Altivo

I can go with that. I checked and the calendar is clear. I think, though, that we'd still want to go down on Friday 13th and then we'd be driving back to Ft. Wayne on Saturday? Otherwise we'd be leaving your place at some time like 3 or 4 am? How long from Westchester to Ft. Wayne?

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quickcasey.livejournal.com

Ft Wayne is 3 hours, 16 minutes according to Tomtom. We could leave at 6 or seven, and be there before 10:30, I'm sure there is some flex time in there.

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Requires different logistics at my end though. Either I'm leaving here at 4 am to get to your place in time, or I come the evening before and stay over. I guess it's feasible either way as long as the weather is tolerable, but I might prefer coming on Friday evening so as to be better rested to take that exam. I dunno. Either way, I needed a little push to finally take the exam and this is probably it.

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There's nothing wrong with having old machines that still work. Classic cars, for instance. And though it's arguable, the US space shuttles.

That does remind me of a story about a supposed real true time traveler who went back in time from the far future where the world is on it's last legs, looking for some old computer because he was told it could process a certain kind of computer language that the future Earth needed to save itself. He supposedly disappeared after his story went public and hasn't been seen for over 20 years. The stinger is, when people investigated the computer, IBM confirmed that the model of computer he was after had a secret ability to process this other language, but the ability was deemed unnecessary and was phased out and unadvertised.

As for your trip, sometimes it's good to take a ride.

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That seems like an interesting story. Do you remember where you heard it?

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That standard outpost for all things bizarre and strange, Coast to Coast AM. :)

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Ah..radio show. :)

I am stuck on Radio 2 at the moment. Sadly there are fewer odd stories on that lately.

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I haven't listened to Coast to Coast AM in years. I think the last time I listened was the night I got on the bus to Florida...

I don't know of this Radio 2 of which you speak.

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Not on he same continent as you. ;)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/

I think they broadcast over the web if you want to listen.

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Oh. Coast to Coast AM is international as well as on the Interwebz. :)

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/

They got a picture gallery and "news" stories, too.

Actually, it was my longtime enjoyment of their program that led me to realize I was suffering from a schizotypal personality and to start analyzing how insane I really was. Now these little things amuse me, but I don't give them any weight as far as merit goes.

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I'll have a look if I remember.

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Maybe you should avoid it. It's like listening to someone read a cheesy tabloid, and then have more people run over and tell you that everything in the tabloid is true because they or some relative of theirs saw it or something like it.

Plus, I like long LiveJournal conversations because I get to show off my icon collection. ;)

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Ah...a lilac one. :)

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Purple! D:<

Heh, just kidding. But now I've got emotional gryphon icons left over. Grr, angry gryphon!

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Sharp beak too, no doubt. :)

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Of course. Gryphons are fierce!

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mondhasen.livejournal.com

We gave up our pentium III's when the library went to Millennium. It ran on them, but too slowly. XP was too much for the systems.

The Gate's Grant/Champlin Foundation support has been a boon to all of us. Unfortunately the ref librarian and I have been of the opinion that when the pc's work well we shouldn't consider replacing them. While other libraries in the state are enjoying faster and more sophisticated machines 'because they can,' we're still using our pentium iv's.

The computer I ghosted over last night was a spare p IV, formerly from the Adult ref area. The Children's pc it replaced has been relegated to 'parts status.'

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I'm running Millennium on P3 processors, but not in Windows. It's Windows that has grown too bloated for the P3, not Millennium itself. Most of the P3's are just running as OPAC kiosks, though. All they have to support is a stripped down web browser, Epiphany in this case.

Windows has a long history of eating up resources for no good purpose, and Vista in particular is a fine example of this dubious development. We are not the only ones to find that XP on a P4 is faster and preferable to Vista on a Dual Core or even a Quad. We still have Windows on a few staff workstations used by people who are terrified at the mention of Linux. It's all XP for them. The majority of our machines run Linux, though. The cost savings is phenomenal, and the performance, security, and reliability has proven to be far superior to Windows.

