I'm an Austin resident. I don't have any direct involvement with the police except for the traffic enforcement people -- speeding, stop signs and state inspection stickers. If the Austin Police Chief wants to talk about eroding public trust, they need to collectively agree to follow all laws they plan to enforce. If they want to ticket for 40 in a 45 a block from my house, they damn well better keep it at 40 or under -- speeding by a park with kids at 50 is not acceptable. If they want to ticket for rolling stops, they damn well better actually stop at the stop signs.
And it would be nice if Austin Police would actually ticket the state police asshole who keeps cutting across 4 lanes of traffic from the far right side of Burnet to get onto MoPac in less than the 100 feet between the traffic light at Gracy Farms and the entrance ramp (ignoring the solid white stripes).
Instead, the city and state police and the county sheriffs in Austin make me feel like what the good Shephard Book said, "The government is a body of people usually notably ungoverned." There are many specific complaints I have, and can provide patrol car numbers and times; instead, I fear the departments are so corrupt I dare not tempt reprisal.
Fine. So your data rate is higher. But the fact is, a carrier pigeon is only half-duplex, whereas your network connection, though slower, is full-duplex. I bet your carrier-pigeon vendor didn't talk about that part, did he?
A single carrier pigeon is half duplex, but if you add another at the other end, you have full duplex. Increasing bandwidth is easy, too, just add another pigeon.
From TFA: "Braidwood, which is expected to offer anywhere from 4GB to 16GB capacity,..." - In what way would it even compete with the SSD market? I'll stick to my separate 250 gig SSD drives for a while longer methinks.
You lack imagination. Consider a case where terabyte SSDs are more than $500, but spinning terabyte spinning media is less than $100. If there was a 16 gig cache sitting on the main board that would provide SSD write speeds at all times, and SSD read speeds for most things (in a consumer app, I think "most" works, in a database, not so much), and it cost significantly less than $400, I can easily see how it would erode the SSD market.
As an aside, any SSD that could sit in a lower latency, higher bandwidth place than at the end of a SATA cable starts to look pretty interesting. What if I could buy a Thinkpad that had no upgradable hard drive, but had 150 gigs of SSD on board that responded faster than 6GB/s and with lower latency than any current media... I think I wouldn't resent the "not upgradable".
I didn't enjoy multiplayer WC3 until I found DOTA in 2004, and then it got worlds better when banlisting and ping addons started showing up. What will Blizzard be doing to support such features in SC2?
Will Battle.Net 2 under SC2 support filtering opponents by latency? Reputation for leaving / lagging / griefing / feeding (some reputation classes may be more interesting for third party maps)? A minimum number of games played (I realize I'm a below average player and experts may create new accounts to stomp my kind, so I'll only play someone whose account has played more than 30 games)? Region labeling (country flags would be awesome)? Ladder scores for third party maps (I know scoring a 5v5 DOTA would be hard, but it would make games far more interesting)?
By the way, if I don't have SC2 preordered, I'll certainly be there on opening day.
I do. Went looking for my "next" TV in 2002 and found HDTV standards still in flux, so I went and bought the best CRT TV I could find, a 32" Sony Trinitron for $650. I can't say I'm perfectly happy with it, but I am certainly happy enough with it not to cough up $500-$1500 for its replacement. It plays PS2 and Wii games perfectly well, and there are no difficulties playing DVDs or videos transcoded on the AppleTV (in 480i). There's no blacker blacks, no fake resolution blurring and it doesn't tip over or break when my son throws something at it.
I imagine this beast has a lot of life left. I can't imagine "needing" to upgrade until my kids are old enough to be gentle (youngest is 3), or a HD Wii successor comes out. My mother-in-law keeps asking when we're going to upgrade to the "HDTV generation" and what we're going to do with our old set when we do, so if it still works when we replace it, that tube is going to keep getting used for a long time.
Compare these to Starcraft 2, which needs four copies for a family of four.
I'm in a family of four. Please allow me to point out that the average family doesn't have 4 computers, so right there you're betraying how much money you have in your computing budget. A family of four would do very well enjoying the single player campaign -- Starcraft's single player was great -- and random battle.net skirmishes (assuming they get a decent ladder system going, and a way to filter out griefers like WC3's current Banlist programs) using a single $50 (hypothetically speaking) copy. If you add computers to the mix, yes, you can add $50 seats too. Chess has no single player option. Mario Kart Wii's single player game isn't of much value, and while I can't be certain about Brawl, I believe the same can be said there -- they're multiplayer games, nearly exclusive of single player content. With MKW, the tracks are all the same, the AI is the same, it's just not connected to any other clients and it's in single screen mode. (Not bashing MKW, by the way, I bought it on launch and it was a bargain at that price!)
