If purchasing faster hardware at the consumer end won't fix the problem. Then isn't there someone else that needs to buy faster hardware? That's right, the telcos. And if I recall they were supposed to do that before 2000, and they still haven't.
I don't see how QoS even gets thrown into the discussion. The problem isn't that 'Our resources on the network are scarce and we can't give you IPTV without giving our IPTV traffic priority through this bottleneck', it's 'We're still trying to send you high definition content over our aged network hardware. We don't want to upgrade to more modern technology because that requires reinvestment of funds. Who cares that the government subsidized billions of dollars just so we didn't take a financial blow for laying down newer, better lines, we get more money by telling you to pay more for higher priority in our queues on our slow networks, which are slow for no other reason than that we're profiting by not upgrading them.'
You never know. Enforcing net neutrality may prevent the development of a ubiquitous high bandwidth wireless Internet which can compete with the land lines for performance and cost. When you institute a law like this you are essentially trying to hold development static at the current state of affairs.
This could be true only in a case where the 'Enforcing Net Neutrality' you're talking about implies restricting competitors from implementing new ideas. The Net Neutrality that this slashdot article is talking about does not attempt to do that at all. Network Neutrality attempts to stop one action, and that is the throttling of packets that a corporation finds to conflict with their interests.
Large telecommunications companies have expressed their will to implement this sort of packet-queueing to start offering services in other markets using their already-entrenched market share and widespread influence as a way to draw more customers towards their new services. This Net Neutrality legislation is proposed to keep this from happening, and nothing more.
As to whether this law "tries to hold development static at the current state of affairs, I believe it serves to encourage just the opposite. Telcos only have to slow things down because there is a limit to what their current infrastructure can hold. The telcos have been given exorbitant amounts of money with the agreement that they will upgrade their networks to meet the needs of a growing market, and they haven't. In this sense, network neutrality's attempts to keep the telcos from throttling tells them directly to upgrade their network so they can handle their proposed new traffic(The telco's own IPTV? Maybe.) instead of trying to milk more cash out of both the aged network infrastructure and the bottlenecks in the network that are still there only because the network hasn't been upgraded to fix them. Am I right? As far as I see, the only thing trying to hold development at the current state of affairs are the telcos, and the current state of affairs boils down to 'You're still using shitty network hardware and lines. You want to keep using them because they give the illusion of resources being much more limited than they actually are.'
All in all, net neutrality doesn't aim to be the solution to a problem (the problem being the aged network), it aims to be: 1. A response to combat a threat to one of the foundations of the internet. 2: Another push to get the telcos to do what they agreed to doing when they took government subsidies intended for upgrading and maintaining a high speed information network.
Nope. This is a Clevo notebook, just like all of the earlier high end notebooks from Alienware. Specifically, it's a Clevo M590K. http://www.clevo.com.tw/products/M590K.asp
Considering both Alienware and Voodoo just sell rebranded Clevo laptops with pretty paintjobs, their prices are outrageous. Might as well just buy from a Sager reseller and get the same thing for considerably less.
Don't even worry about the weight differences. The heavier weight is the one you'll be carrying, this is for sure. The lighter weight is the same laptop minus the batteries.
I've been told that it is around as cool as Clevo's other DTR notebooks (Alienware's new notebook is, of course, just a rebranded Clevo M590k), and in some cases cooler. My Clevo D900t idles between 40 and 60 C, which is high in comparison to a desktop, but is extremely cool for a laptop. That puts the temperature into perspective pretty well. As long as you're not covering up the fans, you don't really have to worry about heat problems much at all. I'm also told that it's more quiet than my D900t, which (unless I crank the fans into overdrive) is just a low hum most of the time as is.
Eh, I'm glad they haven't implemented PvP. If improperly implemented, it ruins games. I mean, I'd much rather kill computer controlled mobs than AOLer controlled players. Maybe that's just me though.
Back on topic, does anyone know if the Sting 917 takes standard, off-the-shelf video cards? The site mentions that the "video card" can be changed, but doesn't seem to elaborate further...
The laptop doesn't take standard formfactor desktop graphics cards, but rather the mobile versions, which are provided by the manufacturer. In this case, the US manufacturer for these notebooks is Sager. You can buy the video cards for this notebook through them, and if you buy from a good reseller, they'll probably be working with Sager as well.
Currently available video cards are the top of the line mobile cards from last year until now, including the Mobility Radeon X800 and Mobility Radeon X800XT platinum edition, the Geforce Go 6800, the Geforce Go 6800 Ultra, the Geforce Go 7800GTX, and the Quadro FX 1400. All cards have 256MB of GDDR3 memory on them.
