How many people read Slashdot? Is it alot? A whole hell of alot? Bloody hell... How many people will be annoyed by this? I wonder..... How many of those people will quit because of this? Probably not that many... How many of those people will decide to never play WOW because of this? Damn, that could be a few... ---- I know of at least one person who being a Warcraft Fan (Got almost everything Blizzard makes), won't be giving them money because of this...
I've had this handle probably longer than Taco has held his... If I make a Character using my handle, and they bitch during the first week, not so big a deal...
Once I've invested a great deal of time in the game... At that point they can go to hell...
This delves into personal identity politics and the internal self-view that people have. A handle is something that expresses how we see ourselves, who we want to be, or some part of our character that we wish to express. It's not something to be trifled with.
The stupid thing is this... Evercrack and WoW are not really serious RPGs no matter WTF Sony or Blizzard think. I've seen people discussing sports, TV, jobs, and life on these games. Generally while a character is played, affectations relating to the character are not expressed (unlike Vampire/D&D/Warhammer RolePlaying games, not to be confused with D&D Roll-playing/AKA Hack and Slash). Blizzard needs to get over themselves, while they may own the game and have the right to take their dice home, I have the right not to pay them if they do stupid shit like this! The customer is to be served, not to be screwed over... I certainly hope that if they do business this way, it gets out and people quit giving them money. I for one will not pay for that sort of abuse.
While there is one MMORPG that I have played here and there, I'll not be playing WOW, even though it's something I had previously really wanted to try out.
It's not the construction equipment that was targeted for the most stringent levels. It was the consumer level, highly fuel efficient vehicles, like the Volkwagon Jetta TDI. Volkswagon has managed to overcome these issues, but none of the other car companies have found a way to meet these requirements.
You'll notice that the full size trucks featuring diesel engines don't appear to have been impacted at all... Ford and Chevy are selling more diesels than ever, just not in greatly fuel efficient gearings....
You should also notice that they're still making construction equipment with only minor changes.
What you won't see is new 4-passenger cars that get 48Mpg and can do 0-60 in less than 10 seconds. The regulations appear to have been created specifically to remove this segment of vehicles from the market, and it's been largely successful at doing this.
Note: When I first heard of the regulations, it was from diesel people saying that it would mean that the only diesel vehicles that would be legal to sell would in fact be the very vehicles that the laws proponents claimed they were trying to clean up.
[blockquote] This will obviously fuel environmental types and greenies who believe this is more evidence of global warming. And then you'll have the people who will correctly point out its still not necessarily because of humans. [/blockquote] Global warming is sort of a misleading focus. It's not the temperature that's directly at issue. It's the effects of that temperature increase. Higher average temperatures make everything more energetic. Temperature increase can make hurricane Katrina seem like a walk in the park. Hurricanes get stronger by feeding off of warm water. This is why they always weaken on land. Now think about making even more energy available. Stronger storms, blizzards (in some places since more moisture in the air is available), etc. The earthquake part I'm not so sure I buy into.
The question to ask is this: How much will it hurt to play it safe and cut back on emissions, if pollution isn't contributing significantly to climate change? How much will it hurt if we do nothing, and we are adding to global warming?
I for one would prefer to take the safer route, just in case. This used to be called taking a conservative approach, as in not sticking ones neck on the block needlessly. But I'd definately want to evenly scale back emissions at a measured rate.
I would not for example do what Bush did with one of the major emissions rule changes made a couple of years ago. Diesel cars were virtually made illegal for sale in the US in a single stroke. The legal limit for the two pollutants that they give off in higher quantity than gasoline engines was reduced by a very large amount. Gas cars give off a great deal more CO2 than diesel. Diesel on the other hand produces more NOX, and particulates. The allowable levels for NOX were dropped drastically, while CO2 were cut a small amount. Industry needs time to make changes. For some reason gasoline based vehicles are given far more leeway in pollutant production for some reason.
Oddly full size trucks and SUVs, were exempt from this. A large diesel truck getting 14 MPG is ok, but not a 50 MPG diesel passenger car... Luckily Volkwagon has figured out a way to get below the levels required. I'd not expect any more major cuts because then it would affect gasoline based cars... But it would have been far better to drop all emission levels by a set percentage. Wait for industry to catch up. Rinse, Repeat. This also will stimulate the economy, since companies will always be slowly making things cleaner. The tortoise not the hare.
Anyways this is all Revelations type stuff, sooner or later it's gonna bite us in the ass.
two things that differentiate "Mac" Video cards and "PC" ones. #1 the card must support big endian mode (important data is first in byte order). #2 the BIOS of the video card must be tweaked in order to respond to the initialization signal that Macs use.
Crap, apparently I forgot the part about since the change to a non-Big endian CPU, that's no longer valid. Also if the x86 Macs use the AT BIOS or EFI, then #2 will likewise no longer be valid....
Then it's all about drivers. I'd imagine it'd be in the vid card makers best interests to have monolithic drivers for OS X like the Windows counterparts
1. Apple would have to support a massively larger amount of hardware.
Ummm, no. That's what unsupported means. The old beige Macs are not supported for running OSX. You can do it with a little bit of work, but don't call Apple about it. Likewise don't call Dell about running Windows XP on a Pentium 233MMX, or Microsoft about Windows 95... In the real world software and hardware vendors have a list of supported products, and a list of products that are no longer supported.
2. there would be a loss of branding and a lowering of the quality associated with OS X.
Not as much as you might imagine. Moron: "OSX doesn't work very well on my Dell..." Apple: "That's because it's not written to run on Dells... If you had one of our shiny new boxes it'd run very well.... We'd be happy to show you, come into a nearby Apple store. Now that you've had a taste, come get the real deal."
