I've slashed my fingers on sharp metal card slots a number of times, so there is some danger lurking with your case (aside from the live current). What gets me is trying to remove a stiff PCI card from both ends with your fingers and then slice yourself as it comes free. I now use gloves or a screwdriver to hold the plate end.
Freak accident or asking for it?
on
Steve Irwin Dead
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Sucks to be his family, but his basic modus was to pick-up, provoke or otherwise annoy wild and venomous animals. Therefore, "freak accident" is more like "asking for it".
While details are still muddled of his death it would not surprise me if he tried to touch one from above and accidentally triggered the stingray's automatic defence to flick the barb straight into his chest. You can't jump back, or dodge, or do anything in water if an animals reacts. As such you'd think the rules of engagement (even for Steve) in the water would be far stricter than on land.
Exactly. It's some crappy VB / C++ /.NET wrapper around the IE control. All it can do is set some settings, fire up IE, wipe some settings and hope for the best. It is as vulnerable to spyware, adware, cookies etc. as any other IE-wrapped skin. It is a waste of time to even use the thing since it is snake oil. It is even hard to understand why the thing has garnered ANY attention since IE has been embedded countless times since it appeared as a control.
I don't see bin tracking being a big deal, however at the same time RFID is not going to solve all issues. As you say, people paint their house numbers on bins. The council could easily send everyone a sticker to afix to the top which did the same. A barcoded sticker could even serve to identify the bin, and to allow reading by the weigh machine.
An RFID on its own will be no good. There will instances where some extended family of scumbags swap their bin with the little old lady next door so she gets the bill for their rubbish. So some kind of external sticker is going to be necessary in any event.
The ability to play PS1 games is coming apparently. As for PS2 games, the PSP is similar but probably not quite as capable graphically. Still, most PS2 ports come out pretty well assuming the controls are worked out properly for the PSP layout. GTA: VCS for example is an excellent, near perfect port of GTA: III but with different content.
Homebrewers should be asking Sony to create / licence a version of Linux that runs on the PSP, because it is totally unrealistic to think Sony is going to risk piracy for them. It could work really well - boot off the UMD, run your homebrew from memory stick.
Other than that, I think UMD is fine for games, but they should dump it for movies and just sell movies on the web. I'm sure Sony could pull their thumbs out of their backsides and produce a decent, non-evil platform for purchasing / renting download movies at reasonable prices and make a lot of money from it.
BTW, the battery life is pretty good already, but you can improve it by turning down the screen brightness and wireless.
Well, it does require at least MSIE 5.5 in order to run.
In other words this browser is worse than fucking useless. It just embeds IE, tweaks what settings it can and then tries to clean up afterwards. If you want to do that, you can do it in Opera and in Firefox. I believe there are even builds of Firefox which run off a keychain and leave absolutely no tell tale clues they were ever there (e.g. cache files etc.).
In theory Nero Backitup should be fine, but my experience tells me that it sometimes stall on scheduled tasks and never recovers. i.e. you schedule a job, it runs the first few times and then never again. Even forcing the job to work does nothing. You're then faced with wiping the job and starting all over which is a pain.
I've recently upgraded to Nero 7 in the last week so it's too early to see if it makes a difference, but I'd hold on a recommendation. Otherwise it's fairly intuitive though backing up to DVD media is as much of a pain as its always been. I don't do multi-disc, but I do backup the important files, which get stuck in a firesafe afterwards. I think in a few years, the network backups will take over. Every one will backup over the web, which in theory is far safer in the event of a catastrope (house burning down) anyway.
Not nonsense, reality. Show me a 30fps ray tracer anywhere which runs at even 1/4 the resolution of a normal GPU rendering a complex scene with multiple light sources such as practically any FPS game in the last two or three years would do. I'm only aware of a couple of "realtime" ray tracers (there is a Quake 3 demo for example) and the result looks terrible even at low-res. And 30fps is an awful framerate. Most midrange graphics cards could deliver more than that on the highest settings.
Besides, ray tracing triangular meshes makes your scene look awful. Everything looks like it was hewn with a diamond cutter unless you increase the number of triangles, do phong like shading to give it some approximation to a curve, use parametric patches, or tesselate the patches into a mesh of triangles at runtime based on CPU settings. All of which would slow things down even further.
I'm sure there is a crossover point between conventional rendering and ray tracing. I just have major doubts that it will be any time soon. Even if you threw 4 processors at the task it seems highly unlikely that you could match the quality of today's midrange card in realtime even at a lower resolution.
I know it sounds crazy, but if HP are so upset that people don't use their inkjet cartridges, perhaps they should make them affordable and reasonably priced to begin with. In other words dump the razor blade model, dump the expensive "chipped" refills and just sell things at an honest price. If the printer is any good and has cheap ink it will sell just as well. Hell, what's to stop them even selling their own refill kits?
HP are just pissed that others only supply kits because printer ink refills are absurdly expensive, totally out of proportion with what it costs to make them. Chipping their refills failed miserably thanks to EU laws on recycling so now they're trying scare tactics instead.
Ray tracing works by tracing a hypothetical ray(s) of light back from a screen pixel, and following it as it bounces and splits off various objects which may or may not be opaque, shiny, textured etc. to the light source. So a ray might first hit a sphere so you calculate the light at that point and recursively to trace the light as it bounces off other objects. To get any level of realism you're talking about multiple recursion which takes an enormous amount of time in any complex scene. Transparency also requires the relected and refracted ray to be traced so the number of rays can increase dramatically.
Ray tracing also suffers terribly from "jaggies". Edges look bad because rays can just miss an object and cause really bad stepping on the edges of objects. To eliminate jaggies and do anti-aliasing, you need to do sub-pixel rendering with jitter (slight randomness) to produce an average value for the pixel. So you might have to trace 4 or more rays in a pixel for acceptable anti-aliasing. Effects like focal length, fog, bump mapping etc. cause things to get even more complex. Most pictures rendered with high quality on Blender, POVRay etc. would take minutes if not hours even on a fast / dual core processor.
The only way you'd get 30fps is if cut your ray trace depth to 1 or 2, used a couple of lights, cut the screen res down and forgot about fixing jaggies. It would look terrible. Oh and find time for all the other things that apps and games must do.
I'm waiting for PETA's report on how many ickle wittle bunny wunny's die to make PCs.
Seriously though, green policies can actually save you money. A PC which shuts down while inactive, or which uses cooler / low power chips is going to save you a quite a bit of money over its lifetime.
Exactly, except I'd buy two. One for the kid, and one for me. The CM1 / OLPC would be a sweet, sweet machine for anyone who needs mobile computing but not the inconvenience of lugging around cables, laptops, cases, cds etc. This thing is so small and rugged that you could toss it into a backback, use it on the beach, take it to the coffee shop etc. A touchpad, keyboard, speakers, mic, USB, screen make it far more useful than a pocket pc for wireless internet but its nowhere near as expensive or fragile as a laptop (or an Origami device). And if the worst happens and someone steals it... well it only cost $200-300 so big deal.
What good is wiping software if it leaves tell-tale traces that files have been wiped. For example I know that PGP's wipe renames files as aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.... which would be a sure sign that someone has been wiping data. Perhaps it's better to wipe the files, uninstall the wiper, remove all registry entries and then fill the drive to 100% with crap (e.g. by copying your Windows system folder over and over) and then a full system defrag, followed by a registry / page defrag followed by yet more crap copying.
Which linux distro do you use that's so hard to install nvidia drivers on? What problems do you have? Please be specific.
Any dist that requires anyone to hunt for the howto, drop to a shell, su, run a script downloaded from NVidia, cycle through init 3 / 5, possibly edit their xorg.conf is hard. Most dists require that or similar. I find it an inconvenience, people not versed with shells or other Unix / Linux terminology (the vast majority of PC users) would find it an impossibility. They would rightly conclude that Linux is hard and stick with MS Windows.
One scenario is FOSS software on your box interacting with information distrubted over the web, the other is executing closed code on your box. One requires redistribution rights, the other does not. Beginning to see the difference now?
