Well, on macs mouse buttons are assigned keys, like button 4 & 5 are back/forward. But not application specific. Little different, but doable.
But ya, the problems with cut/paste is in the X part of bsd, getting the hang of application instead of window cycling is wierd but doable. The command/1,2, etc doesnt seem to work with xdarwin. But maybe it will in jaguar 10.3 and apples own xserver.
The alt-tab, command-tab thing is kinda the same, just one is for windows, the other is apps, then on the app use command-1. (Doesnt work in X, but neat alternative.)
Hey, I did say I only had my mac for 1 day, right?;)
Actually price for price, a good duel Compaq 2.4ghz Xeon runs around 2000 bux from tiger direct. 1.4ghz DP Apple powermac runs around 2600. But comes with DVD-R and applications to make movies.
So, the prices dont seem too bad. But we are talking high performance workstations, right?
Lots of my friends who are Unix admins also, have been buying power macs for their desktops. So I decided to try a mac since OSX should rock with a freebsd (darwin) core. I just picked up my power mac yesterday, give you my impressions from a hardcore linux/solaris/xp user.
I wont even be using the machine for video edit (or not anytime soon). But the damn thing comes with some nice video editing features as standard. I can tell right away, that this OS is geared around it, all these iSuff on the desktop. Looks easy enough to put some dvd movies together. Not the direction im going, but its there, and in your face.
But onto my impressions of a unix workstation.
Pretty much a very nice machine, I grabbed apple developers tools, xtox, fink and all the goodies to enable X and some programs. Compiled all the terms (aterm/rxvt/eterm) and screen for me to start working. (Thank god for dsl)
First thing, I didnt even bother using the Mac keyboard or mouse. Used my windows M$ mouse/keyboard. Cant stand typing on anything other than the natural. And a wheel mouse is extremely nice. (Had to load osx drivers off m$ site to get it to work, yes osx drivers...) Not all features are supported or work right from app to app. Some standards would be nice. (Most programs are dumbed down to 1 mouse it seems also.)
Terminal, the weak client that it comes with cant hold its own with putty. I grabbed a OS9 client that supports more features and works much better. Tried to use some Aterm's with a vga font I installed. Font support is ok, but lacks good ansi/vt100 fonts which you can install manually for X, but for system, dunno yet. Antialaising looks like freetype (for all I know it could be..)
Cut/paste/select all is annoying as hell, no standard like windows, or even KDE/Icewm/CDE. Cant even hit home/end to move the cursor on some apps command line. Very freak'n weak in this area, maybe they will fix it, as is, I would like to bitch slap the apple devleopers for this. (This OS IS NOT command line friendly for text input...)
Alt-tab doesnt work, grabbed a 3rd party app to fix that. BUT (and horrible) all X programs show up as 1 program (same as finder, major suckage.) Finder is another waste of space, found a Midnight Commander clone, thank god. Copying files in the shell is quicker than moving around in Finder. Finder is the worst file manager i've ever seen. And I've had my share of them on many OS's.
You can tell Apple is moving this OS towards the home user, and video people. But with a bsd core, this os would rock with some tweaks for command line users. Too much work to get it to function as a terminal/ssh, multiple command window workstation. I'm looking around for apps, but this is to be a slap in the face of taking BSD and crippling it with horible text input. No, Really it is this bad, but it can be fixed.....
So far, finding software has been kinda hard. Only freeware stuff is ports from stuff you can find on freshmeat, and most 3rd party apps are shareware only. Ported Games dont even run smoothly on the 1.42ghz DP with the raedon 9000. Seti ran slower than expected, with the 2meg l3 cache thought it would run faster (yes I niced it...) (I only tried quake1, q3a,ut,u2k3,medal of honor demos. MOHAA ran the best and is osx not os9 versioned.
I will say, I wanted it for the bsd core, and awesome aqua qui. Thou after using it the command line (text) typing interface is weak, and needs improvement. But its a new O/S I hope they fix it. (Where can I ask developers at apple about this? How can you mess this up?) Its much improved over OS/9, and I can even ps and kill hung applications. Smb mount from the command line works. (Be careful, my first crash was smb mounting a share with blackslashs..)
