Recently I read that even the fastest processors out (at the time of the writing) aren't quick enough for Quake III when you turn on all of the graphics features.
Not really. I built an Athlon 550 Box w/128MB ram (Crucial PC-133 ECC), my old TNT-2 Ultra (clocked at 170/196 right now), diamond mx-300 sound and a WD Expert 7200 rpm disk on Ultra-66. Retail quake 3 scores (w sound and cd music on, lightmap lighting, high detail, highest texture quality):
1024x768 16 bit: 45fps demo001
1024x768 32bit: 30fps demo001
1280x1024 16bit: 28-30fps demo001
Granted these scores would be higher if Ibenchmarked the way most hardware sites do (sound off, no cd), but who actually plays play with sound off?:)
What? I use Macromedia Dreamweaver 2 and Macomedia Flash 4 (2 seperate programs) and this seems physically impossible to me. Dreamweaver is a HTML (or JavaScript) generator not a graphics prgram and Flash is well something different entirely.
Hold on. I never said that I used dreamweaver. My sister created the content using dreamweaver (and I guess probably flash as well - I didn't ask), I just helped her upload the finished product to a web server. And the finished product was 99% images and flash.
I may be jumping to conclusions by assuming dreamweaver did the image creation; I've never used the program myself. If so I retract that statement as an unwarranted generalizartion. But I do know that the way she was taught in art school was to do things that way, and stand by my belief that overusage of images, flash, javascript is not a good way to create websites. The result is bloated sites that take forever to load and only look right in the newest browsers on windows boxes.
and for more reasons than just accesibility. Using lots of images, flash, javascript, etc . . . does nothing but slow down pages and make them a pain in the ass to view for people without IE 5/Netscape 4. Take a look at Jakob Nielsen's site for lots of info on web usability in general.
On my own personal site, I use primarily static HTML with some frames. All of my navigational/title graphics have alt tags, and I refuse to use platform specific plugins like flash. I also preview each new page at 640x480 in both IE & navigator on win and linux before I post them to make sure everything is readable. While this layout may not be very flashy or modern (layout has not changed drastically since I started the site in 95), it is functional and fast.
As a counter example, I recently helped my sister (a graphic design major) put a site on line. She used dreamweaver to build her site. Dreamweaver created the entire site in images and flash! Even the text was created as images! Unbelievably slow and inefficient.
200 Mhz K6-2's arnt in the market anymoe.. a query on pricewatch for K6-2 300mhz's turned up chips for 27 dollars.. He had 11 processors.. that's well under 300 dollars..I will use 100 processors, --- which would be 2700 bucks.
Yeah, why not just build a bunch of individual K6 (or better yet low end athlon) boxes, put them on 100base-T and do a Beowulf cluster? Sounds to me that you could get similar/better perf for much less money.
The only thing you *might* loose is the redundancy and reliablity, but if you set up the boxes right that should not be a prob either. Hell, you can duplicate their power reliablility with a backyard generator from Sears and a bunch of APC ups's.
need. There are motherboards out there with onboard SCSI, for example the ASUS P2B98-S/DS. You can disable the onboard IDE to release those valuable resources.
I think he was referring to atually swapping the drive circuitry, ie to use an ide disk on a scsi controller. The idea being to buy a cheap eide disk and swap the circuit board and interface on it... I really dont think its possible though.
After reading a lot of WD sucks posts here I thought I'd chime in with some of my personal experience with them...
First off, I'd love to be using SCSI. But its just too expensive for my budget (wich is not exactly small, I just replaced a 2yr old P-II with an athlon sys)
On to disks... I've used lots of WD disks. The first machine I owned, a Quantex P-100 I bought about 6yr ago came with a 1.2G WD caviar (mode 4). I later added a 2G Seagate Medalist (mode 4) to that box, but the WD was always a bit faster, albeit louder. FYI that box was running dual boot Win95/Slackware (1.2.1 kernel). Today that box is used by my little brother and the WD is still running strong! And that drive was up 24/7 for the first 3yr of its life!
Second box I built was a P2-266 that I powered with a Seagate disk. I later added a 8.4G WD caviar ata-33 disk. 2yr of 24/7 uptime and that WD is still doing fine as well.(its now a dedicated RH 6.1 box)
Along the way I also built boxes for my father and a couple of friends. The only disk problems I ever had were upgrading my fathers machine. The maxtor disk he had would not live on the same controller as a Seagate. And that Maxtor later died, only disk I've ever seen go bad.
Newest box is an Athlon I just put together using a WD Expert 27G disk. Runs great and the disk is very quiet.
