Font smoothing on my Powerbook looks like shit sometimes. I have an old skool G3/333 Lombard, 14" diagonal inches of screen real estate but only 1024x768 pixels of resolution. Font smoothing is hit or miss on it. Larger font sizes usually don't look so bad but the super small font say...slashdot uses to tell you how many rabid squirrel ninjas made your page for you is unreadable with smoothing on. Scrolling is also bitch slow under Moz and OSX. Under 9 it is damn smooth and I don't need to worry about not being able to read text. Of course some fonts have actually sliced through my retinas. I just can't win.
First context menus have only been around for a little while, first appearing in OS8 IIRC. Secondly the design of context menus in Mac apps have usually been in line with MacOS command keys. Since Mac developers have been using one button mice for a million years they know how to design their context menus.
Most of the important Finder commands are on the left side of the keyboard, your left hand is typically on the keyboard while you're using your mouse. Apps that have commands dealing with mouse operations keep their hot keys on the left side of the keyboard so they are easily accessible when holding the shift, option(alt) or Apple keys with your thumb. When context menus were introduced the modifier keys were made to be the CTRL and Option keys which made using context menus in programs like Photoshop fairly quick for old Mac users.
Because the keyboard shortcuts are well in line with modifier keys extra mouse buttons would be quite a shift in many users workflows. People who come from backgrounds using X or Windows like to pick up multi-button mice and are greeted with context menus. Old skool Mac users don't need extra mouse buttons in most cases. They're comfortable using the keyboard/mouse combination because context menus have been designed to well compliment keyboard shortcuts. I think some hardcore Photoshop and Illustrator users would much rather just have a programmable keypad than a full fledged keyboard. I've seen some guys with some crazy deterity on the keyboard. I make it a rule to never play video games against such people.
A satellite compared to the total volume of space it is moving through is insignifigantly small. Even something we might consider large on Earth is a teeny tiny spec in space. The chance a satellite in a geosynchronus orbit is going to impact a piece of debris is very very small. The biggest dangers don't lie in the same orbit as the satellite anyhow, the biggest dangers come from debris with radical orbits. Anything with a stable geosynchronus orbit is going to be moving at the same velocity so your bird isn't going to rear end the bird ahead of it like a car would rear end someone on the freeway. It is the bolt with the 5000m/s escape trajectory that happens to be intersecting the satellite's flight path that is the danger. A net or some other shielding does little good unless you suround the satellite with it and then your satellite is a very expensive paper floating rock.
Using ReiserFS 3.6 you can have files sized up to 1 exabyte which is somewhere over a quintillion bytes (1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes I do believe). However on 32-bit systems the size of a single file is limited to 17.6TB or so. Older versions of ReiserFS only support file sizes of about 4GB. Practically however the entire file system is limited to 17.6TB so it is doubtful you're going to be able to have a single exabyte sized file. A single 17.6TB file isn't too shabby however.
Launching an interplanetary mission from the ISS isn't going to happen. The ISS has a steep incline to its orbit (51.6 degrees to the equator) which makes it useless as a launch platform for planetary missions. Originally Freedom which became the ISS was meant to only have a inclination of 28 degrees which is a good orbit for the STS to be able to service the station but also not a terrible orbit to launch planetary missions from.
The only reason the damn thing has such an inclined orbit is so it can be services by Soyuz rockets from Baikonur as well as the STS. Unfortunately the STS has a rough time making it into the ISS' orbit because it doesn't get a easterly boost from the Earth's rotation because it is launching itself so steeply northward to hit the ISS. This steep incline also prevents you from launching planetary missions because you don't get a boost from your orbit around the Earth and any boost you get from the Earth's solar orbit is reduced by the fact you've got to spend a shitload of energy getting into a Hohmann transfer orbit.
One of the reasons Skylab was scrapped was its orbit was not very easy for the STS (then in develpement to be an adjuct system to a space station) to hit. Freedom was planned as a replacement for Skylab and eventually as an orbital assembly facility for future Mars missions. The original design for Freedom made it a great match for the whole STS project because it fit the capabilites of the STS well. The HST has a 28 degree inclined orbit specifically so the STS can support it effectively. The ISS is a complete failure as an orbital assembly facility of any sort, especially for planetary missions.
If you want to mine heavy metals it is not fucking economical to lift them off the surface of a planet and send them millions of miles to another planet. What sort of Sid Meyer fantasy do you live in? If you want to mine metals you find something with really low gravity but an apriciable percentage of heavy elements like a decent sized asteroid, hook up a mass driver to it and put it into orbit around the Earth. Once it is there you can set up an automated facility to mine it and either build stuff in orbit for launching from orbit or send it down to Earth to be used in industry.
Launching anything off the surface of a planet is expensive unless you've got some ultra efficient means to do so. Even then it is not going to be terribly economical because you'll still putting a huge percentage of your effort into making fuel to send material up into space.
The Simputer is ridiculous. Its designed ostensibly to provide computers to people who can't afford computers and help people learn and communicate. There is not a snowball chance in hell it can effectively meet either of these tasks.
If they think they have a reasonable price for some third world country to buy for schools they are putting themselves on. A pricetag of a "mere" $216 in US dollars is beaucoup cash for some family in the middle of nowhere on a dirt farm. They'd be lucky to sell just one per small village let alone one per person. People would be better off buying anti-biotics or flu shots rather than one of these things.
They get cool points among Linux zealots for even mentioning GNU or Linux but in reality having Linux on it means very little. It's like having Linux on a TiVo, nothing the user interacts with is Linux-y so to the user they aren't using something called Linux. You don't turn on a TiVo and watch a Twilight Zone marathon rerun and think "holy peepants this uses Linux and it is so cool because of that", well sane sociologically adjusted people dont. The Simputer isn't going to win over a bunch of third world Open Source zealots or some stupid shit like that. The software running on the Simputer will be all they really know or care about with regards to the system.
Instead of a stupid idea like the Simputer they should have stuck with something like a Dreamcast. The late edition DCs had a bunch of components packed onto a handful of chips and Sega even had a DC on a chip worked out ready for fabrication. They intended to stick DC guts into DVD players like the Matsushita/Panasonic DVD capable GameCube. They would be much more flexible than some handheld toy that is itching to be dropped or otherwise lost. Plus it could hook up to a television which a place likely to have the ability to plop down $50 for a DC based console ought to have at least one television in town. A number of people could use the thing at once which makes it much more cost effective.
Educational material is easy to ship off to people, a CD or DVD can store instructional material in the form of animated or live action movies for people who can't read. A student's entire lifetime curricula could be stored on a single CD. A class of students could use a single CD-ROM for several years worth of education. Textbooks from elementary to a high school level (or whatever your local equivilent is) could be stored at HTML or PDF files or some other format friendly to your particular language. As for languages, a single disc could contain the same information in multiple formats so a bunch of people speaking different languages or dialects only need to buy a single disc. Using CD-ROMs rather than semiconductor memory cards is scores cheaper and people could afford to not only buy more software but multiple copies in case one ends up ruined.
The goal of the Simputer would be more easily met by a much simpler and cheaper machine. Its creators might have the right mindset but they don't seem to have thought through the implications of the hardware they developed. Even if there was some requirement for a portable device people would be better off putting tough rubber cases on a bunch of Palm m105s or Handspring Visors and handing them out to people.
Unfortunately I have to be in the "big whoop" crowd. This is not a terribly impressive feat. I can run MOL on my Powerbook. Terra Soft briQ systems could do the same thing. MOL doesn't require a ROM image in order to run MacOS 8.6 or later because the New World systems don't use the ROM to store the ToolBox anymore, it is a file in the system folder. All the ROM does anymore is tell the system where to find certain devices and stuff. MOL takes care of that as a virtual machine.
MOL as a virtual machine is impressive in its own right. I use it a bit on my Powerbook when I'm booted into Linux because there isn't always an analog for a Mac program I want to use. It isn't always terribly fast but I can get stuff done with it if I'm a little patient. However an Amiga PPC board running MOL under YDL isn't exactly making me cream in my pants. It is a PPC board that runs Linux well enough and then runs MOL which abstracts MacOS from the hardware. If someone had managed to get MacOS running on the PPC board natively by hacking up their own ROM replacement I'd ooh and ahh. Suggesting the ability to run MacOS in a virtual machine is somehow a competitor to Apple's hold on the desktop PPC market is a bit of an immature statement.
If OSX ever works directly on the hardware my ears will perk up. However it will only take a small tweak in the Cocoa framework to check for a Mac ROM. Lack of a ROM will keep the whole Cocoa environment from even working leaving you with the Darwin kernel working but none of the rest of what makes OSX unique not work.
