The military needs more money to shoot people with. The reason this crap is being addressed now is because the military is moving into a generation of unmanned vehicles as many have already pointed out. They're also making soldiers increasingly electronic from night vision to GPS systems. If someone can hack (crack) into an army's eletronic (C4 infrastructure) they can control the army. I see the "21st century soldier" stuff and just laugh. Instead of making soldiers more independant technology makes them more dependant on a base of operations. The digital soldier's effectiveness only lasts as long as his (her) battery. Eletronic toys will also have to be heavily protected from the environment which adds to their weight and bulkiness. After a while soldiers will be entirely dependant on technology for mobility and survival in the field. Want to cripple a ground unit? Fly over them with bombers releasing lightweight radio reflective chaff with small amounts of radio static causing isotopes. A cheap and easy way to keep your enemies from phoning home. Want to get more complex? Arm your army with a bunch of HERF guns and lay waste to your electronic opponents. The US military's vision of fighting in the future is fundamentally flawed, radio reflective chaff and HERF guns are cheap, with a little bit of cash and know-how you can build some low yield nuclear bombs. You don't use them to obliderate cities, you shoot them up into the ionosphere and detonate them to create one whammy of an EMP. Keep IT Simple Stupid.
If you're really interested in 2D graphics rather than 3D stuff think about an ATI. ATI cards have REALLY good colour control and display (at least they do on Windows and Mac boxes). I bet the Fury Maxx would be a pretty decent card for you, it's dual head and has plenty of framebuffer room. I've found a good monitor and good colour control are better in graphics/publishing than raw speed.
Diamond's drivers for the Viper 770 et al. are just nVidia drivers with enhancements. nVidia makes the drivers for the CHIP, Diamond extends that for the hardware on the video card. S-Video out and special memory configurations and such would be what Diamond's drivers take care of. One of the reasons the Diamond cards don't have Win2k (go flame yourself) drivers is because nVidia is working on new chip drivers which the card manufacturers need to build a new driver set.
I didn't meantion that because it's debateable whether or not proprietary formats are "bad". You wouldnt want your encryption algorithms open sourced. A single "proprietary" document format would be much better than a free spec, that way everyone could build a reader/parser/manipulator that would behave in the same fashion as someone else's with a standard document spec.
Whether or not the Barron's article holds water is moot, the fact that people are starting to tread carefully around the "netconomy" is so rad. Everyone will fall victim to cash flow at some time, despite what everyone thinks about e-commerce. A majority of the new internet based companies are service providers, a service business is VERY EXPENSIVE. Manpower is expensive especially when a company needs oodles of noodles of programmers to maintain their site. What I bet you'll see is all the damn nitche market companies start to die off, ones that need 10 million a year to operate but don't make nearly enough to keep running. It used to be an IPO was to get EXTRA cash to cover expensions, aquisitions, mergers, ect. not a quick and easy way to get some attention and make the CEOs billionaires overnight. If you take a step back all these net companies start to look like well funded get-rich-quick schemes. Build a website, get alot of people to check it out at least once, then overevaluate it's stock price. The investors sell out with their chunk of the cash and buy Ferraris and 5 bedroom houses in San Jose. If you want a successful internet company watch television for a day, the stuff that makes money on television will make money on the internet being related media types. Entertainment, edutainment, and product sales. E-companies also forget an important thing, money. You need to CHARGE for your services rather than give them away for free. Advertisement revenue does not make nearly as much money as charging for services. People need to visit your site for the ads to work. If a million people visit in a single day you make alot of money, if after the first day only ten people come to the site you're screwed. You want to know a good way to charge for services? SUBSCRIPTIONS! Magazines and newspapers have been doing this for centuries! With subscriptions all you need is that first million page hits. AOL makes their billions in part to subscriptions, the subscriptions don't make the company money, they save them money. Every person on AOL subscribes to view advertising and product promotion, AOL's cash cow. Their internet connection (cost distributed among millions of users) only costs AOL 15$ at most, then on top of that AOL gets another 6.50$ that covers regulatory and rental fees. But for every 21.50$ that a user costs AOL they make them 1,000$ from advertising, affiliates, promotions and the like. If you want to start a company on the internet ask yourself what you can provide to people, then ask how much it's worth to them, give them a discount, charge them for services, use them to make you money, and lastly, niches are for weenies.
