I'm still not entirely convinced by his arguments about how high a temp you need to burn cardboard. Seriously - 258C?? It's probablly not that far off but while it sounds high I would draw your attention to
>AMD athlon 1400 >Temperature 370C/698F >Application crashes >CPU and board up in smoke
Ok modern CPUs have more protection but the fact remains is there is enough power there to make small areas hot enough to burn cardboard under fault conditions. The case must be able to contain that.
This is a cool project but the three issues of fire safety, lack of screening and lack of robustness make it impractical as a product IMO.
I know you were joking, but I doubt your processor (or any component in your computer case for that matter) would run hot enough to ignite paper/cardboard. In normal operation no, under fault conditions some chips could probablly reach those kind of temperatures.
>AMD athlon 1400 >Temperature 370C/698F >Application crashes >CPU and board up in smoke
If a CPU lacking the thermal protection built into modern CPUs can do it with mere heatsink removal then I'm pretty certain the power stuff on the board could more than do it under the right fault conditions.
No worries. I think the melting point of solder is lower than ignition point of cardboard. So there's an automatic safety mechanism: solder melts, electric connections break, heating stops. Solder melting does not imply that the electrical connections that carry the power to the fault will break.
The trouble with fusewire (and to a lesser extent some types of cartridge fuse) is that people replace them with either large fusewire or worse wire that isn't fusewire at all.
Fuses are there for a reason, unfortunately many people don't understand and respect this fact.
Proper building is important, e.g. in most cases you will find there are metal blanks behind the plastic blanks on drive bays, theese make up part of the shielding but are often not replaced (or even can't be replaced) when moving drives arround (PC manufacturers don't really care about this, they only care about meeting the interference regulations when the machine leaves the factory).
Remember even a 10GHz (that would about the third harmonic of the clock of a 3GHz CPU) electromagnetic wave has a wavelength of a few centimeters so small slits aren't that much of a problem.
They don't build PC cases out of metal (or occasionally metal lined plastic) for fun or to make them cheap, they do it because they need the shielding to meet interference regulations.
But the machine in the photo looks more like an A400 series to me - not sure which vidc they used but I'm not sure it was a huge improvement over that in the A300 series and that drove a TV-resolution monitor. Basic VGA resoloution isn't that much higher than TV resoloution. I know i've seen a VGA monitor driven off an A3000, I don't have any experiance with anything lower than that.
Also I saw some mention online of vidc upgrade podules.
1: it's a smartphone not a netbook. Windows netbooks (particularly the HDD based 10 inch ones) are building the expectation that you can run most PC apps on them just slower and with a bit more cramped screen. Expectations for a smartphone are lower. 2: Apple has a pretty large base of developers from the mac who they have managed to convert to iphone developers. 3: I strongly suspect apple poured a LOT of resources into the iphone.
I'm pretty sure the computer that it's sat on didn't have a 15-pin VGA output At least some of them could drive a VGA monitor though, you just needed a wiring adaptor to connect them up and I think to configure them to the right (which could be "fun" to do with your monitor not operating) speeds.
And PowerPC on desktop was killed by Apptel, not Wintel. Afaict powerpc on the desktop/laptop was finally killed by the fact that the CPU manufacturers who made it either couldn't or wouldn't deliver the performance per watt to make their laptops and all-in-ones competitive and the top-end performance to make their powermacs competitive (they tried to get around this to some degree by throwing CPUs at the problem but that strategy has it's limits).
And a large part of the reason for that was that intel had the massive resources from the dominance of the wintel PC to fund thier development.
This is exactly the same situation on ARM if you are not writing assembly code; the compiler will sort out the details for you Wrong, if you have a pointer to a type the compiler will assume it follows the alignment rules for that type. If you are lucky (high error settings on the compiler and direct conversions) the compiler may error at the pointer conversion that produced the troublesome pointer conversion but in many cases it won't and you usually get silent corruption (though I believe on some chips it is also possible to trap unaligned access attempts from the kernel).
Code bloat is largely orhtogonal to portability. Code messiness can have an impact if it leads to assumptions that are valid on one system but not another. Generally the first port is hard and subsequent ones are easier as the platform specific assumptions are either eliminated or at least moved to platform specific code sections..
Afaict NT has run on five architectures (alpha, mips, x86, x64 and ia64) over it's lifetime and current versions are offerend for three (though for ia64 MS only offers server editions not desktop ones). This makes me suspect that it could indeed be ported given the time and resources.