And while I don't like Rock Band or that genre, I imagine if you wanted SC2 on launch, it will be $200 for your four computers (with graphics chips in the last 3-4 years). If you wait a year, I'd bet the price falls to $120. Another year or two after that, and you're probably looking at $80. Rock Band can't fall that far due to the hardware component. Personally, I know how much enjoyment I got out of playing SC with my girlfriend, later fiance, later wife, and it set us back, what, $160 for two copies of SC and BW? That was a bargain, compared to how much time we played that.
Say, you wouldn't happen to want to complain about how Starcraft 2 isn't playable with 4 people on the same computer, would you? Since we're comparing a next gen RTS to an arguably last gen driver game...
I've been a Blizzard fan since 1995. Blizzard has had hit after hit, and they've always clearly had their pulse on the community, always designed the games that gamers want. Aside from the bnetd thing, they've done a great job catering to their target audience (one could argue that the bnetd "hackers" / digital rights advocates are not part of their audience).
What has Blizzard said about "no LAN play"?
"we don't have any plans to support LAN," he said and clarified "we will not support it." The only multiplayer available will be on Battle.net.
I see this as requiring an internet connection and valid licenses for each seat. Each person at a LAN party will need to log in and authenticate their license. When the game begins, each computer will start sending traffic to the IPs each computer self-reports -- which will be on the same LAN. Each seat will see sub-millisecond pings, so no increased lag will be introduced to level the field.
I expect the next generation of battle.net will support uPNP, and be more NAT friendly than the current one. I expect VOIP. I hope to see better competition selection, including finding games that are low latency, and blacklist / whitelist (or at least plugin) support. I don't expect to see any kind of LAN support, but if their ladder can see all the players of a LAN competing with each other and provide scoring to make subsequent battle.net public games more interesting, I think that's a really big win.
I expect such network authentication means that piracy will be much more difficult and that any cracks that work will have little value. I also expect this to royally blow up in their faces if they fuck it up. I'll tolerate logging in, I won't tolerate anything short of a perfect authentication scheme. They have had a great reputation for battle.net reliability for the last 10 years.
I would say that it these students are in an engineering or science program, they must know how to use these tools, just like someone in a science/math program must know how to use Mathematica.
I'll step in as a professional with 10 years at the same company as an engineer. I don't even remember what I used in college. Some of the CAD was done on AIX / Solaris, some on SGI and some spice was done on a VAX. Colleges are there to teach you how to think, not necessarily do, and the best colleges are good at collecting students who collaborate well and cross-pollinate better thinking methodologies. When I got to my first job, I was asked "Do you know Cadence?" I had, but only for drafting, not for circuit design -- I didn't even know it was possible to do circuit design in the same tool that extruded ideal circles.
CAD systems are pretty straightforward to students. It's when you get into scripting that CAD packages start to show their power, and where it starts to matter what platform you're on, but by then, it's a programming platform -- and if you know C and LISP, you can figure just about everything else out pretty quickly. Heck, if you're talking about Cadence's scripting language (SKILL), which is supposedly built on LISP, you can use typical C syntax interchangeably and it'll understand.
Teach how to think. That opens students beyond "we teach only the CAD package 70% of the industry uses" to "our students can be proficient anywhere because they're trainable and quick learners".
He just declares flooding as the new international standard
Is that the same as stating that we're going to move out of New Orleans and other "below sea level" cities that only exist because Mother Nature hasn't been pissed off enough to drown them yet? Because I seriously don't understand how levees are a sane policy and sustainable in the next 100 years. New Orleans' city planners' biggest problems are still ahead of them.
RAID is no substitute for backups. RAID is very good at propagating errors and problems very quickly, be they software glitches or human errors.
For consumer class storage, weekly / daily backups might be more efficient than investing a lot of effort into live RAID. Since I'm a Mac guy, I see the best answer to this question as Time Machine to a network / USB attached drive -- hourly (configurable for more or less often) differential backups, almost transparent to the user. To my knowledge, Windows has no similar set of software to allow reinstallation to the last hourly backup -- my wife had the misfortune of having to restore a blank drive from her last backup and it was a flawless process that truly left her where she left off less than an hour before the hardware failure. The reinstall wizard just had to ask where the backup was. Casting aside MacOSX advocacy, there is truly no substitute for a good automated backup solution that is regularly tested. I think the best method would use the fewest common components, like a NAS, followed by an external drive with its own power supply. My least favored option would be an internal drive with every single component shared.