Government agencies really ought to take note of GNU software. One of the biggest reasons is price, an office of FreeBSD or Linux boxes is going to be ten times cheaper than the same office with M$ products. Besides initial cost, the same hardware will be competitive for many years (many of the government computers in my city are old Sun machines from back when it was SunOS). Besides price there's the benefit of having third parties do the development and programming. A 50,000$ grant to an Open Source project goes alot farther than 50,000$ in software licenses. I think it's a great idea for government agencies to push Open Source, workstations and servers is what Linux and the BSDs do best.
In the market will exist two mainstream 64-bit processors, the AMD Sledgehammer using an extended x86 instruction code and the Intel Itanium using the IA-64 instruction code. Consumers are screwed. Right now the P3 and Athlon are rad because they can run all the same binaries. In the 64-bit universe you'll have two options, chip optimiuzed code or huge binaries with 32-bit x86 instructions and a few optimized 64-bit instructions (like writing a binary with support for SSE and 3DNow!). My guess is that the software guys will tell the chip guys what they can do with their silicon. Current software and OSes will fork into at least two camps. The only recourse for people will be open sourced software or NeXT-ish packages containing binaries and libraries optimized for said processor. This is going to create so much damned market confusion. In a couple of years there's going to be half a dozen different hardware architectures in the mainstream market, again. I wonder if this is a good or bad thing, I suspect for most people it might be a bad thing being as some software companies will only support x number of OSes and chip architectures. I figure what will probably happen is smaller software companies that can only support one or two different systems will get eaten up by the Microsofts because they won't be able to afford to stay competitive in enough markets. Hmmm.
Like many people have said, this looks like more of an all-in-one device than a true gaming machine. It looks to me like it wants to be a TiVo that can play Quake. What these guys will (as well as M$) will realize too late, console systems are about games. There's either really radical gameplay and fun factor or graphics that make you change your boxers. In some cases there's cult appeal, the Pokemon colour GameBoy (FF7 and 8 are the only reasons for me to have a PSX). The X-Box and i600 seems to appeal to the geeks who love their PC games rather than the 8-14 crowd that awes at Street Fighter 2 and gobbles up Mario Kart. The PSX and Dreamcast do have slightly more appeal for the 15-25 crowd that likes fighting and driving games. The PC game geeks don't mass NEARLY enough for the X-Box/i600 to compete with the DC and PSX/PS2.
If this box ever reaches production you can bet the CLI will be harder to find than a legitimate Godly Armour of Whale.
Really last minute cramming
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Laptop Exams?
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The use of laptops in school is a weird subject to think about, on one hand they're useful and on the other they are a waste of money. As we all know laptops are very expensive and are prone to theft, much more so than my pad of notebook paper and pen (although pens disappear regularly...). I can't really see how any school could require a student to buy a laptop computer upon enrollment, even with assistance, thats an extra 2000$ added to your bills (which at some schools is the price of a semester). Even then there's only a few classes that I could conceive using a laptop in, CS classes would be one and MAYBE math/science classes if you had a really awesome calculator program. An open internet exam doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me in most cases. I think a better solution to the laptop issue would be for the school to purchase the laptops and then lease or sell them to the students. Included with the laptop would be a wireless networking card that would allow you to access the network from anywhere on campus. Instead of letting you use the whole internet for exams and such, put all the relevant information on the school's intranet (essays, texts, research papers ect.) which the students could access from the classrooms. For students who already own laptops they could merely sell the wireless networking cards. This would allow students not to fully purchase the computer (for a 2k computer it would be about 500$ a year not including interest) and would give them access to all the needed information. Some schools are the opposite of this wiring idea, they're completely anal about computers in classrooms. My school doesn't allow non-lab computers in the computer labs which means I get yelled at if I take my Powerbook in there. Many teachers are violently opposed to computers in their classrooms, something I can understand well. I would not to be an English teacher in an auditorium that had 150 students typing away on their keyboards. In the Java course I took it sounded like it was raining whenever we all started coding, I couldn't drink a soda before class without paying the consequences. Besides the annoyance factor, laptops are fairly delicate compared to my textbooks and also would cost me a good deal more to be replaced if I threw my bag into the backseat with my laptop in there. On the upside to laptops, it would be nice in alot of classes to have the teacher's notes and slides available on the school's intranet. Not only for use in the classroom but for when I get home and need to go over the notes. Therein lies another problem, some teachers refuse to make electronic copies of their documents. It is alot of work to transfer all of your photographic slides to Powerpoint or turn your handwritten scribbles into nicely formatted notes. Some professors have TAs that can do the dirty work but many do not. Other professors just don't particularly care for computers in general and don't want to use them in class. All in all sometimes a blackboard, chalk, and some paper have more utility than a computer lab.