3. there are plenty of games on the Mac, but if you want the very latest cutting-edge PC games you'd never be satisfied anyway since you'd need ATI/nVidia making their latest cards in Mac versions too.
Mac versions? WTF are you talking about... Apparently you've not been following that the x86 dev kits are running standard x86 video. Intel GMA 900 series I think. There are only one or two things that differentiate "Mac" Video cards and "PC" ones. #1 the card must support big endian mode (important data is first in byte order). #2 the BIOS of the video card must be tweaked in order to respond to the initialization signal that Macs use.
I had an old PCI Voodoo 2000 that I pulled from a PC, and dropped into a G3... OSX doesn't have drivers for it, but then again, XP likewise doesn't have drivers that work very well(last I checked). And if the drivers for XP are any good, it's because they were written by people in their spare time... Kinda like some of the drivers I'm seeing pop up for OSX.
Really there are only a few major differences between the PPC Macs and PCs. Macs use Sun's Open Firmware BIOS, they use IBM or Freescale (Motorola) CPUs, and of course they have a custom motherboard chipset (of which the G5s is rather nice, never thought I'd see crossbar architecture in a machine that cheap this soon).
4. if you DO want games, why do you want a Mac? if Windows works, use it.
*sigh* To get work done perhaps? Not everyone here uses their computer only as a toy. Some of us use them to make websites, write code, edit movies, correspond with friends/family, run the highest rated Genealogy program, create using Adobe apps, do office work using MS Office, read slashdot, perform network maintenence, run a business, or a million other productive things.
And every now and then want to have friends over for a LAN party.
As far as running Windows, the Apple x86 Developer Machines do run Windows.
What rock have you been under... They run on a standard 900 series Intel Chipset, video card is GMA 900 IGP, use DDR2, etc, etc. It may be in a G5 case, but it's simply an off the shelf motherboard. Actually probably everything in the box is off the shelf.
If the shipping machines (towers) are anything close to my guess, they'll use a fairly standard chipset, a standard video card, standard drives and RAM (they already are in the PPC machines), standard cables, standard power supply.... I'm certain that like Dell, HP, and every other PC vendor of any consequence they'll have a cutom board layout.
What this means is that I'll be able to use OS X, and perhaps run Windows XP in something akin to VMware to play those games that aren't ported. Or perhaps just reboot. To the Mac Game developers, if you port it, I'll buy it.
5. what is happening to the PC game industry? is it growing/shrinking? will PC games be so important when the
Personally I avoid them since they don't support album art. Every song in my collection has cover art. Even the audio books. Likewise those on my home network use iTunes (win and mac). Until a better plugin is released....
You know I used to think that your idea held some water....
However being that a)Intellect is a bit challenging for many people to deal with, and b)I spend more money than I wish to doing that only to meet lots of people I don't end up liking.
It should be a simple thing to think that if you are a computer guy, working at a computer place, perhaps you work with people who share your interests. It would be likewise simple to imagine that you'd be very unlikely to find computer junkies at a cocktail lounge. As for myself, one of my very good friends is someone that I previously worked with.
It's not my employers business what I do on time they don't pay for. They sure as hell don't pay enough for that privlege. I go to work on time. I do more than my job description calls for, and for that matter often more than I'm asked. That is what they get for their money, a completed task. No more, no less.
As for my personal life.... they can fsck off. My time is my own for any legal thing I want and can afford to do.
The only place I disagree with your response is that having anti-virus on a windows machine is critical. This is generally not free, unless you've got a pirate copy of Norton AV or McAfee AV laying around. This is not critical on OSX, but is a good idea for catching things like Word macro viruses (I work in education).
However to the other point...
I have removed Quicktime from OSX, and the GUI, and damned near everything else. What was left was a command-line only version of the OS that we used at a school to reimage the machines. Apple Software Restore (included _for free_ application for reimaging machines) has been a scriptable CLI app for some time. The OS weighed in at around 160 or 170 Megs. It included network support, and reimaging support and not much else. Two of the logins had custom shells that were imaging scripts. Serving the image was an apache web server box on campus....
I have an disk image of it around here somewhere...
I don't think I could do the same thing with XP, and I don't know anyone who could.....
How many times did you look at your keyboard while you typed your post, really? In the middle of an intense FPS shootout, do you really need to know which key you configured to switch from the rocket launcher to grenades?
I type by feel. But I do play quite a few different FPSes. I probably use less than 1/2 of the commands available in America's Army for a few reasons, the major one being that not counting movement and weapon switching, as games incorporate craploads of functions into the game, that other games don't use, it becomes annoying to learn and set up keys for 25 different options.
America's Army for example, there's report in, call for medic, alt fire (which switches fire modes), a key to use the legs on the sniper and SAWs, a key to equip silencer, a key for night vision, a key to use binoculars, a key for scope (common), two keys for zooming with the scope, a key for resetting the scope to zero range, two keys for crouch and prone, a key for team messages, a key for global messages, a toggle key for run, a key to set squad target, keys to have your character bark various commands, a key to fix jams, and all kinds of signaling/messaging commands, and more
That's only one game....And you say that there is a new game coming out that has a totally new set of keys that do different things??????
I'm a gamer, but I do have a life. I only play about 1 session or so of FPSing or other serious gaming per week, and some busy weeks no gaming at all. I have a house, a wife, a project vehicle, a programming project going on, need to rebuild the master bedroom closet (I hate wire shelves), a web site/monitoring project I work on from time to time, and an industry to attempt to keep up with.