Signalling does not give you the right of way. Again, the variation of the "I can't stop", I've seen bicyclists who will stick their arm out and merge into traffic when the lane they are riding in is blocked, expecting the cars to "let them in." Nope. You wait for traffic to clear--just like you were a car. If that means you have to stop and wait, then you have to stop and wait. You have no more rights to the road than anyone else.
I was beginning to think I was the only one who didn't see a blinker / directional flasher as a "I have a basic human right to change lanes here regardless of the space between cars or your need to follow the car in front of you because of your unfamiliarity with this town." It always gets me when the lady on the cell phone with the giant SUV (for some reason, it's always those three things but never the same person) cuts over 3 lanes of traffic and MUST be in front of me to enter the highway so if I don't yield in less than half a second, she'll hold down the horn until I do.
Kinda reminds me of my friend who moved to D.C. and had to buy his first car... he told the salesman he wanted one with the blinkers on it. Nobody in D.C. used them, so he thought they were an option nobody got...
the choice of IBM to use the 8086 CPU. It set back the computer industry several years. The PC would now be at least 2 generations ahead if IBM did not use the retarded 8086 design.
Choosing 8086 as a CPU seems to have obviously proven the value of a system is not in the power of the CPU, but in the ease of programming good programs, reasonable enough expandability and in killer applications. A powerful CPU alone isn't enough, and in fact seems irrelevant if the whole system won't do what you want.
The victory going to a platform that featured 8086 seems to be a good lesson to every engineer out there in "cost/benefit analysis".
for 7 miles, a bicycle would be faster. or a smart car.
For a professional, a bicycle without air conditioning, protection from rain or snow handling is not even an option in any climate I know of.
As for a Smart? Those tiny inefficient things? Have you even looked at their mpg ratings (33mpg)? My 2006 Scion xB does just as well, and I can carry more passengers and stuff. I'm all for mass transit, smarter modes of transit and the like, but a bicycle for anything short of half a mile or a mile is impractical (and that's being generous, many would consider a walk over 100 feet isn't a solution).
Maybe we need to rethink the way we plan cities. Suburban-oriented development needs to stop NOW. We don't have the space or the resources to support it. There's no reason why we can't change our zoning laws to encourage new development to be constructed in a more practical fashion.
I wholly disagree. I think the suburban design is very close to being a system of capillaries needed to support the arteries. A van could circulate through the main roads of my subdivision in 30 minutes and drop people off at a stop on "the main draw". A traditional bus could then pick everybody up an head to the next stop. Down that main draw, my work is only 7 miles away -- a 15 minute ride if we have to stop a few times. Say I'm halfway through the route in my subdivision (I am), that would be a 30 minute commute. Twice my normal commute, sure, but still reasonable. I'd take it, if it were economical. If they took everybody like me who was willing if it were made smart, then they'd have enough funds to start operating more vehicles and it would be even better for everybody (the second vehicle could to in the opposite circle).
Instead, a bus comes by my house once an hour, and instead of going to the main artery, heads down the interstate 5 miles to a park and ride. After taking that 45 minute bus ride, I could take the 30 minute bus to work. That's insane.
Instead of rethinking suburbia, telling people where to live based on where they work, essentially planning to rip up 75-90% of metropolitan areas and replace it with some urban planned concept, we need smarter people running mass transit. Instead of allowing them to hand-pick people who are already on the bus and finding ways for their lives to be better, they need to pick people in major population centers (subdivisions) and come up with some different ideas. Around here, if you can drive to a park and ride, the only thing that makes any sense at all is a cross-town bus, and they have high ridership. The local routes are exclusively for the people who can't afford their own transportation and for the people who are mandated by the court not to drive.
In college, I wrote several e-mail bomb programs in Linux. Of course, he'll likely need to change the sender from "bill.gates@microsoft.com", and maybe the content shouldn't be Linux 1.3.20... but you can still harass the school board and PTA using Linux.
Second, a woman tends to get unflattering ideas if your interest in her starts and ends at sex.
I've been married for 9 years, together for 13. Any ideas you have about suggesting people change their standards mid-relationship should be tempered. My drive is significantly higher than my wife's. From time to time, I get some thought into my head that I should be more sensitive and a little less aggressive. Every time, this leads to her having confidence problems because something changed and she has no idea what it is. Pouting continues until my experiment with sensitivity ends. She knows what she has in her skull is everything I want in a life mate, but it's important for her to know her body occupies a certain percentage of my brains too.