If I could choose any disk, my first choice would be an IBM deskstar, but they are hard to find and a bit pricey. I used to really like Seagates but they seem to be falling behind lately. I had trouble with maxtors so I stay away from those. That leaves WD. 6 years and few disks later I have no complaints.
If Tarantino is gonna make it, heres the flic's title :
"Geeks with Guns" "Pulp Geeks" "Reservoir Geeks"
As much as I'd hate to see a really serious movie about geeks turned into something like that, remember that there are "Geeks with Guns" (guns for sport, not crime) out there. Im one of 'em and proud of it...
I've done the same thing... bought a P-100 for Quake, built a PII-266 for Quake2. Now I'm just waiting for all the parts of my Athlon550 to arrive for Quake3. (also got a 7200rpm drive and some pc133 ram for it too, can't wait)
And this also allows the PII to stay as a linux only box. Oh, life is good.
I always tell my friends/family to only give me traditional stuff - clothes, stuff for my apartment, etc . . . This kills two birds with one stone: 1. I don't have to shop for that stuff myself (I hate shopping) and 2. I save my own money for all the geeky stuff I really want.
This also saves your non-geek family from having to try and figure out what you want and/or coming back from the store with something useless.
Point taken. Im not trying to start a flame war. Im just saying that just because we (US/Uk, etc) have done some of the same does not make Chinas actions right.
I wonder how all those Guatemalans, Columbians, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Peruvians, Bolivians, Chileans, Argentines, Vietnamese, Cambodians,Laotians, Indonesians, Timorese, Iranians, Iraqis, Haitians, Angolans, Congolese, Zairians--the list could go on a lot longer--who've been murdered at the behest of (if not by) the US in the name of anticommu^W corporate profits would view ESR's righteous sniffings about "freedom, increased choice, and *voluntary* cooperation." He might try reading Michael McClintock's _Instruments of Statecraft_ or Mark Danner's _Massacre at El Mozote_ before pontificating on the subject of human rights again.
How can you even compare this to the 20 milling dead in Stalins purges, or Tiananmen Square, or the faimine in North Korea, or the Chinese occupation of Tibet, etc etc etc?
Come on. America is not perfect, I 'll grant you that. But our system is one of the few where you actually have the right to make statements like that without fear of the gov't knocking down your door. If you actuallly lived in one of those communist regimes talk like that would get you dead or at best in a forced labor camp.
For all its faults I still think our system (USA) is the best one out there and I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.
I could not agree more. I just wish the whole 'communism is not a bad thing' thinking would disappear. Unfortunately most school curriculm do not teach the reality of the 20th century Communist states and the blatant human abuses. To this day I cannot understand why this is.
Amen. Its about time somebody stood up to all these communist sympathizers here! Good thing that most of our grandparents generation are not online, some of these comments would reduce Korean War vets to tears... They lost friends fighting these people and now their grandkids are embracing them.
Why do you think that because visiting Americans get these perks overseas, that the locals got them too? Thats ignorant. Most of what I've heard says different:
1. I used to work for a German company (Trumpf)and the German born employees told me that the standard of living there was much lower than here. Up to 50% taxes, higher prices for gas ($3/gal), clothes (50-100 for items like jeans) and food (2-3x what it costs here). They also said that a small apartment over there cost more than a large house on a few acres of land does here.
2. I also once met a guy from Finland who told me that over there most homowners had 50-60yr morgages because the housing was so expensive.
3. I have family who live in Detroit. Out there a lot of the Canadians who live across the water (in Windsor, Canada) have jobs in the US so that they can avoid some of the Canadian taxes and get better US healthcare. Now why would they do that if the Canadian/European system was so much better?
4. Read the long comment about life in England. From what I've heard thats right on the money.
I dont know first hand what its like over on that side of the pond, but here in America there is an awful lot of abuse of social services. A lot of people get on welfare and stay there, then make no effort whatsoever to find a job. I've heard all kinds of horror stories about people who have lots of children to get more welfare money to support their drug habits and then the kids end up suffering. Its gotten to be so bad that many of our states are now adopting welfare-to-work laws (a good idea, IMHO).
I dont think that handouts are the answer to this. Im all for people helping out those in need if they so choose, what I dont like is big government making that choice for us. All that does is take away more of our freedoms, not to mention making people totally dependant on the government doing everything for them like little children.
Now I'm not knocking private health care (my company is kind enough to provide it for me free) but common healthcare should be free to all members of society at a good level.