If your just going to make movies on it, it works great, codecs work. Grabbed mplayer and with all codecs, watched some xvid divx files, smooth as silk. Even saw a program mencoder to dump dvd's right into divx on sourceforge, all gui'ed
I upgraded from Netscape 4.7x as my email client. The email client had all the features I wanted, and everything worked great. I decided to upgrade to Mozilla 1.2.x and most things have worked. Grabbed the spellchecker plugin and gpg, all set.
Only problems I have now, is I want to use Mozilla 1.2.x for email, and also run 1.4 to support and bugcheck. Pain in the ASS. Trying to switch back and forth is a headache. And I dont want to move my data from 2 different versions.
Onto my work machine. (laptop w/docking station aka slow hd)
Mozilla uses way too much resources compared to IE. So I use Crazy Browser. An IE wrapper that ads tabs and popup control, freeware too.
I thought Phoenix would be worth switching from crazy browser, but It still has too much Mozilla bloat at the moment. (I'm sure they will lean that puppy down, but its a work in progress...)
The pre-temp save bug is annoying and locks mozilla while its busy. Windows says its "Not Responding". Bug 129923
But on a fast PC, Mozilla rips IE apart. I added them to my user.js incase anyone is interested. -// This one makes a huge difference. Last value in milliseconds (default is 250) user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);// Enable pipelining: user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true); user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true); user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequ ests", 64);// Specify the amount of memory cache in kilobytes: user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capaci ty", 10240);// Click on throbber to go to Phoenix Help: user_pref("browser.throbber.url","http://ww w.googl e.com/");// Change to normal Google search: user_pref("keyword.URL", "http://google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=");// disable target="_blank" (open in same window): user_pref("browser.block.target_new_wind ow", true);// Stop reusing active windows: user_pref("advanced.system.supportDDEExe c", false);
With searching of google newsgroups, and forums, I can finally say thanks for someones post who fixed my problem, even if the post was months/years old.
Now, how about we add this to Slashcode! This is moderation on a whole new level. Very cool idea.
Now that I've thought about it. How is spamming still profitable? Are there that many people out there that are into having sex with farm animals? Or believe their are pills that increase life span? Who the hell are these people?
IRL (in real life) we call them Commission Salesman, Tele Marketers, or in corporations we call them the "Marketing department"...
I don't see how anyone is going to trust the USA in an international treaty any time soon. The USA will simply opt out of any regulation as soon as it hampers their economic well-being.
First.
Get off the USA bashing kick, all countries look after their own economic needs. (aka, sweat shops are illegal in the USA, but the WTO says that in 3rd world countries as its the only work available, they are legal...)
Second.
The USA (aka Federal Government) has nothing to do with Spam guidelines unless its a Federal Law. (Which could be considered a violation of Interstate Commerce, thats part of the reason no laws are passed at the Federal level... btw, IANAL...) This is also why we are trying to pass State level laws for Spam.
But, if ISPs who want to deal with SPAM can join blacklists, whitelists, coalition, etc. Nothing is stopping them. But on the Other side, there is money to be made in Spam, and companies willing to make a buck will do it. (All around the world, not just the USA or Hong Kong.)
I must say I was really like how anti aliasing looks in Mandrake. Looks better than WinXP (cleartype). Just need some font tweak tools like RedHat. (Unless I just didnt seem them in Mandrake)
Now, lets see if my hosting service crumbles with the/. effect. (Thank god I have unlimited transfers!)
IF your data can be cached. Same thing with slashdot, the webpage is rendered depending on your karma, and account. Cache wont work, when its re-rendered for each person. (It should work for all the AC's loading the same page thou...)
We use cheap netra t1's in a cluster behind load balancers, but our bandwidth usage per user is very small (1-5K) compared to Slashdot 50-100K page pulls.
Strange how people design networks and server configurations without knowing the purpose. This is why when a product is handed off to the customer, they customers end up redesignning the architecture. Its not a cookie cutter world people...
- You know the world's gone mad when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the USA of arrogance and the Germans don't want to go to war.
I want to know, how can their site be up? I thought that Internet access was shut down via the UN as part of the trade embargo.
BTW, Was funny to read Sadam's speechs on that site. The other interesting part was the names of the hospitals and schools, Sadam this, hussein that....
Also, I should really be using an anon-proxy, all I need is my IP's showing up on their webservers logs.
