I sort of wondered about NN's multi-platform plans because I got so pissed off at what happened with BG1&2. I bought copies of BG1&2 (and ToSC) for the PC but I never had the option of JUST getting Mac binaries if I registered with Bioware or something. I already had the media resources, all I wanted was the binaries to play on my Powerbook. They wanted me to fork over even more money to get CDs that only varied from the ones I had by about 1%. They wouldn't be losing any money by giving me a free binary for Mac because I wasn't about to buy the game a second time. I've given Bioware alot of money over the years because I really like playing their AD&D games and have felt before that they were unappriciative of that fact. That's where my query comes from.
What would be really cool even though it is stretching the bounds of reality to the breaking point would be releasing all three OS builds of NWN in a single box. It works financially because you don't need to ship and stock three different packages and don't have to print three different sets of CDs. All of the resource data on the CDs in the same the only differences lie in the binaries. It isn't like they're going to somehow cut into their own sales. I don't buy a game I already own for another OS. I didn't buy a second copy of Quake3 for my Powerbook (which barely runs it) because I'd already paid for all their creative work once. I wasn't going to pay another 40$ for a 1% change in the contents of the CD. The only reason I waited to buy D2 was to see if they'd release a multi-OS package which they did. For 20$ I got D2 that runs fine on PCs and Macs. I can play at home on my PC or when I'm out and about on my Powerbook or take it over to my friend's house for some necromancing monster killifying spell casting blasting monster ass into non-existance. I'd also like to be able to import my characters from BG 1&2 and IWD with my Ankheg plate mail and Ol'Withery.
Not to be insulting but you ought to think about taking and astronomy/cosmology class at a local school (Uni or community college) or maybe even a privately run planetarium. It might cost you a few bucks to take the class and buy course materials but you'll learn alot and by the end you'll have learned a bit. A good telescope is useless without having an idea of where to point it.
As for software and hardware The Sky for Windows and Mac is a good program which I've used before. You get the basic stuff like star positions and all that jazz but it also has a library of objects so you can look up useful data on different objects in the sky. It also has a night viewing mode where it reddens your monitor (for use on a laptop in the field) so you don't ruin your night vision. I can't really vouch for any other software because I've had The Sky on my powerbook for a while. There's a ton of open source astronomy software all over the place. The key to it all is knowing what sort of information you're seeing which goes back to taking an astronomy course somewhere. For hardware...that is a difficult suggestion. I'd say go for a good pair of binoculars at first with a nice size primary lens before you think about a telescope. Getting a telescope is a big investment for amateur astronomy and might leave you with an overwealming sense of "what the fuck do I do now".There's not a whole ton of stuff you're going to see with a telescope you can't see with a good pair of binoculars.
Another way to get aquainted with stuff is attend star parties. Check your local community college, university, or private planetarium for fliers advertising star parties or amateur astronomy groups. Alot of them will readily help you out getting into amateur astronomy. Once you're introduced to amateur astronomy and decide you like it get more expensive equipment, after you know what you're investing money in and have the ability to use it properly.
Load reduces voltage. Your battery under ideal conditions may output at 12 volts but if it is under heavy load the voltage is going to drop quite a bit. Also an actual measurement from the energy in a battery is amperage not voltage. If the amperage of the batteries was greater after his device ran it would have generated energy by working but there was no test for that. Voltage don't mean shit because it is the amps that are the energy carriers not voltage.
Of course IDE has its place, my PC isn't humming along with 10k rpm SCSI drives (yet). However if I'm asked to do a professional setup I'm going to ask for a couple extra bucks for a SCSI drive because most situations don't call for massive files to be transfered back and forth. In most retail applications you're doing alot of small transactions which are going to be done alot faster with a SCSI setup.
While slashdotters will bitch and moan about this because they are quick to jump to conclusions this moratorium comes after several internet (cafe) related crimes in Southern California in the past couple months. A UC Irvine student raped and killed a teenage girl he met online a couple months ago. Then the stabbing of the guy recently. This is a moratorium on any NEW establishments opening in Garden Grove for 45 days while other provisions say minors not accompanied by an adult have to leave after 8pm on days where the next day is a school day (Sunday - Thursday) and 10pm on Friday and Saturday. It sucks it had to happen because it means not enough parents are keeping tabs on their fucking kids. The cafes themselves also aren't charging people anything to be on the property so people are inclined to hang out for free which is just a welcome sign for people you'd just as soon not have around.