Learning all of the differing keys for the 20 or so FPSes that I play (depending on my mood and what the guys on the LAN want to play) is not very high on my agenda. If it's not critical, and doesn't fit into the keyboard layout I use for basically all the FPSes I play, then I don't use the feature. So basically move, shoot, use, and talk..... Most everything else falls by the wayside.
In the past, HP created inkjet print heads through a complex procedure where some parts were built using photolithography and other pieces were built using a mechanical process. The various pieces would then be lined up and laminated together to form a working print head, a process which required HP to have two different manufacturing lines and product designs for low-end and high-end print heads.
Current HP inkjet printers use a two part head.
All new print heads will be built using photolithography, and all from one piece of plastic. -snip- It also means improved print quality. The new manufacturing process allows HP to fit 3,900 or more microscopic ink nozzles on a single print head, compared to 1,266 nozzles on past designs. That means the print head can move faster across a page, as well as turn out documents with more colors and higher image quality.
The new print heads are made from a single piece of plastic. They use photolithography to make the printer heads. The head will be part of the printer, not part of the ink cartridge.
This process is cheaper, has higher resolution, and is faster.
This article is a press release from HP. HP's marketing department created it.
It might be helpful for someone with at least a 12th grade reading level could interpret articles...
Not only have I personally had a lot of Western Digital drives fail, but I've come across a disproportionate number of them professionally. This includes WD drives built during the last 5 or 6 years, except for the Raptor series (of which I have seen no failures).
Maxtor had a seriously bad run about umm, 8 years ago, or at the time 8GB drives were considered large. Quantum made quite a few terrible drives at about the same time. Actually since then I've avoided Quantum as much as possible, and have not come across them in any number in years. And Conner, thank God they're gone...
I have come across failures in other vendors in recent years, but in much smaller percentages.
Several of my friends have built arrays using highpoint cards. The cards have all failed. They aren't hardware RAID controllers. The Linux drivers are somewhat twitchy in the first place as well, especially with SMP kernels.
1) Free -- Machine was an old K6-2 500 (192MB RAM, 1.4G Boot Drive) that I had laying around. 2) Free -- I got a full tower case from my brother in law (no faceplate). 3) Free -- I had a few 120mm fans laying around which I have cooling the drives. 4) $1040 -- 8 Maxtor 250 GB PATA HDs. (8MB cache, 7200 RPM) 5) $215 -- 3Ware 7810 (8 port PATA hardware RAID 5 card). 6) $140 -- APC RS 1500 battery backup. (You don't want the array to suddenly lose power for any reason!)
Total Cost $1395.
What it got me: I have 1400 GB usable redundant storage with a hot-spare. If a drive fails at 1:00am the computer will automatically start the rebuild on the spare drive, and likewise if I'm not home. This was more important than the additional storage. I also know that I can get 40 minutes of power out of the APC if the power goes out. The machine is set up to shut itself down in the event that the battery runs low.
I didn't have to fight with any software configs. The driver is included in the Linux kernel source, and can be compiled into the kernel. I don't have to worry about figuring out SMART data. "tw-cli info c0" gives me easily readable output on all of the drives plugged into the RAID card. It's simple, does the job, is stable as all hell, and was fairly cheap. It would have cost nearly as much to have bought 4 PATA cards (ones not using the flawed silicon image controller) as it cost for the 3ware card off of eBay.
As pipes get faster sites involve more content. You are aware that every picture on every web page you view is a line in a log file. Add to that the flash files, the sound files, etc. More pics, more lines in the logs. Furthermore with tabbed browsing I can scan 20 pages very very quickly for information, which results in at least 20 x (number of pictures, frame pages, flash files...) hits on a web server.
Actually since I'm using Safari, which has an activity log....
My daily reading list, which is in a folder on my bookmarks bar, takes a few seconds to load. It generates the following number of hits: Slashdot: 21 Hits Ars Technica: 60 Hits Mac Central: 43 Hits Mac Rumors: 23 Hits Mac Bytes: 31 Hits Hard OCP: 38 Hits Newsforge 54 Hits The Register: 39 Hits CNN: 95 Hits Techdirt: 22 Hits
For each hit a line in a log file somewhere is generated. That means that in the last 5 minutes I've just generated another 426 lines to logs somewhere. Every story that seems interesting gets opened in a new tab, which is another 20 to 90 hits per story, and if they don't seem interesting in the first 30 seconds, I move on to the next story. I'd guess that I open somewhere in excess of 30 or 40 pages that are linked to from the various sites in the first 15 minutes of checking the daily news/info. That's also a list of what resources (pics, pages, etc) are currently open. The number of lines generated in logs are generally higher than this, due to zombie Windows boxes, etc.
So (50 or more pages) X (~21 to ~100 hits per page) X (however many customers) X (however many days of logs)
This is just for web browsing..... If you start logging more than that it gets far more interesting and painful. I understand that BitTorrent servers can generate a gig of logs per day. Other services while nowhere near that nasty also can generate logs of substantial size.
Many ISPs have over 100,000 customers. If everything were logged using normal settings, and those logs were kept for any serious duration, the logs would consume terrabytes of drive space. Not 5 or 10 TB, but like 10s of TB or more. If the logs were set to higher levels of detail....
Note: This would only list that John Q Public's machine requested a file on a server. It would give no information about the content of the file. So is the "Picture 1.jpg" or "JaneDoe06.jpg" file porn? The logs have no way of knowing.
First when I stated that it's rampant in Linux, the first thing that has to be stated: Debian is Linux. Linux is not Debian. Everyone does not run Debian, nor should they be made to.
