Apart fromt the wireless card, you're just changing out parts that are already there.
For example, I need (well... not need, but would heavily prefer) a gigabit network card. This is impossible on an iMac. Also, dual monitors are impossible with an iMac. Also, the iMac video cards often leave a lot to be desired, and they can not be upgraded.
You can basically exchange most of what's there for a faster version, but the capabilities are static except for the wireless card and whatever you can plug in with USB/firewire.
"That has not be my experience. Even a dual G5 feels sluggish coming from a _single_ P4. Did you miss the MacDate review yesterday?"
The dual G5 is sluggish because Apple chose to castrate it with 256 mb of memory. That's barely enough to run the OS without swapping. Swapping on a dual G5. That's really paying attention to the user experience.
"If you want a PC as quiet as an iMac, you sacrifice speed. You can get a 1.8GHz iMac with display (which will completely obliterate a 3GHz Pentium 4), and have it run so quiet that you can't hear it."
errr... what?
That depends entirely on what you're going to do with it. Pentium 4's have substantial advantages in serveral areas. For example, they have more memory bandwidth than iMacs. Also, while Pentium 4s don't automatically have good video cards, iMacs automatically have bad video cards. If you were doing something graphically intensive, the P4 would likely win.
"I bought my 867 MHz powerbook 2 years ago, and it completely obliterated my 2.26 GHz Pentium 4 (which is *incredibly* noisy), and still does. And it does this all silently."
Again, that depends entire on what you do with it. any G4 computer has a maximum of a 187 mhz bus, which will choke immediately if anything memory intensive is run.
PowerMacs are quite expensive, and they are the only ones that can be upgraded significantly. Were the iMacs similarly upgradable, it wouldn't be a problem.
"Who needs an ugradeable computer (other than RAM) anyway?"
um... me?
"I upgraded a supposedly unupgradable, all in one purple iMac with a 120G HD and all the RAM it will hold."
You'd have fun if you tried to install a hard drive larger than 137 gb, as the ATA controllers of the time didn't support drives that big. I popped an SATA contoller in my PC that sounds like it's about as old as your iMac (ca. 1997), and now it has a 160 gb drive. I also popped a gigabit network card in, and now it's great file server.
Installing an SATA controller in an iMac from that time is impossible, the 160 gb drive would be impossible, and the gigabit interface is impossible on any iMac. In addition, the firewalling requirements of my server have caused me to install a total of 3 network interfaces-- this, too, is impossible on an iMac.
It might be 8 years old, but my NFS performance is about 15-20 mb/s. That's about the best you can do with NFS over ethernet. The hard drive performance is about 2% better than my desktop machine because the chipset in the SATA card is better than the on board SATA controller in my desktop machine, despite the fact that it runs a much faster OS with much faster hardware. As opposed to your iMac, which will be stuck at ATA/33 for the rest of time.
And I don't care what it looks like. It's tucked away under my desk where even I can barely see it. It just sits there working perfectly.
"In a few years, even the most upgraded computer will be hopelessly obsolete and will be replaced if you need/want to run the latest and greatest software"
That's odd. I could have sworn my server was running up to date everything. Either you're full of it, or I recall the versions of my stuff incorrectly.
"especially games."
Games on a Mac. Right.
"Not having to worry about any of those 70,000+ known malwares out for wintel may also allow you to sleep better"
My server is a fully patched OpenBSD machine. Everything else is not.
You're mistaking what you find useful from what others find useful. Just because you would derive no utility from an upgradable computer doesn't mean no one else would. You obviously don't feel like operating a server; I can respect that. However, I want a server, and if I hadn't bought an upgradable machine in 1997 I would have to get a new computer now. I knew I'd be doing something like this back then, so I got the upgradable machine. I know I'll be doing something like this 5 years from now, so my new desktop machine is also upgradable.
There are many other reasons to get an upgradable machine.
Apple is good for three things: immutable desktop machines, powerhaus workstations, and laptops. I have an Apple laptop and I'm happy with it. But Apple doesn't want to sell you an affordable, upgradable desktop. So some of us just have to look elsewhere.
The only extensively ugradable Macs are PowerMacs, which are quite expensive. I tend to get Apple laptops because you can't upgrade a laptop no matter who you buy it from, but for desktops it would be crazy unless you knew for a fact you'd never want anything else from it.
My current server/firewall is a P2 ca. 1997. Just about everything in there would have been impossible on an iMac, current or past. It has 3 network interfaces (iMacs are limited to 1 ethernet), one of them gigabit (impossible on an iMac), an SATA controller (impossible on an iMac that wasn't built with it), a 160 gb hard drive (impossible on an iMac from 1997) that I can actually use at full speed (an iMac would have been stuck at ATA/33).