IDE hard drives are very dumb. They are given commands and execute them in the order they are received and require the guidance of a parental figure in order to work properly. They also can't bear to be alone while they do work of any kind. Any time an IDE drive processes a command it takes full control of the IDE bus and cannot release it until all commands issued are complete. If you occupy two channels on an IDE bus one of the drives is going to be losing out hardcore to the other drive when it comes to throughput. If you really want a reliable storage system under either Windows or Linux go with SCSI drives rather than IDE. SCSI drives are smart and don't need their hand held while doing work. SCSI drives will reorder read/write requests so the order they're executed is the most efficient order not just the order received. They also get a command and relinquish control over the bus when they are given commands and can hold commands in a queue until they can get some bandwidth on the bus again. Adding a second drive to a SCSI bus doesn't ruin the performance like with IDE drives. Drives can also talk to one another independent of the host system which means transfering data from a hard drive to CD-R doesn't require the total control of the host CPU like it would with IDE. Meanwhile you can still read and write data to another drive that isn't being used to burn a CD without making anything crap out on you. SCSI costs more but you get better performance out of it. You can pretty readily find 9GB SCSI drives for under 100$ and a couple of them on a RAID controller ought to provide you with plenty of throughput for a long time.
Ok 8 ports of dedicated bandwidth doesn't mean shit on a slow drive. If you ran an ATA100 drive at ATA33 you wouldn't notice any difference at all in IO speed. Reason being is the internal transfer rate on a 5400 or 7200 rpm drive is slow enough not to be able to max the bandwidth of the bus it resides on. Having 8 individual ports don't mean shit in terms of throughput if your drives aren't fast enough. However with 8 7200rpm SCSI drives on the same bus you're going to maximize the bus bandwidth because none of the drives themselves can max it out but all together they shouldn't have any problem. The SCSI drives aren't going to shit themselves maxing out the bandwidth either because they individually support command queueing and can hold up to 256 commands waiting for some bandwidth on the bus to become available. They're also reordering file read/write requests as to do as little seeking between RWs as possible storing data in their often times much larger buffer. IDE drives fetch and write files in the order they are commanded, often not the most efficient order. The 8 SCSI drives are also going to stand up to thermal stress much better than IDE drives and for the most part have a higher MTBF than their IDE counterparts. Given the choice of a single 40gb IDE drive or 40GB (4x9.1GB SCSI RAID-0/5x9.1GB RAID-5) I'd definitely go with the SCSI option even though I'm paying alot more up front. Shit I'd go with a single SCSI drive over the single IDE drive especially if I'm handling a bunch of small files. The SCSI drive's command reordering is going to be much more efficient grabbing a bunch of small files and acting as a swap partition than the IDE drive is. Don't be so easily misled by the marketing claims of IDE devices, external transfer rates aren't nearly as important as internal ones.
Because a postal inspector can arrest your ass doesn't make them a government agency. They are a private business which happens to have an exclusive government contract to deliver mail within the US. It doesn't make any difference what laws are in place to keep people from fucking with the mail they are a private company and get cash by charging you money to deliver mail. You can get fined and jailed for interfering with a federally funded building project conducted by a federally contracted company but it doesn't make said construction company a government agency.
Talent != equipment. You can do a film is craptastic 8mm with butcher paper soaked in crisco as a lens and still make a rad movie if you've got a smidgen of talent behind the camera and it helps to have some in front of the camera too. I'd rather have a real 8-way system than a cluster-in-a-box. The 8-way with the right software is going to be alot more productive than an 8-node cluster limited to batch rendering stuff I throw at it. Shit I'd rather have four dual processor systems with fast storage systems and 4 talented guys on them rather than 8 processors and one talented guy.
Better monitors will come with the HD-15/DB-15 adapter so you can jam them on older Macs. My Samsung SyncMaster 900p I got in 99' came with such an adapter though I didn't need it to hook up to my PowerBook. As for the ADC it is just a normal DVI connection with extra pins for USB and power. Not only can you get adapters to run DVI displays from ADC equipped towers but you can also get DVI versions of both Studio and Cinema display flat panels from Apple. They cost the same IIRC but require a special order. AFAIK the GeForce cards have two ports (one VGA and one ADC) but only the Twin View GF2MX uses both at once.
