Yeah, no kidding. I am even with an ISP that permits BitTorrent downloads and the fact that there are fewer seeders than there used to be makes what used to be THE fastest way to get a distro ISO about the slowest. Maybe if the illegal stuff was gotten off of BT, we could go back to the good old days? Something tells me no, though...
I'll second you on that one. Windows XP and 98SE required about the same amount of restarts in my usage of them, but generally a reboot "fixed" XP while 98SE would need a reinstallation of a driver or something. Also, you can generally kill a locked-up task in XP and it generally won't take the whole OS down with it like in 98SE. 98SE was much better than 95 as it had USB support, but the DOS-based Windows are inferior to the NT-based ones by a long shot.
I think that PSUs have only gotten bigger because people are sticking more stuff in their machines. There weren't dual 75W graphics cards set up in SLi in the 486 days nor were there CD drives, lights, or even more than one HDD. All of that stuff takes wattage to run and adds up to the PSU bill.
The components themselves today are generally at least as power-efficient as they were back then. My dad's old 486DX2/50 ran without a heatsink or fan and consumed less that 15W of power. One of my friends has a 1.1GHz Pentium M ULV mini-notebook that the *whole notebook* maybe takes 20W of power running full-blast with the screen on high brightness. The old 14" CRT connected to that IBM took more juice than the P-M unit does too.
Well, there are certain features that are present on newer systems that were not on older systems. You are correct in stating that the move from 16-bit to 32-bit CPU architecture was a major one, but what about the jump from 32-bit to 64-bit? How about SSE too? I'd like to see a 386 try to run x86_64 code with SSE3 enhancements. Also, what about FPUs and SMP? They were not even present on a 386 but there are generally several FPUs on new chips. You could not have SMP until the Pentium came out. What about no-execute bits, CPU throttling, etc? Nowhere to be seen on the 386.
My point is that there are a lot of differences between old and new chips and that progress keeps happening, even if technically a 386 could run some of the code we run on new chips today.
I totally agree with you. I leave it up until I have to reboot, and then I do it. I care more about how my machine runs that what value/usr/bin/uptime gives you.
Shoot, once you have a monitor, the rest of an entire NICE computer is a grand or so. I built a very nice X2 4200+ system with 2GB RAM, a Raptor, 6600GT, all very good stuff for about $1100 tax paid and parts shipped. $700 isn't cheap at all.
Ah, I knew that we mere mortal individual customers can't get W2K anymore, but I guess it makes sense for Microsoft not to tee off big corporate customers that have the clout and $$$ to switch to another OS if Microsoft does not at least make some concessions.
The only downsides are that MS no longer sells new W2K licenses and they will stop releasing patches. W2K might be a good OS, but when the patches stop, all it takes is one cracker to write one virus to make the OS unusable.
The best thing for that OS would be to open-source it so the community could support it. I bet it would be EXTREMELY popular. But that will happen...never.
Now I might be in the minority here, but I personally like to see cross-pollination of ideas. So what if Vista rips off its GUI from OSX and its (rumored) shell from Linux? I'd personally be HAPPY to see them do that as imitation is the best form of flattery. And the end-users of Vista will get to have a better experience than they otherwise would have.
However, I believe that the imitation does have its limits- and those limits would be copying code illegally.
Most people have very little of a clue when it comes to computers. They know that newer ones are faster and bigger numbers are better (and thus enters the AMD-P4 clockspeed fiasco.) But they generally do not know what their machine is really capable of and how to extract the most from it. That takes *work* and is something that is not tolerated in a country where most people are overweight.
BTW, if the managers don't like the work laptops with the 7800s, could you "dumpster dive" for them? I sure would be trying to do that and sell them for what they are worth, or at least pick up one for myself.
For me it is using lots of apps at one time. It is just too handy to have everything you need to work open and ready.
I remember, back in the 286 days, when you could only have ONE application open at once. That was awful to try to work in when you were typing up a report but needed to look up figures from a table in a spreadsheet and had to close the report, open the spreadsheet, jot down the figures, close the spreadsheet, and then re-open the word processor. It ran DOS 4.00, which was a single-taking OS, so this was not surprising.
Newer computers with multitasking OSes are able to keep multiple applications to some extent, but the system resources limit how much you can do. A Mac LCII I used in the mid 1990s could have two apps open at one time maximum or else it would lock up. A K6-2/500 box running Windows 98SE in the late 1990s let me keep most of MS Works open and still chance looking up a piece of info online. And my P4-M 2.2GHz laptop I got over 3 years ago can take most any office suite/Internet task I throw at it and still have some room under the pedal (it has the maximum 1GB RAM and runs Linux, which in my experience handles multitasking way better than Windows.)
