... but again, there is no real *price* advantage for the end-user to buy a Linux box. I can get a Sempron 3400+/512mb/80gb/DVD-ROM with XP Home for $279 shipped to my door. I've tried to find machines with no O/S to beat that price (first thing I do when I open the box is indeed wipe the hard drive. Anyone wanna actually help me get about $5000 back from Microsoft?) but I can't even come close.
Okay guys, quick education about why AthlonXP processors idle at the tempature they do:
Some (most) motherboard BIOS's with ACPI do a kind of 'soft cooling' where the proc is told to do very little when it is NOP-ing, ie when windows is idle.
Some mainboards, however, do not, or can have this feature turned off.
For example, the ABIT KT7A-133, in it's earlier revision, was not made with AthlonXP's in mind, as it predated them. Now, AthlonXP's will work on these mainboards, but users would have random, inexplicable lockups on the board, even though their CPU's were running nice and cool. For example, I have an AthlonXP 2100+ that used to idle at about 35c, and peak at about 45c, on a KT7A-133. After ABIT released a BIOS update to correct the random lock-ups, the CPU idles at about 57c and peaks at about 66c. And the system is rock solid. This has nothing to do with voltages or the like, but how the motherboard/BIOS handles the CPU when it is idle and executing NOP's.
There is actually a patch file that can be used with WPCREDIT, whcih allows you to change PCI registers and the like, which is pretty freaking cool, that makes the CPU run nice and cool at around 35c even with the new bios; I've tried it and it works, but the system is not 100% stable with it enabled.
An AthlonXP, at least when it is not overclocked, should run rock solid when it is at 35c or 75c. As long as you are within thermal spec. the proc should work great. Not everyone has massive heatsinks, and some people like quiet fans - those people have system with Athlons that are happily running at 65 degrees and will likley continue to do so for many moons.
Look... Phoenix, err Firebird.. err whatever... It can change it's name one last time to something that even sorta resembles the Gecko/Mozzy guy....
TROGDOR!!!
I'm sure if we all wrote nice email messages to StrongBad, and asked real nicely, he'd let us use the name Trogdor... And all we'd really have to do is attach a StrongArm (No, not the chip) to our mozzy guy.
And hey, TROGDOR!!! the game ever works in Mozzy with the right plugins... http://www.homestarrunner.com/trogdor.html..
What do you guys think?
... Blatantly OT but silencing your cubiclemate is pretty trivial. AM radio can be silenced (or at least squelched) by most kinds of rfi radiation. Taking the cover off your PC may be enough to kill his AM reception. Some old-skool florescent desk lamps have similar properties.
Black & White televisions. Freezers that do not self-defrost. The washboard. Real 'Irons' (Made of a slab of iron). Fuel-Oil based heating.
These are just a few examples: You can still watch a B&W TV, but try to buy a new one and you will be out of luck. If you can actually find one (I think radio shack still has one in their catalouge), you will find it being no less expensive than a colour television. You can still use an old style icebox, but new ones sure do work better and more efficiently. Same with a washboard and a washing machine, and the rest of my examples.
To get back on topic, you can purchase an 8mb ATI Rage 3D Video card for about $40 cdn. through distributor channels, or a 32mb NVidia TNT2 for $44. Sure, the 8mb card might do all you need, but the production cost of that item is probably identical to that of the newer item, as demonstrated by the wholesale price. Ergo, the older, less capable is obsolete.
Having 1000 Cameras all feed into a box is a problem I don't wish to be saddled with solving. However why not just scale up a system I use for a few cameras to fit the task:
What you need:
A roomful of rackmount hardware, 100-Base-T switches, and air conditioning.
1000 2U ATX Cases, with matching motherboards, 1.2ghz+ CPU (Intel or AMD), Bt8x8 PCI VidCap Card, and a 100baseT ethernet card.
4000 100gb UDMA hard drives.
Make 1000 2u rackmount computers with 4 100gb Hard Drives in each unit, with a RAID 1 of 2 RAID 0 sets (IE make 2 200gb Volumes, and mirror). Vidcap at 640x480x30fps with decent codec: you now have about 500mb/hour. This yeilds about 16 days of data on each unit. Make the system delete oldest files when drive full, keeping a 16 day log.