There's a difference in clientele and expectations. Most people want a part to last for 5 years and be qualified for 85C. That's one speed sort. Some may provide better cooling and keep it under 55C and only expect 3 years. Depending on the technology, that's a different sort entirely. I'm not disagreeing that it's a marketing thing, but this is not the same QA standards.
"Factory" "overclocked"? *slaps forehead*
Only marketing weenies would play up such an oxymoron.
I'm pretty sure that word doesn't mean what you think it means. "Overclocked" means "our reliability people don't think this is smart, but it might work for you." In this case, you get a part that may or may not die before you expect it to, it might not last much beyond the warranty, it might have non-standard cooling to enable an operating window that Reliability can't assume (say they model frequency shifting at 85C and they have a heat sink that puts it at 55C; feel free to substitute any other numbers).
Any conditions where the company's Reliability department didn't endorse frequency over the lifetime of the product for 3 sigma worth of sellable parts would be "overclocked".
Hey, young 7-digit poster. Welcome. Yes, occasionally there is overlap between Slashdot and Fark, Reddit or even Digg. It's okay. You read it in both places, so obviously you frequent places that think their audience is interested -- meaning either you frequent the wrong sites, or this is interesting to your kind of person. Not that it auto-loaded the link... it only provided the description to allow you to judge it.
If you don't like what Slashdot posts, send in links to better sites. Find better News for Nerds, more gross News for Nerds with Desk Jobs or whatever, and send them on in. You could even be a Badass Link Gamer and rake through other sites and submit them to Slashdot. It's been a long time gone since this was the Hack a Netpliance and QueCat site it was when I signed up, but I've stayed through. I've since found Digg and don't need to load Slashdot more than twice a day any more.
If we're lucky, a crotchety old 5 digit poster will come along and say how different things were 6 months before I joined than they are today.
With youtube's 720p(*) videos, the quality is actually better than dvd's.
Essentially, you're asserting that more pixels is necessarily better than higher bitrate. The bitrate on youtube looks to be around 600kbps while DVDs max out around 10MBps. From what I've observed and read, YouTube runs H.264 and is typically the same quality at half to a quarter of the bitrate of MPEG2, which is what DVDs use. Using these rules of thumb, DVD quality is unquestionably better, if you're looking at a fixed pixel count.
In reality, low bitrate H.264 will be okay for low motion stuff (people talking into webcams, idiots falling off their roofs or whatever). Upload the first 10 minutes of Saving Private Ryan to YouTube's HD service and then compare that to the DVD. Not that DVD does stuff like that well; you can certainly pick out scenes where DVD doesn't have the bitrate with MPEG2 to handle 480i television (Saving Private Ryan, Fantasia 2000 with the whales and butterflies).
Now, if we wanted to compare CODECs, YouTube wins. If we could even put H.264 on a DVD, the increase in pixels up to 720p wouldn't be a problem -- 1080p might even be decent on all but the worst scenes.
Should we really be including both Windows and iPhone in the same OS usage chart?
My John Deere riding mower does a bang-up job cutting my lawn (get the fuck off it), but it's not quite built for the same purpose as my around-town Escalade.
I have a friend who needed a new cell phone and started asking me about the iPhone. At the time, she was a teacher between schools, and I told her I didn't think she could afford it. She asked me how much it cost -- I looked it up and showed her the numbers. She said, "So, if I buy this phone, I don't need to buy a computer or pay for a cable modem plus I get a phone to replace my busted one." Turns out, the iPhone actually was cheaper for her (iPhone was cheaper than a computer, iPhone plan was cheaper than cell plan plus a cable modem). E-mail on the iPhone helped her land her next job. For the poor, the iPhone is a good computer replacement. If you've used one for the web, you might realize that having one is better than nothing, and might be a good way to lower some bills.
This guy is a moron who's merely attempting to shill his crap.
As others have already said.
Wireless fails in a comparison of throughput.
Wireless fails in a comparison of security.
Wireless fails in a comparison of susceptibility to interference.
If you're just sending e-mail and browsing por^H^H^the web, wireless is fine.
If you're trying to maintain a sustained connection for things like database traffic, or a VPN connection, and being kicked in the balls by someone with electrified spiked boots is preferable.
Carriage returns added for solely for dramatic effect omitted.
I'm in an 802.11g office space. All the workstations are wired to the walls, strangely through the new VOIP phones we got last year. Nominally, the laptops are supposed to be wired when possible, and wireless for meetings -- in reality, most people don't like dropping active connections when they unplug, so they're just wireless all the time. After we got our VOIP system last year, I lost my ethernet cable and have been wireless the whole time. I VNC to my workstation and do light graphics but mostly text work there -- there's more than enough bandwidth for that. I download from intranet sites at 600+KB/s, and that's fine with me. I actively use e-mail and the like. There's enough VPN encryption to keep corporate happy, so that's not a factor. As far as interference goes, 1) throughput is high enough, so I don't care, and 2) we've had one "wireless outage" in the last 2 years, and it was for an hour.
