Thursday, April 24, 2008

Just ordered another machine

Yeah, yeah, I've ordered yet ANOTHER machine:

Abit NF-M2SV GeForce 6100 Socket AM2 Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Socket AM2 CPU
Crucial 1024MB PC4200 DDR2 533MHz (X2)
Seagate 250GB Serial ATA w/NCQ 7200/8MB/SATA-3G
Power Up Silver 5511 ATX Mid-T Case w/450w

All for $199 after $30 in rebates. Note that there's no CPU heatsink/fan, no OS, no CD/DVD burner, and no vidcard (although there's an integrated one on the motherboard, which may get me through the testing/burn-in phase).

I've just ordered an Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 LP CPU Cooler for $25 from Microcenter. I'll order a CD/DVD burner in another week, and within the next month, I'll install a new vidcard. I don't know what OS I'll utilize yet...maybe Linux, but more than likely Windows (only I don't want to buy Vista [or XP, really]).

At this point, the barebones I ordered last year is still the better computer, but I spent quite a bit more for it. Until the new one is up and running, I'm also using its 2gb of RAM in the older computer, for a total of 3gb of RAM (COD4 flies during loading!).

This is the deal I saw on Tigerdirect.com that made me purchase this machine.

Verizon hit with GPL copyright lawsuit over router software

This article is old but interesting. I've this router and I've Verizon's FIOS service. Not long after purchasing this service, I perused Actiontec's website and had seen that they utilized Linux (this is, specifically, an issue with Verizon not including the source code for BusyBox to its customers, per v2 of the GPL) as the firmware for this router. I also saw that Verizon offered firmware versions for this router on their pages. I didn't think that they'd not release their software as GPL, though. I think it was either forgotten or GPL was taken for granted (because GPL software is usually free).

Anyways, this is a good read.