It combines the 5 most important numbers in all of mathematics into a single formula.
It's also got the other important mathematical concepts - exponentiation (i.e. raising something to the power of something else), multiplication, addition and equals. Essentially, it's a huge nugget of maths in a tidy little wrapper.
I've got an old Sharp graphics calculator, which has both proper notation layout and a complex numbers mode. I still like keying in the 'e^(pi*i)+1', pressing 'Enter', then getting the zero, all perfectly laid out on a little LCD display...
As mentioned already, Peltier junctions act as heat pumps. In other words, you put work in to extract heat from the processor, this extra work turning into (you guessed it) even more heat.
While it might contribute to the cooling of the processor, you'll need an even bigger heat-sink and fan stuck on top to dissipate all the extra heat...
(Rant: why can't all processors be like the one in my iBook, designed for power efficiency as well as performance?)
But the whole point of skipping the publishers is to get enough money so the developers can "fund the new games".
Who do you think funds a new development studio with no released titles already making money for them?
Valve's got to the stage where it doesn't need the financial backing of a publisher, but for smaller people, it's a very important source of monetary investment.
As for the Half-Life 2 requiring product activation - I'm not sure if this is the best route to be going down. Yes, nearly everyone has an internet connection these days, but there still are some people without. A friend of mine is a big fan of Half-Life (and games in general) but has no internet access at home. An outlier? Yes, but there's probably more of them than we think, especially in the casual PC gamer market the original Half-Life has more recently done so well in. Such people are a bit unlikely to be posting on here, for a start.;-)
I've nothing against persistent user profiles and product registration for online gaming - a bit less anonymity might cut down on the number of idiots currently infesting servers - but requiring activation for an offline, single-player game does seem to be going a bit far. Anyone pirating the game will most likely have a registration-free hacked version, as already mentioned...
They had demonstration movie footage of the PC game several years before the X-Box launch.
Demonstration footage doesn't really mean anything. There's a very interesting film on the evolution of Halo. That E3 2000 footage, for instance, turns out to have been a complete sham - it was all scripted, and there really wasn't that much in the way of actual playable game there.
I think this may be a contributing factor to people not believing the reasons for missed release dates. They see 'gameplay' footage, they see screenshots, and they believe that what looks like a game must be a game. Even if it's just smoke, mirrors and sleight of hand.:-)
If Doom 3 and HL 2 (& CS:Source) were released on their initially reported release dates? (instead of over a full year later before when Doom 3 and CS:Source actually came out?)
Everyone's obsessed with release dates, and I believe this is one of the biggest problems with game development these days.
Many people seem to assume that a game produces itself, and if it fails to meet the expected release date then the developers are somehow deliberately holding back a finished game. I've seen claims that Halo was complete a long time before the launch of the Xbox (in reality, it shows definite signs of being rushed to completion), and that Half-Life 2 has just been sat on for most of the past year. That sort of situation is very rarely the case.
Half-Life and its sequel are probably good examples of the developer not rushing the game to market, both being delayed by about a year. The original went from being a probable also-ran to a memorable experience in that extra year, and I hope the same can be said about HL2. There was something they really weren't happy about with the game, and they had the bravery to delay it. Beyond the insistence that it was still ready for release on September 30th 2003, I have a lot of respect for them for the delay.
There are the endless lists of technical features and numerical 'assessments' of a game's worth, and that's how some seem to rate their games. Personally, I don't care if a game has per-pixel stencil shadow lighting or precalculated radiosity lightmaps, whether it has a certain licensed physics engine or not. What matters to me is the art, the design, the gameplay, the audio and the story. The underlying engine is important, but only in how it makes the previous aspects possible. A great game can be built on a poor engine, albeit with more difficulty, and a poor game can easily be built on a great engine.
I was playing through System Shock 2 recently. It's old, the engine is primitive, and the graphics are mediocre (in terms of a buzzword contest, anyway). It's still a great game.
Not exactly a lander, but there's the Galileo atmospheric probe which parachuted into Jupiter in late 1995.
While a successful mission, it (slightly disappointingly) didn't have any kind of camera on it . Although any pictures would almost certainly have been devoid of contrast or detail and would have overwhelmed the probe's limited communications capacity, they might have given the imagination a bit more to latch on to than the abstract instrumentation data that was returned. Probably why few people seem to have heard of this intriguing little side-mission...
Fortunately, the Huygens probe has some decent cameras. Judging by the demonstrations shown on BBC2's Horizon last night, expect full panoramic views of the atmosphere and surface of Titan, for assembling into 3D flyovers. Hooray!
