Linux is a viable gaming platform. OpenGL programming under Linux is no harder than OpenGL programming under Windows, and performance levels are similar. The only problems are a lack of games, and difficulty choosing which libraries and sound daemons to support. While this makes it harder from an end user's point of view, the tools are all there from a developer's point of view. Witness Neverwinter Nights, Quake 1/2/3, Doom 3 (which has announced Linux support, and is being developed on Linux machines).
The main problems with Linux-based gaming are ideological ones: the Linux community must convince developers to use OpenGL instead of DirectX, and convince them that the small amount of work involved in a Linux port would give a good return on investment.
Why not just buy another small PC? A minitower case with a Celeron or Via C3 (so you could run it w/o fans, or with one or two small fans in a poorly ventilated area), a decent video card, and such would probably work even better, and you don't have to deal with attenuation and interference resulting from long analog cable runs. Network it to your main box (using nice digital Ethernet or even 802.11a/b/g) and you've got all your MP3s, Divx movies, and whatever else you want right there. Even 10Mbps Ethernet has the bandwidth to stream a decent movie, assuming you aren't on a busy hub or something.
The only problem would be with running games, but the low resolution on the TV screen and low refresh rate of the wireless mouse and keyboard mean that gaming would be difficult at best. If you have your heart set on it, just put Halflife and Counterstrike or something else with slightly dated technology, and you'll never notice the difference. The TV's poor resolution will nicely conceal low-res textures and blocky models;).
The "Flash" button on nearly all cordless phones disconnects and reconnects the line for a fraction of a second; it's exactly the same as tapping the hook on a hardwired phone. If they didn't have it, features like call waiting or 3 way calling wouldn't work. The only problem with using it to dial is if the phone's input circuts have trouble with rapid repeated presses of the same button.
No, but separate cells in a mushroom or slime mold are. The important thing is that each cell can communicate with its neighbors, and has some role to play in a larger system. Also, it would have to communicate intracellularly, or it could never reproduce. That's the Central Dogma of molecular biology: DNA->RNA->proteins. Any organism which lacked intracellular communication would die almost immediately.
Even assuming you meant "intercellular," however, the story mentioned that the cells responded differently towards each other than they did towards "outsiders." If this is the case, then the cells must have some form of communication with the outside world, and with each other. Ergo, it's a single organism, since the cells communicate. Whether it's a fungus doesn't matter; whether it has cells that communicate with each other does.
Other people have mentioned color depth, but there are a few other things you might want to look into:
Does the network have the capacity in the first place? I've run VNC over 10Mbit switched Ethernet without much slowdown; but if the network is non-switched or just really busy, anything that requires low latency is going to be hosed.
Get rid of unnecessary pixmaps. On WinVNC, there's an option to remove the wallpaper (that can REALLY help); in X use a windowmanager or theme that relies on simple shapes and solid colors rather than pixmaps and gradients.
Try using vanilla VNC. If the computers on each end aren't fairly speedy, the compression may actually slow things down over a LAN.
Dvorak doesn't understand the "techie stuff," he just writes about it. If you mention words like "binary executable" around him, he just gets confused until you tell him, "you know, a program," at which point he will tell you how Apple, Microsoft and Red Hat are all secretly run by a consortium of lizard aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy, and plan to merge in order to take over the world Real Soon Now.
Note that this person says they work in a US government office. While it's unlikely, a fax spammer wouldn't want to risk calling down several metric assloads of red tape on his business. Private citizens are easier to deal with; only one in a few thousand at most will follow up all the way into court. On the other hand, all it takes is just one spam fax to the wrong person in the IRS to have a very detailed audit coming your way.
Of course, they would have excpet for the fact they managed to interface their processors with the ship's computer and remodulate the deflector frequencies 6.287 KHz outside the normal range, thus allowing them to barely survive the impact.
Remember, this is Star Trek/strong! If you need to get your characters out of an impossible to escape quandary, simply crank the handle on the Technobabble Generator and give the actors whatever comes out (rumor has it it's connected to Rick Berman's ass, but then so is the main scriptwriting machine).
