Yes, I have that modem myself. I went from an older model that Comcast upgraded me to when they upgraded to 6mbps in the area. It was an older motorola surfboard modem. A friend at work read about the SB5120 and upgraded to it and showed me the results, which were dramatic for him. He was seeing 30mbps at times. I then purchased one for myself. I did speed tests before and after the change. I went from seeing approx 8mbps down and 320kbps up to 28mbps down and 1.5mbps up. This was over the difference of a 10 minute call to Comcast to get the new modem activated... I still normally see in the 20's all the time, with peaks in the low 30's. Best $50 I ever spent.
It all depends on the cable modem that you have. Some of the new motorola modems, like the SB5120, do not have the ability for Comcast to limit as much as they sometimes like. Comcast themselves has not been too worried about it as long as the network segment you are a member of is not over-crowded. They see it more like a new benefit which allows better competition against FIOS. Personally I average 25-28mbps on my modem.
Pounds are certainly not a measure of mass. That is why when you weight yourself at sealevel you will weight more then if you weight yourself on the top of Mt. Everest, however, if you measure the mass of yourself at sealevel, it will be the same as if you measure at the top of Mt. Everest. Pounds are a measure of force, in this case, the force of gravity pulling down on an object.
Not well versed on the US legal system, but can't the court hear "secret" evidence but in some kind of closed session? Granted it's not much better, but this case involves some serious infringements of liberties.
The issue here is that the Court is saying that the people who brought the case have no standing to have brought the case. In the USA, a party who brings a suit, must show that they have been affected by the person/entity they are bringing the suit against. The people bringing the suit do not have possession of any specific evidence that they were affected, and they are being denied access to look for such evidence on the grounds that the evidence is a state secret. The Court is basically saying "Go Away", and may get away with it because the citizens and the government are not up in arms about this.
I really might consider buying at that price, if only for the BluRay. Hell, I paid $1000 for my DVD player!!! I think I can pay $500 for a BluRay player and a console in one.
Using their financial numbers as to the cost of extending the warranty to 3 years, MS themselves anticipates a full 3.8 million COMPLETE NEW replacement Xbox 360's to have to send out. That gives you an idea as to the failure rate they are seeing. This is at the current FULL RETAIL cost of the system and not using only repair costs. If it only costs $100 to repair, that would mean an anticipated 11.5 million failures during the 3 year warranty period.
...who have said that their speaker cable is designed to minimize "skin effect" have some science behind them. It has only take +20 years of this being touted as "science" in the speaker cable industry. Now there is some real science behind it.
"Its chip generates a separate, random code for each ink cartridge, thus requiring a would-be hacker to break every successive cartridge's code to make use of the cartridge."
They won't bother hacking the chips on the cartridges. They will hack the hardware/software that interfaces with the cartridges. It is much faster and you have a known mass distributable crack to the issue. It is also why the hackers of the HD-DVD and BluRay encryption have gone after the process keys and not the individual movie key. The process key lets them crack multiple movies, where-as the individual movie key only works for that specific movie (and even then, that specific copy of that specific movie).
No one in their right mind who knows anything about cryptology would ever state that above quote. Only someone reading what the spinmiesters in PR (who again have no idea about cryptology), would say something like this.
... just about EVERYTHING technology related IS a specific item. What will happen now will be that Sony will say to their retailers, "Even though we only charge you $10 for this CD player, you MUST sell it for $45.".
Or more likely it will be someone like Sharp saying, "No one can sell the new 65 inch LCD TV for less then $4500 even though it only costs you $2000." I personally bought my 45" Sharp LCD TV for $2700 ($2400+$300 shipping/handling), which was $1200 less then the "retail" price. Now the companies can say, you can't sell for less then retail price, no matter what. This keeps places like the small installers out of the market because they would allow you to barter with them on pricing especially if you were picking up a decent amount of gear from one place. Many places do this when they see a customer on the ropes as to if they will buy the item or not. Best Buy and the other big box stores can't do this, because their sales staff do not have the power to do anything other then sell you an extra protection plan. Wait until every TV, phone, computer part, refrigerator, air conditioner, stove, oven, game console, CD, DVD, washer, dryer, etc., all have a price floor set. These are all specific items. Unique in many cases, which means you can't just go pick up another competing brand, as there is no competing item (sure there may be things which are "simlar", but you won't see a LCD TV that has 120Hz refresh, 5 phase backlight, 3 HDMI inputs, 1 DVI input, 2 component inputs from another company... at least not right now, Sharp is the only one. Samsung is close, but won't be out for another month or two, where-as I was able to enjoy this year's Super Bowl on mine...)
If someone has a business model which allows them to make enough money buying the product at the set wholesale price and selling it to the public, they should be able to price it anyway they like. If this means offering 80% off to clear the items out of their warehouse because someone ordered too many, and didn't realize they took up 2050 square feet of of warehouse floor space, and not 20.50 square feet that the person making the order thought, well, they should be allowed to discount it. The company that sold them the products already made their money on the bargain, the only one who risks lossing cash is the retailer who sells the item less then the suggested price. Maybe they want to have something to draw customers into the store because they just opened, and so they have a big opening week sale to get people to know they are open for business and have all these great products and better service then the big box stores....
It is just a normal microcode fix. From what I have been able to gather it is a fairly rare set of conditions that need to occur, but if they do, the memory lookup will return with the incorrect address and thus potentially crash the system. This is nothing to do with the price cuts as the price cuts were announced back in November of 2006. This error also isn't a 1+1=1.91 type error, but more of a sequential combined instruction type error in which something was done out of order or didn't run a proper test. As such, it can be worked around with a microcode update to fix the sequence of instructions that the CPU performs, unlike the condition with a bad math processor or int to float conversion...