I live in another California city where the utilities are municipally owned. Our bills may not be low by any means but even at their peak of the rolling blackouts and overhyped crisis we didn't have it as bad as SCE and PG customers. SCE customers' baseline rate (which SCE is not very up front with) is double what you or I are paying for our base rate. Both PG and SCE have done their best to screw not only their customers but the entire state over with their underhanded power trading practices.
I don't why I said no new power plants have been built, I meant only nuclear plants. There's been something like 13 built in the state this year which amounts to something around 2,000MW of capacity. The lack of nuclear plants was my point, end to end they are much cleaner than coal or oil plants and have a much better track record. New reactor and plant designs have shrunk the size and cost down quite a bit as well as increased the safety margins. The NIMBY folks and Sierra Club terrorists are screwing all of us over blocking these plants.
I say Sac is isolated from the state's problems not to suggest you don't have your share of bums or crime. The legistlation and state government in general is just far removed from anywhere their descisions directly affect. Absurd logging restrictions kill small towns in the northern half of the state while mismanagement of utilities has caused loads of problems in the southern half. Its sad watching this power crap happen because it is causing businesses to avoid staying or moving here.
I agree California legistlativly is fucking itself, the problem is us voters and residents are getting the short end of the stick. Even caring about what the state assembly does has little effect on anything, they are the most easily swayed group of bearucrats and politicians I've ever heard of. They agree with the loudest voice. Unfortunately for the rest of us the loudest voices are usually union loving tree huggers. Deregulation didn't work here specifically because we were getting screwed, SCE and PG were selling power to Oregon and Nevada at the high export price and then importing it back in for the low import price. They were making buckets of money off the state's deregulation. They were passing the high import price off to their customers and pocketing the difference. Then they begged the state for a bail-out cash infusion.
I think the conslusion to this rather informative diddy is spot on, Sony is out to create a network of experienced PS2 programmers. Sony gets oodles of noodles for this move. The PS2 is probably the most popular video game system ever marketed to date, it makes Sony bunches of money. The only problem with the money making aspect is they need a constant stream of games for a system to be popular. Programmers are needed and plenty are interested but as the article says, experience with the platform is not as abundant as people willing to program for it. Sony distributes a system that allows people to poke around the platform and make their own amateur games in their spare time and get 2D6 bonus to their PS2 Programming skill.
Linux is the obvious choice for Sony to pick, not because Linux rox0rz d00dz but because it is a familiar environment for many developers and requires no licensing fee to distribute. The last thing Sony wants is their HDD/eth0 expansion system to cost them more money than it has the potential to make back for them. Paying a $20 or $50 royalty on some commercial OS (pick one, any one) per unit sold will end up costing them in terms of margins. Drives and ethernet adapters that only go down in price as time goes by and shipment volumes increase lead to high margins and eventually profits.
I've thought for a while Sony wants to migrate their computer division from being high priced IBM clone systems to being something proprietary and different. In many of their markets this is an easy sell because there is a shitload of brand loyalty. It might not be terribly difficult in the US either. Sony might pretty easily merge their VAIO desktop computers with future PlayStations. A wide availability of games and media designed specifically for Sony systems could make them a powerful player in the PC market. They already produce a ton of software for their VAIO systems, they could port a good deal of that to whatever OS they might use besides Windows on their new VAIO Stations.
This of course goes back to engendering developer support for the platform. By seeding PS2/3 platform developers early (now) they can set themselves up with a relatively large developer base, independant and otherwise, as long as they can keep their interest. Sony looks like they're intending to paint several markets with one broad brush. Derivitive systems based off the PlayStation architecture; from the dedicated console at $100 for playing games to the $2000 audio video workstation which happens to share 70% of the same parts or interfaces. Maybe Sony is looking to make a new Microsoft-free PC market. Can you forgive them for killing Napster? Tough choice.
Some people bash California as being a bunch of ignorant liberal fucks. This is only partially true. There's a magical land in this very state where the water runs pure and the electricity comes cheap and the migrant workers, well, they are neither heard nor seen. This magical land is called Sacremento. From this shining beacon of cockjockery shines the shiny light of dumbfuckery. See up in Sac Town where all the tough choices are made they're insulated from the rest of the state's problems.
Using diesel electric locomotive engines to boost a local power station has cool geek factor to it but it is a stupid and short term fix for a very serious long term problem. The descision to deregulate power is a failed experiment yet our plucky leadership in Sac Town don't see it that way, they're rather spend billions dollars bailing out these failed and failing utility companies and their shit management. It is sad watching this all happen. It doesn't matter how you vote locally either, the State Assembly doesn't do anything to curb the jackassery coming from the Governor's office.
What the state needs is regulated and less externally dependant electrical power. The state has been growing temendously in the past 20 years but hasn't seen the construction of a single new power plant, nuclear or otherwise. The population in the bay area has boomed as well as the populations of San Diego and Orange counties. A lot of people are moving into Riverside and San Bernadino counties out towards the deserts where they run their air conditioner 24/7 and water their lawns in the middle of the day because they don't know how to live in a desert. These sort of people are a huge strain on the power grid in Southern California and makes the boards of SoCal Edision cream their pants. Running a couple trains down there during the summer to give some extra go juice to people does not solve the problem. Nevada has its own burgeoning population in and around Las Vegas they've got to provide power and water for, they aren't going to able to export power to California for too much longer.
The state needs more eletrical plants. There are plenty of clean-ish power plant designs in common use around the world that the state could use for a basis for new plants. It is getting ridiculous that these retarded stopgap measures are being suggested and implimented when the real solution is so clear cut. There's plenty of plants that can be upgraded to use cleaner technology while at the same time increasing their output. It'd be a much better use than billion dollar bonds being spent to cover the cost of crooked deregulated utility companies.
Cool aspects: instead of needing a physical object to make a hologram you can now use a transparent LCD screen. You can also make your hologram any size you want because instead of a single exposed but if film the hologram is made from little 2"x2" tiles.
Misleading aspects of the story: This is not Star Wars technology come to life. Neither Princess Leia nor Queen Amidala will be hovering in mid-air begging someone for help. There's no motion involved in these holograms unless successive tiles have an animated image. The only way you'll get animation of any sort is the same way you get it out of the baseball cards printed with the plastic ribbing. Each viewing angle gives you a different instance frame. These images do not hover in mid-air either, their focal point is behind the surface of the view window.
The sort of volumetric projection in Star Wars is not possible without some super fancy technology to bend light rays once they hit a certain point in space. You need something for the photons to hit and change direction in, like glass. The people at Dimensional Media (www.3dmedia.com) have a system like this. They take a bunch of 2D slices and project them at high speed onto a piece of glass. Each of the 20 or so slices they use is a slightly different perspective on the 3D image. These are run through a beam splitter and projected onto a set of mirrors that projects onto a glass plate. The image seems to float behind the glass plate and as you move from side to side you're seeing one of the slightly different perspective slices. It is cool technology that might be getting somewhere because DMA has won a couple awards for their technology and got a research grant from somebody in January. I don't work for them or anything I've just run across lots of articles about them in the past 6 years and looked into their technology when I began to research building a home made volumetric projection system. While Zebra Imaging has a cool tech for static holograms I'm much more interested in realtime volumetric projection. My interest in holography lasted about as long as the power supply for my HeNe laser.
Gamma-rays have the anooying tendancy to beak atoms into siny little bits of energy. An intense gamma-ray burst will start transmutting elements into other elements. Even UV radiation has enough energy to ionize molecules. Besides the fact anything producing intense gamma and X ray bursts would tear the shit out of a planet anywhere near it. You need to be less worried about life surviving in one of these environments and just wonder how a planet might survive in these environments. Your planet being whisked off into space from the supernova that caused a gamma-ray burst is going to be a much more difficult problem to deal with than the gamma-rays themselves.
A lot of things have happened to Venus that have taken it on a far different evolutionary route than the Earth. Venus has a much more stable atmosphere then the Earth does and the cloud layer extends far higher than Earth's. Where our highest clouds form at around 16km Venus has a cloud layer almost 70km up. That 10km cloud layer is followed by a second layer is from about 56-52km and a third from 52-48km. Below the third and lowest cloud layer is a haze layer that extends down to about 33km. Below that the air is very clear. The atmosphere is also very uniform which steams from Venus' super slow rotation. It takes Venus 243 days to complete a single rotation, where Earth takes 24 hours. Since large weather systems aren't broken up by the high rotation rate they form into one large and very stable weather pattern.
It takes Venus longer to rotate about its axis than it does to orbit around the Sun. The Sun is held over a single area of the sky for a very long period of time. The only way Venus has to move heat around is by atmospheric convection. The dark side of the planet is bleeding off all the heat absorbed by the Sun as well as heat radiating off the ground.