Blatant conflict of interest? The USPS is not a fucking government agency. They are merely another government contractor needing to make some dough. USPS's management has nothing to do with a DOJ lawsuit against anybody. If there were giant MSN posters hanging off the sides of the White House it would be a blatant conflict of interest but not some poster in a USPS branch office. They are a private fucking company and can do what they want to make cash. I'd rather yet another poster at the post office no one pays attention to than 5$ stamps.
If you want to use a cluster to do the final rendering that might work but you can't use a cluster as a workstation. In order to have cache coherence and whatnot processors need a high speed low latency connection (latency being measured in nano seconds) not be connected by a NIC through the south bridge on the memory controller. If you were to stick 8 Celerons on a single node somehow then you'd give an Octane a run for its money.
Most AOL users don't know what an operating system is so putting Linux on a CD wouldn't accomplish too much. AOLinux "So difficult no wonder it ain't number 1".
By definition a monopoly can't be extended as it already owns as much market is available. If they REALLY are a monopoly what in the fuck is my Powerbook doing here and how come I can format a hard drive and stick AnyOS I want on it. Linux zealots needs to learn the fucking definitions of the words they use.
Keeping track of 200k signatures will be a logistical nightmare? What the hell are you talking about? How many millions of credit and debit cards exist in the world? How many does a single bank issue? Cripe man. As for signing documents...that is just encryption. You have your public key off somewhere and keep the private key on a smart card. Your smart card would have an info file about you and contain your public and private keys (the private key being protected by a password or biometric key). You'd sign the document and add the signature as an attachment to a document. Somebody would get it and grab your public key from something as basic as an HTTP server and verify that the document they received was as you sent it. Easy to crack no. If you're using 128-bit encryption you're pretty set though it'd be even better to use larger keyspaces. Dnet's RC5-64 has been on since 1998 and still hasn't found the key. They're pumping through millions of keys per day. So easy to crack, no. Hard to maintain, no.
I just got myself a new Athlon XP 1700 with a Shuttle AK31 motherboard. It's a nice improvement over the K6-2 350 I was using before which was standing in for a dual P3-500 system that has a nuked motherboard. The new Athlon XP/MPs are based on the Palomino core which cycle per cycle get more done and use less power. The XP 1500's IIRC start at 1.3GHz while the 1900 is around 1.6GHz. The new Durons are based on the Morgan core and start at 1GHz and go up from there. They are a Palomino core with smaller caches and a slower FSB (200MHz as opposed to 266MHz). A 1GHz Duron is still a badass when used with a KT266A though even being slower than the Athlon. CS runs at the highest resolution with all of the video and audio goodness enabled with no problem on a GeForce2MX (salvaged from the previously mentioned dead P3). I think the only thing that manages to push the processor is d.net and Winamp visualizations.
You either have something to do a digital to analog conversion in the CD-ROM drive itself and run a wire between the CD drive and your sound card which passes those signals through or you use bypass the CD drive's DAC and use a DAC on the sound card. Either way you're doing a digital to analog conversion and would be hard pressed to be able to distinguish a difference as a DAC is a DAC and either DAC you run the data through is converting the same data to something you can hear. In fact using the CD drive's DAC and a audio patch cable is MORE prone to noise and static than using the sound card's DAC.
The cost per minute on a satellite stems from the expense of bandwidth on a satellite. A single transponder can only handle so many simultaneous uplinks before individual connections become unreliable. For a single band from a particular bird you only have X bandwidth so if you want a higher throughput you charge more mula so people don't stay connected as long and thus more people are able to connect during the course of a day. You don't want to get a "Network Busy" error in the middle of the Pacific with a broken drive shaft.
If you've got the forsight to send somebody out into the world with a portable satellite link you should have the forsight to offer some sort of file sharing mechanism they can effectively use. Nobody is going to be fucking buying one of these to VPN into a company's servers from their cozy casbah in the middle of the desert. For the price per minute cost (probably close to Inmarsat) it would be costly to do anything but broadcast pertinent information. Also DirecTV is streaming video, they have made it work. The irony is you were suggesting streaming video MIGHT work yet satellite television companies have been proving you right for decades now.
Should be acceptable for streaming video? Shouldn't somebody tell those DirecTV folks their whole system might not work? As for high latency and handshaking why would you be using a small network file sharing protocol like SMB/CIFS to share files over the internet rather than something like WebDAV which works much better under high latency conditions.
