although, a lot of them are probably halfway decent for retro gaming. More than halfway, eduke32 (a windows/linux port of duke3d with some added features for modders) runs just fine on my brothers eee 900 as does starcraft. Zoo tycoon runs fine though you have to edit the config file to get the best screen resoloution and you may want to search out a CD crack. I'm not sure about UT but I'd be surprised if it didn't run reasonablly.
I wouldn't personally suggest using such a device for too much more than that Really it's a matter of knowing what the limitations with netbooks are and matching them up to your use case. Also remember that not all netbooks are created equal. The term netbook covers everything from machines like the EEE 700 (which is shit, a 7 inch very low resoloution screen in a case big enough to take a 9 inch and very little storage) to the higher models of HP mini with a 10 inch 1366x768 screen and a 160GB 7200RPM HDD. There are even some 12 inch machines being sold as "netbooks".
Screen resoloution is the biggest issue IMO. For years prior to the introduction of netbooks 1024x768 was the de-facto standard minimum and app developers assumed screens would be at least this big. Graphics is an issue if you want to run modern games but not an issue for older stuff. CPU is an issue if your apps are CPU bound but afaict most aren't. Ram can also be a bit low out of the box due to microsofts definition of ULCPC but that is easilly fixed.
The flash based machines suffer from small and slow to write drives but the HDD based ones are fine in that regard (they take the same drives as regular notebooks)
Personally I can see why someone buying the cheapest possible netbook and expecting to do everything on it is likely to be dissapointed. On the other hand some of the higher end netbooks are in the same league as regular laptops in every aspect except CPU and 3D graphics while coming in a much smaller package. Thinking that netbooks are only suitable for web browsing and email is a big mistake IMO (indeed web browsing actually seems to be a relatively demanding application theese days).
When I use a laptop as my "main" computer I don't like the keyboard or display, either... both external. Same thing I'd do with a netbook. I don't see the problem. The screens on most netbooks are pretty cramped IMO even for use on the move.
Personally I love my new HP mini 5101. It's about the size of an EEE 1000 the CPU is an atom (though it is the newer N280 variant, not sure how much difference that makes) the RAM/HDD are at the limit of what MS will let them sell with a ULCPC XP home license (and both are upgradable relatively easilly) but the keyboard is chicklet style and goes almost to the edge and the display while still 10 inch is very bright and sharp and has a resoloution of 1366x768 (more pixels than my macbook). The price is high by netbook standards but cheaper than any laptop i've bought before
Great job cherry picking Umm looks like he just pasted all of the results from MS without really doing any investigation into why. That doesn't sound like cherry picking to me.
This particular upgrade involved copying over 650 GB, which was probably the culprit here. The hard drive was a Western Digital Black 1TB. Because upgrading to 7 over Vista requires copying the user profiles (the location has changed), and because there wasn't enough free space to do this, the upgrade sort of thrashed slowly swapping out data. Windows has always had the ability to move files without copying them so needing to rearrange the directory structure a bit is hardly a reason for copying shitloads of data arround in a very slow manner.
I'm sure we'll move past USB2 in the next few years, but I'm not sure the future is USB3....... at a fraction of what USB3 will cost in the near-term. This really depends on the action of intel, the reason USB ports became so common (before there were many devices to plug into them) was because intel included it free in the chipset. If intel do that again (and they probablly will) then USB3 will become just as cheap for motherboard manufacturers as the USB2+esata hack.
ESATA will probablly retain it's niche of connecting high speed external hard drives for a while but I don't see it expanding beyond that. Eventually other devices will need that speed too and I don't see what they would use other than USB3.
The 900mA power bump in USB3 is just about perfect though. This is just enough to run pretty much any 2.5" hard disk or laptop cdrom. Agreed.
Not exactly news but nonetheless a sad indictment of the state of online advertising that even big sites with a reputation to uphold are using adverts from seedy advert networks who tolerate this shit.