It is easy to explain the net energy loss, it has retained much of its formation heat so it likely has a molten metallic core just like the Earth's and has been heated for several billion years by a Sun that is 30% closer. All of that solar radiation has been stored up in the atmosphere. Its internal heat as well as the built up heat from the Sun are going to make it a very nice energy emitter.
The atmosphere rotates quickly around the planet because of convection. The atmosphere of Venus would be much easier to model than the Earth's. The warm air of the equator is rising in a single massive column from the subsolar point (the place on the planet where the Sun is directly overhead) and falls back down at the poles and towards the night side of the planet. These convection currents cause super high speed jet streams which rotate in the same retrograde manner as the rest of the planet.
IBM is one of the primary development interests in MRAM technologies so your idea might have some credibility to it. It also seems like IBM's reseach is netting results that are a bit more fruitful than other groups researching MRAM. They've partnered with Infineon to bring MRAM stuff to market. We might end up seeing IBM MagStar NVRAM drives in the next couple years with decent data density.
I've gone from being completely indifferent about internet radio to being a huge fan of it in the span of about a year. I have not listened to broadcast music in a couple years now. Just about everything I listened to for a long time came out of my friends and I's CD pools. We'd make compilation albums for each other or just snag songs we particularly enjoyed from albums in each others collections. Broadcast radio has always been shit but recently it has been so bad I simply can't stand to listen to it. I began to go to dozens of concerts from LA to San Diego. Last year I think I tallied 35 concerts in about 9 months. Was I going to see bigass arena shows being hyped by radio stations? Only in a very small handful of cases like the Yahoo Outloud Weezer tour, when I went to the LA and SD shows. Most shows I was going to were indie rock shows and small local shows. Anyhow, I was going to these shows SPECIFICALLY because the bands weren't being played on the radio. People I find incredibly talented like Ozma and The Get Up Kids will be lucky to ever have a single played on a station like KROQ. Going to all the shows I did and picking up albums from bands I liked, I not only put money in their pockets but got introduced to more bands than I can easily recall. These are some badass bands in my opinion but they're not going to be found on the radio.
Then I started getting into more electronic stuff but was never really one for the electronic scene. I can't stand seeing a bunch of cornbread white guys revving their rice burners in parking lots. It isn't racism or anything, it just looks stupid seeing some pimply faced kid with his Fred Durst hat with a "Powered by VTEC" sticker on his read window. The drugged out raver wannabes aren't exactly up on my list of social affiliations either. Rather than tell them they shouldn't be who they want to be I just avoid the scene entirely. So that leaves me with nowhere to get music other than Napster or something. It is nice to see if I want to spend money on an album but most songs are recorded poorly at too low of a bit rate for my taste. Then I fire up iTunes on my Powerbook and browse to the electronic stations. Holy shit! Music that doesn't sound like ass when I plug it into my sound system and doesn't have an inane DJ being wiggity whack on the air. Fuck yes. Not only do I get a good stream of music but I also have a display of what song I'm listening to in case I find myself interested in the artist. Then there is the choice available, if one station starts in with something I don't like I can double click another one with a different stream. Internet radio has become the radio I've been wanting for years. In an hour block I get to hear about an hour's worth of music, not 10 minutes of decent music, 30 minutes of slop I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy and 20 minutes of inane advertisements for shit I don't buy and DJs I'd rather have shot into the Sun.
Now it is facing some stiff opposition in the form the RIAA and their demonic minions. I don't want to see internet radio go down because it is the only inexpensive way I've got left to get introduced to some good music. Sharing with my friends is nice but there isn't enough variety to really find off the wall shit I end up really digging. P2P radio seems like an obvious solution because of the P2P buzzword culture surging as of late. The model however runs into serious problems. The RIAA doesn't have to go after a single individual or group of individuals to take out P2P radio like they were able to with various sharing programs. All they have to do is make some deals with cable and DSL providers. Lets say there was a popular P2P radio in my town, all it would take is a deal or lawsuit against Charter and he would be toasted. We'd all end up with our bandwidth curtailed more than it already is and P2P radio would end up specifically forbidden in the AUP.
Switch to DSL you say? I fucking wish. PacBell couldn't find their dicks if they weren't at the end of their arms. Evne if DSL was viable for some people P2P regulating would still happen on the DSL system. Even with a competitive DSL provider like Covad or someone, they're still renting a pipe from PacBell and the bandwidth usage will make them be regulatory asses too.
P2P pirate radio is a noble idea I suppose, sticking it to the jackasses that are the RIAA but it is a short term solution to a long term problem. The RIAA has far too many lawyers on their side and enough backing to cow the major cable and DSL providers into line. An idea would be to get together with a bunch of schools around the country. Many schools have broadcast radio stations that don't have to stand up to RIAA scrutiny or lawsuits. They could house and host internet radio stations with the same function as broadcast stations, providing students with hands on experience either behind a mic or in an equipment room, but have much better standing in any internet radio lawsuits. Anything with P2P in the name is going to get turbofucked rather quickly by the RIAA no matter if they can track people down or not. It's sad but true. So who wants to build an island 13 miles off the Montery penninsula with an OC-192 hooked up to it? We could be Sealand Redux.
Wow man you really told me. I wish I was paid by Microsoft to talk to idiots like you, slashdot is full of them. I'd be a billionaire by now.
Do you know why you've had less hassle with Linux than with Windows? I would wager that you don't. See that lack of difficulty comes from people putting effort into packaging a Linux distribution. This is EXACTLY what Lycoris is doing and exactly why you shouldn't fucking bitch about them charging for a per seat license. The distribution packagers are dealing wiht the hassle of putting Linux together. The hassle is not passed onto you for most distributions. Some people do this work for free but others would like a kickback for their time and affort, if you are too fucking cheap to pay them, use something else and don't bitch about it.
Businesses to not build Linux from scratch, they do not have time nor should they waste the resources to build their IT infrastructure from the ground up. This is where Lycoris, Caldera, and Red Hat come in. They can pre-build a solution that works for most businesses and stick it on a CD.
I don't know where you got your Microsoft ramblings from. I was talking about Linux distributions doing the hard part for you and you should shut the fuck up with your bitching about them including GPL software you gave them a right to include. I didn't mention Windows nor Microsoft anywhere in the comment. I don't see why you even bring it up. Why don't you try finding an old copy 4.x era copy of Red Hat and try installing it on your computer. See if that is as hassle free as anything available today, Linux or Windows.
Take heart my gangley Gnu gobblin cohorts, all is not lost yet! Long ago in the days of mysticism and lore the gods of Economics and Love set down the laws of Economics and Love. Try as they might with their merciless bands of code wielding deperados a whooping and a hollering through town they cannot defeat the laws od Economics and Love. You see my chummy chum chummers not even within the Gates of Redmond lies enough power to overcome these laws. They may be strong now by coercing the likes of the Kingdom of Intel and the AMD Empire into their fold but their power even now begins to wane. The infighting between these two great houses is fierce and the outcome far too unpredictable. Competing standards there are, differences in vision they have.
Hence Microsoft begins along the path of commoditization. They can profit from their allies' struggle. All that is required from them is to design software that removes leverage from under their allies' armies! Given the dark empire's grasp of the market of souls this is an easy task. They can make their software run on both of their allies' competing hardware. No matter who wins out in the end, if indeed anyone does, the dark empire still stands even more powerful than before. They can effectively commoditize all computer hardware.
Their masters in the land of Redmond see oppertunity here besides the obvious. They seek new allies who are stronger because they pay people to produce while consolidating their power by controlling distribution of the produced work. Since Microsoft can effectively commoditize the hardware of their allies they can force software vendors to use their branded environments in order to be assured they will work on Intel and AMD hardware. Microsoft adds magic talismans to software requiring the use of their evvvvil DRM technology from their new Media Mogul Lord allies and BLAMO the world is under their control.
I did say fear not did I not? Strength comes from within so fear not! While the dark empire collects taxes from its vanquished foes of the OEM Republic they conspire against their dark oppressors. The law of Demand which is an entire volume of the law of Economics comes into play. Demand drives the OEM Republic, they don't make money off their competitor's sales like their evil massssters do. Therefore it is in their best interest to serve the masses to which they cater. If the masses reject control by Microsoft and the Media Mogul Lords there will be a revolt in the populace. Microsoft will cease to be in demand.
The OEM Republic being driven by the demand of Microsoft will abandon all things DRM and tell the Media Mogul Lords to stick things in dark places. They will because their coffers will be emboldened by their customers money. Rallying to the call of the smaller OEMs larger neutral nations will become involved in the battle. Nations by the name of IBM and hPaq will enter the forray alongside competitors like Dell and Gateway. Rallying the troops will be Apple ripping and mixing and burning flinging CD-Rs left and right into the eyes of Media Minions. Backing the OEM Republics will be the Norwegian nations of Nokia and Ericsson. Cell phones are driven by as much consumer demand as PCs and if they can't market a MP3/OGG/DVD/TV/CB cell phone lightsaber their customers will move on.