I've been playing pen and paper RPGs for many many years now. The best thing about them is that you've got a set of rules and a world to play in but the stories, quests, ect. is up to the GM to make up (or someone else). I've yet to see an online RPG that was like that. Some of the better MUDs I tried had good replay value but never much questing. What I want in a MMRPG is a huge world with thousands upon thousands of quests and play possibilities with oodles of noodles of items and such (like Rogue). for replay value I thought Diablo was pretty good, it was like a hack'n'slash MUD but the number of items you could possibly find was nice as was the fact that the dungeons were randomly generated so playing more than once could be fun. I think this RPG ought to be based off the pen and paper game by West End Games. I've been playing that forever and it hasn't become old or boring. I'm skeptical so far about this game because in my opinion all the rest of the Lucas Arts SW games blew goats. They were fine for the first level or so but then they just became more of the same. The multiplayer aspect was nice but the only difference between Jedi Knight and Quake was lightsabers. In a universe as rich as Star Wars you would think even a single player game would have tons of interaction between you and NPCs but with JK they only wanted to emulate Quake.Thats what Lucas Arts is good at, emulating everyone else. None of their games have been terribly original, merely some game with a SW theme, the only barely original games were Rogue Squadron and Yoda Stories(sp?). Replacing grunts with Jedi or Zergs with Imperials is not my idea of innovation. Personally I think a game similar in gameplay to Resident Evil or FF7&8 would make an awesome MMRPG, of course with oodles more places to explore. Oh well, I think I'm going to stick to paper for a while longer.
whine whine whine. Is that all people do on here anymore? I think it's cool that MS is going to open up CE under whatever license, why? CE has alot of potential applications that open code would be great for. One of the best examples would be embedded and non-legacy systems. Right now If someone wants to build a low power limited feature product they need to make their own OS with their own software APIs or figure out how to fit a current OS onto their design. You say Linux; a multi-user OS is fine for workstations, servers, and to a lesser extent plain Joe Average desktops but when it comes to closed single user mini-boxes its utility dimishes. WinCE has the advantage of being very similar to Windows which means programmers could port their code relatively easily to whatever device. I bet one of the first places it pops up will be set top boxes, RTOS non-legacy low power products. Because of DirectX being deeply embedded into the CE API it wouldn't be too difficult to build fairly advanced gaming machines using stock hardware rather than spending megabucks designing your own. DirectX would also benefit game programmers because they could develop in a familiar environment. Stop whining you whiners.
Virii need not be the all powerful super destructo weapons that bring systems to their knees. They can just be annoyances that don't actually do "damage". Here's an example of one I've seen. Someone writes a little ditty and names it ls, they upload it (you figure out a way to do it and it'll get done). Then when someone lists the files in the directory it runs instead and does something cute like change the user's password. The user logs in the next day only to find he/she cannot log into their account so they have to email the admin to get their password changfed back. It doesn't really harm anything except a user's productivity. This is where Unix finds itself susceptible to unauthorized programs. Linux isn't anymore invincible to virii attacks than Windows is, it merely makes the attackers me a little more clever. Users who aren't familiar with proper security run as root a good deal of the time, they also like to download little goodies since they are free afterall. Joe Newbie downloads what is supposed to be a desktop toy for KDE and it turns out to nuke his home directory or change his password or some such thing. It's no different than getting a malicious Windows virus.
If Motorola plans to incorporate this into their PPC lines. Taje the 604e for example, from what I understand of its architecture it could have easily been made to do two-chips-on-one-die. I would sorta like to see chips of this caliber in the next generation or so of Mac servers, maybe even non-Mac PPC systems (Linux, BeOS). The benefits of SMP over supercalar is that SMP allows you to have multiple superscalar processing units, if a processor can do n number of processes with a single superscalar processing unit then with SMP it can so xn processes where x is the number of processors. Most people know this already. What really interests me is the high bus speed. Intel and AMD's offerings may be nice for server platforms because of their price but they would get their asses chomped off by the sheer system speed from the Power4. I'm sick of hearing about the Athlon's EV6 bus, the memory (read the entire system besides the processor) only runs at 100mhz. IIRC AMD is going to be using DDR SDRAM with the Sledgehammer to boost its overall system performance and the system will clock at 133, I would still rather have a 500mhz system bus.
