Mandrake totally refused to install on my Athlon64 box. I think it was the VIA SATA that did it.
That was kind of sad, but I don't care, I'm posting this from a Kubuntu LiveCD running on my primary Windows machine. It's completely fantastic, waayyy better than Gnome, super friendly and Konqueror is really nice too.
Little does it know, but Windows is going bye-bye... finally the Linux Desktop surpassed XP !! The trickle will soon turn to a flood;-)
One of the major things you can do to get the best performance out of a given motherboard is spend 10 minutes tracking down what RAM you have installed in your machine and checking the BIOS is setup correctly for the 2.5-3-3-7 RAM settings, or whatever is appropriate.
All the default setups I've seen come with pretty conservative timings and therefore run a lot slower than they need to.
There's a great tool called cpu.z that can help you look into how your machine is running.
Well, one of my boxes, and it's 17" panel are about to migrate to my coffee table.
This setup runs pchdtvr, which spools OTA HDTV so I can record any network shows I want and watch them in glorious 10 MByte sec quality high def whenever I want.
A 17" panel about 4 feet away is not far off the same effect as a 27" TV 8 feet away. And in this case, the picture is wayyyyyy better than cable or satellite, unless you already have high def.
A 200 Gig drive holds about 20 hours which should be plenty for as much TV as I watch. Just think, news, Alias, Lost, Jay Leno, all in high def, whenever you want. Sounds good to me.
I use the PCHDTV 3000 card which absolutely kicks ass once you get the drivers working.
My Compaq Presario is a decent enough home machine with an AMD Athlon Processor that, clocked at 2.16GHz is a fair bit faster, subjectively than a friends Dell with a 2 GHz Pentium 4.
Personally I won't buy Dells anymore as I like the AMD stuff. I just hit Fry's today for a Asus 754 MBoard, Athlon 64 3000, generic Nvidia 5200, 30 Gig Raptor, 512MB OCZ premium, total cost aboput $500. It's pretty easy to put a new system together, so why bother with Dell or Compaq ?
I remember NeWS coming out in the late 80's, but the machines of the time didn't really have the horsepower.
My university at that time was still running Sun 3/50 workstations with 8 Megs of RAM and 68020 processors.
It was so slow, it was hard to tell the difference between the actual screen, and a screenshot image... both were static;-)
But, but if only Microsoft approved software can use the patented protocol, then surely the 'user experience' can be maintained at a high standard... like errrr Passport, and errr, Hotmail.;-)
I kinda believe that if Microsoft keep pushing like this, then something very similar to what happened to IBM will happen to them.
Anyone remember the screams of pain over PS/2 ? PS/2 was cool and modular, but the licensing terms would have brought the IBM 'Compatible' market under control.
PS/2 failed, and EISA, VL-BUS, PCI and now PCI-express, all essentially 'open' specs prospered.
It's steadily happening already, but the problems of maintaining a Windows machine in a working condition will cause people to gradually drift away to MacOS and the new GNU/Linux environments.
The irony of this is that without the Internet, Windows machines would tick along just fine, but with the proliferation of spyware, viruses, aggressive porn web popups... the average user is unable to avoid the holes in the road that can degrade and break the experience of using Windows.
Slowly but surely, like the continued growth in usage of Firefox, people will migrate to competing operating systems that offer similar usability and software.
We can expect to see Microsoft try and head this process of, but in the long term, it is probably unstoppable. Once I see a Linux version of TurboTax I'll be happy, though arguably we already have this using the online version.
My cheapie Athlon 3000+ - based HP/Compaq uses a Samsung drive. It benchmarks about 60 Megs a second which seems pretty good for a commodity machine.
For my self-built, AMD64-based gentoo (compiling) machine, I use a WD Raptor on SATA. Not yet benchmarked, still compiling;-)
The Amiga at the time was pretty cool. I did some of my first programming work in Metacomco C, and assembler, in fact I had the 68000 assembler source for some video digitiser thing, so I could integrate it into a medical application.
