That's more or less the centre of the whole LHC controversy. Hawking Radiation, which is the mechanism with which small black holes would evaporate, hasn't been proven. If Hawking is wrong, black holes don't emit radiation and they will continuously keep gaining mass. If he's right, they will emit energy faster than they gain it and thus evaporate.
There's a few other subject related to strangelets too, but the Hawking Radiation is what is mostly debated by those who want LHC closed down.
Yes. A known good overclocking mainboard + cooler is a wise choice if you want to tinker. If the mainboard suck, so will your system no matter what you put on it. In my case, I prioritize getting lots of RAM instead of fast RAM, but that's because 4GB DDR2 800 will give me more performance than 2GB DDR3 1333, plus I can upgrade to 8GB without throwing away any old sticks later. It's a matter of what you do with your hardware.
My recent upgrade: $24 Graphics card (I'm no gamer. Well, I've got AoE II) $32 CPU-cooler $64 4GB RAM $80 CPU $96 Hard drive $113 Mainboard Reused old chassis, PSU, soundcard and midi interface.
Compared to stock speed I can run the CPU at 160% , RAM at either 120% speed or at 25% lower latencies, FSB at 200% + lowered northbridge latencies, all prime95 stable. Packs one hell of a punch for a $385 computer.
I can get a little more out of the CPU if I crank up the voltage a bit, but I want to keep temperatures below 65 degrees Celsius during continuous full load.
I'd say Windows and OSX are equal in how good they are for tinkering. There's lots of stuff you can do under the surface to enhance the workings of the standard installation in both systems.
I must say that homebuilt x86 PC's are much more tinker-friendly than Apple PC's, or any other brand name PC's, though. There's not much you can do under the hood in an imac. You're restricted to upgrading the CPU, RAM and harddrive. No access to RAM-timings, FSB ratios, northbridge overclocking/overvolting, etc, etc. Not even on the MacPro. As with Dell, HP, IBM or other brand name PC's, you simply do not have access to low level tinkering.
If you want to tinker, you'll have to go with building your own system. And with a bit of tinkering, you can even run OSX on those systems. ^_^
In short: OS tinkering = OSX and Windows are equal. Hardware tinkering = Homebuilt systems rule supreme.
I think it's just a token effort to say they disapprove of doing things the non-Nintendo way So, basically, Nintendo is Apple Light? =)
and maintaining a healthy level of FUD about third-party code that isn't based on any official API for the wii. I'd say it's unhealthy FUD, since I won't be buying any Wii as long as I must fear that they might push an update that make me unable to use my console the way I want to. Give me official support for homebrew software and I'll get one... Keep pushing stupid stuff like this, no deal.
But in order to know if that phase diagram is correct, it must first be proved by someone. And then there's always that certain kind of people who can believe what someone else has proved. You know, the kind that says "It hasn't been 100% proved that smoking causes cancer, I've never seen smoking cause cancer. Look. I just smoked a cigarette. No cancer." And the "That proves nothing, it might have been god who did it" crowd.:P
why is it so hard to find displays that good any more? Have you noticed how prices on laptops just seem to plummet? They do this by using cheaper and cheaper component, like low quality displays and marketing 16:9 screens as if they where 4:3 screens... If you buy a laptop in the same pricerange as you did 5-10 years ago, you still get good quality. It's starting to get tricky to get 4:3 displays in a laptop though. 8-(
I've seen quite a few instructables about how to replace laptop batteries [google.com] yourself. Be careful when you do that. My brother replaced the cells in his old battery, and less then a month later, they exploded. Luckily, they where a few meters away when it happened, but they found pieces of it stuck in the roof and in other rooms of the apartment.
Dead pixels eventually add up. Dead pixels isn't the biggest problem with old laptops. It's the lamps. They grow dim with age. My own laptop is a >5 year old Thinkpad R40, and even though it's still fast enough to run most stuff and has zero dead pixels, when compared to a new laptop it looks like I've got a sun-film taped to the screen...
IMHO, the itunes requirement is the biggest weakness of the iphone. Also the main reason why I never got an ipod.
Nokia and Sony-Ericsson have rather badly designed software for syncing the calendar, phonebook and such, but at least I can connect them in mass-storage mode and copy music, pictures, movies and software to/from them with any file-manager, or simply remove the flash-card and use a cardreader if I happen to not have one of those proprietary cables at hand. The biggest downside with most SE and Nokia phones is that they usually don't use standard mini-usb connectors, which is really dumb design.
