Where does this crap about Microsoft losing hundreds of dollars per console come from? Retarded slashdotnomics? The XBox is definitely not several hundreds of dollars worth of parts, especially for a manufacturer buying hundreds of thousands of each component. Integrated components are scores cheaper than non-integrated components. A processor slow by current standards on a fully integrated motherboard with a hard drive easily produced and procured from several different sources lacking price gouging components like speakers, a monitor, or a KB/mouse combo all make for a pretty inexpensive machine to build. A bare bones PC costs about as much as an XBox and they use more exepensive components. Besides Microsoft isn't paying the beaucoup fees to ship units overseas, they have manufacturing plants on the three continents they sell XBoxes on.
Console makers have always taken a loss on the initial batches of the consoles as a matter of course, the games were the money makers. Half of the cost of a new game goes back into the pockets of whoever makes the console. It costs a bit of money to have that Sony Entertainment or Nintendo logo pop up when the game starts. The consoles merely existed to play the games on. When a console maker hit black they'd drop the price of the console to just above cost and soak up the profit from licensing. Sony has been making a profit off the PS2 for a while now because with the XBox aiming at the same demographics the price of the PS2 hasn't needed to drop. They've sold millions of PS2s and made many more millions off all the blockbuster games for it. Microsoft might be taking a small loss or just operating on a razor thin margin with the XBox but they're not losing hundreds of dollars per freaking console.
June's DDJ (#337) has a pretty good article in it about C++ conformance and actually goes on to test a series of compilers for standards compliance. Pick up the magazine and read the article which was pretty interesting because they used Python to write a test framework that could be used with different compilers and different operating systems. They tested compilers on Solaris, Linux, and Windows2000. GCC 3.04 ended up with the highest passing percentage while VC++ ended up with the worst. They didn't include either the DDJ compiler or Intel's which was one I was especially curious about considering I just got a demo of it.
Geez I find it hard to believe this is the first mention of aerogel on slashdot. This shit is old, anybody who reads Popular Mechanics has read all sorts of stuff about aerogels. For those wondering about the expense of aerogels in production, lab techniques for producing them are pretty costly. IIRC you make them with various metal oxides reacting to form what's called an alcogel which has a 3D lattice of silica molecules with water suspended in the cells of the lattice. The water is forced out of the gel by soaking it in pure alcohol. The new gel is called an alcogel which is then dried supercritically. This forces the alcohol out of the gel leaving only the silica structure left. This process it pretty costly and slow which makes aerogel production sort of unsuitable (for now) in massive scales. There's lots of work being done to find shortcuts in this process, the most promising I recall reading about was to do the supercritical drying in vacuum molding chambers like used in regular plastic molding.
Even cooler than aerogels are hydrogels which instead of being 99.8% air they are like 99% water with a silica lattice structure. There's a bit of work researching hydrogels for use in medicine. Hydrogel strips could be used as bandaids for internal oragans and some other stuff I don't rightly recall at the moment. Aerogels rock.
Your best bet is probably to just act without concent from those above you. Most of the time asking clueless authority figures to take a stance on specific policy is a bad idea. If you tell someone "P2P filesharing is bad" they will extend it to absurd levels of stupidity. You are the administrator, do your job as such.
A good idea is something like dummynet between your internal network and your router. You can throttle bandwidth or add queues (simulates lag) to specific services over your network according to IP addresses or service ports. You can force an even bandwidth distribution between all the hosts connecting through port 80 but throttle back the speed of anything coming through other ports. You don'y necessarily have to block file sharing requests but you can keep them from dominating your network. Once you remove the incentive for people to use P2P services on the school's network they will knock it off.
One group of people you might want to talk to about funding/providing content for would be your local newspaper if you have one. A community website shares many of the same functions as a daily local paper. Community features such as bulletin boards and chat servers could be provided either with a paper subscription or by a small monthly (or yearly) access fee. It might be a local community blog. News articles could be discussed on the forums or in the chat rooms. It might even be pretty useful to have some method of talking to your neighbors about some local bit of news. An article complaining about potholes in the road could spark enough discussions and whatnot that could lead to someone actually fixing the holes in the road.
Of course everyone screams about this without reading up on it. The judge is requiring SB to report the content viewing habits of users of the 4000 series Replay box. The problem with it is the automagic ability to skip over commercials. This always pisses off the TV industry because they can't charge X amount of dollars per commercial slot at certain times if the advertisers can show somehow that the network's audience numbers are too high. The judge is requiring SB to provide statistics on commercial skippingh abits of users in order to decide whether their ReplayTV box actually screws the television networks over as they claim. The home recording cases in the 80s allowed people to use VCRs to record stuff and watch it later (called time shfting) because the commercials were preserved. A recorder that automagically removes commercials doesn't fall under the ruling of those cases.
The retarded part of the whole thing is the TV networks conception that not watching commercials is somehow evil. They don't get money from me watching a McDonalds commercial (even though that is how they charge advertisers), they get money from me buying a Big Mac and a Coke. The only reason they're going after PVRs is because they fuck up their audience statistics. If a show has a specific rating they can assume a certain number of people are watching and charge advertisers accordingly. All an advertisers has to do in negotiations is whip out a paper that says there are a million ReplayTV and not have to pay the netwok as much money as they are charging. It's greed on two fronts screwing over ReplayTV users.
I guess it is sort of fitting that two companies that have recently continued to fail to capitalize on their investments would merge. Compaq bought Digital and failed to really do anything worth while with them. The Alpha was a badass of microprocessor engineering. Had something been made of it the entire industry might have been turned on their head. The 21164 whipped other processors of the time like little bitches. By 2000 only about 500k Alpha systems had been sold. That is bad marketing and poor capitalization. HP for some retarded reason thought the internet bubble boom was going to last for some long period of time and dropped their slow growth steady divisions and spun them off into a separate company. That is another failure to retain their market capitalization. They may sell a lot of computers and not go out of business no one is going to remember them for anything other than for a stupid merger.
