If SunnComm protected CDs install drivers that stay system resident (as I gather happens based on what is said in the article), and no mention of this is made on the packaging of the CDs, might that itself be something one could sue over?
Music CDs are not software, and therefore if I insert a music CD into my computer, it should not act like software, nor should it install anything onto my computer without my consent or even a notice it is doing so. I bet the DMCA could be manipulated to sue over THAT.
- MaineCoon Whose girlfriend recently bought a CD-player/radio for $20 and the Reloaded soundtrack for $15.
The first one was when I bought a flight joystick at Best Buy for $30 (it was on sale), took it home, and went online for updated drivers... only to see a front page ad of a $30 mail in rebate for that joystick.
The second was recently for purchasing my Motorola T720 phone, I could send in my old phone for a $100 rebate. Renewing my contract for 2 years (no biggy, I had just renewed it for 2 years a month before;-) got me an instant Verizon discount... combined with sending in my old phone (which I got free when I joined Verizon originally), and I had a full color top of the line cell phone for $120 after tax. 'course I had to wait 2 months for my rebate, but hey... better than paying full price and throwing out an old junky audiovox.
Big difference... Especially endianness - that is, byte order of multi-byte words (2 byte shorts, 4 byte longs and floats, 8 byte long longs and doubles).
The 68k was big endian, and the PowerPC on the Mac runs in big endian mode. x86 is little endian. Big endian is when the byte order for a number goes most significant to least significant byte. Little endian is the opposite.
Examples:
1 (0x00000001) Big endian: 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x01 Little endian:0x01 0x00 0x00 0x00
4096 (0x00001000) Big endian: 0x00 0x00 0x10 0x00 Little endian:0x00 0x10 0x00 0x00
305419896 (0x12345678) Big endian: 0x12 0x34 0x56 0x78 Little endian: 0x78 0x56 0x34 0x12
Likewise... if one has a 4 byte integer in memory, and assumes it is within 0-255 (or -128-127), little endian processor, treating that pointer to the integer as a pointer to a single byte, will work properly. Big endian machines requires offseting the pointer. This is, of course, bad coding, but it happens nonetheless.
Suddenly all binary data files need translation to work... any code that makes assumptions about byte order doesn't work (such as optimized code for handling byte streams of data in chunks).
A major part of my job is doing conversions of software from Windows to Mac (games specifically), and handling for endian conversions in file read/write and network transmission, and fixing code that is specific to little endian byte order, is a not an insignificant part of the work.
This means that now a lot of code has to be changed/fixed/whatnot, but also a new testing cycle. And if you think getting a lot of developers to just recompile is a pain (and it would be)...
I'm originally from Wisconsin, and we called them Tyme machines too in my area (Fox River Valley), because instead of having an "ATM" sign above them (like they do out here in California), they had a "Tyme" sign above them. At least through most of my childhood in the 80s they did...
All other reasons and problems aside... if voting is too easy and casual, then voters start voting casually.
Casual voting is dangerous. People are much more likely to be more informed before voting if they have to travel somewhere and take half an hour to vote, than if all they have to do is sit down at a computer at home, go to a website, click a few buttons, type a few lines, and walk away 2 minutes later.
The more effort involved in doing something, the more likely people are to think things through.
The last thing I want is a president voted in through casual voters.
Could be a great way to raise extra money, with the "Donate to Our Legal Fund" section...
Essentially, "If you don't give us more money, we can't afford to fight this in court, and Mythic could take away the stuff you already bought from us!" I.e, pay us more money or you will lose what you already paid for.
"Personally, I wish WebRing had just died. I think it's been decaying for quite some time and I don't see that it's going to be recovered," says [Richard] Lowe.
There are such idiots out there, who complain for the sake of complaining... but to hear such whining as this in an article is just sad - somebody slap that journalist around a bit, please.
If Richard Lowe doesn't like the webring service anymore, then he shouldn't use it! If someone wishes to put money and time into it and try to resurrect it, more power to them. People like Lowe must be taught to keep their mouth shut, as they seem to not be learning how on their own. If they don't like the service, and aren't paying for it, then they should stop using it... but asking for it to be shut down because they don't like using it anymore is completely and utterly selfish.