I agree, in the US this is why the feds passed rules for how long truck drivers can be on the road and make them keep log sheets. There was too much "make the deadline, we don't care how" going on and truckers were falling asleep trying to make their quotas. And we in the UK have similar rules for truckers for similar reasons. Indeed for most truckers we go further than log sheets and require a "tachograph".
But there are no such rules for drivers of cars and small vans. There are more general rules about careless driving, driving without due care and attention, workplace health and safety etc but without mandated logging and with employers who are afraid to lose thier jobs and therefore unlikely to rat out thier employer it's much harder to enforce them.
maybe they need to start using versioned URLs for the applications assets like JS files Seems sensible to me at least for major changes (where old js/css won't work with new pages), that way even if cache control gets fucked up somehow the user still doesn't get a broken combination.
IIRC the problem with the DC10 was not so much in the initial safety issues as in what happened following the crashes
IIRC (theese are my memories from an episode of air crash investigation, there may be errors) with the DC10 there was an issue with the cargo door that caused a major incident but did not kill too many people. The NTSB investigated and worked out how to fix the issue. However due to corruption in the faa no airworthyness directive was issued and so the issue was left unfixed on many planes. Soon afterwards the same thing happened again and lead to a crash. Then it was discovered that the problem was known during development but ignored. The scandel destroyed confidence in the DC10 and it's manufacturer.
MySQL is free software, and can't be shut down by an evil monopolist Semi-true, mysql is GPL and it's client libraries are also GPL, according to conservative interpretations of the GPL that means any software that is non-GPL and wants to use mysql needs to either buy a commercial license or get special dispensation (sometimes given out for non-gpl free software, e.g. php)
Noone except the copyright holder can sell those commercial licenses and offer those dispensations and without the ability to do that I suspect it would be very hard to make any money of mysql. Many users would also be screwed if they could no logner get more commerical licenses.
Not that I belive oracle would kill mysql. Killing mysql would probablly gain very few customers for oracle while pushing a lot of users to things like postgresql and MSDE/SQL server. Postgresql and SQL server are much bigger threats to oracle than mysql is.
If they sell, and thus make, more in the 16:10 size, they're going to be cheaper, whether you like it or not. And for that we can blame the marketers for convincing the lusers that widescreens were the way to go when in fact they are considerablly worse.
Indeed, there is a destinction between government funded and government run. The question is of course whether a governement is civilised enough to set up a state broadcaster without allowing it's micromanagement by politicans. Especially in countries where there is not a long tradition of doing so.
IIRC there is also the 240V/120V/208V midpoint grounded delta system used in some parts of the USA (this system has the advantage that single phase 120V and 240V loads can be correctly powered from the three phase system, it has the downside that it's easy for idiots to blow stuff up by connecting 120V equipment between neutral and the high leg.
USB3 is going to be an expensive upgrade. The only controller chip currently available are $15/chip They will come down and intel is also almost certain to integrate support into thier chipsets.
eSATA seems like a much better solution. eSATA has a few issues
1: the designers didn't include any power pins so even the smallest devices have to be externally powered 2: while atapi over sata should support anything that scsi did noone seems to actually bother to make anything other than hard drives and optical drivers with sata interfaces 3: you can only have one layer of port multipliers, it's hard to find them with more than 5 ports,not all hosts support them and i've never seen them in a USB hub like box with eSATA ports on both sides.
So esata will probablly continue to have a niche for high speed external hard drives but I don't see it expanding beyond that.
Don't even get me started that most netbooks are using something around a 800x600 (or 576) resolution screen. Are we returning to the windows 3.0 days? I bought a 11.6" gateway netbook primarily to get the whatever by 768 display. BTW there are a couple of 10 inch machines with 1366x768 displays on the market now. Sony do one as do HP (I bought the HP myself), there may be others too but if there are I haven't found them.
If current cards are anything to go by I strongly suspect you will be able to choose between presenting it as a single display or as multiple independent ones.
