I love my 'desktop replacement' laptop to death. Never mind the fact that it scorches my lap on long plane flights and cuts of circulation at my knees - I just can't go without the power of a full desktop. My one niggling complaint has always been 3D graphics performance, and it is good to see that a high end card manufacturer is finally taking this market segment seriously.
I don't game much, but it is a shame that you can buy the highest end laptop, pack it with a 30 Gig hard drive, 15 inch screen, 512 MB of RAM, and you still can't play Quake II at reasonable frame rates.
You obviously haven't used a laptop manufactured in the last 4 years. Things have gotten much better. My nice 15 inch TFT display has zero blur.
And yes, I would love to be able to play some of the latest 3D games on my laptop. As it is right now, Quake (the original) is just playable on my crappy, supposedly 3D excelerated ATI Rage 'mobile' chipset.
I know that no such negative index materials exists for optical wavelengths, but if it did, would this improve the resolution of lithography techniques used to etch chips? Or are the limitations in lithography due to diffraction effects with the chip masks?
We don't have a resolution independent operating systems/applications. Thus, all that will happen on these displays is everything on your windows or linux desktop will just look smaller, not crisper and sharper.
I might be wrong though, I think OS X with it's display PDF engine could actually make very good use of these displays.
What the hell are you talking about? They had to count all the popular votes in the individual states didn't they? And then they conveyed those results to the meeting of the electoral college. You could have just as easily decided the race on the raw votes themselves, the electoral college had to have them available.
Not that I want to get rid of the electoral college, but the idea that there was some technological limitation back then is sheer idiocy.
About the only remnant of technological limitations of that error that is still left is the gap in time between the actual vote and the meeting of the electoral college. It took some time to count all the votes and convey them to a central location. Nowadays we probably don't need this delay.
Yes, something seems fishy in Palm Beach, but without actually holding another election I don't see how we could possibly sort out what the people in that county intended.
I saw the ballot in question, it did not seem all that confusing to me, but what do I know. A big arrow next to the ballot bunch seems unambigous to me.
What is fascinating is that if this ends up in a protracted legal battle it might bring about the demise of the electoral college system. The foreign press is already wondering why we are still arguing when Gore won the popular vote (albeit by a slim margin).
Another way to reform the presidential election process which is much simpler than scraping the electoral college is to change the state laws that govern how the electors in the electoral college vote. Most people don't know this, but each state determines how their electors vote - most states implement winner take all (New Hampshire is an exception I believe). The states have the power to change it so that the candidates divvy up the electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote in that state or in any other way they wish.
I am glad to know that instead of fixing basic bugs that affect standards compliance the team was instead working on an HTML editor that will get little use.
These people just don't get it, release a rock solid browser first, if the email client or HTML editor ships later, who cares? Who will remember?
This would, of course, create a self-referential belief system for geeks, wherein few new notions would enter the collective conciousness, and the group view of the world would be skewed by, er, the group view of the world.
DHCP is used as a convenience for the ISP, allowing them to reallocate IP addresses dynamically, but they tend to re-allocate infrequenty. My cable modem has given me the same IP address for over 6 months.
Even if used to re-assign IP addresses on a regular basis DHCP is not a security feature. You box only needs to be up long enough to be cracked. The fact that your box might not be at the same IP address tommorrow makes it a slightly less attractive target, but I am sure a smart cracker could install something that would allow them to find you at whatever IP address you happen to have.
Re the quacking duck. If someone didn't do this on purpose, they should have, it is a brilliant example of (most likely unintentional) viral marketting.
I have gotten this in about ten different emails, and myself have been responsible for infecting at least 5 others with this virulent little meme.
How long until we see some copy-cats?
Imagine the following:
(with that old fogey 'we make money the old fashioned way' voice)
'Welcome to Salomen-Smith Barney'
'Press 1 to hear your account balance'
'Press 2 to access stock quotes
'Press 3 to hear me fart the national anthem'
'Press 4 to trade stocks'
'Press 5 to hang up'
. They really couldn't care, plus the bank's systems are probably implemented by some coder who just got into the business for the money, doesn't probalby know much either, and he/they jsut don't want to bother.
As opposed to a coder who got into the business to promote every platform under the sun at the expense of her client's wishes?
