If I can't see a site without scripting enabled, I am not going to look at that site. Period.
I use IE6 to cruise the web. Given the all the security holes and patches, I'll be damned if I say yes to "Scripts are usually hamless. Ok to run?"
Even a site like the NYtimes runs under lockdown on my machine. Though I trust the web designers at the Times not to be malicious, I don't think they can secure their site against an attack that sneaks a malicious script onto their site. Same thing is true of internal web pages.
Yeah, you can get fanless PSUs but watch out. TKpower's only delivers about 80 Watts sans fan. Neither it, nor the RSG RCP 300W-series fanless psu, are recommended for P4s. More here.
Bottom line, no one that I am aware of has delivered a fanless psu that is recommended for the P4.
Perhaps a psu engineer can comment on the following as I'm not sure I'm right. A psu running at 300W at 70% efficiency has to dump 30% of the 300W as heat. That's 90 watts that has to be gotten rid of - a lot to ask of a passively cooled psu. TKPower tries to do it by physically coupling their psu to the case.
If you're burning a batch of CD's, 12 minutes to burn the image is a lot to add just to put a picture on the cd. Had I put together a birthday CD last weekend and had I burned 30 copies for the guests and had I used the image burner, it would have added six hours to the task. Seems a lot of time just to put a label on a CD.
Nah, you'd "win" after you started your year of training in Russia, and you'd have to pay the Russian tax instead of American.
You raised a good point - what do you do for income while you're training?
Let's see now, $20 Mil in taxes + $80K in lost income. I never knew winning could be so expensive!
This promotion has the smell of some marketing weenie not thinking things through very carefully. Harrier jets and Hoover vacuum cleaners come to mind.
Income tax on $20 Mil would easily put you in the 50% tax bracket. That means your $20 mil prize would cost you $10 Mil. If Pepsi decided to pay your tax bill that year as well then their cost goes up by $10 mil. Oh wait, there's tax on the extra $10 mil - that runs to another $5 mil. Then there's another 2.5 on the extra 5... By the time all is said and done, it's an extra $20 mil just for taxes.
Pepsi's $35 mil promotion just ended up costing $55 Mil. It'd probably be cheaper for Pepsi to buy a congressman to exempt you for 1 year from income taxes.
That's you. We're all different in what we can perceive.
I can see 75 and I doubt I've got the most sensitive eyes.
Another aspect to consider is what happens to fps when you up the resolution or image complexity. Per-pixel shading, resolution, Anti-Aliasing, etc., will all combine to slow the cards down.
What's keeping me away from this card is ATI's notorious reputation when it comes to drivers. Why buy killer hardware if the software for it is dodgy? Add to that that ATI's not saying how they'll handle 8X AGP and it doesn't make me comfortable that it's a good choice.
...since the article leaves open that De Niro might be looking for a movie to produce and not necessarily act in.
This review, and this one, and this one all seemed to like it. But more importantly, Kip Thorne said when he saw Alda in Los Angeles that it was like spending some time with Feynman once again.
I know if QED opened within 200 miles of me, I'd go see it. Alda has done great work and Feynman's life was amazing.
Your proirity in testing shouldn't rely on automation necessarily because what you are bound to find is that the application works perfectly, when it's following the script you've programmed. When somebody on my team brings me code/functionality to review, the first thing I try to do is to "do the wrong thing" (eg. letters in a field to be interpreted as numeric). Thorough testing requires "unbridaled" human ingenugity.
There is absolutely nothing that'll find a bug as well as a good QA person who thinks "how can I break this?" However, that QA person should have recorded the sequence of events that breaks the code for two reasons...
Reproducing the problem to show the prorgrammer.
Regression testing to test that bugfix+1000 doesn't re-introduce the bug.
To me, reason 2 is why automated tools are valuable. Give me a QA person who can break my code in novel ways and knows how to run regressions and I'll crank solid code 3 times faster. Productivity and code quality around here dove when they laid off our single QA person.
I run a business that entails printing about 20,000 sheets of paper a week. At that rate, we're swapping toner carts almost weekly. I spent a fair amount of time analyzing which printer could deliver the best image at the lowest price and the two HP laser printers came in ahead of Lexmark and Xerox. Inkjets were way out of the picture due to the cost of the ink cartridges and the fact that they're slower. I don't recall what Xerox's deal-breaker was but Lexmark has a very subtle one. Though the printer's toner and initial prices are quite reasonable, the Lexmark hits you for $250+ at 100,000 copies when the drum needs replacing. The HP's drums go out at around 200,000 copies and cost about the same.
