the best example i ever read explaining this "phenomenon" is the stick figure cow example. draw a cow with a 2" dia. circle for a head, a 1" stick connecting head to body, a 4" dia. circle for the body, and 4 2" stick legs. at this size, everything is relatively strong enough to support the weight it needs. double the size of the cow, and all of a sudden you have a 4" circle for a head, being supported at the end of a 2" neck, which is somthing like 4 times the original volume, with more leverage, being farther away from the head. snap goes the neck and the head bursts as it falls the (now doubled) 4" to the ground. legs collapse under the immense weight of the body, for same reasons as explained about head.
what came to ind when seeing the pic of the dead guy on the floor in the bathroom was "jesus. this is what happens when toy story characters have nightmares".
Color LCD displays aren't cheap. the apple IIIe had an option for a 11" B&grey(W) lcd display, that looked suspiciously like that of a graphing calculator's, but uch larger. i've been looking for somthing similar, sothing htat will take a vga signal and display it on about a 14" B&W LCD screen. in theroy, this should be extremely cheap ($100) and easy to come by.... so far the closest i've come is those 2x40 character LCD's for cash registers and whatnot. any ideas?
4 gig drives seem to be the lowest common denominator these days. fry's sells their linux (no M$) computers w/128 meg ram and a 4gb drive. of course, there may just be a fuck-ton of these drives around and unused, but it seems that most any budget pc comes w/a 4 gb drive.
i agree with you on the total minimal cost of equipment. you still have to pay for materials. just because there's more compressed air inside the box, doesn't mean the box costs less and S&H dissappear. i always wondered why you oculdn't just buy a 486 @ the.13 micron process that ran off a set of AA batteries for a month and could power your palm. problem is, you have to research the idea, design the mobo, voltage regulator, front $$ for the die-mask, or whatever it is. it may be small, but altogether it's still going to cost $100 per unit, b/c that's R&D + materials cost. you can go out and buy a 1.3 ghz athlon + crappy mobo for that.
i'm not really sure if i just made a point or not. enough rambling for me.
I think actually the reverse is probably true. Hardcore gamers used to buy PCs, for which MS would get $100 per unit, more or less.
most "hardcore gamers" either a) have a free copy of XP they installed themself, b) have a friend who installed it for them, or c) bought it at a college textbook store for $5 (legally).
pc vendors buy XP licences to put on their systems from microsoft for ~$40-$60.
nowadays instead of spending 600-1000$, you buy 3 100 gb drives (@ $200 ea.), and put them on a raid 3 setup, and hope no more than 1 fails at a time, if my meager knowledge of raid is correct.instantanious "backup", and a sight faster than a single drive. considerably more heat, noise, electricity, and hassle than a tape drive, though. trade-offs.
how many kW does a nuclear, or coal power plant produce? in sim city 2000 i recall it being roughly 1200kW for nuclear, while coal only produced 400 or 800.
befre anyone says "we don't need no stinking movie news! i'm here for/computer/ stuff!", we should suggest a movie box?
what's next? "new movie, blah is to be released in 8 weeks. the first copies of it on divx are already appearing on the internet. this release beats the old record by 3 and a half hours."?
nah. i've copied plenty of legal stuff there. mostly calvin and hobbess books. works great for me. they help me right till the point where it comes to pushing the green button. and then i pay them, and leave. just make sure you're a "student". this is in upscale/lawyer dallas, so it's not like this is a clueless country kinkos (if they exist)
walmart now sells some brand of flourecent light bulbs. in little letters, it reads:
"this flourecent lightbulb is as a standard incadecent lightbulb of equal or greater wattage of"
(big letters) "200W"
(little letters) "actual wattage - 35W. lower your cooling/electrical bills while producing more light!"