This is a variant on the same laptop design. Where the laptop reviewed in this article is a Clevo D900T, also called the Sager9880 (the current model is the 9890, which supports the 7800GTXgo as well.), the laptop you mention is a Clevo D900K, which is soon to be released stateside as the Sager 9750.
Also, eurocom puts up clevo's laptops as soon as they're announced as 'in development'. Note the release date marked for August 1, 2005? This laptop is still not coming out for another few months.
I wish they'd just wait until the laptop was actually availiable for retail. Too much early hype for me, though the D900K is a dream machine, even while I'm working off of a D900T right now.
Eh, hinges on your definition of huge, noisy, and hot. I own one, or at least one based from the same model. It's more quiet than the desktops next to me during normal use, really. It's louder than your average notebook, and definitely heavier (Mine weighs in at 11 lbs.) but it's not too bad when you counterbalance what you get out of having it. It's hot compared to desktops, but compared to competing P4 laptops, especially the Dell P4 laptops (The 8000 series) this thing is on ice. Mine is idling at 41c at the moment, and it maxes out at 60c, where the fans will throttle and run it back down to 50 or 40, depending on the temperature of the room you're in. Contrasting this with my friend's vaio, which idles at 50-60c and gets close to 70c before it starts chopping out, and my friend's inspiron 1150 (a far unfair comparison, but we're talking processors here,) which he runs with a box fan under it to keep his celeron cool, my D900T is fairly cool.
Concerning small laptops, perhaps the other clevo notebooks, such as sager's NP5720or an NP3880 would be more up your alley? (Note the prices shown are direct from sager, who usually sells through resellers, so those prices are higher than you'd actually buy for. try buying from places like PCTorque or DiscountNotebooks if you want to actually buy a sager notebook.)
Clevo designed the d900T for a very narrow market. My friends have commented that they too would probably be happier with a laptop that was thinner and perhaps less powerful rather than something like mine, which is all a matter of taste. The people this notebook caters to are the people who need a high performance notebook capable of matching up with high end desktops while still maintaining the form factor that makes it feasable to transport with you. (And this notebook does match desktops, in everything other than hard drive space, thanks to the 2.5in form factor. However, the D900T does have a RAID controller supporting RAID 0 and RAID 1 with two hard drives, and supports SATA drives as well.) The laptop supports most all high end moble graphics cards, from the vanilla 6800go and mobilityX800 to the 7800GTXgo and the quadroFX1400go(for people doing 3D intensive 3D modeling, rather than gaming.)
Obviously, this laptop doesn't seem to be quite what you want, which is fine, but if you want a powerful notebook that can match up with high-end desktops, you're looking at it. Or at least it's older sibling. The newest clevo notebook, the D900k or NP9750, is based off of the same chasis, but with an AMD socket 939 motherboard, which of course means compatibility up to the FX-57 and a64x24800+, which will put a new performance crown up for notebooks when it's released.
But like I said, if performance and power aren't *CRUCIAL* to you, then you'd probably be happier with a lower-priced and lower-powered and lower-weighted mid-range notebook, such as dell's inspiron 9300 or the above-noted sager NP5720 and NP3880. Notebooks are a strange thing, because everyone has something they look for in them. Finding what someone likes in their notebooks is half of getting to know them for me.
Oh, and as a last note, I own this notebook and do have a girlfriend. The end IS nigh.
This laptop can very easily cost 100 dollars. It has a tiny screen and runs a 500MHz processor. On the other hand, if by a 'very rudimentary laptop' you mean one that can kind of run windows XP well, that's another story.
(Though I've seen a Pentium II running XP off of 128MB of RAM flying along without too much trouble once all the crap was stripped out of it. Or at least most of the crap.)
Sager is the US seller of clevo notebooks in the US. They are the people who provide the notebooks to retailers such as Hypersonic, Alienware, and a few other retailers.
Sager's direct-consumer tech support is admittedly pretty bad, but that's because they do their business through retailers, and prefer to do consumer tech support through them. (Besides, the retailers give 200 dollar or so discounts off of Sager's prices as is.)
I myself use a Sager NP9860 as my main workstation. It's simply the highest quality laptop I've ever used. Well worth the absurdly high price for the performance it gives. It's heavy as hell for a laptop, not meant to be portable, but I carry it around school and work all day as is. When the day's done, having a laptop that can play the latest games maxed out at 1680x1050 is fairly nice.
I eagerly await the release of the NP9750, which is an AMD-powered equivalent to the NP9890.
If you want to learn about notebooks, the best place to discuss them is going to be at NotebookForums . It has a large, active, friendly (providing you don't make fun of certain user's favorite retailers.) community willing to discuss just about anything about laptops.