Ignoring paper costs, the HP can deliver an image at about.7 cents/sheet as compared to 1.2 for the Lexmark. Though.5 cents doesn't sound like a lot, it adds up when you're cranking 20K copies each week.
Print speeds are as advertised, I get 17 ppm from the 4050's and 24 ppm from the 4100. I looked at some very high end printers because I didn't want to wait forever while the paper churns through. The 40 ppm, and better, printers came in above $10,000. So instead, I bought 3 HP's and wrote a little bit of code that spreads the load out over the 3 machines. Saved $7,000 and had fun while I was at it.
Unfortunately, there has been a downside. All of this ran on Windows 98 with not too many problems. I had to write a prompt into my code to remind me to disable power saving sleep mode whilst printing and it helped if I rebooted before firing off the printer job. I was fairly happy with the setup but thought I could do better if I migrated to Win 2000. (Stuck in Windows for other reasons.) At any rate, Win 2000, Excel, and HP do not seem to get along. One of those three pieces seems to drop a bit every so often and away goes a print job. Away, as in, I've got to watch the printout carefully to catch random imaging problems. I don't know if it's Microsoft trying to coerce me to upgrade from Excel 97, which didn't help, or HP not fully testing Windows 2000 with the 4050's. Right now, you don't want to be around me when I struggle with the mess the problem engenders. Ain't a pretty sight. Fortunately, the bug has migrated from Heisenbug status to reproducible so it's just a matter of time before it's fixed.
This appears to be yet another step in the devolution of HP. HP used to be a world leader in so many areas - calculators, printers, computers, cpus, medical equipment, lab equipment, etc.
However, since the founders died, the company looks to have been taken over by managers who are primarily interested in their paycheck, not the well being of the company. For example, one of the driving factors behind the Compaq merger was the fact that Carly got a $70 Million bonus check if the merger went through. Lord knows what she would have earned had the Price-Waterhouse acquisition taken place.
The corporate logo "HP Invent," alludes to an inventive spirit at HP but unfortunately, that spirit is the spirit of HP-past. I've seen exactly one interesting idea come out of HP in the past 2 years and that was a cooling device - not something that'll generate billions in sales. Carly was a History major at Stanford so she's obviously got some smarts. But they're the wrong kind - she doesn't have the technological background to recognize really good technical ideas when she sees them and so must rely on her staff to evaluate them for her. The inevitable "what does she want to hear?" filtering takes place and in that process and HP is all the poorer for it.
The next time the HP board goes looking for a new CEO (like in the next 18 months maybe...), hopefully they'll choose someone who not only has some sales smarts but is also technologically competent. And perhaps, if they've learned anything, the compensation plan will reflect the CEO's effect on HP's bottom line, not how many pointless mergers the CEO steers the company through.
What if Microsoft bought the patents, and then sued Linus? This would be a perfect way of killing off Linux as we know it.
Microsoft already bought the SGI patents for $62.5 million. Looks like the "git" that Linus will want to hit is Bill Gates.
Back in the mid 90's when the Patent office was holding "hearings" in San Jose on whether to start issuing software patents, the overwhelming testimony from software engineers was "please don't do this." The people testifying in favor were attorneys - neither of which have a clue as to how code is created.
It was clear at the time that software patent hearings were a pro-forma farce.
Years ago, Ray Bradbury came to town and talked about what he did besides write science fiction. Among his many enterprises, he consulted with Disney on their animation museum in Florida. They had a standard museum layout with kiosks showing various Disney cartoons but unfortunately, the room felt flat and uninteresting. So they called Bradbury in as part of a team to figure out how to jazz up the exhibit.
Bradbury, et al., suggested using a material that was common years ago but may not be so common now - it was a type of reflector that showed a picture when viewed one way and another picture when viewed from a slightly different angle. You could flip back and forth by rotating the reflector. Their idea was that if you're going to have an animation museum, the museum itself should be animated. But since they were specifically aiming at kids, they set up the entry just for the kids.
What happened depended on how tall you were. If you were an adult, you saw these static cartoon adult characters, i.e., Goofey, Donald, etc. following you along as you walked down the hall to the exhibit. But if you were a kid, or you lowered your eyes to kid-height, what you saw were an animated Huey, Dewey and Louie running in and out of the cartoon adult's legs.
You shouldn't have skimmed - he answers what you can do. To wit:
Don't email - write a letter and include a check made out to the representatives who support reigning in copyright law. There are so few right now that I can list them. They are:
That's it - all the U.S. Representatives who understand this issue. Support em cause they're all we've got right now. However, there is hope on the horizon....
