Wait, all the keys on your keyboard are the same? That *would* suck. Fortunately, mine has little raised bumps to let you feel where you are, and the shift/ctrl/alt/space/tab keys I use are shaped differently.
Plus, it doesn't hurt that I get free keyboard training every day at work. I'd probably be better with a console controller if I used them all day at work, too.
It's not a question of "better," as some people argue-- it's just a question of what you like. I don't like playing FPS games without my trusty keyboard and mouse, so I don't buy FPS games for my xbox. Online DDR and Burnout 3 are all I really play on it, though-- I'm just not finding a lot of games I really want that I can't already get for the PC or the 'cube.
It's just what he likes. You're allowed to be tired of his argument, but it doesn't make his opinion invalid. You like both. We don't.
The legal limit for radiated power from wifi devices is something like 100mW. Your cell phone radiates many times that, and your microwave goes several orders of magnitude above that.
Additionally, "speed" has little to do with how much radiation you will be getting. Picture yourself talking slowly on a CB radio. Now talk twice as fast. Are you somehow making that radio transmit more power by talking faster? Nope... you're just cramming more information into the same radio signal.
Consider also that "faster" digital cell phones use significantly less power than their old analog cousins.
I'm not saying there are no issues with cell phones, etc... the jury is still out on that. But the risks from wifi are trivial in comparison to those from cell phones, and raising the speed doesn't do much to the output power.
Always good to note. Use as little as possible-- it's only there to fill the tiny surface irregularities that would create air gaps instead of surface-to-surface contact. You're quite right that the only thing heatsink paste is better than is air.
Also important is getting the old heatsink goo cleaned off the GPU nicely while avoiding scratching anything which would create more air gaps. I have fair luck with a credit card to scrape it off, then use an old lint-free eyeglass cloth and some alcohol to remove the rest.
Your card is about as big and as hot as they come. I had a slightly more modest (and older, hence the fan failure) Radeon 9800 Pro. I did notice that Thermaltake had a larger solution for hotter cards, though-- it costs twice as much at $40, but it has more heatsink area, including a set of copper fins that stick out of the neighboring slot to give the card some cooling outside the case, too. The external part looks kinda silly, but it doesn't stick out any further than the VGA plug already would, so it's not going to necessitate any rearrangement in your desktop.
I can't vouch for it, because I haven't used it myself, but it's like the humongous big brother of the one I bought. And those external fins should help significantly-- dumping heat into the lower-temp outside air is much easier than dumping it into the alread-warm internals of your case.
I had the fan die on my video card a few weeks back, and went with the $20 thermaltake fanless kit instead of a replacement fan to prevent the failure from happening again.
It wasn't any harder than installing a heatsink on a CPU. Removing the old one was just a matter of squeezing the little plastic bits that held it on with pliers, and pulling them through the holes. Installing the new one was just a matter of putting all the pieces on in order, with heatsink goo in between.
I believe you are mistaken. I *think* the CPS 2000 was the most powerful Super Soaker ever made. It was modified to become the 2500 with a differnt, less-coherent nozzle after some injuries (retinal detachment? i forget.) caused by the 2000. I believe there was also a wussified version of the 2000 released as a stopgap before the 3000 and its less-coherent water stream.
I had a friend in college with one-- it was truly impressive. Of course, it was empty after like two shots because of the size of the stream of water it produced.
You aren't kidding. We replaced the late-80s fridge that came with our house with a new one, and the difference is staggering. Look at the energy-star ratings when you shop-- some of them are so efficient they're off the bottom of the scale energy star uses to rate. Ours was no more expensive than a less efficient one right next to it, with identical features. And although we expected otherwise, freezer-on-bottom fridges are actually less efficient than the traditional freezer-on-top design. I have no idea why.
Everything helps, though-- I highly recommend switching to the CF bulbs, too. They're cheap now, and in the nine years since I replaced all of our bulbs, I've only had two burn out (both of those made it to eight years). Sure, it can't outstrip population growth, but combining this with everything else, it probably can.
