"Why would someone deface a poor defenseless Mac Mini like this?"
"Because the hard drive is slow (4200 RPM), and this is cheap."
The guy stated that he wanted to build a server that was a) cheap, and b) quiet
In short, he is an idiot.
It is FAR cheaper to obtain an old Pentium based PC, which can easily be found for free as compared to the Mac Mini, which is $799 in Australia.
This project is not a "cheap" way to build a server, it is an expensive way to build a server.
Then there is the noise factor. Yes, the Mac Mini is quiet, much quieter than an old PC.
But this is not where the story ends. Firstly he is making his Mac Mini almost as noisy as a PC, just by putting in a 3.5 inch HDD and running a PC powersupply complete with a PSU + FAN in it! The only other source of noise in a PC is the CPU fan and I explain below how that can usually be removed completly anyway. In such a scenario, a PC would make exactly the same noise that this Mac Mini does.
When looking at typical, stock built PCs, there are four sources of operating noise to consider.
1) PSU Fan. Both the modified Mac Mini and the recycled Pentium PC use a mini tower case, ergo we can expect the same level of PSU fan noise to emanate from both solutions. In both cases an aftermarket "near silent" fan can be fitted to minimise any noise. In any event, we can rule out any PSU fan noise that is present because both solutions will theoretically produce identical levels of noise. PSU fan noise is not a differentiating factor.
2) CPU Fan. This is one area where the Mac Mini will beat the stock Pentium PC. But there is no reason you need to stick with the stock configuration. It is an easy matter on most old PCs to underclock the CPU. This in turn allows you in many cases to run your Pentium using a large, passive heatsink alone ie, it becomes just as noiseless as the Mac Mini.
3) HDD noise. The modified Mac would use the exact same 3.5inch HDD as the Pentium PC, so we can rule this noise out too.
4) GPU cooler. The mac mini doesn't use a seperate GPU cooler, and niether would the PC. It would most likely have some crappy old Trident or S3 based 2D card that has no fan but is perfectly acceptable in a server.
The short story is that we can make a recycled PC just as quiet as this modified Mac mini so the noise issue is moot.
Consider that the Mac Mini option would cost you something like;
1.25 Ghz Mac Mini - $799 Minitower PC case - $50 3,5 Inch HDD ~ $150 (depending on what capacity you want)
= $999 (Australian)
compared to a recycled PC; 2nd hand Pentium 233 - $50 (probably free but lets use a nominal figure anyway) Large passive heatsink - $25 New PSU fan - $15 (the old one might be a bit worn) Linux/FreeBSD OS - $0
= $90
Basically, this goose has wrecked an eight hundred dollar Mac to build a ninety dollar server.
"Fair enough, but why would she even want one? In the process of destroying HP she's amassed enough to live on for a hundred lifetimes."
Because she is a feminist, and was serving a feminist agenda. That is one of the reasons that she has made such a cock-up of things at HP, turning a company that was consistently near the top of the "Fortune 100 best companies to work for" surveys to a sad reflection of itself that couldn't even make the top hundred a few years after she took over.
"I have never had a Quantam drive that didn't eventually fail.
That's kind of misleading...
I don't think so, but if you like I will restate that as "I have never had a Quantam drive that hasn't already failed".
As I said, I have Seagate drives (some of which that are much older than the oldest Quantam I've owned) and most of them still work. I'm talking about drives that are still measured in Mbytes here"
"Meanwhile I'm still using a 13GB Quantum I've had for the last seven or eight years..."
I've had many, many hard disks over the years.
I have never had a Quantam drive that didn't eventually fail. I have plenty of Seagates that still work fine but are too small now to be of use. I did have a pair of 30Gb Seagates that were nothing but trouble, they were replaced under warranty and the replacements failed too. There was obviously a serious design flaw in that particular model but other than those two Seagates have been pretty good in my experience.
Maxtors too. Apart from the fiasco in the early nineties with their 40 and 80 Mb drives that had problematic carbon contacts between the disc chamber and the PCB, Maxtors haven't given me much trouble either.