As long as dedicated personal workstations and VOIP phones are at the desks, we'll have wired infrastructure to support them. But it's clear wireless is up to the task of handling a lot of people's needs.
Can we have this in the US, for my local sheriff's office? They like to speed near the park where the kids play. Sure, it's a 40 mph zone, and kids have some self responsibility, but 55 with no lights? When they ticket at 45? They also like to run the stop sign next to the school where the drunk driver's insurance company got to replace their brick wall and most of their furniture. If they think it's a yield sign for them, then maybe they can back off on ticketing my neighbors?
When I come from, law enforcement was held to a higher standard. Old men could sit on their lawns shaking their canes at "kids these days". These days, the kids who aren't inside playing on their Nintendo PlayBox3s would probably report me to Homeland Security for even owning a cane.
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Heck, it could be a gmailfs user. They wouldn't even necessarily know they got the e-mail.
I'm an Austin resident. I don't have any direct involvement with the police except for the traffic enforcement people -- speeding, stop signs and state inspection stickers. If the Austin Police Chief wants to talk about eroding public trust, they need to collectively agree to follow all laws they plan to enforce. If they want to ticket for 40 in a 45 a block from my house, they damn well better keep it at 40 or under -- speeding by a park with kids at 50 is not acceptable. If they want to ticket for rolling stops, they damn well better actually stop at the stop signs.
And it would be nice if Austin Police would actually ticket the state police asshole who keeps cutting across 4 lanes of traffic from the far right side of Burnet to get onto MoPac in less than the 100 feet between the traffic light at Gracy Farms and the entrance ramp (ignoring the solid white stripes).
Instead, the city and state police and the county sheriffs in Austin make me feel like what the good Shephard Book said, "The government is a body of people usually notably ungoverned." There are many specific complaints I have, and can provide patrol car numbers and times; instead, I fear the departments are so corrupt I dare not tempt reprisal.
A single carrier pigeon is half duplex, but if you add another at the other end, you have full duplex. Increasing bandwidth is easy, too, just add another pigeon.
You lack imagination. Consider a case where terabyte SSDs are more than $500, but spinning terabyte spinning media is less than $100. If there was a 16 gig cache sitting on the main board that would provide SSD write speeds at all times, and SSD read speeds for most things (in a consumer app, I think "most" works, in a database, not so much), and it cost significantly less than $400, I can easily see how it would erode the SSD market.
As an aside, any SSD that could sit in a lower latency, higher bandwidth place than at the end of a SATA cable starts to look pretty interesting. What if I could buy a Thinkpad that had no upgradable hard drive, but had 150 gigs of SSD on board that responded faster than 6GB/s and with lower latency than any current media... I think I wouldn't resent the "not upgradable".
I didn't enjoy multiplayer WC3 until I found DOTA in 2004, and then it got worlds better when banlisting and ping addons started showing up. What will Blizzard be doing to support such features in SC2?
Will Battle.Net 2 under SC2 support filtering opponents by latency? Reputation for leaving / lagging / griefing / feeding (some reputation classes may be more interesting for third party maps)? A minimum number of games played (I realize I'm a below average player and experts may create new accounts to stomp my kind, so I'll only play someone whose account has played more than 30 games)? Region labeling (country flags would be awesome)? Ladder scores for third party maps (I know scoring a 5v5 DOTA would be hard, but it would make games far more interesting)?
By the way, if I don't have SC2 preordered, I'll certainly be there on opening day.
I do. Went looking for my "next" TV in 2002 and found HDTV standards still in flux, so I went and bought the best CRT TV I could find, a 32" Sony Trinitron for $650. I can't say I'm perfectly happy with it, but I am certainly happy enough with it not to cough up $500-$1500 for its replacement. It plays PS2 and Wii games perfectly well, and there are no difficulties playing DVDs or videos transcoded on the AppleTV (in 480i). There's no blacker blacks, no fake resolution blurring and it doesn't tip over or break when my son throws something at it.
I imagine this beast has a lot of life left. I can't imagine "needing" to upgrade until my kids are old enough to be gentle (youngest is 3), or a HD Wii successor comes out. My mother-in-law keeps asking when we're going to upgrade to the "HDTV generation" and what we're going to do with our old set when we do, so if it still works when we replace it, that tube is going to keep getting used for a long time.