Need to grab some suspicious video? Browse to the machine that is attached to the camera you are intersted in over your cheap 100baseT network, and pull down the video. Archive it to CDR if necessary.
This is a reasonably cheap (about $1500 per camera max) and easy solution. And it would be pretty easy to implement. Also, any failures will take out only one or two cameras, not all of them. There are a few caveats tho...
*Unknown long term reliability of these inexpenisve hard drives - I'd guess that they will be fine, but we've raided just in case. Mind you, swapping out ide hard drives on a daily basis in 2006 won't be fun if there are problems down the road.
*Same as above for using commodoity PC hardware.
*Only 16 day archival length.
I've implemented this (in a much smaller scale of course) sucessfully, and if the caveats don't break your requirements, this is a wondefully simple way to go.
Well, I can't say anything about VPN usage, but the issue with NAT / Firewalls / NO-Pay Internet for multiple machines can be at least (partially) gotten around...
I set up DSL for office networks, and instead of forking out money for a DSL router, I just use the really inexpensive Nortel modem, an inexpensive PC, and 2 (Two) NICs. I run my PPPoE client bound only to one nic (hooked to Nortel DSL modem) and my Proxy / Firewall only bound to the other NIC (100bT, hooked to the office network). This works well, and in use with the cable modem system in question, would at least (physically) still eb allowed acording to the TOS: The endpoint of 'their' network is the computer with 2 nics - at no point is their network (physically) distributed. Mind you, this breaks the intended meaning of their TOS, ancd their lawyers could argue this, or they could make their TOS even more restrictive; but where I live this allows me to use 25 machines (legally I think and hope) one one DSL (or Cable) IP.
Okay a short sotry...... I was, literally, the inverse of the Columbine Jocks... I attended a 1200 student public high school in Northern New Jersey. I started out in a clique of odd kids that were reasonably socially acceptable (Smart, clean cut, quiet, not troublemakers), but I didn;t last 6 months with them. By my sophmore year, I had a few very close friends and thats all. School was a living hell, and I went thru exactly what has been described as the terror inflicted by Columbine Jocks. Then I lucked out. Saw a school administrator type having dificulties with a computer and fixed things up with him. Became friends with him, and we were cleaning out an old storage closet, Tandy 1000's galore. A holler fromt he principal that her PcAnywhere connection wasn;t working and we both trotted by. I fixed the problem, that much I planned on. What i didn't plan on was (accidently) circumventing a rudimentary security script written in VB. Since that day I got a lot of respect and buisness form the school. I went from a borderline outcast, activly playing with the idea of mass destruction in the school, to the Novel network admin. It was like getting a juice card, just like the columbine jocks; key to the tech office, my own desk, keys to the faculty washroom. I got a large state contract for a webpage (www.pvgoals2000.org), and basicaly made the most out of my HS years - I made lots of money, learned to do buisness, because a very good netadmin and HW tech, and probably learned more than the top honours students. Yeah I graduated in the bottom third of my class, and shure I wasn't Mr. popularity. And no, maby it wasnt fair that I had a juice card of sorts. But it is imprant to realise that nothing more than luck and my greed kept me from becoming insolent and violent. So I can relate to the trenchcoat mafia boys, and undertsnad exactly why thsi WAVE program is the shaft. Had it existed in my time, no way woudld I have weezeled my way in to admins shoes, I'd be in therapy. And then I would have very likley picked off a few jocks with my dad's 30.06. Now I live in Canada. I love it; I hope the US gets its head on straight... Sleepycow the expatriot says: Don;t shoot at your friends, family, or dog.
...or rather an Island nation. If we could keep from being invaded or completly blocked from the outside world, it would be a nice place to live. Keep a few hundred copies of DeCss et. all on hand, and pool are savings to hire some mercenaries to keep us safe (I am sure there will be planty of countries that would dislike us as much as the corps. ) -Anthony
I was very suprised that some many/.'ers drove big, innefficient beasts! I had (have) a VW fetish, and drover around in a beautiful but floorless 78 SuperBeetle Convertible. Practicality got to me, and now I drive a 3 cylinder 97 Geo Metro. I drive it from Winnipeg, Canada to New York City at least twice a year (just under 2k miles each way) and the odometer is just about at 30k miles. Very effecient, extreemly reliable, fun to drive. Mechanically simple like all cars should be...