Fighting the small battles will be the Linux fanboys with their boxen and the FreeBSDites with their kernels that never quit. Aiding the OEM Republics in their battles by providing them with a Microsoft alternative they don't have to develope with their own cash. It will be a good day to compile.The Law of Economics will see the warriors of light through the day. DRM will die because the masses want their MP3/OGG/DVD/TV cell phone lightsabers and want to continue to burn CDs so they don't have to buy them because they are cheap. Fritz Hollings will stub his toe and Jack Valenti will shrink even more. Compile friends compile!
Take heart my geek pals, Microsoft must bow to demand and the cheapassness of human nature must never be discounted. Palladium will fall and then geek love will commence.
That argument is as ridiculous as the one I originally responded to. I don't care that you chose to give away your software, you did't make it public domain, you stuck it under a viral self perpetuating license in the case of the GPL. What happens with the GPL is that by using it you are licensing it from the person who originally wrote it. You have a non-exclusive license to do as you please with said code. While you have right to do as you please with public domain code the GPL defines an important difference. The licensee (you or I or Lycoris) is granted the right of redistribution in any form we see fit. However, we can charge money for our rerelease of the code as long as we provide the source at no extra charge beyond the media cost of distribution.
If you were a philantropist and your point had any thing meaty to back it up, your code would be public domain and as free as sunshine. Since it isn't the licensees of your code can do as they damn well please with it in accordance to the GPL. If you wanted to better humanity or some shit you wouldn't have used a license on the code that contains a redistribution clause.
The point you make is doubly ineffective because it totally misses the idea I was trying to convey. Lycoris is adding value to an otherwise easily attainable product. Anyone can download KDE and the Linux kernel and whatever other shit they want. The catch is except for a couple large packages like KDE or GNOME few if any Linux applications can be obtained from a single source with any modicum of support. Lycoris is putting their ass in a sling in order to provide users with a value added experience, packaging and supporting otherwise unpackaged and unsupported software. They are doing the same thing every other damn distribution is doing and has done for years and years. The only difference is they are requiring businesses to pay for every system they get use of the OS out of. There is NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS. They are not extorting grandmothers and impregnating virgin teenagers with devil spawn. They are removing the burden of support from their customer companies and charging a pretty fair price at that. You see not everyone has oodles of free time to code up hippiesoft for the good of mankind. Due to this lack of free time and expertise companies who will be Lycoris, SuSE, and Red Hat's customers are willing to fork over money in return for work because they appriciate that people's time and effort is worth something.
The adage is, Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing. Linux is not free to me because my time is not worth nothing. A computer is not a means to an end despite you thinking it is. It is a tool to get shit done, if I can get no shit done with a computer it is useless. A Linux kernel does me no good without a way to command it and programs that I can command to do something. Thus I need a shell be it text or graphical and some compiled and linked programs ready for me to run. There's no magic Linux fairy magically flipping bits on my hard drive when I'm asleep which means I have to do that myself. Since my time is valuable I'd gladly pay someone a small fee to make that bit flipping a whole lot easier so I can get on to things I find more important. If they can amortize the cost of that service over a bunch of customers, the happier I am because the less money I pay.
Oh boohoo, someone is asking you to pay for something. The whining never fucking stops. What about the fact that Lycoris wants to charge money to its corporate customers is so wrong? They're spending their capital packaging a working and decent desktop Linux system, their customers aren't doing the work, therefore the Lycoris folks should be for the work they are freeing the company from doing. Being an economy of scale, Lycoris doesn't need to charge a large fee (which they don't) for their work done. Their customers get a good desktop Linux distribution and the Lycoris folks feed their families and have a place to live. Everybody wins.
I really don't understand this communist manifesto inspired meme among Linux geeks that Linux ought to be free and a person's time is worth nothing. Lycoris is doing work, for that work they ought to get something. A pat on the back and kudos for doing a good job and fighting the good fight or some hippie bullshit is not going to pay their bills. These guys are working a 9-5 on the product, they don't have day jobs and then at night spend endless hours coding like the Debian crowd (which is no bash in the slightest on the Debian crowd). Besides they're only going with per seat licensing, if they wanted to be badasses they would have gone the Microsoft route and used per user licenses. Per seat licensing is not so bad. If you have 5 computers and 10 users you only pay for the 5 computer seats. Find that pricing scheme with Windows XP Server, go ahead and try. It isn't going to happen. Windows XP Server pricing is based on the number of users with site licenses allowing an near infinite number of installs for a pretty hefty price.
It's Linux anyhow, if Lycoris turned into a bunch of insane badasses it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to drop them like a bad habit and switch to another distribution with a better licensing scheme. It is sad this whole process hasn't already worked itself through the fiber of your being preventing you from making this comment. It is also sort of sad that someone had modded you up for making this comment. I feel bad for the people programming shit you use that likely never get so much as a kudos from your hippie meme banner waving ass.
Al Qaeda has hired script kiddies to bring down rain down computer destruction. I don't understand why the fuck things not designed to be hooked up to the internet are being hooked up to it.
I ask in all seriousness, why is a railway switch hooked up to the public internet? What good reason is there for eletronic valve controls for fresh or sewage water to be hooked up to the internet? Does a passing shit or dead goldfish need to check its e-mail? I can understand having some sort of network linking a bunch of sensors and whatnot, that makes sense. I do not understand however why that network needs to be on the internet or even publicly accessible. In some cases, like the guy in Australia, the method of intrusion was not the internet or a network of any sorts, just an unsecured method of entry. Having singular systems with unsecured entry point is understandable and pretty forgivable. Not everyone expects some jackass to try to scre with something. A network of systems with unsecured entry is ridiculous.
I remember reading a billion and a half philez back in the day on how to fuck with systems through Tymnet and other networks similar to it. I still don't see why the SCADA system controlling the Hoover damn needs a modem in it, if it does need that modem in it what is up with the lack of intense and thurough handshaking and password challenges?
The internet is an obvious target regardless for you bozos who question militant religious fanatics and their target aquisition. Why attack the WTC? It was a symbol, same with the White House or Pentagon. They're both symbols. The internet is another symbol of Western culture. Who is the internet big with? A hint: it is not a bunch of predominatly Muslim countries but the word does start with W and end with est. It would be yet another symbol to attack if you're in the mindset that the West is the source of all of your ills.
If you're worried about phone lines going down and needing network access get some geeky friend together, get yourselves Ham licenses and form yourself an emergency packet radio network. If you've got laptops and battery powered equipment you'll be fine even if your power goes from al Qaeda script kiddie attack. While it sounds sort of ufnny to some it is a good idea, hams in an area suffering from power outages or down phone systems can be a big help keeping the flow of information flowing. Nothing helps in an emergency situation like the right information getting to the right people at the right time.
Using Q3A and SS to benchmark a brand new card are important because it gives the card a context that can be compared to other cards. If it gets 45fps in UT 2003 or 20fps in Doom 3 what the hell does that mean? Is it a shit card or are the graphics ultra untense? Now say I run a benchmark using Q3A, the card get 300fps. Damn that is much faster than my _insert card here_. Benchmarking is all about reducing the number of variables as close to one as you possibly can. Benchmarks are not about running the latest and greatest games to give you a consumer report on them. It would also be ridiculous to "benchmark" a card using 16x FSAA when no other card could do that. You would have nothing to compare it to removing all context from the test. You could classify performance as "good" or "bad" but not compare it directly to some other card.
A couple years ago I bought an ATX case that came with a fan like you're talking about. I can't remember if the case is an Antec case or if I'm just imagining things. The fan's duct hooks up to the rectengular grill on the back panel of the case. The duct leads to a larger 5v fan that sucks air in from the rear and pushes it right around the processor. The box right now has my K6-2 in there and it running so I'm not terribly interested in shutting it off.
The K6 has a fan and a small heat sink that I've never turned off with the duct on so I don't know how well it would cool the heat sink. If you figure out it moves about the same volume of air at the same speed as the smaller sink fan you might want to give the idea a shot or see if you can find a fan like mine. One problem I envision is the slower fan not getting enough air over hot spots on the heat sink to keep it cool enough when the processor is running full tilt doing something. I'm also not to sure processors like the P4 or AthlonXP (the Palomino core at least) without a fan right on the heat sink is a good idea. The heat sink fans speed up as the heat increases where a regular 5v case fan is not going to.