Most applications, excepting games, encoders/compilers, and iterative scientific apps, take very little in the way of CPU horsepower to keep running once you open them, and don't take that much to even open. They do require a decent amount of RAM to keep going. But adding more RAM into a already-existing system to speed it up is a lot less expensive and more effective than buying a new computer with a more-overkill CPU if all you do is run an office suite, play music, and surf the Web. But most people do not consider that fact and just are led to buy a new unit that ends up being faster only because it has more memory.
My university (University of Missouri- Columbia) has over 1000 computers over 50 labs. I'd say that about 75-80% of those are Dells and Gateways running only XP Pro. Most of the rest are 15" "lampshade" iMac G4s, with about 50 Dells running XP and RHEL 3 in dual-boot and 20 Dells running only RHEL 3. There are a handful of PowerMac G5s and iMac G5s in the newer labs.
There are two labs that I use quite a bit on campus. One has about 40 computers in it, 30 are XP machines and the other 10 are the G4 iMacs. The XP boxes are usually all filled, and the people who come in look for one of those first. If the Dells are all being used, then one or two that come in will use a Mac. Most just swear under their breath and go to another lab. The other has 30 machines that dual-boot between RHEL 3 and XP. I have only seen one other person boot Linux on those machines, and that was to use a program (Sybyl) that only ran on UNIX. When I was using RHEL in that lab, some guy next to me whispered, "dude, you know you can get rid of that Linux crap by restarting and selecting 'Windows.'"
So I'd say that people stick with what is familiar to them, and that is overwhelmingly Windows.
A lot don't spend much money on software licenses. The district I went to school in used (and is *still* using) Windows 98 on its machines. They paid for the license once and are using it until the AMD Duron 700 computers it runs on die. Most of those computers don't have MS Office or anything like that on them. Some have Word 6 on them, but most are just the W98 OS, a Web browser, and some specific apps (a reading-level test, library card-catalog search function, etc.) that the school really uses the computers for in the first place.
My university used W2K Pro until MS announced that it was moving into extended support phase (last year), upon which they moved to XP. I bet they stay with XP until 2011, when XP Pro gets its mainstream support dropped my MSFT. The Windows OSes have not changed that much since about W2K, so lots of businesses have CFOs that don't buy the Fisher-Price GUI as an improvement and thus hang onto older OSes until they no longer get patched.
In Linux, executables don't generally have extensions on them. But you can easily tell what a file is by looking at its properties at the MIME type. It will not say, "JPEG Image" but "application/binary."
Actually, Wal-Mart doesn't pay for many stolen, damaged, or unsold goods. The manufacturers/distributors do as Wal-Mart just sells them for them for a nice "slotting fee." Anything that does not sell is not Wal-Mart's problem as it technically is not Wal-Mart's to begin with.
Sound goofy? It's true and also why lots of suppliers don't like to sell to Wal-Mart.
And if you read the comments, a few people were saying that they were a shoe-in to win because not a whole lot of people visit AnandTech. Do you think that was before or after they got Slashdotted?;)
Huh, I knew that the binaries were that small, but I thought that the DLLs would be a lot bigger than 2MB. Like another one of the people who responded to my post, then the issue becomes loading the *right* executable for your CPU, not fitting them all on the install media.
Don't underestimate the will of the *nix guys to port their OS to any architecture. IBM put it on a frigging wristwatch for Christ's sake. And Sun DID port Solaris to the x86 platform, maybe Atari's m68k was next...
Heh. I ran that on an old Mac LCII with a whopping 4MB RAM and 33MHz 68030. You learned to save early and often as System 7 tended to lock up very solid when it ran out of RAM. In fact, most any game tended to stretch that old Mac to its limit, but boy, were there some good games out there for it. We had both SimCity 1.4 and 2000, the original Sid Meier's Civilization, Space Invaders, Oregon Trail, a vector-graphics game called Spectre, and several others.
I wish I could find those games again. I am sure that I could get qemu to play them. The games today trade glitz and glamour for the elegant gameplay of those old 8-bit-color games.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, no kidding. I am even with an ISP that permits BitTorrent downloads and the fact that there are fewer seeders than there used to be makes what used to be THE fastest way to get a distro ISO about the slowest. Maybe if the illegal stuff was gotten off of BT, we could go back to the good old days? Something tells me no, though...