Jeff Clarke: Somebody set up us the bomb. Peter Blackmore: We get signal. Mike Capellas: What ! Blackmore: Main screen turn on. Captain: It's You !! Carly Fiorina: How are you gentlemen !! Fiorina: All your Presario are belong to us. Fiorina: You are on the way to destruction. Capellas: What you say !! Fiorina: You have no chance to survive make your time. Fiorina: HA HA HA HA....
Actually that is what I'm getting. I consider it broadband because before I got it my dialup was poking along at 24kbps. I don't see how a 256kb line is not broadband, I may not be pulling down T1 speeds but it suits me fine. The lag is low and I can run Red Carpet or Software Update while playing CS on a different computer with no perceptible detriment in either download speed or lag time in the game. Sure ISDN can get those speeds if you bond a couple channels together but that is pretty cost prohibitive for most people. The higher speed lines are tempting but I dont really don't have heavy throughput so the 256kb line works great for me. Warez kiddies, ISO downloading zealots, and Gnutella whores on the otherhand might see my connection as paltry and unchic.
I guess I'm privilaged or something because I nearly choked on a life saver when I read that some people were paying anywhere from 80 to 100 bucks for cable internet. I pay about 30$ a month for Charter. My pipe my not be a John Holmes but it ain't bad, no one who uses it seems to complain.
I think it is actually a good idea for the FCC to auction off rights to wireless cable to local operators, it will only provide due competition to the incumbant cable operators. There's a wireless company around here that while isn't terribly popular does have enough of a presense in town to keep Charter on their toes in terms of pricing and availability. Widespread situations like that will on the whole be good for consumers, they'll have more options than AOLTW, Adelphia, and COX for pay programming and broadband internet services.
However I do foresee a problem which is sort of inevitable with auctioning off so many small markets. There will be two generations of wireless "cable" availability. The first generation will happen in the next couple years after the spectrum is auctioned off. A huge number of small companies will be providing cheap(er) pay television and broadband internet initially. Logic will follow that because the material cost is so low since they don't have to run hundreds of miles of fiber or coax they will have a higher margin and can charge lower prices. THis will keep up until reality sets in and the debt from the spectrum allocation catches up with them. They'll go under and be forced to sell their aquisitions at a far far lower price than they originally paid, along with their subscribers and equipment. Who will buy this? The local cable and telcom companies who already have a veritable monopoly on those services anyways. Hughes and EchoStar combined have the market penetration of a small cable company. Local wireless operators hooking up with them to provide local television and broadband internet won't be able to provide service cheap enough (in my estimation) to keep themselves afloat and their assets will be passed on. The DBS guys could always aquire the wireless assets in order to grab a huge market for a pretty low cost.
Either way the first generation of companies will band together or get aquired by bigger players in the industry. Sound familiar though? It is what happened to most of the DSL and cable internet companies in the past year or two. The cost of aquiring customers and overhead from their debts was far higher than the money they raked in from subscriptions and selling information to direct marketing companies. They were then aquired by the big boys. Hopefully this doesn't happen but unfortunately it is likely. I would be happy if I were proved wrong though. Being able to get DirecTV and cheap broadband access would be badass.
In real life the structures seen in Hubble photographs are not nearly as colourful as the images lead you to belive. These sorts of images are the net result of various image collecting methods and some digital retouching and fancifying.
To form digital images modern telescopes stick a CCD imager in the place where typical diagrams of telescopes show an eyepiece to be. The CCDs used in astrometric imaging are a vast cut above the pieces of crap in digital cameras. The CCD arrays in many telescopes are hundreds or even thousands of pixels on a side and are cooled by various means in order to cut down on static caused from temperature variations and changes in the electronics. They also differ from consumer models because they do not have a colour mask on them, they only produce greyscale images.
So to take a picture an astronomer points the telescope at a cosmic object, opens the apeture and turns the CCD imager on. To grab colour information in order to perform spectroscopy filters are placed over the CCD imager during exposure. A series of exposures is taken depending on the dimness of the star and the particular part of the spectrum being imaged. Red and infrared light takes the longest to image while blue and ultraviolet take the shortest amount of time (due to the higher energy of the photons). Depending on the equipment available different numbers of exposures are taken. For multi-spectrum images up to 6 exposures are taken IIRC: infrared, red, yellow-orange, green, blue, and ultraviolet. These are each stored as greyscale bitmaps and represent the intensity values for a particular spectrum. For meaningful scientific research these colour spectra are rarely if ever combined, if you're studying characteristics of O and B stars in a nebula you're going to run some analisys algorithms on maybe the blue and ultraviolet images; if you're studying the nebula itself you're going to pay more attention to the IR image because it is going to help you find dust clouds emitting IR radiation. Images ad populus are processed to RGB colour space with the normally imvisible IR and UV bands applied to the red and blue portions of the images respectively to enhance detail. The end result of this process are the images printed in books and magazines and downloaded from space.com.
In reality the objects being imaged are pretty dull looking. Due to the sheer amount of radiative surface area of these objects they don't produce very intense bands of colour. If you were to look through an ultra powerful telescope at the Orion nebula it would look pretty grey and boring to the eye, it would look that way even up close. Remember we're scores of trillions of miles from these objects, to our eyes they are a few arc minutes or seconds across. A single CCD pixel is picking up light front millions of billions miles of radiative surface area. Not only that but the images are processed in such a manner that the compression from 6 channels worth of 8 bit colour values into 3 channels of 8 bit colour values to make colours especially brilliant. Each band is processed with low pass filters and contrast enhancement algorithms to form finer images with less noise. The blooms you mention are artifacts from the spiders holding the secondary reflector in telescopes. In production images these are often enhanced to give a more dramatic look to the image. For research purposes these are almost always filtered out with processing algorithms. Public images from places like space.com are mostly publicity fluff, if you want the really badass images download the ginormous TIFF images from various observatory's websites. These are the closest thing you get to a raw image without manning the telescope yourself.
I think I'm missing some critical component of your question but what exactly makes a 400MHz P2 system slow with Windows 2k and why exactly do you need new systems? Upgrading is great and all but do you REALLY think you need to at this point? I've got Win XP running on a K6-2 with gobs of RAM and it runs great it has a slow hard drive which makes app loading a tad on the slow side in some cases but most of the time it doesn't appear much slower than my Athlon XP 1700 (in anything not dreadfully processor dependant). For most things I wouldn't consider these systems slow unless you're doing heavy graphics work or doing a lot of compiling or plain number crunching.
