Alcohol is a pretty volatile liquid with a low specific heat and would not be a very good coolant, unless you used it evaporatively. But then it evaporates at 78C, which is a tad too hot, and your whiskey would all go up in steam:(
Au contraire. My university has a few P2-233s with 256MB RAM that run XP Pro in one of the labs. It does run but it is pretty slow. These machines originally ran NT 3.51 or 4.0 when they were new.
My experience with Linux over the last two years has been that a full, modern DE (KDE, Gnome) consumes somewhat less RAM than a bone-stock XP does at idle, but it's not that much less. A fresh install of XP without an antivirus, firewall, or other stuff (and it's not online, of course!!) consumes about 175MB RAM on my laptop. A fresh install of SuSE or Ubuntu takes about 130-150MB. Once I added an antivirus, anti-spyware, good bidirectional firewall, XP's idle RAM usage is about 270-330MB vs. the about 130-150 for Linux. I have a gig of RAM, so XP's increase is not that painful.
The real difference is what happens once you start to use the OSes. XP generally uses in that 400-450MB range once you have a bunch of stuff open, and Linux is in the low 300s. Again, that difference is probably due to the antivirus, etc. But load up that CPU or HDD with I/O requests and Windows has a very hard time drawing, moving, resizing windows. Linux will slow down, but stays usable and responsive at a much higher loading than does Windows. So at least in my experience, it is not the increased RAM usage but the better division of computer resources that sets Linux apart as more responsive on older and less-powerful hardware.
I have a similar-vintage Gateway 600 (the big one with a 15.7" screen and weighs 8.6 lbs.) and yes, you can put a different OS on it and it will run just fine. There are specific chipset drivers from the mfr. mostly to implement specific power-management schemes. These save very little power as I have found. I can boot XP with the Gateway power-management utilities all on and get within 5 minutes of the same battery life if I boot up any Linux distribution that support CPU frequency scaling (which means almost all distributions made in the last couple of years.)
When I also maxed out the RAM to 1GB, it runs XP okay and runs Linux well. I'll get a new computer when dual-core, 64-bit processors ship as that will be a major boost in performance over my 2.2GHz P4-M. My brother has a new Dell with a 2.0GHz Pentium M and while it is fast, it isn't THAT much faster, especially under my eight-apps-open-at-a-time usage pattern. The things that I really want are USB 2.0, a DVD burner, a cooler-running CPU (my P4-M has a 34.5W TDP), a significantly smaller chassis, and two CPU cores to help with my multitasking. I'd want 64-bit ones because the OS support is there and the x86_64 app performance is supposedly a little better than i686.
Eh, it depends on what you call "death." I had a battery and HDD die on me in my Gateway 600 when it was about 3 years old. It's not like my CPU was fried, the display cracked, or motherboard conked out and costs $500 to fix. Batteries generally die after 2-3 years anyway and HDDs generally go 3-5 years, so it was not out of the norm.
I guess somebody who knows nothing about computers would hear the HDD crunch and see "No Operating System Found" after the BIOS loads and think it died and get a $2000 new computer to take notes with instead of sticking a $100 HDD in a still-usable machine. I dunno, I tend to want to get a decent useful life out of a machine before I plunk down the big bucks for a new one.
We computer people already spend hours sitting relatively motionless at our desks.
That's why you feel so sleepy and sluggish. You need to get up and around to get the blood flowing every once in a while. It is very hard being a desk jockey. I always make a point to keep the temperature cool (67 degrees) if I can and always have a jug of plain water nearby. The cool temps plus the water makes for a full bladder and that entices me to get up periodically. I also exercise quite a bit and after a while of doing it, you get more energy all the time. I do my running and weightlifting in the evening so that I am not tired during the day as exercise does wear you out after you do it.
I'd agree with you with lossless music taking up a lot of space. I store my relatively small collection (maybe 50 albums) in FLAC Audio format and that takes up well over 20GB. FLAC averages about 1000 Kbps, so that is better than the 1732kbps that 16-bit stereo PCM audio at 44.1KHz does. But unless you add a lot more channels or bit-depth to your audio, I don't see the files getting much bigger. 44.1KHz is already overkill as humans can only hear up to about 22KHz anyway, so 384KHz would be even more over-the-top.
