Not too long ago, didn't AMD essentially throw in the towel to Intel by saying they weren't going to compete for the fastest processor anymore?
What the hell? I've never heard anything like that, and a quick search didn't locate anything either.
I remember a few months before the first Opteron came out that AMD said they weren't going to continue to be the "low cost" chipmaker, and of course the x86-64 processors are notably more expensive than their 32-bit processors were.
4. The solution to 3. is sandboxing: Creating a closed environment with non-shared ressources. Problem: You can't use it for much, because it is per definitionem not able to communicate to the outside.
No. Actually, it's just much more restricted in HOW it can communicate with the outside.
Oh, except if these guys had spent half an hour ringing round a few climatolagists they would have found out that the most likely outcome isn't a smooth, predictable change in temperature but wild, chaotic swings in climate caused by a million climate systems and feedback loops (not limited to the gulfstream) going totally out of whack.
Yes, and the best climatoagists can't be sure whether it's going to rain tommorow or not, so I'm not sure I would take their predictions over several years as a sure thing...
The one and only thing we know for sure about global warming is that, right now, things are getting hotter and mostly drier, so that would certainly be the situation that would be best to plan for.
IBM insisted there was no way to flash/unlock or otherwise repair the problem.
IBM are lying assholes. Anybody, with $20 worth of equipment can wire up a simple adapter for a thinkpad and read the EEPROM, where the password is stored in the clear. I was one of the people who helped figure out the requisite information that made it's way onto this site: http://www.ja.axxs.net/unlock/
What can I say? Read it and weep. I wouldn't be surprised if IBM was selling new systems to customers, then turning around and clearing the passwords on the old ones and reselling them as "refurbished".
Seems like a poor design, but certainly nobody ever saw her locked documents.
That's ridiculous. First of all, the power-on password has nothing to do with the hard drive password, except that most notebooks typically tie them together. IBM could easily have the hard drive passworded, but make the notebook perfectly usable once the drive has been swapped.
Additionally, it's trivially easy to read files off of a passworded hard drive. The password is stored in an EEPROM on the board, so all you have to do is buy an nearly identical drive and swap the circuit board to read all the documents.
If they were smart, they would store the password in sector 0 on the platters. Then, swaping the board wouldn't work. Also, running a strong magnet over the hard drive would erase the password as it erased the files, keeping the files safe, but also allowing you to erase the whole drive, and use it again without knowing the password.
This is really a great upgrade. I'm sure a great many people are very tired of one section (eg. Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc) and would like to turn 99% of it off, but don't want to miss it when there's something legitimately BIG that falls under that section (eg. Apple Switching to Intel).
The one complaint I have is the preferences section where this stuff is adjusted/selected.
First of all, the icons are terribly non-descriptive. I had absolutely no idea what they meant upon looking at them. I would STRONGLY suggest redesigned icons.
Second, the linked FAQ entry about that is fine, but it would be nice if you revered the order of the bullet-points. I generally assume a top-down list will address items from left-to-right. I had to flip back and forth between those two pages a few times to figure it out.
If you can just fix that, I'd be perfectly happy with it.
does that mean porn is also the cause of all spyware and viruses on the net? Because I've heard most spyware and viruses come from "low reputation websites".
Certainly some spyware and viruses come from "free" porn sites, but most spyware comes piggybacked upon freeware programs downloaded from small websites.
People want a free DVD player, or download manager, or CD ripper, or some arcade game, and when they install it, they get a couple spyware programs silently installed along with it.
Look at most "freeware" sites like download.com and they usually even have a section or category now, showing whether it includes spyware or not.
Granted, it allows production and sales to a degree that wasn't fathomable for porn before, however, the mass filesharing means that one well off user can make off with tons of files from the site and host it else where.
The porn industry loves the internet, for just about the same reasons the RIAA/MPAA hates it.
First off, the rampant filesharing doesn't mean a loss of revenue, it means increased public acceptance of porn, and a larger audience that might spend money on it some day. It also makes it less and less likely that the government, or public interest groups will be able to successfully stop or even restrict porn in the future, as they have done in the past.
Porn is to the MPAA what independant bands are to the RIAA...
I think HD will make porn look worse, not better...low-def analog tv has a way of hiding the wrinkles, so to speak.