Cool but...why not use a hydrocarbon fuel rather than pure hydrogen? Hydrogen is for the most part merely an energy transfer device not an energy storage device. Any time you talk about the energy stores in X amount of hydrogen you're REALLY talking about X amount of energy the hydrogen is transporting from one place to another.
To get hydrogen out of somewhere it is happy being requires energy, putting it somewhere it doesn't feel like going requires energy, and finally getting it out of the last place to stuck it because you're being finicky requires energy. Thus the energy you originally put into it to get it out of where it was happy being eventually ends up going into some eletrical thingamajig. The only way to close that loop (to make it efficient) is to get that original energy from Mr.Sun. However that part costs money AND energy because the second law of thermodynamics is not "solar panels will form out of random bits of silicon for your enjoyment".
In the case of hydrocarbons some unsuspecting group of organisms has for millions of years toiled away to put energy in the form of hydrogen into a substance. Said hydrogen is pretty happy there so it is cheaper to just move the hydrogen's home (the hydrocarbon) and evict it later when you have it near the site of energy conversion. Since the toiling is already done (in true open source fashion pun intended) why not use that pent up energy in the hydrocarbon to produce some emergency energy. It'd be much more marketable. You go to a gas station, fill up a propane tank, hook it to your fuel cell unit and energy issues forth as the liquified propane decides without the stopcock in the way it is free to expand to limits never before sought by propane molecules. Hydrogen's energy loop is much shorter than that of hydrocarbons meaning it costs you the user more per unit of energy to use some form of pure extracted hydrogen until solar power systems reach efficiencies and prices that can be more easily marginalized.
There's far too many areas where solar power just isn't going to work. If you live in New Mexico and Arizona it'd be fine as you're getting a ton of sunlight all year. If you live in Washington or Maine you'd be wasting your money. Solar panels are a cool idea for SOME areas to ease their electrical burden on a power grid but aren't for everybody. It'd be more efficient to use the Sun to produce more hydrogen for use in fuel cells that are making more water. Except for the energy coming in from the Sun it is a closed loop system that will work as long as light is shining down onto the ground.
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I sort of wondered about NN's multi-platform plans because I got so pissed off at what happened with BG1&2. I bought copies of BG1&2 (and ToSC) for the PC but I never had the option of JUST getting Mac binaries if I registered with Bioware or something. I already had the media resources, all I wanted was the binaries to play on my Powerbook. They wanted me to fork over even more money to get CDs that only varied from the ones I had by about 1%. They wouldn't be losing any money by giving me a free binary for Mac because I wasn't about to buy the game a second time. I've given Bioware alot of money over the years because I really like playing their AD&D games and have felt before that they were unappriciative of that fact. That's where my query comes from.
What would be really cool even though it is stretching the bounds of reality to the breaking point would be releasing all three OS builds of NWN in a single box. It works financially because you don't need to ship and stock three different packages and don't have to print three different sets of CDs. All of the resource data on the CDs in the same the only differences lie in the binaries. It isn't like they're going to somehow cut into their own sales. I don't buy a game I already own for another OS. I didn't buy a second copy of Quake3 for my Powerbook (which barely runs it) because I'd already paid for all their creative work once. I wasn't going to pay another 40$ for a 1% change in the contents of the CD. The only reason I waited to buy D2 was to see if they'd release a multi-OS package which they did. For 20$ I got D2 that runs fine on PCs and Macs. I can play at home on my PC or when I'm out and about on my Powerbook or take it over to my friend's house for some necromancing monster killifying spell casting blasting monster ass into non-existance. I'd also like to be able to import my characters from BG 1&2 and IWD with my Ankheg plate mail and Ol'Withery.
Not to be insulting but you ought to think about taking and astronomy/cosmology class at a local school (Uni or community college) or maybe even a privately run planetarium. It might cost you a few bucks to take the class and buy course materials but you'll learn alot and by the end you'll have learned a bit. A good telescope is useless without having an idea of where to point it.
As for software and hardware The Sky for Windows and Mac is a good program which I've used before. You get the basic stuff like star positions and all that jazz but it also has a library of objects so you can look up useful data on different objects in the sky. It also has a night viewing mode where it reddens your monitor (for use on a laptop in the field) so you don't ruin your night vision. I can't really vouch for any other software because I've had The Sky on my powerbook for a while. There's a ton of open source astronomy software all over the place. The key to it all is knowing what sort of information you're seeing which goes back to taking an astronomy course somewhere. For hardware...that is a difficult suggestion. I'd say go for a good pair of binoculars at first with a nice size primary lens before you think about a telescope. Getting a telescope is a big investment for amateur astronomy and might leave you with an overwealming sense of "what the fuck do I do now".There's not a whole ton of stuff you're going to see with a telescope you can't see with a good pair of binoculars.