Re:Scoffing Posts Are From Those With Sort/No Memo
on
Hard Drive Memory Lane
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· Score: 1
I think that modern (I use that term LOOSELY) 3.5" floppies have a maximum tx rate of 32KB/sec. At least that's what all of the 1.44MB 3.5" floppies I have ever used have been.
Some even had funky cables too. I had an old 12MHz 80286 PS/1 with a 30MB drive that had a drive connector that looked like the end of a PCI card on the drive end. I also had a 80486 PS/2 that had a 400MB drive that had a cable that looked like a normal IDE cable but had about 60 pins and was 50% wider than a normal ribbon connector.
Oh, and the PS/2 had MicroChannel connectors instead of ISA or PCI slots too. You couldn't put any non-IBM parts into those machines save maybe for a CD-ROM (the PS/2) or a floppy.
It would also take an arm made to extremely tight tolerances, which is very expensive and leads to lots of failed parts. Microprocessors have the same yield problems as they are made with very small tolerances, but unlike a chip that can be clocked lower and have cache, etc turned off, a HDD must either be up to tolerance or go in the trash pile.
No, if they really wanted to punish him, they'd make him run Windows ME for ten years.
On second thought, that would be too cruel and unusual. Give him the chair instead- that would be much more humane!
Re:Fuzzing and Obfuscation
on
Mitnick on OSS
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· Score: 1
Here's the root $PATH on my machine:/sbin/usr/sbin/usr/local/sbin/opt/kde3/sbin/opt/gnome/sbin/root/bin/usr/local/bin/usr/bin/usr/X11R6/bin/bin/usr/games/opt/gnome/bin/opt/kde3/bin/usr/lib/jvm/jre/bin/usr/lib/mit/bin/usr/lib/mit/sbin/usr/lib/qt3/bin
My experience with large organizations (schools, companies) is that they are really slow to upgrade computers and OSes. My university used W2K until the fall of 2005, and my father's company still uses the same W2K/Office 2K that they have been since they upgraded from W95 in 2001. The school district that I attended *still* uses W98 on ancient P2s and AMD Durons. The key word is "ROI"- the longer the upgrade cycle, the more use you can milk out of your computer dollars.
Re:Damned if they do, Damned if they don't
on
No Anti-Virus in Vista
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· Score: -1, Troll
Yeah, I did, lest somebody crack open my Linux box to hack the VMWare XP install in it:D
Have you ever USED a heat pump in any area that gets below freezing in winter? They work well as air-conditioners but provide very little heat. They do suck lots of electricity though.
We do the same thing here at UM-Columbia, except the computers are netbooted with PXE and then the OS and all apps are installed from one cluster of servers.
Why doesn't somebody take one of each an Apple (EFI) and other make (BIOS) Core Duo notebook and run Linux on them. It runs on both kinds and has different drivers than XP does. Then see if the same bug results. If the bug is present in Linux under the BIOS model but not the EFI model, then it is a HW problem on the BIOS model. If the bug occurs in both, it might also be a HW problem but could also be a Linux bug too (but not likely.) If the bug is not noticed in either, then it is a Windows problem only.
Well, they had the fastest 80386 too. That was really famous as it broke the AMD-Intel joint production agreement. I can also think of the dropping of the frontside bus, which Intel still has not done.
There were also some P3s (Klamath core and ~600MHz if I remember correctly) that had overheating problems and had to be recalled/delayed. And then there was the 1.133GHz "Tualatin" PIII that had similar problems and also had to be recalled/delayed. But those never got to be nearly as widespread as the FDIV Pentiums. I think Intel caught most of them before they got out of the door.
I bet that Microsoft will not patch XP to work with EFI. We all know that Vista will support EFI, so MS will want to make people get Vista to run on the x86 Macs instead. MSFT will make money on two fronts: they will sell more copies of Vista and not have to spend money to patch XP.
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I bet people start crapping when they have to pay to see encrypted https sites or check SSL- or TLS-encrypted e-mail.