I agree with you up to a point. For me, the line that was crossed here was when the company decided to pull their unprofitable drug off the market (perfectly legitimate free-market decision) yet would not allow charitable organizations the right to use their patent. What did they stand to lose, even from a purely capitalistic standpoint? If they couldn't make money on the drug, what money could they be losing to license the patent for humanitarian use? In fact, it could have been a massive bit of free advertising for their company.
They were within their legal rights to stop making it-- but I believe they had a responsibility to not hoard it for years.
If I'm following your reasoning correctly, (I may not be-- perhaps you are joking?) you are saying that capitalism works because of the threat of death at the hands of sleeping sickness? The driving factor to get a job in a cubicle, as you say, is that those who don't have such jobs face threats like this, and that it is the responsibility of a good, capitalistic society to make sure that these threats remain in place by removing drugs that could treat them from the market?
Are you really saying that we shouldn't treat people's disease because it removes their desire to work?
Thank you, Aventis, for making sure people everywhere still have Sleeping Sickness as a reason to get up and go to work in the morning. I know it makes me work *extra* hard!
That's there, too. I didn't mean to imply unnecessary litigation was the *only* reason your costs were high-- we're being screwed from multiple directions.
I'm not sure if I'm being trolled here or not. (odds are good with "you stupid fuck" as the lead-in, though...) If I am, you win. I replied.
Nonetheless, I doubt Aventis would have any liability in drugs manufactured by a third party, whether they owned the patent or not. And this is beside the point, anyway-- to the best of my knowledge, there were no liability issues with this drug in the first place. For cripes' sake, the drug it replaced killed or brain-damaged half the people it was given to (and is still manufactured and used in Africa), and this one is mild enough to be used for *cosmetics*. What were they worried about liability for?
Not only is the litigation off-the-deep-end crazy here, but drugs that are necessary but less profitable than things like Viagra sometimes simply disappear off the market.
Take Eflornithine, the best drug available for treating Sleeping Sickness. Obviously, Sleeping Sickness is not a big problem in the US, where we all have lots of money to buy drugs. It's a problem in Africa, where they don't. So what did Aventis, the manufacturer do? They stopped making it in 1995. It took SIX YEARS for the WHO to manage to talk Aventis into letting someone else manufacture it in 2001.
To recap: a drug company SAT ON A VITAL DRUG for SIX YEARS because they didn't find it "profitable enough," yet wouldn't let anybody else manufacture it to save lives.
The other drugs for treating Sleeping Sickness are nearly as bad as the disease. A huge fraction of the people treated with melarsoprol die when it causes reactive encephalopathy (convulsions, coma, etc...) and those that live often have brain damage.
Of course, the second Aventis discovered (recently) that the drug can be used to remove unwanted facial hair in women (now THERE is a profitable use for a drug!) they cranked right back up into production. Saving lives? Not profitable enough-- we won't make it. Facial hair removal? Crank up the factories!!
It appears since this fiasco that Aventis has cleaned up their act and is donating $5M a year worth of the drug to Doctors Without Borders-- but how many died unnecessarily?
And on the litigation front, I know an EM resident who is being sued by the sons of a patient (all three are lawyers). They are upset because the hospital wanted to move the woman, whose condition was stable, out of the ICU and into long-term hospice care. These assholes are why your medical costs are so high.
Sorry for the rant-- this stuff makes me incredibly angry.
Sadly, I have already backed the wrong horse, by buying an HDTV early enough that it didn't have digital inputs. "Sure," I thought to myself, "It's not digital, but I'll bet component analog is the lowest-common-denominator standard that will work with everything down the road." Unfortunately, we already know for certain that HD-DVD won't output HD on component outputs or DVI. Sony doesn't seem like the type of company who'd open things up, either, so I'm not holding my breath there.
I guess I won't be buying a HD disc player of any sort until after I wear out my TV, unless hell freezes over and Sony comes out and supports HD on component outputs.
Wrong horse, indeed. I can't even buy either of the players yet, and I'm already screwed by obsolescence. Thanks, guys!
You don't want a 17' turbine, then, I think. The bigger they are, the slower they spin-- you want a nice little 3' turbine that spins like an airplane propeller. It has to be fast enough that it blurs, and they think it's just air.
Alternatively, you could just get a big picture window. Or a cat.