Slackware as far as I can determine does not do this (remove the app, all library dependancies, preferences,etc) and even if it did, lots of things I install have no slackware package available. And there are many more distros besides Slackware, there's Gentoo, Mandrake, RedHat, Suse, TurboLinux, and so many more that it's not worth continuing. Do all of the mentioned (and not mentioned) versions clean up after themselves properly? Do they clean up applications/services that are installed from source with no package management at all? This sounds pretty damned unlikely to me.
Secondly, this was referring to a standard user. I have shown some people aptget, they freaked, (horrified look), "That's not going to be on our computers, is it?", to which I replied no to their sigh of relief. I have attempted to get techs at a school district to pick up some linux skills, showing them rpms on the consultant set-up linux labs. The response, umm we only reimage those, we can't figure them out.
The point I was making was that Windows Add/Remove Programs while stating that it removes everything clearly doesn't do what it says it does. It's total bullshit because it claims something that is patently untrue. Not only does it not always remove preferences, and registry entries, but at times not even bundled applications (which have no add/remove entry), and drivers and libraries as well. BTW if you run windows actually search your main drive for "uninstall" many of the resultant items are uninstallers that were written to do correctly what add/remove does not.
OSX makes no such statements. Preferences are left behind. Was there ever a claim they were removed? There is no claim that everything is removed anywhere. You drag the app to the trash, and if it's coded according to Apple guidelines, the app is gone. This is an issue in some cases, and not an issue in others. Should Apple or the the application vendor else provide uninstallers? perhaps. Do I personally give a crap if 500k of preferences is left behind on a 41,943,040k (40Gig) hard drive, hell no. Do I like it when installer screws with the OS? You bet your ass. The same bad guys who screw with the OS leaving drivers and shit behind on OSX are the same ones that do it on Windows much of the time. Thankfully due to small marketshare or whatever reason you wish to subscribe to, bundled spyware at least is in a short supply on OSX. This is not the case on Windows at all, and you'd know this if you worked in a support setting where users install dancing purple monkeys and assorted crapware onto machines.
Linux may or may not have good package management depending on what distro you are using, whether the application is available in packaged form (remember damned near everything on MacOSX or Windows is packaged or simply run), etc... With Linux on the other hand, I was installing this neat server monitoring software... It's perl based. So I went to CPAN (which is a similar contrivance to the Debian package archive, being an everything goes here repository), downloaded it, errors out the wazzoo. So I track down the missing dependancies as far as I can find, ask for some help in a particularly rude Perl IRC channel, figure out what the error messages mean from some people in the room in between being cussed at and insulted, and install some of the remaining non-installed dependancies which also have dependancies which don't install properly. This continues this way for a day or two, and I email the developer. The newest version fixed these issues, but is not on CPAN. So I download the newer versions from the guy's site. They apparently also require some other packages that aren't perl. This is a fscking nightmare for package management.
The monitoring software is still not up. At some point when I'm less annoyed
Since I cannot edit comments I have already posted.
Not even an hour after making the last post, I was reading another site I read daily (HardOCP) and found an add for Driver Cleaner. To quote their advertisements on the product page at http://www.drivercleaner.net/:
Driver Cleaner Professional Editon is a program which helps you to remove parts of drivers that are left after uninstalling the old drivers. The program is for ATI, nVidia, Creative, Realtek, SIS, 3Dfx, S3 and more drivers. First you need to uninstall the drivers from the control panel, then reboot. After rebooting, run the program. If you really want a good description of what steps you should take, then you really need to read the readme file included in the zip file and installation as it contains a detailed step by step description. The program also fully supports windows themes and other kind of themes.
This issue is rampant on windows as well as Linux. Simply denying it doesn't help anyone. It's not that the OSX way is perfect, however end users find it easier in my experience.
Futhermore it's fairly simple to make an uninstaller for a package and ship it with the package. And yes I've created drag and drop apps that check for things before running and if they exist install them, as well as removal scripts.
The thing that you can find in Control Panel > Software. It's far from perfect, but at least it lets me see all the installed software on a system and remove it with a single mouse click. It's not as nice as Linux package managers, but it's a whole lot nicer than Macintosh, where I have to go hunting around the file system and can never be sure whether dragging the application into the trash will actually remove all traces of it (in fact, it won't).
I call bullshit.
This is a load of shit, the add/remove programs absolutely does not remove all traces for many applications on windows. 3 days ago I was installing America's Army 2.4 on my Athlon. Since I downloaded the full installer I had to use add/remove programs, choose remove app, then go to the Program Files folder and remove the folder that is left behind.
If the damned add/remove programs system actually worked worth a damn, I'd not have registry traces left behind by apps, and "registry cleaners" would be pointless. Not only does the add/remove programs not remove all of the crap that a program installs, some apps come with spyware that stays on the system after uninstalling the original app, and has no listing. On OSX or linux even I can trash the equivalent to windows messenger (which I don't and won't use and is simply another exploitable hole), and expect it to expect it to stay gone without resorting to registry hacking or the like. And before it's asked XP Pro, yes I've removed this shit by hand, no it was not something a normal user could do, and I use either Trillian or Fire, depending on which machine I am using, and lastly no I don't use IM on Linux, all my linux boxes are servers and GUI/Head-less.
What would be good of Apple to do is to make a disk clean up wizard (perhaps Symantec or whoever is in the cleaning up business . Which can check your preferences to see which aren't being used. Frankly I don't mind using the extra space since sometimes I remove a multiple gig game, and can reinstall it at any time without losing my save games.
I'm tired of hearing people referring to everything computer related, prefaced with the word "my", as in "my windows is broken", or "my excel needs reinstalled". Not that this will probably curb that trend, however any lessening of the obnoxiousness that M$ perpetrates on modern culture is welcome in my eyes.