Slashdot Mirror
If purchasing faster hardware at the consumer end won't fix the problem. Then isn't there someone else that needs to buy faster hardware? That's right, the telcos. And if I recall they were supposed to do that before 2000, and they still haven't.
I don't see how QoS even gets thrown into the discussion.
The problem isn't that 'Our resources on the network are scarce and we can't give you IPTV without giving our IPTV traffic priority through this bottleneck', it's 'We're still trying to send you high definition content over our aged network hardware. We don't want to upgrade to more modern technology because that requires reinvestment of funds. Who cares that the government subsidized billions of dollars just so we didn't take a financial blow for laying down newer, better lines, we get more money by telling you to pay more for higher priority in our queues on our slow networks, which are slow for no other reason than that we're profiting by not upgrading them.'
This could be true only in a case where the 'Enforcing Net Neutrality' you're talking about implies restricting competitors from implementing new ideas. The Net Neutrality that this slashdot article is talking about does not attempt to do that at all. Network Neutrality attempts to stop one action, and that is the throttling of packets that a corporation finds to conflict with their interests.
Large telecommunications companies have expressed their will to implement this sort of packet-queueing to start offering services in other markets using their already-entrenched market share and widespread influence as a way to draw more customers towards their new services. This Net Neutrality legislation is proposed to keep this from happening, and nothing more.
As to whether this law "tries to hold development static at the current state of affairs, I believe it serves to encourage just the opposite. Telcos only have to slow things down because there is a limit to what their current infrastructure can hold. The telcos have been given exorbitant amounts of money with the agreement that they will upgrade their networks to meet the needs of a growing market, and they haven't. In this sense, network neutrality's attempts to keep the telcos from throttling tells them directly to upgrade their network so they can handle their proposed new traffic(The telco's own IPTV? Maybe.) instead of trying to milk more cash out of both the aged network infrastructure and the bottlenecks in the network that are still there only because the network hasn't been upgraded to fix them. Am I right? As far as I see, the only thing trying to hold development at the current state of affairs are the telcos, and the current state of affairs boils down to 'You're still using shitty network hardware and lines. You want to keep using them because they give the illusion of resources being much more limited than they actually are.'
All in all, net neutrality doesn't aim to be the solution to a problem (the problem being the aged network), it aims to be: 1. A response to combat a threat to one of the foundations of the internet. 2: Another push to get the telcos to do what they agreed to doing when they took government subsidies intended for upgrading and maintaining a high speed information network.
Nope. This is a Clevo notebook, just like all of the earlier high end notebooks from Alienware. Specifically, it's a Clevo M590K. http://www.clevo.com.tw/products/M590K.asp
Considering both Alienware and Voodoo just sell rebranded Clevo laptops with pretty paintjobs, their prices are outrageous. Might as well just buy from a Sager reseller and get the same thing for considerably less.
Don't even worry about the weight differences. The heavier weight is the one you'll be carrying, this is for sure. The lighter weight is the same laptop minus the batteries.
I've been told that it is around as cool as Clevo's other DTR notebooks (Alienware's new notebook is, of course, just a rebranded Clevo M590k), and in some cases cooler. My Clevo D900t idles between 40 and 60 C, which is high in comparison to a desktop, but is extremely cool for a laptop.
That puts the temperature into perspective pretty well. As long as you're not covering up the fans, you don't really have to worry about heat problems much at all.
I'm also told that it's more quiet than my D900t, which (unless I crank the fans into overdrive) is just a low hum most of the time as is.
Eh, I'm glad they haven't implemented PvP. If improperly implemented, it ruins games. I mean, I'd much rather kill computer controlled mobs than AOLer controlled players. Maybe that's just me though.
Topic concerning running Linux on this notebook model
Look a bit more in the Notebooks and Linux forum on there for more.
Back on topic, does anyone know if the Sting 917 takes standard, off-the-shelf video cards? The site mentions that the "video card" can be changed, but doesn't seem to elaborate further...
The laptop doesn't take standard formfactor desktop graphics cards, but rather the mobile versions, which are provided by the manufacturer. In this case, the US manufacturer for these notebooks is Sager. You can buy the video cards for this notebook through them, and if you buy from a good reseller, they'll probably be working with Sager as well.
Currently available video cards are the top of the line mobile cards from last year until now, including the Mobility Radeon X800 and Mobility Radeon X800XT platinum edition, the Geforce Go 6800, the Geforce Go 6800 Ultra, the Geforce Go 7800GTX, and the Quadro FX 1400. All cards have 256MB of GDDR3 memory on them.
Signed,
A pleased D900T owner.