The problem there lies in the large datasets, if you were running 16bit code it would be fine but for many applications today (games, graphics, voice recognition, encryption/decryption, ect.) you need more than 16 bits. If you had to emulate 2^n bits higher than 4 you'd have major system slowdown. Having a bunch of identical cores would mean they would need to be small. Small cores mean they won't have the space to have optimized cores. Todays chips have highly optimized cores, like AltiVec that can handle large data sets at high speeds. It's like with Rambus memory, they have really high frequencies but a teeny tiny data bus which means they have lots of latency, sometimes faster is more valuable.
I hate hearing people bitch about sales tax on the internet, it is a stupid idea. Then again, I know from experience. In California we have to pay sales tax for just about everything. I bought a pair of books from B&N and paid sales tax, same as when I buy from anywhere else. My sales tax is 7.75% though. People whining about 5% just make me mad. Shopping on the internet is overratted, at least for me. Because of shipping and sales tax I don't really save any money and you can usually expect 3-6 days for your shipment to arrive. How am I saving through this glorious revolution, now I know what the Russians felt like after the Bolsheviks took over.
I don't want to start any of your people's damn religious wars but I think this is very valid for the discussion. The BSD license allows for a more centralized appraoch to the development of said program. If a project has a core group that is in charge of all actual code changes with other people suggesting and contributing you'll have that number fewer people you don't know communicating. Having a core group also prevents people from seemingly controlling the project because they whine the loudest. Closed source development is pretty efficient in development because it works in this fashion. Open Source still has something to learn.
At my old high school we had one large computer lab filled with antiquated Macs running OS 7.5. The programming class offered was Turbo Pascal. I waiting until college to take a programming course (C++). While in high school I tried to explain Linux to the teachers admining the place and all I got for my effort was dumbfounded looks. These teachers were by no means stupid, they just seemed apalled by an open source code licensing scheme. They had been raised in the 100% proprietary days of programming before anyone listened to RMS. In relation to this kid's problem, a good deal of computer science teachers in high school have been teachers for a number of years and are used to doing things the same way year after year. Some of them keep up with trends and new stuff but for the most part many high school instructors are "behind the times". College instructors usually have been outside the confines of schools and actually applied the stuff they are teaching. The most effective way to get new dogma into schools is wait for it to trickle down. I hate reading on here "force them to do this", "I'll send them a Linux CD", ect.. None of that helps, when the next generation of teachers comes in they almost always bring a new set of ideas with them.
A low-yield atomic bomb is relatively easy to build. The hard part comes in when you're looking for the high grade (purer than average) plutonium for said bomb. Luckily the weapon grade plutonium is rare and difficult for the most part to extract.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA. The black hole thing was absolutely ludicrous in the first place, only an ignorant small mammal would bring it up. Most likely the most dangerous thing we could do with exotic particles is utterly annihilate ourselves. If we did end up annhilating ourselves (war, accident, ect) we would deserve it. Messing with things you don't understand is the only way to learn about them.
the large number of...'s in the article make me suspicious about the accuracy of some of the statements. Here is an example: I had heard rumours that we had threated to format the staffer's hard drives, this is simply untrue. Now after a legal edition: "... we had threatened to format the staffer's hard drives..." Two entirely different statements with entirely different connotations.
I've been looking for some kinda cheap LCD xterm like this. I'm thinking about picking one of these up and moding it. Hmm, extra RAM for the Powerbook or an i-opener...such decsions. Some people have asked in Netpliance is going to go out of business because they'll sell a bunch of boxes without selling the internet service that comes with them. I highly doubt it, scores more people will buy the i-opener to use in its standard configuration with a small small handful (one out of 400) buying them to modify them. Oh well, it would be their own fault, not ours. I wonder if I could replace the processor in it...