No, I mean that in my opinion, MS seem to always make money on everything by any means available, while Apple most or the time want to make money on most things by almost any means available.
If Apple where as greedy as MS, you'd have ad's all over itunes and the default webpage in a newly installed OSX would point to a page littered in ad's...
The biggest advantage of firewire it's ability to reserve resources for a bitstream. That's why it's so much better than USB for file transfer, video transfer and audio. The driver can basically say that "this device must have access to x bps, with a maximum delay of x ms per packet", and then other transfers won't disrupt this stream. Try getting low latencies and smooth playback with a USB soundcard. It's possible, but I wouldn't want to have to rely on it in a live situation...
The reason firewire flashdrives are scarce is definitely cost. In the early days, flash-chips where too slow to take advantage of firewire and too small to need it. Back then, firewire cost $3-$5 more than USB per device, so it would be rather dumb to use it for flashdisks when USB1 at 12Mbps got you exacly as fast file transfers as firewire. Today we're able to saturate a USB2 or firewire interface with a flashdrive but the market is so much lower for a firewire flashdisk, since it is mainly used by the audio/video niche, that the price goes up even though the controllerchips are cheap these days.
$1 per port would make quite a difference on a low cost device, especially if it's got two ports or more. Think a 6 port firewire-hub. That's $6 just in royalty. But I don't think they actually charged that much. Wasn't it more along the lines of $0.25 per device?
The biggest reason why USB was a really slow hit with the x86-crowd was the lack of USB-support in MS-Windows and other x86 OS's. In order to connect a USB-device you had to install USB-support, reboot, install the device drivers, reboot, sometimes there would be another driver to be loaded after the first one (sic) so another install, reboot... Also, some early USB equipped x86-mainboards didn't have USB support in BIOS, so you couldn't use a USB-keyboard to change BIOS-settings, enter Windows safe-mode, etc, etc. USB was also slow as hell for most other uses than HID-devices or printers. My first mp3-player would take more than an hour to fill. 6GB @ 12Mbps, the horror!
When Apple put a port in their hardware, they usually already got the drivers ready and they rely mostly on making their own hardware. The Imac came with a USB-keyboard and USB-mouse made by Apple, and thus everyone that had an Imac used USB-gear.
What has MS license cost or Microsoft's greed got to do with firewire royalty and Apple's greed? They're not connected. Don't confuse subjects. If anyone accuses Apple of greed, that doesn't mean that they think Apple is worse than Microsoft. Both are greedy. Microsoft more than Apple usually though.
It wouldn't be an issue if people had the character to actually not get subscriptions on encrypted channels. Most of the stuff they broadcast is crap anyway, and they won't let you buy only the one or two good channels, you have to buy a whole bunch of other crap too...
It ain't worth what they ask for it, especially when they cripple it, so don't buy it. If no one paid for the crap, they'd have to become customer-friendly in order to stay in business.
But, as I said, the problem is that way too many people actually think the crap is worth paying for, so the broadcasters get rich even without my money...
EVERY hot component needs forced air cooling, which you rarely find in a switch. That's only true for basic edge switches and stuff targeted at home-users. Most professional switches rely on fans for cooling.
I assume we're talking about giving kids critical thought, since that is when you have to learn that skill.
Give them a piece of "fact" that you know to be false but sounds credible and see if they believe it or not. Then ask them to research if it is true or false.
Do this regularly, both with actual true information and false ones. Then you give them the task of looking at Fox News, or some other propaganda'ish channel, and have them research the truth behind the news.
They're bound to learn both scepticism, critical thinking and how to find and use information.
When you capture an enemy combatant, they become a prisoner of war. When imprisoned you're not longer a combatant... You have to be in combat to be that.
Unless you're not at war with the one you're classifying as enemy. In that case, imprisoning an enemy combatant is simply abduction of a foreign citizen. If, say, Iran where to go into Iraq and imprison a few US soldiers, that would be more or less the same thing.
Ah, well. Hopefully, the US will become a better nation when Bush goes away. Problem is, the retards behind the retard aren't elected... Hope they get kicked too...