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Font smoothing on my Powerbook looks like shit sometimes. I have an old skool G3/333 Lombard, 14" diagonal inches of screen real estate but only 1024x768 pixels of resolution. Font smoothing is hit or miss on it. Larger font sizes usually don't look so bad but the super small font say...slashdot uses to tell you how many rabid squirrel ninjas made your page for you is unreadable with smoothing on. Scrolling is also bitch slow under Moz and OSX. Under 9 it is damn smooth and I don't need to worry about not being able to read text. Of course some fonts have actually sliced through my retinas. I just can't win.
Back in the day porn used to be a whopping 16 colours! We don't need 256 colours, 16.7 million is just overkill.
First context menus have only been around for a little while, first appearing in OS8 IIRC. Secondly the design of context menus in Mac apps have usually been in line with MacOS command keys. Since Mac developers have been using one button mice for a million years they know how to design their context menus.
Most of the important Finder commands are on the left side of the keyboard, your left hand is typically on the keyboard while you're using your mouse. Apps that have commands dealing with mouse operations keep their hot keys on the left side of the keyboard so they are easily accessible when holding the shift, option(alt) or Apple keys with your thumb. When context menus were introduced the modifier keys were made to be the CTRL and Option keys which made using context menus in programs like Photoshop fairly quick for old Mac users.
Because the keyboard shortcuts are well in line with modifier keys extra mouse buttons would be quite a shift in many users workflows. People who come from backgrounds using X or Windows like to pick up multi-button mice and are greeted with context menus. Old skool Mac users don't need extra mouse buttons in most cases. They're comfortable using the keyboard/mouse combination because context menus have been designed to well compliment keyboard shortcuts. I think some hardcore Photoshop and Illustrator users would much rather just have a programmable keypad than a full fledged keyboard. I've seen some guys with some crazy deterity on the keyboard. I make it a rule to never play video games against such people.
A satellite compared to the total volume of space it is moving through is insignifigantly small. Even something we might consider large on Earth is a teeny tiny spec in space. The chance a satellite in a geosynchronus orbit is going to impact a piece of debris is very very small. The biggest dangers don't lie in the same orbit as the satellite anyhow, the biggest dangers come from debris with radical orbits. Anything with a stable geosynchronus orbit is going to be moving at the same velocity so your bird isn't going to rear end the bird ahead of it like a car would rear end someone on the freeway. It is the bolt with the 5000m/s escape trajectory that happens to be intersecting the satellite's flight path that is the danger. A net or some other shielding does little good unless you suround the satellite with it and then your satellite is a very expensive paper floating rock.
Using ReiserFS 3.6 you can have files sized up to 1 exabyte which is somewhere over a quintillion bytes (1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes I do believe). However on 32-bit systems the size of a single file is limited to 17.6TB or so. Older versions of ReiserFS only support file sizes of about 4GB. Practically however the entire file system is limited to 17.6TB so it is doubtful you're going to be able to have a single exabyte sized file. A single 17.6TB file isn't too shabby however.
Launching an interplanetary mission from the ISS isn't going to happen. The ISS has a steep incline to its orbit (51.6 degrees to the equator) which makes it useless as a launch platform for planetary missions. Originally Freedom which became the ISS was meant to only have a inclination of 28 degrees which is a good orbit for the STS to be able to service the station but also not a terrible orbit to launch planetary missions from.
The only reason the damn thing has such an inclined orbit is so it can be services by Soyuz rockets from Baikonur as well as the STS. Unfortunately the STS has a rough time making it into the ISS' orbit because it doesn't get a easterly boost from the Earth's rotation because it is launching itself so steeply northward to hit the ISS. This steep incline also prevents you from launching planetary missions because you don't get a boost from your orbit around the Earth and any boost you get from the Earth's solar orbit is reduced by the fact you've got to spend a shitload of energy getting into a Hohmann transfer orbit.
One of the reasons Skylab was scrapped was its orbit was not very easy for the STS (then in develpement to be an adjuct system to a space station) to hit. Freedom was planned as a replacement for Skylab and eventually as an orbital assembly facility for future Mars missions. The original design for Freedom made it a great match for the whole STS project because it fit the capabilites of the STS well. The HST has a 28 degree inclined orbit specifically so the STS can support it effectively. The ISS is a complete failure as an orbital assembly facility of any sort, especially for planetary missions.
If you want to mine heavy metals it is not fucking economical to lift them off the surface of a planet and send them millions of miles to another planet. What sort of Sid Meyer fantasy do you live in? If you want to mine metals you find something with really low gravity but an apriciable percentage of heavy elements like a decent sized asteroid, hook up a mass driver to it and put it into orbit around the Earth. Once it is there you can set up an automated facility to mine it and either build stuff in orbit for launching from orbit or send it down to Earth to be used in industry.
Launching anything off the surface of a planet is expensive unless you've got some ultra efficient means to do so. Even then it is not going to be terribly economical because you'll still putting a huge percentage of your effort into making fuel to send material up into space.
The Simputer is ridiculous. Its designed ostensibly to provide computers to people who can't afford computers and help people learn and communicate. There is not a snowball chance in hell it can effectively meet either of these tasks.
If they think they have a reasonable price for some third world country to buy for schools they are putting themselves on. A pricetag of a "mere" $216 in US dollars is beaucoup cash for some family in the middle of nowhere on a dirt farm. They'd be lucky to sell just one per small village let alone one per person. People would be better off buying anti-biotics or flu shots rather than one of these things.
They get cool points among Linux zealots for even mentioning GNU or Linux but in reality having Linux on it means very little. It's like having Linux on a TiVo, nothing the user interacts with is Linux-y so to the user they aren't using something called Linux. You don't turn on a TiVo and watch a Twilight Zone marathon rerun and think "holy peepants this uses Linux and it is so cool because of that", well sane sociologically adjusted people dont. The Simputer isn't going to win over a bunch of third world Open Source zealots or some stupid shit like that. The software running on the Simputer will be all they really know or care about with regards to the system.
Instead of a stupid idea like the Simputer they should have stuck with something like a Dreamcast. The late edition DCs had a bunch of components packed onto a handful of chips and Sega even had a DC on a chip worked out ready for fabrication. They intended to stick DC guts into DVD players like the Matsushita/Panasonic DVD capable GameCube. They would be much more flexible than some handheld toy that is itching to be dropped or otherwise lost. Plus it could hook up to a television which a place likely to have the ability to plop down $50 for a DC based console ought to have at least one television in town. A number of people could use the thing at once which makes it much more cost effective.
Educational material is easy to ship off to people, a CD or DVD can store instructional material in the form of animated or live action movies for people who can't read. A student's entire lifetime curricula could be stored on a single CD. A class of students could use a single CD-ROM for several years worth of education. Textbooks from elementary to a high school level (or whatever your local equivilent is) could be stored at HTML or PDF files or some other format friendly to your particular language. As for languages, a single disc could contain the same information in multiple formats so a bunch of people speaking different languages or dialects only need to buy a single disc. Using CD-ROMs rather than semiconductor memory cards is scores cheaper and people could afford to not only buy more software but multiple copies in case one ends up ruined.
The goal of the Simputer would be more easily met by a much simpler and cheaper machine. Its creators might have the right mindset but they don't seem to have thought through the implications of the hardware they developed. Even if there was some requirement for a portable device people would be better off putting tough rubber cases on a bunch of Palm m105s or Handspring Visors and handing them out to people.
Unfortunately I have to be in the "big whoop" crowd. This is not a terribly impressive feat. I can run MOL on my Powerbook. Terra Soft briQ systems could do the same thing. MOL doesn't require a ROM image in order to run MacOS 8.6 or later because the New World systems don't use the ROM to store the ToolBox anymore, it is a file in the system folder. All the ROM does anymore is tell the system where to find certain devices and stuff. MOL takes care of that as a virtual machine.
MOL as a virtual machine is impressive in its own right. I use it a bit on my Powerbook when I'm booted into Linux because there isn't always an analog for a Mac program I want to use. It isn't always terribly fast but I can get stuff done with it if I'm a little patient. However an Amiga PPC board running MOL under YDL isn't exactly making me cream in my pants. It is a PPC board that runs Linux well enough and then runs MOL which abstracts MacOS from the hardware. If someone had managed to get MacOS running on the PPC board natively by hacking up their own ROM replacement I'd ooh and ahh. Suggesting the ability to run MacOS in a virtual machine is somehow a competitor to Apple's hold on the desktop PPC market is a bit of an immature statement.
If OSX ever works directly on the hardware my ears will perk up. However it will only take a small tweak in the Cocoa framework to check for a Mac ROM. Lack of a ROM will keep the whole Cocoa environment from even working leaving you with the Darwin kernel working but none of the rest of what makes OSX unique not work.