Actually, a large, camera-laden spacecraft did enter the atmosphere of Jupiter more recently, but I don't think it returned too much data. It was the deliberate destruction of the main Galileo orbiter itself.;-)
If it is using QEMU, then it's just another normal process with the same privileges (or lack thereof) as any other. QEMU's basically a PC emulator, albeit a pretty fast and compatible one.
There is the risk that processes on the host machine can peer at its memory and fish out the unencrypted data without any way of it knowing - unlikely that someone would develop such a thing, but if you're being paranoid there's always the possibility.
While this comment is rated funny, I would like to know how feasible it would be to actually use a high end CPU & mobo to heat a reasonable amount of water.
Processors tend to start overheating at around 60-70C (a guess), whereas water from a central heating boiler apparently runs at around 82C. To get any real heating done, you'd have to run the processor at a rather high temperature, and one which would likely badly damage sooner or later.
Plus, there's the issue of power output - a modern processor might kick out around 70 watts of heat, whereas a typical electric shower is around 5 kilowatts. You might get a slight trickle of warm water from your processor, but nothing much.
Personally, I wish manufacturers would pay more attention to power consumption of computers, as all that heat still has to be dissipated, even if it's not going to be an effective heater. I'd rather not have my PC whirring like a helicopter just to do some web browsing...
All the Ad needs is a "Take back the web" picture and some writing underneath saying "Safer and faster than Internet Explorer" then the URL.
Nah. Needs to be a bit more imaginative. how about...
Thousands of razor-sharp, spring-loaded mini-adverts for various dubious services which ping out across the room, closely followed by a blast of various virus-laden particles ranging from the common cold to herpes and smallpox. Oh, and a leaking colostomy bag too, for good measure.
Then, as the reader curses and tries clearing up the mess, a glowing Firefox logo proclaims (in full quadraphonic audio if available) that your internet experience doesn't have to be like that as well...
Apple still cripples the iBook with mirrored-only video. No desktop spanning. The Radeon chipsets they use do support it, but Apple reserves that feature for the Powerbooks.
In HTML 4 Strict, how does one number an ordered list starting at 10? The value attribute of the li element (<li value="10">) is missing.
Hadn't known about that - apparently the correct route is via CSS, of course, but browser support is meant to be somewhat lacking. As always.;-)
My favourite bit of HTML 4 brokenness is the retention of 'cellpadding', 'cellspacing' and friends in HTML 4 Strict's tables. Having attributes specifying pixel-sizes in the supposedly formatting-by-CSS-only system kind of undermines their arguments for removing the more esoteric, not-quite-display features like those list item attributes...
Check a good professional digital camera and find out how many pictures it can take in continous shooting mode. (EOS-1Ds Mark II - 4 frames/sec!)
That's because it's busy hurling a large, physical mirror around, what with it being an SLR and all that.
As for shutter speed, 1/30 second is considered a pretty slow exposure time - most digital cameras can go down to at least a thousandth of a second in decent lighting. For video, the amount of available light is unlikely to be a problem.
I think the main issues with high-resolution video are about dealing with the large amount of data. If, say, a camera recorded video at 1280x960 instead of 640x480, that's immediately four times as many pixels in each frame to process. Compression hardware will need to be faster, buffers will need to be bigger, and the storage medium much larger and faster.
Plus, after all that effort, you're unlikely to be able to play it back on anything other than a computer. What's the current state of play regarding home-made HD-DVDs and so on? High-definition tellies aren't particularly common at the moment. High-resolution camcorder-like devices might catch on one day, but not quite yet...
It's kind of in the name. Transitional should best-guess. Strict should not.
Not really - HTML 4 Transitional was designed so that it wouldn't be so much work for sites to change their markup from the previous, somewhat ad-hoc standards. As a result, it includes various tags and attributes from HTML 3.2, usually to do with more visual aspects of page layout. Such features aren't present in HTML 4 Strict, where CSS is used for visual formatting (almost) throughout.
References to the Transitional DTD appear at the top of many HTML documents which aren't anywhere near valid HTML 4 Transitional - I suspect this is why many browsers go into some kind of 'Quirks' mode when they see it. The Transitional specification is just as definitive as the Strict one, it just includes a lot of older features for the sake of compatibility and conversion.
Still, it says something about how much the W3C's standards are respected when even now, hardly anyone bothers following the Transitional spec from 1997, considering it too difficult...