No its because Dell doesn't want to have to release a BIOS update for all the affected systems, which would be any system that uses socket 775 or 771 motherboards made/sold in the last 3-5 years. So they basically say that it is a Windows only issue so they can use the built in Windows microcode loader which layers the microcode onto the CPU at every boot (since it is lost when it reboots).
Re:Vestiges of the Industrial Era
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The Mechanized Future
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Well, sort of. The US school system is most definitely still a product of the Industrial Era, everything from the Summer Vacation to the majority of course material is a vestige of its Industrial Era roots. Summer vacation was used because so much of the country was rural and family farm centric that the children were needed during the summer to work the fields during the critical growing seasons. Our high schools education is still based on teaching people how to be good manufacture workers requiring only a basics of math and science with the focus more on being institutionalized units in a large system. Some of this is being changed, but very slowly. Very few charter schools and complete programs are available which have completely re-done the thinking of how and what to teach students. We are no longer a manufacturing society as we once were in the turn of the century to the 1960's and even 1970's. We now need to focus on teaching things like the arts to develop free thinking individuals. People who will ask the question "Why"?, and others who can answer it with something other then "because".
This is a load of PR bull... They are going for overseas talent for several reasons, only one of which is cost savings, the others are things less tangible then that but of great importance. Things like the fact that being an H1-B requires you to have a job to stay in the country, which puts the employee in much different position in terms of reporting on the employer for potential violations, or whistle blowing, for which many of the laws in place to protect the individual will not apply because they are not a citizen.
But cost is the biggest reason. How does this affect cost you might ask if the companies are required to pay a resonable market rate for the job? Because this allows the company to force an artificially lower rate into the system. Once they have started hiring H1-B's, the going rate can now be fixed, irregardless to other market pressures because now the going pay rate is what they have on staff for people performing that particular job. They are not required to give adjustments to pay once they have hired someone, as that adjustment occurs by people leaving the position for other places to work. When enough people leave for other companies, the HR departments have to finally pony up the cash to get new hires in place with the current market rates. However, H1-B's do not have the luxury of being able to leave the job, for if they do, they go back to thier country, and thus the method of pushing the correct market wage rates to the company have been removed out of the equation. The company now can say that we can't hire any Americans because no one will take the job at our current pay rate, ignoring the fact that the current company pay rate is below what the market dictates the payrate should be for that position, and they use their current employees to prove that they have workers working for that rate.
Intel, Google, and MS know this and understand this. They want to hire the best quality worker for the least ammount of money. It just happens that there are plenty of H1-B workers who have equal talent as American workers, and at the same time see the wage offered as being a much higher wage then what they would get in their own country and thus are more then willing to work here for that reason. The workers send as much home as they can where they can effectively live as kings and queens due to the differences in cost of living between the US and the parts of the world where most H1-B are being hired from (mainly India). In fact, in most of India, where the average person makes $450 a year, getting a job that pays $35,000 doing programming in the US is a lifetime even for a short term H1-B. This would be the equivlent of paying a US citizen $2,859,422.22 a year to work in another country (this is using data from the 2002 Bureau of Labor Statistics average American income, and the International Labor Organization wage study of 2000).
Now don't even think of saying that this isn't about the money. With H1-B's, both the employee and the employer believe they are getting an unbelievable deal. The employee is making the equivlent as hitting a lottery jackpot in terms of money, and will promptly send/save as much as he/she can so that he/she can live a luxgurous life when he/she gets back home. The company gets a worker whom they know will be loyal and hard working because they just gave him/her the deal of their lifetime. The ones who get screwed are the American workers who have to live with the American cost of living, and trying to get companies to pay a proper wage for all their hard work and time invested in themselves becoming properly skilled to do the job, but also needing to do it at the American rates of training. Differences in education between American and foriegn school systems have been changing vastly on the quality of education this gives you. This is especially seen in the science and math sectors which also happen to be the foundation of the high tech industry jobs. Don't believe for a moment that Americans are always the best talent, or the worst talent. However,
I had the pleasure of getting to see and work with the demo unit that Sun had/has on tour. The inside of the unit has two rows of their custom built racks, three racks deep on both sides of the "black box". Each rack has a water cooling unit between it and the next rack in the row so that the hot air comming out of the front rack is cooled before it is used as the intake air for the following rack. The racks themselves are on a custom designed damping/shock absorption system and rail system so that when you need to work on a rack, it can be slid out into the center aisle where you can then access the front and back of the rack. A little planning is needed so that you have the appropriate tools/gear on the proper side of the rack before you pull it out into the center asile, however they do slide very easily even when loaded up so you can put is back in and move behind it or in front of it depending on what you need to do. It makes the most sense to have two people, one on either side do and work on the systems.
It may be a little warm in there if you place it out in the middle of nowhere as the cooling system is really designed just to cool the systems in racks, and not the entire box, especially when you have the front or back doors open, and you may want to close the inner door if you can to keep try and keep the moist outside air from entering the container, however there is a dehumidifier in the system to take care of that situation. It will be a little cramped working in there, but no more so then any high density compute server room. The main idea however is to not have to go in there very often, in which the Sun "lights out managment" systems come into play. The only reason to go into the container is for actual hardware failure, all other maintenace can be performed remotely on systems with the "lom" ports, from bios settings, to single user/maintenance mode issues.
As for your "I know that node failures happen on a very regular basis with clusters...", comment, I have personally found that if you are using "lom", you will almost never need to go in there unless it was a true hardware issue. In the 9 racks of beowulf cluster that I manage, there have only been 6 actual hardware outages over the last 3 years. The majority of issues are software related outages which can all be fixed over the "lom" connections, even reloading the OS...