People are acting like HDTV is x-ray vision...
The make-up doesn't have to change, the lighting doesn't have to change, the actors don't have to change. The only thing you really need to do to keep HDTV the same as standard TV is: zoom-out by about 2X.
Tada! Now people are made-up of just as many pixels as before, it just looks like more of a panoramic shot, rather than a close-up and zoomed-in shot.
Not surprising at all. It's a mainstay of the processor industry. Since the start of the PC, processor voltage has been decreasing every generation. Generally, the only difference between AMD's "desktop" CPU and their "mobile" CPUs is the stringency of the testing. A mobile CPU that can't handle extreme underclocking/overclocking gets labled as a desktop chip.
or that voltage of the CPU on a modern motherboard is SOFTWARE Selectable.
Everything you can set in the BIOS is software selectable. I can understand the concern, but all CPUs have built-in safety circuitry that should allow them to automatically shut-down and prevent damage.
Minus any sound it is producing. Which turnes into heat. Minus any vibrations which might be conducted elsewhere. Again, heat
It does turn into heat, but not necessarily inside the room or building you are in, making it less effecient.
If you can hear your computers outside at all, then some (very small) ammount of heat is escaping through vibrations.
Minus any radio-frequency energy that it might output. rf is light, and photons from previous post metions it already.
I was trying to make a (very specific) distinction. Light will generally be contained by the building, unless you have an open window nearby. Most RF energy, however, is perfectly capable of going right through most walls. Also, most RF can hit something like the case of a computer, and be conducted to ground, rather than turning into heat in the immediate area.
(minus the energy of any photons emitted by light-producing components)
Minus any sound it is producing. Minus any vibrations which might be conducted elsewhere. Minus any radio-frequency energy that it might output.
Of course, that's still a very small ammount of energy in total.
Electric heating is usually a bit more expensive than other energy sources, but your vcr on standby at 5 watts is no worse than running a small electric space heater at 5 watts.
Not entirely true. An electric heater will be a purely resistive load, giving you a nearly perfect power factor of 1.0, whereas your VCR probably has a cheap power supply with a power factor as low as 0.4. So the VCR is causing a lot more power loss, even though it's the same 5watts. Residential customers generally don't get billed for their overall power factor, but companies certainly do.
Gates wants to control the living room. Jobs will control the living room.
Really now? I didn't know Disney owned Tivo, Dishnet, DirecTV, all the cable companies, etc. I think you're vastly over-stating things.
There's a huge difference between what this will give Jobs, and what Bill Gates wants. Bill doesn't want to have some small say in the content of a small percentage of the video entertainment people watch... Bill wants his software as the front-end to EVERYTHING everyone watches.
Sounds smart, right? Except if everyone does this, suddenly there's an increased demand for energy in the morning (thus raising the price for morning energy use) and a decreased demand for energy in the afternoon.
Still, no. It's going to be easier to get things cooler when it's cooler outside, so you are using less power over-all.
Just look at the end of the article for proof. It says even without peak/off-peak metering, you'll still save money (a much smaller ammount, though).
Besides that, you are assuming that air conditioning is the only reason for peak electrical demand, which really, really isn't the case. Anything you can do to move some power consumption into the hours when most people are sleeping, is a good thing.
That's not to say that I'm endorsing this at all, I think ground-source heatpumps are a far superior option.
Wouldn't it make more sense to have a hull that's already 'fully repaired'? IE: Whatever that stuff is they're using to harden it all up again, just make it out of that to begin with.
No, in fact that would make no sense.
No material currently known can withstand being hit by a solid object hurtling through space at maybe 50% the speed of light.
Currently, only possibility seems to be repairing the damage after it has been done. This happens to be a solution for self-repair, rather than requiring someone to go out there and manually fix it.
Isn't the Earth itself just a big living spaceship?
Uhh, no. The solar system is the big living spaceship. The Earth wouldn't be "living" at all if seperated from The Sun for a while.
If we want to travel beyond our solar system, we ought to build something like Earth, only smaller.
Much smaller, and its gravity wouldn't be enough to prevent the atmosphere from escaping into space.
At it's current size, it's of course far too unweildy to be a very useful space-ship...