I have an 8MB Matrox Millenium II around here somewhere, PCI, that I use when I need a 2D card for something I'll be sitting at regularly.
I've got a pile of 4MB PCI Matrox Millennia - they're absolutely brilliant for when I want to add another monitor to a machine. Great 2D cards, and extremely well supported in Linux, - my only real complaint is that 4MB isn't quite enough to do 1280x960x32bpp. Still, they were really cheap.:-)
No, Suse just suggests that you wipe everything out and start over. Even if you tell it you want to do an upgrade, it has NO PROVISION what-so-ever to allow you to format the new drive then move your old/home from hda to hdb then reformat hda and partition it up in a useful way.
Handy feature about the SuSE installation stuff - while it comes up with a nice, graphical interface, virtual console Alt-F(something) has a full bash prompt with lots of useful utilities.
It's possible to bring up network connectivity at a very early stage (done automatically if you're doing an FTP install) so if you need to get old data off a machine, an NFS mount is also a possibility. As is using w3m to read Slashdot while the installation progresses.:-)
Before MS bought them out. How can a game company produce only 1 game and not sell the game engine to anyone and still stay in business? Id and Valve are different in that they sell the engine to other folks.
Erm...
There are quite a few game companies who have written their own software without licensing it out as a basis for the games of others.
Ignoring the fact that Bungie already has one licensee for the Halo engine, there's probably one little secret, one little flaw in your theory...
The Halo (1) engine actually isn't that great, and has many peculiar limitations. It's difficult to extend it (Halo PC is somewhat limited in modding potential - there's no chance of adding extra code without hacking the main Halo executable). Its design isn't really suited for online play, and isn't client-server like Quake, Half-Life, Unreal etc. (Gearbox did a pretty good job of retrofitting some modern netcode, but it's still not perfect).
There are a bunch of weird physics bugs involving moving objects (lifts, etc) and non-player entities - persuade a vehicle or monster on to a lift, and it'll fall straight through.
It's perfectly tuned for the game it was written for and works extremely well for that, but it's not some cross-platform, ultra-versatile thing like a Quake or Unreal engine. Anyone wanting to add to it will have to dig deep down into its innards.
As for the Halo 2 leak, probably the biggest problem isn't so much the hand-wringing about copyright theft, more the fact that Bungie has kept the full story of the single-player game a complete secret. There are most likely whole races of creatures you're not supposed to know about yet, like in the original Halo. And the pricks pirating the game are likely to be just the sort who will jump into some online forum to describe all the plot twists and characters.
Halo.Bungie.org has already closed its forums to new posting. Bungie.net are threatening people with permanent bans. Vicious, yes, but for a Bungie game, where the sotory is incredibly important, revealing the plot is wrong...
That's what i'm most concerned with..I have never cared much about the noise level of SCSI drives in my SERVER ROOM. It's supposed to be loud in there.
Actually, quiet servers are a very good idea.
Because when I inherit some company's old office server for use at home, I want to be able to run it without it being audible from the other side of the building. I've got an elderly HP server thing I acquired that way, with lots of disk space in the form of a 10,000 rpm SCSI hard disk. Very fast, and would be ideal for my home network, except...
VRRRMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!
So remember, buy quiet hardware. You never know where it'll end up.;-)
When I'm burning CDs on my IDE-based CD burner, it chews up nearly all my system resources on my puny 1.8GHz processor.
Try enabling DMA and suchlike, so the IDE chipset takes care of large amounts of your I/O processing.
Between SuSE 8.1 and 9.0, my PC's IDE chipset gained DMA support for writing CDs and stuff. The machine went from being unusable when writing a CD to taking up a few percent of processor time, on my punier 1.1GHz processor. Okay, it's not SCSI performance by any means (although it talks SCSI over the IDE bus, heh) but it's still a big improvement.
Actually, the last SCSI device I bought new was a 230MB hard disk for my Atari ST, for a few hundred pounds. I take it things have improved since then.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
It combines the 5 most important numbers in all of mathematics into a single formula.
It's also got the other important mathematical concepts - exponentiation (i.e. raising something to the power of something else), multiplication, addition and equals. Essentially, it's a huge nugget of maths in a tidy little wrapper.
I've got an old Sharp graphics calculator, which has both proper notation layout and a complex numbers mode. I still like keying in the 'e^(pi*i)+1', pressing 'Enter', then getting the zero, all perfectly laid out on a little LCD display...
As mentioned already, Peltier junctions act as heat pumps. In other words, you put work in to extract heat from the processor, this extra work turning into (you guessed it) even more heat.
While it might contribute to the cooling of the processor, you'll need an even bigger heat-sink and fan stuck on top to dissipate all the extra heat...
(Rant: why can't all processors be like the one in my iBook, designed for power efficiency as well as performance?)
I am a complete idiot. Not only is my Google-found link above in the F article, it's also in the summary. Go me! :-)
Just need to put it in this for a completely Lego-based Rubik's cube solution!
But the whole point of skipping the publishers is to get enough money so the developers can "fund the new games".
;-)
Who do you think funds a new development studio with no released titles already making money for them?
Valve's got to the stage where it doesn't need the financial backing of a publisher, but for smaller people, it's a very important source of monetary investment.
As for the Half-Life 2 requiring product activation - I'm not sure if this is the best route to be going down. Yes, nearly everyone has an internet connection these days, but there still are some people without. A friend of mine is a big fan of Half-Life (and games in general) but has no internet access at home. An outlier? Yes, but there's probably more of them than we think, especially in the casual PC gamer market the original Half-Life has more recently done so well in. Such people are a bit unlikely to be posting on here, for a start.
I've nothing against persistent user profiles and product registration for online gaming - a bit less anonymity might cut down on the number of idiots currently infesting servers - but requiring activation for an offline, single-player game does seem to be going a bit far. Anyone pirating the game will most likely have a registration-free hacked version, as already mentioned...
They had demonstration movie footage of the PC game several years before the X-Box launch.
:-)
Demonstration footage doesn't really mean anything. There's a very interesting film on the evolution of Halo. That E3 2000 footage, for instance, turns out to have been a complete sham - it was all scripted, and there really wasn't that much in the way of actual playable game there.
I think this may be a contributing factor to people not believing the reasons for missed release dates. They see 'gameplay' footage, they see screenshots, and they believe that what looks like a game must be a game. Even if it's just smoke, mirrors and sleight of hand.
So, not dead, merely resting. Yes, that's it.
Murphy's law has nothing to do with the Irish.
:-)
Anyway, has anyone else ever thought an article is based on a Slashdot post one made? I was thinking about the exact same similarities last week.
If Doom 3 and HL 2 (& CS:Source) were released on their initially reported release dates? (instead of over a full year later before when Doom 3 and CS:Source actually came out?)
Everyone's obsessed with release dates, and I believe this is one of the biggest problems with game development these days.
Many people seem to assume that a game produces itself, and if it fails to meet the expected release date then the developers are somehow deliberately holding back a finished game. I've seen claims that Halo was complete a long time before the launch of the Xbox (in reality, it shows definite signs of being rushed to completion), and that Half-Life 2 has just been sat on for most of the past year. That sort of situation is very rarely the case.
Half-Life and its sequel are probably good examples of the developer not rushing the game to market, both being delayed by about a year. The original went from being a probable also-ran to a memorable experience in that extra year, and I hope the same can be said about HL2. There was something they really weren't happy about with the game, and they had the bravery to delay it. Beyond the insistence that it was still ready for release on September 30th 2003, I have a lot of respect for them for the delay.
There are the endless lists of technical features and numerical 'assessments' of a game's worth, and that's how some seem to rate their games. Personally, I don't care if a game has per-pixel stencil shadow lighting or precalculated radiosity lightmaps, whether it has a certain licensed physics engine or not. What matters to me is the art, the design, the gameplay, the audio and the story. The underlying engine is important, but only in how it makes the previous aspects possible. A great game can be built on a poor engine, albeit with more difficulty, and a poor game can easily be built on a great engine.
I was playing through System Shock 2 recently. It's old, the engine is primitive, and the graphics are mediocre (in terms of a buzzword contest, anyway). It's still a great game.
Not exactly a lander, but there's the Galileo atmospheric probe which parachuted into Jupiter in late 1995.
;-)
While a successful mission, it (slightly disappointingly) didn't have any kind of camera on it . Although any pictures would almost certainly have been devoid of contrast or detail and would have overwhelmed the probe's limited communications capacity, they might have given the imagination a bit more to latch on to than the abstract instrumentation data that was returned. Probably why few people seem to have heard of this intriguing little side-mission...
Fortunately, the Huygens probe has some decent cameras. Judging by the demonstrations shown on BBC2's Horizon last night, expect full panoramic views of the atmosphere and surface of Titan, for assembling into 3D flyovers. Hooray!
Actually, a large, camera-laden spacecraft did enter the atmosphere of Jupiter more recently, but I don't think it returned too much data. It was the deliberate destruction of the main Galileo orbiter itself.
If it is using QEMU, then it's just another normal process with the same privileges (or lack thereof) as any other. QEMU's basically a PC emulator, albeit a pretty fast and compatible one.
There is the risk that processes on the host machine can peer at its memory and fish out the unencrypted data without any way of it knowing - unlikely that someone would develop such a thing, but if you're being paranoid there's always the possibility.
While this comment is rated funny, I would like to know how feasible it would be to actually use a high end CPU & mobo to heat a reasonable amount of water.
Processors tend to start overheating at around 60-70C (a guess), whereas water from a central heating boiler apparently runs at around 82C. To get any real heating done, you'd have to run the processor at a rather high temperature, and one which would likely badly damage sooner or later.
Plus, there's the issue of power output - a modern processor might kick out around 70 watts of heat, whereas a typical electric shower is around 5 kilowatts. You might get a slight trickle of warm water from your processor, but nothing much.
Personally, I wish manufacturers would pay more attention to power consumption of computers, as all that heat still has to be dissipated, even if it's not going to be an effective heater. I'd rather not have my PC whirring like a helicopter just to do some web browsing...
I wonder who is responsible for a botched surgery, the untrained proxy or the doctor on the other end of the line?
:-)
Simple.
Anything goes wrong, blame it on lag.
Or claim it's due to the patient being a 'ch34tign h4x0r c4mp1ng l4m3r', or whatever.
All the Ad needs is a "Take back the web" picture and some writing underneath saying "Safer and faster than Internet Explorer" then the URL.
Nah. Needs to be a bit more imaginative. how about...
Thousands of razor-sharp, spring-loaded mini-adverts for various dubious services which ping out across the room, closely followed by a blast of various virus-laden particles ranging from the common cold to herpes and smallpox. Oh, and a leaking colostomy bag too, for good measure.
Then, as the reader curses and tries clearing up the mess, a glowing Firefox logo proclaims (in full quadraphonic audio if available) that your internet experience doesn't have to be like that as well...
Apple still cripples the iBook with mirrored-only video. No desktop spanning. The Radeon chipsets they use do support it, but Apple reserves that feature for the Powerbooks.
:-)
I've no idea why they continue do it, but it's easily worked around.
In HTML 4 Strict, how does one number an ordered list starting at 10? The value attribute of the li element (<li value="10">) is missing.
;-)
Hadn't known about that - apparently the correct route is via CSS, of course, but browser support is meant to be somewhat lacking. As always.
My favourite bit of HTML 4 brokenness is the retention of 'cellpadding', 'cellspacing' and friends in HTML 4 Strict's tables. Having attributes specifying pixel-sizes in the supposedly formatting-by-CSS-only system kind of undermines their arguments for removing the more esoteric, not-quite-display features like those list item attributes...
Check a good professional digital camera and find out how many pictures it can take in continous shooting mode. (EOS-1Ds Mark II - 4 frames/sec!)
That's because it's busy hurling a large, physical mirror around, what with it being an SLR and all that.
As for shutter speed, 1/30 second is considered a pretty slow exposure time - most digital cameras can go down to at least a thousandth of a second in decent lighting. For video, the amount of available light is unlikely to be a problem.
I think the main issues with high-resolution video are about dealing with the large amount of data. If, say, a camera recorded video at 1280x960 instead of 640x480, that's immediately four times as many pixels in each frame to process. Compression hardware will need to be faster, buffers will need to be bigger, and the storage medium much larger and faster.
Plus, after all that effort, you're unlikely to be able to play it back on anything other than a computer. What's the current state of play regarding home-made HD-DVDs and so on? High-definition tellies aren't particularly common at the moment. High-resolution camcorder-like devices might catch on one day, but not quite yet...
It's kind of in the name. Transitional should best-guess. Strict should not.
Not really - HTML 4 Transitional was designed so that it wouldn't be so much work for sites to change their markup from the previous, somewhat ad-hoc standards. As a result, it includes various tags and attributes from HTML 3.2, usually to do with more visual aspects of page layout. Such features aren't present in HTML 4 Strict, where CSS is used for visual formatting (almost) throughout.
References to the Transitional DTD appear at the top of many HTML documents which aren't anywhere near valid HTML 4 Transitional - I suspect this is why many browsers go into some kind of 'Quirks' mode when they see it. The Transitional specification is just as definitive as the Strict one, it just includes a lot of older features for the sake of compatibility and conversion.