This still is not any real different then a 2 stroke engine with a turbo. Properly setup, the turbo on the regular 2 stroke will create enough compression to full evacuate the exhaust out of the cylinder becuase there is enough overpressure in the system that air will escape the exhaust valve when it is released. If they are doing something like moving the air intake valve in the cylinder such that it is at the bottom of the cylinder when the piston hits its bottom, this can also be done with a super-charger to give a constant pressure on the air intake even at the start cycle. And frankly I don't see it feesible to put the air intake location at the bottom of the cylinder, as you will run into other issues with maintaince (you have to disassemble the entire engine to clean a clogged intake valve, which DOES happen). But I just speculated the location of the intake valve. If it is still located at the top of the cylinder, then there is no difference between running pre-pressurized air intake from either a super-charger or turbo system then there is from the split cylinder. I highly suspect the power drain on the split cylinder to be very similar to that of a equal powerful supercharger. The turbo would actually be a less draining system since it uses the spent exhaust air to generate its power by harnessing the foward pressure to spin the turbine which runs the compressor.
And as for running a turbo on top of the split cylinder, well, I wouldn't advise it. If you pre-compress the air that goes into the split cylinder's compression cylinder, now you cause a huge loss in power on the system because you are now trying to compress already compressed air using the power of the engine itself. Especially if you already have enough compression to meet the requirements for the efficiency of the engine. Now if you are simply trying to make the most powerful compact engine you can and don't mind using forged pistons, forged engine block, etc., etc., and increase the fuel intake into the cylinder, then, sure you can turbo charge the split cylinder. However, that won't do anything for your fuel economy unless your vehicle needs that extra power all the time, which you don't...
The radical new design of the Scuderi power plant splits the cylinders of an internal-combustion engine in two, compressing air in one chamber, then shooting it into a combustion chamber where it's mixed with gas and ignited....It also creates a highly efficient combustion environment, promising to double gas mileage while drastically reducing tailpipe emissions.
This technology already exists in a sense. It is called a "turbo" or a "super-charger", and has been in use for years. The only difference is that instead of doing it external of the engine as a separate device, they want to combine it into the engine itself. Personally, I think this is a stupid idea. They are increasing the complexity of the engine, adding more moving parts into an already complex system, when you can already get the same or better results by having the compressor (either a turbo or super-charger) being separate from the engine and simply feed the engine cylinder the compressed air. You can get just an efficient combustion environment without increase complexity to the engine system, simply place some electronic controls on measuring the amount of compressed air fed into the cylinder. This is also call engine "tuning"...
Again, if you can't tell, this is not anything new. Everyone who knows anything about cars knows you can get more efficient engines by having a properly tuned engine to feed the correct amount of gas for the correct amount of air that is put into the cylinder. The problem is that doing this has a lot of variables on that exact specific car, from the air intake system all the way to the exhaust system. Even the small tolerance changes from part to part will screw up the calculations to doing a mass production car that is properly tuned right off the line. So you get what we have, which is cars that put more fuel into the cylinder then there is oxygen to burn completely (in other words, the fuel/air mixture is "rich"). The reason you run "rich" is because there is very little risk of physical damage to the car or engine for running the car rich, other then the loss of some power and wasting of fuel. However, if you run "lean" (the opposite of rich), you risk serious damage to the engine and vehicle as a whole. Excess waste heat is generated when running "lean", as well as environmentally damaging gasses are produced in this condition (as there are extra oxygen and nitrogen molecules available in the chemical system to create these gasses). You run the risk of there being enough oxygen from the previous ignition in the cylinder to ignite with the new fuel being injected and causing "knocking" (which is a premature ignition which fires when the cylinder is in the incorrect position, usually while the cylinder has not reached the apex of its current rotation, and is still compressing the fuel and air mixture. When this happens and the fuel/air mixture ignites while the cylinder is still compressing, the cylinder has nowhere for the gasses to expand because the other cylinders in the engine are all pushing against the single cylinder that mis-fired. This can cause anything from the cylinder itself being shot out of the engine (like a bullet being fired out of a gun), to the engine block failing and cracking so the gasses can escape, to the crank shaft being sheared off where the cylinder rod connects.... In other words, major engine damage can occur when running too lean. This is why all cars are factory set to run rich.
Now again, this is no radical concept, everyone knows the engine could use more air intake, which was why turbos and super-chargers came about in the first place to get more air oxygen into the cylinder to allow the amount of fuel to be increased or burned fully. It is also why the diesel engines are almost always turbo diesels (well, it also helps with the basics of the design of the diesel, as it increases in rpm's there isn't as much air that gets sucked into the cylinder in the time it has before it is compressed and ignited by the compression, so as the rpm's go up, the exhau
If "blogging" is banned, then what is "blogging"? Is it the act of posting an article to a website? If so then all web publishing is banned.
Is the the act of publishing an article on the web while the event is still in progress? I would say that the majority of web publishing is still banned as most all sites will post updates to articles of the game, especially if something happened like an injury or upset in the making. If we take this to the logical non-web based world, any pre-submitted articles would also be considered banned. So the sporting equivilent of "Dewey Defeats Truman" won't ever happen again, because if it does, then we know you posted the article before the game/event ended, not that deadlines have anything to do with it.
How can blogging while at the live event be distinguished from blogging from say a TV or radio broadcast (asside from name being attached to said article)?
Is it banned if I call on a cell phone and relay the events to someone else who then "blogs" the phone conversation? What if this is a friend who is participating in some social event in which their entire existance is posted on a blog like say some who was listed as a potential terroriest who decided the best way to beat that fact was to post his entire life online in realtime, like professor Hasan Elahi as posted in a previous slashdot article.
It is an incredible slippery slope that the NCAA is trying to walk on here.
If you are going to do this, do it right. It will cost you some up front, however, in the long run, doing it right will be cheaper. Get a real raid card, as in hardware RAID. Get something that supports multiple volumes and at least 8 disks. I personally just got the Promise SuperTrak EX8350. Now, why do you ask do you need 8 disks? So you can upgrade, that is why. Use your current 3 or 4 disks you have now in a raid volume. In a couple years when bigger disks are dirt cheap, pick up 4 1TB+ size disks and build a second volume on the RAID array using the new disks. Now you can offload all the old data onto the new RAID volume and either ditch the old disks or keep them around (up to you, however, I recommend ditching to other computers or whatever so that you now have 4 empty slots on the RAID card so that you can rinse/repeat the whole process again in another few years...)