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The military needs more money to shoot people with. The reason this crap is being addressed now is because the military is moving into a generation of unmanned vehicles as many have already pointed out. They're also making soldiers increasingly electronic from night vision to GPS systems. If someone can hack (crack) into an army's eletronic (C4 infrastructure) they can control the army. I see the "21st century soldier" stuff and just laugh. Instead of making soldiers more independant technology makes them more dependant on a base of operations. The digital soldier's effectiveness only lasts as long as his (her) battery. Eletronic toys will also have to be heavily protected from the environment which adds to their weight and bulkiness. After a while soldiers will be entirely dependant on technology for mobility and survival in the field. Want to cripple a ground unit? Fly over them with bombers releasing lightweight radio reflective chaff with small amounts of radio static causing isotopes. A cheap and easy way to keep your enemies from phoning home. Want to get more complex? Arm your army with a bunch of HERF guns and lay waste to your electronic opponents. The US military's vision of fighting in the future is fundamentally flawed, radio reflective chaff and HERF guns are cheap, with a little bit of cash and know-how you can build some low yield nuclear bombs. You don't use them to obliderate cities, you shoot them up into the ionosphere and detonate them to create one whammy of an EMP. Keep IT Simple Stupid.
If you're really interested in 2D graphics rather than 3D stuff think about an ATI. ATI cards have REALLY good colour control and display (at least they do on Windows and Mac boxes). I bet the Fury Maxx would be a pretty decent card for you, it's dual head and has plenty of framebuffer room. I've found a good monitor and good colour control are better in graphics/publishing than raw speed.
Diamond's drivers for the Viper 770 et al. are just nVidia drivers with enhancements. nVidia makes the drivers for the CHIP, Diamond extends that for the hardware on the video card. S-Video out and special memory configurations and such would be what Diamond's drivers take care of. One of the reasons the Diamond cards don't have Win2k (go flame yourself) drivers is because nVidia is working on new chip drivers which the card manufacturers need to build a new driver set.
Another acronym you should ponder is URI, U R an Idiot.
I didn't meantion that because it's debateable whether or not proprietary formats are "bad". You wouldnt want your encryption algorithms open sourced. A single "proprietary" document format would be much better than a free spec, that way everyone could build a reader/parser/manipulator that would behave in the same fashion as someone else's with a standard document spec.
Whether or not the Barron's article holds water is moot, the fact that people are starting to tread carefully around the "netconomy" is so rad. Everyone will fall victim to cash flow at some time, despite what everyone thinks about e-commerce. A majority of the new internet based companies are service providers, a service business is VERY EXPENSIVE. Manpower is expensive especially when a company needs oodles of noodles of programmers to maintain their site. What I bet you'll see is all the damn nitche market companies start to die off, ones that need 10 million a year to operate but don't make nearly enough to keep running. It used to be an IPO was to get EXTRA cash to cover expensions, aquisitions, mergers, ect. not a quick and easy way to get some attention and make the CEOs billionaires overnight. If you take a step back all these net companies start to look like well funded get-rich-quick schemes. Build a website, get alot of people to check it out at least once, then overevaluate it's stock price. The investors sell out with their chunk of the cash and buy Ferraris and 5 bedroom houses in San Jose. If you want a successful internet company watch television for a day, the stuff that makes money on television will make money on the internet being related media types. Entertainment, edutainment, and product sales. E-companies also forget an important thing, money. You need to CHARGE for your services rather than give them away for free. Advertisement revenue does not make nearly as much money as charging for services. People need to visit your site for the ads to work. If a million people visit in a single day you make alot of money, if after the first day only ten people come to the site you're screwed.
You want to know a good way to charge for services? SUBSCRIPTIONS! Magazines and newspapers have been doing this for centuries! With subscriptions all you need is that first million page hits. AOL makes their billions in part to subscriptions, the subscriptions don't make the company money, they save them money. Every person on AOL subscribes to view advertising and product promotion, AOL's cash cow. Their internet connection (cost distributed among millions of users) only costs AOL 15$ at most, then on top of that AOL gets another 6.50$ that covers regulatory and rental fees. But for every 21.50$ that a user costs AOL they make them 1,000$ from advertising, affiliates, promotions and the like.
If you want to start a company on the internet ask yourself what you can provide to people, then ask how much it's worth to them, give them a discount, charge them for services, use them to make you money, and lastly, niches are for weenies.