Until you get people asking you to fix the bugs for them, or implement new features for them.
For every user who contributed something back to the code, there were five users who merely thanked me for the software I've released, twenty five that asked me to add new features for them, and one hundred who asked me to fix bugs or help them set it up... or pretty close to those ratios.
I will never work on another open source project again.
Meow. Ignorant idiot... Open Source my ass. I'm in the industry for fun and profit. Not the headaches... I did my last open source project years ago. Never again.
I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere the government has systems that can decrypt any of the major encryption schemes - even with large keys - in relatively short order (and not that I really care if they are reading my email anyways - hope at least someone enjoys the spam). If the government wants to read your email, they will.
However, a computer can only crack encryptions it knows about. If you have an encrypted text and someone wants to crack it, they will run it through various algorithms to be cracked... and if it's identifiable as a specific encryption algorithm, so much the easier. However, if the person doesn't know the encryption and it ISN'T a standard, it's harder to break.
Hell, just XOR your text with some unknown poet's words, and as long as the interceptor doesn't know the method (and it isn't one of the off the shelf schemes), the key will be harder to aquire, and so will the content.
This reminds me o so much of Heinlein's very first published short story, "Life Line", back in 1939, which I read for the first time last night...
In it, a doctor invents a machine which can determine within 1% accuracy one's date of death. He is taken to court by insurance companies, who are told by a judge somethine along the lines "It seems that corporations believe that, regardless of any changes in society, they have a god given right to make a profit, and that it should be the court's duty to stifle said changes for the benefit of the corporations profit margin." If anyone has a copy of said story handy, please post the proper paragraph - my book is at home, and I'm not right now.
Hopefully this won't end like it did in the story, in which one of the insurance companies hired a group of hitmen to kill the doctor and destroy his machine... and then a group of scientists, who were doing a kind of "blind test" of this system, then tore up and burned all evidence of the dates predicted of their own deaths, which were used for evidence in the testing... I can see it now: "Top Open Source proponents murdered - SourceForge and all backups mysteriously destroyed - known developers of open source projects mysteriously disappear"...
Of course, MS wants to kill open source - they don't want any competition.
Re-read his post... he didn't claim Apple invented ALL those things... the last line claims that, "Sure, Apple didn't invent everything themselves, but they sure recognized good ideas and aggressively drove them into the mainstream before any other computer company."
You people can be so quick to respond and judge you don't see the forest for the trees.
- MaineCoon
Meowing inanely at all the petty bickering and wrongfully "Im Right You're Not" people.
TST OnRAmp oversold their bandwidth several times over. During business days, during the day, our service averages a 2000 ping to any service. Sometimes we can actually pull 128kb/s through the connection we have... but doing anything requiring reasonable pings is impossible, and often bandwidth drops into the 64kbs range. Sometimes, we can't even reach some hosts that others have no problems reaching.
Personally, I believe this line to be pure bull - not only in the Mac community, but also in the Linux community.
I know many people who started using Linux, and couldn't write, without help, a single, simple, syntax-error-free line of C code.
Now that may sound very harsh against Linux users - and it is very well meant to be. All in all, the technical competence of most Linux users IS above average. But that doesn't mean that they all have the competence of commercial quality programmers, or even mediocre programmers. I doubt the majority of them could fix a simple buffer overflow bug given adequate debugging information that points the bug out directly.
The claim that there are "40,000" contributors to "Linux" is very misleading. First off, Linux is more than the kernel. It is all the programs that it takes advantage of or requires to get the job done. Linux would be NOWHERE without programs like 'make', 'gcc', 'gdb', and all those similiar tools. However, those tools WOULD exist without Linux. So, that number (which is pure estimate on the part of anyone claiming it as fact anyways) most likely includes the developers of all the programs that Linux takes advantage of... and in this case, that is like saying a printing company (Which can be run by a handful of people - a manager, a couple secretarys, a couple graphic artists, and a few printing press operators) employees "hundreds of people", by counting the foresting company, the people that operate the paper-making machines, and the people who produce the ink.