I imagine that cellular chemical reactions will still take place even very close to freezing, so you could not last indefinitely at this temperature, even with this drug to help revive you.
I think the article mentionned that without this drug people have been successfully revived after an hour with no ill effects. I think beyond an hour they tend not to even try. How long could you last with this drug? Someone needs to try this with a large mammal, a dog perhaps, and see how long he can hang out at just this side of 0degC and still be revived with this drug.
The problem is how do you define a version? At the operating system level when the OS gets a request to write some physical block, does it count that one request as a new version, a string of requests as a new version? It really cannot know about 'versions' at the application level without some changes to the APIs, and that won't happen.
What you could do is create manual 'check points' or snapshots. By default all disk writes go to an 'undo' log. The 'real' data is elsewhere on disk. When a file is requested the OS first looks for writes to that sector in the undo log and returns that data if present.
At any point you could blow away the undo log and go back to the previous state. You could also 'commit' the undo log, writing it to the 'real' data area of the disk and starting with a fresh undo log.
One could also imagine keeping more than one undo log. But this might get space prohibitive.
AFAIK, vmware supports something like this with its virtual disks, you can chose to rollback all disk transactions when you shut down the virtual machine.
Just because there aren't any valid studies doesn't mean that something isn't true. A point which 'cynics' often conveniently ignore.
And you happen to ignore the fact that there are studies which show the exact opposite - no effect whatsoever.
As for anecdotal evidence, it carries zero scientific weight. Certainly it would be looked at to inform or iniate scientific research, but 'My uncle bob lives down by dem der power lines and has a heap o trouble with his lumbago' is not going to prove any coorelation between power lines and lumbago. At best if a bunch of people made this claim someone might iniate some research to establish a clear statistical correlation between proximity to the power lines and the supposed resulting disease.
This has already been done in the case of cancer and power lines and no statistically significant coorelation has been found.
The claim that microwaves can't do anything because they are not ionizing radiation is at best doubtful. How do we know that there isn't a chemical substance in the brain which resonates at the frequencies of these transmitters and which will selectively absorb energy from them causing a breakdown of the chemical from selective heating?
Sure there are many many different possible ways in which EM could effect the body. I doubt very much EM is going to be found breaking up molecules. Most molecular bounds absorb and emit in the infrared range if I remember correctly from Chemistry. Again the RF bands used in cell phones are far too low energy.
By your theory exposure to a heat lamp would be much much more risky than using a cell phone.
But you can postulate possible scenarios until you are blue in the face, if there is no statistical link between the supposed disease causing agent and the disease, your scenario is not worth the paper it's printed on.
They've been noticing more instances of brain cancer in the area where a cell phone's antena is next to the head, often times in the general shape of the antena.
Who is "they"? What study are you refering to? As far as I know, no statistically valid study has ever shown a link between cell phone usage and tumors. There has been plenty of anecdotal evidence - but hell, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the 'Psychic Friends Network' can really tell you if you significant other is cheating on you.
There is absolutely no conclusive evidence and not even an convincing proposed mechanism by which such low energy EM radiation could possibly harm living tissue, other than by warming it up a bit.
Radio waves are far far below the energies required to ionize atoms and thus cause harm to DNA, so I can't possibly see how even the worst phone could cause cancer or any other disease for that matter.
If you can postulate a mechanism by which a slight warming (I think a few tenths of a degree C) of the brain can cause cancer or disease let me know...
I use 21stcentury's Internet and Cable service. Not sure what you mean by their service being spotty, I think you mean their service areas, as they are still rolling it out.
These guys strung a fiber backbone along the North/South Elevated railway tracks in Chicago and then out into the neighborhoods from there. I talked to the techs when they were installing the service and apparently the fiber runs to access boxes in the neighborhood. Unfortunately though this is all shared bandwidth, so I get about T1 speeds at best, though the service is nominally 10mbps.
Now I don't want to move for fear that the building I move to won't have 21stcentury
Slashdot Mirror
I love my 'desktop replacement' laptop to death. Never mind the fact that it scorches my lap on long plane flights and cuts of circulation at my knees - I just can't go without the power of a full desktop. My one niggling complaint has always been 3D graphics performance, and it is good to see that a high end card manufacturer is finally taking this market segment seriously.