None of the software stuff would be impossible on an iMac (particularly if it were running OpenBSD, as it would be if I used it as a server), but the hardware stuff just couldn't be done. Thus, my return on investment has been increased.
It's not just the ability to keep the hardware in production 8 years later, it's the fact that what was once exclusively a desktop computer that I purchased exclusively for desktop use, and it's now a very capable server doing stuff no iMac from 1997 will ever do. And when my current desktop is a server 5 years from now, it will be doing stuff the iMacs of today will never do.
I'm not saying no one should ever buy an iMac, but I am saying an upgradable computer is worth a lot more to people that actually upgrade them.
I typically rotate my passwords when I have to get my iBook fixed-- about every 6 months. I love the looks on their faces when I tell them my password.
Apparentky KDE is slimmer than it used to be (I can't tell), but honestly for desktop systems I just put a gig or two of memory in them and then they run everything I need simultaneously without swapping.
That's not necessarily the strategy for everyone, but the cost of the extra memory is less than the cost of the extra effort of figuring out the lighter weight but harder to use desktops. Sure I can figure them out (I have in the past), but the effort just isn't rewarded when you can throw memory at the problem and have it go away.
Besides, with all the crap I leave running I really don't think the KDE overhead that significant.
I'm not partial to Gnome. It never really suited me (personal tastes, not technical merit), so I have no opinion about its bloat.
"w^x in OpenBSD is rather new. I've run RSBAC in Linux for many years now. I'd say my Linux box has been much more secure than an OpenBSD one because of that."
That depends on what you're doing with it. If you're running a system where you have to let people in for them to do what's needed, access controls are probably the way to go (on Linux or other OS).
If you want a server that does generic serving or firewalling, OpenBSD is the way to go because it is more resistant to exploits of any kind, and the servers tend to be running in jails with dropped privs. It's hard to get out of there even if you've subverted the process.
"OpenBSDs ftpd has had vulnerabilities, it's just not enabled per default. vsftpd has had none."
OpenBSD's ftpd is old. It's been audited extensively over time (just like everything else), but it dates back to 1985.
I couldn't find any vulerabilities after 2000 when I checked.
OpenSSH is on by default in OpenBSD. The one hole in 8 years was in OpenSSH. OpenSSH is the only service visible to the outside that's on be default.
The forked Apache in OpenBSD is much more secure than any you'd find elsewhere. On top of all the patches rejected by the Apache people for various reasons and thus not distributed to anyone else, it benefits from W^X protection (on i386, which no one else has) and ProPolice (it's not that widely used, some of the userspace stuff in Linux seems to use it but the kernel doesn't). This has turned a bunch of arbitrary code exploits into DOSs, which merely crash the server process.
The ftpd in the base install as well as everything else benefits from W^X and ProPolice. W^X is handled by the system, and ProPolice is used by default on anything you compile. Therefore, unless you work pretty hard to avoid it, anything that's run on OpenBSD benefits from the added protection. As a result, it's more secure because exploits aren't always exploitable on the platform.
DOS issues are still patched, but the difference is that they're not exploitable before the patch is issued.
"The complexity of the SMP code in FreeBSD 5.3 was what I was talking about. IMHO, the FreeBSD hackers have been working very hard to move forward with fine-grained locking and my main worry is that they're making such a complicated system that it's going to be hard to continue moving forward with it."
I don't think the way DragonFly does SMP is best for everything.
The problem is that the DF kernel has a great deal less freedom to do what it likes with threads. This may ultimately give DF the advantage because it makes so many things so much easier, but for now, for right now, it increases latency (particularly in relation to 5.x). A desktop system that "feels" responsive is easier to achieve with FreeBSD (or Linux).
In reality you may not notice the difference, but I can tell pretty easily under high load.
The DF is probably ultimately better for highly loaded servers, and certainly for maintainability. Also, the way the userspace system call layer works takes it to a whole other level.
Half the people in my building have an SMC wireless router, they haven't changed the SSID, and they haven't put WEP on it. You can connect to the "SMC" network anywhere in the building.
If they connect to the wrong AP, they don't notice because it still "works".
IIRC, there was a request on misc@ for a dual processor G4 box.
Re:Unknown Error In The Submission
on
Nuclear Batteries
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Coal contains significant amounts of Thorium and Uranium. Burning it releases large quantities of these into the environment.