IF, on the other hand, said number was restricted to the heart of Linux - for TRUE "Linux" is nothing more than the KERNEL - I wouldn't be surprised if, over the course of Linux's 8+ years of evolution, 4,000 (not 40,000) people have contributed something to the source code for some program for some platform or another - but even then Im wondering how many of those contributions were very minor ones - such as a bug fix - and how many contributions overlapped. How many people provided moderate (more than a few dozen lines of code) contributions, and how many provided SIGNIFICANT conributions (on the lines of a few hundred or thousand lines). I'd guess more along the lines of 400 and 40, respectively. And how many Linux kernel contributors are well known by any kernel hacker? I think the number falls around 4 (to 8).
In the end, the true core work of a project is done by just a few people (scaled to the size of the project, of course). While they may take advantage of existing libraries (such as a PNG or JPEG library, ZLIB compression, a communications archiecture, or some such), that does not truly increase the size of the development team - that actually gives them less of an excuse to have large amounts of people. You can't claim the authors of these libraries on your dev team (tho giving them credit for their work and it's use in the project is something else entirely different).
And finally, what if the project is commercial? The problem these days is that Free Software (Free as in Freedom of Speech/Open Source) is equated these days with Free Software (Free as in Free "Beer"/No Cost). This is a very dangerous equation that is being made, and even promoted by so-called experts such as Richard M. Stallman. Eric S. Raymond has a clearer view, but it is still distorted by the belief that everything can and should be source-available. In many cases, especially Games, this option isn't available while the product is still commercially viable. Hence why Doom and Quake were not Open Sourced until years after they were off the shelves and replaced by better products (in the cases of Doom and Quake, 2 generations of products later).
Then consider the goodwill that Apple customers usually hold for Apple as their machines last them around twice what a PC would. And how much more an accerator card adds to that.
Yes, this is true. Until recently, I was using an old PowerCenter 132 (132 MHz 604 clone of the 7[5|6]00 architecture. It ran well, but eventually I added a Voodoo 3, a newer harddrive (10 gig SCSI), and topped it off a G3-250 card (that I clocked to 270 MHz, and upped the bus from 40 to 60 MHz). Upgrade cost: $500 (half of that for the SCSI drive).
Suddenly, Unreal Tournament, SimCity 3K, and Descent 3 were playable!
Now this PowerCenter cost me $3000-some, when it was an upper-mid-range (or lower-high-end) model. The only things that have gone wrong with it are a bad fan at one point (easily replaced for $10), and the floppy drive died after about 3 years (no big deal; it barely ever got used). Over time I also added more memory (from initial 16, to 148 once it became cheaper), and upped the CD rom from 4x to 24x with an off the shelf one at Best Buy.
Now, why am i telling you all this? Because the machine is still useful. It still chugs along nicely, and it still outperforms my friends 2 year old P2-300 Acer at everyday tasks (and UT framerates). Nowadays I dont use it for much, but its still a reasonable system for everyday usage. It'd make a nice server, if I wanted to use it for that.
I dont know anyone who can upgrade a 4 year old PC, to someting that can still play some of the newer games.
I agree with you - while the plot was predictable, what movie isn't? Star Wars (the original 3, never saw the new one, dont really care), which many people here seem to fawn over (and I personally dont care for), is just as predictable, if not more so.
The music and animation was good, and had a Heavy Metal feel to it at times. It could have used some heavier material - personally, I think this movie would have done well if they had included material to get a PG-13 or R rating. Even my friend, who is NOT sci-fi or animation fan, and wasn't expecting much, ended up liking it.
Even though the plot was rushed to a somewhat anti-climatic conclusion (tho I must admit, I hadn't guessed what would be ON the Titan or what it would be for, until they got there - I was under the impression it was meant to search out habitable worlds).