Alcohol is a pretty volatile liquid with a low specific heat and would not be a very good coolant, unless you used it evaporatively. But then it evaporates at 78C, which is a tad too hot, and your whiskey would all go up in steam :(
Au contraire. My university has a few P2-233s with 256MB RAM that run XP Pro in one of the labs. It does run but it is pretty slow. These machines originally ran NT 3.51 or 4.0 when they were new.
My experience with Linux over the last two years has been that a full, modern DE (KDE, Gnome) consumes somewhat less RAM than a bone-stock XP does at idle, but it's not that much less. A fresh install of XP without an antivirus, firewall, or other stuff (and it's not online, of course!!) consumes about 175MB RAM on my laptop. A fresh install of SuSE or Ubuntu takes about 130-150MB. Once I added an antivirus, anti-spyware, good bidirectional firewall, XP's idle RAM usage is about 270-330MB vs. the about 130-150 for Linux. I have a gig of RAM, so XP's increase is not that painful.
The real difference is what happens once you start to use the OSes. XP generally uses in that 400-450MB range once you have a bunch of stuff open, and Linux is in the low 300s. Again, that difference is probably due to the antivirus, etc. But load up that CPU or HDD with I/O requests and Windows has a very hard time drawing, moving, resizing windows. Linux will slow down, but stays usable and responsive at a much higher loading than does Windows. So at least in my experience, it is not the increased RAM usage but the better division of computer resources that sets Linux apart as more responsive on older and less-powerful hardware.
I have a similar-vintage Gateway 600 (the big one with a 15.7" screen and weighs 8.6 lbs.) and yes, you can put a different OS on it and it will run just fine. There are specific chipset drivers from the mfr. mostly to implement specific power-management schemes. These save very little power as I have found. I can boot XP with the Gateway power-management utilities all on and get within 5 minutes of the same battery life if I boot up any Linux distribution that support CPU frequency scaling (which means almost all distributions made in the last couple of years.)
When I also maxed out the RAM to 1GB, it runs XP okay and runs Linux well. I'll get a new computer when dual-core, 64-bit processors ship as that will be a major boost in performance over my 2.2GHz P4-M. My brother has a new Dell with a 2.0GHz Pentium M and while it is fast, it isn't THAT much faster, especially under my eight-apps-open-at-a-time usage pattern. The things that I really want are USB 2.0, a DVD burner, a cooler-running CPU (my P4-M has a 34.5W TDP), a significantly smaller chassis, and two CPU cores to help with my multitasking. I'd want 64-bit ones because the OS support is there and the x86_64 app performance is supposedly a little better than i686.
Eh, it depends on what you call "death." I had a battery and HDD die on me in my Gateway 600 when it was about 3 years old. It's not like my CPU was fried, the display cracked, or motherboard conked out and costs $500 to fix. Batteries generally die after 2-3 years anyway and HDDs generally go 3-5 years, so it was not out of the norm.
I guess somebody who knows nothing about computers would hear the HDD crunch and see "No Operating System Found" after the BIOS loads and think it died and get a $2000 new computer to take notes with instead of sticking a $100 HDD in a still-usable machine. I dunno, I tend to want to get a decent useful life out of a machine before I plunk down the big bucks for a new one.
We computer people already spend hours sitting relatively motionless at our desks.
That's why you feel so sleepy and sluggish. You need to get up and around to get the blood flowing every once in a while. It is very hard being a desk jockey. I always make a point to keep the temperature cool (67 degrees) if I can and always have a jug of plain water nearby. The cool temps plus the water makes for a full bladder and that entices me to get up periodically. I also exercise quite a bit and after a while of doing it, you get more energy all the time. I do my running and weightlifting in the evening so that I am not tired during the day as exercise does wear you out after you do it.
I'd agree with you with lossless music taking up a lot of space. I store my relatively small collection (maybe 50 albums) in FLAC Audio format and that takes up well over 20GB. FLAC averages about 1000 Kbps, so that is better than the 1732kbps that 16-bit stereo PCM audio at 44.1KHz does. But unless you add a lot more channels or bit-depth to your audio, I don't see the files getting much bigger. 44.1KHz is already overkill as humans can only hear up to about 22KHz anyway, so 384KHz would be even more over-the-top.
