Been there, done that (with my own laptop.) 3-year-old Gateway with P4-M 2.2GHz, bumped the RAM to 1GB, HDD to 100GB and it runs Ubuntu 5.10 nicely. I pretty much just do office-app stuff, media playback, and Web browsing/e-mail. It's enough for me for now- upgrading would just let 99% of my CPU cycles go towards Folding at Home instead of 95%.
The best *single* metric of evaluating car performance is lb/hp. That takes advantage of the physics formulas and is pretty much reproducible anywhere: the lower the number the faster the car. Of course your real-world performance will vary (too much power will make launches tricky and give disappointing 0-60 times).
I think your fictional V6 is bogus. 283 CI = 4.6L. That's awfully big for a V6 and it has almost no power to boot. My car has a 200hp V6 with a whopping 182 CI engine, and that's not all that great of a specific output. Neither is that 454 (a real engine), which is really just a stroked 427 to deal with emissions regs better. Getting 350hp from the '80s low-compression 454s was good, but now a GM Performance Parts 454 has at least 450hp.
100 hp/liter (160 hp/100 CI) is the benchmark of " very good" for naturally aspirated engines, sort of like being able to have a teraflop supercomputer. That's what everyone aims at.
Exactly! I kept trying to explain to my brother that his laptop's hardware is not the problem- it's Windows XP (especially the SP2 patches) that is making his system run poorly and experience instabilities. I run Linux on my machine, which is older than his, and it runs with nary a problem. He thinks that it is because my computer is somehow different/better than his (mine is actaully a bit older), but nope, it is because I don't run Windows. I do dual-boot and have a few less problems than he does just because I have things set up a little better in XP, but I still have a lot better time on Linux than XP. I wonder why more people don't at least give it a try on their old computer before they throw it out to get a new one to run the exact same XP OS.
I agree. I know people who had computers much newer than mine and have already replaced them due to poor performance (and they are *not* gamers.) They all run Windows and all got massive malware infections that ground the system to a halt. They would reformat, reinstall, and in a month or two be back at the ground-to-a-halt phase.
They all look at my old laptop and wonder how I keep using it. I just reiterate that you *must* be very careful with your antivirus and antispyware programs and also don't visit warez or porn sites- don't do that and you computer will still be very usable for several years after you bought it. They mumble something about it being a hassle to make sure everything is updated and run. I just shake my head and remember that a fool and his money is soon parted.
Thank God that I don't have anything like that on my profile. About the only people that would hold what's in there against me would be PETA because my picture is of me grilling a few particularly nice steaks out on the barbie.
Because frankly, college is not about doing what you're told, it's about learning, exploring new ideas, and being Free.
That might be nice and all, but all you'll get is a 0.8 GPA and kicked out of school. Sorry to say, but you still have to work while you're in college, unless perhaps you're a comm major...
The lifecycle of an x86 machine is just as long as that of a PPC machine. I have had my Gateway notebook for 3 years and aside from replacing the battery and a hard drive, it has been running very well. I don't see any need to replace it until somehting big breaks or the new dual-core 64-bit mobile CPUs come out midway through 2007.
I dunno, I think I'd take the goofy-looking Linux guys in your picture over the tattooed artsy-fartsy Mac users. At least the Linux guys probably don't have hepatitis...
The built-in Xorg drivers make a huge difference for ATI cards. Supposedly ATI's fglrx drivers are a little better, but the only things I have seen with the ATI binary drivers is that they tend to goof up my touchpad and prevent my laptop from suspending. It's not like I play UT2004 or anything on my laptop, so the DRI drivers are good enough for me. Even considering that, my next laptop will have an nVidia GPU in it for sure.
Yeah, no kidding. I am *very* used to running games at moderate detail and with all of the AA/AF turned off as I have Jurassic-era equipment by gamer standards (P4-M 2.2 GHz running a AGP 4x Radeon 9000 64MB.) It does not make that big of a difference to me anyway as it looks nice, but in a FPS game, do you just stand there admiring the scenery? No! You run around and shoot the bad guys.