This is a movie I could watch again in the near future. Maybe not this month or next, but in a few months I could watch it again and enjoy it. There are very few movies that I consider worth rewatching.
- Maine Coon
Temperature (Was: Re: Rad-hard?)
on
Macs In Space!
·
· Score: 1
Yes, I can imagine temperature being an issue, however the PowerPC chips run somewhat cooler than even ix86 chips of the same mhz, from what I have heard. My G3-350 runs, closed case w/ fan running, at 23C.
Open case, shuts the fan off - I think it drives it up into 30-35C. I've seen some overclocked G3s (300 OC'd to 450 or 500) flake out at 35C.
The problem with vacuum, is there is no heat convection to cool the satellite. At least humidity isn't an issue;-)
I wonder how they will be dealing with radiation. The G4 isn't rad-hard by any means.
Are satellites even subjected to the radiation of space? I suppose it depends on altitude, but as far as I am aware, satellites are beyond any radiation-protecting layers of atmosphere, and thus exposed to the radiation of space.
Of course, even if this WAS legitimate, it wouldn't matter without a government (or corporation with military forces) to back it up. Without defense, anybody could move in and set up shop. So you'ld be stuck dealing with tresspassers on you're own, and all you could do is watch through your telescope and bitch at your friends that somebody is on your property... which, if they have the resources to get up there and you don't, they damn well deserve to take it from you.
Slashdot Mirror
If SunnComm protected CDs install drivers that stay system resident (as I gather happens based on what is said in the article), and no mention of this is made on the packaging of the CDs, might that itself be something one could sue over?
Music CDs are not software, and therefore if I insert a music CD into my computer, it should not act like software, nor should it install anything onto my computer without my consent or even a notice it is doing so. I bet the DMCA could be manipulated to sue over THAT.
- MaineCoon
Whose girlfriend recently bought a CD-player/radio for $20 and the Reloaded soundtrack for $15.
The only two rebates I've ever bothered with...
;-) got me an instant Verizon discount... combined with sending in my old phone (which I got free when I joined Verizon originally), and I had a full color top of the line cell phone for $120 after tax. 'course I had to wait 2 months for my rebate, but hey... better than paying full price and throwing out an old junky audiovox.
The first one was when I bought a flight joystick at Best Buy for $30 (it was on sale), took it home, and went online for updated drivers... only to see a front page ad of a $30 mail in rebate for that joystick.
The second was recently for purchasing my Motorola T720 phone, I could send in my old phone for a $100 rebate. Renewing my contract for 2 years (no biggy, I had just renewed it for 2 years a month before
- Chris Jacobson
Big difference... Especially endianness - that is, byte order of multi-byte words (2 byte shorts, 4 byte longs and floats, 8 byte long longs and doubles).
The 68k was big endian, and the PowerPC on the Mac runs in big endian mode. x86 is little endian. Big endian is when the byte order for a number goes most significant to least significant byte. Little endian is the opposite.
Examples:
1 (0x00000001)
Big endian: 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x01
Little endian:0x01 0x00 0x00 0x00
4096 (0x00001000)
Big endian: 0x00 0x00 0x10 0x00
Little endian:0x00 0x10 0x00 0x00
305419896 (0x12345678)
Big endian: 0x12 0x34 0x56 0x78
Little endian: 0x78 0x56 0x34 0x12
Likewise... if one has a 4 byte integer in memory, and assumes it is within 0-255 (or -128-127), little endian processor, treating that pointer to the integer as a pointer to a single byte, will work properly. Big endian machines requires offseting the pointer. This is, of course, bad coding, but it happens nonetheless.
Suddenly all binary data files need translation to work... any code that makes assumptions about byte order doesn't work (such as optimized code for handling byte streams of data in chunks).
A major part of my job is doing conversions of software from Windows to Mac (games specifically), and handling for endian conversions in file read/write and network transmission, and fixing code that is specific to little endian byte order, is a not an insignificant part of the work.
This means that now a lot of code has to be changed/fixed/whatnot, but also a new testing cycle. And if you think getting a lot of developers to just recompile is a pain (and it would be)...