Another way to get aquainted with stuff is attend star parties. Check your local community college, university, or private planetarium for fliers advertising star parties or amateur astronomy groups. Alot of them will readily help you out getting into amateur astronomy. Once you're introduced to amateur astronomy and decide you like it get more expensive equipment, after you know what you're investing money in and have the ability to use it properly.
Load reduces voltage. Your battery under ideal conditions may output at 12 volts but if it is under heavy load the voltage is going to drop quite a bit. Also an actual measurement from the energy in a battery is amperage not voltage. If the amperage of the batteries was greater after his device ran it would have generated energy by working but there was no test for that. Voltage don't mean shit because it is the amps that are the energy carriers not voltage.
Of course IDE has its place, my PC isn't humming along with 10k rpm SCSI drives (yet). However if I'm asked to do a professional setup I'm going to ask for a couple extra bucks for a SCSI drive because most situations don't call for massive files to be transfered back and forth. In most retail applications you're doing alot of small transactions which are going to be done alot faster with a SCSI setup.
While slashdotters will bitch and moan about this because they are quick to jump to conclusions this moratorium comes after several internet (cafe) related crimes in Southern California in the past couple months. A UC Irvine student raped and killed a teenage girl he met online a couple months ago. Then the stabbing of the guy recently. This is a moratorium on any NEW establishments opening in Garden Grove for 45 days while other provisions say minors not accompanied by an adult have to leave after 8pm on days where the next day is a school day (Sunday - Thursday) and 10pm on Friday and Saturday. It sucks it had to happen because it means not enough parents are keeping tabs on their fucking kids. The cafes themselves also aren't charging people anything to be on the property so people are inclined to hang out for free which is just a welcome sign for people you'd just as soon not have around.
IDE hard drives are very dumb. They are given commands and execute them in the order they are received and require the guidance of a parental figure in order to work properly. They also can't bear to be alone while they do work of any kind. Any time an IDE drive processes a command it takes full control of the IDE bus and cannot release it until all commands issued are complete. If you occupy two channels on an IDE bus one of the drives is going to be losing out hardcore to the other drive when it comes to throughput. If you really want a reliable storage system under either Windows or Linux go with SCSI drives rather than IDE. SCSI drives are smart and don't need their hand held while doing work. SCSI drives will reorder read/write requests so the order they're executed is the most efficient order not just the order received. They also get a command and relinquish control over the bus when they are given commands and can hold commands in a queue until they can get some bandwidth on the bus again. Adding a second drive to a SCSI bus doesn't ruin the performance like with IDE drives. Drives can also talk to one another independent of the host system which means transfering data from a hard drive to CD-R doesn't require the total control of the host CPU like it would with IDE. Meanwhile you can still read and write data to another drive that isn't being used to burn a CD without making anything crap out on you. SCSI costs more but you get better performance out of it. You can pretty readily find 9GB SCSI drives for under 100$ and a couple of them on a RAID controller ought to provide you with plenty of throughput for a long time.
Ok 8 ports of dedicated bandwidth doesn't mean shit on a slow drive. If you ran an ATA100 drive at ATA33 you wouldn't notice any difference at all in IO speed. Reason being is the internal transfer rate on a 5400 or 7200 rpm drive is slow enough not to be able to max the bandwidth of the bus it resides on. Having 8 individual ports don't mean shit in terms of throughput if your drives aren't fast enough. However with 8 7200rpm SCSI drives on the same bus you're going to maximize the bus bandwidth because none of the drives themselves can max it out but all together they shouldn't have any problem. The SCSI drives aren't going to shit themselves maxing out the bandwidth either because they individually support command queueing and can hold up to 256 commands waiting for some bandwidth on the bus to become available. They're also reordering file read/write requests as to do as little seeking between RWs as possible storing data in their often times much larger buffer. IDE drives fetch and write files in the order they are commanded, often not the most efficient order. The 8 SCSI drives are also going to stand up to thermal stress much better than IDE drives and for the most part have a higher MTBF than their IDE counterparts. Given the choice of a single 40gb IDE drive or 40GB (4x9.1GB SCSI RAID-0/5x9.1GB RAID-5) I'd definitely go with the SCSI option even though I'm paying alot more up front. Shit I'd go with a single SCSI drive over the single IDE drive especially if I'm handling a bunch of small files. The SCSI drive's command reordering is going to be much more efficient grabbing a bunch of small files and acting as a swap partition than the IDE drive is. Don't be so easily misled by the marketing claims of IDE devices, external transfer rates aren't nearly as important as internal ones.