But the cool games, the speed, the graphics, the sound... it doesn't compare to what we can do with decent PC hardware now.
Go check out the Avalon site, PC's can do the Amiga ball demo in XML now, instead of some poor bastard sweating it out in video and 68000 programming for days on end.
I still love computers, but the action is in Open Source. If you have a bunch of energy, go help out. Spread Firefox. Buy AMD;-) Fix the crappy UI of the GIMP etc., etc.
Ahhhh, the ole' Sun 3/50, 8 Megs of Ram and a 68020, and a queue of people waiting to get on the console, and two poor suckers using Facit (the terminal for the man who want's to be eloctrocuted) on the side.
This was St Andrews Uni in 1986 I think, and those Sun's were fantastic. Especially with PS/Algol... Java long before it's time.... and now back to your scheduled programs...
Slashdot Mirror
Mandrake totally refused to install on my Athlon64 box. I think it was the VIA SATA that did it.
... finally the Linux Desktop surpassed XP !! The trickle will soon turn to a flood ;-)
That was kind of sad, but I don't care, I'm posting this from a Kubuntu LiveCD running on my primary Windows machine. It's completely fantastic, waayyy better than Gnome, super friendly and Konqueror is really nice too.
Little does it know, but Windows is going bye-bye
Oh shit, so ya wouldn't trust me then, having had a minor career selling new and used cars for 4 months last year ...
... and the sales skills come in handy sometimes too ;-)
I make a *lot* more money as a programmer though
I already have to reboot my TV ...
And my car just got recalled due to have the wrong program flashed into the computer.
hee hee, I read that as techno-bubba-sphere. That seems appropriate somehow.
One of the major things you can do to get the best performance out of a given motherboard is spend 10 minutes tracking down what RAM you have installed in your machine and checking the BIOS is setup correctly for the 2.5-3-3-7 RAM settings, or whatever is appropriate.
All the default setups I've seen come with pretty conservative timings and therefore run a lot slower than they need to.
There's a great tool called cpu.z that can help you look into how your machine is running.
Is this related to the new upcoming Disney sequel 'Finding gNemo' ...
Well, one of my boxes, and it's 17" panel are about to migrate to my coffee table.
This setup runs pchdtvr, which spools OTA HDTV so I can record any network shows I want and watch them in glorious 10 MByte sec quality high def whenever I want.
A 17" panel about 4 feet away is not far off the same effect as a 27" TV 8 feet away. And in this case, the picture is wayyyyyy better than cable or satellite, unless you already have high def.
A 200 Gig drive holds about 20 hours which should be plenty for as much TV as I watch. Just think, news, Alias, Lost, Jay Leno, all in high def, whenever you want. Sounds good to me.
I use the PCHDTV 3000 card which absolutely kicks ass once you get the drivers working.
I was setting up a PC at a friends with Windows Media Centre Edition, and the only available formatting for the new hard drive was NTFS !
Didn't FAT also used to be available in XP ?
I sure feel happier accessing FAT partitions than NTFS ones from Linux. Is the write access still experimental ?
It didn't occur to me at the time, but I probably should have formatted the partition in FAT using Linux. Doh!
The drivers can be tricky to install, but once working, the display is faultless.
Check out this link to see one in action.
This happened to me the other day, but then I realized, "Wait a second, I don't even bank with Washington Mutual."
Finally ... something on Slashdot to interest my grandmother !!
It just worked !! Bam I was using the sofa as a mousemat.
It worked, just !! Bam, I had to surf off to somwehere to find the following for my xorg-conf file (to get the scroll wheel to work):
I'd give a 7/10. Lots of stuff works, but you still need to get your hands dirty.
My Compaq Presario is a decent enough home machine with an AMD Athlon Processor that, clocked at 2.16GHz is a fair bit faster, subjectively than a friends Dell with a 2 GHz Pentium 4.