- Chris Jacobson
That's all well and good. Now lets see them target a different platform, with a different processor, especially one not little endian.
Like MacOS.
- Chris Jacobson
People who got into the theater 30 minutes before the show starts, to get a good seat, and are waiting for the movie to start.
- Maine Coon
Of course, if the spammers were required to donate organs, they'd simply start spamming about great organ sales opportunities...
"Need spare cash? Sell us half your liver! We'll buy any working, healthy organ!"
Followed up by:
"Need an organ? Try our Cheap Plastic Replacements(tm)!"
- Chris Jacobson
I'm originally from Wisconsin, and we called them Tyme machines too in my area (Fox River Valley), because instead of having an "ATM" sign above them (like they do out here in California), they had a "Tyme" sign above them. At least through most of my childhood in the 80s they did...
- Chris Jacobson
All other reasons and problems aside... if voting is too easy and casual, then voters start voting casually.
Casual voting is dangerous. People are much more likely to be more informed before voting if they have to travel somewhere and take half an hour to vote, than if all they have to do is sit down at a computer at home, go to a website, click a few buttons, type a few lines, and walk away 2 minutes later.
The more effort involved in doing something, the more likely people are to think things through.
The last thing I want is a president voted in through casual voters.
- Chris Jacobson
Could be a great way to raise extra money, with the "Donate to Our Legal Fund" section...
Essentially, "If you don't give us more money, we can't afford to fight this in court, and Mythic could take away the stuff you already bought from us!" I.e, pay us more money or you will lose what you already paid for.
- Chris Jacobson
There are such idiots out there, who complain for the sake of complaining... but to hear such whining as this in an article is just sad - somebody slap that journalist around a bit, please.
If Richard Lowe doesn't like the webring service anymore, then he shouldn't use it! If someone wishes to put money and time into it and try to resurrect it, more power to them. People like Lowe must be taught to keep their mouth shut, as they seem to not be learning how on their own. If they don't like the service, and aren't paying for it, then they should stop using it... but asking for it to be shut down because they don't like using it anymore is completely and utterly selfish.
- Chris Jacobson
Until you get people asking you to fix the bugs for them, or implement new features for them.
For every user who contributed something back to the code, there were five users who merely thanked me for the software I've released, twenty five that asked me to add new features for them, and one hundred who asked me to fix bugs or help them set it up... or pretty close to those ratios.
I will never work on another open source project again.
- Chris Jacobson
It's true - my officemate was at that show (he used to do Atari 2600 stuff when he first started out).
It was Sierra hiding the C-64 under the table running Frogger.
- MaineCoon
Meow. Ignorant idiot... Open Source my ass. I'm in the industry for fun and profit. Not the headaches... I did my last open source project years ago. Never again.
Meow.
- MaineCoon
http://www.mainecoon.net/
"Netpliance 'greed"
:-P
Those two words right there... says it all.
- MaineCoon
PS. I know it was supposed to be "agreed"
...it's the TYPE.
I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere the government has systems that can decrypt any of the major encryption schemes - even with large keys - in relatively short order (and not that I really care if they are reading my email anyways - hope at least someone enjoys the spam). If the government wants to read your email, they will.
However, a computer can only crack encryptions it knows about. If you have an encrypted text and someone wants to crack it, they will run it through various algorithms to be cracked... and if it's identifiable as a specific encryption algorithm, so much the easier. However, if the person doesn't know the encryption and it ISN'T a standard, it's harder to break.
Hell, just XOR your text with some unknown poet's words, and as long as the interceptor doesn't know the method (and it isn't one of the off the shelf schemes), the key will be harder to aquire, and so will the content.
- MaineCoon
This reminds me o so much of Heinlein's very first published short story, "Life Line", back in 1939, which I read for the first time last night...
In it, a doctor invents a machine which can determine within 1% accuracy one's date of death. He is taken to court by insurance companies, who are told by a judge somethine along the lines "It seems that corporations believe that, regardless of any changes in society, they have a god given right to make a profit, and that it should be the court's duty to stifle said changes for the benefit of the corporations profit margin." If anyone has a copy of said story handy, please post the proper paragraph - my book is at home, and I'm not right now.