Government agencies really ought to take note of GNU software. One of the biggest reasons is price, an office of FreeBSD or Linux boxes is going to be ten times cheaper than the same office with M$ products. Besides initial cost, the same hardware will be competitive for many years (many of the government computers in my city are old Sun machines from back when it was SunOS). Besides price there's the benefit of having third parties do the development and programming. A 50,000$ grant to an Open Source project goes alot farther than 50,000$ in software licenses. I think it's a great idea for government agencies to push Open Source, workstations and servers is what Linux and the BSDs do best.
In the market will exist two mainstream 64-bit processors, the AMD Sledgehammer using an extended x86 instruction code and the Intel Itanium using the IA-64 instruction code. Consumers are screwed. Right now the P3 and Athlon are rad because they can run all the same binaries. In the 64-bit universe you'll have two options, chip optimiuzed code or huge binaries with 32-bit x86 instructions and a few optimized 64-bit instructions (like writing a binary with support for SSE and 3DNow!). My guess is that the software guys will tell the chip guys what they can do with their silicon. Current software and OSes will fork into at least two camps. The only recourse for people will be open sourced software or NeXT-ish packages containing binaries and libraries optimized for said processor. This is going to create so much damned market confusion. In a couple of years there's going to be half a dozen different hardware architectures in the mainstream market, again. I wonder if this is a good or bad thing, I suspect for most people it might be a bad thing being as some software companies will only support x number of OSes and chip architectures. I figure what will probably happen is smaller software companies that can only support one or two different systems will get eaten up by the Microsofts because they won't be able to afford to stay competitive in enough markets. Hmmm.
Like many people have said, this looks like more of an all-in-one device than a true gaming machine. It looks to me like it wants to be a TiVo that can play Quake. What these guys will (as well as M$) will realize too late, console systems are about games. There's either really radical gameplay and fun factor or graphics that make you change your boxers. In some cases there's cult appeal, the Pokemon colour GameBoy (FF7 and 8 are the only reasons for me to have a PSX). The X-Box and i600 seems to appeal to the geeks who love their PC games rather than the 8-14 crowd that awes at Street Fighter 2 and gobbles up Mario Kart. The PSX and Dreamcast do have slightly more appeal for the 15-25 crowd that likes fighting and driving games. The PC game geeks don't mass NEARLY enough for the X-Box/i600 to compete with the DC and PSX/PS2.
If this box ever reaches production you can bet the CLI will be harder to find than a legitimate Godly Armour of Whale.
The use of laptops in school is a weird subject to think about, on one hand they're useful and on the other they are a waste of money. As we all know laptops are very expensive and are prone to theft, much more so than my pad of notebook paper and pen (although pens disappear regularly...). I can't really see how any school could require a student to buy a laptop computer upon enrollment, even with assistance, thats an extra 2000$ added to your bills (which at some schools is the price of a semester). Even then there's only a few classes that I could conceive using a laptop in, CS classes would be one and MAYBE math/science classes if you had a really awesome calculator program. An open internet exam doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me in most cases.
I think a better solution to the laptop issue would be for the school to purchase the laptops and then lease or sell them to the students. Included with the laptop would be a wireless networking card that would allow you to access the network from anywhere on campus. Instead of letting you use the whole internet for exams and such, put all the relevant information on the school's intranet (essays, texts, research papers ect.) which the students could access from the classrooms. For students who already own laptops they could merely sell the wireless networking cards. This would allow students not to fully purchase the computer (for a 2k computer it would be about 500$ a year not including interest) and would give them access to all the needed information.
Some schools are the opposite of this wiring idea, they're completely anal about computers in classrooms. My school doesn't allow non-lab computers in the computer labs which means I get yelled at if I take my Powerbook in there. Many teachers are violently opposed to computers in their classrooms, something I can understand well. I would not to be an English teacher in an auditorium that had 150 students typing away on their keyboards. In the Java course I took it sounded like it was raining whenever we all started coding, I couldn't drink a soda before class without paying the consequences. Besides the annoyance factor, laptops are fairly delicate compared to my textbooks and also would cost me a good deal more to be replaced if I threw my bag into the backseat with my laptop in there. On the upside to laptops, it would be nice in alot of classes to have the teacher's notes and slides available on the school's intranet. Not only for use in the classroom but for when I get home and need to go over the notes. Therein lies another problem, some teachers refuse to make electronic copies of their documents. It is alot of work to transfer all of your photographic slides to Powerpoint or turn your handwritten scribbles into nicely formatted notes. Some professors have TAs that can do the dirty work but many do not. Other professors just don't particularly care for computers in general and don't want to use them in class.