I don't game much, but it is a shame that you can buy the highest end laptop, pack it with a 30 Gig hard drive, 15 inch screen, 512 MB of RAM, and you still can't play Quake II at reasonable frame rates.
-josh
You obviously haven't used a laptop manufactured in the last 4 years. Things have gotten much better. My nice 15 inch TFT display has zero blur.
And yes, I would love to be able to play some of the latest 3D games on my laptop. As it is right now, Quake (the original) is just playable on my crappy, supposedly 3D excelerated ATI Rage 'mobile' chipset.
-josh
I know that no such negative index materials exists for optical wavelengths, but if it did, would this improve the resolution of lithography techniques used to etch chips? Or are the limitations in lithography due to diffraction effects with the chip masks?
-josh
We don't have a resolution independent operating systems/applications. Thus, all that will happen on these displays is everything on your windows or linux desktop will just look smaller, not crisper and sharper.
I might be wrong though, I think OS X with it's display PDF engine could actually make very good use of these displays.
-josh
What the hell are you talking about? They had to count all the popular votes in the individual states didn't they? And then they conveyed those results to the meeting of the electoral college. You could have just as easily decided the race on the raw votes themselves, the electoral college had to have them available.
Not that I want to get rid of the electoral college, but the idea that there was some technological limitation back then is sheer idiocy.
About the only remnant of technological limitations of that error that is still left is the gap in time between the actual vote and the meeting of the electoral college. It took some time to count all the votes and convey them to a central location. Nowadays we probably don't need this delay.
-josh
Yes, something seems fishy in Palm Beach, but without actually holding another election I don't see how we could possibly sort out what the people in that county intended.
I saw the ballot in question, it did not seem all that confusing to me, but what do I know. A big arrow next to the ballot bunch seems unambigous to me.
What is fascinating is that if this ends up in a protracted legal battle it might bring about the demise of the electoral college system. The foreign press is already wondering why we are still arguing when Gore won the popular vote (albeit by a slim margin).
Another way to reform the presidential election process which is much simpler than scraping the electoral college is to change the state laws that govern how the electors in the electoral college vote. Most people don't know this, but each state determines how their electors vote - most states implement winner take all (New Hampshire is an exception I believe). The states have the power to change it so that the candidates divvy up the electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote in that state or in any other way they wish.
-josh
I am glad to know that instead of fixing basic bugs that affect standards compliance the team was instead working on an HTML editor that will get little use.
These people just don't get it, release a rock solid browser first, if the email client or HTML editor ships later, who cares? Who will remember?
-josh
Hmmm.... sounds what slashdot has become.
-josh
Cute :)
The length of the curve formed by your semi-circles always equals pi for any subdivision.
You might as well just define pi = 2.
-josh
Definitely this a very good application of medicine.
-josh
I thought I was a geek...
Anyone doing this with fellow broadband subscribers on the same loop? Should be about as fast.
-josh
What, pray tell, is a 'LAN party'?
-josh
DHCP is used as a convenience for the ISP, allowing them to reallocate IP addresses dynamically, but they tend to re-allocate infrequenty. My cable modem has given me the same IP address for over 6 months.
Even if used to re-assign IP addresses on a regular basis DHCP is not a security feature. You box only needs to be up long enough to be cracked. The fact that your box might not be at the same IP address tommorrow makes it a slightly less attractive target, but I am sure a smart cracker could install something that would allow them to find you at whatever IP address you happen to have.
-josh
Re the quacking duck. If someone didn't do this on purpose, they should have, it is a brilliant example of (most likely unintentional) viral marketting.
I have gotten this in about ten different emails, and myself have been responsible for infecting at least 5 others with this virulent little meme.
How long until we see some copy-cats?
Imagine the following:
(with that old fogey 'we make money the old fashioned way' voice)
'Welcome to Salomen-Smith Barney'
'Press 1 to hear your account balance'
'Press 2 to access stock quotes
'Press 3 to hear me fart the national anthem'
'Press 4 to trade stocks'
'Press 5 to hang up'
-josh
As opposed to a coder who got into the business to promote every platform under the sun at the expense of her client's wishes?
-josh
Ok, test on pigs, better?
-josh
I imagine that cellular chemical reactions will still take place even very close to freezing, so you could not last indefinitely at this temperature, even with this drug to help revive you.