Why should common health care be free? Where does it say that we have some god given right to health care? Somebody has to pay for it somewhere, and one thing I really hate is being taxed to pay for handouts to people who wont go get a job.
Remember that healthcare is standard and LOTS cheaper than in the US (that goes for all European countries).
Is it really? Maybe we don't get gov't (ie Socialized) medicine here, but we also don't pay 50% tax! Also, private healthcare gives us the flexibility to choose our own doctors and not have to wait on lists for simple procedures. Private medicine = better medicine!
As an aside, my company pays completely for my health insurance, so I basically get my health care free. And since its not really an HMO (CIGNA PPO) I can go to specialists/hospital etc... without having to get pre-approval.
Long story short, I'll take US healthcare over Socialized medicine anyday.
Go to your College carrer office/ career center, whatever. If they are any good they will have binders full of all kinds of info on salary, that will give you a good idea of the going rate based on degree/major/job field/location/etc. You should be able to look up the national salary surveys (done by the college board I think) for the past few years and also may be able to get the survey for grads from your school as well.
Good Luck!
I did this when I graduated, and took the information with me to the salary negotiation. It made it much easier to back up my demands and I ended up getting a decent number from my employer (granted that they knew me well from co-op experience and weren't out to lowball me in the first place).
When it comes to cost, it is also mainly a perception issue. Commercial *nix is mainly only more expensive if you compare specialized workstation hardware to generic commodity PCs. Commercial *nixes on x86 hardware are similar in cost to NT (Windows 95/98 are really not very suitable for CAD usage), and Linux on the same hardware is cheaper than even Windows 9x.
OK, but what commercial *nix is currently avalable on intel? (and dont count future realeases like the solaris move to intel). Right now there are no major commercial nixes on intel and as a result we (PTC)only support 'nix on proprietary hardware:
SunOS/Solaris on UltraSPARC
HP-UX on PA-RISC
IRIX64 on MIPS/R10000/R12000
DigitalUNIX on Alpha
AIX on RS6000
Again, don't get me wrong, I love 'nix. I have an SGI Octane box at work, and have been using linux off and on at home since I first installed Slackware (1.2.1 kernel) back in college in 94. But many corporate customers just can't resist the perceved cheapness of wintel (and that evil Gates marketing machine doesn't help).
There used to be rumors that ITS (or CIS or whatever its called now) had sombody cruising dormnet looking for warez/mp3's/etc... but I never believed it. ITS always seemed to be shotstaffed enough, now they are wasting time on this? Now I'm really glad I'm out of there (as if the change to dhcp & manditory laptops weren't annoying enough)
***DISCLAMER: This message in no way reflects official company policy***
As a PTC employee (for those of you who dont know, we make Pro/Engineer) I can tell you this:
The decision as to which platforms are supported is in large part based on customer feedback. If we get enough customer requests for linux support, it will proably be done. But as far as I know it hasen't happened yet - unfortunately (in my opinon) many of our customers are actually moving from unix to nt (cost).
Other than that I don't see any technical reason why we won't do it, as we support almost every other major platform (SunOS/solaris, HP-UX, IRIX/IRIX64, DigitalUNIX, AIX, WinNT, Alpha WinNT, Win95/98)
Jeremy Harkin QA Engineer, Production Applications Parametric Technology Corp. jharkin@ptc.com
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. I built an Athlon 550 Box w/128MB ram (Crucial PC-133 ECC), my old TNT-2 Ultra (clocked at 170/196 right now), diamond mx-300 sound and a WD Expert 7200 rpm disk on Ultra-66. Retail quake 3 scores (w sound and cd music on, lightmap lighting, high detail, highest texture quality):
Granted these scores would be higher if Ibenchmarked the way most hardware sites do (sound off, no cd), but who actually plays play with sound off? :)
Hold on. I never said that I used dreamweaver. My sister created the content using dreamweaver (and I guess probably flash as well - I didn't ask), I just helped her upload the finished product to a web server. And the finished product was 99% images and flash.
I may be jumping to conclusions by assuming dreamweaver did the image creation; I've never used the program myself. If so I retract that statement as an unwarranted generalizartion. But I do know that the way she was taught in art school was to do things that way, and stand by my belief that overusage of images, flash, javascript is not a good way to create websites. The result is bloated sites that take forever to load and only look right in the newest browsers on windows boxes.
and for more reasons than just accesibility. Using lots of images, flash, javascript, etc . . . does nothing but slow down pages and make them a pain in the ass to view for people without IE 5/Netscape 4. Take a look at Jakob Nielsen's site for lots of info on web usability in general.
