expresses very little. Most common single words turn out to be quite abstract in their definitions!
Having said that - this is a very, very interesting little planet. Isn't it about time that we built a sizeable, nuclear powered, ion drive probe filled with instruments and hires telescopes and sent it hurtling off through the solar system with enough juice for say 50 years complete with a big transmitter to get the data back?
AFAIAK the BIG-N are still sitting around on a substantial pile of cash (billions)... i think they should've bought Sega when they had the chance but what do I know!
Congratulations! I've got the VGN-T1XP. The _only_ complaint I have is that the internal HD is only 40gig and stuffed full of crud bundled apps I never use (Works for example). My storage needs are handled by an external 300 gig USB2 hard drive and audio (i'm a musician of sorts) by a Firewire M-Audio box which is very nice. I just copy over what I need when I go off somewhere with it.
It cost me an arm and a leg but I can't say I regret spending the cash. This thing is so tiny I stick it in my handbag and no one even knows I've got a computer with me!
Sorry for the fanboyism but it's the best PC i've ever owned and I've owned plenty!
Oh i believe it. It's probably a difference in the hard drives and/or graphics chipsets. I suspect mostly the harddrive.
The Intel ULV CPU's are quite fab though. Not exactly speed demons (compared to FX57 et al) but they sure do the job for me. They barely need cooling at all. I'm no Intel fanboy. My tower system is an AMD system and it's great, just a little loud despite my attempts to quieten it.
If you're not a total performance junky but like me just want to get on with computing (audio/music/image editing/perl/html/asm etc) then buy a thin and light or ultraportable laptop like sony T or S series. Many laptops are very quiet and the "centrino" based systems even more so (yeah, Intel's done a good job on those CPUs)
o ry.action?site=ite_en_GB&category=VN+T+Series
8 1.htm ;-)
here's more info on the T series
http://vaio.sony-europe.com/view/ShowProductCateg
I can barely hear it. Failing that you will just have to spend a small fortune on low noise fans etc all of which cost more, usually due to the enormous size of the things. TBH I can't the stand drone PC's make it sends me to sleep, so does the whirr of air cons. I can't stand working in offices. Hence, I work at home! Those places literally knock me out. My old tower system has low noise components (PSU/cpu fan/fanless video card) but it is still very audible to me.
failing that this computer is deadly silent...
http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/computers/zx81/zx
http://www.burnttoys.co.uk/
When Itanium was up and coming it was expensive. This in itself is _not_ a problem for Intel as up till then they'd been making a bucket of cash on every x86 CPU they sold. I imagine they thought they could do the same with Itanium.
However, AMD began to challenge in their cash cow (x86) and the clock rate race started. Itanium would never be able to compete on clock speed but the battle lines were drawn. Ever since Intel has pumped oodles of cash into getting the P4 as fast as possible. Unfortuantely the P4 really isn't that great as a CPU, but it keeps up (with a bit of kicking) and I guess that will do.
Also AMD realised there was no immediate reason to push the 64bit desktop (no software!) and so just didn't bother to compete on that ground at all, this probably saved them a fortune and gave them a few years break to re-equip x86 with 64bit addressing. Which TBH isn't that hard as there are so many operation modes on x86 anyway! 1 more isn't gonna kill it! They did do it very elegantly though. AMD have built the worlds first truely defacto 64bit CPU... well... for the next 10 years anyway.
Intel already have the Pentium M but don't seem to be sure on how to sell it. It has very good IPC stats but a low clock rate. Oh well. Everyone's gone to some sort of PR value... even Intel... kinda... dual and quad core are going to help confuse the PR ratings considerably.
I worked at Videologic when 3dfx were in their ascendency (comprising a lot of SGI engineers). We were producing some fine graphics chips (yup, the dreamcast STILL looks damn good to me ;-) and so were they, nVidia were giving us the TNT and TNT2 and _STILL_ SGI were trying to charge mega-bucks for performance that could be got straight from the shelf at a fraction of the price & AGP was just around the corner. 3DLabs (worked there too!) whose chips _are_ very good at geometry - a corner stone of 3D rendering - started making serious efforts on windows drivers... and the game was over for SGI
.com boom is over a lot of people still made a lot of money in share option trading at that time.
Yup, they should've done graphics cards. At one time they had all the knowledge they needed but i guess someone high up the company didn't like the competition or cut throat margins so decided not to. A lot of engineers jumped ship to nVidia or 3dfx, I guess they realised the money was goning to be elsewhere.
3D software ended up running OGL or DX under Windows using cheap 3D hardware. Since then few have considered SGI.
So... who killed SGI? Lack of "vision" really causing engineers to jump ship when they soppted opportunities elsewhere. Let's not forget that althhough 3dfx are gone and the
...as much as i do?
That isn't clever... that's slander!
my sony vaio (xp-sp2) came preconfigured by sony (masses of crap on it i'll just _NEVER_ use!). i got it home and switched it on and the wifi was enabled and auto connected to my neighbours wifi access point. i did nufink guv! i've been pimping connections left, right and center ever since! naught ol' me ;-)
i'm getting a router in my place soon too. i'll doubtless leave it open to the net for others to use too. i'll barely use a fraction of the available bandwidth so why not let others use it too? (asides any legal argument). is it _morally_ wrong to allow others to use your connection?
TBH if the host network was open (no key/encryption) then they are just asking to be "used". it's not so much about leaving the door unlocked on your house as leaving all your possessions on the side of the road by a sign that says "free, please consume".
I dunno about the _wrong_ set of instruments after all there's an enormous number of restrictions on what they can send (mostly weight I suspect) but it is a shame that they didn't take a MARSIS style detector and Huygens was necessarily (weight again) restricted in its scope. Nevermind! I just hope they send another probe (or cluster of probes - or even titan aeroplane) next time. It is a truely fascinating world in our solar system. Then again so are Europa, Callisto and Triton.
I suspect they were deliberatley conservative with the Huygens probe.. after all they didn't know if it would sink into the surface when it got there.
These unmanned missions do truely rock. Altoughit's nice to send people out in to space these probes can stay out there a long, long time. I believe Cassini has another 39 Titan flybys to complete yet. That's a lot of data. I'm looking forward to it!
JVM is not complex at all. Any reasonable emulator coder could lash one up in no time. Getting it fast is another matter but JVM is designed to be implemented in silicon and as (a form of) stack machine is not to difficult to implement in a small amount of silicon.