If you insist on upgrades a good strategy is to stagger the upgrades spreading the process out over a longer period of time. Grab a couple new systems and get them integrated and slowly but surely phase out the older P2 systems. If possible recycle them to take the place of more specialized systems like file servers, firewalls, domain controllers and the like. If you stagger the upgrades you eventually get more for your money because of continued development and you have time to build or merely integrate all of your systems. Getting five workstations meshing with your network is much simpler than getting 50 meshing all at the same time. If you're building them you'll definitely appriciate not trying to do it all at once.
Instead of building them grab refurb units from the major vendors, considering the number of high power systems purchased in the past couple years you can end up with a speedy system for a pretty good price. It makes ghosting a single drive image a bit more difficult than having a homogenous system but it saves you a bit of time. Besides how expensive is it to buy a pack of CD-Rs to burn images for particular families of systems? Some organizational elbow grease and this process is not too difficult. I like color coding systems to make it easy for tech monkies to find the right CD to image a system with. It's lowtech but it works. One color for the manufacturer and a second color for a particular model or family. Just organize your CD images by color and it works fine usually.
Woohoo someone finally mentioned a Miggy. I can relate my story without being entirely off topic. I have proof Miggys still replace Intel based systems. The other day flipping through channels I happened to cross the government access channel. Lo and behold, it was the desktop belonging to none other than an Amiga. Months past that same channel was run by a Windows system. The twist of course is the Miggy has suffered some horrible failure and was outputting an error message to the broadcast. In a retwist an error popping up is the same reason I knew the government access channel was running off a Windows computer. (-1 Useless)
Nintendo and Sony parted ways not because Sony debuted their technology as I recall. Nintendo halfway through the project decided to go with Phillips and their CD-i technology leaving Sony with a bunch of money invested into their CD system. Sony kept developing it because Ken Kutaragi bet his career on it. He thought a game console would be what Sony needed to spurn some demand for their products. Nintendo and Sony got back together about two years later but the deal broke because Sony wanted to do a stand alone system and Nintendo still wanted a add-on for the SNES.
Sony then formed their CEE division with Ken Kutaragi at the helm and launched the PSX. It became ultra popular because they managed to get the big wigs like Capcom and Konami to develop native games as well as port Arcade games to it. It whomped the shit out of the Saturn and Nintendo dropped their CD-ROM add-on plans and hooked up with SGI. I remember at the time there was a good deal of confusion as to what the fuck Nintendo was doing. You were never sure if they were making a stand alone 32-bit console or a add-on for the SNES.
Microsoft I think was in the same position as Sony was in 1992, they had an initiative to get into the game console market but wanted someone more experienced to go in with. What I think people miss is Sony is the Microsoft of Japan. Career minded folks in Japan's electronics industry don't badmouth Sony. With the PSX they were entering into a industry they had no experience in. It was only through learning from Nintendo and Kutaragi's incessant board room bowing and scraping that the PSX saw the light of day.
Ok come on dude, how many other Unicies do people regular have on desktop computers? How many of that small percentage have computers that can even run modern games? Then of THAT percentage how many are willing to pay for a port of a game they probably already have the Windows copy of? Think about it, a handful of Linux users with Athlon XP systems does not a viable customer base make. Also OpenGL has never been much of a standard in the gaming industry, it is portable but by no means standard. In 3Dfx's hayday Glide was the API of choice because everybody had a Voodoo accelerator. OpenGl has never really dominated in terms of a 3D graphics API.
Uh..in 1982 you'd be damn fucking lucky if you could find a bit of software that would run on computers from different vendors. The OEMs want to make their own versions of Windows, AMD does not want this. If the top 3 PC OEMs have a version of Windows that is specifically unfriendly to AMD they could make AMD's position in the market a moot point to argue, their market capitalization would disappear unless they managed to find a shitload of software developers that were staunch AMD supporters. Even then the voting dollars of millions of computer users would be backing the Intel backed OEM Windows, not AMD's Windows versions. Like I've said before AMD's strength is running software you've already got faster than their competitors can run it. If they can't even run that software anymore, they become a market casulty.
There is a lot more at stake for AMD than users running WinAmp ad Netscape rather than IE and Media Player. Get past your myopic view of the situation. Twenty years ago there were dozens of OSes each from different vendors. You went with a specific vendor because some vital app you needed was available for that vendor's system. This meant if VisiCalc was only available for Apple ][s and IBM PCs and your job or business required VisiCalc you either bought an Apple or IBM. Systems it didn't run on weren't considered. If SomePopularProgram or SomePopularGame didn't run on the Windows version AMD using OEMs were spitting out AMD would tank pretty quick and they know it.
For fuck sake, haven't you been reading the proposals? What OEMs want is not to just replace IE and Media Player but instead release their own distributions of Windows with whatever software they decided they wanted to include in it. They'd pay Microsoft for their contribution to the package and whoever else they used software from. Instead of just Windows you'd have Delldows, Gatewaydows, and IBMdows. AMD's contention is if this is mandated due to previous unscrupulous business tactics on the part of Microsoft that the market will implode. Every OEM vendor with a different Windows distribution, maintained independently by said vendors. Any sort of homogeny present in Windows would disappear as soon as you had computers from different OEMs. It is bad enough when OEMs package software that they don't maintain and isn't forward compatible with future OS upgrades, one can only imagine how OEMs would fuck up operating systems even more than they do now.
Whether Microsoft's business tactics are right or wrong is moot when you're talking about real world implications of removing the packaging of the OS from the control of Microsoft. A fragmentation of PC's most highly used OS would just lead to a catastrophy in the PC industry. It'd go from Microsoft being the omnipresent corporate entity to some other company who provided some other homogeneous environment for OEM vendors to use. AMD is worried that OEMs with Intel's backing will use an imcompatible version of Windows from the one OEMs using AMD processors have. This fragmentation would effectively turn AMD into a bit player in the industry. Their hook is being able to run software you've already got faster than their competition runs it, if they can't run that software they offer no benefit to their customers who will quickly abandon them, except for a handful of Linux zealots who will defend AMD's honor because they are retarded and think the company is somehow more hallow than any other.