Again, doing it correct up front takes care of upgrade options down the line. It also gives you room to do monster sized volume if you ever need that much space (8 disk array). Most of these RAID solutions are also OS independent, so if you want dual boot, the volume would be recognized by Windows, Linux, Unix, BSD, etc., and you are also not dependent on using the exact same motherboard if you motherboard dies or wants to be upgraded (you would lose all your data if you use the built in RAID on the motherboard when changing to a new motherboard other then the exact same model).
These better cards also can be linked together (i.e. you always get a second card assuming your motherboard has a slot for it, and add more disks to the array that way as well).
I would assume that sophisticated game AI algorithms wouldn't use boolean logic as much as some kind of "fuzzy" logic. That is, it would take into account the number, strength and proximity of known enemies, adding up to some "threat level", compare that to its own "capability level" which includes things like health, available firepower, proximity of friendlies, etc., then applies a "personality factor" which makes that unit more or less agressive, etc. All that is fed into a function that decides the next move.
While humans have many advantages, when you're talking about combat, most soldiers react based on their training because there isn't a lot of time to think. Therefore it may be able to create AI that follows the same basic "twitch" style of gameplay as a human if you tried hard. The difference would come after the encounter when a human reflects on the game and adapts their gameplay, whereas the AI would act virtually the same every time.
First and foremost, game AI as we know it has almost nothing to do with real AI for several simple reasons. First of all, the game would simply be too darn hard for the players if it used real AI modeling. If true AI approaches were used to create different base logic units, or "personalities" that had the ability to "learn" the environment and world, games quickly become too difficult to play and win.
It is not altogether difficult to create a Kohonen neural network and teach it how to react to certain situations. A rewards based learning and evolution environment will quickly be able to generate different personalities for use in a game. It is very easy in fact for game AI, as there are a finite number of inputs that need to be generated depending on how complex you want to go. Really there are probably only about dozen personalities that need to be made for any "shooter" games. You can always make more if you want to have more interesting interactions, but that leads me to the second reason why real AI is not used in games, it is NOT predictable.
You can not script it to do something. Each time you play, it will work a little differently. Complex interactions quickly occur with even the simplest of reward rule sets. You will be surprised when the game AI guards start killing the berzerker units becuase the guards learn that the guards around the berzerker units die faster becuase the "player" tends to use a rocket launcher on the berzerkers and guards located near the berzerkers tend to die as a result... You can start to see my point here, the game itself become un-predictible, which most story line games can not be, certain events have to occur, certain areas must be difficult to make it through, etc., etc., what good is it if the AI learns that it has no chance to fight the player and win, and thus decides to run away? Now some of that can be fixed by the reward system for the AI units, i.e. give a large reward for activily engaging the human player, but then you will run into cases where you will have units that snipe if there is a rule in place that rewards the AI unit for staying alive as there almost always should be (otherwise you just wind up with suiciders).
My point is that games and real AI will not work for many of the games we currently have and play. Some games which are not storyline driven, things like MMORPGs or open ended games may very well benefit from true AI by changing the monotony of the game itself. But it is just cheaper and more controlled in the minds of the publishers to not do this and hard code behaviour so they have a more consistant product.
The problem we face is that the market is actually closed. There is no free market in the telecom or cable industries. Almost all towns, counties, and even states have laws in place restricting the number of cable providers and forcing a monopoly in the state, county, etc., etc.
In an open market, things would work out for the consumer, as they would have the choice to go to a different company if they were not getting the service they want or even expect from their current providers. Yet, where I live, I can not even start a rival cable company if I wanted let alone have a choice between different ones because the law forbids me from being able to use anything other then Comcast, as they have an exclusive deal with the county to be the only licensed cable tv provider, and the county will not license any other competition. So, since I have a choice of them or nothing, it isn't like I can do a whole lot when I am upset about a change in service or experience poor service, etc., etc. In a free and open market, I would go to someone else who didn't do X or Y to me, and isn't speed throttling different network connections, etc., etc., and that is the idea of the free market, and in that case, the free market would make sure that the consumer got what he or she wants, not what is forced on them.
Well, to a point. Yes, but not always. While it is true that the vast ammount of current MMORPGs usually have little active storyline, some have vast storyline/quest systems which in essence create the story. Take "Guild Wars" for example. While some may argue how much of a MMORPG it truly is (no monthly fees, just the upfront game costs), it does have a story line that you follow along with many of the more traditional RPG elements.
That said, traditional RPGs have a huge advantage over any of the MMORPGs in my mind, that being the no need for churning, or gold farming (usually not needed), or other such activities.
If you can't read the "standard" documentation and develop a program that properly works for that standard, then it is not a standard. The "standard" still has things like "will support rendering of Office97 table format", and never define what the "Office97 table format" exactly is and how it works.
Until each and every thing in the standard is properly defined and explained, it is not a standard.
While I will admit that the "kona blend" or other such kona mixes are not anything special, true, fresh 100% pure kona is very, VERY hard to beat. The stuff you see in the stores in the USA or anywhere for that matter are not fresh. It spent a month on a boat getting to where it is, and in many cases more then a month on the boat.
The good stuff needs to be bought direct in Hawaii. How do I know this? Because my work regulary sends people to Hawaii and usually we have them bring back a few pounds of the good stuff direct. Freshness matters with coffee. Even more so with kona in my opinion. It loses a lot of flavor when it is old.