Slashdot Mirror
... but again, there is no real *price* advantage for the end-user to buy a Linux box. I can get a Sempron 3400+/512mb/80gb/DVD-ROM with XP Home for $279 shipped to my door. I've tried to find machines with no O/S to beat that price (first thing I do when I open the box is indeed wipe the hard drive. Anyone wanna actually help me get about $5000 back from Microsoft?) but I can't even come close.
Okay guys, quick education about why AthlonXP processors idle at the tempature they do:
Some (most) motherboard BIOS's with ACPI do a kind of 'soft cooling' where the proc is told to do very little when it is NOP-ing, ie when windows is idle.
Some mainboards, however, do not, or can have this feature turned off.
For example, the ABIT KT7A-133, in it's earlier revision, was not made with AthlonXP's in mind, as it predated them. Now, AthlonXP's will work on these mainboards, but users would have random, inexplicable lockups on the board, even though their CPU's were running nice and cool. For example, I have an AthlonXP 2100+ that used to idle at about 35c, and peak at about 45c, on a KT7A-133. After ABIT released a BIOS update to correct the random lock-ups, the CPU idles at about 57c and peaks at about 66c. And the system is rock solid. This has nothing to do with voltages or the like, but how the motherboard/BIOS handles the CPU when it is idle and executing NOP's.
There is actually a patch file that can be used with WPCREDIT, whcih allows you to change PCI registers and the like, which is pretty freaking cool, that makes the CPU run nice and cool at around 35c even with the new bios; I've tried it and it works, but the system is not 100% stable with it enabled.
An AthlonXP, at least when it is not overclocked, should run rock solid when it is at 35c or 75c. As long as you are within thermal spec. the proc should work great. Not everyone has massive heatsinks, and some people like quiet fans - those people have system with Athlons that are happily running at 65 degrees and will likley continue to do so for many moons.
Look... Phoenix, err Firebird.. err whatever... It can change it's name one last time to something that even sorta resembles the Gecko/Mozzy guy....
..
What do you guys think?
TROGDOR!!!
I'm sure if we all wrote nice email messages to StrongBad, and asked real nicely, he'd let us use the name Trogdor... And all we'd really have to do is attach a StrongArm (No, not the chip) to our mozzy guy.
And hey, TROGDOR!!! the game ever works in Mozzy with the right plugins... http://www.homestarrunner.com/trogdor.html
... Blatantly OT but silencing your cubiclemate is pretty trivial. AM radio can be silenced (or at least squelched) by most kinds of rfi radiation. Taking the cover off your PC may be enough to kill his AM reception. Some old-skool florescent desk lamps have similar properties.
Actually, I can.
Black & White televisions. Freezers that do not self-defrost. The washboard. Real 'Irons' (Made of a slab of iron). Fuel-Oil based heating.
These are just a few examples: You can still watch a B&W TV, but try to buy a new one and you will be out of luck. If you can actually find one (I think radio shack still has one in their catalouge), you will find it being no less expensive than a colour television. You can still use an old style icebox, but new ones sure do work better and more efficiently. Same with a washboard and a washing machine, and the rest of my examples.
To get back on topic, you can purchase an 8mb ATI Rage 3D Video card for about $40 cdn. through distributor channels, or a 32mb NVidia TNT2 for $44. Sure, the 8mb card might do all you need, but the production cost of that item is probably identical to that of the newer item, as demonstrated by the wholesale price. Ergo, the older, less capable is obsolete.
Follow me here for a miniute.....
Having 1000 Cameras all feed into a box is a problem I don't wish to be saddled with solving. However why not just scale up a system I use for a few cameras to fit the task:
What you need:
A roomful of rackmount hardware, 100-Base-T switches, and air conditioning.
1000 2U ATX Cases, with matching motherboards, 1.2ghz+ CPU (Intel or AMD), Bt8x8 PCI VidCap Card, and a 100baseT ethernet card.
4000 100gb UDMA hard drives.
Make 1000 2u rackmount computers with 4 100gb Hard Drives in each unit, with a RAID 1 of 2 RAID 0 sets (IE make 2 200gb Volumes, and mirror). Vidcap at 640x480x30fps with decent codec: you now have about 500mb/hour. This yeilds about 16 days of data on each unit. Make the system delete oldest files when drive full, keeping a 16 day log.