No, all scenarios are the facets of the same issue - free (beer) software in Linux. Except I'm not objecting to any of them, but you're objecting one instance and appear to condone the others. There is no significant distinction between Firefox offering to install Shockwave, and Aptitude (for example) installing NVidia drivers. Web services are just another example of open source code hooking up to free (as in beer) content. You can't defend one and then attack the other.
Whether you accept the inconsistency of your own argument or resort to yet another facile insult is irrelevant at this point. This thread is done as far as I'm concerned.
Exactly. IBM have been using Linux as the development platform for the Cell processor so it's not as far fetched as it sounds. Sony could have Linux running on the PS3 from the get go. It remains to be seen if they do though or what it looks like... It would be awesome if it did. At that point the PS3 *is* a computer (not just for tax dodging purposes), as well as a kick ass console, media jukebox. When you think of it from that perspective, the price really isn't unreasonable, especially compared to the Mac Mini (for example).
Much though I like SETI, I have to agree. Every consumer device, including PCs for home & office should be default be set to save as much power as possible. That means the operating system should stick devices in standby if they're idle and ultimately hibernate them. I believe Vista will do this and not before time. The amount of power wasted by empty offices filled with computers & monitors left on all night must be obscene.
What are you talking about? NVidia supports Linux exceedingly well. Their drive is excellent. Whether they release the source or not is irrelevant to me and I suspect others who own an NVidia card and just wish to use it. You appear to think people should use a brain dead IGP card, or hold out indefinitely for NVidia / ATI to come around.
You might have that luxury, I don't. Dists might not ship the driver but there is no justification for not making it easy to install. All it requires is an 10k RPM / DEB that scripts the installation and fetching of the real driver, with the correct dependencies to ensure the driver keeps in step with other packages such as X.org and the kernel. Some unofficial packages already do this, so why not just include them.
1) You haven't used linux for years (most distros do offer single click installs for the binary blobs you mention)
Actually I use it every day and have done so for longer than most I expect. And most dists *don't* offer single click installs or anything like it. Most require you screw around on the command line, su, edit apt / yum settings, fetch patches or simply direct you to the NVidia site to figure it out. Even the otherwise straightforward Ubuntu requires most of this. In each case, it is far from simple, and often requires repeating after each upgrade of the kernel / X.org because the dependencies are all wrong. The only one I recall offering the driver with a minimum of fuss is SUSE and even that doesn't try very hard to integrate the process.
2) You don't understand licensing issues at all (WTF do free webservices have to do with anything)?
The clue is in the definition of free as you should well know as a self-professed expert on licensing. How is this any different than Firefox (for example) offering to install free (as in beer) Shockwave / Flash / Acrobat / Java / Realplayer etc. when you run across a page that needs them? How is it any different than browsers, RSS readers, Sherlock search plugins etc. hooking up to free (as in beer) web services? How is it any different than the OS offering to install free (as in beer) video / sound / games drivers? Answer - It isn't. If they can do one, they can do the other.
If you disagree I suggest you start lobbying every single distribution and have them remove all of the free (as in beer) functionality. Otherwise your argument looks a tad inconsistent.
I've spent a bit of time trying to figure out exactly what the scam was (since the original post didn't tell us) and it seems that this guy, Dentara Rast (in-game Cally) ran some sort of Eve Intergalactic Bank (EIB) which presumably did all the things a bank normally does. Deposits, withdrawls, interest, loans, etc.
EVE Online has an incredible economy that would be very good training for real world brokerage. Therefore it doesn't surprise me that the same scams as occur in real life could occur in EVE. I guess a lot of the scams that people pull off in real life from pyramid schemes, MLMs, ponzis, insider trading etc. could all have their counterparts on EVE. The moral of this tale, is don't be dumb enough to fall for them in the first place. Anything that looks too good to be true, is too good to be true.
Which is great if all you need is a brain dead IGP chip. It's nice that they help document those things, but they are not in even in the same ballpark as an NVidia / ATI chip. Nor is expecting someone to replace their motherboard or PC (since that's what IGP entails) is a reasonable solution for someone who already has a PC and wants to try Linux. Personally I'd love to see the big two commit to document their chipsets if not immediately then at least after a few years when they are no longer bleeding edge. That is certainly far more realistic than expecting them to open up their drivers.