I assume this was meant to be funny, but in reality it seems like that statement is closer to the truth than it should be.
If anything, the punishment for breaking a law should be more severe the higher up in the government you are. This would discourage people in power from abusing their power. Granting them any kind of immunity is asking them to abuse you...
Wait a few years and you'll have iPhone Mini/Nanos replacing your Nokia and Sony Ericssons. You're comparing "Ipod" vs "Ipod Nano/Mini" with "Smartphone" vs "Standard mobile phone"
The problem with this is that an Iphone Mini or Nano would have to give up what makes the Iphone such a desirable smartphone to a certain group of people. It's big screen and touch-screen GUI.
The most irritation thing about Windows isn't that it doesn't come with lots of software pre-installed. Actually, it would be quite irritating if it did since I want to select my software for myself so that I don't have useless crap installed, like Moviemaker or Outlook Express.
The irritating part is that in Windows, I have to manually track down all the software I want on tens or hundreds of webpages around the world, download them, in some cases unpack them, and then install them. One by one. Every time. And then keep them updated manually, one by one, all the time.
They could add a utility that let people download and install freeware without having to look for it, download it and install it manually and that would automatically update all of them. No one would be crying monopoly. Unless they only add their own software, which also would make it rather useless since MS have a rather limited freeware-portfolio. And some of their freeware is actually adware, like MSN Messenger. (One would think that the wealthiest software-company in the world could afford to not have their software and search-engines rendered almost unusable by ads)
An OS with no bundled applications is rather useless from an end users point of view. Most people expect the OS to come bundled and pre-configured with applications like a window-manager, file-manager, text-editor, http-reader, cd/dvd-tools, other file-managing tools (copy, move, etc), configuration-managers, tcp/ip-stack, bluetooth-stack, etc, etc.
Why does Windows come with less powerful applications bundled than most other OS's, then? MS also sell (or license, which isn't exactly the same) applications, which is why they only bundle the minimum of what they can get away with while still keeping competitors at bay. If you want to have full productivity using Windows, they want you to also pay for the applications needed for this.
A free OS bundle doesn't need to keep the full functionality back in order so sell other software. They can ship with everything needed for full productivity bundled.
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That's more or less the centre of the whole LHC controversy.
Hawking Radiation, which is the mechanism with which small black holes would evaporate, hasn't been proven.
If Hawking is wrong, black holes don't emit radiation and they will continuously keep gaining mass.
If he's right, they will emit energy faster than they gain it and thus evaporate.
There's a few other subject related to strangelets too, but the Hawking Radiation is what is mostly debated by those who want LHC closed down.
Yes.
A known good overclocking mainboard + cooler is a wise choice if you want to tinker.
If the mainboard suck, so will your system no matter what you put on it.
In my case, I prioritize getting lots of RAM instead of fast RAM, but that's because 4GB DDR2 800 will give me more performance than 2GB DDR3 1333, plus I can upgrade to 8GB without throwing away any old sticks later.
It's a matter of what you do with your hardware.
My recent upgrade:
$24 Graphics card (I'm no gamer. Well, I've got AoE II)
$32 CPU-cooler
$64 4GB RAM
$80 CPU
$96 Hard drive
$113 Mainboard
Reused old chassis, PSU, soundcard and midi interface.
Compared to stock speed I can run the CPU at 160% , RAM at either 120% speed or at 25% lower latencies, FSB at 200% + lowered northbridge latencies, all prime95 stable.
Packs one hell of a punch for a $385 computer.
I can get a little more out of the CPU if I crank up the voltage a bit, but I want to keep temperatures below 65 degrees Celsius during continuous full load.
I'd say Windows and OSX are equal in how good they are for tinkering.
There's lots of stuff you can do under the surface to enhance the workings of the standard installation in both systems.
I must say that homebuilt x86 PC's are much more tinker-friendly than Apple PC's, or any other brand name PC's, though.
There's not much you can do under the hood in an imac. You're restricted to upgrading the CPU, RAM and harddrive. No access to RAM-timings, FSB ratios, northbridge overclocking/overvolting, etc, etc.
Not even on the MacPro. As with Dell, HP, IBM or other brand name PC's, you simply do not have access to low level tinkering.
If you want to tinker, you'll have to go with building your own system. And with a bit of tinkering, you can even run OSX on those systems. ^_^
In short:
OS tinkering = OSX and Windows are equal.