Because a postal inspector can arrest your ass doesn't make them a government agency. They are a private business which happens to have an exclusive government contract to deliver mail within the US. It doesn't make any difference what laws are in place to keep people from fucking with the mail they are a private company and get cash by charging you money to deliver mail. You can get fined and jailed for interfering with a federally funded building project conducted by a federally contracted company but it doesn't make said construction company a government agency.
Talent != equipment. You can do a film is craptastic 8mm with butcher paper soaked in crisco as a lens and still make a rad movie if you've got a smidgen of talent behind the camera and it helps to have some in front of the camera too. I'd rather have a real 8-way system than a cluster-in-a-box. The 8-way with the right software is going to be alot more productive than an 8-node cluster limited to batch rendering stuff I throw at it. Shit I'd rather have four dual processor systems with fast storage systems and 4 talented guys on them rather than 8 processors and one talented guy.
Better monitors will come with the HD-15/DB-15 adapter so you can jam them on older Macs. My Samsung SyncMaster 900p I got in 99' came with such an adapter though I didn't need it to hook up to my PowerBook. As for the ADC it is just a normal DVI connection with extra pins for USB and power. Not only can you get adapters to run DVI displays from ADC equipped towers but you can also get DVI versions of both Studio and Cinema display flat panels from Apple. They cost the same IIRC but require a special order. AFAIK the GeForce cards have two ports (one VGA and one ADC) but only the Twin View GF2MX uses both at once.
Blatant conflict of interest? The USPS is not a fucking government agency. They are merely another government contractor needing to make some dough. USPS's management has nothing to do with a DOJ lawsuit against anybody. If there were giant MSN posters hanging off the sides of the White House it would be a blatant conflict of interest but not some poster in a USPS branch office. They are a private fucking company and can do what they want to make cash. I'd rather yet another poster at the post office no one pays attention to than 5$ stamps.
If you want to use a cluster to do the final rendering that might work but you can't use a cluster as a workstation. In order to have cache coherence and whatnot processors need a high speed low latency connection (latency being measured in nano seconds) not be connected by a NIC through the south bridge on the memory controller. If you were to stick 8 Celerons on a single node somehow then you'd give an Octane a run for its money.
Most AOL users don't know what an operating system is so putting Linux on a CD wouldn't accomplish too much. AOLinux "So difficult no wonder it ain't number 1".
By definition a monopoly can't be extended as it already owns as much market is available. If they REALLY are a monopoly what in the fuck is my Powerbook doing here and how come I can format a hard drive and stick AnyOS I want on it. Linux zealots needs to learn the fucking definitions of the words they use.
*shakes head*
If it was supposed to be funny it failed to be. If it was a serious statement turn your phone 90 degrees to the left and dial the number again.
Keeping track of 200k signatures will be a logistical nightmare? What the hell are you talking about? How many millions of credit and debit cards exist in the world? How many does a single bank issue? Cripe man. As for signing documents...that is just encryption. You have your public key off somewhere and keep the private key on a smart card. Your smart card would have an info file about you and contain your public and private keys (the private key being protected by a password or biometric key). You'd sign the document and add the signature as an attachment to a document. Somebody would get it and grab your public key from something as basic as an HTTP server and verify that the document they received was as you sent it. Easy to crack no. If you're using 128-bit encryption you're pretty set though it'd be even better to use larger keyspaces. Dnet's RC5-64 has been on since 1998 and still hasn't found the key. They're pumping through millions of keys per day. So easy to crack, no. Hard to maintain, no.