Where do you live, Louisiana? Law is supposed to be up to interpretation, that is how the legal system in 49 out of 50 states work. Interpretive law is a good thing and its merits are far too numerous to list here. Use some neurons to imagine yourself making a defending arguement against a law that didn't use language like "construed" or "reasonably infered". Questioning what can be construed or what is reasonable is like 80% of all defense cases. A reasonable inference is the difference between intent to use and intent to distribute which is the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony.
USb doesn't have enough bandwidth for uncompressed HD video or even compressed DV but it has plenty for an NTSC capture. A crappy motion JPEG NTSC capture only requires about 10Mb/s of bandwidth with an off the top of my head tally. If you're going to get more realistic you'd need even less bandwidth for an NTSC capture because of the way colour information is broadcast. A good video Y/Cr/Cb CODEC designed to grab a composite NTSC signal could probably shave a couple Mb/s off that number. The audio is negligible compared to that. USB video capture toys have been around for a long time, just look around sometime, they're all over and cheap.
Having a couple hundred thousand Macs with gigabit ethernet probably did have something to do with it. Many vendors now offer gigabit ethernet NICs in their professional series systems which means for network infrastructure folks there's a high demand for equipment leading to increased production and a lower cost. Apple's been selling gigabit ethernet standard for almost two years now which amounts to lots of gigabit ethernet cards floating around in Macland.
Stop oohing and ahhing over fucking bash. If you want to teach people the Unix program meme teach them how to fucking think with pipes in mind. Most people when looking for a file would just type find filename or locate filename and then search through the (oftentimes) enormous list of files that comes up. To experienced Unix users this is retarded, they'd pipe find into grep and look for a specific pattern to find a file somewhere. Teaching this method of thinking to non-Unix users is essencial to having them get anything meaningful done.
The "wonders", as zealots put it, of Linux are just a very large collection of small tweaks and hacks that combine the features of dozens to programs to do something useful. The syntactic stuff like the actual commands for listing the contents of a directory are something you can shove onto a reference guide and only need a quick glancing over. Teaching people to REALLY use the tools they've got available is the important part. The file system hierarchy is pretty simple and just given an overview reference for it ought to be enough for people in a MSCD course. Focus on how to configure, start, stop, and importantly RESTART daemons. The damnest thing when running Linux is to not have someone simply poit out that restarting a daemon will make it reload the configuration file. Novice users don't know this and end up doing shutdown -r (or for the more technically adept init 0) instead of just restarting the daemon process itself.
The little tricks experienced users take for granted are the reasons people come to them with a million and one questions on how to do stuff. If novices knew to ps aux | grep process rather than running top and trying to decipher what all the hoobajoob means (and figuring out its backwards fucking commands) they'd be in a much better situation. As it stands too many people introducing Linux to novices go into how great and powerful ls is like it is going to solve world hunger or something. Brush over the simple commands and hunker down over combining those simple commands to do really spectacular things. Impressing people doesn't mean shit, don't try wowing people with virtual desktops or consoles. No one gives a fuck about "true" multitasking or telneting into some server somewhere. Show people how to get stuff done rather than harping on how great your OS is.
The one size fits all desktop is exactly what made both Apple and Microsoft a good deal of money. You can sit down at just about anybody's Windows 9X/NT computer and get to work pretty quickly. If you're writing a application for Windows you know where to write your configuration information and put the binaries and know for the most part what libraries you can and can't link to without providing them yourself.
The Linux roll your own and be an individual while doing it mentality creates a giant hodge podge ad hoc operating system. Linux in its bazaar style of development have turned it into an amalgamation of features and configurations. Honestly, how many/bin directories do you REALLY need?
A one size fits all OS is what most users really want and in some cases need. Too many options is as bad as not enough options. Microsoft doing a geek release of Windows wouldn't have done anything to increase Microsoft's popularity. You wouldn't get it for free and it will still be the product of a company Linux users zealously despise.
What Lycoris does that none of the other Linux distros really do is limit your options (maybe some do but why nitpick). Contrary to the belief of Linux users in basements around the globe, this is not a bad thing. Lycoris does right where others have done wrong. Instead of giving the option of a billion different file managers and command line ftp clients they simplified the software package down to something manageable. One serious hurdle in a Linux installation is knowing what programs you want and which you don't want.
RedHat, SuSE, and Debian cater to the everything comes in a single box paradigm. This is great for the people who've used Linux before and have a feel for certain apps and thus choose to install them. Others have a feel for different apps and thus install those, this continues until there's a dozen dozen various installations of the same distribution. For people new to Linux this is wholly confusing, I've been using Linux for years and I still get confused when I've got six CDs full of stuff. I think Lycoris fits into a very nice niche of Linux users, ones who want to just turn something on and get work done. Like the tag line it seems like it could be very nice for general consumers as they'd be hard pressed to tell you what operating system was on their computer anyhow.
Hopefully the companies building beige box PCs bundling Linux will take note of Lycoris and give it a bit of a bigger install base and popularize it. RedHat is a good company but it seems like they're definitely going in a more corporate user direction which is of course fine, more power to them.
So..open source is the solution to all of life's problems. I guess that means despite evidense to the contrary Blackdown really DOES have JIT support and is the fastest JVM ever made? Man I'm sure glad you told me that so I don't have to believe the Blackdown group's lies anymore.
Re:Well...
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The protons and electrons go through a reverse beta decay to form neutrons and neutrinos. Not all protons and electrons are consumed in this fashion which lets the following ideas progress, the outter shell of a neutron star is covered with a bunch of high energy electrons and protons exisiting in the crust of the neutron star can be in a super fluidic state making the neutron star a gigantic super conductor. Electrons being annhihilated on the surface release X-Rays which get funneled by the intend magnetic field of the super conducting protons into beams which create the effect we dub a pulsar.