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cozycabbage.livejournal.com

I have no clue what I've got over here, but I seem to find quite a few older machines. It strikes me that I never find anything five years old; it's always over ten. The largest RAM I have that fits in them is only 64MB, so it's not like I can upgrade them, either.

I'd suggest you find some used computers, but even those are bound to be a few hundred, when they're actually worth something like $50.

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These P3 class machines are in fact 8 years old and still going strong. None of them have ever had any failure except for hard drives, which seem to be getting crappier and less reliable all the time. Possibly that's because of an assumption that most users will dump any machine after two to three years at most, so why make it last longer than that?

They upgrade to a maximum of 512MB RAM. The cost of those two SIMMs is $36 total now, which is a pittance, really. Windows XP or a current Linux distribution will be perfectly happy running in that as long as you don't load them down with screen graphics or run too many memory intensive tasks at once. Vista, in keeping with Microsoft's usual alliance with hardware vendors, will die on such a machine, and demands the latest and highest powered hardware, which it eats up with its own internal bloat, delivering nothing of value to the user.

Yes, a 1GHz P3 is not a fast machine by today's standards, but it performs admirably as a router or small file server or print server for say a dozen users. We aren't playing games, and frankly, I have little use for web sites that are loaded up with Flash video, 27 layers of style sheet, and all that other Java crap that takes so long to download and process. Most of it is just chaff and fluff instead of content. Library sites tend to be content focused and largely text. One of these machines as a client works beautifully for searching large catalogs of books or indexes of articles.

The vendor, of course, designs software to "look pretty" and "sell lots" so they want to load us down with "themes" and "skins" and "backdrops" and other memory and time wasters. I say "Bah, humbug!"

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cozycabbage.livejournal.com

I was giggling at the specs for the newest Intel Solid State Drives. I think they were rated for something like 200 years. (Not counting the wear caused by writing, of course.)

I find 1GHz to be pretty good. I more often see 400MHz or so, and that's just too slow for my tastes. The newest iPhone is about 600MHz, though I've heard they underclock it to save battery.

I think the biggest bottleneck in recent times has been the hard-drive. The CPU is rarely used, 512MB is usually enough RAM, and 32MB of shared graphics seems to be perfectly fine. So I wonder just what kind of performance boost a new Intel X-25 SSD would give an older computer?

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The short answer is "probably not much" even if it has an IDE interface, since that's all those older machines are equipped for. Remember, no SATA or other such newfangled stuff. The reason is that the data bus and I/O chips on those older motherboards are clocked at 133MHz or less. It was fast then, but will be the limiting factor in writing to a solid state drive.

You can do solid state drives for less than those new things will cost, probably. There are little adapters that take a camera-style memory card and turn it into an IDE or SATA drive. They sell for as little as $20 US. Probably not good for quite as many write cycles as the latest Intel thingie, but memory cards are cheap and getting cheaper. Still no moving parts, which is the big saving.

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cozycabbage.livejournal.com

I know that SATA has something like a 3.0 Gbps maximum (theoretical), but what's the maximum on IDE? A bit of searching shows numbers across the board, so I assume it has everything to do with which controller I buy?

The latest drives have had another price drop, actually. The Intel X-25 I mentioned is about $250 for 80GB. I think a 64GB SDHC card is about $80, but those seem pretty slow. From what I've read, camera chips are optimized to quickly write large files (such as photos), so the random access on those things would be terrible.

When it comes to solid state, you don't want to touch old things. They're worse AND more expensive. I found it funny, looking through the flyers, that 1GB DDR costs more than 2GB DDR2. (Which is slightly off topic, being DRAM, but the idea is the same.)

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A faster IDE controller will do nothing for you as long as the data bus feeding the controller is limited to 133MHz (or 66MHz in even older machines.) The slowest link controls the speed of transfer, period. In those days we sped things up by using techniques like DMA to offload tasks from the processor onto the controllers. Even DMA is limited to the data rate of the bus, though.