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Yes, I have that modem myself. I went from an older model that Comcast upgraded me to when they upgraded to 6mbps in the area. It was an older motorola surfboard modem. A friend at work read about the SB5120 and upgraded to it and showed me the results, which were dramatic for him. He was seeing 30mbps at times. I then purchased one for myself. I did speed tests before and after the change. I went from seeing approx 8mbps down and 320kbps up to 28mbps down and 1.5mbps up. This was over the difference of a 10 minute call to Comcast to get the new modem activated... I still normally see in the 20's all the time, with peaks in the low 30's. Best $50 I ever spent.
DOL... forgot the link is a pic/link... well, it was 20,000+ down, 1,500+ up...
It all depends on the cable modem that you have. Some of the new motorola modems, like the SB5120, do not have the ability for Comcast to limit as much as they sometimes like. Comcast themselves has not been too worried about it as long as the network segment you are a member of is not over-crowded. They see it more like a new benefit which allows better competition against FIOS. Personally I average 25-28mbps on my modem.
Here is a current snapshot:
Pounds are certainly not a measure of mass. That is why when you weight yourself at sealevel you will weight more then if you weight yourself on the top of Mt. Everest, however, if you measure the mass of yourself at sealevel, it will be the same as if you measure at the top of Mt. Everest. Pounds are a measure of force, in this case, the force of gravity pulling down on an object.
Not well versed on the US legal system, but can't the court hear "secret" evidence but in some kind of closed session? Granted it's not much better, but this case involves some serious infringements of liberties.
The issue here is that the Court is saying that the people who brought the case have no standing to have brought the case. In the USA, a party who brings a suit, must show that they have been affected by the person/entity they are bringing the suit against. The people bringing the suit do not have possession of any specific evidence that they were affected, and they are being denied access to look for such evidence on the grounds that the evidence is a state secret. The Court is basically saying "Go Away", and may get away with it because the citizens and the government are not up in arms about this.
I really might consider buying at that price, if only for the BluRay. Hell, I paid $1000 for my DVD player!!! I think I can pay $500 for a BluRay player and a console in one.
Using their financial numbers as to the cost of extending the warranty to 3 years, MS themselves anticipates a full 3.8 million COMPLETE NEW replacement Xbox 360's to have to send out. That gives you an idea as to the failure rate they are seeing. This is at the current FULL RETAIL cost of the system and not using only repair costs. If it only costs $100 to repair, that would mean an anticipated 11.5 million failures during the 3 year warranty period.
...who have said that their speaker cable is designed to minimize "skin effect" have some science behind them. It has only take +20 years of this being touted as "science" in the speaker cable industry. Now there is some real science behind it.
"Its chip generates a separate, random code for each ink cartridge, thus requiring a would-be hacker to break every successive cartridge's code to make use of the cartridge."
They won't bother hacking the chips on the cartridges. They will hack the hardware/software that interfaces with the cartridges. It is much faster and you have a known mass distributable crack to the issue. It is also why the hackers of the HD-DVD and BluRay encryption have gone after the process keys and not the individual movie key. The process key lets them crack multiple movies, where-as the individual movie key only works for that specific movie (and even then, that specific copy of that specific movie).
No one in their right mind who knows anything about cryptology would ever state that above quote. Only someone reading what the spinmiesters in PR (who again have no idea about cryptology), would say something like this.
... just about EVERYTHING technology related IS a specific item. What will happen now will be that Sony will say to their retailers, "Even though we only charge you $10 for this CD player, you MUST sell it for $45.".
Or more likely it will be someone like Sharp saying, "No one can sell the new 65 inch LCD TV for less then $4500 even though it only costs you $2000." I personally bought my 45" Sharp LCD TV for $2700 ($2400+$300 shipping/handling), which was $1200 less then the "retail" price. Now the companies can say, you can't sell for less then retail price, no matter what. This keeps places like the small installers out of the market because they would allow you to barter with them on pricing especially if you were picking up a decent amount of gear from one place. Many places do this when they see a customer on the ropes as to if they will buy the item or not. Best Buy and the other big box stores can't do this, because their sales staff do not have the power to do anything other then sell you an extra protection plan. Wait until every TV, phone, computer part, refrigerator, air conditioner, stove, oven, game console, CD, DVD, washer, dryer, etc., all have a price floor set. These are all specific items. Unique in many cases, which means you can't just go pick up another competing brand, as there is no competing item (sure there may be things which are "simlar", but you won't see a LCD TV that has 120Hz refresh, 5 phase backlight, 3 HDMI inputs, 1 DVI input, 2 component inputs from another company... at least not right now, Sharp is the only one. Samsung is close, but won't be out for another month or two, where-as I was able to enjoy this year's Super Bowl on mine...)
If someone has a business model which allows them to make enough money buying the product at the set wholesale price and selling it to the public, they should be able to price it anyway they like. If this means offering 80% off to clear the items out of their warehouse because someone ordered too many, and didn't realize they took up 2050 square feet of of warehouse floor space, and not 20.50 square feet that the person making the order thought, well, they should be allowed to discount it. The company that sold them the products already made their money on the bargain, the only one who risks lossing cash is the retailer who sells the item less then the suggested price. Maybe they want to have something to draw customers into the store because they just opened, and so they have a big opening week sale to get people to know they are open for business and have all these great products and better service then the big box stores....
It is just a normal microcode fix. From what I have been able to gather it is a fairly rare set of conditions that need to occur, but if they do, the memory lookup will return with the incorrect address and thus potentially crash the system. This is nothing to do with the price cuts as the price cuts were announced back in November of 2006. This error also isn't a 1+1=1.91 type error, but more of a sequential combined instruction type error in which something was done out of order or didn't run a proper test. As such, it can be worked around with a microcode update to fix the sequence of instructions that the CPU performs, unlike the condition with a bad math processor or int to float conversion...