A bigger issue is running x86 windows apps, an emulator would have to be included (as was done for alpha and ia64 afaict) and that emulator would need to perform very well to make windows on arm a viable platform.
Another issue is FPUs, afaict there are a load of different FPUs for arm. So if you want to make a general purpose arm OS you either have to use softfloat (as debian armel does), choose one and screw everyone else even worse than if you had used softfloat (as debian arm did) or find some clever soloution to supporting multiple FPUs without too much overhead (maybe putting floating point in a library and swapping that library out based on the FPU could work, not sure how much overhead that would add).
Looking at the manufacturers reccomeneded supplier (globalspec) the sheevaplug is just over £60 and the shipping just over £40. So either something has changed since you bought it or you bought it somewhere else.
and probablly gets a lot harder with increasing storage density.
Though the GP doesn't seem to have tried that hard to recover the tapes (maybe because he found the cronjob backups). A motor swap and/or trying to recalibrate a good drive to match the bad drive would seem like the obvious steps to take.
Try one of these babies [backblaze.com] on for size. 67TB for about $8,000. Unfortunately there are a couple of custom parts in there (IIRC the main ones are the case and the multiplier backplanes) plus you probablly won't get the same bulk discounts on the commodity parts so building one may cost you quite a bit more than it costs backblaze.
True but there are going to be a lot of windows XP machines that do have ports open in the firewall for whatever reason.
P.S. I wonder if the patch for server 2003 x64 will work on XP proffesional x64 edition. Afaict they are essentially the same OS (unlike 32 bit XP and server 2003).
Indeed but I'd bet the way layoffs would be handled would not give them the opportunity. First they would probablly offer all the most experianced guys early retirement packages that were hard to resist. Then if that wasn't enough they would probablly go down the line of voulantry redundancies (read: all your best people take the redundancy package and go elsewhere while the not so good ones who can't find a better job stay). If they still couldn't get rid of the number of people they wanted only then would they move onto compulsory redundancies and even then I bet they would be handled in a way that didn't allow cutting the dead wood.
Note that this is not a problem limited to government, it often happens in big buisnesses too especially if a union is involved.
Having a multi-OS environment is a HUGE waste of time and resources for a school. It does take some resources yes but I'd hardly call it a waste to 1: make students aware of the fact that there are various options with different strengths and weaknesses and 2: introduce them to the operating systems likely to be used in thier field (for arty types that would probablly be mac+windows, for CS/EE types it would be windows+linux, dunno about other fields).
OTOH even for stuff that runs on windows i'm not at all convinced that hugely bloated images that try to satisfy the needs of everyone are a good idea compared to much simpler department specific ones. IMO IT support is much better handled on a department level.
Apple provides cheap stuff Umm even at education discount prices i'd hardly call macs cheap.
BTW at least the windows license we have at our unviersity considers mac os-x a suitable base for "upgrading" so departments can now legally run windows on thier macs under the site license. This means mac labs could double as windows labs if desired/required.
You would be right about the storage except that the netbook has an SSD so it's actually much smaller. You might, therefore, think that it would be faster than the Sony's HDD. But it's not. It doesn't have one of those snazzy, new, spinning-platter-killer SSDs that they sell today. It has whatever crap HP was sticking in Netbooks in March of '09 There seem to be (and have been for about a year now) two main categories of netbook, one with small slow and usually propietry flash drives (most 9 inch models fall into this category) and ones with standard laptop hard drives which can be swapped for good SSDs if desired (most 10 inch models fall into this category). Unfortunately the mini 1000 seems to fall into the former category despite being a 10 inch machine (there is a HDD option but that is apparently also 1.8 inch).
Afaict linux was mainly used by the netbook vendors as a ploy to get what they wanted from MS (and it worked).
Had the netbook companies shipped XP home initially then they would have been SOL when MS stopped selling XP home licenses and made buying a (far more expensive) vista buisness (or ultimate) license the only way to get XP. Either installing vista or paying the extra for vista buisness licenses would have crippled the netbook concept.
So ASUS made a clever ploy, they shipped linux and included instructions for users on how to install thier own (most likely pirate or at least reused in violation of the license agreement) copies of windows. As they developed new models they made sure to keep a linux option.
The ploy worked, MS offered to keep selling netbook manufacturers XP home licenses and give them a much cheaper rate.