- you know the world's gone mad when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the USA of arrogance and the Germans don't want to go to war.
Also, X over a network is quite a bit faster than VNC.
OMG, I dont know why you got modded up, but Bullshit with a capital B.
The only way to make X applications run at any decent speed is to use VNC. Even X over a SSH tunnel with blowfish can not keep up with vnc on 8bit. And running multiple copies of VNC on a server takes up little ram.
And btw, Ever have the network go down, and loose your X connection? Really sucks with the program aborts your process and you have to restart. With VNC running on the server, you dont have to worry about your connection, just reconnect and resume.
X is good, VNC makes X better. Just as Screen makes the unix shell more functional.
- Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script
Hey, use Gentoo or Freebsd, then you dont have to download all the useless packages.
But calling CD's with lots of applications "bloated", isnt the correct use of the term. WinXP using 1.5gigs for an install is the correct way to use for "Bloated". - Well, let's see how fast this sumbitch'll go!
Camera Showing a intersection with Trafic Lights..
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
Anyone else watching that damn Traffic light in Baghdad? Interesting that at 6am, and bombings, people are obeying the traffic lights.
Also, Sadam is also watching CNN and those cameras, wonder how long he leaves them up.
Because Creative Labs is number 1, they are the standard on which all sound cards are based. Hell all gaming companies just make sure they support CL, and screw the rest.
For the longest time it was, Intel/Nvidia/CLabs for all your hardware. If you wanted to make sure your game had all the bells and whistles you had to use name brand hardware.
Remember when EAX came out? How about EAX2, MMX, SSE? SSE2.. Everyone tried to lock you into thier hardware.
But if your not gaming, and just using linux, go get a yamaha pci card that has full support and only costs 9 bux.
Actually, where are the damn robot servants? The ones who can cook/clean/fetch beer.
Also, wheres the AI programs that can run errands for me, like pay the bills online, record my TV shows, remind me about important dates. Oh, an AI lawyer and account would be nice too.
The cars that can drive themselves, and let me read a book on the way to work.
With dual incomes becoming the norm just to live in the USA, where are the time saving robot/AI programs to give us more time to spend with the family. Work a ten hour day, commute for 2 hours, sleep for 8, doesnt leave much time to eat dinner with the family and and wind down from work.
Theres a reply, buts a score of 1, so people might not view it. (I was thinking same thing, So I'll reply also...)
Windows GUI is ok, mostly just for alt-tab/taskbar. But I switched over to BB4win (Blackbox for windows). Supports blackbox themes, just grab new ones off freshmeat. Virtual window support, and with bbkeys, hotkey support rocks. (shift+ctrl+p = launchs putty)
Also, to help memory useage, switching bloated apps to freeware applications helps. SecureCRT uses 22megs per instance, Putty uses 800K with the same scrollback buffer. I find for WinXP the memory sweet spot is about 320 megs for myself with all my apps (office/exchange/putty/browsers/java apps). Even a slower windows box can get a large improvement by adding ram.
Oh, and on my sun box, I run icewm with the MicroGui theme, with some extra buttons added. Works fine for getting work done.
I know Opterons will be upto 8x cpus, but i hope they keep the chipset cost down for home users wanting dual/quad boards. The MP chipset line is end of life via its roadmap.
Slashdot Mirror
Dont forget about all the people who have the most expensive and lowest speed DSL, iDSL. DSL over ISDN.
I was stuck on iDSL on covad for 2 years till they fixed our phone lines.
Good points, faster than modem, almost 3x. And ping was great, 20ms to all hops in Seattle. (Low ping bastard for games)
So it was doable. And compared to ISDN which you had to bind the channels together, and dial out, was a snap, static IPs and never a disconnect.
Total cost, about 400 bux for a modem, 100 bux a month service.
Now YOU bitch about the price of high speed DSL.
Well, on macs mouse buttons are assigned keys, like button 4 & 5 are back/forward. But not application specific. Little different, but doable.
;)
But ya, the problems with cut/paste is in the X part of bsd, getting the hang of application instead of window cycling is wierd but doable. The command/1,2, etc doesnt seem to work with xdarwin. But maybe it will in jaguar 10.3 and apples own xserver.
