I'm sitting at LAX waiting to go home and the flight is delayed 1.5 hours. This place is ghetto, they don't have free wifi Since I'm doing nothing I'll tell you how my recent computer build went.

I went with the following specs:

core i5-760
some intel motherboard
4gb of some ram
120gb sandforce-based ssd (made by corsair, can't remember the model name)
some random dvd burner thing
some corsair power supply
Antec Illusion 300 case
Nvidia gtx 460 (some factory-overclocked one)

I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on it. The thing boots in ~10 seconds (not counting bios junk/intel splash screen). Once up, it's quick to load programs. The 3d graphics as part of the ubuntu desktop look okay and are snappy.

I put doom3 on it since it's the most modern game I have that will run on linux. Actually I think I have quake4 so I'll try that again.

So I can run it at some high resolution on high quality settings and it sits at 60fps or something. I may have vsync enabled, I don't know. Anyway, from my p4 and geforce 5900 or something it's a big improvement. Unfortunately, the new computer didn't make the game fun.

I'm now a big fan of these ssds. I think I'm going to buy another one and dual boot windows 7 so I can play some modern games.

I was expecting the processor to be faster. I can't tell any difference between it and my work computer, which is a core2 quad. Firefox is still sluggish on pages with heavy javascript (I hope 4.x will fix this).

There are some weird issues with ubuntu 10.10 and ssd drives. Apparently they are race conditions or some other crap. The symptom is that every so often when I boot, my cpu will be maxed out at 100% load for no reason. The x.org is the process taking up all the cpu but it won't clear up until I reboot.

So anyway, I haven't built a computer for something like a decade. I was surprised at how nicely everything went together. The case has a "cable management" hole that allowed me to push the cables out of the way. The cables themselves are a lot nicer, too, I love the SATA cables vs. the old IDE ribbon cables. My graphics card takes 1 pci-e power cords which I wasn't expecting. My power supply doesn't have enough for 4 so if I ever went SLI, I'd have to get some adapters or something. My motherboard doesn't support SLI, though, if I had it to do over again, I'd make sure it was supported.

The case itself is fine. The other thing I don't like about it is the top fan is noisy. Not noisy like fan noise but noisy like the bearings are bad. I read on newegg that this was a problem and that antec won't replace just the fan, they want you to send the whole case. I might call them, but it will probably be easier to just buy a new fan. The other annoying thing is that all the fans have blue LED lights on them. Wtf?

Overall, I'm happy with the computer but unhappy with ubuntu 10.10. I can't downgrade to 10.4 because apparently TRIM support doesn't work right. I may switch over to vanilla debian to see if the issues go away there (I've always had better luck with debian).

tl;dr... but..

It's my (extensive, recent) experience that most airports do not have free wifi. A lot of them have wifi, but you gotta rent it.

(I've only ever found one airport that had free wifi.. it was a smaller one.. can't remember which.)

I'm also quite disappointed with 10.10. The only things it really added to the desktop were a new font and a pile of bugs.

Nice, good to see you are mostly happy with it. Depending on which C2Q is in your work desktop there might not be much difference at all. In my Antec 300, I never noticed my top fan being noisy, but I run them all at the lowest speed.

Also SLI/Crossfire option is nice, but keep in mind it can also be very noisy. My backup rig has 2 x 4850's in it and when I do something GPU intensive it gets loud. Someday I might upgrade it to 2 passively cooled cards.

LAX is gross. Least favorite airport I've been too so far.

We have like the same PC.

MSI mobo
I5 - 750 quad
4gb RAM
GTX 460 - also some factory overclocked one

I also have an i5 750. Good processor.

VPS in Fort Walton Beach, shares the strip with Eglin AFB is completely free.
Atlanta is free if you're in the right part of the airport, I think I got on one of their premier lounge hotspots. I also spent a lot of time jumping from random network to random network, at one point I was tethering off of someone's cell phone.

And as far as horrible airport? Charles de Gaulle in Paris. **** that airport.

Same, installed it on a netbook, used it for a day, uninstalled.

Did the TSA at LAX touch your junk?