Thorium and Uranium are both in the multiple billions of years. They'll still be there when the Earth is a scorched cinder circling a long dead star.
Tritium (one of the isotopes they discussed using) has a half life of 12 years. Most of it will decay to helium and the helium will blow away in the solar wind within your lifetime.
Say everyone (police and protesters) knows something's going to happen this afternoon, and they know the general area where it will happen. The police are already very well equipped for coordinated actions (radio, etc). There is no increase in their capabilities.
However, the protesters are now able to deploy with the same rapidity. The police are no longer able to get there first and disperse the crowd before it forms.
The "threat" is that protests can now be organized with a rapidity that makes effective countermeasures very difficult.
In the good old days, word would get around long before the event, and you could have riot police ready to go. Now you can still probably find out about it, but advanced warning is very much reduced.
I think it's pretty simple. If Google links to sites that Chinese can't get to, all they'll get is whatever the Great Firewall gives them when it blocks something. If they provide cached content, or quotes from blocked sites, they'll end up blocked themselves.
They're too big a site to escape scrutiny. They can benefit from the situation themselves (advertising revenue for a billion people), but they can't improve the situation for the Chinese.
It's ethically ambiguous, but the cause is the government's policy on censorship. They're not going to change that if they have to block Google and use search.msn.com instead.
You're 100% right. Hotmail pages contain a lot of content that doesn't just take a long time to transfer, it takes a long time to render and eats a lot of CPU. Fine on a P4 sitting on a cable modem, but you can't assume that. Gmail requires a newer browser, which is a software upgrade.
Also, the hotmail interface is stupid. It's like using a plastic spork. The spam filtering sucks. My hotmail account is now used only when I need to sign up for something. I log in, clear out all the junk (it fills up in about a day), get the sign up message, and then leave it again.
Gmail is better in just about every way. The only thing I'd want is more encryption.
Slashdot Mirror
Apart fromt the wireless card, you're just changing out parts that are already there.
For example, I need (well... not need, but would heavily prefer) a gigabit network card. This is impossible on an iMac. Also, dual monitors are impossible with an iMac. Also, the iMac video cards often leave a lot to be desired, and they can not be upgraded.
You can basically exchange most of what's there for a faster version, but the capabilities are static except for the wireless card and whatever you can plug in with USB/firewire.
"That has not be my experience. Even a dual G5 feels sluggish coming from a _single_ P4. Did you miss the MacDate review yesterday?"
The dual G5 is sluggish because Apple chose to castrate it with 256 mb of memory. That's barely enough to run the OS without swapping. Swapping on a dual G5. That's really paying attention to the user experience.
I'd say 1 gb minimum is manditory.
"If you want a PC as quiet as an iMac, you sacrifice speed. You can get a 1.8GHz iMac with display (which will completely obliterate a 3GHz Pentium 4), and have it run so quiet that you can't hear it."
errr... what?
That depends entirely on what you're going to do with it. Pentium 4's have substantial advantages in serveral areas. For example, they have more memory bandwidth than iMacs. Also, while Pentium 4s don't automatically have good video cards, iMacs automatically have bad video cards. If you were doing something graphically intensive, the P4 would likely win.
"I bought my 867 MHz powerbook 2 years ago, and it completely obliterated my 2.26 GHz Pentium 4 (which is *incredibly* noisy), and still does. And it does this all silently."
Again, that depends entire on what you do with it. any G4 computer has a maximum of a 187 mhz bus, which will choke immediately if anything memory intensive is run.
PowerMacs are quite expensive, and they are the only ones that can be upgraded significantly. Were the iMacs similarly upgradable, it wouldn't be a problem.
My P2 from 1997 has a gigabit network interface because I installed one. No iMac anywhere has a gigabit network interface.
"Who needs an ugradeable computer (other than RAM) anyway?"
um... me?
"I upgraded a supposedly unupgradable, all in one purple iMac with a 120G HD and all the RAM it will hold."
You'd have fun if you tried to install a hard drive larger than 137 gb, as the ATA controllers of the time didn't support drives that big. I popped an SATA contoller in my PC that sounds like it's about as old as your iMac (ca. 1997), and now it has a 160 gb drive. I also popped a gigabit network card in, and now it's great file server.
Installing an SATA controller in an iMac from that time is impossible, the 160 gb drive would be impossible, and the gigabit interface is impossible on any iMac. In addition, the firewalling requirements of my server have caused me to install a total of 3 network interfaces-- this, too, is impossible on an iMac.