Hank Perritt, the former dean of the Chicago School of Law, is running for congress. Help him win his seat and it'll help. If you live in Chicago, volunteer at Perritt's campaign headquarters. He needs all the free help he can get.
In your letter that includes a donation, make it clear why you support these particular men.
How would you keep a large platform level as the platform moves?
The original design had a mercury filled tube running around the perimeter of the transport platform. The idea was the mercury would flow to a low spot, trigger a relay and the low spot would rise. The basic idea was fine but it ignored latencies as the mercury flowed around the transport's 500 foot perimeter. They called my cousin in to fix the design after NASA powered the transport up and the platform started oscillating.
If I recall correctly (and I may not, it's been almost 40 years since he described the problem at the family dinner table), his solution was to discard the mercury tubes and replace them with photocells.
I wasn't so much suprised by the missing 0 as much as the.10 target. Intel and AMD are aiming at.09 for their next generation so why is IBM not doing the same?
They're going to have to demonstrate that long-term weather at 60,000 feet is docile enough to enable these planes to stay up. Some U2 images were taken above a cloud that got up to 18 km. That doesn't leave an awful lot of clearance between the plane and the clouds from this particular storm. Conceivably, there are higher clouds associated with bigger storms. Even if you're above the cloud turbulence, you still have to cope with:
At 22:14 CST on July 6, 1989 they recorded a twin flash originating in a storm top cloud and discharging into the stratosphere.
Don't get me wrong, it'll be wonderful if the company can pull this off. It just looks like there are an awful lot of unanswered questions as to what it'll be like up at that elevation for extended periods. If I were starting up an isp based on the technology, I'd make it clear to my customers that there may be black out periods when I bring the planes down to avoid losing them to a major storm. The tradeoff is when the planes are up, they'll get terrific throughput. 98% uptime may be good enough for most people. For the 99.999 crowd, they could use the service to supplement whatever they're doing and fall back to slower circuits during a storm.
Not only are they working on building a large, long-endurance airplane, they're also working on a small, short-endurance spy plane. The basic idea is you take a briefcase to where you're interested in looking at something, open the case, set up a small antennae and launch a little hand-held plane to go snoop around. There's a paper on how they built the plane near the bottom of this page.
When CD audio came out, there was no question the sound was cleaner. We were so used to hearing snaps and underlying noise on vinyl that the CD sound was simply gold compared to lead. So expecting a similar quality payoff from Digital Video, three of us made an effort to see Attack of the Clones in a digital theater. We were disappointed. In retrospect, it isn't that surprising. A new vinyl record sounds wonderful. It's not until it's been played a lot and collected dust and scratches that the CD/Vinyl gap favors CDs.
For a consumer, the big digital payoff might be down the road when a movie has been through a projector so many times that the quality becomes objectionable on an analog print. But since the majority of a movie's gross is in the first few weeks of the run and the studios get the lion's share of the take during those weeks, the economics may work against digital. The studios reap the long term benefit of digital and the theater owner has to pay for it. If I owned a theater, I think I'd hold back as well.
Good estimate but I'd guess you're off by at least a factor of two. The $0.15 kW-h is probably more like.07 or.08 kW-h. They can locate their farm pretty much anywhere, including the Northwest where electricity is cheaper.
If they were really adventurous, they could locate the farm on Iceland where the government is subsidizing Alcoa's new aluminum smelter to the tune of $0.02 kwh.
When I saw that Stanford had a product realization lab I regretted I wasn't young enough to "have went to Stanford." Then again, with grammar like that, they wouldn't have let me in.
That's too bad. My shareware keyboard macro program, mgSimply, allows you to use the Windows key as a modifier key. The benefit is the key significantly increases the number of keyboard macros you can have.
If you use Windows XP,NT, or 2000, you'll need this patch.
Slashdot Mirror
I use IE6 to cruise the web. Given the all the security holes and patches, I'll be damned if I say yes to "Scripts are usually hamless. Ok to run?"
Even a site like the NYtimes runs under lockdown on my machine. Though I trust the web designers at the Times not to be malicious, I don't think they can secure their site against an attack that sneaks a malicious script onto their site. Same thing is true of internal web pages.
Bottom line, no one that I am aware of has delivered a fanless psu that is recommended for the P4.
Perhaps a psu engineer can comment on the following as I'm not sure I'm right. A psu running at 300W at 70% efficiency has to dump 30% of the 300W as heat. That's 90 watts that has to be gotten rid of - a lot to ask of a passively cooled psu. TKPower tries to do it by physically coupling their psu to the case.
