I saw this box advertised on this page at Surplus Computers for the price of $599. It made me think of 2 things.
Why? For the same price, I can get a new Mac Mini, WITH an Operating System.
Apple is pricing the Mac Mini line competitively!
It’s complicated, but it works great. I have a Linux box that I put up for http access on my DSL. I sometimes let friends download stuff, and I need to limit the bandwidth. Luckily, the system is running Arch linux and it comes with the ‘traffic control’ patches built into the iptables kernel.
So, today, I needed to turn it on. I did it before, so all I had to do was find the time capsule file with my instructions in it. Then it was just, copy/paste, bam…. running.
Here is my set of commands:
tc -s qdisc show
tc qdisc add dev eth0 root handle 1: htb default 11
tc class add dev eth0 parent 1: classid 1:1 htb rate 512Kbit
tc class add dev eth0 parent 1:1 classid 1:10 htb rate 220Kbit
tc class add dev eth0 parent 1:1 classid 1:11 htb rate 512Kbit
tc filter add dev eth0 protocol ip parent 1:0 prio 1 u32 match ip sport 80 0xffff flowid 1:10
This essentially sets up a small tree of pipes. The max output is 512kb for normal traffic. Port 80 traffic can use up to 220kbit. Any other traffic can get at least 292kb and more if the port 80 stuff isn’t in use.
Here is a linux forums article on what XGL is all about. Good stuff!
BTW, tried it on my old Athlon - no go. I don’t have SSE on that chip. I thought it was a Duron, but it turns out that it is a Thunderbird core. This was the first Athlon for Socket A and the last to not have SSE :-(. The old box is finally showing its age (Ah, but, it can still do a mean Mame of Bubble Bobble!).
I then tried it on my dell with the P4 and the Nvidia 6600 GT. It ran Kororaa and X at 1920 x 1200 without breaking a sweat 
Too bad. This box is for windows only.
Gotta try upgrading the ole Athlon to see if this will run
About 4 years ago, I put up a whiteboard in the garage. I put up a list of the areas where the world would have some big issues or trends. I made money only on one of them, energy.
Here they are:
The only other one that I didn’t put up there was War. Am I missing anything?
If I don’t blog about this, I will forget this. I know I’ve probably researched this before.
Larry Osterman posts about the origin of the file IO flags under Win32. He goes all the way back to DOS.
Why is this important? I was thinking about Unix file system semantics the other day. I really like that a file can be renamed or removed while it is still held open by a process. The FILESHAREDELETE flag gives us this in a Windows NT kernel.
Ok, why is this important? If you read the MSDN docs on this, you miss this. If you read Larry’s blog post, it all becomes obvious.
Ok, I’ve been trying out the new stuff.
Mark J installed Vista Beta 2 on a desktop near him at work. Sweet! I checked out their progress. This release, IMHO, is getting much closer to production. Things are much snappier with the UI. According to the IHT, Ballmer said Microsoft was “on track” for the scheduled general release of Windows Vista in January. After seeing this BETA, I can see this happening.
So, overall… Vista’s UI is a nice refresh (DirectX rendering, bigger icons, etc.) I still wish they would make a better shell and compatability environment for Unix people. The CMD.exe shell and the lack of the ability to use ‘/’ is very annoying. Will I install it when it is ready? Yep. (It will be ‘ready’, next June/July when SP1 comes out.)
Mac OS X has been my desktop for the last 6 months. Either between my Mini or the Mac Book Pro that I have from work. What can I say about it? It’s solid. It looks good. It has very few issues (there are issues, though). I see myself also running this system for the forseable future. (Note, I use Apple’s dashboard a lot)
X Windows XGL. Wow! Ethan, has been telling me to check this out (Note, of course, he never checked it out himself ) So after chatting with him about this today, we decided to give it a shot. After much typical Linux driver crap and flakery, I got it to work (Kororaa distro)… and it looks NICE! They have done things with XGL that the other systems (Win/Mac) have not. This is cool… I love competition. They also got the keyboard shortcuts right! If you want to see what I’m raving about, go search for XGL on youtube. More on this. The redraws finally don’t tear! On ubuntu, the fonts look nice! Of course, they all use firefox. Soon, Linux will have Xen built in as well. Will I install in the future? If I need a linux box with graphics… absolutely. Once XGL solidifies a bit (3 months)… I will try it on my spare Athlon box here at home. Yes, after this (XGL), the free Unix’s finally got some cred.
But what is going on here? Ah, this is all just the slow progression of 3D into our lives. The ‘operating systems’ out there are slowly but surely catching up with the game programs and giving everybody some good eye candy. People have talked about this, and it is finally becoming a reality. I mean, our computers can finally look like the screens that the hackers have in the movies! I welcome it.
Mr. R is blogging over at his site. I can’t believe it. Wow.
Check out his first post. I actually think the guy can write or his mind has been warped from reading to much sports journalism!
Recently there have been a few grreat memes that have described some new and relevant patterns. The Long Tail is a great example of this.
As I was watching the events of recent, I’ve been noticing a pattern too. I call it the ‘Death of the Middle’. Maybe this is just a phenemenon in America, but I think it is worth discussing.
Do you see a ‘Death of the Middle?’ Or maybe this is just a ‘Less of the Middle’? There is something definitely happening to the middle.
For example:
In America, you are less likely to be in the middle. You are either fairly poor (ie. in major debt) or you are becoming very wealthy.
In Movies, the successes have either been major productions or ultra-low budget films.
If you want to make a living writing software, you will either work for an open source company or end up working for a large corporation.
When buying something, you either deal with a high end sales team or you buy direct from the factory. The middleman is going away or losing power/margins. (Think about how many businesses have stopped competing with WalMart or major restaurant chains).
Countries are either very advanced or really not advanced.
Can you think of more examples?
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