The alt-tab, command-tab thing is kinda the same, just one is for windows, the other is apps, then on the app use command-1. (Doesnt work in X, but neat alternative.)
Hey, I did say I only had my mac for 1 day, right?
Actually price for price, a good duel Compaq 2.4ghz Xeon runs around 2000 bux from tiger direct. 1.4ghz DP Apple powermac runs around 2600. But comes with DVD-R and applications to make movies.
So, the prices dont seem too bad. But we are talking high performance workstations, right?
Lots of my friends who are Unix admins also, have been buying power macs for their desktops. So I decided to try a mac since OSX should rock with a freebsd (darwin) core. I just picked up my power mac yesterday, give you my impressions from a hardcore linux/solaris/xp user.
I wont even be using the machine for video edit (or not anytime soon). But the damn thing comes with some nice video editing features as standard. I can tell right away, that this OS is geared around it, all these iSuff on the desktop. Looks easy enough to put some dvd movies together. Not the direction im going, but its there, and in your face.
But onto my impressions of a unix workstation.
Pretty much a very nice machine, I grabbed apple developers tools, xtox, fink and all the goodies to enable X and some programs. Compiled all the terms (aterm/rxvt/eterm) and screen for me to start working. (Thank god for dsl)
First thing, I didnt even bother using the Mac keyboard or mouse. Used my windows M$ mouse/keyboard. Cant stand typing on anything other than the natural. And a wheel mouse is extremely nice. (Had to load osx drivers off m$ site to get it to work, yes osx drivers...) Not all features are supported or work right from app to app. Some standards would be nice. (Most programs are dumbed down to 1 mouse it seems also.)
Terminal, the weak client that it comes with cant hold its own with putty. I grabbed a OS9 client that supports more features and works much better. Tried to use some Aterm's with a vga font I installed. Font support is ok, but lacks good ansi/vt100 fonts which you can install manually for X, but for system, dunno yet. Antialaising looks like freetype (for all I know it could be..)
Cut/paste/select all is annoying as hell, no standard like windows, or even KDE/Icewm/CDE. Cant even hit home/end to move the cursor on some apps command line. Very freak'n weak in this area, maybe they will fix it, as is, I would like to bitch slap the apple devleopers for this. (This OS IS NOT command line friendly for text input...)
Alt-tab doesnt work, grabbed a 3rd party app to fix that. BUT (and horrible) all X programs show up as 1 program (same as finder, major suckage.) Finder is another waste of space, found a Midnight Commander clone, thank god. Copying files in the shell is quicker than moving around in Finder. Finder is the worst file manager i've ever seen. And I've had my share of them on many OS's.
You can tell Apple is moving this OS towards the home user, and video people. But with a bsd core, this os would rock with some tweaks for command line users. Too much work to get it to function as a terminal/ssh, multiple command window workstation. I'm looking around for apps, but this is to be a slap in the face of taking BSD and crippling it with horible text input. No, Really it is this bad, but it can be fixed.....
So far, finding software has been kinda hard. Only freeware stuff is ports from stuff you can find on freshmeat, and most 3rd party apps are shareware only. Ported Games dont even run smoothly on the 1.42ghz DP with the raedon 9000. Seti ran slower than expected, with the 2meg l3 cache thought it would run faster (yes I niced it...) (I only tried quake1, q3a,ut,u2k3,medal of honor demos. MOHAA ran the best and is osx not os9 versioned.
I will say, I wanted it for the bsd core, and awesome aqua qui. Thou after using it the command line (text) typing interface is weak, and needs improvement. But its a new O/S I hope they fix it. (Where can I ask developers at apple about this? How can you mess this up?) Its much improved over OS/9, and I can even ps and kill hung applications. Smb mount from the command line works. (Be careful, my first crash was smb mounting a share with blackslashs..)
If your just going to make movies on it, it works great, codecs work. Grabbed mplayer and with all codecs, watched some xvid divx files, smooth as silk. Even saw a program mencoder to dump dvd's right into divx on sourceforge, all gui'ed
Why record twice, im sure dvd's players with 30 second skip will be out. :) Gotta come up with some new features to make you buy new DVD players.
And with dvd blanks being expensive, why reburn to lower quality.. Of course, if your gonna share, edited SVCD or Divx will work nicely.