Hopefully this won't end like it did in the story, in which one of the insurance companies hired a group of hitmen to kill the doctor and destroy his machine... and then a group of scientists, who were doing a kind of "blind test" of this system, then tore up and burned all evidence of the dates predicted of their own deaths, which were used for evidence in the testing... I can see it now: "Top Open Source proponents murdered - SourceForge and all backups mysteriously destroyed - known developers of open source projects mysteriously disappear"...
Of course, MS wants to kill open source - they don't want any competition.
- MaineCoon
Re-read his post... he didn't claim Apple invented ALL those things... the last line claims that, "Sure, Apple didn't invent everything themselves, but they sure recognized good ideas and aggressively drove them into the mainstream before any other computer company."
You people can be so quick to respond and judge you don't see the forest for the trees.
- MaineCoon
Meowing inanely at all the petty bickering and wrongfully "Im Right You're Not" people.
TST OnRAmp oversold their bandwidth several times over. During business days, during the day, our service averages a 2000 ping to any service. Sometimes we can actually pull 128kb/s through the connection we have... but doing anything requiring reasonable pings is impossible, and often bandwidth drops into the 64kbs range. Sometimes, we can't even reach some hosts that others have no problems reaching.
- MaineCoon
Meow.
NSI has claimed that they own domains registered under them. Yet in a court of law (and I believe NSI also claimed this), domains are >NOTowned.
Quite hypocritical! Am I right, am I missing something, or am I just confused?
- Maine Coon
Personally, I believe this line to be pure bull - not only in the Mac community, but also in the Linux community.
I know many people who started using Linux, and couldn't write, without help, a single, simple, syntax-error-free line of C code.
Now that may sound very harsh against Linux users - and it is very well meant to be. All in all, the technical competence of most Linux users IS above average. But that doesn't mean that they all have the competence of commercial quality programmers, or even mediocre programmers. I doubt the majority of them could fix a simple buffer overflow bug given adequate debugging information that points the bug out directly.
The claim that there are "40,000" contributors to "Linux" is very misleading. First off, Linux is more than the kernel. It is all the programs that it takes advantage of or requires to get the job done. Linux would be NOWHERE without programs like 'make', 'gcc', 'gdb', and all those similiar tools. However, those tools WOULD exist without Linux. So, that number (which is pure estimate on the part of anyone claiming it as fact anyways) most likely includes the developers of all the programs that Linux takes advantage of... and in this case, that is like saying a printing company (Which can be run by a handful of people - a manager, a couple secretarys, a couple graphic artists, and a few printing press operators) employees "hundreds of people", by counting the foresting company, the people that operate the paper-making machines, and the people who produce the ink.
IF, on the other hand, said number was restricted to the heart of Linux - for TRUE "Linux" is nothing more than the KERNEL - I wouldn't be surprised if, over the course of Linux's 8+ years of evolution, 4,000 (not 40,000) people have contributed something to the source code for some program for some platform or another - but even then Im wondering how many of those contributions were very minor ones - such as a bug fix - and how many contributions overlapped. How many people provided moderate (more than a few dozen lines of code) contributions, and how many provided SIGNIFICANT conributions (on the lines of a few hundred or thousand lines). I'd guess more along the lines of 400 and 40, respectively. And how many Linux kernel contributors are well known by any kernel hacker? I think the number falls around 4 (to 8).
In the end, the true core work of a project is done by just a few people (scaled to the size of the project, of course). While they may take advantage of existing libraries (such as a PNG or JPEG library, ZLIB compression, a communications archiecture, or some such), that does not truly increase the size of the development team - that actually gives them less of an excuse to have large amounts of people. You can't claim the authors of these libraries on your dev team (tho giving them credit for their work and it's use in the project is something else entirely different).