If you were trying to send someone a copy of Linux via a filesharing service, you would be comitting an even greater crime: restricting Microsoft's Freedom to Innovate. It is the God-given duty of our legislators at this time to remove all threats of competition to good, honest American companies like Microsoft. If you dare think anything else, you are a TRAITOR and a TERRORIST!
Uhhh... no. Turbos and blowers (superchargers to all you washed masses) put more air into the cylinder. While this may increase fuel economy and power slightly (due to a more complete burn), to get the most out of a forced induction system, you need to put more fuel in. The ideal is for every hydrocarbon molecule, you have exactly enough oxygen to turn that hydrocarbon into carbon dioxide and water. Thus, since more fuel is forced induction systems all decrease fuel efficiency and emissions, while increasing power. While you may be able to compensate by running at a lower RPM for normal driving, the fact remains that an optimally tuned engine with a forced induction system will burn more gas than an equivalent engine without such a system.
The GPS signal is *very* hard to jam - it was designed to be so.
While GPS may have all sorts of anti-jamming technology built in, the fact remains that it's a tiny signal by the time it gets to Earth: about -160 dBW (that's 10^-16 watts!). Even a fairly small wideband transmitter (like something running off a generator on the back of a truck) should be able to overwhelm GPS in a small area. This is probably the main problem with all the fancy new GPS-guided weapons: just park a truck with a jammer next to a presidential palace, power station, or whatever you want to protect. Instantly, all those JDAMs become iron bombs.
They still paid for heating; the electricity was just going into the supercomputer rather than into big resistors. In this case, it's the first law of thermodynamics that gets you; you can't make energy (of any type) any more than you can make a 100% efficent device.
Google's toolbar sends data on the sites you browse only with the advanced features turned on. These advanced features are things like the ability to view Pagerank, or "Pagerank voting" - you can click a plus or minus button, and have a very slight effect on a page's Pagerank. I don't see how Google could implement either without sending a query to their servers containing the URL of the current site.
The privacy implications of these features are laid out very clearly in the configuration page, in plain English, right next to the button that allows you to disable them. I don't know of any spyware that will give you any information on what you have unwittingly allowed them to monitor outside a near-incomprehensible EULA, and I don't know of any spyware that will allow you to turn off its monitoring "features" easily.
The only thing I can really fault Google for is its treatment of the Scientology search-blocking issue, but it seemed to me they were only trying to follow the law and not get burned themselves; the issue was more the DMCA's fault (to keep your rights as a common carrier, you must remove materials which are alleged to be copyrighted immediately upon notice).
Regarding the GUID, Google keeps track of users' clickthroughs and uses that as a Pagerank modifier. The GUID prevents someone from simply querying Google and clicking through to their own page lots of times - basically stuffing the ballot box. Slashdot does something similar for its poll-voting code; it tracks the IP (which is as close as you can get to an Internet-wide GUID) and I don't see you complaining about that. Google isn't perfect, but they don't act like Microsoft either.
How would you hang more than one PS/2 keyboard off one machine anyway? I don't think I've ever seen any system that could do that, which is why I recommended USB (although serial mice would work just as well, now that I think about it).
Also, it seems to me that you wouldn't really need more than one textmode console, since you can run xterm/rxvt/konsole/gnome-terminal on an X-only KVM head. The only times you really need a real console are during bootup and emergencies, when two people using the system simultaneously wouldn't be a real asset.
Just get a USB hub, a second video card, a USB keyboard, and a USB mouse. Then run two X sessions, each configured to use one K/V/M configuration. The only issue is if you want to run high-end 3D graphics on both monitors, since you can only fit one AGP card into a PC. You might be able to get around this with one of the Matrox or ATI dual-head boards, but I don't know that for certain.
Incidentally, you may want to check out this review of a product that does something similar in Windows, again using multiple video cards.
Alternately, you may want to cruise Ebay for some secondhand X terminals. While they tend to be ridiculously expensive new (on the order of a whole new PC), you may be able to find someone with a few they just want to get rid of. Of course, check out the specs before hand and cruise Google to make sure that they'll work under Linux without any special hardware or software. X may be an open protocol, but it never hurts to be sure.