The "giant rock" spaceship isn't an entirely bad idea though. Evidence would suggest, however, that stronger, lighter materials will be practical long before extreme propulsion methods are. So light-and-strong should win-out.
or that we don't apply glue to cuts, but either way, they're wrong.
The latter. I agree it was poorly worded, but not wrong.
Your link is off-topic, which is why you are wrong. They said "when we nick ourselves" not "when we rip off limbs" or "rip large chunks of skin away".
It is referring to the fact that your body develops scabs, and heals itself, as opposed to just remaining damaged until somebody comes along and fixes your cuts in the case of machines (or anemics).
No one ever ends a rant on education with IANATeacher. Why is that?
Probably because nobody is saying anything they would have to be a teacher to understand...
Or perhaps it's because being a teacher is something any well-educated individual could do if they so chose, unlike Lawyers or Doctors that need 4 years of very difficult courses to become competent.
Does anyone ever say "IANA Oplympic Athlete" or "IANA Grave Digger" ??? They're just the extremes of things everyone has done, and not hard to understand.
Considering that this is/. I wouldn't be at all surprised if a large percentage of these people have been teachers at one point or another. If not teachers, perhaps some variation of class assistant, tutor, etc.
Kids today are entirely helpless without computers
Kids are, and have always been, helpless. That's why we call them kids.
The educational system in the US was headed down the tubes since before computers came into the picture, so they're just another scapegoat. You could blame videotape too... or the fall of communism... or global warming... or the decline of pirates... or the flying spaghetti monster... or penny arcade...
(and judging by the quality of English on Slashdot they're helpess with them as well.)
Well that's just crap. I have impecible grammar and spelling when I'm writting something important. On/. however, I just type it as fast as I can think it up, and hardly give a damn if every other word is spelled incorrectly. No preview for me, thanks, I have better things to do with my life than make sure my HTML is flawless.
This precooling... Wont it be uncomfortable for the people inside since you have constant temperature changes?
Didn't bother to read the article, huh? 70 degrees in the morning isn't bad at all. Here in the desert, it isn't unusual for nighttime tempuratures to be around 50F (10C), while daytime tempuratures are near 120F (49C). So, precooling probably wouldn't help here.
Why not develop some kind of air chamber that could be installed in a building that is insulated so air could be cooled off-peak but then released on-demand? Or maybe a pressurized tank?
Because air doesn't hold it's tempurature very well (specific heat and all that), what with convection and not being very dense and all.
That's why more advanced systems cool WATER at night (not air) and then draw from that cool water/ice during the hot part of the day.
However, this all seems like a moot point to me, since ground-source heat pumps have been around for decades, and are still more effecient than this could possibly be (even without a peak/off-peak rate structure).
Apple's already been down the road of choosing the apparently spiffier processor from a vendor that wasn't able to deliver in quantity.
It's pure, unmitigated bullshit to claim AMD can't deliver processors in quantity. They have not experienced shortages, are expanding their facilities, and have contracted with a 3rd party to produce cores in the even that demand exceeds capacity.
Intel, OTOH, is the one who has recently been having shortages, and was unable to produce enough chips to fill current demand, let alone the additional demands of Apple.
It was replaced by an AIWA who made far superior portable cassette players than the walkmans.
Funny that AIWA is owned by Sony.
The good part of that seems to be that Sony has given AIWA great battery-life, but the downside being that AIWA products have long been intentional feature-limited by Sony, to prevent cannibalizing their higher-end, higher-profit products.
I'd say that the converse is true. Sony still has very appealing designs but the build quality and component reliability suck.
No, I'd really say BOTH SUCK. Take, for example, my newest Sony Discman, the D-NF610.
Back when Discmans had 3sec Skip Protection (ESP), you could hold it securely with one hand, and still operate volume, play, pause, next/back and volume with that same hand. The buttons were just in the right place that your fingers would be right over them. They were also different-sized so you could easily tell the difference in the dark. Plus, each special button (shuffle, repeat, etc) only had one function, so you instinctively knew if you were in shuffle mode or not, and could just hit the button to toggle that.
Now with the D-NF610, the play/next/back/stop buttons are on the opposite side as the volume buttons. Since play/next/back/stop is integrated in one nearly-round button, you have NO IDEA what button your finger is on, unless you have a lot of light. You wouldn't believe how many times I've hit stop instead of next in the dark, and wouldn't believe how incredibly frustrating that is when you do it over and over.