"The PSU looks like cake after you do the motherboard"
These days, yes, back in the old days pre ATX, when PC's had turbo buttons and "megahurtz LED displays" the powerswitch was often on the front of the case and their was 240 power being routed to the front panel. Ofetn times you had to remove the front panel so you could get to the powerswitch which also had to be removed, and occasionally you had to unsolder and resolder the switch back on to the power switch leads.
It could be quite the PITA I assure you. I have some old PC's of this type running Linux to this day.
" Most small computer shops I'm aware of, in my neck of the woods at least, offer the cheap unbranded PSUs as well, basically the same ones you'd find in those cheap cases but obviously without the deadweight."
Up until a few years ago, it was actually cheaper (in Australia) to buy a new case and rip the PSU out of it than it was to buy the exact same PSU on it's own. It had to do with the guv'mint import duties. Apparently "power supplies" in general were things that were also made in Australia, therefore imported power supplies would attract high levels of import duty. This is despite the fact that actual power supplies specifically for PC's were never actually made here at all.
Computer cases on the other hand were not made here at all so you could import a case + PSU and not attract any extra import duty at all.
You can imagine the consequences. Vast numbers of computer cases were imported, stripped of the PSU and those brand new cases were then unceremoniously dumped as landfill.
To be fair, the dodgy cap problem affected many other mobo manufacturers too, but no props to Aopen for not acknowledging the problem and offering to resolve it.
Now I've got a nice big G5.:)
Fair enough then, if you've got the cash, why the hell not go for a Mac?
"requires tech support telling the user to nuke it whenever a problem arises. "Oh, just wipe the HD and reinstall from scratch."
I have *never* used tech support for any PC in my entire 25 year career in IT, except for this one time.
It was an old Compaq notebook my dad had. It had a problem that when you would hit the power-on button it would just sit there and act dead for about 3 minutes doing absolutely nothing. The power LED would come on but there would be no screen or disk activity at all. All of a sudden it would just spring to life and POST and things would be fine, but that three minute wait sure was a pain in the arse for my Dad.
Clearly there was some sort of a hardware issue there. I replaced the hard disk (it seemed a possible culprit, slow to spin up mebbe) and even the RAM (mainly because it was easy to do so) all to no avail, so I called the Compaq support line, thinking that this would be a prerequisite for getting the thing repaired.
Of course the very first thing that the dingbat reading from his tech support script told me was to re-install Windows. I told him I had already replaced the entire hard disk (it was not under warranty) and I re-iterated that the problem manifests before the unit even does its POST The guy probably didn't have a clue what a POST was and repeated his solution, that of re-installing Windows. He refused to budge from this position.
The laptop was old at the time (133mhz P1 when PIII 800s were becoming common) so I gave up and told my dad to buy himself a new laptop, and to make sure he doesn't buy a Compaq.
The spec's written on most el-cheapo Chinese PSU's are about as accurate and truthfull as the wattage claims written on the box of those $25 "1000 WATT" PC speakers you bought at the local PC market. The difference being that if you blow up your craptastic speakers you just need to buy new speakers, but a bad PSU can cause you to re-purchase a completely new PC.
It amazes me the number of "tech heads" out there who will pay AU$900 for a top of the line GPU (just to gain another 3fps in Doom 3) but will try to run it and their P4EE off a $15 SangChoyBow "500 WATT" powersupply.
"especially if the person is female and attractive."
If she doesn't put out then what are you giving her a discount for? Attractive bimbos already get a free ride through lots of lifes hardships and I don't see why I should contribute to that undeserved free ride just because she happens to be a genetic celebrity
Have some pride in yourself man and don't turn yourself into a compliant buffoon everytime a nice pair of breasts enters your field of view.
"I probably need to have a new login. My old one is stalked by a former employee-gone-psycho on substance abuse (he looks like a meth abuser but not sure). Really bright guy but goes in and out of the delusional stages."
I worked with a gal who was clearly abusing some sort of substance. She was a total psycho. Early in the week she would be pretty zoned out, later on in the week she would turn into a raving nutjob. She would burst into hysterics and abuse entire rooms full of people for no reason.
I figured she was out popping tabs and clubbing all weekend, and as the weekend approached she was probably coming into the DT's until she hit the clubs again on friday.