And finally, what if the project is commercial? The problem these days is that Free Software (Free as in Freedom of Speech/Open Source) is equated these days with Free Software (Free as in Free "Beer"/No Cost). This is a very dangerous equation that is being made, and even promoted by so-called experts such as Richard M. Stallman. Eric S. Raymond has a clearer view, but it is still distorted by the belief that everything can and should be source-available. In many cases, especially Games, this option isn't available while the product is still commercially viable. Hence why Doom and Quake were not Open Sourced until years after they were off the shelves and replaced by better products (in the cases of Doom and Quake, 2 generations of products later).
- Chris Jacobson
(MaineCoon)
Then consider the goodwill that Apple customers usually hold for Apple as their machines last them around twice what a PC would. And how much more an accerator card adds to that.
Yes, this is true. Until recently, I was using an old PowerCenter 132 (132 MHz 604 clone of the 7[5|6]00 architecture. It ran well, but eventually I added a Voodoo 3, a newer harddrive (10 gig SCSI), and topped it off a G3-250 card (that I clocked to 270 MHz, and upped the bus from 40 to 60 MHz). Upgrade cost: $500 (half of that for the SCSI drive).
Suddenly, Unreal Tournament, SimCity 3K, and Descent 3 were playable!
Now this PowerCenter cost me $3000-some, when it was an upper-mid-range (or lower-high-end) model. The only things that have gone wrong with it are a bad fan at one point (easily replaced for $10), and the floppy drive died after about 3 years (no big deal; it barely ever got used). Over time I also added more memory (from initial 16, to 148 once it became cheaper), and upped the CD rom from 4x to 24x with an off the shelf one at Best Buy.
Now, why am i telling you all this? Because the machine is still useful. It still chugs along nicely, and it still outperforms my friends 2 year old P2-300 Acer at everyday tasks (and UT framerates). Nowadays I dont use it for much, but its still a reasonable system for everyday usage. It'd make a nice server, if I wanted to use it for that.
I dont know anyone who can upgrade a 4 year old PC, to someting that can still play some of the newer games.
- MaineCoon
I agree with you - while the plot was predictable, what movie isn't? Star Wars (the original 3, never saw the new one, dont really care), which many people here seem to fawn over (and I personally dont care for), is just as predictable, if not more so.
The music and animation was good, and had a Heavy Metal feel to it at times. It could have used some heavier material - personally, I think this movie would have done well if they had included material to get a PG-13 or R rating. Even my friend, who is NOT sci-fi or animation fan, and wasn't expecting much, ended up liking it.
Even though the plot was rushed to a somewhat anti-climatic conclusion (tho I must admit, I hadn't guessed what would be ON the Titan or what it would be for, until they got there - I was under the impression it was meant to search out habitable worlds).
This is a movie I could watch again in the near future. Maybe not this month or next, but in a few months I could watch it again and enjoy it. There are very few movies that I consider worth rewatching.
- Maine Coon
Yes, I can imagine temperature being an issue, however the PowerPC chips run somewhat cooler than even ix86 chips of the same mhz, from what I have heard. My G3-350 runs, closed case w/ fan running, at 23C.
;-)
Open case, shuts the fan off - I think it drives it up into 30-35C. I've seen some overclocked G3s (300 OC'd to 450 or 500) flake out at 35C.
The problem with vacuum, is there is no heat convection to cool the satellite. At least humidity isn't an issue
- MaineCoon
I wonder how they will be dealing with radiation. The G4 isn't rad-hard by any means.
Are satellites even subjected to the radiation of space? I suppose it depends on altitude, but as far as I am aware, satellites are beyond any radiation-protecting layers of atmosphere, and thus exposed to the radiation of space.
- MaineCoon
... aka Space Conquest for Dummies...
Of course, even if this WAS legitimate, it wouldn't matter without a government (or corporation with military forces) to back it up. Without defense, anybody could move in and set up shop. So you'ld be stuck dealing with tresspassers on you're own, and all you could do is watch through your telescope and bitch at your friends that somebody is on your property... which, if they have the resources to get up there and you don't, they damn well deserve to take it from you.
- Maine Coon
Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow!