You, sir, combine ignorance and arrogance into one efficient package.
There was NO Lend-Lease material delivered to reds before 1942. None, Zero, Nada, Zilch.
In other words US materiel got forwarded to soviets after they proved to the world they could take everything nazis could thrown at them head on.. and scraped by the skin of their prick to not collapse.
Moreover the more significant part of the aid was actually in stuff like trucks, tires, railroad rails and so on. Soviet tanks, planes and arms were just better at nazi killing than the US counterparts of the time.
To wit, soviets made hell of a lot more germans die for the Vaterland than Amis.
The original Windows 95 release was quite usable in 8MB of RAM. It wasn't until IE4 beefed up the shell that 16MB+ became necessary.
At the same time, OS/2 basically required 16MB (you could limp by in 12MB), and NT4 20MB.
Sounds like you didn't actually use it much. The SIQ was a notorious OS/2 problem and would usually lock it up at least every couple of days (and that's if you weren't doing anything particularly interesting).
Between OS/2 and a properly setup Windows 95 system, without any 16-bit drivers or (to a lesser degree) programs, the stability difference was negligible - but Windows 95 ran equally well on 1/2 to 2/3 the hardware and had _vastly_ better compatibility.
Ahem. As a guy who did use OS/2 for several years doing fairly geeky stuff all the time, I beg to differ on that. OS/2 just blew the pants off W95 in stability with zero contest. I had uptimes of several weeks quite commonly.
The SIQ issue was bad but it got as good patch/workaround as was possible without rewriting an asynchronous queue. I do not remember anymore if it happened in 3.0 or on some 2.1 service pack.
A bigger problem was the system level unability to terminate a misbehaving application. I usually had to finally reboot when enough zombie apps were sucking system resources that were for all intents and purposes unkillable.
Pls do not claim there was magic software z that would fix it, none of them worked even 50% of the time.
"compatibility" is a nebulous quantity as you should know. See for reference "Is year XXXX year of the Linux on desktop" -nonsense.
Graphics card device driver support thoroughly sucked on OS/2 and considering the cards of that time were mostly simple frame buffer affairs it's saying something.
Actually towards the end OS/2 got really good at running windows software. There was a project that made an executable converter that would take regular Win32 app and make OS/2 exe out of it. Obviously the problem is how do you get the darn Office installed in the 1st place..
Also there was a blatant sabotage on Microsoft's part with the abortion of 32bit extension for Win 3.1 family - They came up with an update that just basically irreversibly broke windows 3.1 software under OS/2..
WRT OS/2 3.0, yeah, NT is pretty solid design on technical viewpoint. But damn it was a resource hog back in the day. And it took more than ten years to break into the Desktop with Windows XP.
Beyond stuff that you can do in free fall that'd be difficult/impossible in 1G, there's truckload of money to be grabbed. As soon as you can extract useful resources from moon and later, asteroid belt, sky's the proverbial limit.
One obvious moneymaker would be of course manufacturing more spaceships. It's the whole pyramid cost structure - Setting up that 1st space ship factory is astronomically (ha) expensive but each step after that costs less and less while the profits grow inversely.
Rocket equation for moon is just way different for rocket equation for earth. And once you can drag heavy metals from asteroid belt you have unlimited resources for practical foreseeable future.
But, yes, in quaterly fiscal thinking, there's no money to be made.
As a heavy user of zinc-air batteries, I can spoil the party for all of you. Zinc-air and likely Lithium-Air batteries are great for energy storage where you need high size/energy ratio.
What they absolutely suck on is self-discharging. Your average zinc-air hearing air battery will discharge in about a week exposed to oxygen. So these lithium-air batteries would probably come with a tape sealing the terminal and as soon as you remove it, it will start discharging.
This would pretty much sabotage applications where you would prefer regular batteries over rechargeable ones right now. Namely clocks, remotes and so on, which are supposed to run on a single set of batteries for more than a year.
See, this is an example of exactly the flaw with dogmatic beliefs. Just because something is a time honored tradition amongst otherwise perfectly reasonable people doesn't make it not a horrible practice.
The other side of the coin is that by demonizing the practise you're making men with constriction or other problems in their wiener much much less likely to get help.
As a guy who got chopped at adult age (30ish) I very much prefer the lack of pain, bleeding sores and other assorted fun afterwards. Only regret is I didn't have it done 10 years earlier + doctors asshole attitude prevalent over here (europe) due to the propaganda blowing downsides all out of proportion.
You're correct that, if an elevator cable is frayed and the auditor missed it, he should be sued. However, audits aren't a way for businesses to shift the blame onto the auditor: they're a way for honest businesses to confirm that everybody (employees and contractors) and everything is in order at a certain point in time. If the auditor finds something that isn't right, his job is to inform his client, and perhaps propose remedies, but that's all. It's the business' job to implement the remedies. What I mean is, audits are a tools *for the client* to help do things right, that's all.
Nb. Following pertains to european regulations. Yes, it's the continent not on same map page as US.
On the subject of auditing machines and devices, now the demand is suddenly the auditor/inspector has personally checked every single critical component making up the elevator? And their installation?
Right. Maybe Superman with his X-Ray vision could give decent go-ahead on an installation with superficial examination and checking the paperwork. Ordinary people obviously can't.
However much you'd love to shift the blame, it's still the responsibility of the manufacturer and installer of the elevator that the elevator is safe to use. Auditors can only verify the company manufactoring practices and QA are according to the required standards. On paper.
What this auditing and certifying actually does is alleviate the blame on the people doing the installation. If there's an accident, you can be sure the setup will be examined thoroughly to find out what exactly went wrong and why. But someone can be actually sued if it can be demonstrated there was criminal negligence or fraudulent practices.
In any case systems like elevators have huge safety margins and strict regulation. Whereas contruction industry as a whole is known for integrity and following standards to the letter (cough) consequences for using substandard equipment or installations where people are liable to be hurt or killed are fairly severe.
After all strict quality management practices and certifications exist so that manufacturers and builders are not able to endanger lives as a cost cutting measure.
Accidents do happen and then there is a chain of blame and it's not not usually the auditor or inspector ending up holding the bag. Supervisors are far more likely to get the blame who actually oversee the construction.
You must not be an American. Or know very many protestants.
Almost everyone I know is protestant. The vast vast vast majority of them accept Genesis as the literal description of creation.
And I would say that's not an abnormal figure:
I'm not American for sure. But coming from a protestant country I resent your sweeping stereotyping of protestant people. Of course the very term "protestant" is somewhat fuzzy and misleading. Protestant movement invoved many factions such as lutherians (that would be the nordic countries) who were pretty much live and let live kind of ideology. However, Luther's peers Zwingli, Calvin and the ilk thought moderates are just too soft and pliable so they went ahead with their own crackpot zealot view of things. To put things into perspective full half of german region's population was butchered due to violence between hardliner protestants and catholics during the reformation.
I'm too lazy to look up proper terminology but you have reformist protestants on the extremist end and whole mess of spin-offs who also had ties with each other so the whole protestant "scene" is pretty darn amorphous. British (anglicans) indeed kicked out the zealot troublemakers to US. Or rather "encouraged" them to pack their things.
Calvin and the boys would be organizing suicide bombings if they lived today and you do _not_ want such people living next door.
So summa summarum, I'm an atheist living in a country with protestant state religion and I can say at least 75% of people here see creationism ans nonsense. Society is very secular in any case with strong separation between church and state.
Generally speaking the PDF file is just registered for foxit in firefox so it gets automagically dumped to a temporary location and foxit (or acrobat) will handle the file. So I definitely do not save pdf files 1st and open them later.
I think foxit does all that for you as long as you un-tick "open PDF in browser" during installation.
That said, Adobe is bloated. It just has nothing to do with running all the time in the background and prompting for updates, but just with generally shitty programming.
Run all the time is a DIRECT RESULT of the general all around crappiness of the acrobat reader. Foxit kicks up in seconds without any background "quick start" applet. And so should acrobat.
The whole "quick start" background applet garbage appeared in acrobat 6, I think, when the startup time just got too damn bad.
Actually you can trim acrobat itself to start pretty quickly with the preload turned off. There's amazing amount of cruft in the plugins most people have no use for whatsoever. It's just not in the UI, but you can simply move plugin files to another folder.
I'd rather just use foxit. When they take enough demographic Adobe is probably forced to fix their crummy software, just like MS had to do with IE.
I also understand overclocking for the sake of overclocking. But is getting 15% increase in MHz really noticeable without testing?
You forget whole geek bragging rights-aspect.
Another point worth keeping in mind is that the last 15% actually would cost you a whole lot of money. If you buy a CPU/GPU that is stock clocked 15% faster, you can easily end up paying 100% more.
Which is of course why CPU manufacturers have gone to considerable trouble to stop you from overclocking. Anyone remember overclocking Athlons with a pencil? Or the silly superglue-method tom's hardware guide came out with to overclock the CPU that made pencilling impossible?
Same with GPUs of course. And as everyone already pointed out, you can often get quite a bit more than "15%" more. My 3GHz Dual core is running at 4GHz, for example, just because I can. Low end parts tend to be more overclockable than high end.
Of course Olympus is saying they don't want to compete in the megapixel race. They can't.
This strikes me as similar to AMD claiming that clock speed was a bad performance metric back when their stuff was clocked slower and couldn't quite compete with Intel.
They were (AMD) right, of course. It was true then and it's true now. Not that it meant diddly-squat in the markeplace realities but even intel dropped the megaherz is just a megaherz -nonsense after they came out with Pentium-M that kicked poor old P4 design where it hurts clock cycle to clock cycle.
Now about the megapixels. They're handy for cropping but for 10x15 photos most people take it doesn't make much difference if it's 3M or 6M or 12M. As a case in point, nice sublimation photo printers are 300dpi devices and still tend to look superior to most inkjets with far higher resolution because of the color reproduction.
The sad thing about megapixel war is that it actually hurts real camera performance => Cram more pixels to the same sensor area and you tend to hurt noise, dynamic range, low light performance.. As a case in point, you can have my Fuji F30 compact when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers! It's "only" 6Mp device but it actually has superior image quality to the "improved" f50 that doubles pixel count to 12Mp on the same sensor. With F30 Fuji made "low" pixel count camera with larger-than-average sensor size on purpose and created a compact with superb low-light performance. With f50 you have double the pixels but low light performance and other image quality metrics went down, not up.
With f50 Fuji caved in to the market pressure (as they should as a business entity) but "more pixels equals better" just isn't true.
Not really a serious question, but since we're at it; I do not really see a problem for anyone supposing deity-of-your-preference created universe and life and so on: Exactly like it is, evolving, perfecting (to it's niche).. After all the big book says something about free will and such. What are fundies to presume how omnipotent entity sees "free will"? Quite possibly for universe-as-a-reference-frame consciousness would see biosphere as an entity and so forth. Or, even more likely, galaxies would form a singular entity from such viewpoint..
You think it's insane for game developers to require 4GB+ ram? Well it may be but they can and do. Lazy it may be, fact it is.
It's of course funny they can fairly easily cram the same game into Xbox360 that has 512MB because that's the platform spec and the programmers HAVE to make it work on that amount.
With PC gaming the programmers do not have hard upper limit except they're hurting the potential customer base if they require more than 4GB installed RAM because most people are not on 64bit windows.
3 mile island was trivial. Chernobyl was due to crappy Soviet engineering, management, and maintenance. We've had plenty of time to learn from their mistakes.
That's not true. Chernobyl was no accident. The asshats were performing deliberate experiment on large live nuclear power station. In order to perform the experiment every safety system they had in place had to be turned off - The fail-safes would've kicked in and ruined their little experiment, see. As in preventing the plant from going boom. Even more damning, when they started to perform the experiment they had unexpected complications but decided to crank up the power and proceed anyways. You know the result.
So the fault was not with design or engineering but solely in management. Althought I'm sure engineers or rather some academic came up with the experiment to begin with.
Probably a few things would be a lot easier (programming by telling the computer what to do in a natural language rather than having to write objects and procedures in a high-level computer language... Or perhaps gaming applications.
Programming? Yeah right. Probably last thing ever to go voice-activated. Something more plausible would be for example info-desk style application or perhaps GPS navigation system. After all you're supposed to be driving the car if you change your mind about destination etc.
Gaming is dead-on, too. In fact it's surprising it's been used so little. There was ancient c64 game that already could be taught 3 speech commands. Given the modern cpu and memory capabilities it should be all over the place, especially since X360 has microphone as standard issue.
Not all games benefit of course, but RTS would for sure and so should shooters - In multiplayer better teams have coordinated on voice channels for a decade already, no reason why you shouldn't be able to give AI voice commands in single-player too.
Dude, wrong tool for the job if ease of setup was your primary criteria which it turned out to be. People don't claim exotic things like an HTPC with SPDIF sound is going to be a piece of cake like you seem to think they have.
Well my anonymous coward pal, it *is* a piece of cake with XP. Adding insult to injury the sound chip is just a bog-standard AC97 on-board audio, most common chip in the world. "Known good audio cards" for linux is like one of those world shortest books.
Then there's the whole debacle of setting up specific resolutions for display, kind of handy for HTPC use..
Just goes to show if you need anything beyond pre-set Iceweasel/TB/OpenOffice, you're knee deep in gore.
It really depends on what gaming you want to do. Anything that doesn't require Direct X 10 or strange drivers that for some reason are Vista only (which is like 99.9% of all games/hardware) Just use XP.
Which is actually what I'm doing. But face it, XP is being phased out whether we like it or not. 3 years down the line the vista installation base has a lion's share of gaming rigs on plain windows tax inertia alone. At work, I recently upgraded W2k to XP for the sole reason of latest PCB design tools puking on W2k as it's not supported or tested against it anymore. Vista's creeping there too as well, unless you're big enough shop to have dedicated IT staff etc.
I went all Linux back in 2006, apart from gaming just about everything else works perfectly. I used Firefox to browse, OOo to write documents, and so there was no change in software. Today just about everything with Ubuntu can be done quicker than on Windows to set up a comparable system, it takes me less time to get a fully functioning Ubuntu box with DVD/MP3/a few programs/nVidia drivers compared to just installing Windows XP and getting all of the hardware to work.
Mm. No.
I wasted a week'n'half of my vacation last summer trying to set up a HTPC running on mythbuntu. Even after I scaled down the requirements to just getting something to "play" I was not getting anywhere fast. Linux audio is a big steaming turd and even really elementary stuff like getting SPDIF enabled is an adventure where you have to get comfy with mod parameters and the like.
Not to mention there are no system wide codecs all applications know how to use and so on and so forth.
That whole party line of "so easy anyone can do it" degenerates pretty fast into.conf hell if you want to do something "exotic" like use the digital output or multi-channel audio.
Ooo is just terrible compared to Office as well. I use excel a lot for various engineering things and just making simple solve-with-parameters table or a 2d chart to study component values is much more difficult than it needs to be.
Yeah, maybe 3.x release did something about that, but 2.x calc at least was really bad. I don't feel obliged to learn to use user-hostile software for ideological reasons, I just want to get my day-to-day work done.
To sum up my HTPC project, once I gave up on the whole geek-credibility linux idea, I had fully functional media-box running on top of XP within a few hours including reinstall from scratch. With ffdshow and media player classic everything just works and dvbviewer is remarkably straightforward to set up compared to mythtv or vdr.
My only mistake was wasting more than couple of nights on the linux-project. That's the engineering mindset that difficulties are made to be surpassed. But sometimes the tool is just wrong. I also tried plain ubuntu and debian to see if they make any difference but the whole "multimedia" thing doesn't seem to be there.
Used to be web *was* IE and people were reduced to fool web pages with bogus client ID to get working IE web code instead of terrible buggy netscape 4.x code or just simple "get IE" -banner.
2/3rd is still a lot but it was 90% a little while ago and it could be perfectly justified to develop a new site IE only.
With these figures, in 2009 new sites designed have even stronger reason to cater for the "other" demographic.
Too bad there's no credible alternative to vista or vista 2nd release in sight for your average gaming-oriented PC. I wouldn't use linux for general desktop stuff either, too much pain if there's no ideological reason to go there. And the other notable requires joining a cult with the membership fee charged in overpriced hardware.
ATI drivers seem to have problems with suspend-to-ram and hibernate, thought. I have grand total sample of 2 ati cards and 2 nvidia cards - With Nvidia suspend always worked. With ATI there was always problems. In fact I've not been able to make HD3850 card to suspend/resume despite trying every trick in the book up to and including tweaking bios..
The older radeon 9700 worked fine until driver release ZZZ, after that it shazam stopped working. I was using year'n'half old driver just to keep the suspend working.
Suspend is one of these things that you never miss until you see it working 1st hand and then you can't figure out how you survived without..
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You, sir, combine ignorance and arrogance into one efficient package.
There was NO Lend-Lease material delivered to reds before 1942. None, Zero, Nada, Zilch.
In other words US materiel got forwarded to soviets after they proved to the world they could take everything nazis could thrown at them head on .. and scraped by the skin of their prick to not collapse.
Moreover the more significant part of the aid was actually in stuff like trucks, tires, railroad rails and so on. Soviet tanks, planes and arms were just better at nazi killing than the US counterparts of the time.
To wit, soviets made hell of a lot more germans die for the Vaterland than Amis.
[/offtopic]
The original Windows 95 release was quite usable in 8MB of RAM. It wasn't until IE4 beefed up the shell that 16MB+ became necessary.
At the same time, OS/2 basically required 16MB (you could limp by in 12MB), and NT4 20MB.
Sounds like you didn't actually use it much. The SIQ was a notorious OS/2 problem and would usually lock it up at least every couple of days (and that's if you weren't doing anything particularly interesting).
Between OS/2 and a properly setup Windows 95 system, without any 16-bit drivers or (to a lesser degree) programs, the stability difference was negligible - but Windows 95 ran equally well on 1/2 to 2/3 the hardware and had _vastly_ better compatibility.
Ahem. As a guy who did use OS/2 for several years doing fairly geeky stuff all the time, I beg to differ on that. OS/2 just blew the pants off W95 in stability with zero contest. I had uptimes of several weeks quite commonly.
The SIQ issue was bad but it got as good patch/workaround as was possible without rewriting an asynchronous queue. I do not remember anymore if it happened in 3.0 or on some 2.1 service pack.
A bigger problem was the system level unability to terminate a misbehaving application. I usually had to finally reboot when enough zombie apps were sucking system resources that were for all intents and purposes unkillable.
Pls do not claim there was magic software z that would fix it, none of them worked even 50% of the time.
"compatibility" is a nebulous quantity as you should know. See for reference "Is year XXXX year of the Linux on desktop" -nonsense.
Graphics card device driver support thoroughly sucked on OS/2 and considering the cards of that time were mostly simple frame buffer affairs it's saying something.
Actually towards the end OS/2 got really good at running windows software. There was a project that made an executable converter that would take regular Win32 app and make OS/2 exe out of it. Obviously the problem is how do you get the darn Office installed in the 1st place..
Also there was a blatant sabotage on Microsoft's part with the abortion of 32bit extension for Win 3.1 family - They came up with an update that just basically irreversibly broke windows 3.1 software under OS/2..
WRT OS/2 3.0, yeah, NT is pretty solid design on technical viewpoint. But damn it was a resource hog back in the day. And it took more than ten years to break into the Desktop with Windows XP.
Beyond stuff that you can do in free fall that'd be difficult/impossible in 1G, there's truckload of money to be grabbed. As soon as you can extract useful resources from moon and later, asteroid belt, sky's the proverbial limit.
One obvious moneymaker would be of course manufacturing more spaceships. It's the whole pyramid cost structure - Setting up that 1st space ship factory is astronomically (ha) expensive but each step after that costs less and less while the profits grow inversely.
Rocket equation for moon is just way different for rocket equation for earth. And once you can drag heavy metals from asteroid belt you have unlimited resources for practical foreseeable future.
But, yes, in quaterly fiscal thinking, there's no money to be made.
Unless there's some huge breakthrough in power generation. Which might happen, but I'm not holding my breath...
Oh! Oh! I know this!
It's called nucular-something!
As a heavy user of zinc-air batteries, I can spoil the party for all of you. Zinc-air and likely Lithium-Air batteries are great for energy storage where you need high size/energy ratio.
What they absolutely suck on is self-discharging. Your average zinc-air hearing air battery will discharge in about a week exposed to oxygen. So these lithium-air batteries would probably come with a tape sealing the terminal and as soon as you remove it, it will start discharging.
This would pretty much sabotage applications where you would prefer regular batteries over rechargeable ones right now. Namely clocks, remotes and so on, which are supposed to run on a single set of batteries for more than a year.
See, this is an example of exactly the flaw with dogmatic beliefs. Just because something is a time honored tradition amongst otherwise perfectly reasonable people doesn't make it not a horrible practice.
The other side of the coin is that by demonizing the practise you're making men with constriction or other problems in their wiener much much less likely to get help.
As a guy who got chopped at adult age (30ish) I very much prefer the lack of pain, bleeding sores and other assorted fun afterwards. Only regret is I didn't have it done 10 years earlier + doctors asshole attitude prevalent over here (europe) due to the propaganda blowing downsides all out of proportion.
You're correct that, if an elevator cable is frayed and the auditor missed it, he should be sued. However, audits aren't a way for businesses to shift the blame onto the auditor: they're a way for honest businesses to confirm that everybody (employees and contractors) and everything is in order at a certain point in time. If the auditor finds something that isn't right, his job is to inform his client, and perhaps propose remedies, but that's all. It's the business' job to implement the remedies. What I mean is, audits are a tools *for the client* to help do things right, that's all.
Nb. Following pertains to european regulations. Yes, it's the continent not on same map page as US.
On the subject of auditing machines and devices, now the demand is suddenly the auditor/inspector has personally checked every single critical component making up the elevator? And their installation?
Right. Maybe Superman with his X-Ray vision could give decent go-ahead on an installation with superficial examination and checking the paperwork. Ordinary people obviously can't.
However much you'd love to shift the blame, it's still the responsibility of the manufacturer and installer of the elevator that the elevator is safe to use. Auditors can only verify the company manufactoring practices and QA are according to the required standards. On paper.
What this auditing and certifying actually does is alleviate the blame on the people doing the installation. If there's an accident, you can be sure the setup will be examined thoroughly to find out what exactly went wrong and why. But someone can be actually sued if it can be demonstrated there was criminal negligence or fraudulent practices.
In any case systems like elevators have huge safety margins and strict regulation. Whereas contruction industry as a whole is known for integrity and following standards to the letter (cough) consequences for using substandard equipment or installations where people are liable to be hurt or killed are fairly severe.
After all strict quality management practices and certifications exist so that manufacturers and builders are not able to endanger lives as a cost cutting measure.
Accidents do happen and then there is a chain of blame and it's not not usually the auditor or inspector ending up holding the bag. Supervisors are far more likely to get the blame who actually oversee the construction.
You must not be an American. Or know very many protestants.
Almost everyone I know is protestant. The vast vast vast majority of them accept Genesis as the literal description of creation.
And I would say that's not an abnormal figure:
I'm not American for sure. But coming from a protestant country I resent your sweeping stereotyping of protestant people. Of course the very term "protestant" is somewhat fuzzy and misleading. Protestant movement invoved many factions such as lutherians (that would be the nordic countries) who were pretty much live and let live kind of ideology. However, Luther's peers Zwingli, Calvin and the ilk thought moderates are just too soft and pliable so they went ahead with their own crackpot zealot view of things. To put things into perspective full half of german region's population was butchered due to violence between hardliner protestants and catholics during the reformation.
I'm too lazy to look up proper terminology but you have reformist protestants on the extremist end and whole mess of spin-offs who also had ties with each other so the whole protestant "scene" is pretty darn amorphous. British (anglicans) indeed kicked out the zealot troublemakers to US. Or rather "encouraged" them to pack their things.
Calvin and the boys would be organizing suicide bombings if they lived today and you do _not_ want such people living next door.
So summa summarum, I'm an atheist living in a country with protestant state religion and I can say at least 75% of people here see creationism ans nonsense. Society is very secular in any case with strong separation between church and state.
"It was a rubber tree"
Darn I laughed so hard 1st time.
Generally speaking the PDF file is just registered for foxit in firefox so it gets automagically dumped to a temporary location and foxit (or acrobat) will handle the file. So I definitely do not save pdf files 1st and open them later.
I think foxit does all that for you as long as you un-tick "open PDF in browser" during installation.
Just don't use the firefox plugin. There's no particular _need_ to open the PDF in browser, is there?
Kick out the browser plugin and the pdf will open in the standalone program like FSM meant it.
That said, Adobe is bloated. It just has nothing to do with running all the time in the background and prompting for updates, but just with generally shitty programming.
Run all the time is a DIRECT RESULT of the general all around crappiness of the acrobat reader. Foxit kicks up in seconds without any background "quick start" applet. And so should acrobat.
The whole "quick start" background applet garbage appeared in acrobat 6, I think, when the startup time just got too damn bad.
Actually you can trim acrobat itself to start pretty quickly with the preload turned off. There's amazing amount of cruft in the plugins most people have no use for whatsoever. It's just not in the UI, but you can simply move plugin files to another folder.
I'd rather just use foxit. When they take enough demographic Adobe is probably forced to fix their crummy software, just like MS had to do with IE.
I also understand overclocking for the sake of overclocking. But is getting 15% increase in MHz really noticeable without testing?
You forget whole geek bragging rights-aspect.
Another point worth keeping in mind is that the last 15% actually would cost you a whole lot of money. If you buy a CPU/GPU that is stock clocked 15% faster, you can easily end up paying 100% more.
Which is of course why CPU manufacturers have gone to considerable trouble to stop you from overclocking. Anyone remember overclocking Athlons with a pencil? Or the silly superglue-method tom's hardware guide came out with to overclock the CPU that made pencilling impossible?
Same with GPUs of course. And as everyone already pointed out, you can often get quite a bit more than "15%" more. My 3GHz Dual core is running at 4GHz, for example, just because I can. Low end parts tend to be more overclockable than high end.
Of course Olympus is saying they don't want to compete in the megapixel race. They can't.
This strikes me as similar to AMD claiming that clock speed was a bad performance metric back when their stuff was clocked slower and couldn't quite compete with Intel.
They were (AMD) right, of course. It was true then and it's true now. Not that it meant diddly-squat in the markeplace realities but even intel dropped the megaherz is just a megaherz -nonsense after they came out with Pentium-M that kicked poor old P4 design where it hurts clock cycle to clock cycle.
Now about the megapixels. They're handy for cropping but for 10x15 photos most people take it doesn't make much difference if it's 3M or 6M or 12M. As a case in point, nice sublimation photo printers are 300dpi devices and still tend to look superior to most inkjets with far higher resolution because of the color reproduction.
The sad thing about megapixel war is that it actually hurts real camera performance => Cram more pixels to the same sensor area and you tend to hurt noise, dynamic range, low light performance.. As a case in point, you can have my Fuji F30 compact when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers! It's "only" 6Mp device but it actually has superior image quality to the "improved" f50 that doubles pixel count to 12Mp on the same sensor. With F30 Fuji made "low" pixel count camera with larger-than-average sensor size on purpose and created a compact with superb low-light performance. With f50 you have double the pixels but low light performance and other image quality metrics went down, not up.
With f50 Fuji caved in to the market pressure (as they should as a business entity) but "more pixels equals better" just isn't true.
Not really a serious question, but since we're at it; I do not really see a problem for anyone supposing deity-of-your-preference created universe and life and so on: Exactly like it is, evolving, perfecting (to it's niche) .. After all the big book says something about free will and such. What are fundies to presume how omnipotent entity sees "free will"? Quite possibly for universe-as-a-reference-frame consciousness would see biosphere as an entity and so forth. Or, even more likely, galaxies would form a singular entity from such viewpoint..
Never mind, I'm not an expert, being atheist and all. However vatican of all places just dealt a serious blow to ID!
I wonder what IDers claim neanderthals are supposed to be. Beta versions?
The scenarios benefiting from Long Mode would be:
You think it's insane for game developers to require 4GB+ ram? Well it may be but they can and do. Lazy it may be, fact it is.
It's of course funny they can fairly easily cram the same game into Xbox360 that has 512MB because that's the platform spec and the programmers HAVE to make it work on that amount.
With PC gaming the programmers do not have hard upper limit except they're hurting the potential customer base if they require more than 4GB installed RAM because most people are not on 64bit windows.
3 mile island was trivial. Chernobyl was due to crappy Soviet engineering, management, and maintenance. We've had plenty of time to learn from their mistakes.
That's not true. Chernobyl was no accident. The asshats were performing deliberate experiment on large live nuclear power station. In order to perform the experiment every safety system they had in place had to be turned off - The fail-safes would've kicked in and ruined their little experiment, see. As in preventing the plant from going boom. Even more damning, when they started to perform the experiment they had unexpected complications but decided to crank up the power and proceed anyways. You know the result.
So the fault was not with design or engineering but solely in management. Althought I'm sure engineers or rather some academic came up with the experiment to begin with.
You can read more about it here.
Probably a few things would be a lot easier (programming by telling the computer what to do in a natural language rather than having to write objects and procedures in a high-level computer language... Or perhaps gaming applications.
Programming? Yeah right. Probably last thing ever to go voice-activated. Something more plausible would be for example info-desk style application or perhaps GPS navigation system. After all you're supposed to be driving the car if you change your mind about destination etc.
Gaming is dead-on, too. In fact it's surprising it's been used so little. There was ancient c64 game that already could be taught 3 speech commands. Given the modern cpu and memory capabilities it should be all over the place, especially since X360 has microphone as standard issue.
Not all games benefit of course, but RTS would for sure and so should shooters - In multiplayer better teams have coordinated on voice channels for a decade already, no reason why you shouldn't be able to give AI voice commands in single-player too.
The hardware is still overpriced no matter what.
Mind you, if you could put OSX on a no-name intel box, I'd probably had had it running for years. It's like linux done right.
Dude, wrong tool for the job if ease of setup was your primary criteria which it turned out to be. People don't claim exotic things like an HTPC with SPDIF sound is going to be a piece of cake like you seem to think they have.
Well my anonymous coward pal, it *is* a piece of cake with XP. Adding insult to injury the sound chip is just a bog-standard AC97 on-board audio, most common chip in the world. "Known good audio cards" for linux is like one of those world shortest books.
Then there's the whole debacle of setting up specific resolutions for display, kind of handy for HTPC use..
Just goes to show if you need anything beyond pre-set Iceweasel/TB/OpenOffice, you're knee deep in gore.
It really depends on what gaming you want to do. Anything that doesn't require Direct X 10 or strange drivers that for some reason are Vista only (which is like 99.9% of all games/hardware) Just use XP.
Which is actually what I'm doing. But face it, XP is being phased out whether we like it or not. 3 years down the line the vista installation base has a lion's share of gaming rigs on plain windows tax inertia alone. At work, I recently upgraded W2k to XP for the sole reason of latest PCB design tools puking on W2k as it's not supported or tested against it anymore. Vista's creeping there too as well, unless you're big enough shop to have dedicated IT staff etc.
I went all Linux back in 2006, apart from gaming just about everything else works perfectly. I used Firefox to browse, OOo to write documents, and so there was no change in software. Today just about everything with Ubuntu can be done quicker than on Windows to set up a comparable system, it takes me less time to get a fully functioning Ubuntu box with DVD/MP3/a few programs/nVidia drivers compared to just installing Windows XP and getting all of the hardware to work.
Mm. No.
I wasted a week'n'half of my vacation last summer trying to set up a HTPC running on mythbuntu. Even after I scaled down the requirements to just getting something to "play" I was not getting anywhere fast. Linux audio is a big steaming turd and even really elementary stuff like getting SPDIF enabled is an adventure where you have to get comfy with mod parameters and the like.
Not to mention there are no system wide codecs all applications know how to use and so on and so forth.
That whole party line of "so easy anyone can do it" degenerates pretty fast into .conf hell if you want to do something "exotic" like use the digital output or multi-channel audio.
Ooo is just terrible compared to Office as well. I use excel a lot for various engineering things and just making simple solve-with-parameters table or a 2d chart to study component values is much more difficult than it needs to be.
Yeah, maybe 3.x release did something about that, but 2.x calc at least was really bad. I don't feel obliged to learn to use user-hostile software for ideological reasons, I just want to get my day-to-day work done.
To sum up my HTPC project, once I gave up on the whole geek-credibility linux idea, I had fully functional media-box running on top of XP within a few hours including reinstall from scratch. With ffdshow and media player classic everything just works and dvbviewer is remarkably straightforward to set up compared to mythtv or vdr.
My only mistake was wasting more than couple of nights on the linux-project. That's the engineering mindset that difficulties are made to be surpassed. But sometimes the tool is just wrong. I also tried plain ubuntu and debian to see if they make any difference but the whole "multimedia" thing doesn't seem to be there.
Get over yourself already.
Used to be web *was* IE and people were reduced to fool web pages with bogus client ID to get working IE web code instead of terrible buggy netscape 4.x code or just simple "get IE" -banner.
2/3rd is still a lot but it was 90% a little while ago and it could be perfectly justified to develop a new site IE only.
With these figures, in 2009 new sites designed have even stronger reason to cater for the "other" demographic.
Too bad there's no credible alternative to vista or vista 2nd release in sight for your average gaming-oriented PC. I wouldn't use linux for general desktop stuff either, too much pain if there's no ideological reason to go there. And the other notable requires joining a cult with the membership fee charged in overpriced hardware.
ATI drivers seem to have problems with suspend-to-ram and hibernate, thought. I have grand total sample of 2 ati cards and 2 nvidia cards - With Nvidia suspend always worked. With ATI there was always problems. In fact I've not been able to make HD3850 card to suspend/resume despite trying every trick in the book up to and including tweaking bios..
The older radeon 9700 worked fine until driver release ZZZ, after that it shazam stopped working. I was using year'n'half old driver just to keep the suspend working.
Suspend is one of these things that you never miss until you see it working 1st hand and then you can't figure out how you survived without..
I could think of some trivial loads suitable for railgun approach (or whatever you want to call it) such as water, oxygen, fuel..