It might be 8 years old, but my NFS performance is about 15-20 mb/s. That's about the best you can do with NFS over ethernet. The hard drive performance is about 2% better than my desktop machine because the chipset in the SATA card is better than the on board SATA controller in my desktop machine, despite the fact that it runs a much faster OS with much faster hardware. As opposed to your iMac, which will be stuck at ATA/33 for the rest of time.
And I don't care what it looks like. It's tucked away under my desk where even I can barely see it. It just sits there working perfectly.
"In a few years, even the most upgraded computer will be hopelessly obsolete and will be replaced if you need/want to run the latest and greatest software"
That's odd. I could have sworn my server was running up to date everything. Either you're full of it, or I recall the versions of my stuff incorrectly.
"especially games."
Games on a Mac. Right.
"Not having to worry about any of those 70,000+ known malwares out for wintel may also allow you to sleep better"
My server is a fully patched OpenBSD machine. Everything else is not.
You're mistaking what you find useful from what others find useful. Just because you would derive no utility from an upgradable computer doesn't mean no one else would. You obviously don't feel like operating a server; I can respect that. However, I want a server, and if I hadn't bought an upgradable machine in 1997 I would have to get a new computer now. I knew I'd be doing something like this back then, so I got the upgradable machine. I know I'll be doing something like this 5 years from now, so my new desktop machine is also upgradable.
There are many other reasons to get an upgradable machine.
Apple is good for three things: immutable desktop machines, powerhaus workstations, and laptops. I have an Apple laptop and I'm happy with it. But Apple doesn't want to sell you an affordable, upgradable desktop. So some of us just have to look elsewhere.
The only extensively ugradable Macs are PowerMacs, which are quite expensive. I tend to get Apple laptops because you can't upgrade a laptop no matter who you buy it from, but for desktops it would be crazy unless you knew for a fact you'd never want anything else from it.
My current server/firewall is a P2 ca. 1997. Just about everything in there would have been impossible on an iMac, current or past. It has 3 network interfaces (iMacs are limited to 1 ethernet), one of them gigabit (impossible on an iMac), an SATA controller (impossible on an iMac that wasn't built with it), a 160 gb hard drive (impossible on an iMac from 1997) that I can actually use at full speed (an iMac would have been stuck at ATA/33).
None of the software stuff would be impossible on an iMac (particularly if it were running OpenBSD, as it would be if I used it as a server), but the hardware stuff just couldn't be done. Thus, my return on investment has been increased.
It's not just the ability to keep the hardware in production 8 years later, it's the fact that what was once exclusively a desktop computer that I purchased exclusively for desktop use, and it's now a very capable server doing stuff no iMac from 1997 will ever do. And when my current desktop is a server 5 years from now, it will be doing stuff the iMacs of today will never do.
I'm not saying no one should ever buy an iMac, but I am saying an upgradable computer is worth a lot more to people that actually upgrade them.
My passwords inspire similar awe. :)
http://homestar.sytes.net/cgi-bin/passgen
I typically rotate my passwords when I have to get my iBook fixed-- about every 6 months. I love the looks on their faces when I tell them my password.
Apparentky KDE is slimmer than it used to be (I can't tell), but honestly for desktop systems I just put a gig or two of memory in them and then they run everything I need simultaneously without swapping.
That's not necessarily the strategy for everyone, but the cost of the extra memory is less than the cost of the extra effort of figuring out the lighter weight but harder to use desktops. Sure I can figure them out (I have in the past), but the effort just isn't rewarded when you can throw memory at the problem and have it go away.
Besides, with all the crap I leave running I really don't think the KDE overhead that significant.
I'm not partial to Gnome. It never really suited me (personal tastes, not technical merit), so I have no opinion about its bloat.
"w^x in OpenBSD is rather new. I've run RSBAC in Linux for many years now. I'd say my Linux box has been much more secure than an OpenBSD one because of that."
That depends on what you're doing with it. If you're running a system where you have to let people in for them to do what's needed, access controls are probably the way to go (on Linux or other OS).
If you want a server that does generic serving or firewalling, OpenBSD is the way to go because it is more resistant to exploits of any kind, and the servers tend to be running in jails with dropped privs. It's hard to get out of there even if you've subverted the process.
"OpenBSDs ftpd has had vulnerabilities, it's just not enabled per default. vsftpd has had none."
OpenBSD's ftpd is old. It's been audited extensively over time (just like everything else), but it dates back to 1985.
I couldn't find any vulerabilities after 2000 when I checked.
Those services are running, but not visible or available to the outside.
OpenSSH is on by default in OpenBSD. The one hole in 8 years was in OpenSSH. OpenSSH is the only service visible to the outside that's on be default.