Need to grab some suspicious video? Browse to the machine that is attached to the camera you are intersted in over your cheap 100baseT network, and pull down the video. Archive it to CDR if necessary.
This is a reasonably cheap (about $1500 per camera max) and easy solution. And it would be pretty easy to implement. Also, any failures will take out only one or two cameras, not all of them. There are a few caveats tho...
*Unknown long term reliability of these inexpenisve hard drives - I'd guess that they will be fine, but we've raided just in case. Mind you, swapping out ide hard drives on a daily basis in 2006 won't be fun if there are problems down the road.
*Same as above for using commodoity PC hardware.
*Only 16 day archival length.
I've implemented this (in a much smaller scale of course) sucessfully, and if the caveats don't break your requirements, this is a wondefully simple way to go.
Well, I can't say anything about VPN usage, but the issue with NAT / Firewalls / NO-Pay Internet for multiple machines can be at least (partially) gotten around... I set up DSL for office networks, and instead of forking out money for a DSL router, I just use the really inexpensive Nortel modem, an inexpensive PC, and 2 (Two) NICs. I run my PPPoE client bound only to one nic (hooked to Nortel DSL modem) and my Proxy / Firewall only bound to the other NIC (100bT, hooked to the office network). This works well, and in use with the cable modem system in question, would at least (physically) still eb allowed acording to the TOS: The endpoint of 'their' network is the computer with 2 nics - at no point is their network (physically) distributed. Mind you, this breaks the intended meaning of their TOS, ancd their lawyers could argue this, or they could make their TOS even more restrictive; but where I live this allows me to use 25 machines (legally I think and hope) one one DSL (or Cable) IP.
Okay a short sotry...... I was, literally, the inverse of the Columbine Jocks... I attended a 1200 student public high school in Northern New Jersey. I started out in a clique of odd kids that were reasonably socially acceptable (Smart, clean cut, quiet, not troublemakers), but I didn;t last 6 months with them. By my sophmore year, I had a few very close friends and thats all. School was a living hell, and I went thru exactly what has been described as the terror inflicted by Columbine Jocks. Then I lucked out. Saw a school administrator type having dificulties with a computer and fixed things up with him. Became friends with him, and we were cleaning out an old storage closet, Tandy 1000's galore. A holler fromt he principal that her PcAnywhere connection wasn;t working and we both trotted by. I fixed the problem, that much I planned on. What i didn't plan on was (accidently) circumventing a rudimentary security script written in VB. Since that day I got a lot of respect and buisness form the school. I went from a borderline outcast, activly playing with the idea of mass destruction in the school, to the Novel network admin. It was like getting a juice card, just like the columbine jocks; key to the tech office, my own desk, keys to the faculty washroom. I got a large state contract for a webpage (www.pvgoals2000.org), and basicaly made the most out of my HS years - I made lots of money, learned to do buisness, because a very good netadmin and HW tech, and probably learned more than the top honours students. Yeah I graduated in the bottom third of my class, and shure I wasn't Mr. popularity. And no, maby it wasnt fair that I had a juice card of sorts. But it is imprant to realise that nothing more than luck and my greed kept me from becoming insolent and violent. So I can relate to the trenchcoat mafia boys, and undertsnad exactly why thsi WAVE program is the shaft. Had it existed in my time, no way woudld I have weezeled my way in to admins shoes, I'd be in therapy. And then I would have very likley picked off a few jocks with my dad's 30.06. Now I live in Canada. I love it; I hope the US gets its head on straight... Sleepycow the expatriot says: Don;t shoot at your friends, family, or dog.
...or rather an Island nation. If we could keep from being invaded or completly blocked from the outside world, it would be a nice place to live. Keep a few hundred copies of DeCss et. all on hand, and pool are savings to hire some mercenaries to keep us safe (I am sure there will be planty of countries that would dislike us as much as the corps. ) -Anthony
I was very suprised that some many /.'ers drove big, innefficient beasts! I had (have) a VW fetish, and drover around in a beautiful but floorless 78 SuperBeetle Convertible. Practicality got to me, and now I drive a 3 cylinder 97 Geo Metro. I drive it from Winnipeg, Canada to New York City at least twice a year (just under 2k miles each way) and the odometer is just about at 30k miles. Very effecient, extreemly reliable, fun to drive. Mechanically simple like all cars should be...