I just got myself a new Athlon XP 1700 with a Shuttle AK31 motherboard. It's a nice improvement over the K6-2 350 I was using before which was standing in for a dual P3-500 system that has a nuked motherboard. The new Athlon XP/MPs are based on the Palomino core which cycle per cycle get more done and use less power. The XP 1500's IIRC start at 1.3GHz while the 1900 is around 1.6GHz. The new Durons are based on the Morgan core and start at 1GHz and go up from there. They are a Palomino core with smaller caches and a slower FSB (200MHz as opposed to 266MHz). A 1GHz Duron is still a badass when used with a KT266A though even being slower than the Athlon. CS runs at the highest resolution with all of the video and audio goodness enabled with no problem on a GeForce2MX (salvaged from the previously mentioned dead P3). I think the only thing that manages to push the processor is d.net and Winamp visualizations.
You either have something to do a digital to analog conversion in the CD-ROM drive itself and run a wire between the CD drive and your sound card which passes those signals through or you use bypass the CD drive's DAC and use a DAC on the sound card. Either way you're doing a digital to analog conversion and would be hard pressed to be able to distinguish a difference as a DAC is a DAC and either DAC you run the data through is converting the same data to something you can hear. In fact using the CD drive's DAC and a audio patch cable is MORE prone to noise and static than using the sound card's DAC.
The cost per minute on a satellite stems from the expense of bandwidth on a satellite. A single transponder can only handle so many simultaneous uplinks before individual connections become unreliable. For a single band from a particular bird you only have X bandwidth so if you want a higher throughput you charge more mula so people don't stay connected as long and thus more people are able to connect during the course of a day. You don't want to get a "Network Busy" error in the middle of the Pacific with a broken drive shaft.
If you've got the forsight to send somebody out into the world with a portable satellite link you should have the forsight to offer some sort of file sharing mechanism they can effectively use. Nobody is going to be fucking buying one of these to VPN into a company's servers from their cozy casbah in the middle of the desert. For the price per minute cost (probably close to Inmarsat) it would be costly to do anything but broadcast pertinent information. Also DirecTV is streaming video, they have made it work. The irony is you were suggesting streaming video MIGHT work yet satellite television companies have been proving you right for decades now.
Methanol is a hydrocarbon derivitive because it contains something else besides hydrogen and carbon.
Should be acceptable for streaming video? Shouldn't somebody tell those DirecTV folks their whole system might not work? As for high latency and handshaking why would you be using a small network file sharing protocol like SMB/CIFS to share files over the internet rather than something like WebDAV which works much better under high latency conditions.
Cool but...why not use a hydrocarbon fuel rather than pure hydrogen? Hydrogen is for the most part merely an energy transfer device not an energy storage device. Any time you talk about the energy stores in X amount of hydrogen you're REALLY talking about X amount of energy the hydrogen is transporting from one place to another.
To get hydrogen out of somewhere it is happy being requires energy, putting it somewhere it doesn't feel like going requires energy, and finally getting it out of the last place to stuck it because you're being finicky requires energy. Thus the energy you originally put into it to get it out of where it was happy being eventually ends up going into some eletrical thingamajig. The only way to close that loop (to make it efficient) is to get that original energy from Mr.Sun. However that part costs money AND energy because the second law of thermodynamics is not "solar panels will form out of random bits of silicon for your enjoyment".
In the case of hydrocarbons some unsuspecting group of organisms has for millions of years toiled away to put energy in the form of hydrogen into a substance. Said hydrogen is pretty happy there so it is cheaper to just move the hydrogen's home (the hydrocarbon) and evict it later when you have it near the site of energy conversion. Since the toiling is already done (in true open source fashion pun intended) why not use that pent up energy in the hydrocarbon to produce some emergency energy. It'd be much more marketable. You go to a gas station, fill up a propane tank, hook it to your fuel cell unit and energy issues forth as the liquified propane decides without the stopcock in the way it is free to expand to limits never before sought by propane molecules. Hydrogen's energy loop is much shorter than that of hydrocarbons meaning it costs you the user more per unit of energy to use some form of pure extracted hydrogen until solar power systems reach efficiencies and prices that can be more easily marginalized.
There's far too many areas where solar power just isn't going to work. If you live in New Mexico and Arizona it'd be fine as you're getting a ton of sunlight all year. If you live in Washington or Maine you'd be wasting your money. Solar panels are a cool idea for SOME areas to ease their electrical burden on a power grid but aren't for everybody. It'd be more efficient to use the Sun to produce more hydrogen for use in fuel cells that are making more water. Except for the energy coming in from the Sun it is a closed loop system that will work as long as light is shining down onto the ground.