So while the card doesn't care about the physical size of the display, it does care about the resolution - and that tends to scale with the physical size. Am I the only one who finds it very annoying that there seems to be very little choice in pixel density with desktop LCDs?
They clearly can make high pixel density LCDs since they put them in portables but noone seems to offer them to offer them for use with desktops.
Even more annoying 4:3 LCDs (which give you more pixels per unit of desk space) cost far more than 16:10 ones with similar pixel counts.
Which is why you want the behaviour to be to maximise to one screen not accross the whole group. That way you can quickly put one thing on each monitor without having to mess arround manually resizing stuff.
How about a magma expressbox with a dual-head card in it? add that to the fact that your laptop can probablly run one external monitor directly and you have your triple monitor setup.
Indeed, afaict the biggest issue with radioactive contaimination is if it gets into the groundwater, from there it gets absorbed into plants and from there into any animals that eat those plants.
If you can't farm and you can't source water then the area isn't going to be very attractive to live in even if the actual radiation is well within safe limits.
A well produced tv advert on a major channel conveys a message of "we are a big stable company who can afford to make a good quality advert and buy expensive TV time to show it". That message is somewhat reassuring to customers. Not saying big companies are angels but at least there is likely to be someone left to complain to/sue when your product doesn't turn up or turns out to be faulty.
Whereas with internet advertising adverts from reputable firms are mixed in with adverts from companies that are frankly outright scammers and often are outside your jurisdiction making them very difficult to go after legally.
Another issue is the targetting sucks, I see adverts that are clearly aimed at americans all the time on slashdot, can't they seem i'm coming from british IP addresses?!
Slashdot Mirror
although, a lot of them are probably halfway decent for retro gaming.
More than halfway, eduke32 (a windows/linux port of duke3d with some added features for modders) runs just fine on my brothers eee 900 as does starcraft. Zoo tycoon runs fine though you have to edit the config file to get the best screen resoloution and you may want to search out a CD crack. I'm not sure about UT but I'd be surprised if it didn't run reasonablly.
I wouldn't personally suggest using such a device for too much more than that
Really it's a matter of knowing what the limitations with netbooks are and matching them up to your use case. Also remember that not all netbooks are created equal. The term netbook covers everything from machines like the EEE 700 (which is shit, a 7 inch very low resoloution screen in a case big enough to take a 9 inch and very little storage) to the higher models of HP mini with a 10 inch 1366x768 screen and a 160GB 7200RPM HDD. There are even some 12 inch machines being sold as "netbooks".
Screen resoloution is the biggest issue IMO. For years prior to the introduction of netbooks 1024x768 was the de-facto standard minimum and app developers assumed screens would be at least this big. Graphics is an issue if you want to run modern games but not an issue for older stuff. CPU is an issue if your apps are CPU bound but afaict most aren't. Ram can also be a bit low out of the box due to microsofts definition of ULCPC but that is easilly fixed.
The flash based machines suffer from small and slow to write drives but the HDD based ones are fine in that regard (they take the same drives as regular notebooks)
Personally I can see why someone buying the cheapest possible netbook and expecting to do everything on it is likely to be dissapointed. On the other hand some of the higher end netbooks are in the same league as regular laptops in every aspect except CPU and 3D graphics while coming in a much smaller package. Thinking that netbooks are only suitable for web browsing and email is a big mistake IMO (indeed web browsing actually seems to be a relatively demanding application theese days).
When I use a laptop as my "main" computer I don't like the keyboard or display, either... both external. Same thing I'd do with a netbook. I don't see the problem.
The screens on most netbooks are pretty cramped IMO even for use on the move.