It looks like they've locked themselves out of a sale from me-- I have an HDTV set, but it's a slightly older one with only analog component inputs. I was really looking forward to HD media of some flavor, but it won't be this one, and I imagine I'm not alone. I wonder what percentage of deployed HDTVs are analog-only, and how many of those folks would be willing to upgrade after such a short time?
I'd be interested to hear this, too. I'm a non-preaching "engineer vegitarian" by way of the reasoning that it's more efficient for me to eat the plants than it is to feed them to an animal who burns off most of the energy maintaining body temperature before it gets to us.
Anything that improves the efficiency of our food chain is good news. Of course, if this is *more* energy-intensive than just raising a cow, it's silly.
The grandparent has it right. If anyone is breaking any rules here, it is clearly the guy with the unsecured AP who is publicly sharing an internet connection which he (presumably) signed an agreement not to share.
Cities, apartment complexes, and suburbs are so saturated with wifi anymore it is impossible for the average person with a laptop to distinguish the legitimate open APs from those that are open but aren't "fair game". Some ISPs allow sharing (I believe speakeasy is one), some don't. Near many neighborhoods (or directly below many apartments) are stores that run free, open APs. How is the average person with a laptop going to tell which of the 15 APs he can see from where he's sitting is legit if none of them have descriptive labelling, and they all allow him online?
We have trouble with this at our house-- we're in a sprawling suburb in Indiana, but there are 9 open APs in range from our house. My fiancee's laptop often drops the encrypted connection to our AP, and preferentially prompts to reconnect to the next-door neighbors open AP. Heck, windows used to go right ahead and auto-connect to their network. Is microsoft "pirating internet access" because their software did this automatically?
If you leave your network wide open against the policies of your ISP, it's your own damn fault. YOU are the pirate, not the guy who was granted permission to use your network. Even a simple MAC allow-list would serve the purpose of indicating that this network was not for public consumption.
Same here. She likes (and still plays) the Lucasarts-type adventure games. She likes Zelda, but is irritated by fighting the bosses, and the action sequences in general-- to her, they are adventure games with an annoying action component she tolerates.
ScummVM is fantastic for getting the oldies up and running, and thank goodness there are still a few companies putting out new adventure games. Although I play nearly everything, this genre was always high on my list, too, and it's sad it has become the abandoned backwater of the gaming industry.
I figured after I finished up my Engineering degree that I'd jump through the hoops so I could call myself a Professional Engineer, but it was pretty silly. I took the first test, and passed, which I think makes me an EIT (it's been a while). But there simply wasn't a test at the time for software engineers. You could take your choice of test from any of the other engineering disciplines, but does it really help certify you as a Computer Engineer to take a Chemical Engineering or Mechanical Engineering test? I think I took ME. Does anybody know if this has actually changed? I'm not about to take the second half of the exam without some sort of reasonable test that is actually applicable to software engineering.
Hey-- everybody's different. I could have lived without having to work for a living in Shenmue... carrying crates every morning to earn $60 isn't exactly what I want in a video game. I get enough dull crap at my *real* job, and it pays better.
I just eat first. Your body gets used to that, too, and it's significantly less annoying and performance-killing than attempting a morning bike ride on an empty stomach.
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Wait, all the keys on your keyboard are the same? That *would* suck. Fortunately, mine has little raised bumps to let you feel where you are, and the shift/ctrl/alt/space/tab keys I use are shaped differently.
Plus, it doesn't hurt that I get free keyboard training every day at work. I'd probably be better with a console controller if I used them all day at work, too.
It's not a question of "better," as some people argue-- it's just a question of what you like. I don't like playing FPS games without my trusty keyboard and mouse, so I don't buy FPS games for my xbox. Online DDR and Burnout 3 are all I really play on it, though-- I'm just not finding a lot of games I really want that I can't already get for the PC or the 'cube.
It's just what he likes. You're allowed to be tired of his argument, but it doesn't make his opinion invalid. You like both. We don't.
The legal limit for radiated power from wifi devices is something like 100mW. Your cell phone radiates many times that, and your microwave goes several orders of magnitude above that.