Re:Quartz Extreme
on
Jaguar Reviewed
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"A lot of us iBook owners, and other Rage128-based Mac owners, would like to know if QE will work partially, or at all, on this hardware."
in short - You're Phucked.
quarts extreme is going to be the "killer app" to get everyone to upgrade from their "legacy" hardware, to the new ibooks and whatnot that you'll see comming out @ macworld NY. i'd suggest selling your ibook now, or at least get someone with cash in hand lined up for it, as it's about to devalue by about $300:)
it's no coincidence that the new tibook came out with a 32 meg ati radeon 7500 a week before they released the minimum "optimal performance" specs for quartz extreme. so far the only laptops capable of quartz extreme is the rev. b & c tibooks. all ibooks, crt imacs, and g3 powerbooks are Phucked.
hunh. i've had the same ip (24.xxx)since the Great Switch. which was about 8 months ago. previous to that my ip had been a (12.xxx). It's documented better on the link i provide. of course, i live in plano, tx, where alot of phone companies have their headquarters (supposedly), so cable internet downloads burst @ 1.7 mbps, and i've seen as much as 700k/s sustained transfer. i don't run my own DNS server, but i haven't had problems otherwise.
don't know why, but i thought i'd back up your argument:
"Joe User has no idea what software is, where it comes from, what its limitations are, etc. Computers are magic boxes."
to my mom, who uses a computer every day to run financial software for her mortgage buisness, and as a result owns 2 laptops, the "computer" is the big glowing box. the big beige boxy thing next to it is nothing more than somthing to plug the phone, eithernet, mouse and keyboard into, that doubles as a Very Large Power Switch.
however, as an antheisis to the next paragraph,
" Computers are such an integral part of society today, yet knowledge of basic computer science is virtually nonexistant. The way people are trained to interact with computers doesn't even give them the necessary information to know what questions to ask to learn how stuff works. I think that this is very unfortunate, and possibly even detrimental to society as a whole. With the computer industry so thoroughly dominated by a single company, I worry that people will end up unable to think "outside the box". "
i bring the analogy of the computer as a car to the stand. exactly how much do you know you could replace on your car with your current knowledge? what about your neighbor's wife with a perfect driving record? i'm willing to bet most people's knowledge doesn't extend much past refuleing, changing the oil, and the tires. people are trained to used cars, without the slightest amount of knowledge given on how a 4 stroke engine works. yet the world has continued to prosper, despite the fact that most people are clueless about how cars work, despite the fact that cars are an absolute staple of our culture and economy. software is quickly becomming the new economy and culture. for some, at least. ford (microsoft) didn't exactly have alot of competitors it's first 10 or 15 years. eventually chrystler (sun) and luxury brands such as caddilac (apple) managed to grab market share, despite ford's huge installed userbase. 100 years later, after being led steadily along by a single corperation, we have plenty of competetors (roughly 15 major ones, i'd guess), and a healthy auto industry.
Anyway, I'm rambling.
so am i:)
i think compsci should be taught in schools, for a different reason, though. to teach logic, which for the past 200-2000 years has been taught via algebra and it's brothers trig and calculus. comp sci is more redeeming, in the fact that it isn't just a practiced mental reflex you are developing (quick, 5 + x = 7. x=?), comp sci forces you to come up with your own solution to a problem, and usually the quickest and easiest, because you don't want to spend alot of time doing it. personally i'd love to see this type of learning as an option instead of having to take a remedial class like geometry. making more connections in the brain is more important than swapping out the engine of my 95 dodge neon. so to speak.:)
i've seen the ^H^H^H^H before, alot, more recently... what does it mean/stand for? usually i'm on top of geek/h4>0r culture, but i'm completely in the dark on this one
i have VPC 5.0 on there right now. running win 98 on there...slow as a dog. kazaa wouldn't install properly. codewarrior works like a charm, however. also, the 200 is in a case FAR away from where i sit, keeping my desk area much more quiet. VPC 5.0 seems to make the fan come on at high speed continiously. plus, it's easier to monitor my downloads on a 17" screen, though:)
you can brew your here in the good ole us of a. not a problem. you can't distill your own, um "moonshine", although distillers can be purchased legally, but only for to home-distill your own drinking water. not that anyone really does that.
there's been alot of huff about wether or not it's legal or not to censor various things (aside from porn, like pro-animal abuse, KKK, ect.). schools have the right to censor their web access, i think they're required to do so. public librarys shouldn't but do so anyways alot of the time.
i agree with you on that. i had a p400 for 3 years before fiddling with the motherboard/cmos battery finally died on me. probably not a smart thing to do in the first place.... anyways, i ended up with an apple tibook, which does everything i need, and then some. wish it had an audio-in port:-/
inherited my dad's p200 when he died and i use that mostly for kazaa and video capture. it's too slow to play divx movies, and i didn't want to invest in a video card to play counterstrike on it. still plays mpeg2, flash, and quicktime movies just fine, along with winamp and aim, ie and netscape - 99% of what i do anyways. needed a laptop for college next year, though.