But either way I don't see why I should have to suffer because NVidia have reasons for keeping their source closed. As it happens most of the difficulty in installing the driver can be laid squarely at the feet of the distributions. It shouldn't be hard to fetch the NVidia package and install it (e.g. an "NVidia" package could script the fetch and install so it's seamless). The same goes for Sun Java, Realplayer, Shockwave, Skype or any other commercial product or drive that a user might reasonably want. The funny thing is that dists will ship or use web services when it suits them (e.g. Weather.com for forecasts, RSS feeds, Google search etc.), but not offer commercial packages. They don't have to host them, just offer to download them.
why can't ATI/Nvidia release the source for the code they do have IP rights over?
Quite simply because ATI and NVidia are at each other's throats. They aren't about to set free a bunch of trade secrets which might give their rivals (or their customers) a competitive advantage. As a Linux user that sucks, but that's the reality.
Personally I couldn't care if the driver was free or not. I just want proper graphics support out of the box. Is it any wonder people perceive Linux as hard when it can't even offer decent graphics performance unless you drop to the command line and execute a shell script as root?
My work blocks all IP traffic except HTTP requests which are via a filtering firewall. While I can understand they don't want people looking at porn, it is extremely annoying that it blanket blocks entire sites and urls for no good reason. Perhaps one page out of possibly thousands runs afoul of the filter but the whole site gets blocked. Blogs for example. Archive.org being another even though it can be very useful. It even blocks links to things with no legitimate objectionable content of any kind. I was looking up something about genetic algorithms and discovered I was blocked from an evolution site that the article linked to! It wouldn't surprise me if they decide to block some huge resource of technical info such as Google Groups on the same flimsy premises.
All in all, it is incredibly annoying. In stark contrast, the security / tech ops group in my last company couldn't have been cooler. They basically opened up all the ports, but said plainly to us that they can monitor what we request. So it was up to us what we could browse. You could get fired just as easily if you looked at porn, but the security group was mature enough to trust us.
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I've slashed my fingers on sharp metal card slots a number of times, so there is some danger lurking with your case (aside from the live current). What gets me is trying to remove a stiff PCI card from both ends with your fingers and then slice yourself as it comes free. I now use gloves or a screwdriver to hold the plate end.
While details are still muddled of his death it would not surprise me if he tried to touch one from above and accidentally triggered the stingray's automatic defence to flick the barb straight into his chest. You can't jump back, or dodge, or do anything in water if an animals reacts. As such you'd think the rules of engagement (even for Steve) in the water would be far stricter than on land.
Exactly. It's some crappy VB / C++ / .NET wrapper around the IE control. All it can do is set some settings, fire up IE, wipe some settings and hope for the best. It is as vulnerable to spyware, adware, cookies etc. as any other IE-wrapped skin. It is a waste of time to even use the thing since it is snake oil. It is even hard to understand why the thing has garnered ANY attention since IE has been embedded countless times since it appeared as a control.
Too many cocks spoil the brothel.
An RFID on its own will be no good. There will instances where some extended family of scumbags swap their bin with the little old lady next door so she gets the bill for their rubbish. So some kind of external sticker is going to be necessary in any event.
The ability to play PS1 games is coming apparently. As for PS2 games, the PSP is similar but probably not quite as capable graphically. Still, most PS2 ports come out pretty well assuming the controls are worked out properly for the PSP layout. GTA: VCS for example is an excellent, near perfect port of GTA: III but with different content.
Gamespot article - "PSM unveils two-thumbstick, 8GB PSP?". Zonk - "PSP2 Not Coming Any Time Soon".
Other than that, I think UMD is fine for games, but they should dump it for movies and just sell movies on the web. I'm sure Sony could pull their thumbs out of their backsides and produce a decent, non-evil platform for purchasing / renting download movies at reasonable prices and make a lot of money from it.
BTW, the battery life is pretty good already, but you can improve it by turning down the screen brightness and wireless.
In other words this browser is worse than fucking useless. It just embeds IE, tweaks what settings it can and then tries to clean up afterwards. If you want to do that, you can do it in Opera and in Firefox. I believe there are even builds of Firefox which run off a keychain and leave absolutely no tell tale clues they were ever there (e.g. cache files etc.).
I've recently upgraded to Nero 7 in the last week so it's too early to see if it makes a difference, but I'd hold on a recommendation. Otherwise it's fairly intuitive though backing up to DVD media is as much of a pain as its always been. I don't do multi-disc, but I do backup the important files, which get stuck in a firesafe afterwards. I think in a few years, the network backups will take over. Every one will backup over the web, which in theory is far safer in the event of a catastrope (house burning down) anyway.
Besides, ray tracing triangular meshes makes your scene look awful. Everything looks like it was hewn with a diamond cutter unless you increase the number of triangles, do phong like shading to give it some approximation to a curve, use parametric patches, or tesselate the patches into a mesh of triangles at runtime based on CPU settings. All of which would slow things down even further.
I'm sure there is a crossover point between conventional rendering and ray tracing. I just have major doubts that it will be any time soon. Even if you threw 4 processors at the task it seems highly unlikely that you could match the quality of today's midrange card in realtime even at a lower resolution.
HP are just pissed that others only supply kits because printer ink refills are absurdly expensive, totally out of proportion with what it costs to make them. Chipping their refills failed miserably thanks to EU laws on recycling so now they're trying scare tactics instead.
Ray tracing also suffers terribly from "jaggies". Edges look bad because rays can just miss an object and cause really bad stepping on the edges of objects. To eliminate jaggies and do anti-aliasing, you need to do sub-pixel rendering with jitter (slight randomness) to produce an average value for the pixel. So you might have to trace 4 or more rays in a pixel for acceptable anti-aliasing. Effects like focal length, fog, bump mapping etc. cause things to get even more complex. Most pictures rendered with high quality on Blender, POVRay etc. would take minutes if not hours even on a fast / dual core processor.
The only way you'd get 30fps is if cut your ray trace depth to 1 or 2, used a couple of lights, cut the screen res down and forgot about fixing jaggies. It would look terrible. Oh and find time for all the other things that apps and games must do.
Seriously though, green policies can actually save you money. A PC which shuts down while inactive, or which uses cooler / low power chips is going to save you a quite a bit of money over its lifetime.
Exactly, except I'd buy two. One for the kid, and one for me. The CM1 / OLPC would be a sweet, sweet machine for anyone who needs mobile computing but not the inconvenience of lugging around cables, laptops, cases, cds etc. This thing is so small and rugged that you could toss it into a backback, use it on the beach, take it to the coffee shop etc. A touchpad, keyboard, speakers, mic, USB, screen make it far more useful than a pocket pc for wireless internet but its nowhere near as expensive or fragile as a laptop (or an Origami device). And if the worst happens and someone steals it... well it only cost $200-300 so big deal.
Use eMule or another P2P network. Lots of users would love to archive your customer data for you.
What good is wiping software if it leaves tell-tale traces that files have been wiped. For example I know that PGP's wipe renames files as aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.... which would be a sure sign that someone has been wiping data. Perhaps it's better to wipe the files, uninstall the wiper, remove all registry entries and then fill the drive to 100% with crap (e.g. by copying your Windows system folder over and over) and then a full system defrag, followed by a registry / page defrag followed by yet more crap copying.
Any dist that requires anyone to hunt for the howto, drop to a shell, su, run a script downloaded from NVidia, cycle through init 3 / 5, possibly edit their xorg.conf is hard. Most dists require that or similar. I find it an inconvenience, people not versed with shells or other Unix / Linux terminology (the vast majority of PC users) would find it an impossibility. They would rightly conclude that Linux is hard and stick with MS Windows.
One scenario is FOSS software on your box interacting with information distrubted over the web, the other is executing closed code on your box. One requires redistribution rights, the other does not. Beginning to see the difference now?
No, all scenarios are the facets of the same issue - free (beer) software in Linux. Except I'm not objecting to any of them, but you're objecting one instance and appear to condone the others. There is no significant distinction between Firefox offering to install Shockwave, and Aptitude (for example) installing NVidia drivers. Web services are just another example of open source code hooking up to free (as in beer) content. You can't defend one and then attack the other.