I upgraded from Netscape 4.7x as my email client. The email client had all the features I wanted, and everything worked great. I decided to upgrade to Mozilla 1.2.x and most things have worked. Grabbed the spellchecker plugin and gpg, all set.
// This one makes a huge difference. Last value in milliseconds (default is 250) // Enable pipelining:, true);u ests", 64); // Specify the amount of memory cache in kilobytes:i ty", 10240); // Click on throbber to go to Phoenix Help:w w.googl e.com/"); // Change to normal Google search:; // disable target="_blank" (open in same window):d ow", true); // Stop reusing active windows:e c", false);
Only problems I have now, is I want to use Mozilla 1.2.x for email, and also run 1.4 to support and bugcheck. Pain in the ASS. Trying to switch back and forth is a headache. And I dont want to move my data from 2 different versions.
Onto my work machine. (laptop w/docking station aka slow hd)
Mozilla uses way too much resources compared to IE. So I use Crazy Browser. An IE wrapper that ads tabs and popup control, freeware too.
I thought Phoenix would be worth switching from crazy browser, but It still has too much Mozilla bloat at the moment. (I'm sure they will lean that puppy down, but its a work in progress...)
The pre-temp save bug is annoying and locks mozilla while its busy. Windows says its "Not Responding". Bug 129923
But on a fast PC, Mozilla rips IE apart. I added them to my user.js incase anyone is interested.
-
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining"
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxreq
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capac
user_pref("browser.throbber.url","http://w
user_pref("keyword.URL", "http://google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=")
user_pref("browser.block.target_new_win
user_pref("advanced.system.supportDDEEx
With searching of google newsgroups, and forums, I can finally say thanks for someones post who fixed my problem, even if the post was months/years old.
Now, how about we add this to Slashcode! This is moderation on a whole new level. Very cool idea.
I was wondering if anyone was going to get that humor.
Now that I've thought about it. How is spamming still profitable? Are there that many people out there that are into having sex with farm animals? Or believe their are pills that increase life span? Who the hell are these people?
IRL (in real life) we call them Commission Salesman, Tele Marketers, or in corporations we call them the "Marketing department"...
I don't see how anyone is going to trust the USA in an international treaty any time soon. The USA will simply opt out of any regulation as soon as it hampers their economic well-being.
First.
Get off the USA bashing kick, all countries look after their own economic needs. (aka, sweat shops are illegal in the USA, but the WTO says that in 3rd world countries as its the only work available, they are legal...)
Second.
The USA (aka Federal Government) has nothing to do with Spam guidelines unless its a Federal Law. (Which could be considered a violation of Interstate Commerce, thats part of the reason no laws are passed at the Federal level... btw, IANAL...) This is also why we are trying to pass State level laws for Spam.
But, if ISPs who want to deal with SPAM can join blacklists, whitelists, coalition, etc. Nothing is stopping them. But on the Other side, there is money to be made in Spam, and companies willing to make a buck will do it. (All around the world, not just the USA or Hong Kong.)
My god, have you looked at how many print cartridges there are? Compusa has a whole isle just for them..
I wish someone would read slashdot, and get story ideas for a computer magazine. Really, this is what people want to know.
Its a classic joke that can be changed every few years. Thou the france/germany comment was extremely funny.
Yup, its a good Qoute.
BTW, Leave Porn Alone, And go do something Constructive.
The reason according to Elke Monssen-Engberding, director of the Ministry for Family Affairs: 'It portrays war as the only way to resolve conflicts.'"
Germany outlaws ideas, beliefs and feelings. If thought crimes ever existed, it will start in Germany.
Of course, here in the USA, if you voice bias towards a minority, it can be considered a Hate Crime.
-
Political Correctness can bite my shiney metal ass.
I must say I was really like how anti aliasing looks in Mandrake. Looks better than WinXP (cleartype). Just need some font tweak tools like RedHat. (Unless I just didnt seem them in Mandrake)
/. effect. (Thank god I have unlimited transfers!)
Now, lets see if my hosting service crumbles with the
Copying and pasting is a bitch....
Oh come on, how hard is.
Middle mouse button, First+Third mouse button, Right mouse button, Ctrl-X/C/V, Shift-Insert/Shift+Control+Insert, Right mouse click (copy/paste/select)..