The forked Apache in OpenBSD is much more secure than any you'd find elsewhere. On top of all the patches rejected by the Apache people for various reasons and thus not distributed to anyone else, it benefits from W^X protection (on i386, which no one else has) and ProPolice (it's not that widely used, some of the userspace stuff in Linux seems to use it but the kernel doesn't). This has turned a bunch of arbitrary code exploits into DOSs, which merely crash the server process.
The ftpd in the base install as well as everything else benefits from W^X and ProPolice. W^X is handled by the system, and ProPolice is used by default on anything you compile. Therefore, unless you work pretty hard to avoid it, anything that's run on OpenBSD benefits from the added protection. As a result, it's more secure because exploits aren't always exploitable on the platform.
DOS issues are still patched, but the difference is that they're not exploitable before the patch is issued.
Changing your password every week is dumb, or at best of little benefit.
Better pick a good password and hang onto it for a while so you can remember it.
"The complexity of the SMP code in FreeBSD 5.3 was what I was talking about. IMHO, the FreeBSD hackers have been working very hard to move forward with fine-grained locking and my main worry is that they're making such a complicated system that it's going to be hard to continue moving forward with it."
I don't think the way DragonFly does SMP is best for everything.
The problem is that the DF kernel has a great deal less freedom to do what it likes with threads. This may ultimately give DF the advantage because it makes so many things so much easier, but for now, for right now, it increases latency (particularly in relation to 5.x). A desktop system that "feels" responsive is easier to achieve with FreeBSD (or Linux).
In reality you may not notice the difference, but I can tell pretty easily under high load.
The DF is probably ultimately better for highly loaded servers, and certainly for maintainability. Also, the way the userspace system call layer works takes it to a whole other level.
DANGER
Replying to this post may result in flames no matter what your position.
I know which BSD is the cleanest. I'm just not going to say it here...
Half the people in my building have an SMC wireless router, they haven't changed the SSID, and they haven't put WEP on it. You can connect to the "SMC" network anywhere in the building.
If they connect to the wrong AP, they don't notice because it still "works".
Truly horrifying.
"BSD
/hopes the mods can tell a joke from a troll
4 more"
When was the last time anyone saw that? It's like a creepy zombie movie.
I can't tell if you think it's a bad thing, but it sounds pretty accurate.
OpenBSD's done releases on every May 1st and Nov 1st for years... They didn't do it. :)
:)
NetBSD and FreeBSD tend to release when what they're working on is ready. Must be their doing.
IIRC, there was a request on misc@ for a dual processor G4 box.
Coal contains significant amounts of Thorium and Uranium. Burning it releases large quantities of these into the environment.
Thorium and Uranium are both in the multiple billions of years. They'll still be there when the Earth is a scorched cinder circling a long dead star.
Tritium (one of the isotopes they discussed using) has a half life of 12 years. Most of it will decay to helium and the helium will blow away in the solar wind within your lifetime.
They can already call riot police in that way.
Say everyone (police and protesters) knows something's going to happen this afternoon, and they know the general area where it will happen. The police are already very well equipped for coordinated actions (radio, etc). There is no increase in their capabilities.
However, the protesters are now able to deploy with the same rapidity. The police are no longer able to get there first and disperse the crowd before it forms.
The "threat" is that protests can now be organized with a rapidity that makes effective countermeasures very difficult.
In the good old days, word would get around long before the event, and you could have riot police ready to go. Now you can still probably find out about it, but advanced warning is very much reduced.
I think it's pretty simple. If Google links to sites that Chinese can't get to, all they'll get is whatever the Great Firewall gives them when it blocks something. If they provide cached content, or quotes from blocked sites, they'll end up blocked themselves.
They're too big a site to escape scrutiny. They can benefit from the situation themselves (advertising revenue for a billion people), but they can't improve the situation for the Chinese.
It's ethically ambiguous, but the cause is the government's policy on censorship. They're not going to change that if they have to block Google and use search.msn.com instead.
You're 100% right. Hotmail pages contain a lot of content that doesn't just take a long time to transfer, it takes a long time to render and eats a lot of CPU. Fine on a P4 sitting on a cable modem, but you can't assume that. Gmail requires a newer browser, which is a software upgrade.
Also, the hotmail interface is stupid. It's like using a plastic spork. The spam filtering sucks. My hotmail account is now used only when I need to sign up for something. I log in, clear out all the junk (it fills up in about a day), get the sign up message, and then leave it again.
Gmail is better in just about every way. The only thing I'd want is more encryption.
I have 6 invites. Contact me.