If you're burning a batch of CD's, 12 minutes to burn the image is a lot to add just to put a picture on the cd. Had I put together a birthday CD last weekend and had I burned 30 copies for the guests and had I used the image burner, it would have added six hours to the task. Seems a lot of time just to put a label on a CD.
Nah, he meant Dragonian - they're dragging him out and he's gone.
You raised a good point - what do you do for income while you're training?
Let's see now, $20 Mil in taxes + $80K in lost income. I never knew winning could be so expensive!
This promotion has the smell of some marketing weenie not thinking things through very carefully. Harrier jets and Hoover vacuum cleaners come to mind.
Pepsi's $35 mil promotion just ended up costing $55 Mil. It'd probably be cheaper for Pepsi to buy a congressman to exempt you for 1 year from income taxes.
That's you. We're all different in what we can perceive.
I can see 75 and I doubt I've got the most sensitive eyes.
Another aspect to consider is what happens to fps when you up the resolution or image complexity. Per-pixel shading, resolution, Anti-Aliasing, etc., will all combine to slow the cards down.
What's keeping me away from this card is ATI's notorious reputation when it comes to drivers. Why buy killer hardware if the software for it is dodgy? Add to that that ATI's not saying how they'll handle 8X AGP and it doesn't make me comfortable that it's a good choice.
Are you sure you have the title right? I found The Best Mind Since Einstein.
This review, and this one, and this one all seemed to like it. But more importantly, Kip Thorne said when he saw Alda in Los Angeles that it was like spending some time with Feynman once again.
I know if QED opened within 200 miles of me, I'd go see it. Alda has done great work and Feynman's life was amazing.
There is absolutely nothing that'll find a bug as well as a good QA person who thinks "how can I break this?" However, that QA person should have recorded the sequence of events that breaks the code for two reasons...
- Reproducing the problem to show the prorgrammer.
- Regression testing to test that bugfix+1000 doesn't re-introduce the bug.
To me, reason 2 is why automated tools are valuable. Give me a QA person who can break my code in novel ways and knows how to run regressions and I'll crank solid code 3 times faster. Productivity and code quality around here dove when they laid off our single QA person.The parent's point is well taken - at 200 dpi, the monitor is just at fax quality. (Albeit helped by the additional color information.)
Ignoring paper costs, the HP can deliver an image at about .7 cents/sheet as compared to 1.2 for the Lexmark. Though .5 cents doesn't sound like a lot, it adds up when you're cranking 20K copies each week.
Print speeds are as advertised, I get 17 ppm from the 4050's and 24 ppm from the 4100. I looked at some very high end printers because I didn't want to wait forever while the paper churns through. The 40 ppm, and better, printers came in above $10,000. So instead, I bought 3 HP's and wrote a little bit of code that spreads the load out over the 3 machines. Saved $7,000 and had fun while I was at it.
Unfortunately, there has been a downside. All of this ran on Windows 98 with not too many problems. I had to write a prompt into my code to remind me to disable power saving sleep mode whilst printing and it helped if I rebooted before firing off the printer job. I was fairly happy with the setup but thought I could do better if I migrated to Win 2000. (Stuck in Windows for other reasons.) At any rate, Win 2000, Excel, and HP do not seem to get along. One of those three pieces seems to drop a bit every so often and away goes a print job. Away, as in, I've got to watch the printout carefully to catch random imaging problems. I don't know if it's Microsoft trying to coerce me to upgrade from Excel 97, which didn't help, or HP not fully testing Windows 2000 with the 4050's. Right now, you don't want to be around me when I struggle with the mess the problem engenders. Ain't a pretty sight. Fortunately, the bug has migrated from Heisenbug status to reproducible so it's just a matter of time before it's fixed.
However, since the founders died, the company looks to have been taken over by managers who are primarily interested in their paycheck, not the well being of the company. For example, one of the driving factors behind the Compaq merger was the fact that Carly got a $70 Million bonus check if the merger went through. Lord knows what she would have earned had the Price-Waterhouse acquisition taken place.
The corporate logo "HP Invent," alludes to an inventive spirit at HP but unfortunately, that spirit is the spirit of HP-past. I've seen exactly one interesting idea come out of HP in the past 2 years and that was a cooling device - not something that'll generate billions in sales. Carly was a History major at Stanford so she's obviously got some smarts. But they're the wrong kind - she doesn't have the technological background to recognize really good technical ideas when she sees them and so must rely on her staff to evaluate them for her. The inevitable "what does she want to hear?" filtering takes place and in that process and HP is all the poorer for it.
The next time the HP board goes looking for a new CEO (like in the next 18 months maybe...), hopefully they'll choose someone who not only has some sales smarts but is also technologically competent. And perhaps, if they've learned anything, the compensation plan will reflect the CEO's effect on HP's bottom line, not how many pointless mergers the CEO steers the company through.