1) will "netbooks" wipe out the notebook industry I doubt they will wipe it out per-se but I imagine they may make quite a dent. I would not though that there isn't really a notebook industry and a netbook industry, theese machines are made in the same factories and designed by the same companies.
2) will "netbooks" become slaves to mobile phone companies, like handset Good question, over here the mobile companies seem content to bundle them without messing with them in any way but who knows if it will stay that way. Unlike mobile phones they are at least somewhat usefull without a mobile contract so I suspect a lot will still be sold direct.
3) will Microsoft succeed in enforcing their ceiling on how powerful a netbook can get. If your machine doesn't fit microsofts rules for XP home ULCPC/7 starter (note: afaict the rules are different) then the OEM will pay more for windows and they will have to pass that cost on to you.
I strongly suspect that better ultraportables will continue to exist (runing either linux or higher editions of windows) but there will be a lot of machines that are on or just below microsofts limits just as there are now.
When Microsoft was pushing Vista one of the things that they claimed was that the number of available XP product keys had become exhausted. There was such an issue but IIRC it was for XP pro not home and they introduced a new CD version (SP2C iirc) that added support for new keys.
Due to this they decided to remove the SKU from OEM vendors and other retailers, and set support services end dates. While they did set such dates I don't remember there being any claims that this was anything other than normal pushing of the next OS version. They also left open the option of buying vista buisness and downgrading and even decided to allow the OEMs to sell pre-downgraded machines after a bit of a backlash
Their claim was that since they couldn't issue any more XP product keys you needed to upgrade to Vista instead. I don't remember any such claim and afaict MS would often give out a new product key if you downgraded with retail or whitebox OEM media.
Under Linux these limitations don't exist and that is probably a good part of the reason that Dell has chosen to produce some Linux netbooks with some oomph. These limits are only on XP based netbooks whereas the Linux netbooks can be much more powerful if the manufacturer wishes it. So can XP netbooks, it just means the manufacturer has to pay the extra for a vista buisness license. HP US for example offer this option on the HP mini 5101.
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I'm still not entirely convinced by his arguments about how high a temp you need to burn cardboard. Seriously - 258C??
It's probablly not that far off but while it sounds high I would draw your attention to
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/26293/cpu_cooler_removed/
>AMD athlon 1400
>Temperature 370C/698F
>Application crashes
>CPU and board up in smoke
Ok modern CPUs have more protection but the fact remains is there is enough power there to make small areas hot enough to burn cardboard under fault conditions. The case must be able to contain that.
This is a cool project but the three issues of fire safety, lack of screening and lack of robustness make it impractical as a product IMO.
I know you were joking, but I doubt your processor (or any component in your computer case for that matter) would run hot enough to ignite paper/cardboard.
In normal operation no, under fault conditions some chips could probablly reach those kind of temperatures.
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/26293/cpu_cooler_removed/
>AMD athlon 1400
>Temperature 370C/698F
>Application crashes
>CPU and board up in smoke
If a CPU lacking the thermal protection built into modern CPUs can do it with mere heatsink removal then I'm pretty certain the power stuff on the board could more than do it under the right fault conditions.
No worries. I think the melting point of solder is lower than ignition point of cardboard. So there's an automatic safety mechanism: solder melts, electric connections break, heating stops.
Solder melting does not imply that the electrical connections that carry the power to the fault will break.
The trouble with fusewire (and to a lesser extent some types of cartridge fuse) is that people replace them with either large fusewire or worse wire that isn't fusewire at all.
Fuses are there for a reason, unfortunately many people don't understand and respect this fact.
Proper building is important, e.g. in most cases you will find there are metal blanks behind the plastic blanks on drive bays, theese make up part of the shielding but are often not replaced (or even can't be replaced) when moving drives arround (PC manufacturers don't really care about this, they only care about meeting the interference regulations when the machine leaves the factory).
Remember even a 10GHz (that would about the third harmonic of the clock of a 3GHz CPU) electromagnetic wave has a wavelength of a few centimeters so small slits aren't that much of a problem.
They don't build PC cases out of metal (or occasionally metal lined plastic) for fun or to make them cheap, they do it because they need the shielding to meet interference regulations.
But the machine in the photo looks more like an A400 series to me - not sure which vidc they used but I'm not sure it was a huge improvement over that in the A300 series and that drove a TV-resolution monitor.
Basic VGA resoloution isn't that much higher than TV resoloution. I know i've seen a VGA monitor driven off an A3000, I don't have any experiance with anything lower than that.
Also I saw some mention online of vidc upgrade podules.