Whether you accept the inconsistency of your own argument or resort to yet another facile insult is irrelevant at this point. This thread is done as far as I'm concerned.
Exactly. IBM have been using Linux as the development platform for the Cell processor so it's not as far fetched as it sounds. Sony could have Linux running on the PS3 from the get go. It remains to be seen if they do though or what it looks like... It would be awesome if it did. At that point the PS3 *is* a computer (not just for tax dodging purposes), as well as a kick ass console, media jukebox. When you think of it from that perspective, the price really isn't unreasonable, especially compared to the Mac Mini (for example).
Much though I like SETI, I have to agree. Every consumer device, including PCs for home & office should be default be set to save as much power as possible. That means the operating system should stick devices in standby if they're idle and ultimately hibernate them. I believe Vista will do this and not before time. The amount of power wasted by empty offices filled with computers & monitors left on all night must be obscene.
You might have that luxury, I don't. Dists might not ship the driver but there is no justification for not making it easy to install. All it requires is an 10k RPM / DEB that scripts the installation and fetching of the real driver, with the correct dependencies to ensure the driver keeps in step with other packages such as X.org and the kernel. Some unofficial packages already do this, so why not just include them.
1) You haven't used linux for years (most distros do offer single click installs for the binary blobs you mention)
Actually I use it every day and have done so for longer than most I expect. And most dists *don't* offer single click installs or anything like it. Most require you screw around on the command line, su, edit apt / yum settings, fetch patches or simply direct you to the NVidia site to figure it out. Even the otherwise straightforward Ubuntu requires most of this. In each case, it is far from simple, and often requires repeating after each upgrade of the kernel / X.org because the dependencies are all wrong. The only one I recall offering the driver with a minimum of fuss is SUSE and even that doesn't try very hard to integrate the process.
2) You don't understand licensing issues at all (WTF do free webservices have to do with anything)?
The clue is in the definition of free as you should well know as a self-professed expert on licensing. How is this any different than Firefox (for example) offering to install free (as in beer) Shockwave / Flash / Acrobat / Java / Realplayer etc. when you run across a page that needs them? How is it any different than browsers, RSS readers, Sherlock search plugins etc. hooking up to free (as in beer) web services? How is it any different than the OS offering to install free (as in beer) video / sound / games drivers? Answer - It isn't. If they can do one, they can do the other.
If you disagree I suggest you start lobbying every single distribution and have them remove all of the free (as in beer) functionality. Otherwise your argument looks a tad inconsistent.
EVE Online has an incredible economy that would be very good training for real world brokerage. Therefore it doesn't surprise me that the same scams as occur in real life could occur in EVE. I guess a lot of the scams that people pull off in real life from pyramid schemes, MLMs, ponzis, insider trading etc. could all have their counterparts on EVE. The moral of this tale, is don't be dumb enough to fall for them in the first place. Anything that looks too good to be true, is too good to be true.
But either way I don't see why I should have to suffer because NVidia have reasons for keeping their source closed. As it happens most of the difficulty in installing the driver can be laid squarely at the feet of the distributions. It shouldn't be hard to fetch the NVidia package and install it (e.g. an "NVidia" package could script the fetch and install so it's seamless). The same goes for Sun Java, Realplayer, Shockwave, Skype or any other commercial product or drive that a user might reasonably want. The funny thing is that dists will ship or use web services when it suits them (e.g. Weather.com for forecasts, RSS feeds, Google search etc.), but not offer commercial packages. They don't have to host them, just offer to download them.
Quite simply because ATI and NVidia are at each other's throats. They aren't about to set free a bunch of trade secrets which might give their rivals (or their customers) a competitive advantage. As a Linux user that sucks, but that's the reality.
Personally I couldn't care if the driver was free or not. I just want proper graphics support out of the box. Is it any wonder people perceive Linux as hard when it can't even offer decent graphics performance unless you drop to the command line and execute a shell script as root?
All in all, it is incredibly annoying. In stark contrast, the security / tech ops group in my last company couldn't have been cooler. They basically opened up all the ports, but said plainly to us that they can monitor what we request. So it was up to us what we could browse. You could get fired just as easily if you looked at porn, but the security group was mature enough to trust us.