No its because Dell doesn't want to have to release a BIOS update for all the affected systems, which would be any system that uses socket 775 or 771 motherboards made/sold in the last 3-5 years. So they basically say that it is a Windows only issue so they can use the built in Windows microcode loader which layers the microcode onto the CPU at every boot (since it is lost when it reboots).
Well, sort of. The US school system is most definitely still a product of the Industrial Era, everything from the Summer Vacation to the majority of course material is a vestige of its Industrial Era roots. Summer vacation was used because so much of the country was rural and family farm centric that the children were needed during the summer to work the fields during the critical growing seasons. Our high schools education is still based on teaching people how to be good manufacture workers requiring only a basics of math and science with the focus more on being institutionalized units in a large system. Some of this is being changed, but very slowly. Very few charter schools and complete programs are available which have completely re-done the thinking of how and what to teach students. We are no longer a manufacturing society as we once were in the turn of the century to the 1960's and even 1970's. We now need to focus on teaching things like the arts to develop free thinking individuals. People who will ask the question "Why"?, and others who can answer it with something other then "because".
This is a load of PR bull... They are going for overseas talent for several reasons, only one of which is cost savings, the others are things less tangible then that but of great importance. Things like the fact that being an H1-B requires you to have a job to stay in the country, which puts the employee in much different position in terms of reporting on the employer for potential violations, or whistle blowing, for which many of the laws in place to protect the individual will not apply because they are not a citizen.
But cost is the biggest reason. How does this affect cost you might ask if the companies are required to pay a resonable market rate for the job? Because this allows the company to force an artificially lower rate into the system. Once they have started hiring H1-B's, the going rate can now be fixed, irregardless to other market pressures because now the going pay rate is what they have on staff for people performing that particular job. They are not required to give adjustments to pay once they have hired someone, as that adjustment occurs by people leaving the position for other places to work. When enough people leave for other companies, the HR departments have to finally pony up the cash to get new hires in place with the current market rates. However, H1-B's do not have the luxury of being able to leave the job, for if they do, they go back to thier country, and thus the method of pushing the correct market wage rates to the company have been removed out of the equation. The company now can say that we can't hire any Americans because no one will take the job at our current pay rate, ignoring the fact that the current company pay rate is below what the market dictates the payrate should be for that position, and they use their current employees to prove that they have workers working for that rate.
Intel, Google, and MS know this and understand this. They want to hire the best quality worker for the least ammount of money. It just happens that there are plenty of H1-B workers who have equal talent as American workers, and at the same time see the wage offered as being a much higher wage then what they would get in their own country and thus are more then willing to work here for that reason. The workers send as much home as they can where they can effectively live as kings and queens due to the differences in cost of living between the US and the parts of the world where most H1-B are being hired from (mainly India). In fact, in most of India, where the average person makes $450 a year, getting a job that pays $35,000 doing programming in the US is a lifetime even for a short term H1-B. This would be the equivlent of paying a US citizen $2,859,422.22 a year to work in another country (this is using data from the 2002 Bureau of Labor Statistics average American income, and the International Labor Organization wage study of 2000).
Now don't even think of saying that this isn't about the money. With H1-B's, both the employee and the employer believe they are getting an unbelievable deal. The employee is making the equivlent as hitting a lottery jackpot in terms of money, and will promptly send/save as much as he/she can so that he/she can live a luxgurous life when he/she gets back home. The company gets a worker whom they know will be loyal and hard working because they just gave him/her the deal of their lifetime. The ones who get screwed are the American workers who have to live with the American cost of living, and trying to get companies to pay a proper wage for all their hard work and time invested in themselves becoming properly skilled to do the job, but also needing to do it at the American rates of training. Differences in education between American and foriegn school systems have been changing vastly on the quality of education this gives you. This is especially seen in the science and math sectors which also happen to be the foundation of the high tech industry jobs. Don't believe for a moment that Americans are always the best talent, or the worst talent. However,
I had the pleasure of getting to see and work with the demo unit that Sun had/has on tour. The inside of the unit has two rows of their custom built racks, three racks deep on both sides of the "black box". Each rack has a water cooling unit between it and the next rack in the row so that the hot air comming out of the front rack is cooled before it is used as the intake air for the following rack. The racks themselves are on a custom designed damping/shock absorption system and rail system so that when you need to work on a rack, it can be slid out into the center aisle where you can then access the front and back of the rack. A little planning is needed so that you have the appropriate tools/gear on the proper side of the rack before you pull it out into the center asile, however they do slide very easily even when loaded up so you can put is back in and move behind it or in front of it depending on what you need to do. It makes the most sense to have two people, one on either side do and work on the systems.
It may be a little warm in there if you place it out in the middle of nowhere as the cooling system is really designed just to cool the systems in racks, and not the entire box, especially when you have the front or back doors open, and you may want to close the inner door if you can to keep try and keep the moist outside air from entering the container, however there is a dehumidifier in the system to take care of that situation. It will be a little cramped working in there, but no more so then any high density compute server room. The main idea however is to not have to go in there very often, in which the Sun "lights out managment" systems come into play. The only reason to go into the container is for actual hardware failure, all other maintenace can be performed remotely on systems with the "lom" ports, from bios settings, to single user/maintenance mode issues.
As for your "I know that node failures happen on a very regular basis with clusters...", comment, I have personally found that if you are using "lom", you will almost never need to go in there unless it was a true hardware issue. In the 9 racks of beowulf cluster that I manage, there have only been 6 actual hardware outages over the last 3 years. The majority of issues are software related outages which can all be fixed over the "lom" connections, even reloading the OS...