And I laugh any time I see people doing CPU framerate comparisons at 640x480 or 800x600 with everything dialed down and judge CPU #2 a winner because it got 447 fps and CPU #1 only got 432. You honestly can't see anything over the refresh rate of your monitor (85 Hz top-end, generally 60Hz for an LCD) so you waste most of your huge framerate anyway. Shooter games are playable for me as long as the framerate is about 30-35 fps or so. Movies and TV are shot at 24 fps!! and few complain about flicker in them.
I think that the entire gaming industry is just set up to take advantage of suckers that will buy $900 sets of SLI graphics cards, $1000 CPUs, and super-expensive high-frequency overclocker RAM. Almost makes me wish I had invested in ATI, nVidia, AMD, or Crucial so I can take $1500 in dividends and buy a very usable computer that will last me four or more years.
Yes, I've seen it too. You'd think that they would use the opportunity to make a smaller overall package with the shorter screen but use a full-sized-keyboard. But that's not so- they seem to take a small laptop and tack an inch on each side, which makes the screen wider but uses the same small keyboard as the smaller unit.
I have a Gateway 600 with a 15.7" 4:3 screen at 1280x1024 (there *were* no widescreen laptops when it came out!) The keyboard is full-sized and there is maybe about 3/4" of plastic shroud on each side of the keyboard. That isn't bad. I know a guy with an eMachines 15.4" widescreen. His computer is about exactly as wide as mine is, but he has about 1.25-1.5" of plastic to the sides of his keyboard and he has a lot more keys that he has to do Fn+ to work. It is kind of funny watching him use Word as he has about 2/3 as many lines on a screen as I do but about three inches of "off the page" on each side of the page.
If I can still find one, I will get another 4:3 notebook, but everything is going widescreen now because the manufacturers want to push "media center" laptops that people can watch and record movies on. I hope that people see that with a 120GB notebook hard drive, your capture card will fill up your HDD in no time and realize the idiocy of this. I just want a reasonably powerful general-use laptop that has a long battery life and a reasonable keyboard and screen as I use a laptop to take notes and haul to the library and such- what a laptop is really designed to do.
Xandros, Linspire, Mepis, Mandriva, Knoppix, Kanotix, Gentoo, Slackware all use KDE. SuSE (for now) is KDE. I think FC4 has no preference like RHEL does- it all pretty much looks the same in either DE.
The tough thing for me was finding a good up-to-date Gnome distro. Sure, Debian uses Gnome, but it is 2.8 while current is 2.12. So I use Ubuntu.
Yeah, I know about that. The guy down the hall's 130nm Pentium M 1.4 stomped all over my 2.2GHz P4-M. Granted, it was a year newer than mine. I don't even want to see my brother's new 2.0GHz Dothan laptop. It will make my computer seem really, really slow and his runs XP and mine runs Ubuntu on a P4 kernel. God help my wallet if he sticks my Ubuntu CD in his computer...
It all depends on what your budget is and what you do with your computer. I use my laptop as basically an office machine- word processing, spreadsheets, e-mail, Web browsing. I also use it to play DVDs and music. That will not stress pretty much any machine made past 2000. My "heavy lifting" is doing the occasional compile or audio encoding, so the 2.2GHz P4-M takes a bit of time, but I don't do it that much so it does not matter if it is a little slower than new ones- just that it won't take ten minutes to rip a song.
I will probably upgrade when this machine wears out or the software gets too big for the hardware to handle. Since I run Linux, it will probably be the durability of the machine. Which I suppose it will take another couple of years of being hauled around before it becomes too broken to use. Then I will get a new one.
Also, until you can get a real difference in platform, it's kind of useless to buy a whole new computer. If I were to run out and buy a brand new laptop with a Pentium M 780 in it, I still am running a single-core 32-bit chip on i686 code. It will undoubtedly be faster, but there is nothing that it can do that I can't reasonably do with mine.