All in all sometimes a blackboard, chalk, and some paper have more utility than a computer lab.
I've been playing pen and paper RPGs for many many years now. The best thing about them is that you've got a set of rules and a world to play in but the stories, quests, ect. is up to the GM to make up (or someone else). I've yet to see an online RPG that was like that. Some of the better MUDs I tried had good replay value but never much questing. What I want in a MMRPG is a huge world with thousands upon thousands of quests and play possibilities with oodles of noodles of items and such (like Rogue). for replay value I thought Diablo was pretty good, it was like a hack'n'slash MUD but the number of items you could possibly find was nice as was the fact that the dungeons were randomly generated so playing more than once could be fun.
I think this RPG ought to be based off the pen and paper game by West End Games. I've been playing that forever and it hasn't become old or boring. I'm skeptical so far about this game because in my opinion all the rest of the Lucas Arts SW games blew goats. They were fine for the first level or so but then they just became more of the same. The multiplayer aspect was nice but the only difference between Jedi Knight and Quake was lightsabers. In a universe as rich as Star Wars you would think even a single player game would have tons of interaction between you and NPCs but with JK they only wanted to emulate Quake.Thats what Lucas Arts is good at, emulating everyone else. None of their games have been terribly original, merely some game with a SW theme, the only barely original games were Rogue Squadron and Yoda Stories(sp?). Replacing grunts with Jedi or Zergs with Imperials is not my idea of innovation.
Personally I think a game similar in gameplay to Resident Evil or FF7&8 would make an awesome MMRPG, of course with oodles more places to explore. Oh well, I think I'm going to stick to paper for a while longer.
whine whine whine. Is that all people do on here anymore? I think it's cool that MS is going to open up CE under whatever license, why? CE has alot of potential applications that open code would be great for. One of the best examples would be embedded and non-legacy systems. Right now If someone wants to build a low power limited feature product they need to make their own OS with their own software APIs or figure out how to fit a current OS onto their design. You say Linux; a multi-user OS is fine for workstations, servers, and to a lesser extent plain Joe Average desktops but when it comes to closed single user mini-boxes its utility dimishes. WinCE has the advantage of being very similar to Windows which means programmers could port their code relatively easily to whatever device. I bet one of the first places it pops up will be set top boxes, RTOS non-legacy low power products. Because of DirectX being deeply embedded into the CE API it wouldn't be too difficult to build fairly advanced gaming machines using stock hardware rather than spending megabucks designing your own. DirectX would also benefit game programmers because they could develop in a familiar environment. Stop whining you whiners.
Even in parody it's funny how people complain about the paperclip. It isn't that hard to turn off, just call Cthulhu.
Virii need not be the all powerful super destructo weapons that bring systems to their knees. They can just be annoyances that don't actually do "damage". Here's an example of one I've seen. Someone writes a little ditty and names it ls, they upload it (you figure out a way to do it and it'll get done). Then when someone lists the files in the directory it runs instead and does something cute like change the user's password. The user logs in the next day only to find he/she cannot log into their account so they have to email the admin to get their password changfed back. It doesn't really harm anything except a user's productivity. This is where Unix finds itself susceptible to unauthorized programs. Linux isn't anymore invincible to virii attacks than Windows is, it merely makes the attackers me a little more clever. Users who aren't familiar with proper security run as root a good deal of the time, they also like to download little goodies since they are free afterall. Joe Newbie downloads what is supposed to be a desktop toy for KDE and it turns out to nuke his home directory or change his password or some such thing. It's no different than getting a malicious Windows virus.
You're equating virus writers to Linux users? Real intelligent Jethro.