Two things
1: it's a smartphone not a netbook. Windows netbooks (particularly the HDD based 10 inch ones) are building the expectation that you can run most PC apps on them just slower and with a bit more cramped screen. Expectations for a smartphone are lower.
2: Apple has a pretty large base of developers from the mac who they have managed to convert to iphone developers.
3: I strongly suspect apple poured a LOT of resources into the iphone.
I'm pretty sure the computer that it's sat on didn't have a 15-pin VGA output
At least some of them could drive a VGA monitor though, you just needed a wiring adaptor to connect them up and I think to configure them to the right (which could be "fun" to do with your monitor not operating) speeds.
And PowerPC on desktop was killed by Apptel, not Wintel.
Afaict powerpc on the desktop/laptop was finally killed by the fact that the CPU manufacturers who made it either couldn't or wouldn't deliver the performance per watt to make their laptops and all-in-ones competitive and the top-end performance to make their powermacs competitive (they tried to get around this to some degree by throwing CPUs at the problem but that strategy has it's limits).
And a large part of the reason for that was that intel had the massive resources from the dominance of the wintel PC to fund thier development.
This is exactly the same situation on ARM if you are not writing assembly code; the compiler will sort out the details for you
Wrong, if you have a pointer to a type the compiler will assume it follows the alignment rules for that type. If you are lucky (high error settings on the compiler and direct conversions) the compiler may error at the pointer conversion that produced the troublesome pointer conversion but in many cases it won't and you usually get silent corruption (though I believe on some chips it is also possible to trap unaligned access attempts from the kernel).
Code bloat is largely orhtogonal to portability. Code messiness can have an impact if it leads to assumptions that are valid on one system but not another. Generally the first port is hard and subsequent ones are easier as the platform specific assumptions are either eliminated or at least moved to platform specific code sections..
Afaict NT has run on five architectures (alpha, mips, x86, x64 and ia64) over it's lifetime and current versions are offerend for three (though for ia64 MS only offers server editions not desktop ones). This makes me suspect that it could indeed be ported given the time and resources.
A bigger issue is running x86 windows apps, an emulator would have to be included (as was done for alpha and ia64 afaict) and that emulator would need to perform very well to make windows on arm a viable platform.
Another issue is FPUs, afaict there are a load of different FPUs for arm. So if you want to make a general purpose arm OS you either have to use softfloat (as debian armel does), choose one and screw everyone else even worse than if you had used softfloat (as debian arm did) or find some clever soloution to supporting multiple FPUs without too much overhead (maybe putting floating point in a library and swapping that library out based on the FPU could work, not sure how much overhead that would add).
Looking at the manufacturers reccomeneded supplier (globalspec) the sheevaplug is just over £60 and the shipping just over £40. So either something has changed since you bought it or you bought it somewhere else.
and probablly gets a lot harder with increasing storage density.
Though the GP doesn't seem to have tried that hard to recover the tapes (maybe because he found the cronjob backups). A motor swap and/or trying to recalibrate a good drive to match the bad drive would seem like the obvious steps to take.
Try one of these babies [backblaze.com] on for size. 67TB for about $8,000.
Unfortunately there are a couple of custom parts in there (IIRC the main ones are the case and the multiplier backplanes) plus you probablly won't get the same bulk discounts on the commodity parts so building one may cost you quite a bit more than it costs backblaze.
True but there are going to be a lot of windows XP machines that do have ports open in the firewall for whatever reason.
P.S. I wonder if the patch for server 2003 x64 will work on XP proffesional x64 edition. Afaict they are essentially the same OS (unlike 32 bit XP and server 2003).
Indeed but I'd bet the way layoffs would be handled would not give them the opportunity. First they would probablly offer all the most experianced guys early retirement packages that were hard to resist. Then if that wasn't enough they would probablly go down the line of voulantry redundancies (read: all your best people take the redundancy package and go elsewhere while the not so good ones who can't find a better job stay). If they still couldn't get rid of the number of people they wanted only then would they move onto compulsory redundancies and even then I bet they would be handled in a way that didn't allow cutting the dead wood.
Note that this is not a problem limited to government, it often happens in big buisnesses too especially if a union is involved.
Having a multi-OS environment is a HUGE waste of time and resources for a school.
It does take some resources yes but I'd hardly call it a waste to 1: make students aware of the fact that there are various options with different strengths and weaknesses and 2: introduce them to the operating systems likely to be used in thier field (for arty types that would probablly be mac+windows, for CS/EE types it would be windows+linux, dunno about other fields).