Yeah! I know- I have an Orinico Gold 802.11b card sitting in the bottom of my laptop. It's a 3-year-old card and it still can't scan for APs. I wish somebody had gotten onto getting that fixed, but I guess I am guilty as well as I can't code beyond "Hello World."
Here's why more people don't use OpenOffice:
1. THEY'VE NEVER HEARD OF IT. Most people don't know jack squat about computers or programs. They use what everyone else does or what they've seen elsewhere. That would be MS Office because that's what they have at school or work. They don't know that there are any other office suites even out there.
2. If they do know about OpenOffice, they don't like it because if they had ever used it before, the commands are in slightly different places on the menus than in the version of Office they use at work. This made it "too hard to use" because they have to re-learn a few locations of functions. (Interestingly enough, most people I know HATED Office 2003 when it first came out because the commands and menus were a little different than in Office 2000. They said it was impossible to use! Same thing for Windows 98 users than went to XP.)
3. They opened up the most heavily-formatted Office 2003 document they could find- lots of macros and such. It didn't open up quite right in OpenOffice, so they concluded that it was junk, never minding that Office 2000 or XP would have barfed on it worse. I used my Linux-running computer to display a read-only PPT 2003 presentation off of a USB stick after the presenter's computer crashed. He was SO pissed that one hyperlink didn't work right (linked to a non-existant file on the "E:/" drive, but the rest of the presentation was *perfect.*). So he used somebody else's computer with Office 2000. The text boxes were all over the place and his background was gone when they displayed it...
4. You can get MS Office for free from peer-to-peer or by sharing an original disc.
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Been there, done that (with my own laptop.) 3-year-old Gateway with P4-M 2.2GHz, bumped the RAM to 1GB, HDD to 100GB and it runs Ubuntu 5.10 nicely. I pretty much just do office-app stuff, media playback, and Web browsing/e-mail. It's enough for me for now- upgrading would just let 99% of my CPU cycles go towards Folding at Home instead of 95%.
The best *single* metric of evaluating car performance is lb/hp. That takes advantage of the physics formulas and is pretty much reproducible anywhere: the lower the number the faster the car. Of course your real-world performance will vary (too much power will make launches tricky and give disappointing 0-60 times).
I think your fictional V6 is bogus. 283 CI = 4.6L. That's awfully big for a V6 and it has almost no power to boot. My car has a 200hp V6 with a whopping 182 CI engine, and that's not all that great of a specific output. Neither is that 454 (a real engine), which is really just a stroked 427 to deal with emissions regs better. Getting 350hp from the '80s low-compression 454s was good, but now a GM Performance Parts 454 has at least 450hp. 100 hp/liter (160 hp/100 CI) is the benchmark of " very good" for naturally aspirated engines, sort of like being able to have a teraflop supercomputer. That's what everyone aims at.
Now Sony can make a Linux rootkit too!
Go work for Microsoft?
Exactly! I kept trying to explain to my brother that his laptop's hardware is not the problem- it's Windows XP (especially the SP2 patches) that is making his system run poorly and experience instabilities. I run Linux on my machine, which is older than his, and it runs with nary a problem. He thinks that it is because my computer is somehow different/better than his (mine is actaully a bit older), but nope, it is because I don't run Windows. I do dual-boot and have a few less problems than he does just because I have things set up a little better in XP, but I still have a lot better time on Linux than XP. I wonder why more people don't at least give it a try on their old computer before they throw it out to get a new one to run the exact same XP OS.
I agree. I know people who had computers much newer than mine and have already replaced them due to poor performance (and they are *not* gamers.) They all run Windows and all got massive malware infections that ground the system to a halt. They would reformat, reinstall, and in a month or two be back at the ground-to-a-halt phase.
