A Thread

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THE TECH LOUNGE -- pair Networks shared hosting since 2001
Technology > General Hardware > POST YOUR RIGS 2004 EDITION
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Thread started by: CoolHandLuke -- January 12, 2004, 03:47 PM
Replies: 247 | Views: 8,912 | Last post: March 03, 2004

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CoolHandLuke | Member since 2002 | Posts: 1,247
Location: Dayton, OH | Jan 12, 2004, 03:47 PM

  New year, new thread. Post your rigs. Pics or GTFO.
  Mine:

  - AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton core, unlocked, OC'd
    to 2.2GHz)
  - 1GB DDR400 (2x512 Corsair XMS)
  - Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB
  - 120GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (7200rpm, yeah I
    know, shut up)
  - Antec SX1040B (beige, deal with it)
  - Samsung 19" CRT (the good one, not the flat-screen)
  - Windows XP Pro SP1

  No I don't have a DVD burner. Yes I know. Save it.

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GRAVEROBBER | Member since 2001 | Posts: 4,891
Location: Chicago | Jan 12, 2004, 03:52 PM

  > Maxtor DiamondMax

  I give it six months. Maxtors die like fruit flies.
  Get a Western Digital or get a backup. Both, ideally.

  Nice 9800 Pro though. What are you running on it?

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x_sector_7 | Member since 2003 | Posts: 342
Location: undisclosed | Jan 12, 2004, 03:59 PM

  lol @ beige case in 2004. Do you also have a pager?

  My rig:
  - P4 3.0 GHz HT
  - 2GB DDR
  - GeForce FX 5950 Ultra

  before anyone says it: YES it runs hot. YES the fan
  sounds like a helicopter. NO i do not care.

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Mz_Chips | Senior Member since 2000 | Posts: 11,203
Location: Toronto | Jan 12, 2004, 04:12 PM

  > GeForce FX 5950 Ultra

  Oh honey.

  My condolences to your ears and your electric bill.
  That card draws 80 watts on its own and turns the
  rest of your case into a convection oven. I've seen
  space heaters that make less noise.

  Mine:
  - Athlon 64 3200+ (Socket 754, ClawHammer core)
  - 1GB DDR400 Mushkin
  - Sapphire Radeon 9600 XT (quiet. QUIET. Remember
    quiet?)
  - 2x80GB WD Raptors RAID 0 (yes, I know RAID 0 is
    a risk, I have backups, I'm not an animal)
  - Lian Li PC-60 (aluminum, not beige, Luke)
  - ViewSonic P95f+ 19" CRT

  The Athlon 64 is the future. I will die on this hill.
  Intel can keep their Prescott furnace.

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CoolHandLuke | Member since 2002 | Posts: 1,247
Location: Dayton, OH | Jan 12, 2004, 04:18 PM

  > beige case in 2004. Do you also have a pager

  The case works. It has fans. It holds components.
  The electrons inside do not know what color the
  outside is. I'm sorry you spent $90 on a window
  and a neon tube so you can watch your components
  sit there being components.

  > Mz_Chips

  RAID 0 on Raptors is disgusting and I respect it
  completely.

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GRAVEROBBER | Member since 2001 | Posts: 4,891
Location: Chicago | Jan 12, 2004, 04:24 PM

  The Athlon 64 IS the future. Anyone buying Prescott
  right now is paying Intel to heat their apartment.
  The P4 at 3.0GHz pulls 89 watts. The Athlon 64
  3200+ does the same work at 67 watts. These are
  not opinions. These are numbers on a spec sheet.
  Intel is shipping a chip that needs its own cooling
  solution because they designed their way into a
  thermal corner and the only way out was "more
  gigahertz."

  I said this in the P4 vs. A64 thread three months
  ago and someone called me an AMD fanboy. Fine. I'm
  an AMD fanboy with a lower power bill. We are not
  the same.

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x_sector_7 | Member since 2003 | Posts: 342
Location: undisclosed | Jan 12, 2004, 04:31 PM

  okay so I might have been wrong about the FX 5950.

  Might.

  anyone want to buy a GeForce FX 5950 Ultra? Barely
  used. Fan works great. Very loud but it works.
  Please.

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TinFoilHat_Larry | Member since 2003 | Posts: 87
Location: [CLASSIFIED] | Jan 12, 2004, 04:38 PM

  You guys are all being monitored. Every component
  you just listed has a manufacturer ID. Every MAC
  address is logged. Every time you connect to the
  internet your ISP records the session. I run my rig
  air-gapped and boot from a custom Slackware install
  with no networking drivers. If I need to go online
  I use a separate machine at a public library.