This is a variant on the same laptop design. Where the laptop reviewed in this article is a Clevo D900T, also called the Sager9880 (the current model is the 9890, which supports the 7800GTXgo as well.), the laptop you mention is a Clevo D900K, which is soon to be released stateside as the Sager 9750.
Also, eurocom puts up clevo's laptops as soon as they're announced as 'in development'. Note the release date marked for August 1, 2005? This laptop is still not coming out for another few months.
I wish they'd just wait until the laptop was actually availiable for retail. Too much early hype for me, though the D900K is a dream machine, even while I'm working off of a D900T right now.
Eh, hinges on your definition of huge, noisy, and hot. I own one, or at least one based from the same model. It's more quiet than the desktops next to me during normal use, really.
It's louder than your average notebook, and definitely heavier (Mine weighs in at 11 lbs.) but it's not too bad when you counterbalance what you get out of having it. It's hot compared to desktops, but compared to competing P4 laptops, especially the Dell P4 laptops (The 8000 series) this thing is on ice. Mine is idling at 41c at the moment, and it maxes out at 60c, where the fans will throttle and run it back down to 50 or 40, depending on the temperature of the room you're in. Contrasting this with my friend's vaio, which idles at 50-60c and gets close to 70c before it starts chopping out, and my friend's inspiron 1150 (a far unfair comparison, but we're talking processors here,) which he runs with a box fan under it to keep his celeron cool, my D900T is fairly cool.
Concerning small laptops, perhaps the other clevo notebooks, such as sager's NP5720or an NP3880 would be more up your alley? (Note the prices shown are direct from sager, who usually sells through resellers, so those prices are higher than you'd actually buy for. try buying from places like PCTorque or DiscountNotebooks if you want to actually buy a sager notebook.)
Clevo designed the d900T for a very narrow market. My friends have commented that they too would probably be happier with a laptop that was thinner and perhaps less powerful rather than something like mine, which is all a matter of taste. The people this notebook caters to are the people who need a high performance notebook capable of matching up with high end desktops while still maintaining the form factor that makes it feasable to transport with you. (And this notebook does match desktops, in everything other than hard drive space, thanks to the 2.5in form factor. However, the D900T does have a RAID controller supporting RAID 0 and RAID 1 with two hard drives, and supports SATA drives as well.)
The laptop supports most all high end moble graphics cards, from the vanilla 6800go and mobilityX800 to the 7800GTXgo and the quadroFX1400go(for people doing 3D intensive 3D modeling, rather than gaming.)
Obviously, this laptop doesn't seem to be quite what you want, which is fine, but if you want a powerful notebook that can match up with high-end desktops, you're looking at it. Or at least it's older sibling. The newest clevo notebook, the D900k or NP9750, is based off of the same chasis, but with an AMD socket 939 motherboard, which of course means compatibility up to the FX-57 and a64x24800+, which will put a new performance crown up for notebooks when it's released.
But like I said, if performance and power aren't *CRUCIAL* to you, then you'd probably be happier with a lower-priced and lower-powered and lower-weighted mid-range notebook, such as dell's inspiron 9300 or the above-noted sager NP5720 and NP3880. Notebooks are a strange thing, because everyone has something they look for in them. Finding what someone likes in their notebooks is half of getting to know them for me.
Oh, and as a last note, I own this notebook and do have a girlfriend. The end IS nigh.
This laptop can very easily cost 100 dollars. It has a tiny screen and runs a 500MHz processor. On the other hand, if by a 'very rudimentary laptop' you mean one that can kind of run windows XP well, that's another story.
(Though I've seen a Pentium II running XP off of 128MB of RAM flying along without too much trouble once all the crap was stripped out of it. Or at least most of the crap.)
Sager is the US seller of clevo notebooks in the US. They are the people who provide the notebooks to retailers such as Hypersonic, Alienware, and a few other retailers. Sager's direct-consumer tech support is admittedly pretty bad, but that's because they do their business through retailers, and prefer to do consumer tech support through them. (Besides, the retailers give 200 dollar or so discounts off of Sager's prices as is.)
I myself use a Sager NP9860 as my main workstation. It's simply the highest quality laptop I've ever used. Well worth the absurdly high price for the performance it gives. It's heavy as hell for a laptop, not meant to be portable, but I carry it around school and work all day as is. When the day's done, having a laptop that can play the latest games maxed out at 1680x1050 is fairly nice.
I eagerly await the release of the NP9750, which is an AMD-powered equivalent to the NP9890.
If you want to learn about notebooks, the best place to discuss them is going to be at NotebookForums . It has a large, active, friendly (providing you don't make fun of certain user's favorite retailers.) community willing to discuss just about anything about laptops.