Slashdot Mirror
Where does this crap about Microsoft losing hundreds of dollars per console come from? Retarded slashdotnomics? The XBox is definitely not several hundreds of dollars worth of parts, especially for a manufacturer buying hundreds of thousands of each component. Integrated components are scores cheaper than non-integrated components. A processor slow by current standards on a fully integrated motherboard with a hard drive easily produced and procured from several different sources lacking price gouging components like speakers, a monitor, or a KB/mouse combo all make for a pretty inexpensive machine to build. A bare bones PC costs about as much as an XBox and they use more exepensive components. Besides Microsoft isn't paying the beaucoup fees to ship units overseas, they have manufacturing plants on the three continents they sell XBoxes on.
Console makers have always taken a loss on the initial batches of the consoles as a matter of course, the games were the money makers. Half of the cost of a new game goes back into the pockets of whoever makes the console. It costs a bit of money to have that Sony Entertainment or Nintendo logo pop up when the game starts. The consoles merely existed to play the games on. When a console maker hit black they'd drop the price of the console to just above cost and soak up the profit from licensing. Sony has been making a profit off the PS2 for a while now because with the XBox aiming at the same demographics the price of the PS2 hasn't needed to drop. They've sold millions of PS2s and made many more millions off all the blockbuster games for it. Microsoft might be taking a small loss or just operating on a razor thin margin with the XBox but they're not losing hundreds of dollars per freaking console.
June's DDJ (#337) has a pretty good article in it about C++ conformance and actually goes on to test a series of compilers for standards compliance. Pick up the magazine and read the article which was pretty interesting because they used Python to write a test framework that could be used with different compilers and different operating systems. They tested compilers on Solaris, Linux, and Windows2000. GCC 3.04 ended up with the highest passing percentage while VC++ ended up with the worst. They didn't include either the DDJ compiler or Intel's which was one I was especially curious about considering I just got a demo of it.
Geez I find it hard to believe this is the first mention of aerogel on slashdot. This shit is old, anybody who reads Popular Mechanics has read all sorts of stuff about aerogels. For those wondering about the expense of aerogels in production, lab techniques for producing them are pretty costly. IIRC you make them with various metal oxides reacting to form what's called an alcogel which has a 3D lattice of silica molecules with water suspended in the cells of the lattice. The water is forced out of the gel by soaking it in pure alcohol. The new gel is called an alcogel which is then dried supercritically. This forces the alcohol out of the gel leaving only the silica structure left. This process it pretty costly and slow which makes aerogel production sort of unsuitable (for now) in massive scales. There's lots of work being done to find shortcuts in this process, the most promising I recall reading about was to do the supercritical drying in vacuum molding chambers like used in regular plastic molding.
Even cooler than aerogels are hydrogels which instead of being 99.8% air they are like 99% water with a silica lattice structure. There's a bit of work researching hydrogels for use in medicine. Hydrogel strips could be used as bandaids for internal oragans and some other stuff I don't rightly recall at the moment. Aerogels rock.
Your best bet is probably to just act without concent from those above you. Most of the time asking clueless authority figures to take a stance on specific policy is a bad idea. If you tell someone "P2P filesharing is bad" they will extend it to absurd levels of stupidity. You are the administrator, do your job as such.
A good idea is something like dummynet between your internal network and your router. You can throttle bandwidth or add queues (simulates lag) to specific services over your network according to IP addresses or service ports. You can force an even bandwidth distribution between all the hosts connecting through port 80 but throttle back the speed of anything coming through other ports. You don'y necessarily have to block file sharing requests but you can keep them from dominating your network. Once you remove the incentive for people to use P2P services on the school's network they will knock it off.
One group of people you might want to talk to about funding/providing content for would be your local newspaper if you have one. A community website shares many of the same functions as a daily local paper. Community features such as bulletin boards and chat servers could be provided either with a paper subscription or by a small monthly (or yearly) access fee. It might be a local community blog. News articles could be discussed on the forums or in the chat rooms. It might even be pretty useful to have some method of talking to your neighbors about some local bit of news. An article complaining about potholes in the road could spark enough discussions and whatnot that could lead to someone actually fixing the holes in the road.
Of course everyone screams about this without reading up on it. The judge is requiring SB to report the content viewing habits of users of the 4000 series Replay box. The problem with it is the automagic ability to skip over commercials. This always pisses off the TV industry because they can't charge X amount of dollars per commercial slot at certain times if the advertisers can show somehow that the network's audience numbers are too high. The judge is requiring SB to provide statistics on commercial skippingh abits of users in order to decide whether their ReplayTV box actually screws the television networks over as they claim. The home recording cases in the 80s allowed people to use VCRs to record stuff and watch it later (called time shfting) because the commercials were preserved. A recorder that automagically removes commercials doesn't fall under the ruling of those cases.
The retarded part of the whole thing is the TV networks conception that not watching commercials is somehow evil. They don't get money from me watching a McDonalds commercial (even though that is how they charge advertisers), they get money from me buying a Big Mac and a Coke. The only reason they're going after PVRs is because they fuck up their audience statistics. If a show has a specific rating they can assume a certain number of people are watching and charge advertisers accordingly. All an advertisers has to do in negotiations is whip out a paper that says there are a million ReplayTV and not have to pay the netwok as much money as they are charging. It's greed on two fronts screwing over ReplayTV users.
I guess it is sort of fitting that two companies that have recently continued to fail to capitalize on their investments would merge. Compaq bought Digital and failed to really do anything worth while with them. The Alpha was a badass of microprocessor engineering. Had something been made of it the entire industry might have been turned on their head. The 21164 whipped other processors of the time like little bitches. By 2000 only about 500k Alpha systems had been sold. That is bad marketing and poor capitalization. HP for some retarded reason thought the internet bubble boom was going to last for some long period of time and dropped their slow growth steady divisions and spun them off into a separate company. That is another failure to retain their market capitalization. They may sell a lot of computers and not go out of business no one is going to remember them for anything other than for a stupid merger.
....
Jeff Clarke: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Peter Blackmore: We get signal.
Mike Capellas: What !
Blackmore: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's You !!