Hardware tinkering = Homebuilt systems rule supreme.
Give me official support for homebrew software and I'll get one...
Keep pushing stupid stuff like this, no deal.
about:config
browser.urlbar.maxRichResults = 0
Turns of the "awesome bar"
But they should have that option in the options!
Hiding something important like that in a non-obvious place is stupid.
Simple way to disable the horrible "awesome bar"
about:config
browser.urlbar.maxRichResults = 0
But in order to know if that phase diagram is correct, it must first be proved by someone. :P
And then there's always that certain kind of people who can believe what someone else has proved.
You know, the kind that says "It hasn't been 100% proved that smoking causes cancer, I've never seen smoking cause cancer. Look. I just smoked a cigarette. No cancer."
And the "That proves nothing, it might have been god who did it" crowd.
They do this by using cheaper and cheaper component, like low quality displays and marketing 16:9 screens as if they where 4:3 screens...
If you buy a laptop in the same pricerange as you did 5-10 years ago, you still get good quality.
It's starting to get tricky to get 4:3 displays in a laptop though. 8-(
My brother replaced the cells in his old battery, and less then a month later, they exploded.
Luckily, they where a few meters away when it happened, but they found pieces of it stuck in the roof and in other rooms of the apartment. Dead pixels eventually add up. Dead pixels isn't the biggest problem with old laptops. It's the lamps. They grow dim with age.
My own laptop is a >5 year old Thinkpad R40, and even though it's still fast enough to run most stuff and has zero dead pixels, when compared to a new laptop it looks like I've got a sun-film taped to the screen...
It does:
http://zh.openoffice.org/new/index.html
Here's the list of localized version:
http://projects.openoffice.org/native-lang.html
Exactly, so solution is to not use consumer-grade hardware in space... =)
IMHO, the itunes requirement is the biggest weakness of the iphone.
Also the main reason why I never got an ipod.
Nokia and Sony-Ericsson have rather badly designed software for syncing the calendar, phonebook and such, but at least I can connect them in mass-storage mode and copy music, pictures, movies and software to/from them with any file-manager, or simply remove the flash-card and use a cardreader if I happen to not have one of those proprietary cables at hand.
The biggest downside with most SE and Nokia phones is that they usually don't use standard mini-usb connectors, which is really dumb design.
No, I mean that in my opinion, MS seem to always make money on everything by any means available, while Apple most or the time want to make money on most things by almost any means available.
If Apple where as greedy as MS, you'd have ad's all over itunes and the default webpage in a newly installed OSX would point to a page littered in ad's...
The biggest advantage of firewire it's ability to reserve resources for a bitstream.
That's why it's so much better than USB for file transfer, video transfer and audio.
The driver can basically say that "this device must have access to x bps, with a maximum delay of x ms per packet", and then other transfers won't disrupt this stream.
Try getting low latencies and smooth playback with a USB soundcard.
It's possible, but I wouldn't want to have to rely on it in a live situation...
The reason firewire flashdrives are scarce is definitely cost.
In the early days, flash-chips where too slow to take advantage of firewire and too small to need it.
Back then, firewire cost $3-$5 more than USB per device, so it would be rather dumb to use it for flashdisks when USB1 at 12Mbps got you exacly as fast file transfers as firewire.
Today we're able to saturate a USB2 or firewire interface with a flashdrive but the market is so much lower for a firewire flashdisk, since it is mainly used by the audio/video niche, that the price goes up even though the controllerchips are cheap these days.
$1 per port would make quite a difference on a low cost device, especially if it's got two ports or more.
Think a 6 port firewire-hub. That's $6 just in royalty.
But I don't think they actually charged that much. Wasn't it more along the lines of $0.25 per device?
The biggest reason why USB was a really slow hit with the x86-crowd was the lack of USB-support in MS-Windows and other x86 OS's. In order to connect a USB-device you had to install USB-support, reboot, install the device drivers, reboot, sometimes there would be another driver to be loaded after the first one (sic) so another install, reboot...
Also, some early USB equipped x86-mainboards didn't have USB support in BIOS, so you couldn't use a USB-keyboard to change BIOS-settings, enter Windows safe-mode, etc, etc.