I'm in a family of four. Please allow me to point out that the average family doesn't have 4 computers, so right there you're betraying how much money you have in your computing budget. A family of four would do very well enjoying the single player campaign -- Starcraft's single player was great -- and random battle.net skirmishes (assuming they get a decent ladder system going, and a way to filter out griefers like WC3's current Banlist programs) using a single $50 (hypothetically speaking) copy. If you add computers to the mix, yes, you can add $50 seats too. Chess has no single player option. Mario Kart Wii's single player game isn't of much value, and while I can't be certain about Brawl, I believe the same can be said there -- they're multiplayer games, nearly exclusive of single player content. With MKW, the tracks are all the same, the AI is the same, it's just not connected to any other clients and it's in single screen mode. (Not bashing MKW, by the way, I bought it on launch and it was a bargain at that price!)
And while I don't like Rock Band or that genre, I imagine if you wanted SC2 on launch, it will be $200 for your four computers (with graphics chips in the last 3-4 years). If you wait a year, I'd bet the price falls to $120. Another year or two after that, and you're probably looking at $80. Rock Band can't fall that far due to the hardware component. Personally, I know how much enjoyment I got out of playing SC with my girlfriend, later fiance, later wife, and it set us back, what, $160 for two copies of SC and BW? That was a bargain, compared to how much time we played that.
Say, you wouldn't happen to want to complain about how Starcraft 2 isn't playable with 4 people on the same computer, would you? Since we're comparing a next gen RTS to an arguably last gen driver game...
I've been a Blizzard fan since 1995. Blizzard has had hit after hit, and they've always clearly had their pulse on the community, always designed the games that gamers want. Aside from the bnetd thing, they've done a great job catering to their target audience (one could argue that the bnetd "hackers" / digital rights advocates are not part of their audience).
What has Blizzard said about "no LAN play"?
I see this as requiring an internet connection and valid licenses for each seat. Each person at a LAN party will need to log in and authenticate their license. When the game begins, each computer will start sending traffic to the IPs each computer self-reports -- which will be on the same LAN. Each seat will see sub-millisecond pings, so no increased lag will be introduced to level the field.
I expect the next generation of battle.net will support uPNP, and be more NAT friendly than the current one. I expect VOIP. I hope to see better competition selection, including finding games that are low latency, and blacklist / whitelist (or at least plugin) support. I don't expect to see any kind of LAN support, but if their ladder can see all the players of a LAN competing with each other and provide scoring to make subsequent battle.net public games more interesting, I think that's a really big win.
I expect such network authentication means that piracy will be much more difficult and that any cracks that work will have little value. I also expect this to royally blow up in their faces if they fuck it up. I'll tolerate logging in, I won't tolerate anything short of a perfect authentication scheme. They have had a great reputation for battle.net reliability for the last 10 years.
I'll step in as a professional with 10 years at the same company as an engineer. I don't even remember what I used in college. Some of the CAD was done on AIX / Solaris, some on SGI and some spice was done on a VAX. Colleges are there to teach you how to think, not necessarily do, and the best colleges are good at collecting students who collaborate well and cross-pollinate better thinking methodologies. When I got to my first job, I was asked "Do you know Cadence?" I had, but only for drafting, not for circuit design -- I didn't even know it was possible to do circuit design in the same tool that extruded ideal circles.
CAD systems are pretty straightforward to students. It's when you get into scripting that CAD packages start to show their power, and where it starts to matter what platform you're on, but by then, it's a programming platform -- and if you know C and LISP, you can figure just about everything else out pretty quickly. Heck, if you're talking about Cadence's scripting language (SKILL), which is supposedly built on LISP, you can use typical C syntax interchangeably and it'll understand.
Teach how to think. That opens students beyond "we teach only the CAD package 70% of the industry uses" to "our students can be proficient anywhere because they're trainable and quick learners".
Is that the same as stating that we're going to move out of New Orleans and other "below sea level" cities that only exist because Mother Nature hasn't been pissed off enough to drown them yet? Because I seriously don't understand how levees are a sane policy and sustainable in the next 100 years. New Orleans' city planners' biggest problems are still ahead of them.
Charging for high quality journalism? Wonder what NPR will do to the competition?
RAID is no substitute for backups. RAID is very good at propagating errors and problems very quickly, be they software glitches or human errors.