It's also nearly impossible to hold it with the same hands you use to operate the next/back/play/stop and volume buttons. They're just at such terrible angles that it doesn't work.
Then there's the "mode" buttons which toggle between about 10 different modes (shuffle to single to repeat to shuffle repeat to single repeat to...). It's positively impossible to figure out what mode you're in in less than a minute, and equally impossible to put it into the right mode without seeing the LCD.
Then there's the scroll-wheel which works in the exact opposite order as on my Sony MiniDisc player. Besides that, it can only show about the first 4 letters of a song title, and only two songs at a time, so it's nearly impossible to see if you're actually scrolling up or down.
And this is the PREMIUM discman available at the time. The lower-end model (which I bought first and traded-in) was the D-EJ360, which was complete crap. With the extremely hard-to-push buttons on the very side of the unit, it was VERY difficult to operate, even using BOTH HANDS.
What's so terrible, is that this has been a very obvious trend. Not only did Sony's discman line get less and less ergonomic as I've thoroughly illustrated, but their far more expensive MiniDisc players and recorders have gone in exactly the same direction. Controls that were easy to reach (with on hand) on the side of the unit are moved to the top of the unit where it's much more difficult. Then the controls are split and put on opposing sides of the unit. Then the buttons lose all distintive properties, and can barely be distinguished at all. Over the past 10 years, it's gone from great ergonomics in nearly all of their products, to the worst ergonomics anywhere, at any price.
If you ask me, the ONLY thing Sony has going for them at this point is battery-life, and that's not worth all that much.
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell? I've never heard anything like that, and a quick search didn't locate anything either.
I remember a few months before the first Opteron came out that AMD said they weren't going to continue to be the "low cost" chipmaker, and of course the x86-64 processors are notably more expensive than their 32-bit processors were.
I certainly do, and nothing I said should imply otherwise.
Yes, the "secure one" (stored in an EEPROM) is exactly what we are talking about here.
No. Actually, it's just much more restricted in HOW it can communicate with the outside.
Yes, and the best climatoagists can't be sure whether it's going to rain tommorow or not, so I'm not sure I would take their predictions over several years as a sure thing...
The one and only thing we know for sure about global warming is that, right now, things are getting hotter and mostly drier, so that would certainly be the situation that would be best to plan for.
IBM are lying assholes. Anybody, with $20 worth of equipment can wire up a simple adapter for a thinkpad and read the EEPROM, where the password is stored in the clear. I was one of the people who helped figure out the requisite information that made it's way onto this site: http://www.ja.axxs.net/unlock/
What can I say? Read it and weep. I wouldn't be surprised if IBM was selling new systems to customers, then turning around and clearing the passwords on the old ones and reselling them as "refurbished".
That's ridiculous. First of all, the power-on password has nothing to do with the hard drive password, except that most notebooks typically tie them together. IBM could easily have the hard drive passworded, but make the notebook perfectly usable once the drive has been swapped.
Additionally, it's trivially easy to read files off of a passworded hard drive. The password is stored in an EEPROM on the board, so all you have to do is buy an nearly identical drive and swap the circuit board to read all the documents.
If they were smart, they would store the password in sector 0 on the platters. Then, swaping the board wouldn't work. Also, running a strong magnet over the hard drive would erase the password as it erased the files, keeping the files safe, but also allowing you to erase the whole drive, and use it again without knowing the password.
This is really a great upgrade. I'm sure a great many people are very tired of one section (eg. Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc) and would like to turn 99% of it off, but don't want to miss it when there's something legitimately BIG that falls under that section (eg. Apple Switching to Intel).
The one complaint I have is the preferences section where this stuff is adjusted/selected.
First of all, the icons are terribly non-descriptive. I had absolutely no idea what they meant upon looking at them. I would STRONGLY suggest redesigned icons.
Second, the linked FAQ entry about that is fine, but it would be nice if you revered the order of the bullet-points. I generally assume a top-down list will address items from left-to-right. I had to flip back and forth between those two pages a few times to figure it out.
If you can just fix that, I'd be perfectly happy with it.