lol. they really should remove the karma cap. i think about 1/3rd of the slashdot "regulars" have joined the "enlightened leauge", or just simly, "50 karma club". oh well.
my personal webserver that i got off of ebay (mac lc ii - 68020 processor, 10 mb ram and rj-45 10 base t eithernet card) came from some middle school with OS 7.6.1 on it, if i recall correctly. eventually i got fed up with being restricted by all the various software the school put on to keep kids from messing up the software and downloaded and loaded OS 7.5.3, the last free OS avalible on apple's site once i got an upgraded 1 GB scsi drive for it. runs like a charm. hasn't crashed in 8 months (as in 8 month continious uptime), either. runs an ftp server and apple mail server version 1 on it, although i still have to play with it some more before i switch over to that. good little workhorse for what it does, though.
so yeah, it was probably 8.1. sorry about the rambling.
it's one operation. upgrading a video card is alot like upgrading your ram - it even costs about the same - ati radeo 7500 32 mb RAM cards were selling for about 85$ last time i checked. 512 mb of ram (realistic minimum amount to run os x) is going to set you back about $100 for name brand ram. as for install - once you get the case open, you're dealing with a single screw instead of those silly clips for the memory stick. just make sure you're grounded, and unplug and turn off everything first.
the only video cards i'm aware of upgrading the VRAM on is those comming out of 286's, where you could plug in an extra 256k of ram or somthing. either way, it's not a very common feature.
bolo, an old, classic, favoirte gsme of alot of my friends from elementary and middle school used to play, works great on my tibook 550:) they have a windows port too, which is pretty neat.
i think it'd be educational to look at OS 6 and previous, which were all written in assembly. some things i've heard though lead me to believe that coding in assembly is different for each archtecture (x86, 680x0, PPC)
Slashdot Mirror
the best example i ever read explaining this "phenomenon" is the stick figure cow example. draw a cow with a 2" dia. circle for a head, a 1" stick connecting head to body, a 4" dia. circle for the body, and 4 2" stick legs. at this size, everything is relatively strong enough to support the weight it needs. double the size of the cow, and all of a sudden you have a 4" circle for a head, being supported at the end of a 2" neck, which is somthing like 4 times the original volume, with more leverage, being farther away from the head. snap goes the neck and the head bursts as it falls the (now doubled) 4" to the ground. legs collapse under the immense weight of the body, for same reasons as explained about head.
so all we need to do now is tow europa out of jupiter's orbit, and crash it into mars...and we're all set!!!
what came to ind when seeing the pic of the dead guy on the floor in the bathroom was "jesus. this is what happens when toy story characters have nightmares".
Color LCD displays aren't cheap. the apple IIIe had an option for a 11" B&grey(W) lcd display, that looked suspiciously like that of a graphing calculator's, but uch larger. i've been looking for somthing similar, sothing htat will take a vga signal and display it on about a 14" B&W LCD screen. in theroy, this should be extremely cheap ($100) and easy to come by.... so far the closest i've come is those 2x40 character LCD's for cash registers and whatnot. any ideas?
4 gig drives seem to be the lowest common denominator these days. fry's sells their linux (no M$) computers w/128 meg ram and a 4gb drive. of course, there may just be a fuck-ton of these drives around and unused, but it seems that most any budget pc comes w/a 4 gb drive.
.13 micron process that ran off a set of AA batteries for a month and could power your palm. problem is, you have to research the idea, design the mobo, voltage regulator, front $$ for the die-mask, or whatever it is. it may be small, but altogether it's still going to cost $100 per unit, b/c that's R&D + materials cost. you can go out and buy a 1.3 ghz athlon + crappy mobo for that.
i agree with you on the total minimal cost of equipment. you still have to pay for materials. just because there's more compressed air inside the box, doesn't mean the box costs less and S&H dissappear. i always wondered why you oculdn't just buy a 486 @ the
i'm not really sure if i just made a point or not. enough rambling for me.