They all look at my old laptop and wonder how I keep using it. I just reiterate that you *must* be very careful with your antivirus and antispyware programs and also don't visit warez or porn sites- don't do that and you computer will still be very usable for several years after you bought it. They mumble something about it being a hassle to make sure everything is updated and run. I just shake my head and remember that a fool and his money is soon parted.
Thank God that I don't have anything like that on my profile. About the only people that would hold what's in there against me would be PETA because my picture is of me grilling a few particularly nice steaks out on the barbie.
Because frankly, college is not about doing what you're told, it's about learning, exploring new ideas, and being Free.
That might be nice and all, but all you'll get is a 0.8 GPA and kicked out of school. Sorry to say, but you still have to work while you're in college, unless perhaps you're a comm major...
Yeah, it's not a bad idea. I wonder if they too will get an office in Brady?
A girl with taped-together glasses, a pocket protector, and a "How to Program in Machine Code" book standing naked would be geek porn.
The lifecycle of an x86 machine is just as long as that of a PPC machine. I have had my Gateway notebook for 3 years and aside from replacing the battery and a hard drive, it has been running very well. I don't see any need to replace it until somehting big breaks or the new dual-core 64-bit mobile CPUs come out midway through 2007.
I dunno, I think I'd take the goofy-looking Linux guys in your picture over the tattooed artsy-fartsy Mac users. At least the Linux guys probably don't have hepatitis...
The built-in Xorg drivers make a huge difference for ATI cards. Supposedly ATI's fglrx drivers are a little better, but the only things I have seen with the ATI binary drivers is that they tend to goof up my touchpad and prevent my laptop from suspending. It's not like I play UT2004 or anything on my laptop, so the DRI drivers are good enough for me. Even considering that, my next laptop will have an nVidia GPU in it for sure.
Yeah, no kidding. I am *very* used to running games at moderate detail and with all of the AA/AF turned off as I have Jurassic-era equipment by gamer standards (P4-M 2.2 GHz running a AGP 4x Radeon 9000 64MB.) It does not make that big of a difference to me anyway as it looks nice, but in a FPS game, do you just stand there admiring the scenery? No! You run around and shoot the bad guys.
And I laugh any time I see people doing CPU framerate comparisons at 640x480 or 800x600 with everything dialed down and judge CPU #2 a winner because it got 447 fps and CPU #1 only got 432. You honestly can't see anything over the refresh rate of your monitor (85 Hz top-end, generally 60Hz for an LCD) so you waste most of your huge framerate anyway. Shooter games are playable for me as long as the framerate is about 30-35 fps or so. Movies and TV are shot at 24 fps!! and few complain about flicker in them.
I think that the entire gaming industry is just set up to take advantage of suckers that will buy $900 sets of SLI graphics cards, $1000 CPUs, and super-expensive high-frequency overclocker RAM. Almost makes me wish I had invested in ATI, nVidia, AMD, or Crucial so I can take $1500 in dividends and buy a very usable computer that will last me four or more years.
Yes, I've seen it too. You'd think that they would use the opportunity to make a smaller overall package with the shorter screen but use a full-sized-keyboard. But that's not so- they seem to take a small laptop and tack an inch on each side, which makes the screen wider but uses the same small keyboard as the smaller unit. I have a Gateway 600 with a 15.7" 4:3 screen at 1280x1024 (there *were* no widescreen laptops when it came out!) The keyboard is full-sized and there is maybe about 3/4" of plastic shroud on each side of the keyboard. That isn't bad. I know a guy with an eMachines 15.4" widescreen. His computer is about exactly as wide as mine is, but he has about 1.25-1.5" of plastic to the sides of his keyboard and he has a lot more keys that he has to do Fn+ to work. It is kind of funny watching him use Word as he has about 2/3 as many lines on a screen as I do but about three inches of "off the page" on each side of the page. If I can still find one, I will get another 4:3 notebook, but everything is going widescreen now because the manufacturers want to push "media center" laptops that people can watch and record movies on. I hope that people see that with a 120GB notebook hard drive, your capture card will fill up your HDD in no time and realize the idiocy of this. I just want a reasonably powerful general-use laptop that has a long battery life and a reasonable keyboard and screen as I use a laptop to take notes and haul to the library and such- what a laptop is really designed to do.