She ended up leaving after a run in with a "new" employee. I say "new" as he was really an old employee who had returned after an absense of about a year. The guy was a Croatian of the Christian persuasion but she didn't know that. He looked slightly swarthy. Anyway, this crazed bird arrived in the office one day ranting about terrorists and how all muslims are bomb carrying death merchants etc etc. She must have been listening to some right wing talkback program on her way in that morning and whatever she'd heard had really set her off that day. Anyway, this Croatian guy stood up and took mock offense to her "calling me a terrorist" and proceeded to tell her that he was a muslim and he takes offence at being labelled as a "terrorist".
She left the building post haste, and was last seen running down the centre of the street screaming hysterically about how there was a "terrorist on the loose".
" There's a big space between the "foot" and "Applications" (same spacing as between other menus), yet they're the same menu?!"
That is one (minor) thing that has nonetheless always annoyed the hell out me. Another is how difficult it is to add extra items to the "Start Menu" under Gnome. KDE is so much uglier than Gnome, but at least all I need to do is open up the Prefs dialogue and hit "right-click>Add New Item" to add an app.
You have to edit some text file hidden deep in the bowels of the system to do the same thing in Gnome (or at least you did in 2.4 which is the last time I tried Gnome)
All I want to do is make standard DVDs that can be played on a standard DVD player. I'm not particularly interested in HDTV or any of the fandangled new codecs because the originals I have are low definition anyway so why bother transcoding them to some whizbang hi-definition format that is not now (and possibly will never be) widely adopted?
Use of MPEG2/DVD is widely supported, requires no special equipment and the use of which does not act to provide momentum and demand for the widespread adoption of various DRM schemes that will be without a doubt fully integrated into whatever the next generation of "high definition" content delivery mechanism is.
No thanks, for what I want MPEG2/DVD is just fine, as are plain old unencumbered audio CD's and MP3 files. Portability is more important to me than wringing the nth degree of a barely perceptable level of image quality out of a $20,000 home theatre system that I don't even own.
"Twenty years from now, we'll look back on the computers we have today as ancient history because they're not capable of doing whatever the hell we'll be doing in 20 years."
This is true to a point, but I have been using PCs since the CP/M days, and I have to say that the need to upgrade to ever faster machines is less now than it has been at any time in the last 25 years.
10 years ago nobody in their right mind, let alone me personally, would consider using a 5 year old computer. Today, plenty of people (myself included) are doing just that.
Apart from video encoding, which will always be ruled by the "faster is better" maxim, there are really no compelling reasons for your average punter to need anything like the 4Ghz(or PR rated) CPU's that are currently the flagship models for AMD/intel.
With the currently stagnated state of MS Windows (until Longhorn in 2006 or later) there is less reason than ever before for people to upgrade. I am typing this on a mobile PIII/700Mhz laptop. Even my fastest PC (at home) which I use to do video encoding and games is only a 2Ghz XP2400. A faster CPU would be nice for video encoding, turning a six hour encode session into a four hour session but this is not enough to justify the expense of an upgrade in my opinion.
As far as games go I have yet to see a game that doesn't work perfectly smoothly on my XP2400, and that includes Far Cry and Half-Life 2, both of which run flawlessly (not counting the obscene load-times for HL2, but that is not a CPU bound phenonenom at all)
I fully expect to have the same suite of PC's for another year at least, and quite possibly two, without any substantial changes.
Maybe I'll consider getting a hardware MPEG2 encoder card though, anybody have any suggestions on a good encoder card that allows transcoding of existing video streams as oppossed to "hardware encoding of ONLY the data stream coming from its in built TV tuner" ala the Hauppauge PVR350 et al?
" imagine though if apple's hardware business actually imploded and they became a software company"
Apple is, first and foremost, a hardware company.
They have absolutely no desire at all to be a software company. None at all. They only do software as a means to sell more hardware.
As it is, they are able to "sell" a copy of OS/X with every single Mac they sell. Were they to release OS/X for i386 then they would open themselves up to rampant piracy and would be lucky to sell a copy of OS/X for every 5 copies in circulation and their hardware sales would fall absolutely plummet as fast as you can say "can you burn me a copy too mate".
It would be an unmitigated disaster. Please direct your future coporate strategising efforts towards helping Microsoft, as we can use every bit of help we can get in removing thier monopoly from the industry.
" People complaining that the hack is really not worth voiding the warranty are missing the whole point. It is just the coolness factor out here."
This is true, it is cool to konow it can be done. I don't o'clock new stuff myself. I buy what suits me performance vs price wise at the time and just use it. Several months later when the upgrade itch starts itching, and the stuff is out of warranty (or nearly) then I scratch the itch for free by embarking on an overclocking adventure (which by then will be well documented on the web) and if I burn something then what they hey, it was time for an upgrade anyway.
" I'm told that those are technically "0 ohm resistors", not "jumpers", though that's probably a distinction that only a real EE would make."
Not really. Usually when the term "jumper" is used it is to describe a user (re)movable connector that makes an optional electrical connection between two points.
A "resistor" on the other hand is almost always soldered onto a PCB and is not at all associated with being (re)movable or in anyway "optional" from the perspective of an end user.
The original article correctly called them "zero ohm resistors" and then added "call them jumpers if you will" to indicate that they perform the same eletrical role as a jumper and can be considered as such in the contect of the article, but being soldered on they realy don't qualify as being true jumpers.
He probably caused more confusion by equating them to jumpers than he saved, really.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, forgot to add the $150 for the 3.5 inch HDD to the PC server pricing. You can redo the mat I'm sure.
"Why would someone deface a poor defenseless Mac Mini like this?"
"Because the hard drive is slow (4200 RPM), and this is cheap."
The guy stated that he wanted to build a server that was a) cheap, and b) quiet
In short, he is an idiot.
It is FAR cheaper to obtain an old Pentium based PC, which can easily be found for free as compared to the Mac Mini, which is $799 in Australia.
This project is not a "cheap" way to build a server, it is an expensive way to build a server.
Then there is the noise factor. Yes, the Mac Mini is quiet, much quieter than an old PC.
But this is not where the story ends. Firstly he is making his Mac Mini almost as noisy as a PC, just by putting in a 3.5 inch HDD and running a PC powersupply complete with a PSU + FAN in it! The only other source of noise in a PC is the CPU fan and I explain below how that can usually be removed completly anyway. In such a scenario, a PC would make exactly the same noise that this Mac Mini does.
When looking at typical, stock built PCs, there are four sources of operating noise to consider.
1) PSU Fan. Both the modified Mac Mini and the recycled Pentium PC use a mini tower case, ergo we can expect the same level of PSU fan noise to emanate from both solutions. In both cases an aftermarket "near silent" fan can be fitted to minimise any noise. In any event, we can rule out any PSU fan noise that is present because both solutions will theoretically produce identical levels of noise. PSU fan noise is not a differentiating factor.
2) CPU Fan. This is one area where the Mac Mini will beat the stock Pentium PC. But there is no reason you need to stick with the stock configuration. It is an easy matter on most old PCs to underclock the CPU. This in turn allows you in many cases to run your Pentium using a large, passive heatsink alone ie, it becomes just as noiseless as the Mac Mini.
3) HDD noise. The modified Mac would use the exact same 3.5inch HDD as the Pentium PC, so we can rule this noise out too.
4) GPU cooler. The mac mini doesn't use a seperate GPU cooler, and niether would the PC. It would most likely have some crappy old Trident or S3 based 2D card that has no fan but is perfectly acceptable in a server.
The short story is that we can make a recycled PC just as quiet as this modified Mac mini so the noise issue is moot.
Consider that the Mac Mini option would cost you something like;
1.25 Ghz Mac Mini - $799
Minitower PC case - $50
3,5 Inch HDD ~ $150 (depending on what capacity you want)
= $999 (Australian)
compared to a recycled PC;
2nd hand Pentium 233 - $50 (probably free but lets use a nominal figure anyway)
Large passive heatsink - $25
New PSU fan - $15 (the old one might be a bit worn)
Linux/FreeBSD OS - $0
= $90
Basically, this goose has wrecked an eight hundred dollar Mac to build a ninety dollar server.
What a moron.
"Fair enough, but why would she even want one? In the process of destroying HP she's amassed enough to live on for a hundred lifetimes."
Because she is a feminist, and was serving a feminist agenda. That is one of the reasons that she has made such a cock-up of things at HP, turning a company that was consistently near the top of the "Fortune 100 best companies to work for" surveys to a sad reflection of itself that couldn't even make the top hundred a few years after she took over.
HP failed Fortune test on purpose - memo
"'m surprised slashdot doesn't run all the links in articles through coral servers"
Ummm, because Coral Cache doesn't work perhaps?
"I have never had a Quantam drive that didn't eventually fail.
That's kind of misleading...
I don't think so, but if you like I will restate that as "I have never had a Quantam drive that hasn't already failed".
As I said, I have Seagate drives (some of which that are much older than the oldest Quantam I've owned) and most of them still work. I'm talking about drives that are still measured in Mbytes here"
This is a much better article on the subject.
"Meanwhile I'm still using a 13GB Quantum I've had for the last seven or eight years..."
I've had many, many hard disks over the years.
I have never had a Quantam drive that didn't eventually fail. I have plenty of Seagates that still work fine but are too small now to be of use. I did have a pair of 30Gb Seagates that were nothing but trouble, they were replaced under warranty and the replacements failed too. There was obviously a serious design flaw in that particular model but other than those two Seagates have been pretty good in my experience.
Maxtors too. Apart from the fiasco in the early nineties with their 40 and 80 Mb drives that had problematic carbon contacts between the disc chamber and the PCB, Maxtors haven't given me much trouble either.
"The PSU looks like cake after you do the motherboard"
These days, yes, back in the old days pre ATX, when PC's had turbo buttons and "megahurtz LED displays" the powerswitch was often on the front of the case and their was 240 power being routed to the front panel. Ofetn times you had to remove the front panel so you could get to the powerswitch which also had to be removed, and occasionally you had to unsolder and resolder the switch back on to the power switch leads.
It could be quite the PITA I assure you. I have some old PC's of this type running Linux to this day.
" Most small computer shops I'm aware of, in my neck of the woods at least, offer the cheap unbranded PSUs as well, basically the same ones you'd find in those cheap cases but obviously without the deadweight."
Up until a few years ago, it was actually cheaper (in Australia) to buy a new case and rip the PSU out of it than it was to buy the exact same PSU on it's own. It had to do with the guv'mint import duties. Apparently "power supplies" in general were things that were also made in Australia, therefore imported power supplies would attract high levels of import duty. This is despite the fact that actual power supplies specifically for PC's were never actually made here at all.
Computer cases on the other hand were not made here at all so you could import a case + PSU and not attract any extra import duty at all.
You can imagine the consequences. Vast numbers of computer cases were imported, stripped of the PSU and those brand new cases were then unceremoniously dumped as landfill.
The wastage was horrendous.
"my dad dumped an entire can of beer into the heat vent by accident when he was checking his wristwatch.
You see, this is why I refuse to wear a wristwatch. Haven't had one for twenty years, I'm too afraid of accidentally wasting some beer.
No more AOPEN for me.
:)
To be fair, the dodgy cap problem affected many other mobo manufacturers too, but no props to Aopen for not acknowledging the problem and offering to resolve it.
Now I've got a nice big G5.
Fair enough then, if you've got the cash, why the hell not go for a Mac?
"requires tech support telling the user to nuke it whenever a problem arises.
"Oh, just wipe the HD and reinstall from scratch."
I have *never* used tech support for any PC in my entire 25 year career in IT, except for this one time.
It was an old Compaq notebook my dad had. It had a problem that when you would hit the power-on button it would just sit there and act dead for about 3 minutes doing absolutely nothing. The power LED would come on but there would be no screen or disk activity at all. All of a sudden it would just spring to life and POST and things would be fine, but that three minute wait sure was a pain in the arse for my Dad.
Clearly there was some sort of a hardware issue there. I replaced the hard disk (it seemed a possible culprit, slow to spin up mebbe) and even the RAM (mainly because it was easy to do so) all to no avail, so I called the Compaq support line, thinking that this would be a prerequisite for getting the thing repaired.
Of course the very first thing that the dingbat reading from his tech support script told me was to re-install Windows. I told him I had already replaced the entire hard disk (it was not under warranty) and I re-iterated that the problem manifests before the unit even does its POST The guy probably didn't have a clue what a POST was and repeated his solution, that of re-installing Windows. He refused to budge from this position.
The laptop was old at the time (133mhz P1 when PIII 800s were becoming common) so I gave up and told my dad to buy himself a new laptop, and to make sure he doesn't buy a Compaq.
"One example being them using IE instead of Firefox even though I've told them a hundred times to use Firefox."
Simple solution: Change all the shortcuts with the big blue "e" and point them to Firefox.
You have to look at users like Pavlov looked at dogs
Abso-fricking-lutely correct.
The spec's written on most el-cheapo Chinese PSU's are about as accurate and truthfull as the wattage claims written on the box of those $25 "1000 WATT" PC speakers you bought at the local PC market. The difference being that if you blow up your craptastic speakers you just need to buy new speakers, but a bad PSU can cause you to re-purchase a completely new PC.
It amazes me the number of "tech heads" out there who will pay AU$900 for a top of the line GPU (just to gain another 3fps in Doom 3) but will try to run it and their P4EE off a $15 SangChoyBow "500 WATT" powersupply.
Incredible.
"especially if the person is female and attractive."
If she doesn't put out then what are you giving her a discount for? Attractive bimbos already get a free ride through lots of lifes hardships and I don't see why I should contribute to that undeserved free ride just because she happens to be a genetic celebrity
Have some pride in yourself man and don't turn yourself into a compliant buffoon everytime a nice pair of breasts enters your field of view.
"I probably need to have a new login. My old one is stalked by a former employee-gone-psycho on substance abuse (he looks like a meth abuser but not sure). Really bright guy but goes in and out of the delusional stages."
I worked with a gal who was clearly abusing some sort of substance. She was a total psycho. Early in the week she would be pretty zoned out, later on in the week she would turn into a raving nutjob. She would burst into hysterics and abuse entire rooms full of people for no reason.
I figured she was out popping tabs and clubbing all weekend, and as the weekend approached she was probably coming into the DT's until she hit the clubs again on friday.
She ended up leaving after a run in with a "new" employee. I say "new" as he was really an old employee who had returned after an absense of about a year. The guy was a Croatian of the Christian persuasion but she didn't know that. He looked slightly swarthy. Anyway, this crazed bird arrived in the office one day ranting about terrorists and how all muslims are bomb carrying death merchants etc etc. She must have been listening to some right wing talkback program on her way in that morning and whatever she'd heard had really set her off that day. Anyway, this Croatian guy stood up and took mock offense to her "calling me a terrorist" and proceeded to tell her that he was a muslim and he takes offence at being labelled as a "terrorist".
She left the building post haste, and was last seen running down the centre of the street screaming hysterically about how there was a "terrorist on the loose".
I kid you not.
She never returned after that day.
" There's a big space between the "foot" and "Applications" (same spacing as between other menus), yet they're the same menu?!"
That is one (minor) thing that has nonetheless always annoyed the hell out me. Another is how difficult it is to add extra items to the "Start Menu" under Gnome. KDE is so much uglier than Gnome, but at least all I need to do is open up the Prefs dialogue and hit "right-click>Add New Item" to add an app.
You have to edit some text file hidden deep in the bowels of the system to do the same thing in Gnome (or at least you did in 2.4 which is the last time I tried Gnome)
All I want to do is make standard DVDs that can be played on a standard DVD player. I'm not particularly interested in HDTV or any of the fandangled new codecs because the originals I have are low definition anyway so why bother transcoding them to some whizbang hi-definition format that is not now (and possibly will never be) widely adopted?
Use of MPEG2/DVD is widely supported, requires no special equipment and the use of which does not act to provide momentum and demand for the widespread adoption of various DRM schemes that will be without a doubt fully integrated into whatever the next generation of "high definition" content delivery mechanism is.
No thanks, for what I want MPEG2/DVD is just fine, as are plain old unencumbered audio CD's and MP3 files. Portability is more important to me than wringing the nth degree of a barely perceptable level of image quality out of a $20,000 home theatre system that I don't even own.
Thanks for the tip anyway.
"Twenty years from now, we'll look back on the computers we have today as ancient history because they're not capable of doing whatever the hell we'll be doing in 20 years."
This is true to a point, but I have been using PCs since the CP/M days, and I have to say that the need to upgrade to ever faster machines is less now than it has been at any time in the last 25 years.
10 years ago nobody in their right mind, let alone me personally, would consider using a 5 year old computer. Today, plenty of people (myself included) are doing just that.
Apart from video encoding, which will always be ruled by the "faster is better" maxim, there are really no compelling reasons for your average punter to need anything like the 4Ghz(or PR rated) CPU's that are currently the flagship models for AMD/intel.
With the currently stagnated state of MS Windows (until Longhorn in 2006 or later) there is less reason than ever before for people to upgrade. I am typing this on a mobile PIII/700Mhz laptop. Even my fastest PC (at home) which I use to do video encoding and games is only a 2Ghz XP2400. A faster CPU would be nice for video encoding, turning a six hour encode session into a four hour session but this is not enough to justify the expense of an upgrade in my opinion.
As far as games go I have yet to see a game that doesn't work perfectly smoothly on my XP2400, and that includes Far Cry and Half-Life 2, both of which run flawlessly (not counting the obscene load-times for HL2, but that is not a CPU bound phenonenom at all)
I fully expect to have the same suite of PC's for another year at least, and quite possibly two, without any substantial changes.
Maybe I'll consider getting a hardware MPEG2 encoder card though, anybody have any suggestions on a good encoder card that allows transcoding of existing video streams as oppossed to "hardware encoding of ONLY the data stream coming from its in built TV tuner" ala the Hauppauge PVR350 et al?
" imagine though if apple's hardware business actually imploded and they became a software company"
Apple is, first and foremost, a hardware company.
They have absolutely no desire at all to be a software company. None at all. They only do software as a means to sell more hardware.
As it is, they are able to "sell" a copy of OS/X with every single Mac they sell. Were they to release OS/X for i386 then they would open themselves up to rampant piracy and would be lucky to sell a copy of OS/X for every 5 copies in circulation and their hardware sales would fall absolutely plummet as fast as you can say "can you burn me a copy too mate".
It would be an unmitigated disaster. Please direct your future coporate strategising efforts towards helping Microsoft, as we can use every bit of help we can get in removing thier monopoly from the industry.
"YOU MOVE IT BACK BEFORE YOU TAKE IT TO THE SHOP!"
You can't move the "jumpers" back BECAUSE THEY ARE SOLDERED ON TO THE MOTHERBOARD!
" People complaining that the hack is really not worth voiding the warranty are missing the whole point. It is just the coolness factor out here."
This is true, it is cool to konow it can be done. I don't o'clock new stuff myself. I buy what suits me performance vs price wise at the time and just use it. Several months later when the upgrade itch starts itching, and the stuff is out of warranty (or nearly) then I scratch the itch for free by embarking on an overclocking adventure (which by then will be well documented on the web) and if I burn something then what they hey, it was time for an upgrade anyway.
" The solder was on the opposite side of the board. Its teeny tiny jumper. Read closer."
They are "zero ohm resistors", NOT fucking jumpers.
You need to "read closer" yourself.
" DV certainly IS compressed."
This is correct
" I'm told that those are technically "0 ohm resistors", not "jumpers", though that's probably a distinction that only a real EE would make."
Not really. Usually when the term "jumper" is used it is to describe a user (re)movable connector that makes an optional electrical connection between two points.
A "resistor" on the other hand is almost always soldered onto a PCB and is not at all associated with being (re)movable or in anyway "optional" from the perspective of an end user.
The original article correctly called them "zero ohm resistors" and then added "call them jumpers if you will" to indicate that they perform the same eletrical role as a jumper and can be considered as such in the contect of the article, but being soldered on they realy don't qualify as being true jumpers.
He probably caused more confusion by equating them to jumpers than he saved, really.