Personally I love my new HP mini 5101. It's about the size of an EEE 1000 the CPU is an atom (though it is the newer N280 variant, not sure how much difference that makes) the RAM/HDD are at the limit of what MS will let them sell with a ULCPC XP home license (and both are upgradable relatively easilly) but the keyboard is chicklet style and goes almost to the edge and the display while still 10 inch is very bright and sharp and has a resoloution of 1366x768 (more pixels than my macbook). The price is high by netbook standards but cheaper than any laptop i've bought before
Great job cherry picking
Umm looks like he just pasted all of the results from MS without really doing any investigation into why. That doesn't sound like cherry picking to me.
This particular upgrade involved copying over 650 GB, which was probably the culprit here. The hard drive was a Western Digital Black 1TB. Because upgrading to 7 over Vista requires copying the user profiles (the location has changed), and because there wasn't enough free space to do this, the upgrade sort of thrashed slowly swapping out data.
Windows has always had the ability to move files without copying them so needing to rearrange the directory structure a bit is hardly a reason for copying shitloads of data arround in a very slow manner.
IIRC you can also upgrade to vista first and then upgrade that to XP though MS doesn't reccomend that path.
I'm sure we'll move past USB2 in the next few years, but I'm not sure the future is USB3. ...... at a fraction of what USB3 will cost in the near-term.
This really depends on the action of intel, the reason USB ports became so common (before there were many devices to plug into them) was because intel included it free in the chipset. If intel do that again (and they probablly will) then USB3 will become just as cheap for motherboard manufacturers as the USB2+esata hack.
ESATA will probablly retain it's niche of connecting high speed external hard drives for a while but I don't see it expanding beyond that. Eventually other devices will need that speed too and I don't see what they would use other than USB3.
The 900mA power bump in USB3 is just about perfect though. This is just enough to run pretty much any 2.5" hard disk or laptop cdrom.
Agreed.
Not exactly news but nonetheless a sad indictment of the state of online advertising that even big sites with a reputation to uphold are using adverts from seedy advert networks who tolerate this shit.
I agree, in the US this is why the feds passed rules for how long truck drivers can be on the road and make them keep log sheets. There was too much "make the deadline, we don't care how" going on and truckers were falling asleep trying to make their quotas.
And we in the UK have similar rules for truckers for similar reasons. Indeed for most truckers we go further than log sheets and require a "tachograph".
But there are no such rules for drivers of cars and small vans. There are more general rules about careless driving, driving without due care and attention, workplace health and safety etc but without mandated logging and with employers who are afraid to lose thier jobs and therefore unlikely to rat out thier employer it's much harder to enforce them.
maybe they need to start using versioned URLs for the applications assets like JS files
Seems sensible to me at least for major changes (where old js/css won't work with new pages), that way even if cache control gets fucked up somehow the user still doesn't get a broken combination.
IIRC the problem with the DC10 was not so much in the initial safety issues as in what happened following the crashes
IIRC (theese are my memories from an episode of air crash investigation, there may be errors) with the DC10 there was an issue with the cargo door that caused a major incident but did not kill too many people. The NTSB investigated and worked out how to fix the issue. However due to corruption in the faa no airworthyness directive was issued and so the issue was left unfixed on many planes. Soon afterwards the same thing happened again and lead to a crash. Then it was discovered that the problem was known during development but ignored. The scandel destroyed confidence in the DC10 and it's manufacturer.
Also sometimes the ebay sellers will sell to customers that the big sites won't.
Lots and lots of stuff on amazon.com says they will only ship it within the USA.
MySQL is free software, and can't be shut down by an evil monopolist
Semi-true, mysql is GPL and it's client libraries are also GPL, according to conservative interpretations of the GPL that means any software that is non-GPL and wants to use mysql needs to either buy a commercial license or get special dispensation (sometimes given out for non-gpl free software, e.g. php)
Noone except the copyright holder can sell those commercial licenses and offer those dispensations and without the ability to do that I suspect it would be very hard to make any money of mysql. Many users would also be screwed if they could no logner get more commerical licenses.