Cooling CPUs below the dewpoint won't hurt them at all if you are careful to seal everything well. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with it; it just means you have to be careful about sealing off the areas to be cooled. Most vaporphase and Peltier cooling systems are insulated quite well around the chilled area, with closed-cell foam and lots of sealants (mostly silicone). The Vapochill system even includes a little heater to place on the backside of your motherboard to keep it around room temperature.
In fact, lowering the temperature of the CPU will actually increase processor life, all other things being equal. Heat can and will shorten a processor's life; a process called "thermal electron drift" will cause the transistors to fail (perhaps someone more intelligent than I could fill in the details; I just know it ruins processors and the rate is directly proportional to the heat of the CPU over long periods of time).
The reason generic video drivers will only give you 640x480x16 colors is that's a sort of "universal language" for video cards. While some video cards will choke on even 800x600, anything that speaks VGA (that is, pretty much all PC graphics hardware) will run on that standard. The idea is for your system to get to a point to where you can get drivers installed that support all its features.
After all, if your display drivers defaulted to 1024x768x32-bit color, a lot of older video cards would choke and only display a black screen. There might even be trouble with the monitor if you push it too hard (although most monitors are fine and just shut down if you have a wacky scanrate, some will literally emit smoke). If I want to keep a known good video card around for troubleshooting purposes, it shouldn't have to be the latest Geforce or Radeon. I should be able to throw in an 8-year old Cirrus Logic and get some basic diagnostic tools up.
On another note, you may wish to invest in a NIC that is something of an industry standard. I have had great success with the 3com 3c509 (ISA 10mbit) and 3c905 (PCI 10/100). While they are kind of pricey, having a NIC that's supported by most flavors of OS (Windows, Linux, *BSD, BeOS, QNX, lots of others) has pulled my ass out of some rather nasty situations in the past.
Also, with modems and soundcards, if they aren't Windows-only designs that do everything in software anyway, try using Soundblaster and Hayes drivers. Most decent hardware will emulate these; they are more or less industry standards. You won't get much in the way of special features, but it will work unless you have some funky hardware.
Um, it is an HTTP server. However, that's not that much harder than basic TCP/IP; HTML is just text. I doubt it's going to serve anything more than a textonly webpage with a status report and possibly the ability to remotely initiate diagnostics. Once you get TCP/IP, transferring text that has to conform to a few standards is easy. Just wrap it in <HTML> and <BODY> tags, and you have what is more or less a webpage that would display in most browsers.
This has a lot to do with Your Rights, online or not. It has been considered a basic right of a prisoner to have legal counsel available ever since the US was founded. Bush and his pals trying to take that away has very far-reaching implications on the entire US legal system.
After all, if someone is detained without counsel for allegedly trying to blow up a plane, what's to say they couldn't be detained without counsel for allegedly trying to hack a government website? I don't condone either action, but people should have the right to represent themselves in court, and access to someone who can advise them on legal issues. Anything else is just a show trial, where the verdict is decided before the trial begins.
Very few, but I would imagine that some people fill up the password field with as many 'x's as it will hold. The idea is that the extra 'x's will be truncated, and you end up with a sort of "universal password".
ECC isn't there for the tiny chance that one, and only one, chip on the module would catch fire and die. It's there so that any random "bit rot" (single-bit errors) is caught and corrected before it causes damage. All RAM is susceptable to this; it can be caused by cosmic rays (!) or by radioactive decay (can't remember if it's alpha or beta) of minute quantities of radioisotopes in the chips' substrate. While it will only happen once in every ten years or so on average, it does happen and can cause a system crash. ECC is about reducing the possible risk (it would have to flip 3 bits simultaneously to fool ECC RAM).
And, depending on who's in the Whitehouse in 2005, an attempt to leverage desktop software dominance into control of a new data-communication monopoly could land Microsoft in more serious legal trouble than they've ever had before.
Yeah, they might get two slaps on the wrist. Unless Bush can get the economy out of the smoking hole in the ground he seems to have made, the next president will be tasked with bringing the US economy back into shape. This means that MS could simply whine about how Evil Government is oppressing their God-Given Freedom to Innovate. Suddenly, the DoJ will tread very carefully around anything that might infringe upon their right to bend the customers over and ream them up the arse, because that might hurt the recovering economy.