Xandros, Linspire, Mepis, Mandriva, Knoppix, Kanotix, Gentoo, Slackware all use KDE. SuSE (for now) is KDE. I think FC4 has no preference like RHEL does- it all pretty much looks the same in either DE. The tough thing for me was finding a good up-to-date Gnome distro. Sure, Debian uses Gnome, but it is 2.8 while current is 2.12. So I use Ubuntu.
Yeah, I know about that. The guy down the hall's 130nm Pentium M 1.4 stomped all over my 2.2GHz P4-M. Granted, it was a year newer than mine. I don't even want to see my brother's new 2.0GHz Dothan laptop. It will make my computer seem really, really slow and his runs XP and mine runs Ubuntu on a P4 kernel. God help my wallet if he sticks my Ubuntu CD in his computer...
http://pegasosppc.com/
It all depends on what your budget is and what you do with your computer. I use my laptop as basically an office machine- word processing, spreadsheets, e-mail, Web browsing. I also use it to play DVDs and music. That will not stress pretty much any machine made past 2000. My "heavy lifting" is doing the occasional compile or audio encoding, so the 2.2GHz P4-M takes a bit of time, but I don't do it that much so it does not matter if it is a little slower than new ones- just that it won't take ten minutes to rip a song. I will probably upgrade when this machine wears out or the software gets too big for the hardware to handle. Since I run Linux, it will probably be the durability of the machine. Which I suppose it will take another couple of years of being hauled around before it becomes too broken to use. Then I will get a new one. Also, until you can get a real difference in platform, it's kind of useless to buy a whole new computer. If I were to run out and buy a brand new laptop with a Pentium M 780 in it, I still am running a single-core 32-bit chip on i686 code. It will undoubtedly be faster, but there is nothing that it can do that I can't reasonably do with mine.
Yes, communism is like the Intel NetBurst architecture- looks great on paper but real life proves it's a failure.
I have a hunch as to why they are doing this: it will help them sell "secure" TPM/TCPA platforms that require Windows Vista to run.
Don't take up smoking crack unless you want to be a Big 12 basketball coach. Right, Quin?
Yeah! I know- I have an Orinico Gold 802.11b card sitting in the bottom of my laptop. It's a 3-year-old card and it still can't scan for APs. I wish somebody had gotten onto getting that fixed, but I guess I am guilty as well as I can't code beyond "Hello World."
Here's why more people don't use OpenOffice: 1. THEY'VE NEVER HEARD OF IT. Most people don't know jack squat about computers or programs. They use what everyone else does or what they've seen elsewhere. That would be MS Office because that's what they have at school or work. They don't know that there are any other office suites even out there. 2. If they do know about OpenOffice, they don't like it because if they had ever used it before, the commands are in slightly different places on the menus than in the version of Office they use at work. This made it "too hard to use" because they have to re-learn a few locations of functions. (Interestingly enough, most people I know HATED Office 2003 when it first came out because the commands and menus were a little different than in Office 2000. They said it was impossible to use! Same thing for Windows 98 users than went to XP.) 3. They opened up the most heavily-formatted Office 2003 document they could find- lots of macros and such. It didn't open up quite right in OpenOffice, so they concluded that it was junk, never minding that Office 2000 or XP would have barfed on it worse. I used my Linux-running computer to display a read-only PPT 2003 presentation off of a USB stick after the presenter's computer crashed. He was SO pissed that one hyperlink didn't work right (linked to a non-existant file on the "E:/" drive, but the rest of the presentation was *perfect.*). So he used somebody else's computer with Office 2000. The text boxes were all over the place and his background was gone when they displayed it... 4. You can get MS Office for free from peer-to-peer or by sharing an original disc.