Likewise another completely obnoxious thing is the number of things that people substitute the brand name for the item name. Like "I typed this document in Microsoft" [Word], or "can you show me how to turn on the Proxima" [LCD Projector].
Not M$'s fault but, have you ever noticed how many people make everything possessive, especially relating to brands or stores? Like I got this shitty clothing at Wal-Mart's, or I have 10 CD's. It's stunning how completely ignorant the majority of people in the US seems to be with regards to speaking even their mother tongue (and probably only one) with any competency.
Intel makes some very nice ethernet controllers... as well as some decent embedded CPUs for raid controllers and the like, i960.
Apple could very simply be trying to add Intel EEPro network cards to their line up. They rule. I just wish that intels desktop CPUs were as baddass in comparison to what their NIC controllers were in their respective markets.
Slashdot Mirror
Good fscking God, this isn't a fscking diplomatic meeting, it's not the Senate, it's not an awards ceremony...
It's supposed to be a FSCKING GAME... and one that people pay to play on...
Methinks Blizzzrd takes themselves too seriously...
What Blizzard should consider:
How many people read Slashdot? Is it alot? A whole hell of alot? Bloody hell...
How many people will be annoyed by this? I wonder.....
How many of those people will quit because of this? Probably not that many...
How many of those people will decide to never play WOW because of this? Damn, that could be a few...
----
I know of at least one person who being a Warcraft Fan (Got almost everything Blizzard makes), won't be giving them money because of this...
I've used this handle since about 1984 or 85, so 20 years give or take, which is probably:
A) Longer than you've been alive.
B) Had coherent thought.
C) Twice as long as you've had any single character/account/identity online.
So perhaps it's understandable that you don't grok the things that annoy us old folks.
Perhaps when you grow up, you'll understand, but then again....
I've had this handle probably longer than Taco has held his... If I make a Character using my handle, and they bitch during the first week, not so big a deal...
Once I've invested a great deal of time in the game... At that point they can go to hell...
This delves into personal identity politics and the internal self-view that people have. A handle is something that expresses how we see ourselves, who we want to be, or some part of our character that we wish to express. It's not something to be trifled with.
The stupid thing is this... Evercrack and WoW are not really serious RPGs no matter WTF Sony or Blizzard think. I've seen people discussing sports, TV, jobs, and life on these games. Generally while a character is played, affectations relating to the character are not expressed (unlike Vampire/D&D/Warhammer RolePlaying games, not to be confused with D&D Roll-playing/AKA Hack and Slash). Blizzard needs to get over themselves, while they may own the game and have the right to take their dice home, I have the right not to pay them if they do stupid shit like this! The customer is to be served, not to be screwed over... I certainly hope that if they do business this way, it gets out and people quit giving them money. I for one will not pay for that sort of abuse.
While there is one MMORPG that I have played here and there, I'll not be playing WOW, even though it's something I had previously really wanted to try out.
It's not the construction equipment that was targeted for the most stringent levels. It was the consumer level, highly fuel efficient vehicles, like the Volkwagon Jetta TDI. Volkswagon has managed to overcome these issues, but none of the other car companies have found a way to meet these requirements.
You'll notice that the full size trucks featuring diesel engines don't appear to have been impacted at all... Ford and Chevy are selling more diesels than ever, just not in greatly fuel efficient gearings....
You should also notice that they're still making construction equipment with only minor changes.
What you won't see is new 4-passenger cars that get 48Mpg and can do 0-60 in less than 10 seconds. The regulations appear to have been created specifically to remove this segment of vehicles from the market, and it's been largely successful at doing this.
Note: When I first heard of the regulations, it was from diesel people saying that it would mean that the only diesel vehicles that would be legal to sell would in fact be the very vehicles that the laws proponents claimed they were trying to clean up.
[blockquote]
This will obviously fuel environmental types and greenies who believe this is more evidence of global warming. And then you'll have the people who will correctly point out its still not necessarily because of humans.
[/blockquote]
Global warming is sort of a misleading focus. It's not the temperature that's directly at issue. It's the effects of that temperature increase. Higher average temperatures make everything more energetic. Temperature increase can make hurricane Katrina seem like a walk in the park. Hurricanes get stronger by feeding off of warm water. This is why they always weaken on land. Now think about making even more energy available. Stronger storms, blizzards (in some places since more moisture in the air is available), etc. The earthquake part I'm not so sure I buy into.
The question to ask is this: How much will it hurt to play it safe and cut back on emissions, if pollution isn't contributing significantly to climate change? How much will it hurt if we do nothing, and we are adding to global warming?
I for one would prefer to take the safer route, just in case. This used to be called taking a conservative approach, as in not sticking ones neck on the block needlessly. But I'd definately want to evenly scale back emissions at a measured rate.
I would not for example do what Bush did with one of the major emissions rule changes made a couple of years ago. Diesel cars were virtually made illegal for sale in the US in a single stroke. The legal limit for the two pollutants that they give off in higher quantity than gasoline engines was reduced by a very large amount. Gas cars give off a great deal more CO2 than diesel. Diesel on the other hand produces more NOX, and particulates. The allowable levels for NOX were dropped drastically, while CO2 were cut a small amount. Industry needs time to make changes. For some reason gasoline based vehicles are given far more leeway in pollutant production for some reason.
Oddly full size trucks and SUVs, were exempt from this. A large diesel truck getting 14 MPG is ok, but not a 50 MPG diesel passenger car... Luckily Volkwagon has figured out a way to get below the levels required. I'd not expect any more major cuts because then it would affect gasoline based cars... But it would have been far better to drop all emission levels by a set percentage. Wait for industry to catch up. Rinse, Repeat. This also will stimulate the economy, since companies will always be slowly making things cleaner. The tortoise not the hare.