As for old solid state stuff, the RAM for the 16 Pentium 3 systems I have here is much cheaper than newer RAM modules required by newer machines. Sure, it doesn't work in those newer machines, why should it? But in the machines for which it was designed, it works just fine. The price of 512MB of RAM for these machines is less than the original price of the 64MB that came in the machines back when they were made. I don't see that as bad, but rather as an advantage. Memory always gets cheaper over time. Back in about 1982 I paid $100 for 16KB of RAM and it was a good price. (Yes, KB, not MB.) I worked on an IBM mainframe system that had only about 128KB of real memory itself, but had very impressive virtual memory capabilities and speed so that any of the hundred or more processes it was running at a given time might have access to up to 2GB, which was amazingly huge back then.

Nowadays that $100 will buy a GB or more of RAM, but the performance you get for it is all eaten up by wasteful code that spends most of its time painting pretty pictures rather than delivering the useful data that is really needed.

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keeganfox.livejournal.com

Why is a basic computer running Win98SE, doing file searching tasks, such an incredibly obtuse concept for computer people?
I want CPU horsepower for the stuff I play with, but is it really necessary for that?
Maybe it saves too much money.

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Microsoft has decreed that Win98 is "no longer supported" hence the software vendors and web designers feel safe in assuming that it is "no longer used" or at least, that anyone who still uses it is utterly irrelevant to them.

For reliability and security reasons, if we have to run Windows on these older machines I use XP but strip out the unneeded "features" as much as possible. It works at least as well as Win98 did but needs the memory pushed to max. The P3's that still run Windows all have the maximum 512MB of RAM. The ones that run Linux have been performing equally well with 128 or 256.

It's amazing how much the load goes down in Windows if you get rid of junk like screen savers, wallpaper, icon themes, and background "notifier" tasks that run out of the Systray. Turn off the warning sounds too, especially since these machines have no speakers anyway though they do have sound cards.

Web designers irritate me the most. Today they assume that everyone has at least DSL or cable bandwidth. (Wrong, in the US 35% of users have no access to anything but dialup speeds.) They also assume that everyone is running a maxed out hyperthreaded machine like the one they use to develop on (and probably play massive games like WOW.) Worse yet, they assume that everyone is running Windows and Internet Explorer, rather than sticking to standards that are supported by multiple browsers and other operating systems. And, out of sheer laziness, they rely on gimmicky crap like Flash when they could do what is needed in simple HTML or with server-side scripting. They have no sense of the bandwidth and CPU power consumed by scripting stuff in Flash, because it has no impact on their own supercharged world.

Amusing stuff leaked out of Microsoft this morning by inside friends:

The computers being used to show Powerpoint presentations and videos for the Win7 release party are all running XP. (Probably because 7 isn't stable enough yet and might embarrass someone, and Vista requires more expensive hardware than what they have readily available.)

At least one MS exec admitted that Ubuntu Linux is probably "better" than Windows 7. (After all, it's free, does everything Windows 7 does, needs less powerful hardware to run, and is about as user friendly as Windows ever was.)

MS staffers received t-shirts as party favors. The t-shirts are dark blue with white lettering on them, which makes them look like the infamous Windows blue screen crash announcement. (Great planning, Microsoft.)

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keeganfox.livejournal.com

Huzzah for abandonware!

Yeah, I noticed that too. With the advent of greater bandwidth, instead of the web going faster, they slow it all right back down with bandwidth sucking commercials and fancy animations and stuff. It's a freakin' text news page! Load already!!

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cabcat.livejournal.com

I'd have said it would've been fairly obvious that libraries don't need superdooper terminals and as you say in this climate sticking with what you've got makes perfect sense.

Seeing all those colours sounds lovely, I think I've said most of the trees here are evergreen so we don't see such changes although when they flower its nice...the roadside dogwoods are flowering at the moment. I still miss the big maple tree on the corner.

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