I think the article mentionned that without this drug people have been successfully revived after an hour with no ill effects. I think beyond an hour they tend not to even try. How long could you last with this drug? Someone needs to try this with a large mammal, a dog perhaps, and see how long he can hang out at just this side of 0degC and still be revived with this drug.
-josh
There is a port of Nedit to cygwin. Runs great with Exceed (win32 X Server) under windows.
Granted, this is not the easiest way to run it, and for my money ultraedit is all a win32 user could ever want or need in a text editor.
Wish the ulraedit guy would work on a Linux/Unix port.
-josh
The problem is how do you define a version? At the operating system level when the OS gets a request to write some physical block, does it count that one request as a new version, a string of requests as a new version? It really cannot know about 'versions' at the application level without some changes to the APIs, and that won't happen.
What you could do is create manual 'check points' or snapshots. By default all disk writes go to an 'undo' log. The 'real' data is elsewhere on disk. When a file is requested the OS first looks for writes to that sector in the undo log and returns that data if present.
At any point you could blow away the undo log and go back to the previous state. You could also 'commit' the undo log, writing it to the 'real' data area of the disk and starting with a fresh undo log.
One could also imagine keeping more than one undo log. But this might get space prohibitive.
AFAIK, vmware supports something like this with its virtual disks, you can chose to rollback all disk transactions when you shut down the virtual machine.
-josh
And you happen to ignore the fact that there are studies which show the exact opposite - no effect whatsoever.
As for anecdotal evidence, it carries zero scientific weight. Certainly it would be looked at to inform or iniate scientific research, but 'My uncle bob lives down by dem der power lines and has a heap o trouble with his lumbago' is not going to prove any coorelation between power lines and lumbago. At best if a bunch of people made this claim someone might iniate some research to establish a clear statistical correlation between proximity to the power lines and the supposed resulting disease.
This has already been done in the case of cancer and power lines and no statistically significant coorelation has been found.
The claim that microwaves can't do anything because they are not ionizing radiation is at best doubtful. How do we know that there isn't a chemical substance in the brain which resonates at the frequencies of these transmitters and which will selectively absorb energy from them causing a breakdown of the chemical from selective heating?
Sure there are many many different possible ways in which EM could effect the body. I doubt very much EM is going to be found breaking up molecules. Most molecular bounds absorb and emit in the infrared range if I remember correctly from Chemistry. Again the RF bands used in cell phones are far too low energy.
By your theory exposure to a heat lamp would be much much more risky than using a cell phone.
But you can postulate possible scenarios until you are blue in the face, if there is no statistical link between the supposed disease causing agent and the disease, your scenario is not worth the paper it's printed on.
-josh
And so far observations has shown no link between EM radiation and cancer.
Believing in effects which are not observable, now that's religion.
-josh
Do a controlled study, get one of those earphone/mics - try that for twenty minutes - if you are still getting headaches its not the attenae's fault.
-josh
They've been noticing more instances of brain cancer in the area where a cell phone's antena is next to the head, often times in the general shape of the antena.
Who is "they"? What study are you refering to? As far as I know, no statistically valid study has ever shown a link between cell phone usage and tumors. There has been plenty of anecdotal evidence - but hell, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the 'Psychic Friends Network' can really tell you if you significant other is cheating on you.
-josh
There is absolutely no conclusive evidence and not even an convincing proposed mechanism by which such low energy EM radiation could possibly harm living tissue, other than by warming it up a bit.
Radio waves are far far below the energies required to ionize atoms and thus cause harm to DNA, so I can't possibly see how even the worst phone could cause cancer or any other disease for that matter.
If you can postulate a mechanism by which a slight warming (I think a few tenths of a degree C) of the brain can cause cancer or disease let me know...
-josh
I use 21stcentury's Internet and Cable service. Not sure what you mean by their service being spotty, I think you mean their service areas, as they are still rolling it out.
These guys strung a fiber backbone along the North/South Elevated railway tracks in Chicago and then out into the neighborhoods from there. I talked to the techs when they were installing the service and apparently the fiber runs to access boxes in the neighborhood. Unfortunately though this is all shared bandwidth, so I get about T1 speeds at best, though the service is nominally 10mbps.
Now I don't want to move for fear that the building I move to won't have 21stcentury
-josh