This still is not any real different then a 2 stroke engine with a turbo. Properly setup, the turbo on the regular 2 stroke will create enough compression to full evacuate the exhaust out of the cylinder becuase there is enough overpressure in the system that air will escape the exhaust valve when it is released. If they are doing something like moving the air intake valve in the cylinder such that it is at the bottom of the cylinder when the piston hits its bottom, this can also be done with a super-charger to give a constant pressure on the air intake even at the start cycle. And frankly I don't see it feesible to put the air intake location at the bottom of the cylinder, as you will run into other issues with maintaince (you have to disassemble the entire engine to clean a clogged intake valve, which DOES happen). But I just speculated the location of the intake valve. If it is still located at the top of the cylinder, then there is no difference between running pre-pressurized air intake from either a super-charger or turbo system then there is from the split cylinder. I highly suspect the power drain on the split cylinder to be very similar to that of a equal powerful supercharger. The turbo would actually be a less draining system since it uses the spent exhaust air to generate its power by harnessing the foward pressure to spin the turbine which runs the compressor.
And as for running a turbo on top of the split cylinder, well, I wouldn't advise it. If you pre-compress the air that goes into the split cylinder's compression cylinder, now you cause a huge loss in power on the system because you are now trying to compress already compressed air using the power of the engine itself. Especially if you already have enough compression to meet the requirements for the efficiency of the engine. Now if you are simply trying to make the most powerful compact engine you can and don't mind using forged pistons, forged engine block, etc., etc., and increase the fuel intake into the cylinder, then, sure you can turbo charge the split cylinder. However, that won't do anything for your fuel economy unless your vehicle needs that extra power all the time, which you don't...
The radical new design of the Scuderi power plant splits the cylinders of an internal-combustion engine in two, compressing air in one chamber, then shooting it into a combustion chamber where it's mixed with gas and ignited....It also creates a highly efficient combustion environment, promising to double gas mileage while drastically reducing tailpipe emissions.
This technology already exists in a sense. It is called a "turbo" or a "super-charger", and has been in use for years. The only difference is that instead of doing it external of the engine as a separate device, they want to combine it into the engine itself. Personally, I think this is a stupid idea. They are increasing the complexity of the engine, adding more moving parts into an already complex system, when you can already get the same or better results by having the compressor (either a turbo or super-charger) being separate from the engine and simply feed the engine cylinder the compressed air. You can get just an efficient combustion environment without increase complexity to the engine system, simply place some electronic controls on measuring the amount of compressed air fed into the cylinder. This is also call engine "tuning"...
Again, if you can't tell, this is not anything new. Everyone who knows anything about cars knows you can get more efficient engines by having a properly tuned engine to feed the correct amount of gas for the correct amount of air that is put into the cylinder. The problem is that doing this has a lot of variables on that exact specific car, from the air intake system all the way to the exhaust system. Even the small tolerance changes from part to part will screw up the calculations to doing a mass production car that is properly tuned right off the line. So you get what we have, which is cars that put more fuel into the cylinder then there is oxygen to burn completely (in other words, the fuel/air mixture is "rich"). The reason you run "rich" is because there is very little risk of physical damage to the car or engine for running the car rich, other then the loss of some power and wasting of fuel. However, if you run "lean" (the opposite of rich), you risk serious damage to the engine and vehicle as a whole. Excess waste heat is generated when running "lean", as well as environmentally damaging gasses are produced in this condition (as there are extra oxygen and nitrogen molecules available in the chemical system to create these gasses). You run the risk of there being enough oxygen from the previous ignition in the cylinder to ignite with the new fuel being injected and causing "knocking" (which is a premature ignition which fires when the cylinder is in the incorrect position, usually while the cylinder has not reached the apex of its current rotation, and is still compressing the fuel and air mixture. When this happens and the fuel/air mixture ignites while the cylinder is still compressing, the cylinder has nowhere for the gasses to expand because the other cylinders in the engine are all pushing against the single cylinder that mis-fired. This can cause anything from the cylinder itself being shot out of the engine (like a bullet being fired out of a gun), to the engine block failing and cracking so the gasses can escape, to the crank shaft being sheared off where the cylinder rod connects.... In other words, major engine damage can occur when running too lean. This is why all cars are factory set to run rich.
Now again, this is no radical concept, everyone knows the engine could use more air intake, which was why turbos and super-chargers came about in the first place to get more air oxygen into the cylinder to allow the amount of fuel to be increased or burned fully. It is also why the diesel engines are almost always turbo diesels (well, it also helps with the basics of the design of the diesel, as it increases in rpm's there isn't as much air that gets sucked into the cylinder in the time it has before it is compressed and ignited by the compression, so as the rpm's go up, the exhau
If "blogging" is banned, then what is "blogging"? Is it the act of posting an article to a website? If so then all web publishing is banned.
Is the the act of publishing an article on the web while the event is still in progress? I would say that the majority of web publishing is still banned as most all sites will post updates to articles of the game, especially if something happened like an injury or upset in the making. If we take this to the logical non-web based world, any pre-submitted articles would also be considered banned. So the sporting equivilent of "Dewey Defeats Truman" won't ever happen again, because if it does, then we know you posted the article before the game/event ended, not that deadlines have anything to do with it.
How can blogging while at the live event be distinguished from blogging from say a TV or radio broadcast (asside from name being attached to said article)?
Is it banned if I call on a cell phone and relay the events to someone else who then "blogs" the phone conversation? What if this is a friend who is participating in some social event in which their entire existance is posted on a blog like say some who was listed as a potential terroriest who decided the best way to beat that fact was to post his entire life online in realtime, like professor Hasan Elahi as posted in a previous slashdot article.
It is an incredible slippery slope that the NCAA is trying to walk on here.
If you are going to do this, do it right. It will cost you some up front, however, in the long run, doing it right will be cheaper. Get a real raid card, as in hardware RAID. Get something that supports multiple volumes and at least 8 disks. I personally just got the Promise SuperTrak EX8350. Now, why do you ask do you need 8 disks? So you can upgrade, that is why. Use your current 3 or 4 disks you have now in a raid volume. In a couple years when bigger disks are dirt cheap, pick up 4 1TB+ size disks and build a second volume on the RAID array using the new disks. Now you can offload all the old data onto the new RAID volume and either ditch the old disks or keep them around (up to you, however, I recommend ditching to other computers or whatever so that you now have 4 empty slots on the RAID card so that you can rinse/repeat the whole process again in another few years...)