Anyways this is all Revelations type stuff, sooner or later it's gonna bite us in the ass.
Ummm, no. That's what unsupported means. The old beige Macs are not supported for running OSX. You can do it with a little bit of work, but don't call Apple about it.
Likewise don't call Dell about running Windows XP on a Pentium 233MMX, or Microsoft about Windows 95...
In the real world software and hardware vendors have a list of supported products, and a list of products that are no longer supported.
Not as much as you might imagine.
Moron: "OSX doesn't work very well on my Dell..."
Apple: "That's because it's not written to run on Dells... If you had one of our shiny new boxes it'd run very well.... We'd be happy to show you, come into a nearby Apple store. Now that you've had a taste, come get the real deal."
Mac versions? WTF are you talking about... Apparently you've not been following that the x86 dev kits are running standard x86 video. Intel GMA 900 series I think. There are only one or two things that differentiate "Mac" Video cards and "PC" ones.
#1 the card must support big endian mode (important data is first in byte order).
#2 the BIOS of the video card must be tweaked in order to respond to the initialization signal that Macs use.
I had an old PCI Voodoo 2000 that I pulled from a PC, and dropped into a G3... OSX doesn't have drivers for it, but then again, XP likewise doesn't have drivers that work very well(last I checked). And if the drivers for XP are any good, it's because they were written by people in their spare time... Kinda like some of the drivers I'm seeing pop up for OSX.
Really there are only a few major differences between the PPC Macs and PCs. Macs use Sun's Open Firmware BIOS, they use IBM or Freescale (Motorola) CPUs, and of course they have a custom motherboard chipset (of which the G5s is rather nice, never thought I'd see crossbar architecture in a machine that cheap this soon).
*sigh* To get work done perhaps? Not everyone here uses their computer only as a toy. Some of us use them to make websites, write code, edit movies, correspond with friends/family, run the highest rated Genealogy program, create using Adobe apps, do office work using MS Office, read slashdot, perform network maintenence, run a business, or a million other productive things.
And every now and then want to have friends over for a LAN party.
As far as running Windows, the Apple x86 Developer Machines do run Windows.
What rock have you been under... They run on a standard 900 series Intel Chipset, video card is GMA 900 IGP, use DDR2, etc, etc. It may be in a G5 case, but it's simply an off the shelf motherboard. Actually probably everything in the box is off the shelf.
If the shipping machines (towers) are anything close to my guess, they'll use a fairly standard chipset, a standard video card, standard drives and RAM (they already are in the PPC machines), standard cables, standard power supply.... I'm certain that like Dell, HP, and every other PC vendor of any consequence they'll have a cutom board layout.
What this means is that I'll be able to use OS X, and perhaps run Windows XP in something akin to VMware to play those games that aren't ported. Or perhaps just reboot. To the Mac Game developers, if you port it, I'll buy it.
Whatever the numbers are....
Most people say, Ogg What???
Personally I avoid them since they don't support album art. Every song in my collection has cover art. Even the audio books. Likewise those on my home network use iTunes (win and mac). Until a better plugin is released....
You know I used to think that your idea held some water....
However being that a)Intellect is a bit challenging for many people to deal with, and b)I spend more money than I wish to doing that only to meet lots of people I don't end up liking.
It should be a simple thing to think that if you are a computer guy, working at a computer place, perhaps you work with people who share your interests. It would be likewise simple to imagine that you'd be very unlikely to find computer junkies at a cocktail lounge. As for myself, one of my very good friends is someone that I previously worked with.
It's not my employers business what I do on time they don't pay for. They sure as hell don't pay enough for that privlege. I go to work on time. I do more than my job description calls for, and for that matter often more than I'm asked. That is what they get for their money, a completed task. No more, no less.
As for my personal life.... they can fsck off. My time is my own for any legal thing I want and can afford to do.
The only place I disagree with your response is that having anti-virus on a windows machine is critical. This is generally not free, unless you've got a pirate copy of Norton AV or McAfee AV laying around. This is not critical on OSX, but is a good idea for catching things like Word macro viruses (I work in education).
However to the other point...
I have removed Quicktime from OSX, and the GUI, and damned near everything else. What was left was a command-line only version of the OS that we used at a school to reimage the machines. Apple Software Restore (included _for free_ application for reimaging machines) has been a scriptable CLI app for some time. The OS weighed in at around 160 or 170 Megs. It included network support, and reimaging support and not much else. Two of the logins had custom shells that were imaging scripts. Serving the image was an apache web server box on campus....
I have an disk image of it around here somewhere...
I don't think I could do the same thing with XP, and I don't know anyone who could.....
I have Slack 10.1 on a P233MMX, a k6-2 500 (my file server), and a P II 450 (my firewall, web, SFTP server).
Who needs a GUI?
I type by feel. But I do play quite a few different FPSes. I probably use less than 1/2 of the commands available in America's Army for a few reasons, the major one being that not counting movement and weapon switching, as games incorporate craploads of functions into the game, that other games don't use, it becomes annoying to learn and set up keys for 25 different options.
America's Army for example, there's report in, call for medic, alt fire (which switches fire modes), a key to use the legs on the sniper and SAWs, a key to equip silencer, a key for night vision, a key to use binoculars, a key for scope (common), two keys for zooming with the scope, a key for resetting the scope to zero range, two keys for crouch and prone, a key for team messages, a key for global messages, a toggle key for run, a key to set squad target, keys to have your character bark various commands, a key to fix jams, and all kinds of signaling/messaging commands, and more
That's only one game.