Carly Fiorina: How are you gentlemen !!
Fiorina: All your Presario are belong to us.
Fiorina: You are on the way to destruction.
Capellas: What you say !!
Fiorina: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Fiorina: HA HA HA HA
Actually that is what I'm getting. I consider it broadband because before I got it my dialup was poking along at 24kbps. I don't see how a 256kb line is not broadband, I may not be pulling down T1 speeds but it suits me fine. The lag is low and I can run Red Carpet or Software Update while playing CS on a different computer with no perceptible detriment in either download speed or lag time in the game. Sure ISDN can get those speeds if you bond a couple channels together but that is pretty cost prohibitive for most people. The higher speed lines are tempting but I dont really don't have heavy throughput so the 256kb line works great for me. Warez kiddies, ISO downloading zealots, and Gnutella whores on the otherhand might see my connection as paltry and unchic.
I guess I'm privilaged or something because I nearly choked on a life saver when I read that some people were paying anywhere from 80 to 100 bucks for cable internet. I pay about 30$ a month for Charter. My pipe my not be a John Holmes but it ain't bad, no one who uses it seems to complain.
I think it is actually a good idea for the FCC to auction off rights to wireless cable to local operators, it will only provide due competition to the incumbant cable operators. There's a wireless company around here that while isn't terribly popular does have enough of a presense in town to keep Charter on their toes in terms of pricing and availability. Widespread situations like that will on the whole be good for consumers, they'll have more options than AOLTW, Adelphia, and COX for pay programming and broadband internet services.
However I do foresee a problem which is sort of inevitable with auctioning off so many small markets. There will be two generations of wireless "cable" availability. The first generation will happen in the next couple years after the spectrum is auctioned off. A huge number of small companies will be providing cheap(er) pay television and broadband internet initially. Logic will follow that because the material cost is so low since they don't have to run hundreds of miles of fiber or coax they will have a higher margin and can charge lower prices. THis will keep up until reality sets in and the debt from the spectrum allocation catches up with them. They'll go under and be forced to sell their aquisitions at a far far lower price than they originally paid, along with their subscribers and equipment. Who will buy this? The local cable and telcom companies who already have a veritable monopoly on those services anyways. Hughes and EchoStar combined have the market penetration of a small cable company. Local wireless operators hooking up with them to provide local television and broadband internet won't be able to provide service cheap enough (in my estimation) to keep themselves afloat and their assets will be passed on. The DBS guys could always aquire the wireless assets in order to grab a huge market for a pretty low cost.
Either way the first generation of companies will band together or get aquired by bigger players in the industry. Sound familiar though? It is what happened to most of the DSL and cable internet companies in the past year or two. The cost of aquiring customers and overhead from their debts was far higher than the money they raked in from subscriptions and selling information to direct marketing companies. They were then aquired by the big boys. Hopefully this doesn't happen but unfortunately it is likely. I would be happy if I were proved wrong though. Being able to get DirecTV and cheap broadband access would be badass.
In real life the structures seen in Hubble photographs are not nearly as colourful as the images lead you to belive. These sorts of images are the net result of various image collecting methods and some digital retouching and fancifying.
To form digital images modern telescopes stick a CCD imager in the place where typical diagrams of telescopes show an eyepiece to be. The CCDs used in astrometric imaging are a vast cut above the pieces of crap in digital cameras. The CCD arrays in many telescopes are hundreds or even thousands of pixels on a side and are cooled by various means in order to cut down on static caused from temperature variations and changes in the electronics. They also differ from consumer models because they do not have a colour mask on them, they only produce greyscale images.
So to take a picture an astronomer points the telescope at a cosmic object, opens the apeture and turns the CCD imager on. To grab colour information in order to perform spectroscopy filters are placed over the CCD imager during exposure. A series of exposures is taken depending on the dimness of the star and the particular part of the spectrum being imaged. Red and infrared light takes the longest to image while blue and ultraviolet take the shortest amount of time (due to the higher energy of the photons). Depending on the equipment available different numbers of exposures are taken. For multi-spectrum images up to 6 exposures are taken IIRC: infrared, red, yellow-orange, green, blue, and ultraviolet. These are each stored as greyscale bitmaps and represent the intensity values for a particular spectrum. For meaningful scientific research these colour spectra are rarely if ever combined, if you're studying characteristics of O and B stars in a nebula you're going to run some analisys algorithms on maybe the blue and ultraviolet images; if you're studying the nebula itself you're going to pay more attention to the IR image because it is going to help you find dust clouds emitting IR radiation. Images ad populus are processed to RGB colour space with the normally imvisible IR and UV bands applied to the red and blue portions of the images respectively to enhance detail. The end result of this process are the images printed in books and magazines and downloaded from space.com.
In reality the objects being imaged are pretty dull looking. Due to the sheer amount of radiative surface area of these objects they don't produce very intense bands of colour. If you were to look through an ultra powerful telescope at the Orion nebula it would look pretty grey and boring to the eye, it would look that way even up close. Remember we're scores of trillions of miles from these objects, to our eyes they are a few arc minutes or seconds across. A single CCD pixel is picking up light front millions of billions miles of radiative surface area. Not only that but the images are processed in such a manner that the compression from 6 channels worth of 8 bit colour values into 3 channels of 8 bit colour values to make colours especially brilliant. Each band is processed with low pass filters and contrast enhancement algorithms to form finer images with less noise. The blooms you mention are artifacts from the spiders holding the secondary reflector in telescopes. In production images these are often enhanced to give a more dramatic look to the image. For research purposes these are almost always filtered out with processing algorithms. Public images from places like space.com are mostly publicity fluff, if you want the really badass images download the ginormous TIFF images from various observatory's websites. These are the closest thing you get to a raw image without manning the telescope yourself.
I think I'm missing some critical component of your question but what exactly makes a 400MHz P2 system slow with Windows 2k and why exactly do you need new systems? Upgrading is great and all but do you REALLY think you need to at this point? I've got Win XP running on a K6-2 with gobs of RAM and it runs great it has a slow hard drive which makes app loading a tad on the slow side in some cases but most of the time it doesn't appear much slower than my Athlon XP 1700 (in anything not dreadfully processor dependant). For most things I wouldn't consider these systems slow unless you're doing heavy graphics work or doing a lot of compiling or plain number crunching.