Jesus Christ, you're paranoid. The purpose of licensing professional geologists is so that some dishonest buisiness doesn't get the CEO's brother who took an 'Intro to Geology' course at the local community college to certify something as being built on geologically stable ground.
Believe it or not, a lot of different factors go into choosing a site for a major building. One of them is the stability of the ground. It's generally considered a Bad Idea to put 50 story highrise buildings on loose gravel. Thus, you need a geologist to conduct a survey and figure out whether the ground can support the weight of your planned construction. If you don't take that step, your new building might start looking like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Slashdot Mirror
The main problems with Linux-based gaming are ideological ones: the Linux community must convince developers to use OpenGL instead of DirectX, and convince them that the small amount of work involved in a Linux port would give a good return on investment.
Come get some
The only problem would be with running games, but the low resolution on the TV screen and low refresh rate of the wireless mouse and keyboard mean that gaming would be difficult at best. If you have your heart set on it, just put Halflife and Counterstrike or something else with slightly dated technology, and you'll never notice the difference. The TV's poor resolution will nicely conceal low-res textures and blocky models ;).
The "Flash" button on nearly all cordless phones disconnects and reconnects the line for a fraction of a second; it's exactly the same as tapping the hook on a hardwired phone. If they didn't have it, features like call waiting or 3 way calling wouldn't work. The only problem with using it to dial is if the phone's input circuts have trouble with rapid repeated presses of the same button.
Even assuming you meant "intercellular," however, the story mentioned that the cells responded differently towards each other than they did towards "outsiders." If this is the case, then the cells must have some form of communication with the outside world, and with each other. Ergo, it's a single organism, since the cells communicate. Whether it's a fungus doesn't matter; whether it has cells that communicate with each other does.
Dvorak doesn't understand the "techie stuff," he just writes about it. If you mention words like "binary executable" around him, he just gets confused until you tell him, "you know, a program," at which point he will tell you how Apple, Microsoft and Red Hat are all secretly run by a consortium of lizard aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy, and plan to merge in order to take over the world Real Soon Now.
Note that this person says they work in a US government office. While it's unlikely, a fax spammer wouldn't want to risk calling down several metric assloads of red tape on his business. Private citizens are easier to deal with; only one in a few thousand at most will follow up all the way into court. On the other hand, all it takes is just one spam fax to the wrong person in the IRS to have a very detailed audit coming your way.
Remember, this is Star Trek/strong! If you need to get your characters out of an impossible to escape quandary, simply crank the handle on the Technobabble Generator and give the actors whatever comes out (rumor has it it's connected to Rick Berman's ass, but then so is the main scriptwriting machine).
</SARCASM> (for all you mods out there)
Uhhh... no. Turbos and blowers (superchargers to all you washed masses) put more air into the cylinder. While this may increase fuel economy and power slightly (due to a more complete burn), to get the most out of a forced induction system, you need to put more fuel in. The ideal is for every hydrocarbon molecule, you have exactly enough oxygen to turn that hydrocarbon into carbon dioxide and water. Thus, since more fuel is forced induction systems all decrease fuel efficiency and emissions, while increasing power. While you may be able to compensate by running at a lower RPM for normal driving, the fact remains that an optimally tuned engine with a forced induction system will burn more gas than an equivalent engine without such a system.
They still paid for heating; the electricity was just going into the supercomputer rather than into big resistors. In this case, it's the first law of thermodynamics that gets you; you can't make energy (of any type) any more than you can make a 100% efficent device.
The privacy implications of these features are laid out very clearly in the configuration page, in plain English, right next to the button that allows you to disable them. I don't know of any spyware that will give you any information on what you have unwittingly allowed them to monitor outside a near-incomprehensible EULA, and I don't know of any spyware that will allow you to turn off its monitoring "features" easily.
The only thing I can really fault Google for is its treatment of the Scientology search-blocking issue, but it seemed to me they were only trying to follow the law and not get burned themselves; the issue was more the DMCA's fault (to keep your rights as a common carrier, you must remove materials which are alleged to be copyrighted immediately upon notice).