I'm a gamer, but I do have a life. I only play about 1 session or so of FPSing or other serious gaming per week, and some busy weeks no gaming at all. I have a house, a wife, a project vehicle, a programming project going on, need to rebuild the master bedroom closet (I hate wire shelves), a web site/monitoring project I work on from time to time, and an industry to attempt to keep up with.
Learning all of the differing keys for the 20 or so FPSes that I play (depending on my mood and what the guys on the LAN want to play) is not very high on my agenda. If it's not critical, and doesn't fit into the keyboard layout I use for basically all the FPSes I play, then I don't use the feature. So basically move, shoot, use, and talk..... Most everything else falls by the wayside.
or if you need it to be easier to understand:
Current HP inkjet printers use a two part head.
The new print heads are made from a single piece of plastic. They use photolithography to make the printer heads. The head will be part of the printer, not part of the ink cartridge.
This process is cheaper, has higher resolution, and is faster.
This article is a press release from HP. HP's marketing department created it.
It might be helpful for someone with at least a 12th grade reading level could interpret articles...
I'll second that...
Not only have I personally had a lot of Western Digital drives fail, but I've come across a disproportionate number of them professionally. This includes WD drives built during the last 5 or 6 years, except for the Raptor series (of which I have seen no failures).
Maxtor had a seriously bad run about umm, 8 years ago, or at the time 8GB drives were considered large. Quantum made quite a few terrible drives at about the same time. Actually since then I've avoided Quantum as much as possible, and have not come across them in any number in years. And Conner, thank God they're gone...
I have come across failures in other vendors in recent years, but in much smaller percentages.
Why 400w power supply? And for a 3 drive array? WTF kind of hardware are you running the array on?
My 8 drive array uses a 300w power supply, with room to spare.
Several of my friends have built arrays using highpoint cards. The cards have all failed. They aren't hardware RAID controllers. The Linux drivers are somewhat twitchy in the first place as well, especially with SMP kernels.
1) Free -- Machine was an old K6-2 500 (192MB RAM, 1.4G Boot Drive) that I had laying around.
2) Free -- I got a full tower case from my brother in law (no faceplate).
3) Free -- I had a few 120mm fans laying around which I have cooling the drives.
4) $1040 -- 8 Maxtor 250 GB PATA HDs. (8MB cache, 7200 RPM)
5) $215 -- 3Ware 7810 (8 port PATA hardware RAID 5 card).
6) $140 -- APC RS 1500 battery backup. (You don't want the array to suddenly lose power for any reason!)
Total Cost $1395.
What it got me: I have 1400 GB usable redundant storage with a hot-spare. If a drive fails at 1:00am the computer will automatically start the rebuild on the spare drive, and likewise if I'm not home. This was more important than the additional storage. I also know that I can get 40 minutes of power out of the APC if the power goes out. The machine is set up to shut itself down in the event that the battery runs low.
I didn't have to fight with any software configs. The driver is included in the Linux kernel source, and can be compiled into the kernel. I don't have to worry about figuring out SMART data. "tw-cli info c0" gives me easily readable output on all of the drives plugged into the RAID card. It's simple, does the job, is stable as all hell, and was fairly cheap. It would have cost nearly as much to have bought 4 PATA cards (ones not using the flawed silicon image controller) as it cost for the 3ware card off of eBay.
More information here.
Bullshit.
As pipes get faster sites involve more content. You are aware that every picture on every web page you view is a line in a log file. Add to that the flash files, the sound files, etc. More pics, more lines in the logs. Furthermore with tabbed browsing I can scan 20 pages very very quickly for information, which results in at least 20 x (number of pictures, frame pages, flash files...) hits on a web server.
Actually since I'm using Safari, which has an activity log....
My daily reading list, which is in a folder on my bookmarks bar, takes a few seconds to load. It generates the following number of hits:
Slashdot: 21 Hits
Ars Technica: 60 Hits
Mac Central: 43 Hits
Mac Rumors: 23 Hits
Mac Bytes: 31 Hits
Hard OCP: 38 Hits
Newsforge 54 Hits
The Register: 39 Hits
CNN: 95 Hits
Techdirt: 22 Hits
For each hit a line in a log file somewhere is generated. That means that in the last 5 minutes I've just generated another 426 lines to logs somewhere. Every story that seems interesting gets opened in a new tab, which is another 20 to 90 hits per story, and if they don't seem interesting in the first 30 seconds, I move on to the next story. I'd guess that I open somewhere in excess of 30 or 40 pages that are linked to from the various sites in the first 15 minutes of checking the daily news/info. That's also a list of what resources (pics, pages, etc) are currently open. The number of lines generated in logs are generally higher than this, due to zombie Windows boxes, etc.
So (50 or more pages) X (~21 to ~100 hits per page) X (however many customers) X (however many days of logs)
This is just for web browsing..... If you start logging more than that it gets far more interesting and painful. I understand that BitTorrent servers can generate a gig of logs per day. Other services while nowhere near that nasty also can generate logs of substantial size.
Many ISPs have over 100,000 customers. If everything were logged using normal settings, and those logs were kept for any serious duration, the logs would consume terrabytes of drive space. Not 5 or 10 TB, but like 10s of TB or more. If the logs were set to higher levels of detail....
Note: This would only list that John Q Public's machine requested a file on a server. It would give no information about the content of the file. So is the "Picture 1.jpg" or "JaneDoe06.jpg" file porn? The logs have no way of knowing.
First when I stated that it's rampant in Linux, the first thing that has to be stated:
Debian is Linux.
Linux is not Debian.
Everyone does not run Debian, nor should they be made to.