I think that modern (I use that term LOOSELY) 3.5" floppies have a maximum tx rate of 32KB/sec. At least that's what all of the 1.44MB 3.5" floppies I have ever used have been.
Some even had funky cables too. I had an old 12MHz 80286 PS/1 with a 30MB drive that had a drive connector that looked like the end of a PCI card on the drive end. I also had a 80486 PS/2 that had a 400MB drive that had a cable that looked like a normal IDE cable but had about 60 pins and was 50% wider than a normal ribbon connector.
Oh, and the PS/2 had MicroChannel connectors instead of ISA or PCI slots too. You couldn't put any non-IBM parts into those machines save maybe for a CD-ROM (the PS/2) or a floppy.
It would also take an arm made to extremely tight tolerances, which is very expensive and leads to lots of failed parts. Microprocessors have the same yield problems as they are made with very small tolerances, but unlike a chip that can be clocked lower and have cache, etc turned off, a HDD must either be up to tolerance or go in the trash pile.
enlightenment please!?!
http://www.enlightenment.org/
No, if they really wanted to punish him, they'd make him run Windows ME for ten years.
On second thought, that would be too cruel and unusual. Give him the chair instead- that would be much more humane!
Here's the root $PATH on my machine: /sbin /usr/sbin /usr/local/sbin /opt/kde3/sbin /opt/gnome/sbin /root/bin /usr/local/bin /usr/bin /usr/X11R6/bin /bin /usr/games /opt/gnome/bin /opt/kde3/bin /usr/lib/jvm/jre/bin /usr/lib/mit/bin /usr/lib/mit/sbin /usr/lib/qt3/bin
/home/$USER in there at all.
No
My experience with large organizations (schools, companies) is that they are really slow to upgrade computers and OSes. My university used W2K until the fall of 2005, and my father's company still uses the same W2K/Office 2K that they have been since they upgraded from W95 in 2001. The school district that I attended *still* uses W98 on ancient P2s and AMD Durons. The key word is "ROI"- the longer the upgrade cycle, the more use you can milk out of your computer dollars.
Yeah, I did, lest somebody crack open my Linux box to hack the VMWare XP install in it :D
Have you ever USED a heat pump in any area that gets below freezing in winter? They work well as air-conditioners but provide very little heat. They do suck lots of electricity though.
We do the same thing here at UM-Columbia, except the computers are netbooted with PXE and then the OS and all apps are installed from one cluster of servers.
Hah! My laptop has only USB 1.1 interfaces so it's exempt from the bug!
Why doesn't somebody take one of each an Apple (EFI) and other make (BIOS) Core Duo notebook and run Linux on them. It runs on both kinds and has different drivers than XP does. Then see if the same bug results. If the bug is present in Linux under the BIOS model but not the EFI model, then it is a HW problem on the BIOS model. If the bug occurs in both, it might also be a HW problem but could also be a Linux bug too (but not likely.) If the bug is not noticed in either, then it is a Windows problem only.
Well, they had the fastest 80386 too. That was really famous as it broke the AMD-Intel joint production agreement. I can also think of the dropping of the frontside bus, which Intel still has not done.
I heard that AMD will be shipping their first 65nm products in late 2006 and have heard nothing about 45nm production.
There were also some P3s (Klamath core and ~600MHz if I remember correctly) that had overheating problems and had to be recalled/delayed. And then there was the 1.133GHz "Tualatin" PIII that had similar problems and also had to be recalled/delayed. But those never got to be nearly as widespread as the FDIV Pentiums. I think Intel caught most of them before they got out of the door.
No. The movie was "This Film is Not Yet Rated," which is supposed to be a scathing documentary making fun of the MPAA.
I bet that Microsoft will not patch XP to work with EFI. We all know that Vista will support EFI, so MS will want to make people get Vista to run on the x86 Macs instead. MSFT will make money on two fronts: they will sell more copies of Vista and not have to spend money to patch XP.