Regarding the GUID, Google keeps track of users' clickthroughs and uses that as a Pagerank modifier. The GUID prevents someone from simply querying Google and clicking through to their own page lots of times - basically stuffing the ballot box. Slashdot does something similar for its poll-voting code; it tracks the IP (which is as close as you can get to an Internet-wide GUID) and I don't see you complaining about that. Google isn't perfect, but they don't act like Microsoft either.
Also, it seems to me that you wouldn't really need more than one textmode console, since you can run xterm/rxvt/konsole/gnome-terminal on an X-only KVM head. The only times you really need a real console are during bootup and emergencies, when two people using the system simultaneously wouldn't be a real asset.
Incidentally, you may want to check out this review of a product that does something similar in Windows, again using multiple video cards.
Alternately, you may want to cruise Ebay for some secondhand X terminals. While they tend to be ridiculously expensive new (on the order of a whole new PC), you may be able to find someone with a few they just want to get rid of. Of course, check out the specs before hand and cruise Google to make sure that they'll work under Linux without any special hardware or software. X may be an open protocol, but it never hurts to be sure.
In fact, lowering the temperature of the CPU will actually increase processor life, all other things being equal. Heat can and will shorten a processor's life; a process called "thermal electron drift" will cause the transistors to fail (perhaps someone more intelligent than I could fill in the details; I just know it ruins processors and the rate is directly proportional to the heat of the CPU over long periods of time).
After all, if your display drivers defaulted to 1024x768x32-bit color, a lot of older video cards would choke and only display a black screen. There might even be trouble with the monitor if you push it too hard (although most monitors are fine and just shut down if you have a wacky scanrate, some will literally emit smoke). If I want to keep a known good video card around for troubleshooting purposes, it shouldn't have to be the latest Geforce or Radeon. I should be able to throw in an 8-year old Cirrus Logic and get some basic diagnostic tools up.
On another note, you may wish to invest in a NIC that is something of an industry standard. I have had great success with the 3com 3c509 (ISA 10mbit) and 3c905 (PCI 10/100). While they are kind of pricey, having a NIC that's supported by most flavors of OS (Windows, Linux, *BSD, BeOS, QNX, lots of others) has pulled my ass out of some rather nasty situations in the past.
Also, with modems and soundcards, if they aren't Windows-only designs that do everything in software anyway, try using Soundblaster and Hayes drivers. Most decent hardware will emulate these; they are more or less industry standards. You won't get much in the way of special features, but it will work unless you have some funky hardware.
Um, it is an HTTP server. However, that's not that much harder than basic TCP/IP; HTML is just text. I doubt it's going to serve anything more than a textonly webpage with a status report and possibly the ability to remotely initiate diagnostics. Once you get TCP/IP, transferring text that has to conform to a few standards is easy. Just wrap it in <HTML> and <BODY> tags, and you have what is more or less a webpage that would display in most browsers.
After all, if someone is detained without counsel for allegedly trying to blow up a plane, what's to say they couldn't be detained without counsel for allegedly trying to hack a government website? I don't condone either action, but people should have the right to represent themselves in court, and access to someone who can advise them on legal issues. Anything else is just a show trial, where the verdict is decided before the trial begins.
Very few, but I would imagine that some people fill up the password field with as many 'x's as it will hold. The idea is that the extra 'x's will be truncated, and you end up with a sort of "universal password".
ECC isn't there for the tiny chance that one, and only one, chip on the module would catch fire and die. It's there so that any random "bit rot" (single-bit errors) is caught and corrected before it causes damage. All RAM is susceptable to this; it can be caused by cosmic rays (!) or by radioactive decay (can't remember if it's alpha or beta) of minute quantities of radioisotopes in the chips' substrate. While it will only happen once in every ten years or so on average, it does happen and can cause a system crash. ECC is about reducing the possible risk (it would have to flip 3 bits simultaneously to fool ECC RAM).
Believe it or not, a lot of different factors go into choosing a site for a major building. One of them is the stability of the ground. It's generally considered a Bad Idea to put 50 story highrise buildings on loose gravel. Thus, you need a geologist to conduct a survey and figure out whether the ground can support the weight of your planned construction. If you don't take that step, your new building might start looking like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.