USB was also slow as hell for most other uses than HID-devices or printers.
My first mp3-player would take more than an hour to fill. 6GB @ 12Mbps, the horror!
When Apple put a port in their hardware, they usually already got the drivers ready and they rely mostly on making their own hardware.
The Imac came with a USB-keyboard and USB-mouse made by Apple, and thus everyone that had an Imac used USB-gear.
What has MS license cost or Microsoft's greed got to do with firewire royalty and Apple's greed?
They're not connected. Don't confuse subjects.
If anyone accuses Apple of greed, that doesn't mean that they think Apple is worse than Microsoft. Both are greedy. Microsoft more than Apple usually though.
It wouldn't be an issue if people had the character to actually not get subscriptions on encrypted channels.
Most of the stuff they broadcast is crap anyway, and they won't let you buy only the one or two good channels, you have to buy a whole bunch of other crap too...
It ain't worth what they ask for it, especially when they cripple it, so don't buy it.
If no one paid for the crap, they'd have to become customer-friendly in order to stay in business.
But, as I said, the problem is that way too many people actually think the crap is worth paying for, so the broadcasters get rich even without my money...
Most professional switches rely on fans for cooling.
I assume we're talking about giving kids critical thought, since that is when you have to learn that skill.
Give them a piece of "fact" that you know to be false but sounds credible and see if they believe it or not.
Then ask them to research if it is true or false.
Do this regularly, both with actual true information and false ones.
Then you give them the task of looking at Fox News, or some other propaganda'ish channel, and have them research the truth behind the news.
They're bound to learn both scepticism, critical thinking and how to find and use information.
When you capture an enemy combatant, they become a prisoner of war.
When imprisoned you're not longer a combatant...
You have to be in combat to be that.
Unless you're not at war with the one you're classifying as enemy.
In that case, imprisoning an enemy combatant is simply abduction of a foreign citizen.
If, say, Iran where to go into Iraq and imprison a few US soldiers, that would be more or less the same thing.
Ah, well. Hopefully, the US will become a better nation when Bush goes away.
Problem is, the retards behind the retard aren't elected... Hope they get kicked too...
But what files is illegal to bring into the US?
Well, child-porn is obvious... But that can't be the only thing they look for, right?
What else?
So, OSX is simply a proprietary, closed-source, non-free, vendor-locked version of GNU then...
I assume this was meant to be funny, but in reality it seems like that statement is closer to the truth than it should be.
If anything, the punishment for breaking a law should be more severe the higher up in the government you are.
This would discourage people in power from abusing their power.
Granting them any kind of immunity is asking them to abuse you...
The problem with this is that an Iphone Mini or Nano would have to give up what makes the Iphone such a desirable smartphone to a certain group of people.
It's big screen and touch-screen GUI.
The most irritation thing about Windows isn't that it doesn't come with lots of software pre-installed.
Actually, it would be quite irritating if it did since I want to select my software for myself so that I don't have useless crap installed, like Moviemaker or Outlook Express.
The irritating part is that in Windows, I have to manually track down all the software I want on tens or hundreds of webpages around the world, download them, in some cases unpack them, and then install them. One by one. Every time. And then keep them updated manually, one by one, all the time.
They could add a utility that let people download and install freeware without having to look for it, download it and install it manually and that would automatically update all of them.
No one would be crying monopoly.
Unless they only add their own software, which also would make it rather useless since MS have a rather limited freeware-portfolio. And some of their freeware is actually adware, like MSN Messenger.
(One would think that the wealthiest software-company in the world could afford to not have their software and search-engines rendered almost unusable by ads)
An OS with no bundled applications is rather useless from an end users point of view.
Most people expect the OS to come bundled and pre-configured with applications like a window-manager, file-manager, text-editor, http-reader, cd/dvd-tools, other file-managing tools (copy, move, etc), configuration-managers, tcp/ip-stack, bluetooth-stack, etc, etc.
Why does Windows come with less powerful applications bundled than most other OS's, then?
MS also sell (or license, which isn't exactly the same) applications, which is why they only bundle the minimum of what they can get away with while still keeping competitors at bay.
If you want to have full productivity using Windows, they want you to also pay for the applications needed for this.
A free OS bundle doesn't need to keep the full functionality back in order so sell other software.
They can ship with everything needed for full productivity bundled.