Lego Mindstorm Robot

Jack, Aidan and I had to make a couple of robots using the Lego Mindstorm kit for IT. It was pretty cool, we made this strange vehicle which wasn't too hard and Alpha Rex, the 'human' robot. He was a bit harder but again, not too hard. Just a lot more time consuming and we had a missing piece so that delayed us a little bit more.

Here's some pictures of Rex.

ATI Radeon 4800 Series.

The battle for top spot in the GPU market has been fought between two major competitors for a long time now, Nvidia and ATI. They have both been on top at different times, with Nvidia most recently pretty much annihilating ATI with the 8000 series. But are the times changing once again with ATI releasing the 4000 series of graphics cards? It appears they may be. Nvidia are currently having to deal with defective hardware and revenues short of what they expected and now they have to deal with ATIs 4850 and 4870 cards, selling for $235 and and $399 respectively. And soon to come the 4870x2, ATIs monster card that will be sporting 2Gb of GDDR5 memory.

Benchmark with the 4850, 4870, 9800, 8800 and 3870

After looking at that it clearly shows the best two cards as the Radeon 4870 and GeForce 9800 GTX+

The 4870 costs $399au while the 9800 GTX + costs inbetween $450au and $500au. So really making the decision rather one sided considering ATIs high end card the 4870x2 hasn't been released yet and when it does it will probably only be a little more expensive than the 9800 GTX + and judging by what shows in the benchmark it will murder anything out by Nvidia at this moment.

And to shame Nvidia even more Tom's Hardware HD 4870 better than GTX 260!

Nvidia GTX260s can go for up to $550au and Nvidia GTX280s can go for up to $899au. For the difference in performance, I don't think anyone could justify the purchase of an Nvidia GTX280.

Look at the results and judge for yourself. I myself am happy to see ATI back up on top and will be interested to see how the 3870x2 performs.

Science Laptop Project.

Aidan, Jack and I were given the task to upload a master ghost image and succesfully image a number of Toshiba laptops for science.


The first problem me and Aidan encountered was when we tried to upload the master ghost image to the ghost server. The first switch we used was dead, didn't work at all. Second one we tried was so slow and took about 3 hours for us to upload the master image to the server. Now that I think about all that though I don't know why we just didn't directly link the server with the master laptop...

Once we got finally got the master image up we (Aidan, Jack and I) multicasted the image over to two laptops using the slow switch, this took about an hour and a half. Once they'd completed we attempted to change the SID IDs on the laptops so no network conflict would happen but these imaged laptops will no longer fully read the ghost disc which is needed to change the SID IDs. Even after formatting them with a Windows disc they still hang on reading the ghost disc which is really really strange.

Yesterday Roger brought in a new switch that was actually fast and we were able to ghost all the remaining laptops in one go, taking no longer than 20 minutes to image them all. After that was done all we had to do was change the SID IDs.

All in all it was good and pretty easy apart from the few minor setbacks.