For consumer class storage, weekly / daily backups might be more efficient than investing a lot of effort into live RAID. Since I'm a Mac guy, I see the best answer to this question as Time Machine to a network / USB attached drive -- hourly (configurable for more or less often) differential backups, almost transparent to the user. To my knowledge, Windows has no similar set of software to allow reinstallation to the last hourly backup -- my wife had the misfortune of having to restore a blank drive from her last backup and it was a flawless process that truly left her where she left off less than an hour before the hardware failure. The reinstall wizard just had to ask where the backup was. Casting aside MacOSX advocacy, there is truly no substitute for a good automated backup solution that is regularly tested. I think the best method would use the fewest common components, like a NAS, followed by an external drive with its own power supply. My least favored option would be an internal drive with every single component shared.
I was beginning to think I was the only one who didn't see a blinker / directional flasher as a "I have a basic human right to change lanes here regardless of the space between cars or your need to follow the car in front of you because of your unfamiliarity with this town." It always gets me when the lady on the cell phone with the giant SUV (for some reason, it's always those three things but never the same person) cuts over 3 lanes of traffic and MUST be in front of me to enter the highway so if I don't yield in less than half a second, she'll hold down the horn until I do.
Kinda reminds me of my friend who moved to D.C. and had to buy his first car... he told the salesman he wanted one with the blinkers on it. Nobody in D.C. used them, so he thought they were an option nobody got...
Choosing 8086 as a CPU seems to have obviously proven the value of a system is not in the power of the CPU, but in the ease of programming good programs, reasonable enough expandability and in killer applications. A powerful CPU alone isn't enough, and in fact seems irrelevant if the whole system won't do what you want.
The victory going to a platform that featured 8086 seems to be a good lesson to every engineer out there in "cost/benefit analysis".
For a professional, a bicycle without air conditioning, protection from rain or snow handling is not even an option in any climate I know of.
As for a Smart? Those tiny inefficient things? Have you even looked at their mpg ratings (33mpg)? My 2006 Scion xB does just as well, and I can carry more passengers and stuff. I'm all for mass transit, smarter modes of transit and the like, but a bicycle for anything short of half a mile or a mile is impractical (and that's being generous, many would consider a walk over 100 feet isn't a solution).
I wholly disagree. I think the suburban design is very close to being a system of capillaries needed to support the arteries. A van could circulate through the main roads of my subdivision in 30 minutes and drop people off at a stop on "the main draw". A traditional bus could then pick everybody up an head to the next stop. Down that main draw, my work is only 7 miles away -- a 15 minute ride if we have to stop a few times. Say I'm halfway through the route in my subdivision (I am), that would be a 30 minute commute. Twice my normal commute, sure, but still reasonable. I'd take it, if it were economical. If they took everybody like me who was willing if it were made smart, then they'd have enough funds to start operating more vehicles and it would be even better for everybody (the second vehicle could to in the opposite circle).
Instead, a bus comes by my house once an hour, and instead of going to the main artery, heads down the interstate 5 miles to a park and ride. After taking that 45 minute bus ride, I could take the 30 minute bus to work. That's insane.
Instead of rethinking suburbia, telling people where to live based on where they work, essentially planning to rip up 75-90% of metropolitan areas and replace it with some urban planned concept, we need smarter people running mass transit. Instead of allowing them to hand-pick people who are already on the bus and finding ways for their lives to be better, they need to pick people in major population centers (subdivisions) and come up with some different ideas. Around here, if you can drive to a park and ride, the only thing that makes any sense at all is a cross-town bus, and they have high ridership. The local routes are exclusively for the people who can't afford their own transportation and for the people who are mandated by the court not to drive.
In college, I wrote several e-mail bomb programs in Linux. Of course, he'll likely need to change the sender from "bill.gates@microsoft.com", and maybe the content shouldn't be Linux 1.3.20... but you can still harass the school board and PTA using Linux.
I've been married for 9 years, together for 13. Any ideas you have about suggesting people change their standards mid-relationship should be tempered. My drive is significantly higher than my wife's. From time to time, I get some thought into my head that I should be more sensitive and a little less aggressive. Every time, this leads to her having confidence problems because something changed and she has no idea what it is. Pouting continues until my experiment with sensitivity ends. She knows what she has in her skull is everything I want in a life mate, but it's important for her to know her body occupies a certain percentage of my brains too.
There's a difference in clientele and expectations. Most people want a part to last for 5 years and be qualified for 85C. That's one speed sort. Some may provide better cooling and keep it under 55C and only expect 3 years. Depending on the technology, that's a different sort entirely. I'm not disagreeing that it's a marketing thing, but this is not the same QA standards.