On my own personal site, I use primarily static HTML with some frames. All of my navigational/title graphics have alt tags, and I refuse to use platform specific plugins like flash. I also preview each new page at 640x480 in both IE & navigator on win and linux before I post them to make sure everything is readable. While this layout may not be very flashy or modern (layout has not changed drastically since I started the site in 95), it is functional and fast.
As a counter example, I recently helped my sister (a graphic design major) put a site on line. She used dreamweaver to build her site. Dreamweaver created the entire site in images and flash! Even the text was created as images! Unbelievably slow and inefficient.
Yeah, why not just build a bunch of individual K6 (or better yet low end athlon) boxes, put them on 100base-T and do a Beowulf cluster? Sounds to me that you could get similar/better perf for much less money.
The only thing you *might* loose is the redundancy and reliablity, but if you set up the boxes right that should not be a prob either. Hell, you can duplicate their power reliablility with a backyard generator from Sears and a bunch of APC ups's.
I hope not, I can't wait to see what the KX133 is going to do for the Athlon!
I think he was referring to atually swapping the drive circuitry, ie to use an ide disk on a scsi controller. The idea being to buy a cheap eide disk and swap the circuit board and interface on it... I really dont think its possible though.
After reading a lot of WD sucks posts here I thought I'd chime in with some of my personal experience with them...
First off, I'd love to be using SCSI. But its just too expensive for my budget (wich is not exactly small, I just replaced a 2yr old P-II with an athlon sys)
On to disks... I've used lots of WD disks. The first machine I owned, a Quantex P-100 I bought about 6yr ago came with a 1.2G WD caviar (mode 4). I later added a 2G Seagate Medalist (mode 4) to that box, but the WD was always a bit faster, albeit louder. FYI that box was running dual boot Win95/Slackware (1.2.1 kernel). Today that box is used by my little brother and the WD is still running strong! And that drive was up 24/7 for the first 3yr of its life!
Second box I built was a P2-266 that I powered with a Seagate disk. I later added a 8.4G WD caviar ata-33 disk. 2yr of 24/7 uptime and that WD is still doing fine as well.(its now a dedicated RH 6.1 box)
Along the way I also built boxes for my father and a couple of friends. The only disk problems I ever had were upgrading my fathers machine. The maxtor disk he had would not live on the same controller as a Seagate. And that Maxtor later died, only disk I've ever seen go bad.
Newest box is an Athlon I just put together using a WD Expert 27G disk. Runs great and the disk is very quiet.
If I could choose any disk, my first choice would be an IBM deskstar, but they are hard to find and a bit pricey. I used to really like Seagates but they seem to be falling behind lately. I had trouble with maxtors so I stay away from those. That leaves WD. 6 years and few disks later I have no complaints.
Jeremy"Geeks with Guns"
"Pulp Geeks"
"Reservoir Geeks"
As much as I'd hate to see a really serious movie about geeks turned into something like that, remember that there are "Geeks with Guns" (guns for sport, not crime) out there. Im one of 'em and proud of it...
I've done the same thing... bought a P-100 for Quake, built a PII-266 for Quake2. Now I'm just waiting for all the parts of my Athlon550 to arrive for Quake3. (also got a 7200rpm drive and some pc133 ram for it too, can't wait)
And this also allows the PII to stay as a linux only box. Oh, life is good.
Funny how you complain about Americans preaching to Europeans, but yet you see nothing wrong with preaching to Americans. . .
I always tell my friends/family to only give me traditional stuff - clothes, stuff for my apartment, etc . . . This kills two birds with one stone: 1. I don't have to shop for that stuff myself (I hate shopping) and 2. I save my own money for all the geeky stuff I really want.
This also saves your non-geek family from having to try and figure out what you want and/or coming back from the store with something useless.
Ok, you got me, I was an idiot. Its been a bad day... (makes mental note to self to think before posting in fututre)
Don't any of you read the link before you post? This BSA is the Business Software Alliance, not the Boy Scouts of America (also BSA).
Point taken. Im not trying to start a flame war. Im just saying that just because we (US/Uk, etc) have done some of the same does not make Chinas actions right.
Oh and your contry (UK) doesn't have a history of its own? cough Colonies cough India cough
How can you even compare this to the 20 milling dead in Stalins purges, or Tiananmen Square, or the faimine in North Korea, or the Chinese occupation of Tibet, etc etc etc?
Come on. America is not perfect, I 'll grant you that. But our system is one of the few where you actually have the right to make statements like that without fear of the gov't knocking down your door. If you actuallly lived in one of those communist regimes talk like that would get you dead or at best in a forced labor camp.