I think actually the reverse is probably true. Hardcore gamers used to buy PCs, for which MS would get $100 per unit, more or less.
most "hardcore gamers" either a) have a free copy of XP they installed themself, b) have a friend who installed it for them, or c) bought it at a college textbook store for $5 (legally).
pc vendors buy XP licences to put on their systems from microsoft for ~$40-$60.
nowadays instead of spending 600-1000$, you buy 3 100 gb drives (@ $200 ea.), and put them on a raid 3 setup, and hope no more than 1 fails at a time, if my meager knowledge of raid is correct.instantanious "backup", and a sight faster than a single drive. considerably more heat, noise, electricity, and hassle than a tape drive, though. trade-offs.
Intel STILL hasn't made a chip that compares with the DEC Alpha, and the Alpha is essentially dead now.
;-)
that's why it's called the Alpha
""Defensive weapon" is an oxymoron if I ever heard one."
i think it was patton, maybe churchill who said "the best offense is a good defense".
how many kW does a nuclear, or coal power plant produce? in sim city 2000 i recall it being roughly 1200kW for nuclear, while coal only produced 400 or 800.
befre anyone says "we don't need no stinking movie news! i'm here for /computer/ stuff!", we should suggest a movie box?
what's next? "new movie, blah is to be released in 8 weeks. the first copies of it on divx are already appearing on the internet. this release beats the old record by 3 and a half hours."?
nah. i've copied plenty of legal stuff there. mostly calvin and hobbess books. works great for me. they help me right till the point where it comes to pushing the green button. and then i pay them, and leave. just make sure you're a "student". this is in upscale/lawyer dallas, so it's not like this is a clueless country kinkos (if they exist)
walmart now sells some brand of flourecent light bulbs. in little letters, it reads:
"this flourecent lightbulb is as a standard incadecent lightbulb of equal or greater wattage of"
(big letters) "200W"
(little letters) "actual wattage - 35W. lower your cooling/electrical bills while producing more light!"
"A lot of us iBook owners, and other Rage128-based Mac owners, would like to know if QE will work partially, or at all, on this hardware."
:)
in short - You're Phucked.
quarts extreme is going to be the "killer app" to get everyone to upgrade from their "legacy" hardware, to the new ibooks and whatnot that you'll see comming out @ macworld NY. i'd suggest selling your ibook now, or at least get someone with cash in hand lined up for it, as it's about to devalue by about $300
it's no coincidence that the new tibook came out with a 32 meg ati radeon 7500 a week before they released the minimum "optimal performance" specs for quartz extreme. so far the only laptops capable of quartz extreme is the rev. b & c tibooks. all ibooks, crt imacs, and g3 powerbooks are Phucked.
hunh. i've had the same ip (24.xxx)since the Great Switch. which was about 8 months ago. previous to that my ip had been a (12.xxx). It's documented better on the link i provide. of course, i live in plano, tx, where alot of phone companies have their headquarters (supposedly), so cable internet downloads burst @ 1.7 mbps, and i've seen as much as 700k/s sustained transfer. i don't run my own DNS server, but i haven't had problems otherwise.
don't know why, but i thought i'd back up your argument:
:)
:)
"Joe User has no idea what software is, where it comes from, what its limitations are, etc. Computers are magic boxes."
to my mom, who uses a computer every day to run financial software for her mortgage buisness, and as a result owns 2 laptops, the "computer" is the big glowing box. the big beige boxy thing next to it is nothing more than somthing to plug the phone, eithernet, mouse and keyboard into, that doubles as a Very Large Power Switch.
however, as an antheisis to the next paragraph,
" Computers are such an integral part of society today, yet knowledge of basic computer science is virtually nonexistant. The way people are trained to interact with computers doesn't even give them the necessary information to know what questions to ask to learn how stuff works. I think that this is very unfortunate, and possibly even detrimental to society as a whole. With the computer industry so thoroughly dominated by a single company, I worry that people will end up unable to think "outside the box". "
i bring the analogy of the computer as a car to the stand. exactly how much do you know you could replace on your car with your current knowledge? what about your neighbor's wife with a perfect driving record? i'm willing to bet most people's knowledge doesn't extend much past refuleing, changing the oil, and the tires. people are trained to used cars, without the slightest amount of knowledge given on how a 4 stroke engine works. yet the world has continued to prosper, despite the fact that most people are clueless about how cars work, despite the fact that cars are an absolute staple of our culture and economy. software is quickly becomming the new economy and culture. for some, at least. ford (microsoft) didn't exactly have alot of competitors it's first 10 or 15 years. eventually chrystler (sun) and luxury brands such as caddilac (apple) managed to grab market share, despite ford's huge installed userbase. 100 years later, after being led steadily along by a single corperation, we have plenty of competetors (roughly 15 major ones, i'd guess), and a healthy auto industry.