If you insist on upgrades a good strategy is to stagger the upgrades spreading the process out over a longer period of time. Grab a couple new systems and get them integrated and slowly but surely phase out the older P2 systems. If possible recycle them to take the place of more specialized systems like file servers, firewalls, domain controllers and the like. If you stagger the upgrades you eventually get more for your money because of continued development and you have time to build or merely integrate all of your systems. Getting five workstations meshing with your network is much simpler than getting 50 meshing all at the same time. If you're building them you'll definitely appriciate not trying to do it all at once.
Instead of building them grab refurb units from the major vendors, considering the number of high power systems purchased in the past couple years you can end up with a speedy system for a pretty good price. It makes ghosting a single drive image a bit more difficult than having a homogenous system but it saves you a bit of time. Besides how expensive is it to buy a pack of CD-Rs to burn images for particular families of systems? Some organizational elbow grease and this process is not too difficult. I like color coding systems to make it easy for tech monkies to find the right CD to image a system with. It's lowtech but it works. One color for the manufacturer and a second color for a particular model or family. Just organize your CD images by color and it works fine usually.
Woohoo someone finally mentioned a Miggy. I can relate my story without being entirely off topic. I have proof Miggys still replace Intel based systems. The other day flipping through channels I happened to cross the government access channel. Lo and behold, it was the desktop belonging to none other than an Amiga. Months past that same channel was run by a Windows system. The twist of course is the Miggy has suffered some horrible failure and was outputting an error message to the broadcast. In a retwist an error popping up is the same reason I knew the government access channel was running off a Windows computer. (-1 Useless)
Nintendo and Sony parted ways not because Sony debuted their technology as I recall. Nintendo halfway through the project decided to go with Phillips and their CD-i technology leaving Sony with a bunch of money invested into their CD system. Sony kept developing it because Ken Kutaragi bet his career on it. He thought a game console would be what Sony needed to spurn some demand for their products. Nintendo and Sony got back together about two years later but the deal broke because Sony wanted to do a stand alone system and Nintendo still wanted a add-on for the SNES.
Sony then formed their CEE division with Ken Kutaragi at the helm and launched the PSX. It became ultra popular because they managed to get the big wigs like Capcom and Konami to develop native games as well as port Arcade games to it. It whomped the shit out of the Saturn and Nintendo dropped their CD-ROM add-on plans and hooked up with SGI. I remember at the time there was a good deal of confusion as to what the fuck Nintendo was doing. You were never sure if they were making a stand alone 32-bit console or a add-on for the SNES.
Microsoft I think was in the same position as Sony was in 1992, they had an initiative to get into the game console market but wanted someone more experienced to go in with. What I think people miss is Sony is the Microsoft of Japan. Career minded folks in Japan's electronics industry don't badmouth Sony. With the PSX they were entering into a industry they had no experience in. It was only through learning from Nintendo and Kutaragi's incessant board room bowing and scraping that the PSX saw the light of day.
You mean those were spoofs? Holy baby Jesus!
Bad: No support for any other Unices.
Ok come on dude, how many other Unicies do people regular have on desktop computers? How many of that small percentage have computers that can even run modern games? Then of THAT percentage how many are willing to pay for a port of a game they probably already have the Windows copy of? Think about it, a handful of Linux users with Athlon XP systems does not a viable customer base make. Also OpenGL has never been much of a standard in the gaming industry, it is portable but by no means standard. In 3Dfx's hayday Glide was the API of choice because everybody had a Voodoo accelerator. OpenGl has never really dominated in terms of a 3D graphics API.
Uh..in 1982 you'd be damn fucking lucky if you could find a bit of software that would run on computers from different vendors. The OEMs want to make their own versions of Windows, AMD does not want this. If the top 3 PC OEMs have a version of Windows that is specifically unfriendly to AMD they could make AMD's position in the market a moot point to argue, their market capitalization would disappear unless they managed to find a shitload of software developers that were staunch AMD supporters. Even then the voting dollars of millions of computer users would be backing the Intel backed OEM Windows, not AMD's Windows versions. Like I've said before AMD's strength is running software you've already got faster than their competitors can run it. If they can't even run that software anymore, they become a market casulty.
There is a lot more at stake for AMD than users running WinAmp ad Netscape rather than IE and Media Player. Get past your myopic view of the situation. Twenty years ago there were dozens of OSes each from different vendors. You went with a specific vendor because some vital app you needed was available for that vendor's system. This meant if VisiCalc was only available for Apple ][s and IBM PCs and your job or business required VisiCalc you either bought an Apple or IBM. Systems it didn't run on weren't considered. If SomePopularProgram or SomePopularGame didn't run on the Windows version AMD using OEMs were spitting out AMD would tank pretty quick and they know it.
For fuck sake, haven't you been reading the proposals? What OEMs want is not to just replace IE and Media Player but instead release their own distributions of Windows with whatever software they decided they wanted to include in it. They'd pay Microsoft for their contribution to the package and whoever else they used software from. Instead of just Windows you'd have Delldows, Gatewaydows, and IBMdows. AMD's contention is if this is mandated due to previous unscrupulous business tactics on the part of Microsoft that the market will implode. Every OEM vendor with a different Windows distribution, maintained independently by said vendors. Any sort of homogeny present in Windows would disappear as soon as you had computers from different OEMs. It is bad enough when OEMs package software that they don't maintain and isn't forward compatible with future OS upgrades, one can only imagine how OEMs would fuck up operating systems even more than they do now.
Whether Microsoft's business tactics are right or wrong is moot when you're talking about real world implications of removing the packaging of the OS from the control of Microsoft. A fragmentation of PC's most highly used OS would just lead to a catastrophy in the PC industry. It'd go from Microsoft being the omnipresent corporate entity to some other company who provided some other homogeneous environment for OEM vendors to use. AMD is worried that OEMs with Intel's backing will use an imcompatible version of Windows from the one OEMs using AMD processors have. This fragmentation would effectively turn AMD into a bit player in the industry. Their hook is being able to run software you've already got faster than their competition runs it, if they can't run that software they offer no benefit to their customers who will quickly abandon them, except for a handful of Linux zealots who will defend AMD's honor because they are retarded and think the company is somehow more hallow than any other.