No, neither did I end up in the new "see you naked" scanners. They're both old school. Although they have some of the new machines in seatac, I don't know how they decide who has to go through them.

It turns out the "tmobile" hotspot at lax has some agreement with boingo which is the wireless service I use on the ferries up here so I was able to get on w/out paying any extra. Seatac has free wifi.

ahh yeah, that's probably the one I remember that did.

I haven't done any serious gaming in quite some time but both Bulletstorm & Rage have me at least considering the possibility of building a new PC.

I rebuilt my first computer:
Pentium 2 233 Mhz
150 Megabytes of RAM (It was 32 before I started)
12 Gigabyte hard drive (It was 3 before I started)
52x CD burner (It was an 8x before I started)
4 MB Riva 128 (Kept it)
Creative Awe64 (Hell yeah I kept it)
It was a labour of love, this was my first computer and it had spent the last few years wasting away in it's old case. That old case was broken down to it's bare metal chassis. I cleaned it all up, replaced all the connectors and the CMOS. I also set the date on it to 2010, hurray for Y2K compliance

I still haven't seen a need to upgrade from a slightly overclocked Q6600 to i5 or i7.

I think the SSD makes the biggest difference. I've been wanting one for a while, but keep holding out for the bigger capacities to fall in price. 120 GB is about right, but 240 GB would be nicer!

woah wait do those actually see your weiner?

I believe the TSA racially profiles white people.



Kansas City does as well. Last time I was through there it was a decent little airport but I'm sure the TSA has had enough time to jack it up now.



I'm not sure if it could actually be used to find Brian's but, generally speaking, they leave practically nothing to the imagination.

honestly, they're really not as bad as all the hype makes them out.

There's one picture in particular, which shows a side-by-side image of a woman supposedly scanned, and then color inverted. In reality, this image is a FAKE. The first image shows a picture of a naked woman color inverted, and with some kind of blur filter. The second image shows the results of the first picture inverted again. This FAKE image is what has caused the majority of the hype over the scanners.

I'm providing a link to the image below so you can see what I mean. Before clicking, note the graphic nature of the image, and do not click if you cannot view this with a mature attitude. (Admins, if you don't like this, I won't be upset if you edit it out, but the image is posted simply as a visual aid to my post, not as a link to "pornography".)

LINK DO NOT CLICK THIS IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE A BLURRY NAKED WOMAN.


By comparison, here are links to actual body scans. Note the lack of hair, and detail when compared to the first image. Also, if you invert these, it will not come back out as a skin toned image.
http://access.nscpcdn.com/gallery/i/w/wnew_new_airport_xray/xray1.jpg
http://bikyamasr.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/AirportBodyScanner1.jpg

Oh, that said, I still think they're an entirely unnecessary invasion of privacy.

Interesting links, Sarn. I've never heard of or seen the fake image but the real ones I have seen along with other similar images. But, yeah, totally unnecessary. We all know we should be focusing on elderly white men because it could be an asian in disguise.

Hey not to throw the thread in yet ANOTHER direction but!

What do you guys think about those new "six core" AMD processors? Its is just marketing hype or are they actually a solid design? It might be time for an upgrade from my e8600 but I want to make sure it will be a worthwhile one.

AMD seems to be about showy numbers over actual performance right now, at least processor wise. Wait for sandy bridge and get an i5.

What exactly is wrong with a 6 core processor for the price that AMD is charging?

As always the full benefit is only seen with multi-threaded applications but "showy numbers" only is a big exaggeration. i7 is clearly superior to the current AMD offerings in most applications but i5 is a different story.

I distrust AMD engineering.

I only have personal experience, so you would be better off looking for benchmarks and such, but I have always found that AMD inflates the numbers. 6 cores that are slow and badly designed and so perform just like 4, or maybe even less.

Host 'ubuntu', running Linux 2.6.35-22-generic - Cpu0: Mobile AMD Sempron 2000 MHz; Up: 4d+3:56; Users: 2; Load: 1.50; Free: [Mem: 68/1376 Mio] [Swap: 244/255 Mio] [/: 2258/9591 Mio] [/host: 30848/114471 Mio]

INTERESTING.