Anyway, I'm rambling.
so am i
i think compsci should be taught in schools, for a different reason, though. to teach logic, which for the past 200-2000 years has been taught via algebra and it's brothers trig and calculus. comp sci is more redeeming, in the fact that it isn't just a practiced mental reflex you are developing (quick, 5 + x = 7. x=?), comp sci forces you to come up with your own solution to a problem, and usually the quickest and easiest, because you don't want to spend alot of time doing it. personally i'd love to see this type of learning as an option instead of having to take a remedial class like geometry. making more connections in the brain is more important than swapping out the engine of my 95 dodge neon. so to speak.
i've seen the ^H^H^H^H before, alot, more recently... what does it mean/stand for? usually i'm on top of geek/h4>0r culture, but i'm completely in the dark on this one
i have VPC 5.0 on there right now. running win 98 on there...slow as a dog. kazaa wouldn't install properly. codewarrior works like a charm, however. also, the 200 is in a case FAR away from where i sit, keeping my desk area much more quiet. VPC 5.0 seems to make the fan come on at high speed continiously. plus, it's easier to monitor my downloads on a 17" screen, though :)
you can brew your here in the good ole us of a. not a problem. you can't distill your own, um "moonshine", although distillers can be purchased legally, but only for to home-distill your own drinking water. not that anyone really does that.
there's been alot of huff about wether or not it's legal or not to censor various things (aside from porn, like pro-animal abuse, KKK, ect.). schools have the right to censor their web access, i think they're required to do so. public librarys shouldn't but do so anyways alot of the time.
i agree with you on that. i had a p400 for 3 years before fiddling with the motherboard/cmos battery finally died on me. probably not a smart thing to do in the first place.... anyways, i ended up with an apple tibook, which does everything i need, and then some. wish it had an audio-in port :-/
inherited my dad's p200 when he died and i use that mostly for kazaa and video capture. it's too slow to play divx movies, and i didn't want to invest in a video card to play counterstrike on it. still plays mpeg2, flash, and quicktime movies just fine, along with winamp and aim, ie and netscape - 99% of what i do anyways. needed a laptop for college next year, though.
lol. they really should remove the karma cap. i think about 1/3rd of the slashdot "regulars" have joined the "enlightened leauge", or just simly, "50 karma club". oh well.
my personal webserver that i got off of ebay (mac lc ii - 68020 processor, 10 mb ram and rj-45 10 base t eithernet card) came from some middle school with OS 7.6.1 on it, if i recall correctly. eventually i got fed up with being restricted by all the various software the school put on to keep kids from messing up the software and downloaded and loaded OS 7.5.3, the last free OS avalible on apple's site once i got an upgraded 1 GB scsi drive for it. runs like a charm. hasn't crashed in 8 months (as in 8 month continious uptime), either. runs an ftp server and apple mail server version 1 on it, although i still have to play with it some more before i switch over to that. good little workhorse for what it does, though.
so yeah, it was probably 8.1. sorry about the rambling.
it's one operation. upgrading a video card is alot like upgrading your ram - it even costs about the same - ati radeo 7500 32 mb RAM cards were selling for about 85$ last time i checked. 512 mb of ram (realistic minimum amount to run os x) is going to set you back about $100 for name brand ram. as for install - once you get the case open, you're dealing with a single screw instead of those silly clips for the memory stick. just make sure you're grounded, and unplug and turn off everything first.
the only video cards i'm aware of upgrading the VRAM on is those comming out of 286's, where you could plug in an extra 256k of ram or somthing. either way, it's not a very common feature.
bolo, an old, classic, favoirte gsme of alot of my friends from elementary and middle school used to play, works great on my tibook 550 :) they have a windows port too, which is pretty neat.
i think it'd be educational to look at OS 6 and previous, which were all written in assembly. some things i've heard though lead me to believe that coding in assembly is different for each archtecture (x86, 680x0, PPC)