If Motorola plans to incorporate this into their PPC lines. Taje the 604e for example, from what I understand of its architecture it could have easily been made to do two-chips-on-one-die. I would sorta like to see chips of this caliber in the next generation or so of Mac servers, maybe even non-Mac PPC systems (Linux, BeOS). The benefits of SMP over supercalar is that SMP allows you to have multiple superscalar processing units, if a processor can do n number of processes with a single superscalar processing unit then with SMP it can so xn processes where x is the number of processors. Most people know this already. What really interests me is the high bus speed. Intel and AMD's offerings may be nice for server platforms because of their price but they would get their asses chomped off by the sheer system speed from the Power4. I'm sick of hearing about the Athlon's EV6 bus, the memory (read the entire system besides the processor) only runs at 100mhz. IIRC AMD is going to be using DDR SDRAM with the Sledgehammer to boost its overall system performance and the system will clock at 133, I would still rather have a 500mhz system bus.
The problem there lies in the large datasets, if you were running 16bit code it would be fine but for many applications today (games, graphics, voice recognition, encryption/decryption, ect.) you need more than 16 bits. If you had to emulate 2^n bits higher than 4 you'd have major system slowdown. Having a bunch of identical cores would mean they would need to be small. Small cores mean they won't have the space to have optimized cores. Todays chips have highly optimized cores, like AltiVec that can handle large data sets at high speeds. It's like with Rambus memory, they have really high frequencies but a teeny tiny data bus which means they have lots of latency, sometimes faster is more valuable.
I hate hearing people bitch about sales tax on the internet, it is a stupid idea. Then again, I know from experience. In California we have to pay sales tax for just about everything. I bought a pair of books from B&N and paid sales tax, same as when I buy from anywhere else. My sales tax is 7.75% though. People whining about 5% just make me mad. Shopping on the internet is overratted, at least for me. Because of shipping and sales tax I don't really save any money and you can usually expect 3-6 days for your shipment to arrive. How am I saving through this glorious revolution, now I know what the Russians felt like after the Bolsheviks took over.
I don't want to start any of your people's damn religious wars but I think this is very valid for the discussion. The BSD license allows for a more centralized appraoch to the development of said program. If a project has a core group that is in charge of all actual code changes with other people suggesting and contributing you'll have that number fewer people you don't know communicating. Having a core group also prevents people from seemingly controlling the project because they whine the loudest. Closed source development is pretty efficient in development because it works in this fashion. Open Source still has something to learn.
At my old high school we had one large computer lab filled with antiquated Macs running OS 7.5. The programming class offered was Turbo Pascal. I waiting until college to take a programming course (C++). While in high school I tried to explain Linux to the teachers admining the place and all I got for my effort was dumbfounded looks. These teachers were by no means stupid, they just seemed apalled by an open source code licensing scheme. They had been raised in the 100% proprietary days of programming before anyone listened to RMS. In relation to this kid's problem, a good deal of computer science teachers in high school have been teachers for a number of years and are used to doing things the same way year after year. Some of them keep up with trends and new stuff but for the most part many high school instructors are "behind the times". College instructors usually have been outside the confines of schools and actually applied the stuff they are teaching. The most effective way to get new dogma into schools is wait for it to trickle down. I hate reading on here "force them to do this", "I'll send them a Linux CD", ect.. None of that helps, when the next generation of teachers comes in they almost always bring a new set of ideas with them.
A low-yield atomic bomb is relatively easy to build. The hard part comes in when you're looking for the high grade (purer than average) plutonium for said bomb. Luckily the weapon grade plutonium is rare and difficult for the most part to extract.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA. The black hole thing was absolutely ludicrous in the first place, only an ignorant small mammal would bring it up. Most likely the most dangerous thing we could do with exotic particles is utterly annihilate ourselves. If we did end up annhilating ourselves (war, accident, ect) we would deserve it. Messing with things you don't understand is the only way to learn about them.
the large number of ...'s in the article make me suspicious about the accuracy of some of the statements. Here is an example: ..."
I had heard rumours that we had threated to format the staffer's hard drives, this is simply untrue.
Now after a legal edition:
"... we had threatened to format the staffer's hard drives
Two entirely different statements with entirely different connotations.
I've been looking for some kinda cheap LCD xterm like this. I'm thinking about picking one of these up and moding it. Hmm, extra RAM for the Powerbook or an i-opener...such decsions. Some people have asked in Netpliance is going to go out of business because they'll sell a bunch of boxes without selling the internet service that comes with them. I highly doubt it, scores more people will buy the i-opener to use in its standard configuration with a small small handful (one out of 400) buying them to modify them. Oh well, it would be their own fault, not ours. I wonder if I could replace the processor in it...