I live in another California city where the utilities are municipally owned. Our bills may not be low by any means but even at their peak of the rolling blackouts and overhyped crisis we didn't have it as bad as SCE and PG customers. SCE customers' baseline rate (which SCE is not very up front with) is double what you or I are paying for our base rate. Both PG and SCE have done their best to screw not only their customers but the entire state over with their underhanded power trading practices.
I don't why I said no new power plants have been built, I meant only nuclear plants. There's been something like 13 built in the state this year which amounts to something around 2,000MW of capacity. The lack of nuclear plants was my point, end to end they are much cleaner than coal or oil plants and have a much better track record. New reactor and plant designs have shrunk the size and cost down quite a bit as well as increased the safety margins. The NIMBY folks and Sierra Club terrorists are screwing all of us over blocking these plants.
I say Sac is isolated from the state's problems not to suggest you don't have your share of bums or crime. The legistlation and state government in general is just far removed from anywhere their descisions directly affect. Absurd logging restrictions kill small towns in the northern half of the state while mismanagement of utilities has caused loads of problems in the southern half. Its sad watching this power crap happen because it is causing businesses to avoid staying or moving here.
I agree California legistlativly is fucking itself, the problem is us voters and residents are getting the short end of the stick. Even caring about what the state assembly does has little effect on anything, they are the most easily swayed group of bearucrats and politicians I've ever heard of. They agree with the loudest voice. Unfortunately for the rest of us the loudest voices are usually union loving tree huggers. Deregulation didn't work here specifically because we were getting screwed, SCE and PG were selling power to Oregon and Nevada at the high export price and then importing it back in for the low import price. They were making buckets of money off the state's deregulation. They were passing the high import price off to their customers and pocketing the difference. Then they begged the state for a bail-out cash infusion.
I think the conslusion to this rather informative diddy is spot on, Sony is out to create a network of experienced PS2 programmers. Sony gets oodles of noodles for this move. The PS2 is probably the most popular video game system ever marketed to date, it makes Sony bunches of money. The only problem with the money making aspect is they need a constant stream of games for a system to be popular. Programmers are needed and plenty are interested but as the article says, experience with the platform is not as abundant as people willing to program for it. Sony distributes a system that allows people to poke around the platform and make their own amateur games in their spare time and get 2D6 bonus to their PS2 Programming skill.
Linux is the obvious choice for Sony to pick, not because Linux rox0rz d00dz but because it is a familiar environment for many developers and requires no licensing fee to distribute. The last thing Sony wants is their HDD/eth0 expansion system to cost them more money than it has the potential to make back for them. Paying a $20 or $50 royalty on some commercial OS (pick one, any one) per unit sold will end up costing them in terms of margins. Drives and ethernet adapters that only go down in price as time goes by and shipment volumes increase lead to high margins and eventually profits.
I've thought for a while Sony wants to migrate their computer division from being high priced IBM clone systems to being something proprietary and different. In many of their markets this is an easy sell because there is a shitload of brand loyalty. It might not be terribly difficult in the US either. Sony might pretty easily merge their VAIO desktop computers with future PlayStations. A wide availability of games and media designed specifically for Sony systems could make them a powerful player in the PC market. They already produce a ton of software for their VAIO systems, they could port a good deal of that to whatever OS they might use besides Windows on their new VAIO Stations.
This of course goes back to engendering developer support for the platform. By seeding PS2/3 platform developers early (now) they can set themselves up with a relatively large developer base, independant and otherwise, as long as they can keep their interest. Sony looks like they're intending to paint several markets with one broad brush. Derivitive systems based off the PlayStation architecture; from the dedicated console at $100 for playing games to the $2000 audio video workstation which happens to share 70% of the same parts or interfaces. Maybe Sony is looking to make a new Microsoft-free PC market. Can you forgive them for killing Napster? Tough choice.
Some people bash California as being a bunch of ignorant liberal fucks. This is only partially true. There's a magical land in this very state where the water runs pure and the electricity comes cheap and the migrant workers, well, they are neither heard nor seen. This magical land is called Sacremento. From this shining beacon of cockjockery shines the shiny light of dumbfuckery. See up in Sac Town where all the tough choices are made they're insulated from the rest of the state's problems.
Using diesel electric locomotive engines to boost a local power station has cool geek factor to it but it is a stupid and short term fix for a very serious long term problem. The descision to deregulate power is a failed experiment yet our plucky leadership in Sac Town don't see it that way, they're rather spend billions dollars bailing out these failed and failing utility companies and their shit management. It is sad watching this all happen. It doesn't matter how you vote locally either, the State Assembly doesn't do anything to curb the jackassery coming from the Governor's office.
What the state needs is regulated and less externally dependant electrical power. The state has been growing temendously in the past 20 years but hasn't seen the construction of a single new power plant, nuclear or otherwise. The population in the bay area has boomed as well as the populations of San Diego and Orange counties. A lot of people are moving into Riverside and San Bernadino counties out towards the deserts where they run their air conditioner 24/7 and water their lawns in the middle of the day because they don't know how to live in a desert. These sort of people are a huge strain on the power grid in Southern California and makes the boards of SoCal Edision cream their pants. Running a couple trains down there during the summer to give some extra go juice to people does not solve the problem. Nevada has its own burgeoning population in and around Las Vegas they've got to provide power and water for, they aren't going to able to export power to California for too much longer.
The state needs more eletrical plants. There are plenty of clean-ish power plant designs in common use around the world that the state could use for a basis for new plants. It is getting ridiculous that these retarded stopgap measures are being suggested and implimented when the real solution is so clear cut. There's plenty of plants that can be upgraded to use cleaner technology while at the same time increasing their output. It'd be a much better use than billion dollar bonds being spent to cover the cost of crooked deregulated utility companies.
Cool aspects: instead of needing a physical object to make a hologram you can now use a transparent LCD screen. You can also make your hologram any size you want because instead of a single exposed but if film the hologram is made from little 2"x2" tiles.
Misleading aspects of the story: This is not Star Wars technology come to life. Neither Princess Leia nor Queen Amidala will be hovering in mid-air begging someone for help. There's no motion involved in these holograms unless successive tiles have an animated image. The only way you'll get animation of any sort is the same way you get it out of the baseball cards printed with the plastic ribbing. Each viewing angle gives you a different instance frame. These images do not hover in mid-air either, their focal point is behind the surface of the view window.
The sort of volumetric projection in Star Wars is not possible without some super fancy technology to bend light rays once they hit a certain point in space. You need something for the photons to hit and change direction in, like glass. The people at Dimensional Media (www.3dmedia.com) have a system like this. They take a bunch of 2D slices and project them at high speed onto a piece of glass. Each of the 20 or so slices they use is a slightly different perspective on the 3D image. These are run through a beam splitter and projected onto a set of mirrors that projects onto a glass plate. The image seems to float behind the glass plate and as you move from side to side you're seeing one of the slightly different perspective slices. It is cool technology that might be getting somewhere because DMA has won a couple awards for their technology and got a research grant from somebody in January. I don't work for them or anything I've just run across lots of articles about them in the past 6 years and looked into their technology when I began to research building a home made volumetric projection system. While Zebra Imaging has a cool tech for static holograms I'm much more interested in realtime volumetric projection. My interest in holography lasted about as long as the power supply for my HeNe laser.
Gamma-rays have the anooying tendancy to beak atoms into siny little bits of energy. An intense gamma-ray burst will start transmutting elements into other elements. Even UV radiation has enough energy to ionize molecules. Besides the fact anything producing intense gamma and X ray bursts would tear the shit out of a planet anywhere near it. You need to be less worried about life surviving in one of these environments and just wonder how a planet might survive in these environments. Your planet being whisked off into space from the supernova that caused a gamma-ray burst is going to be a much more difficult problem to deal with than the gamma-rays themselves.
A lot of things have happened to Venus that have taken it on a far different evolutionary route than the Earth. Venus has a much more stable atmosphere then the Earth does and the cloud layer extends far higher than Earth's. Where our highest clouds form at around 16km Venus has a cloud layer almost 70km up. That 10km cloud layer is followed by a second layer is from about 56-52km and a third from 52-48km. Below the third and lowest cloud layer is a haze layer that extends down to about 33km. Below that the air is very clear. The atmosphere is also very uniform which steams from Venus' super slow rotation. It takes Venus 243 days to complete a single rotation, where Earth takes 24 hours. Since large weather systems aren't broken up by the high rotation rate they form into one large and very stable weather pattern.
It takes Venus longer to rotate about its axis than it does to orbit around the Sun. The Sun is held over a single area of the sky for a very long period of time. The only way Venus has to move heat around is by atmospheric convection. The dark side of the planet is bleeding off all the heat absorbed by the Sun as well as heat radiating off the ground.