Yes, it does. I forgot that- we had 95 (first ed.) computers at school and they did not suport USB. :(
I'll second you on that one. Windows XP and 98SE required about the same amount of restarts in my usage of them, but generally a reboot "fixed" XP while 98SE would need a reinstallation of a driver or something. Also, you can generally kill a locked-up task in XP and it generally won't take the whole OS down with it like in 98SE. 98SE was much better than 95 as it had USB support, but the DOS-based Windows are inferior to the NT-based ones by a long shot.
I think that PSUs have only gotten bigger because people are sticking more stuff in their machines. There weren't dual 75W graphics cards set up in SLi in the 486 days nor were there CD drives, lights, or even more than one HDD. All of that stuff takes wattage to run and adds up to the PSU bill.
The components themselves today are generally at least as power-efficient as they were back then. My dad's old 486DX2/50 ran without a heatsink or fan and consumed less that 15W of power. One of my friends has a 1.1GHz Pentium M ULV mini-notebook that the *whole notebook* maybe takes 20W of power running full-blast with the screen on high brightness. The old 14" CRT connected to that IBM took more juice than the P-M unit does too.
Well, there are certain features that are present on newer systems that were not on older systems. You are correct in stating that the move from 16-bit to 32-bit CPU architecture was a major one, but what about the jump from 32-bit to 64-bit? How about SSE too? I'd like to see a 386 try to run x86_64 code with SSE3 enhancements. Also, what about FPUs and SMP? They were not even present on a 386 but there are generally several FPUs on new chips. You could not have SMP until the Pentium came out. What about no-execute bits, CPU throttling, etc? Nowhere to be seen on the 386.
My point is that there are a lot of differences between old and new chips and that progress keeps happening, even if technically a 386 could run some of the code we run on new chips today.
I totally agree with you. I leave it up until I have to reboot, and then I do it. I care more about how my machine runs that what value /usr/bin/uptime gives you.
A 3-year-old PC is not *that* old, anyway. Most businesses keep computers for 4-5 years. Now 8or 10 years is certainly getting up there though...
That 80GB is to hold all the viruses and spyware ;-)
My HDD is only 74GB, BTW.
Shoot, once you have a monitor, the rest of an entire NICE computer is a grand or so. I built a very nice X2 4200+ system with 2GB RAM, a Raptor, 6600GT, all very good stuff for about $1100 tax paid and parts shipped. $700 isn't cheap at all.
The Conroe (with a C) will use the same LGA775 socket used in the Prescott and Presler chips.
Hey hey, what about Socket 603/604 for the Xeons?
Ah, I knew that we mere mortal individual customers can't get W2K anymore, but I guess it makes sense for Microsoft not to tee off big corporate customers that have the clout and $$$ to switch to another OS if Microsoft does not at least make some concessions.
The only downsides are that MS no longer sells new W2K licenses and they will stop releasing patches. W2K might be a good OS, but when the patches stop, all it takes is one cracker to write one virus to make the OS unusable.
The best thing for that OS would be to open-source it so the community could support it. I bet it would be EXTREMELY popular. But that will happen...never.
Now I might be in the minority here, but I personally like to see cross-pollination of ideas. So what if Vista rips off its GUI from OSX and its (rumored) shell from Linux? I'd personally be HAPPY to see them do that as imitation is the best form of flattery. And the end-users of Vista will get to have a better experience than they otherwise would have.
However, I believe that the imitation does have its limits- and those limits would be copying code illegally.
Most people have very little of a clue when it comes to computers. They know that newer ones are faster and bigger numbers are better (and thus enters the AMD-P4 clockspeed fiasco.) But they generally do not know what their machine is really capable of and how to extract the most from it. That takes *work* and is something that is not tolerated in a country where most people are overweight.
BTW, if the managers don't like the work laptops with the 7800s, could you "dumpster dive" for them? I sure would be trying to do that and sell them for what they are worth, or at least pick up one for myself.
For me it is using lots of apps at one time. It is just too handy to have everything you need to work open and ready.
I remember, back in the 286 days, when you could only have ONE application open at once. That was awful to try to work in when you were typing up a report but needed to look up figures from a table in a spreadsheet and had to close the report, open the spreadsheet, jot down the figures, close the spreadsheet, and then re-open the word processor. It ran DOS 4.00, which was a single-taking OS, so this was not surprising.