No problem.
IF your data can be cached. Same thing with slashdot, the webpage is rendered depending on your karma, and account. Cache wont work, when its re-rendered for each person. (It should work for all the AC's loading the same page thou...)
We use cheap netra t1's in a cluster behind load balancers, but our bandwidth usage per user is very small (1-5K) compared to Slashdot 50-100K page pulls.
Strange how people design networks and server configurations without knowing the purpose. This is why when a product is handed off to the customer, they customers end up redesignning the architecture. Its not a cookie cutter world people...
-
You know the world's gone mad when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the USA of arrogance and the Germans don't want to go to war.
I want to know, how can their site be up? I thought that Internet access was shut down via the UN as part of the trade embargo.
BTW, Was funny to read Sadam's speechs on that site. The other interesting part was the names of the hospitals and schools, Sadam this, hussein that....
Also, I should really be using an anon-proxy, all I need is my IP's showing up on their webservers logs.
-
you know the world's gone mad when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the USA of arrogance and the Germans don't want to go to war.
Also, X over a network is quite a bit faster than VNC.
OMG, I dont know why you got modded up, but Bullshit with a capital B.
The only way to make X applications run at any decent speed is to use VNC. Even X over a SSH tunnel with blowfish can not keep up with vnc on 8bit. And running multiple copies of VNC on a server takes up little ram.
And btw, Ever have the network go down, and loose your X connection? Really sucks with the program aborts your process and you have to restart. With VNC running on the server, you dont have to worry about your connection, just reconnect and resume.
X is good, VNC makes X better. Just as Screen makes the unix shell more functional.
-
Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script
Hey, use Gentoo or Freebsd, then you dont have to download all the useless packages.
But calling CD's with lots of applications "bloated", isnt the correct use of the term. WinXP using 1.5gigs for an install is the correct way to use for "Bloated".
-
Well, let's see how fast this sumbitch'll go!
Anyone else watching that damn Traffic light in Baghdad?
Interesting that at 6am, and bombings, people are obeying the traffic lights.
Also, Sadam is also watching CNN and those cameras, wonder how long he leaves them up.
Because Creative Labs is number 1, they are the standard on which all sound cards are based. Hell all gaming companies just make sure they support CL, and screw the rest.
For the longest time it was, Intel/Nvidia/CLabs for all your hardware. If you wanted to make sure your game had all the bells and whistles you had to use name brand hardware.
Remember when EAX came out? How about EAX2, MMX, SSE? SSE2.. Everyone tried to lock you into thier hardware.
But if your not gaming, and just using linux, go get a yamaha pci card that has full support and only costs 9 bux.
Actually, where are the damn robot servants? The ones who can cook/clean/fetch beer.
Also, wheres the AI programs that can run errands for me, like pay the bills online, record my TV shows, remind me about important dates. Oh, an AI lawyer and account would be nice too.
The cars that can drive themselves, and let me read a book on the way to work.
With dual incomes becoming the norm just to live in the USA, where are the time saving robot/AI programs to give us more time to spend with the family. Work a ten hour day, commute for 2 hours, sleep for 8, doesnt leave much time to eat dinner with the family and and wind down from work.
Theres a reply, buts a score of 1, so people might not view it. (I was thinking same thing, So I'll reply also...)
Windows GUI is ok, mostly just for alt-tab/taskbar. But I switched over to BB4win (Blackbox for windows). Supports blackbox themes, just grab new ones off freshmeat. Virtual window support, and with bbkeys, hotkey support rocks. (shift+ctrl+p = launchs putty)
Also, to help memory useage, switching bloated apps to freeware applications helps. SecureCRT uses 22megs per instance, Putty uses 800K with the same scrollback buffer. I find for WinXP the memory sweet spot is about 320 megs for myself with all my apps (office/exchange/putty/browsers/java apps). Even a slower windows box can get a large improvement by adding ram.
Oh, and on my sun box, I run icewm with the MicroGui theme, with some extra buttons added. Works fine for getting work done.
I know Opterons will be upto 8x cpus, but i hope they keep the chipset cost down for home users wanting dual/quad boards. The MP chipset line is end of life via its roadmap.
Guess its just, hurry up and wait.