Not that I belive oracle would kill mysql. Killing mysql would probablly gain very few customers for oracle while pushing a lot of users to things like postgresql and MSDE/SQL server. Postgresql and SQL server are much bigger threats to oracle than mysql is.
If they sell, and thus make, more in the 16:10 size, they're going to be cheaper, whether you like it or not.
And for that we can blame the marketers for convincing the lusers that widescreens were the way to go when in fact they are considerablly worse.
Indeed, there is a destinction between government funded and government run. The question is of course whether a governement is civilised enough to set up a state broadcaster without allowing it's micromanagement by politicans. Especially in countries where there is not a long tradition of doing so.
IIRC there is also the 240V/120V/208V midpoint grounded delta system used in some parts of the USA (this system has the advantage that single phase 120V and 240V loads can be correctly powered from the three phase system, it has the downside that it's easy for idiots to blow stuff up by connecting 120V equipment between neutral and the high leg.
USB3 is going to be an expensive upgrade. The only controller chip currently available are $15/chip
They will come down and intel is also almost certain to integrate support into thier chipsets.
eSATA seems like a much better solution.
eSATA has a few issues
1: the designers didn't include any power pins so even the smallest devices have to be externally powered
2: while atapi over sata should support anything that scsi did noone seems to actually bother to make anything other than hard drives and optical drivers with sata interfaces
3: you can only have one layer of port multipliers, it's hard to find them with more than 5 ports,not all hosts support them and i've never seen them in a USB hub like box with eSATA ports on both sides.
So esata will probablly continue to have a niche for high speed external hard drives but I don't see it expanding beyond that.
Don't even get me started that most netbooks are using something around a 800x600 (or 576) resolution screen. Are we returning to the windows 3.0 days? I bought a 11.6" gateway netbook primarily to get the whatever by 768 display.
BTW there are a couple of 10 inch machines with 1366x768 displays on the market now. Sony do one as do HP (I bought the HP myself), there may be others too but if there are I haven't found them.
mobility electronics limited have a product that will solve that problem for you. Unfortunately it's not cheap.
http://www.magma.com/products/pciexpress/expressbox7/index.html
If current cards are anything to go by I strongly suspect you will be able to choose between presenting it as a single display or as multiple independent ones.
Didn't the EEEPCs start at 7 inch?
So while the card doesn't care about the physical size of the display, it does care about the resolution - and that tends to scale with the physical size.
Am I the only one who finds it very annoying that there seems to be very little choice in pixel density with desktop LCDs?
They clearly can make high pixel density LCDs since they put them in portables but noone seems to offer them to offer them for use with desktops.
Even more annoying 4:3 LCDs (which give you more pixels per unit of desk space) cost far more than 16:10 ones with similar pixel counts.
Ahh fucked up american punctuation rules that make it unclear what exactly is being quoted.
Which is why you want the behaviour to be to maximise to one screen not accross the whole group. That way you can quickly put one thing on each monitor without having to mess arround manually resizing stuff.
How about a magma expressbox with a dual-head card in it? add that to the fact that your laptop can probablly run one external monitor directly and you have your triple monitor setup.
Indeed, afaict the biggest issue with radioactive contaimination is if it gets into the groundwater, from there it gets absorbed into plants and from there into any animals that eat those plants.
If you can't farm and you can't source water then the area isn't going to be very attractive to live in even if the actual radiation is well within safe limits.
One issue is exclusivity.
A well produced tv advert on a major channel conveys a message of "we are a big stable company who can afford to make a good quality advert and buy expensive TV time to show it". That message is somewhat reassuring to customers. Not saying big companies are angels but at least there is likely to be someone left to complain to/sue when your product doesn't turn up or turns out to be faulty.
Whereas with internet advertising adverts from reputable firms are mixed in with adverts from companies that are frankly outright scammers and often are outside your jurisdiction making them very difficult to go after legally.
Another issue is the targetting sucks, I see adverts that are clearly aimed at americans all the time on slashdot, can't they seem i'm coming from british IP addresses?!