Personally I won't buy Dells anymore as I like the AMD stuff. I just hit Fry's today for a Asus 754 MBoard, Athlon 64 3000, generic Nvidia 5200, 30 Gig Raptor, 512MB OCZ premium, total cost aboput $500. It's pretty easy to put a new system together, so why bother with Dell or Compaq ?
I remember NeWS coming out in the late 80's, but the machines of the time didn't really have the horsepower. My university at that time was still running Sun 3/50 workstations with 8 Megs of RAM and 68020 processors. It was so slow, it was hard to tell the difference between the actual screen, and a screenshot image ... both were static ;-)
50 licenses ...
Who says BSD is dead !!!!!!
But, but if only Microsoft approved software can use the patented protocol, then surely the 'user experience' can be maintained at a high standard ... like errrr Passport, and errr, Hotmail. ;-)
I kinda believe that if Microsoft keep pushing like this, then something very similar to what happened to IBM will happen to them.
Anyone remember the screams of pain over PS/2 ? PS/2 was cool and modular, but the licensing terms would have brought the IBM 'Compatible' market under control.
PS/2 failed, and EISA, VL-BUS, PCI and now PCI-express, all essentially 'open' specs prospered.
Let's hope for the same thing with software.
Yeah, the text is big in those pictures, but it's really simple to tweak all the text sizes in Linux.
My Gnome setup looks pretty much like Windows 2000 because that's the way I like it set up.
It's steadily happening already, but the problems of maintaining a Windows machine in a working condition will cause people to gradually drift away to MacOS and the new GNU/Linux environments.
... the average user is unable to avoid the holes in the road that can degrade and break the experience of using Windows.
;-))
The irony of this is that without the Internet, Windows machines would tick along just fine, but with the proliferation of spyware, viruses, aggressive porn web popups
Slowly but surely, like the continued growth in usage of Firefox, people will migrate to competing operating systems that offer similar usability and software.
We can expect to see Microsoft try and head this process of, but in the long term, it is probably unstoppable. Once I see a Linux version of TurboTax I'll be happy, though arguably we already have this using the online version.
Disclaimer: I use Gentoo. (still compiling
In other news, Australian 'engineers' transplanted the engine from a priceless Bugatti into a 1986 Nissan Crew Cab light pickup.
The engineers were later heard to complain that the engine 'lacked pickup'.
My cheapie Athlon 3000+ - based HP/Compaq uses a Samsung drive. It benchmarks about 60 Megs a second which seems pretty good for a commodity machine. For my self-built, AMD64-based gentoo (compiling) machine, I use a WD Raptor on SATA. Not yet benchmarked, still compiling ;-)
There was a story reported a long time ago about a dba in a bank who was requested to create a form letter to the richest of the banks customers ...
...
The letter read 'Dear Rich Bastard'
Yeah, exactly, why ???
... it doesn't compare to what we can do with decent PC hardware now.
;-) Fix the crappy UI of the GIMP etc., etc.
The Amiga at the time was pretty cool. I did some of my first programming work in Metacomco C, and assembler, in fact I had the 68000 assembler source for some video digitiser thing, so I could integrate it into a medical application.
But the cool games, the speed, the graphics, the sound
Go check out the Avalon site, PC's can do the Amiga ball demo in XML now, instead of some poor bastard sweating it out in video and 68000 programming for days on end.
I still love computers, but the action is in Open Source. If you have a bunch of energy, go help out. Spread Firefox. Buy AMD
Ovation !?!?!? I thought all the power users used !Impression ...
hehehe, that was a great app.
Ahhhh, the ole' Sun 3/50, 8 Megs of Ram and a 68020, and a queue of people waiting to get on the console, and two poor suckers using Facit (the terminal for the man who want's to be eloctrocuted) on the side.
... Java long before it's time. ... and now back to your scheduled programs ...
This was St Andrews Uni in 1986 I think, and those Sun's were fantastic. Especially with PS/Algol
My God, it's full of ... oh, wait, it's empty !!