Slackware as far as I can determine does not do this (remove the app, all library dependancies, preferences,etc) and even if it did, lots of things I install have no slackware package available. And there are many more distros besides Slackware, there's Gentoo, Mandrake, RedHat, Suse, TurboLinux, and so many more that it's not worth continuing. Do all of the mentioned (and not mentioned) versions clean up after themselves properly? Do they clean up applications/services that are installed from source with no package management at all? This sounds pretty damned unlikely to me.
Secondly, this was referring to a standard user. I have shown some people aptget, they freaked, (horrified look), "That's not going to be on our computers, is it?", to which I replied no to their sigh of relief. I have attempted to get techs at a school district to pick up some linux skills, showing them rpms on the consultant set-up linux labs. The response, umm we only reimage those, we can't figure them out.
The point I was making was that Windows Add/Remove Programs while stating that it removes everything clearly doesn't do what it says it does. It's total bullshit because it claims something that is patently untrue. Not only does it not always remove preferences, and registry entries, but at times not even bundled applications (which have no add/remove entry), and drivers and libraries as well. BTW if you run windows actually search your main drive for "uninstall" many of the resultant items are uninstallers that were written to do correctly what add/remove does not.
OSX makes no such statements. Preferences are left behind. Was there ever a claim they were removed? There is no claim that everything is removed anywhere. You drag the app to the trash, and if it's coded according to Apple guidelines, the app is gone. This is an issue in some cases, and not an issue in others. Should Apple or the the application vendor else provide uninstallers? perhaps. Do I personally give a crap if 500k of preferences is left behind on a 41,943,040k (40Gig) hard drive, hell no. Do I like it when installer screws with the OS? You bet your ass. The same bad guys who screw with the OS leaving drivers and shit behind on OSX are the same ones that do it on Windows much of the time. Thankfully due to small marketshare or whatever reason you wish to subscribe to, bundled spyware at least is in a short supply on OSX. This is not the case on Windows at all, and you'd know this if you worked in a support setting where users install dancing purple monkeys and assorted crapware onto machines.
Linux may or may not have good package management depending on what distro you are using, whether the application is available in packaged form (remember damned near everything on MacOSX or Windows is packaged or simply run), etc... With Linux on the other hand, I was installing this neat server monitoring software... It's perl based. So I went to CPAN (which is a similar contrivance to the Debian package archive, being an everything goes here repository), downloaded it, errors out the wazzoo. So I track down the missing dependancies as far as I can find, ask for some help in a particularly rude Perl IRC channel, figure out what the error messages mean from some people in the room in between being cussed at and insulted, and install some of the remaining non-installed dependancies which also have dependancies which don't install properly. This continues this way for a day or two, and I email the developer. The newest version fixed these issues, but is not on CPAN. So I download the newer versions from the guy's site. They apparently also require some other packages that aren't perl. This is a fscking nightmare for package management.
The monitoring software is still not up. At some point when I'm less annoyed
Not even an hour after making the last post, I was reading another site I read daily (HardOCP) and found an add for Driver Cleaner. To quote their advertisements on the product page at http://www.drivercleaner.net/
This issue is rampant on windows as well as Linux. Simply denying it doesn't help anyone. It's not that the OSX way is perfect, however end users find it easier in my experience.
Futhermore it's fairly simple to make an uninstaller for a package and ship it with the package. And yes I've created drag and drop apps that check for things before running and if they exist install them, as well as removal scripts.
I call bullshit.
This is a load of shit, the add/remove programs absolutely does not remove all traces for many applications on windows. 3 days ago I was installing America's Army 2.4 on my Athlon. Since I downloaded the full installer I had to use add/remove programs, choose remove app, then go to the Program Files folder and remove the folder that is left behind.
If the damned add/remove programs system actually worked worth a damn, I'd not have registry traces left behind by apps, and "registry cleaners" would be pointless. Not only does the add/remove programs not remove all of the crap that a program installs, some apps come with spyware that stays on the system after uninstalling the original app, and has no listing. On OSX or linux even I can trash the equivalent to windows messenger (which I don't and won't use and is simply another exploitable hole), and expect it to expect it to stay gone without resorting to registry hacking or the like. And before it's asked XP Pro, yes I've removed this shit by hand, no it was not something a normal user could do, and I use either Trillian or Fire, depending on which machine I am using, and lastly no I don't use IM on Linux, all my linux boxes are servers and GUI/Head-less.
What would be good of Apple to do is to make a disk clean up wizard (perhaps Symantec or whoever is in the cleaning up business . Which can check your preferences to see which aren't being used. Frankly I don't mind using the extra space since sometimes I remove a multiple gig game, and can reinstall it at any time without losing my save games.
I'm tired of hearing people referring to everything computer related, prefaced with the word "my", as in "my windows is broken", or "my excel needs reinstalled". Not that this will probably curb that trend, however any lessening of the obnoxiousness that M$ perpetrates on modern culture is welcome in my eyes.
Likewise another completely obnoxious thing is the number of things that people substitute the brand name for the item name. Like "I typed this document in
Microsoft" [Word], or "can you show me how to turn on the Proxima" [LCD Projector].
Not M$'s fault but, have you ever noticed how many people make everything possessive, especially relating to brands or stores? Like I got this shitty clothing at Wal-Mart's, or I have 10 CD's. It's stunning how completely ignorant the majority of people in the US seems to be with regards to speaking even their mother tongue (and probably only one) with any competency.
Intel makes some very nice ethernet controllers... as well as some decent embedded CPUs for raid controllers and the like, i960.
Apple could very simply be trying to add Intel EEPro network cards to their line up. They rule. I just wish that intels desktop CPUs were as baddass in comparison to what their NIC controllers were in their respective markets.
I won't be a fan of ogg files until they support what the full ID3 tag spec does.
That means album art. It's a deal breaker for me...