Where do you live, Louisiana? Law is supposed to be up to interpretation, that is how the legal system in 49 out of 50 states work. Interpretive law is a good thing and its merits are far too numerous to list here. Use some neurons to imagine yourself making a defending arguement against a law that didn't use language like "construed" or "reasonably infered". Questioning what can be construed or what is reasonable is like 80% of all defense cases. A reasonable inference is the difference between intent to use and intent to distribute which is the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony.
USb doesn't have enough bandwidth for uncompressed HD video or even compressed DV but it has plenty for an NTSC capture. A crappy motion JPEG NTSC capture only requires about 10Mb/s of bandwidth with an off the top of my head tally. If you're going to get more realistic you'd need even less bandwidth for an NTSC capture because of the way colour information is broadcast. A good video Y/Cr/Cb CODEC designed to grab a composite NTSC signal could probably shave a couple Mb/s off that number. The audio is negligible compared to that. USB video capture toys have been around for a long time, just look around sometime, they're all over and cheap.
Having a couple hundred thousand Macs with gigabit ethernet probably did have something to do with it. Many vendors now offer gigabit ethernet NICs in their professional series systems which means for network infrastructure folks there's a high demand for equipment leading to increased production and a lower cost. Apple's been selling gigabit ethernet standard for almost two years now which amounts to lots of gigabit ethernet cards floating around in Macland.
Stop oohing and ahhing over fucking bash. If you want to teach people the Unix program meme teach them how to fucking think with pipes in mind. Most people when looking for a file would just type find filename or locate filename and then search through the (oftentimes) enormous list of files that comes up. To experienced Unix users this is retarded, they'd pipe find into grep and look for a specific pattern to find a file somewhere. Teaching this method of thinking to non-Unix users is essencial to having them get anything meaningful done.
The "wonders", as zealots put it, of Linux are just a very large collection of small tweaks and hacks that combine the features of dozens to programs to do something useful. The syntactic stuff like the actual commands for listing the contents of a directory are something you can shove onto a reference guide and only need a quick glancing over. Teaching people to REALLY use the tools they've got available is the important part. The file system hierarchy is pretty simple and just given an overview reference for it ought to be enough for people in a MSCD course. Focus on how to configure, start, stop, and importantly RESTART daemons. The damnest thing when running Linux is to not have someone simply poit out that restarting a daemon will make it reload the configuration file. Novice users don't know this and end up doing shutdown -r (or for the more technically adept init 0) instead of just restarting the daemon process itself.
The little tricks experienced users take for granted are the reasons people come to them with a million and one questions on how to do stuff. If novices knew to ps aux | grep process rather than running top and trying to decipher what all the hoobajoob means (and figuring out its backwards fucking commands) they'd be in a much better situation. As it stands too many people introducing Linux to novices go into how great and powerful ls is like it is going to solve world hunger or something. Brush over the simple commands and hunker down over combining those simple commands to do really spectacular things. Impressing people doesn't mean shit, don't try wowing people with virtual desktops or consoles. No one gives a fuck about "true" multitasking or telneting into some server somewhere. Show people how to get stuff done rather than harping on how great your OS is.
The one size fits all desktop is exactly what made both Apple and Microsoft a good deal of money. You can sit down at just about anybody's Windows 9X/NT computer and get to work pretty quickly. If you're writing a application for Windows you know where to write your configuration information and put the binaries and know for the most part what libraries you can and can't link to without providing them yourself.
/bin directories do you REALLY need?
The Linux roll your own and be an individual while doing it mentality creates a giant hodge podge ad hoc operating system. Linux in its bazaar style of development have turned it into an amalgamation of features and configurations. Honestly, how many
A one size fits all OS is what most users really want and in some cases need. Too many options is as bad as not enough options. Microsoft doing a geek release of Windows wouldn't have done anything to increase Microsoft's popularity. You wouldn't get it for free and it will still be the product of a company Linux users zealously despise.
What Lycoris does that none of the other Linux distros really do is limit your options (maybe some do but why nitpick). Contrary to the belief of Linux users in basements around the globe, this is not a bad thing. Lycoris does right where others have done wrong. Instead of giving the option of a billion different file managers and command line ftp clients they simplified the software package down to something manageable. One serious hurdle in a Linux installation is knowing what programs you want and which you don't want.
RedHat, SuSE, and Debian cater to the everything comes in a single box paradigm. This is great for the people who've used Linux before and have a feel for certain apps and thus choose to install them. Others have a feel for different apps and thus install those, this continues until there's a dozen dozen various installations of the same distribution. For people new to Linux this is wholly confusing, I've been using Linux for years and I still get confused when I've got six CDs full of stuff. I think Lycoris fits into a very nice niche of Linux users, ones who want to just turn something on and get work done. Like the tag line it seems like it could be very nice for general consumers as they'd be hard pressed to tell you what operating system was on their computer anyhow.
Hopefully the companies building beige box PCs bundling Linux will take note of Lycoris and give it a bit of a bigger install base and popularize it. RedHat is a good company but it seems like they're definitely going in a more corporate user direction which is of course fine, more power to them.
So..open source is the solution to all of life's problems. I guess that means despite evidense to the contrary Blackdown really DOES have JIT support and is the fastest JVM ever made? Man I'm sure glad you told me that so I don't have to believe the Blackdown group's lies anymore.
The protons and electrons go through a reverse beta decay to form neutrons and neutrinos. Not all protons and electrons are consumed in this fashion which lets the following ideas progress, the outter shell of a neutron star is covered with a bunch of high energy electrons and protons exisiting in the crust of the neutron star can be in a super fluidic state making the neutron star a gigantic super conductor. Electrons being annhihilated on the surface release X-Rays which get funneled by the intend magnetic field of the super conducting protons into beams which create the effect we dub a pulsar.