It is easy to explain the net energy loss, it has retained much of its formation heat so it likely has a molten metallic core just like the Earth's and has been heated for several billion years by a Sun that is 30% closer. All of that solar radiation has been stored up in the atmosphere. Its internal heat as well as the built up heat from the Sun are going to make it a very nice energy emitter.
The atmosphere rotates quickly around the planet because of convection. The atmosphere of Venus would be much easier to model than the Earth's. The warm air of the equator is rising in a single massive column from the subsolar point (the place on the planet where the Sun is directly overhead) and falls back down at the poles and towards the night side of the planet. These convection currents cause super high speed jet streams which rotate in the same retrograde manner as the rest of the planet.
IBM is one of the primary development interests in MRAM technologies so your idea might have some credibility to it. It also seems like IBM's reseach is netting results that are a bit more fruitful than other groups researching MRAM. They've partnered with Infineon to bring MRAM stuff to market. We might end up seeing IBM MagStar NVRAM drives in the next couple years with decent data density.
I've gone from being completely indifferent about internet radio to being a huge fan of it in the span of about a year. I have not listened to broadcast music in a couple years now. Just about everything I listened to for a long time came out of my friends and I's CD pools. We'd make compilation albums for each other or just snag songs we particularly enjoyed from albums in each others collections. Broadcast radio has always been shit but recently it has been so bad I simply can't stand to listen to it. I began to go to dozens of concerts from LA to San Diego. Last year I think I tallied 35 concerts in about 9 months. Was I going to see bigass arena shows being hyped by radio stations? Only in a very small handful of cases like the Yahoo Outloud Weezer tour, when I went to the LA and SD shows. Most shows I was going to were indie rock shows and small local shows. Anyhow, I was going to these shows SPECIFICALLY because the bands weren't being played on the radio. People I find incredibly talented like Ozma and The Get Up Kids will be lucky to ever have a single played on a station like KROQ. Going to all the shows I did and picking up albums from bands I liked, I not only put money in their pockets but got introduced to more bands than I can easily recall. These are some badass bands in my opinion but they're not going to be found on the radio.
Then I started getting into more electronic stuff but was never really one for the electronic scene. I can't stand seeing a bunch of cornbread white guys revving their rice burners in parking lots. It isn't racism or anything, it just looks stupid seeing some pimply faced kid with his Fred Durst hat with a "Powered by VTEC" sticker on his read window. The drugged out raver wannabes aren't exactly up on my list of social affiliations either. Rather than tell them they shouldn't be who they want to be I just avoid the scene entirely. So that leaves me with nowhere to get music other than Napster or something. It is nice to see if I want to spend money on an album but most songs are recorded poorly at too low of a bit rate for my taste. Then I fire up iTunes on my Powerbook and browse to the electronic stations. Holy shit! Music that doesn't sound like ass when I plug it into my sound system and doesn't have an inane DJ being wiggity whack on the air. Fuck yes. Not only do I get a good stream of music but I also have a display of what song I'm listening to in case I find myself interested in the artist. Then there is the choice available, if one station starts in with something I don't like I can double click another one with a different stream. Internet radio has become the radio I've been wanting for years. In an hour block I get to hear about an hour's worth of music, not 10 minutes of decent music, 30 minutes of slop I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy and 20 minutes of inane advertisements for shit I don't buy and DJs I'd rather have shot into the Sun.
Now it is facing some stiff opposition in the form the RIAA and their demonic minions. I don't want to see internet radio go down because it is the only inexpensive way I've got left to get introduced to some good music. Sharing with my friends is nice but there isn't enough variety to really find off the wall shit I end up really digging. P2P radio seems like an obvious solution because of the P2P buzzword culture surging as of late. The model however runs into serious problems. The RIAA doesn't have to go after a single individual or group of individuals to take out P2P radio like they were able to with various sharing programs. All they have to do is make some deals with cable and DSL providers. Lets say there was a popular P2P radio in my town, all it would take is a deal or lawsuit against Charter and he would be toasted. We'd all end up with our bandwidth curtailed more than it already is and P2P radio would end up specifically forbidden in the AUP.
Switch to DSL you say? I fucking wish. PacBell couldn't find their dicks if they weren't at the end of their arms. Evne if DSL was viable for some people P2P regulating would still happen on the DSL system. Even with a competitive DSL provider like Covad or someone, they're still renting a pipe from PacBell and the bandwidth usage will make them be regulatory asses too.
P2P pirate radio is a noble idea I suppose, sticking it to the jackasses that are the RIAA but it is a short term solution to a long term problem. The RIAA has far too many lawyers on their side and enough backing to cow the major cable and DSL providers into line. An idea would be to get together with a bunch of schools around the country. Many schools have broadcast radio stations that don't have to stand up to RIAA scrutiny or lawsuits. They could house and host internet radio stations with the same function as broadcast stations, providing students with hands on experience either behind a mic or in an equipment room, but have much better standing in any internet radio lawsuits. Anything with P2P in the name is going to get turbofucked rather quickly by the RIAA no matter if they can track people down or not. It's sad but true. So who wants to build an island 13 miles off the Montery penninsula with an OC-192 hooked up to it? We could be Sealand Redux.
Wow man you really told me. I wish I was paid by Microsoft to talk to idiots like you, slashdot is full of them. I'd be a billionaire by now.
Do you know why you've had less hassle with Linux than with Windows? I would wager that you don't. See that lack of difficulty comes from people putting effort into packaging a Linux distribution. This is EXACTLY what Lycoris is doing and exactly why you shouldn't fucking bitch about them charging for a per seat license. The distribution packagers are dealing wiht the hassle of putting Linux together. The hassle is not passed onto you for most distributions. Some people do this work for free but others would like a kickback for their time and affort, if you are too fucking cheap to pay them, use something else and don't bitch about it.
Businesses to not build Linux from scratch, they do not have time nor should they waste the resources to build their IT infrastructure from the ground up. This is where Lycoris, Caldera, and Red Hat come in. They can pre-build a solution that works for most businesses and stick it on a CD.
I don't know where you got your Microsoft ramblings from. I was talking about Linux distributions doing the hard part for you and you should shut the fuck up with your bitching about them including GPL software you gave them a right to include. I didn't mention Windows nor Microsoft anywhere in the comment. I don't see why you even bring it up. Why don't you try finding an old copy 4.x era copy of Red Hat and try installing it on your computer. See if that is as hassle free as anything available today, Linux or Windows.
Now I really wish I was paid to talk to idiots.
Take heart my gangley Gnu gobblin cohorts, all is not lost yet! Long ago in the days of mysticism and lore the gods of Economics and Love set down the laws of Economics and Love. Try as they might with their merciless bands of code wielding deperados a whooping and a hollering through town they cannot defeat the laws od Economics and Love. You see my chummy chum chummers not even within the Gates of Redmond lies enough power to overcome these laws. They may be strong now by coercing the likes of the Kingdom of Intel and the AMD Empire into their fold but their power even now begins to wane. The infighting between these two great houses is fierce and the outcome far too unpredictable. Competing standards there are, differences in vision they have.
Hence Microsoft begins along the path of commoditization. They can profit from their allies' struggle. All that is required from them is to design software that removes leverage from under their allies' armies! Given the dark empire's grasp of the market of souls this is an easy task. They can make their software run on both of their allies' competing hardware. No matter who wins out in the end, if indeed anyone does, the dark empire still stands even more powerful than before. They can effectively commoditize all computer hardware.
Their masters in the land of Redmond see oppertunity here besides the obvious. They seek new allies who are stronger because they pay people to produce while consolidating their power by controlling distribution of the produced work. Since Microsoft can effectively commoditize the hardware of their allies they can force software vendors to use their branded environments in order to be assured they will work on Intel and AMD hardware. Microsoft adds magic talismans to software requiring the use of their evvvvil DRM technology from their new Media Mogul Lord allies and BLAMO the world is under their control.
I did say fear not did I not? Strength comes from within so fear not! While the dark empire collects taxes from its vanquished foes of the OEM Republic they conspire against their dark oppressors. The law of Demand which is an entire volume of the law of Economics comes into play. Demand drives the OEM Republic, they don't make money off their competitor's sales like their evil massssters do. Therefore it is in their best interest to serve the masses to which they cater. If the masses reject control by Microsoft and the Media Mogul Lords there will be a revolt in the populace. Microsoft will cease to be in demand.