Microsoft already bought the SGI patents for $62.5 million. Looks like the "git" that Linus will want to hit is Bill Gates.
Back in the mid 90's when the Patent office was holding "hearings" in San Jose on whether to start issuing software patents, the overwhelming testimony from software engineers was "please don't do this." The people testifying in favor were attorneys - neither of which have a clue as to how code is created.
It was clear at the time that software patent hearings were a pro-forma farce.
Bradbury, et al., suggested using a material that was common years ago but may not be so common now - it was a type of reflector that showed a picture when viewed one way and another picture when viewed from a slightly different angle. You could flip back and forth by rotating the reflector. Their idea was that if you're going to have an animation museum, the museum itself should be animated. But since they were specifically aiming at kids, they set up the entry just for the kids.
What happened depended on how tall you were. If you were an adult, you saw these static cartoon adult characters, i.e., Goofey, Donald, etc. following you along as you walked down the hall to the exhibit. But if you were a kid, or you lowered your eyes to kid-height, what you saw were an animated Huey, Dewey and Louie running in and out of the cartoon adult's legs.
You shouldn't have skimmed - he answers what you can do. To wit:
Don't email - write a letter and include a check made out to the representatives who support reigning in copyright law. There are so few right now that I can list them. They are:
Rick Boucher
Chris Cannon
That's it - all the U.S. Representatives who understand this issue. Support em cause they're all we've got right now. However, there is hope on the horizon....
Hank Perritt, the former dean of the Chicago School of Law, is running for congress. Help him win his seat and it'll help. If you live in Chicago, volunteer at Perritt's campaign headquarters. He needs all the free help he can get.
In your letter that includes a donation, make it clear why you support these particular men.
You can also send money to Eff.
You're not helpless, you can do something. The thing is to DO IT - not whing about it.
Do it now, not later.
Have no cash? Then at least get and display your free Free the Mouse bumper sticker.
How would you keep a large platform level as the platform moves?
The original design had a mercury filled tube running around the perimeter of the transport platform. The idea was the mercury would flow to a low spot, trigger a relay and the low spot would rise. The basic idea was fine but it ignored latencies as the mercury flowed around the transport's 500 foot perimeter. They called my cousin in to fix the design after NASA powered the transport up and the platform started oscillating.
If I recall correctly (and I may not, it's been almost 40 years since he described the problem at the family dinner table), his solution was to discard the mercury tubes and replace them with photocells.
I wasn't so much suprised by the missing 0 as much as the .10 target. Intel and AMD are aiming at .09 for their next generation so why is IBM not doing the same?
Don't get me wrong, it'll be wonderful if the company can pull this off. It just looks like there are an awful lot of unanswered questions as to what it'll be like up at that elevation for extended periods. If I were starting up an isp based on the technology, I'd make it clear to my customers that there may be black out periods when I bring the planes down to avoid losing them to a major storm. The tradeoff is when the planes are up, they'll get terrific throughput. 98% uptime may be good enough for most people. For the 99.999 crowd, they could use the service to supplement whatever they're doing and fall back to slower circuits during a storm.
Not only are they working on building a large, long-endurance airplane, they're also working on a small, short-endurance spy plane. The basic idea is you take a briefcase to where you're interested in looking at something, open the case, set up a small antennae and launch a little hand-held plane to go snoop around. There's a paper on how they built the plane near the bottom of this page.
For a consumer, the big digital payoff might be down the road when a movie has been through a projector so many times that the quality becomes objectionable on an analog print. But since the majority of a movie's gross is in the first few weeks of the run and the studios get the lion's share of the take during those weeks, the economics may work against digital. The studios reap the long term benefit of digital and the theater owner has to pay for it. If I owned a theater, I think I'd hold back as well.
Good estimate but I'd guess you're off by at least a factor of two. The $0.15 kW-h is probably more like .07 or .08 kW-h. They can locate their farm pretty much anywhere, including the Northwest where electricity is cheaper.
If they were really adventurous, they could locate the farm on Iceland where the government is subsidizing Alcoa's new aluminum smelter to the tune of $0.02 kwh.
A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you're talking real money.
When I saw that Stanford had a product realization lab I regretted I wasn't young enough to "have went to Stanford." Then again, with grammar like that, they wouldn't have let me in.
That's too bad. My shareware keyboard macro program, mgSimply, allows you to use the Windows key as a modifier key. The benefit is the key significantly increases the number of keyboard macros you can have.
If you use Windows XP,NT, or 2000, you'll need this patch.