Newer computers with multitasking OSes are able to keep multiple applications to some extent, but the system resources limit how much you can do. A Mac LCII I used in the mid 1990s could have two apps open at one time maximum or else it would lock up. A K6-2/500 box running Windows 98SE in the late 1990s let me keep most of MS Works open and still chance looking up a piece of info online. And my P4-M 2.2GHz laptop I got over 3 years ago can take most any office suite/Internet task I throw at it and still have some room under the pedal (it has the maximum 1GB RAM and runs Linux, which in my experience handles multitasking way better than Windows.)
Most applications, excepting games, encoders/compilers, and iterative scientific apps, take very little in the way of CPU horsepower to keep running once you open them, and don't take that much to even open. They do require a decent amount of RAM to keep going. But adding more RAM into a already-existing system to speed it up is a lot less expensive and more effective than buying a new computer with a more-overkill CPU if all you do is run an office suite, play music, and surf the Web. But most people do not consider that fact and just are led to buy a new unit that ends up being faster only because it has more memory.
My university (University of Missouri- Columbia) has over 1000 computers over 50 labs. I'd say that about 75-80% of those are Dells and Gateways running only XP Pro. Most of the rest are 15" "lampshade" iMac G4s, with about 50 Dells running XP and RHEL 3 in dual-boot and 20 Dells running only RHEL 3. There are a handful of PowerMac G5s and iMac G5s in the newer labs.
There are two labs that I use quite a bit on campus. One has about 40 computers in it, 30 are XP machines and the other 10 are the G4 iMacs. The XP boxes are usually all filled, and the people who come in look for one of those first. If the Dells are all being used, then one or two that come in will use a Mac. Most just swear under their breath and go to another lab. The other has 30 machines that dual-boot between RHEL 3 and XP. I have only seen one other person boot Linux on those machines, and that was to use a program (Sybyl) that only ran on UNIX. When I was using RHEL in that lab, some guy next to me whispered, "dude, you know you can get rid of that Linux crap by restarting and selecting 'Windows.'"
So I'd say that people stick with what is familiar to them, and that is overwhelmingly Windows.
A lot don't spend much money on software licenses. The district I went to school in used (and is *still* using) Windows 98 on its machines. They paid for the license once and are using it until the AMD Duron 700 computers it runs on die. Most of those computers don't have MS Office or anything like that on them. Some have Word 6 on them, but most are just the W98 OS, a Web browser, and some specific apps (a reading-level test, library card-catalog search function, etc.) that the school really uses the computers for in the first place.
My university used W2K Pro until MS announced that it was moving into extended support phase (last year), upon which they moved to XP. I bet they stay with XP until 2011, when XP Pro gets its mainstream support dropped my MSFT. The Windows OSes have not changed that much since about W2K, so lots of businesses have CFOs that don't buy the Fisher-Price GUI as an improvement and thus hang onto older OSes until they no longer get patched.
That's where I store mine: /home/user/code.
In Linux, executables don't generally have extensions on them. But you can easily tell what a file is by looking at its properties at the MIME type. It will not say, "JPEG Image" but "application/binary."
Actually, Wal-Mart doesn't pay for many stolen, damaged, or unsold goods. The manufacturers/distributors do as Wal-Mart just sells them for them for a nice "slotting fee." Anything that does not sell is not Wal-Mart's problem as it technically is not Wal-Mart's to begin with.
Sound goofy? It's true and also why lots of suppliers don't like to sell to Wal-Mart.
And if you read the comments, a few people were saying that they were a shoe-in to win because not a whole lot of people visit AnandTech. Do you think that was before or after they got Slashdotted? ;)
Huh, I knew that the binaries were that small, but I thought that the DLLs would be a lot bigger than 2MB. Like another one of the people who responded to my post, then the issue becomes loading the *right* executable for your CPU, not fitting them all on the install media.
Don't underestimate the will of the *nix guys to port their OS to any architecture. IBM put it on a frigging wristwatch for Christ's sake. And Sun DID port Solaris to the x86 platform, maybe Atari's m68k was next...
Heh. I ran that on an old Mac LCII with a whopping 4MB RAM and 33MHz 68030. You learned to save early and often as System 7 tended to lock up very solid when it ran out of RAM. In fact, most any game tended to stretch that old Mac to its limit, but boy, were there some good games out there for it. We had both SimCity 1.4 and 2000, the original Sid Meier's Civilization, Space Invaders, Oregon Trail, a vector-graphics game called Spectre, and several others.
I wish I could find those games again. I am sure that I could get qemu to play them. The games today trade glitz and glamour for the elegant gameplay of those old 8-bit-color games.