The OEM Republic being driven by the demand of Microsoft will abandon all things DRM and tell the Media Mogul Lords to stick things in dark places. They will because their coffers will be emboldened by their customers money. Rallying to the call of the smaller OEMs larger neutral nations will become involved in the battle. Nations by the name of IBM and hPaq will enter the forray alongside competitors like Dell and Gateway. Rallying the troops will be Apple ripping and mixing and burning flinging CD-Rs left and right into the eyes of Media Minions. Backing the OEM Republics will be the Norwegian nations of Nokia and Ericsson. Cell phones are driven by as much consumer demand as PCs and if they can't market a MP3/OGG/DVD/TV/CB cell phone lightsaber their customers will move on.
Fighting the small battles will be the Linux fanboys with their boxen and the FreeBSDites with their kernels that never quit. Aiding the OEM Republics in their battles by providing them with a Microsoft alternative they don't have to develope with their own cash. It will be a good day to compile.The Law of Economics will see the warriors of light through the day. DRM will die because the masses want their MP3/OGG/DVD/TV cell phone lightsabers and want to continue to burn CDs so they don't have to buy them because they are cheap. Fritz Hollings will stub his toe and Jack Valenti will shrink even more. Compile friends compile!
Take heart my geek pals, Microsoft must bow to demand and the cheapassness of human nature must never be discounted. Palladium will fall and then geek love will commence.
That argument is as ridiculous as the one I originally responded to. I don't care that you chose to give away your software, you did't make it public domain, you stuck it under a viral self perpetuating license in the case of the GPL. What happens with the GPL is that by using it you are licensing it from the person who originally wrote it. You have a non-exclusive license to do as you please with said code. While you have right to do as you please with public domain code the GPL defines an important difference. The licensee (you or I or Lycoris) is granted the right of redistribution in any form we see fit. However, we can charge money for our rerelease of the code as long as we provide the source at no extra charge beyond the media cost of distribution.
If you were a philantropist and your point had any thing meaty to back it up, your code would be public domain and as free as sunshine. Since it isn't the licensees of your code can do as they damn well please with it in accordance to the GPL. If you wanted to better humanity or some shit you wouldn't have used a license on the code that contains a redistribution clause.
The point you make is doubly ineffective because it totally misses the idea I was trying to convey. Lycoris is adding value to an otherwise easily attainable product. Anyone can download KDE and the Linux kernel and whatever other shit they want. The catch is except for a couple large packages like KDE or GNOME few if any Linux applications can be obtained from a single source with any modicum of support. Lycoris is putting their ass in a sling in order to provide users with a value added experience, packaging and supporting otherwise unpackaged and unsupported software. They are doing the same thing every other damn distribution is doing and has done for years and years. The only difference is they are requiring businesses to pay for every system they get use of the OS out of. There is NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS. They are not extorting grandmothers and impregnating virgin teenagers with devil spawn. They are removing the burden of support from their customer companies and charging a pretty fair price at that. You see not everyone has oodles of free time to code up hippiesoft for the good of mankind. Due to this lack of free time and expertise companies who will be Lycoris, SuSE, and Red Hat's customers are willing to fork over money in return for work because they appriciate that people's time and effort is worth something.
The adage is, Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing. Linux is not free to me because my time is not worth nothing. A computer is not a means to an end despite you thinking it is. It is a tool to get shit done, if I can get no shit done with a computer it is useless. A Linux kernel does me no good without a way to command it and programs that I can command to do something. Thus I need a shell be it text or graphical and some compiled and linked programs ready for me to run. There's no magic Linux fairy magically flipping bits on my hard drive when I'm asleep which means I have to do that myself. Since my time is valuable I'd gladly pay someone a small fee to make that bit flipping a whole lot easier so I can get on to things I find more important. If they can amortize the cost of that service over a bunch of customers, the happier I am because the less money I pay.
Oh boohoo, someone is asking you to pay for something. The whining never fucking stops. What about the fact that Lycoris wants to charge money to its corporate customers is so wrong? They're spending their capital packaging a working and decent desktop Linux system, their customers aren't doing the work, therefore the Lycoris folks should be for the work they are freeing the company from doing. Being an economy of scale, Lycoris doesn't need to charge a large fee (which they don't) for their work done. Their customers get a good desktop Linux distribution and the Lycoris folks feed their families and have a place to live. Everybody wins.
I really don't understand this communist manifesto inspired meme among Linux geeks that Linux ought to be free and a person's time is worth nothing. Lycoris is doing work, for that work they ought to get something. A pat on the back and kudos for doing a good job and fighting the good fight or some hippie bullshit is not going to pay their bills. These guys are working a 9-5 on the product, they don't have day jobs and then at night spend endless hours coding like the Debian crowd (which is no bash in the slightest on the Debian crowd). Besides they're only going with per seat licensing, if they wanted to be badasses they would have gone the Microsoft route and used per user licenses. Per seat licensing is not so bad. If you have 5 computers and 10 users you only pay for the 5 computer seats. Find that pricing scheme with Windows XP Server, go ahead and try. It isn't going to happen. Windows XP Server pricing is based on the number of users with site licenses allowing an near infinite number of installs for a pretty hefty price.
It's Linux anyhow, if Lycoris turned into a bunch of insane badasses it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to drop them like a bad habit and switch to another distribution with a better licensing scheme. It is sad this whole process hasn't already worked itself through the fiber of your being preventing you from making this comment. It is also sort of sad that someone had modded you up for making this comment. I feel bad for the people programming shit you use that likely never get so much as a kudos from your hippie meme banner waving ass.
Al Qaeda has hired script kiddies to bring down rain down computer destruction. I don't understand why the fuck things not designed to be hooked up to the internet are being hooked up to it.
I ask in all seriousness, why is a railway switch hooked up to the public internet? What good reason is there for eletronic valve controls for fresh or sewage water to be hooked up to the internet? Does a passing shit or dead goldfish need to check its e-mail? I can understand having some sort of network linking a bunch of sensors and whatnot, that makes sense. I do not understand however why that network needs to be on the internet or even publicly accessible. In some cases, like the guy in Australia, the method of intrusion was not the internet or a network of any sorts, just an unsecured method of entry. Having singular systems with unsecured entry point is understandable and pretty forgivable. Not everyone expects some jackass to try to scre with something. A network of systems with unsecured entry is ridiculous.
I remember reading a billion and a half philez back in the day on how to fuck with systems through Tymnet and other networks similar to it. I still don't see why the SCADA system controlling the Hoover damn needs a modem in it, if it does need that modem in it what is up with the lack of intense and thurough handshaking and password challenges?
The internet is an obvious target regardless for you bozos who question militant religious fanatics and their target aquisition. Why attack the WTC? It was a symbol, same with the White House or Pentagon. They're both symbols. The internet is another symbol of Western culture. Who is the internet big with? A hint: it is not a bunch of predominatly Muslim countries but the word does start with W and end with est. It would be yet another symbol to attack if you're in the mindset that the West is the source of all of your ills.
If you're worried about phone lines going down and needing network access get some geeky friend together, get yourselves Ham licenses and form yourself an emergency packet radio network. If you've got laptops and battery powered equipment you'll be fine even if your power goes from al Qaeda script kiddie attack. While it sounds sort of ufnny to some it is a good idea, hams in an area suffering from power outages or down phone systems can be a big help keeping the flow of information flowing. Nothing helps in an emergency situation like the right information getting to the right people at the right time.
Using Q3A and SS to benchmark a brand new card are important because it gives the card a context that can be compared to other cards. If it gets 45fps in UT 2003 or 20fps in Doom 3 what the hell does that mean? Is it a shit card or are the graphics ultra untense? Now say I run a benchmark using Q3A, the card get 300fps. Damn that is much faster than my _insert card here_. Benchmarking is all about reducing the number of variables as close to one as you possibly can. Benchmarks are not about running the latest and greatest games to give you a consumer report on them. It would also be ridiculous to "benchmark" a card using 16x FSAA when no other card could do that. You would have nothing to compare it to removing all context from the test. You could classify performance as "good" or "bad" but not compare it directly to some other card.
A couple years ago I bought an ATX case that came with a fan like you're talking about. I can't remember if the case is an Antec case or if I'm just imagining things. The fan's duct hooks up to the rectengular grill on the back panel of the case. The duct leads to a larger 5v fan that sucks air in from the rear and pushes it right around the processor. The box right now has my K6-2 in there and it running so I'm not terribly interested in shutting it off.
The K6 has a fan and a small heat sink that I've never turned off with the duct on so I don't know how well it would cool the heat sink. If you figure out it moves about the same volume of air at the same speed as the smaller sink fan you might want to give the idea a shot or see if you can find a fan like mine. One problem I envision is the slower fan not getting enough air over hot spots on the heat sink to keep it cool enough when the processor is running full tilt doing something. I'm also not to sure processors like the P4 or AthlonXP (the Palomino core at least) without a fan right on the heat sink is a good idea. The heat sink fans speed up as the heat increases where a regular 5v case fan is not going to.