Still, it says something about how much the W3C's standards are respected when even now, hardly anyone bothers following the Transitional spec from 1997, considering it too difficult...
I have an 8MB Matrox Millenium II around here somewhere, PCI, that I use when I need a 2D card for something I'll be sitting at regularly.
:-)
I've got a pile of 4MB PCI Matrox Millennia - they're absolutely brilliant for when I want to add another monitor to a machine. Great 2D cards, and extremely well supported in Linux, - my only real complaint is that 4MB isn't quite enough to do 1280x960x32bpp. Still, they were really cheap.
Well, you see, games about getting out of bed, going to work, scooping cat poop into a bag and such never really took off.
Except in Japan.
No, Suse just suggests that you wipe everything out and start over. Even if you tell it you want to do an upgrade, it has NO PROVISION what-so-ever to allow you to format the new drive then move your old /home from hda to hdb then reformat hda and partition it up in a useful way.
:-)
Handy feature about the SuSE installation stuff - while it comes up with a nice, graphical interface, virtual console Alt-F(something) has a full bash prompt with lots of useful utilities.
It's possible to bring up network connectivity at a very early stage (done automatically if you're doing an FTP install) so if you need to get old data off a machine, an NFS mount is also a possibility. As is using w3m to read Slashdot while the installation progresses.
Before MS bought them out. How can a game company produce only 1 game and not sell the game engine to anyone and still stay in business? Id and Valve are different in that they sell the engine to other folks.
Erm...
There are quite a few game companies who have written their own software without licensing it out as a basis for the games of others.
Ignoring the fact that Bungie already has one licensee for the Halo engine, there's probably one little secret, one little flaw in your theory...
The Halo (1) engine actually isn't that great, and has many peculiar limitations. It's difficult to extend it (Halo PC is somewhat limited in modding potential - there's no chance of adding extra code without hacking the main Halo executable). Its design isn't really suited for online play, and isn't client-server like Quake, Half-Life, Unreal etc. (Gearbox did a pretty good job of retrofitting some modern netcode, but it's still not perfect).
There are a bunch of weird physics bugs involving moving objects (lifts, etc) and non-player entities - persuade a vehicle or monster on to a lift, and it'll fall straight through.
It's perfectly tuned for the game it was written for and works extremely well for that, but it's not some cross-platform, ultra-versatile thing like a Quake or Unreal engine. Anyone wanting to add to it will have to dig deep down into its innards.
As for the Halo 2 leak, probably the biggest problem isn't so much the hand-wringing about copyright theft, more the fact that Bungie has kept the full story of the single-player game a complete secret. There are most likely whole races of creatures you're not supposed to know about yet, like in the original Halo. And the pricks pirating the game are likely to be just the sort who will jump into some online forum to describe all the plot twists and characters.
Halo.Bungie.org has already closed its forums to new posting. Bungie.net are threatening people with permanent bans. Vicious, yes, but for a Bungie game, where the sotory is incredibly important, revealing the plot is wrong...
That's what i'm most concerned with..I have never cared much about the noise level of SCSI drives in my SERVER ROOM. It's supposed to be loud in there.
;-)
Actually, quiet servers are a very good idea.
Because when I inherit some company's old office server for use at home, I want to be able to run it without it being audible from the other side of the building. I've got an elderly HP server thing I acquired that way, with lots of disk space in the form of a 10,000 rpm SCSI hard disk. Very fast, and would be ideal for my home network, except...
VRRRMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!
So remember, buy quiet hardware. You never know where it'll end up.
When I'm burning CDs on my IDE-based CD burner, it chews up nearly all my system resources on my puny 1.8GHz processor.
:-)
Try enabling DMA and suchlike, so the IDE chipset takes care of large amounts of your I/O processing.
Between SuSE 8.1 and 9.0, my PC's IDE chipset gained DMA support for writing CDs and stuff. The machine went from being unusable when writing a CD to taking up a few percent of processor time, on my punier 1.1GHz processor. Okay, it's not SCSI performance by any means (although it talks SCSI over the IDE bus, heh) but it's still a big improvement.
Actually, the last SCSI device I bought new was a 230MB hard disk for my Atari ST, for a few hundred pounds. I take it things have improved since then.
They installed the switch backwards.
For some reason, I'm reminded of the origins of Murphy's Law. I recall that too was the result of some sensors being installed backwards...