Again, doing it correct up front takes care of upgrade options down the line. It also gives you room to do monster sized volume if you ever need that much space (8 disk array). Most of these RAID solutions are also OS independent, so if you want dual boot, the volume would be recognized by Windows, Linux, Unix, BSD, etc., and you are also not dependent on using the exact same motherboard if you motherboard dies or wants to be upgraded (you would lose all your data if you use the built in RAID on the motherboard when changing to a new motherboard other then the exact same model).
These better cards also can be linked together (i.e. you always get a second card assuming your motherboard has a slot for it, and add more disks to the array that way as well).
I would assume that sophisticated game AI algorithms wouldn't use boolean logic as much as some kind of "fuzzy" logic. That is, it would take into account the number, strength and proximity of known enemies, adding up to some "threat level", compare that to its own "capability level" which includes things like health, available firepower, proximity of friendlies, etc., then applies a "personality factor" which makes that unit more or less agressive, etc. All that is fed into a function that decides the next move.
While humans have many advantages, when you're talking about combat, most soldiers react based on their training because there isn't a lot of time to think. Therefore it may be able to create AI that follows the same basic "twitch" style of gameplay as a human if you tried hard. The difference would come after the encounter when a human reflects on the game and adapts their gameplay, whereas the AI would act virtually the same every time.
First and foremost, game AI as we know it has almost nothing to do with real AI for several simple reasons. First of all, the game would simply be too darn hard for the players if it used real AI modeling. If true AI approaches were used to create different base logic units, or "personalities" that had the ability to "learn" the environment and world, games quickly become too difficult to play and win.
It is not altogether difficult to create a Kohonen neural network and teach it how to react to certain situations. A rewards based learning and evolution environment will quickly be able to generate different personalities for use in a game. It is very easy in fact for game AI, as there are a finite number of inputs that need to be generated depending on how complex you want to go. Really there are probably only about dozen personalities that need to be made for any "shooter" games. You can always make more if you want to have more interesting interactions, but that leads me to the second reason why real AI is not used in games, it is NOT predictable.
You can not script it to do something. Each time you play, it will work a little differently. Complex interactions quickly occur with even the simplest of reward rule sets. You will be surprised when the game AI guards start killing the berzerker units becuase the guards learn that the guards around the berzerker units die faster becuase the "player" tends to use a rocket launcher on the berzerkers and guards located near the berzerkers tend to die as a result... You can start to see my point here, the game itself become un-predictible, which most story line games can not be, certain events have to occur, certain areas must be difficult to make it through, etc., etc., what good is it if the AI learns that it has no chance to fight the player and win, and thus decides to run away? Now some of that can be fixed by the reward system for the AI units, i.e. give a large reward for activily engaging the human player, but then you will run into cases where you will have units that snipe if there is a rule in place that rewards the AI unit for staying alive as there almost always should be (otherwise you just wind up with suiciders).
My point is that games and real AI will not work for many of the games we currently have and play. Some games which are not storyline driven, things like MMORPGs or open ended games may very well benefit from true AI by changing the monotony of the game itself. But it is just cheaper and more controlled in the minds of the publishers to not do this and hard code behaviour so they have a more consistant product.
The problem we face is that the market is actually closed. There is no free market in the telecom or cable industries. Almost all towns, counties, and even states have laws in place restricting the number of cable providers and forcing a monopoly in the state, county, etc., etc.
In an open market, things would work out for the consumer, as they would have the choice to go to a different company if they were not getting the service they want or even expect from their current providers. Yet, where I live, I can not even start a rival cable company if I wanted let alone have a choice between different ones because the law forbids me from being able to use anything other then Comcast, as they have an exclusive deal with the county to be the only licensed cable tv provider, and the county will not license any other competition. So, since I have a choice of them or nothing, it isn't like I can do a whole lot when I am upset about a change in service or experience poor service, etc., etc. In a free and open market, I would go to someone else who didn't do X or Y to me, and isn't speed throttling different network connections, etc., etc., and that is the idea of the free market, and in that case, the free market would make sure that the consumer got what he or she wants, not what is forced on them.
Well, to a point. Yes, but not always. While it is true that the vast ammount of current MMORPGs usually have little active storyline, some have vast storyline/quest systems which in essence create the story. Take "Guild Wars" for example. While some may argue how much of a MMORPG it truly is (no monthly fees, just the upfront game costs), it does have a story line that you follow along with many of the more traditional RPG elements.
That said, traditional RPGs have a huge advantage over any of the MMORPGs in my mind, that being the no need for churning, or gold farming (usually not needed), or other such activities.
Initial review March 19th:
9 49
9 49
9 74
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2
Follow-up RAID performance April 19th:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2
Follow-up to the follow-up April 23rd:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2
If you can't read the "standard" documentation and develop a program that properly works for that standard, then it is not a standard. The "standard" still has things like "will support rendering of Office97 table format", and never define what the "Office97 table format" exactly is and how it works.
Until each and every thing in the standard is properly defined and explained, it is not a standard.
While I will admit that the "kona blend" or other such kona mixes are not anything special, true, fresh 100% pure kona is very, VERY hard to beat. The stuff you see in the stores in the USA or anywhere for that matter are not fresh. It spent a month on a boat getting to where it is, and in many cases more then a month on the boat. The good stuff needs to be bought direct in Hawaii. How do I know this? Because my work regulary sends people to Hawaii and usually we have them bring back a few pounds of the good stuff direct. Freshness matters with coffee. Even more so with kona in my opinion. It loses a lot of flavor when it is old.