I'm pretty sure that word doesn't mean what you think it means. "Overclocked" means "our reliability people don't think this is smart, but it might work for you." In this case, you get a part that may or may not die before you expect it to, it might not last much beyond the warranty, it might have non-standard cooling to enable an operating window that Reliability can't assume (say they model frequency shifting at 85C and they have a heat sink that puts it at 55C; feel free to substitute any other numbers).
Any conditions where the company's Reliability department didn't endorse frequency over the lifetime of the product for 3 sigma worth of sellable parts would be "overclocked".
Hey, young 7-digit poster. Welcome. Yes, occasionally there is overlap between Slashdot and Fark, Reddit or even Digg. It's okay. You read it in both places, so obviously you frequent places that think their audience is interested -- meaning either you frequent the wrong sites, or this is interesting to your kind of person. Not that it auto-loaded the link... it only provided the description to allow you to judge it.
If you don't like what Slashdot posts, send in links to better sites. Find better News for Nerds, more gross News for Nerds with Desk Jobs or whatever, and send them on in. You could even be a Badass Link Gamer and rake through other sites and submit them to Slashdot. It's been a long time gone since this was the Hack a Netpliance and QueCat site it was when I signed up, but I've stayed through. I've since found Digg and don't need to load Slashdot more than twice a day any more.
If we're lucky, a crotchety old 5 digit poster will come along and say how different things were 6 months before I joined than they are today.
Essentially, you're asserting that more pixels is necessarily better than higher bitrate. The bitrate on youtube looks to be around 600kbps while DVDs max out around 10MBps. From what I've observed and read, YouTube runs H.264 and is typically the same quality at half to a quarter of the bitrate of MPEG2, which is what DVDs use. Using these rules of thumb, DVD quality is unquestionably better, if you're looking at a fixed pixel count.
In reality, low bitrate H.264 will be okay for low motion stuff (people talking into webcams, idiots falling off their roofs or whatever). Upload the first 10 minutes of Saving Private Ryan to YouTube's HD service and then compare that to the DVD. Not that DVD does stuff like that well; you can certainly pick out scenes where DVD doesn't have the bitrate with MPEG2 to handle 480i television (Saving Private Ryan, Fantasia 2000 with the whales and butterflies).
Now, if we wanted to compare CODECs, YouTube wins. If we could even put H.264 on a DVD, the increase in pixels up to 720p wouldn't be a problem -- 1080p might even be decent on all but the worst scenes.
I have a friend who needed a new cell phone and started asking me about the iPhone. At the time, she was a teacher between schools, and I told her I didn't think she could afford it. She asked me how much it cost -- I looked it up and showed her the numbers. She said, "So, if I buy this phone, I don't need to buy a computer or pay for a cable modem plus I get a phone to replace my busted one." Turns out, the iPhone actually was cheaper for her (iPhone was cheaper than a computer, iPhone plan was cheaper than cell plan plus a cable modem). E-mail on the iPhone helped her land her next job. For the poor, the iPhone is a good computer replacement. If you've used one for the web, you might realize that having one is better than nothing, and might be a good way to lower some bills.
Carriage returns added for solely for dramatic effect omitted.
I'm in an 802.11g office space. All the workstations are wired to the walls, strangely through the new VOIP phones we got last year. Nominally, the laptops are supposed to be wired when possible, and wireless for meetings -- in reality, most people don't like dropping active connections when they unplug, so they're just wireless all the time. After we got our VOIP system last year, I lost my ethernet cable and have been wireless the whole time. I VNC to my workstation and do light graphics but mostly text work there -- there's more than enough bandwidth for that. I download from intranet sites at 600+KB/s, and that's fine with me. I actively use e-mail and the like. There's enough VPN encryption to keep corporate happy, so that's not a factor. As far as interference goes, 1) throughput is high enough, so I don't care, and 2) we've had one "wireless outage" in the last 2 years, and it was for an hour.
As long as dedicated personal workstations and VOIP phones are at the desks, we'll have wired infrastructure to support them. But it's clear wireless is up to the task of handling a lot of people's needs.
Can we have this in the US, for my local sheriff's office? They like to speed near the park where the kids play. Sure, it's a 40 mph zone, and kids have some self responsibility, but 55 with no lights? When they ticket at 45? They also like to run the stop sign next to the school where the drunk driver's insurance company got to replace their brick wall and most of their furniture. If they think it's a yield sign for them, then maybe they can back off on ticketing my neighbors?
When I come from, law enforcement was held to a higher standard. Old men could sit on their lawns shaking their canes at "kids these days". These days, the kids who aren't inside playing on their Nintendo PlayBox3s would probably report me to Homeland Security for even owning a cane.