For all its faults I still think our system (USA) is the best one out there and I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.
Amen. Its about time somebody stood up to all these communist sympathizers here! Good thing that most of our grandparents generation are not online, some of these comments would reduce Korean War vets to tears... They lost friends fighting these people and now their grandkids are embracing them.
Why do you think that because visiting Americans get these perks overseas, that the locals got them too? Thats ignorant. Most of what I've heard says different:
1. I used to work for a German company (Trumpf)and the German born employees told me that the standard of living there was much lower than here. Up to 50% taxes, higher prices for gas ($3/gal), clothes (50-100 for items like jeans) and food (2-3x what it costs here). They also said that a small apartment over there cost more than a large house on a few acres of land does here.
2. I also once met a guy from Finland who told me that over there most homowners had 50-60yr morgages because the housing was so expensive.
3. I have family who live in Detroit. Out there a lot of the Canadians who live across the water (in Windsor, Canada) have jobs in the US so that they can avoid some of the Canadian taxes and get better US healthcare. Now why would they do that if the Canadian/European system was so much better?
4. Read the long comment about life in England. From what I've heard thats right on the money.
I dont know first hand what its like over on that side of the pond, but here in America there is an awful lot of abuse of social services. A lot of people get on welfare and stay there, then make no effort whatsoever to find a job. I've heard all kinds of horror stories about people who have lots of children to get more welfare money to support their drug habits and then the kids end up suffering. Its gotten to be so bad that many of our states are now adopting welfare-to-work laws (a good idea, IMHO).
I dont think that handouts are the answer to this. Im all for people helping out those in need if they so choose, what I dont like is big government making that choice for us. All that does is take away more of our freedoms, not to mention making people totally dependant on the government doing everything for them like little children.
Why should common health care be free? Where does it say that we have some god given right to health care? Somebody has to pay for it somewhere, and one thing I really hate is being taxed to pay for handouts to people who wont go get a job.
Is it really? Maybe we don't get gov't (ie Socialized) medicine here, but we also don't pay 50% tax! Also, private healthcare gives us the flexibility to choose our own doctors and not have to wait on lists for simple procedures. Private medicine = better medicine!
As an aside, my company pays completely for my health insurance, so I basically get my health care free. And since its not really an HMO (CIGNA PPO) I can go to specialists/hospital etc... without having to get pre-approval.
Long story short, I'll take US healthcare over Socialized medicine anyday.
Go to your College carrer office/ career center, whatever. If they are any good they will have binders full of all kinds of info on salary, that will give you a good idea of the going rate based on degree/major/job field/location/etc. You should be able to look up the national salary surveys (done by the college board I think) for the past few years and also may be able to get the survey for grads from your school as well.
Good Luck!I did this when I graduated, and took the information with me to the salary negotiation. It made it much easier to back up my demands and I ended up getting a decent number from my employer (granted that they knew me well from co-op experience and weren't out to lowball me in the first place).
OK, but what commercial *nix is currently avalable on intel? (and dont count future realeases like the solaris move to intel). Right now there are no major commercial nixes on intel and as a result we (PTC)only support 'nix on proprietary hardware:
Again, don't get me wrong, I love 'nix. I have an SGI Octane box at work, and have been using linux off and on at home since I first installed Slackware (1.2.1 kernel) back in college in 94. But many corporate customers just can't resist the perceved cheapness of wintel (and that evil Gates marketing machine doesn't help).
There used to be rumors that ITS (or CIS or whatever its called now) had sombody cruising dormnet looking for warez/mp3's/etc... but I never believed it. ITS always seemed to be shotstaffed enough, now they are wasting time on this? Now I'm really glad I'm out of there (as if the change to dhcp & manditory laptops weren't annoying enough)
JeremyH RPI'99***DISCLAMER: This message in no way reflects official company policy***
As a PTC employee (for those of you who dont know, we make Pro/Engineer) I can tell you this:
The decision as to which platforms are supported is in large part based on customer feedback. If we get enough customer requests for linux support, it will proably be done. But as far as I know it hasen't happened yet - unfortunately (in my opinon) many of our customers are actually moving from unix to nt (cost).
Other than that I don't see any technical reason why we won't do it, as we support almost every other major platform (SunOS/solaris, HP-UX, IRIX/IRIX64, DigitalUNIX, AIX, WinNT, Alpha WinNT, Win95/98)
Jeremy HarkinQA Engineer, Production Applications
Parametric Technology Corp.
jharkin@ptc.com