OTOH even for stuff that runs on windows i'm not at all convinced that hugely bloated images that try to satisfy the needs of everyone are a good idea compared to much simpler department specific ones. IMO IT support is much better handled on a department level.
Apple provides cheap stuff
Umm even at education discount prices i'd hardly call macs cheap.
BTW at least the windows license we have at our unviersity considers mac os-x a suitable base for "upgrading" so departments can now legally run windows on thier macs under the site license. This means mac labs could double as windows labs if desired/required.
s/to XP/to 7/
You would be right about the storage except that the netbook has an SSD so it's actually much smaller. You might, therefore, think that it would be faster than the Sony's HDD. But it's not. It doesn't have one of those snazzy, new, spinning-platter-killer SSDs that they sell today. It has whatever crap HP was sticking in Netbooks in March of '09
There seem to be (and have been for about a year now) two main categories of netbook, one with small slow and usually propietry flash drives (most 9 inch models fall into this category) and ones with standard laptop hard drives which can be swapped for good SSDs if desired (most 10 inch models fall into this category). Unfortunately the mini 1000 seems to fall into the former category despite being a 10 inch machine (there is a HDD option but that is apparently also 1.8 inch).
Afaict linux was mainly used by the netbook vendors as a ploy to get what they wanted from MS (and it worked).
Had the netbook companies shipped XP home initially then they would have been SOL when MS stopped selling XP home licenses and made buying a (far more expensive) vista buisness (or ultimate) license the only way to get XP. Either installing vista or paying the extra for vista buisness licenses would have crippled the netbook concept.
So ASUS made a clever ploy, they shipped linux and included instructions for users on how to install thier own (most likely pirate or at least reused in violation of the license agreement) copies of windows. As they developed new models they made sure to keep a linux option.
The ploy worked, MS offered to keep selling netbook manufacturers XP home licenses and give them a much cheaper rate.
1) will "netbooks" wipe out the notebook industry
I doubt they will wipe it out per-se but I imagine they may make quite a dent. I would not though that there isn't really a notebook industry and a netbook industry, theese machines are made in the same factories and designed by the same companies.
2) will "netbooks" become slaves to mobile phone companies, like handset
Good question, over here the mobile companies seem content to bundle them without messing with them in any way but who knows if it will stay that way. Unlike mobile phones they are at least somewhat usefull without a mobile contract so I suspect a lot will still be sold direct.
3) will Microsoft succeed in enforcing their ceiling on how powerful a netbook can get.
If your machine doesn't fit microsofts rules for XP home ULCPC/7 starter (note: afaict the rules are different) then the OEM will pay more for windows and they will have to pass that cost on to you.
I strongly suspect that better ultraportables will continue to exist (runing either linux or higher editions of windows) but there will be a lot of machines that are on or just below microsofts limits just as there are now.
Or maybe the complainent was using linux. Flash on linux is well known for having apalling video performance.
You could but bear in mind that it is probablly going to be slower than even intel integrated graphics.
Assuming you are in the US you could also pick up a refurb mini 2140 from the HP buisness outlet store and use an exprescard graphics soloution.
When Microsoft was pushing Vista one of the things that they claimed was that the number of available XP product keys had become exhausted.
There was such an issue but IIRC it was for XP pro not home and they introduced a new CD version (SP2C iirc) that added support for new keys.
Due to this they decided to remove the SKU from OEM vendors and other retailers, and set support services end dates.
While they did set such dates I don't remember there being any claims that this was anything other than normal pushing of the next OS version. They also left open the option of buying vista buisness and downgrading and even decided to allow the OEMs to sell pre-downgraded machines after a bit of a backlash
Their claim was that since they couldn't issue any more XP product keys you needed to upgrade to Vista instead.
I don't remember any such claim and afaict MS would often give out a new product key if you downgraded with retail or whitebox OEM media.
Under Linux these limitations don't exist and that is probably a good part of the reason that Dell has chosen to produce some Linux netbooks with some oomph. These limits are only on XP based netbooks whereas the Linux netbooks can be much more powerful if the manufacturer wishes it.
So can XP netbooks, it just means the manufacturer has to pay the extra for a vista buisness license. HP US for example offer this option on the HP mini 5101.
have a 5 year-old $2000, prissy Sony laptop
Out of interest can you post the model/specs of that laptop so we can compare?