  Just thought you should know.

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Mz_Chips | Senior Member since 2000 | Posts: 11,203
Location: Toronto | Jan 12, 2004, 04:41 PM

  > TinFoilHat_Larry

  Larry you posted this from your home connection. We
  can see your IP in the post header.

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TinFoilHat_Larry | Member since 2003 | Posts: 87
Location: [CLASSIFIED] | Jan 12, 2004, 04:43 PM

  DAMN IT.

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dormouse | Member since 2001 | Posts: 6,744
Location: Glasgow | Jan 12, 2004, 05:02 PM

  Thread tax:

  - Dual Opteron 240 workstation (yes, two CPUs, yes
    it was meant to be a server, yes I bought it
    surplus from a hosting company that went bankrupt)
  - 4GB ECC DDR (registered, because this board is a
    server board and it only takes registered, which
    means my RAM cost four times what yours did but it
    also error-corrects, which means I have never had
    a random crash and you have)
  - Quadro FX 1100 (it's a workstation card, it
    renders CAD, no it does not game well, I don't
    game, I do actual work on my computer, I'll wait
    while you process that)
  - 4x36GB SCSI drives (15000 RPM, RAID 5, on an
    Adaptec 2200S, yes the drives sound like a
    dentist's office, I wear headphones)
  - Tyan Thunder K8W motherboard
  - Generic black rack case
  - Debian Sarge

  I work from home. This is my livelihood. It has a
  UPS. It has redundancy. It has monitoring. I know
  what every LED means without looking. When I die
  they will find me in this chair and the uptime
  counter will still be running.

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CoolHandLuke | Member since 2002 | Posts: 1,247
Location: Dayton, OH | Jan 12, 2004, 05:11 PM

  > dormouse

  Dual Opteron 240 as a desktop machine is like
  parking an ambulance in your driveway because it
  has a good stereo. Respect.

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Mz_Chips | Senior Member since 2000 | Posts: 11,203
Location: Toronto | Jan 12, 2004, 05:15 PM

  Can we talk about the fact that dormouse has four
  SCSI drives doing RAID 5 on a DESKTOP and Larry is
  worried about being surveilled while posting from
  his home IP? This thread has everything.

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[deleted user] | Account closed
Jan 12, 2004, 05:22 PM

  [This post has been removed by the poster.]

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GRAVEROBBER | Member since 2001 | Posts: 4,891
Location: Chicago | Jan 12, 2004, 05:24 PM

  Whatever that was, I'm sure it was worth deleting
  in under two minutes.

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  [...]

  [82 more posts in this thread -- click to expand]

  [Page 1 of 5]

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This is what a thread was. Not the content – the content is interchangeable, could be hardware or politics or gardening or any of the ten thousand subjects that humans argue about when you give them a text box and time. The thread is the container. It has structure: someone starts it, regulars arrive, a personality ecosystem establishes itself within hours, knowledge accumulates, the thread drifts from its original subject because all threads drift, someone drops genuine expertise that would cost three hundred dollars an hour from a consultant, someone else says something stupid and gets corrected, someone deletes a post and nobody will ever know what it said, and the whole thing persists. It is there tomorrow. It is there next year. You can search for it. You can link to it. A stranger in 2007 can find it and learn something from it that the people who wrote it in 2004 did not know they were teaching.

The thread is the unit of knowledge that the platform era destroyed. Not because platforms cannot host threads – Reddit has threads, Twitter has threads, every platform has something it calls a thread. But a thread on a platform is content in a feed. It appears, it gets engagement, the algorithm loses interest, and it sinks. A thread on a forum was architecture. It had an address. It accumulated. It got better with time, because every reply added information and every correction refined the record. The Honda timing belt thread from Chapter 12 was not a conversation. It was a textbook that wrote itself over eleven years, contributed to by dozens of practitioners, and it was better than any textbook a single author could have produced, because no single author has that many engines’ worth of experience.

When people say they miss forums, they are not missing an interface. They are missing this: the slow, persistent, cumulative production of shared knowledge by people who showed up to the same place over years and left something behind. The thread is the room. The forum is the unlicensed bar in someone’s basement – no sign, no bouncer, just a door that was open if you knew where it was. When the building gets condemned and replaced with a shopping mall, the room is gone, and what is lost is not the space but the regulars who showed up often enough to know each other by name.