Certainly some spyware and viruses come from "free" porn sites, but most spyware comes piggybacked upon freeware programs downloaded from small websites.
People want a free DVD player, or download manager, or CD ripper, or some arcade game, and when they install it, they get a couple spyware programs silently installed along with it.
Look at most "freeware" sites like download.com and they usually even have a section or category now, showing whether it includes spyware or not.
The porn industry loves the internet, for just about the same reasons the RIAA/MPAA hates it.
First off, the rampant filesharing doesn't mean a loss of revenue, it means increased public acceptance of porn, and a larger audience that might spend money on it some day. It also makes it less and less likely that the government, or public interest groups will be able to successfully stop or even restrict porn in the future, as they have done in the past.
Porn is to the MPAA what independant bands are to the RIAA...
People are acting like HDTV is x-ray vision...
The make-up doesn't have to change, the lighting doesn't have to change, the actors don't have to change. The only thing you really need to do to keep HDTV the same as standard TV is: zoom-out by about 2X.
Tada! Now people are made-up of just as many pixels as before, it just looks like more of a panoramic shot, rather than a close-up and zoomed-in shot.
Not surprising at all. It's a mainstay of the processor industry. Since the start of the PC, processor voltage has been decreasing every generation. Generally, the only difference between AMD's "desktop" CPU and their "mobile" CPUs is the stringency of the testing. A mobile CPU that can't handle extreme underclocking/overclocking gets labled as a desktop chip.
Everything you can set in the BIOS is software selectable. I can understand the concern, but all CPUs have built-in safety circuitry that should allow them to automatically shut-down and prevent damage.
It does turn into heat, but not necessarily inside the room or building you are in, making it less effecient.
If you can hear your computers outside at all, then some (very small) ammount of heat is escaping through vibrations.
I was trying to make a (very specific) distinction. Light will generally be contained by the building, unless you have an open window nearby. Most RF energy, however, is perfectly capable of going right through most walls. Also, most RF can hit something like the case of a computer, and be conducted to ground, rather than turning into heat in the immediate area.
It is a distinction worth making.
Minus any sound it is producing. Minus any vibrations which might be conducted elsewhere. Minus any radio-frequency energy that it might output.
Of course, that's still a very small ammount of energy in total.
Not entirely true. An electric heater will be a purely resistive load, giving you a nearly perfect power factor of 1.0, whereas your VCR probably has a cheap power supply with a power factor as low as 0.4. So the VCR is causing a lot more power loss, even though it's the same 5watts. Residential customers generally don't get billed for their overall power factor, but companies certainly do.
Unfortunately, that is by-far the most expensive and least effecient way to generate heat.
Better to spend $5 more on natural gas (or whatever you use) rather than $50 for that electricity.
Really now? I didn't know Disney owned Tivo, Dishnet, DirecTV, all the cable companies, etc. I think you're vastly over-stating things.
There's a huge difference between what this will give Jobs, and what Bill Gates wants. Bill doesn't want to have some small say in the content of a small percentage of the video entertainment people watch... Bill wants his software as the front-end to EVERYTHING everyone watches.
Still, no. It's going to be easier to get things cooler when it's cooler outside, so you are using less power over-all.
Just look at the end of the article for proof. It says even without peak/off-peak metering, you'll still save money (a much smaller ammount, though).
Besides that, you are assuming that air conditioning is the only reason for peak electrical demand, which really, really isn't the case. Anything you can do to move some power consumption into the hours when most people are sleeping, is a good thing.
That's not to say that I'm endorsing this at all, I think ground-source heatpumps are a far superior option.
No, in fact that would make no sense.
No material currently known can withstand being hit by a solid object hurtling through space at maybe 50% the speed of light.
Currently, only possibility seems to be repairing the damage after it has been done. This happens to be a solution for self-repair, rather than requiring someone to go out there and manually fix it.
Uhh, no. The solar system is the big living spaceship. The Earth wouldn't be "living" at all if seperated from The Sun for a while.
Much smaller, and its gravity wouldn't be enough to prevent the atmosphere from escaping into space.
At it's current size, it's of course far too unweildy to be a very useful space-ship...
The "giant rock" spaceship isn't an entirely bad idea though. Evidence would suggest, however, that stronger, lighter materials will be practical long before extreme propulsion methods are. So light-and-strong should win-out.
The latter. I agree it was poorly worded, but not wrong.
Your link is off-topic, which is why you are wrong. They said "when we nick ourselves" not "when we rip off limbs" or "rip large chunks of skin away".
It is referring to the fact that your body develops scabs, and heals itself, as opposed to just remaining damaged until somebody comes along and fixes your cuts in the case of machines (or anemics).
Probably because nobody is saying anything they would have to be a teacher to understand...
Or perhaps it's because being a teacher is something any well-educated individual could do if they so chose, unlike Lawyers or Doctors that need 4 years of very difficult courses to become competent.
Does anyone ever say "IANA Oplympic Athlete" or "IANA Grave Digger" ??? They're just the extremes of things everyone has done, and not hard to understand.
Considering that this is
Kids are, and have always been, helpless. That's why we call them kids.
The educational system in the US was headed down the tubes since before computers came into the picture, so they're just another scapegoat. You could blame videotape too... or the fall of communism... or global warming... or the decline of pirates... or the flying spaghetti monster... or penny arcade...
Well that's just crap. I have impecible grammar and spelling when I'm writting something important. On
Didn't bother to read the article, huh? 70 degrees in the morning isn't bad at all. Here in the desert, it isn't unusual for nighttime tempuratures to be around 50F (10C), while daytime tempuratures are near 120F (49C). So, precooling probably wouldn't help here.
Because air doesn't hold it's tempurature very well (specific heat and all that), what with convection and not being very dense and all.
That's why more advanced systems cool WATER at night (not air) and then draw from that cool water/ice during the hot part of the day.
However, this all seems like a moot point to me, since ground-source heat pumps have been around for decades, and are still more effecient than this could possibly be (even without a peak/off-peak rate structure).
Funny that AIWA is owned by Sony.
The good part of that seems to be that Sony has given AIWA great battery-life, but the downside being that AIWA products have long been intentional feature-limited by Sony, to prevent cannibalizing their higher-end, higher-profit products.
No, I'd really say BOTH SUCK. Take, for example, my newest Sony Discman, the D-NF610.
Back when Discmans had 3sec Skip Protection (ESP), you could hold it securely with one hand, and still operate volume, play, pause, next/back and volume with that same hand. The buttons were just in the right place that your fingers would be right over them. They were also different-sized so you could easily tell the difference in the dark. Plus, each special button (shuffle, repeat, etc) only had one function, so you instinctively knew if you were in shuffle mode or not, and could just hit the button to toggle that.
Now with the D-NF610, the play/next/back/stop buttons are on the opposite side as the volume buttons. Since play/next/back/stop is integrated in one nearly-round button, you have NO IDEA what button your finger is on, unless you have a lot of light. You wouldn't believe how many times I've hit stop instead of next in the dark, and wouldn't believe how incredibly frustrating that is when you do it over and over.
It's also nearly impossible to hold it with the same hands you use to operate the next/back/play/stop and volume buttons. They're just at such terrible angles that it doesn't work.
Then there's the "mode" buttons which toggle between about 10 different modes (shuffle to single to repeat to shuffle repeat to single repeat to
Then there's the scroll-wheel which works in the exact opposite order as on my Sony MiniDisc player. Besides that, it can only show about the first 4 letters of a song title, and only two songs at a time, so it's nearly impossible to see if you're actually scrolling up or down.
And this is the PREMIUM discman available at the time. The lower-end model (which I bought first and traded-in) was the D-EJ360, which was complete crap. With the extremely hard-to-push buttons on the very side of the unit, it was VERY difficult to operate, even using BOTH HANDS.
What's so terrible, is that this has been a very obvious trend. Not only did Sony's discman line get less and less ergonomic as I've thoroughly illustrated, but their far more expensive MiniDisc players and recorders have gone in exactly the same direction. Controls that were easy to reach (with on hand) on the side of the unit are moved to the top of the unit where it's much more difficult. Then the controls are split and put on opposing sides of the unit. Then the buttons lose all distintive properties, and can barely be distinguished at all. Over the past 10 years, it's gone from great ergonomics in nearly all of their products, to the worst ergonomics anywhere, at any price.
If you ask me, the ONLY thing Sony has going for them at this point is battery-life, and that's not worth all that much.