Additionally, "speed" has little to do with how much radiation you will be getting. Picture yourself talking slowly on a CB radio. Now talk twice as fast. Are you somehow making that radio transmit more power by talking faster? Nope... you're just cramming more information into the same radio signal.
Consider also that "faster" digital cell phones use significantly less power than their old analog cousins.
I'm not saying there are no issues with cell phones, etc... the jury is still out on that. But the risks from wifi are trivial in comparison to those from cell phones, and raising the speed doesn't do much to the output power.
No worries. Man, that was a hell of a squirtgun.
Always good to note. Use as little as possible-- it's only there to fill the tiny surface irregularities that would create air gaps instead of surface-to-surface contact. You're quite right that the only thing heatsink paste is better than is air.
Also important is getting the old heatsink goo cleaned off the GPU nicely while avoiding scratching anything which would create more air gaps. I have fair luck with a credit card to scrape it off, then use an old lint-free eyeglass cloth and some alcohol to remove the rest.
Big loud bangs in PSUs are usually capacitors. I've not had one go right off the bat like that, but I had an old Antec do that to me last year.
...... stinky smoke.
*BAM*
Your card is about as big and as hot as they come. I had a slightly more modest (and older, hence the fan failure) Radeon 9800 Pro. I did notice that Thermaltake had a larger solution for hotter cards, though-- it costs twice as much at $40, but it has more heatsink area, including a set of copper fins that stick out of the neighboring slot to give the card some cooling outside the case, too. The external part looks kinda silly, but it doesn't stick out any further than the VGA plug already would, so it's not going to necessitate any rearrangement in your desktop.
I can't vouch for it, because I haven't used it myself, but it's like the humongous big brother of the one I bought. And those external fins should help significantly-- dumping heat into the lower-temp outside air is much easier than dumping it into the alread-warm internals of your case.
Linky
I had the fan die on my video card a few weeks back, and went with the $20 thermaltake fanless kit instead of a replacement fan to prevent the failure from happening again.
It wasn't any harder than installing a heatsink on a CPU. Removing the old one was just a matter of squeezing the little plastic bits that held it on with pliers, and pulling them through the holes. Installing the new one was just a matter of putting all the pieces on in order, with heatsink goo in between.
I believe you are mistaken. I *think* the CPS 2000 was the most powerful Super Soaker ever made. It was modified to become the 2500 with a differnt, less-coherent nozzle after some injuries (retinal detachment? i forget.) caused by the 2000. I believe there was also a wussified version of the 2000 released as a stopgap before the 3000 and its less-coherent water stream.
I had a friend in college with one-- it was truly impressive. Of course, it was empty after like two shots because of the size of the stream of water it produced.
You aren't kidding. We replaced the late-80s fridge that came with our house with a new one, and the difference is staggering. Look at the energy-star ratings when you shop-- some of them are so efficient they're off the bottom of the scale energy star uses to rate. Ours was no more expensive than a less efficient one right next to it, with identical features. And although we expected otherwise, freezer-on-bottom fridges are actually less efficient than the traditional freezer-on-top design. I have no idea why.
Everything helps, though-- I highly recommend switching to the CF bulbs, too. They're cheap now, and in the nine years since I replaced all of our bulbs, I've only had two burn out (both of those made it to eight years). Sure, it can't outstrip population growth, but combining this with everything else, it probably can.
I agree with you up to a point. For me, the line that was crossed here was when the company decided to pull their unprofitable drug off the market (perfectly legitimate free-market decision) yet would not allow charitable organizations the right to use their patent. What did they stand to lose, even from a purely capitalistic standpoint? If they couldn't make money on the drug, what money could they be losing to license the patent for humanitarian use? In fact, it could have been a massive bit of free advertising for their company.
They were within their legal rights to stop making it-- but I believe they had a responsibility to not hoard it for years.
If I'm following your reasoning correctly, (I may not be-- perhaps you are joking?) you are saying that capitalism works because of the threat of death at the hands of sleeping sickness? The driving factor to get a job in a cubicle, as you say, is that those who don't have such jobs face threats like this, and that it is the responsibility of a good, capitalistic society to make sure that these threats remain in place by removing drugs that could treat them from the market?
Are you really saying that we shouldn't treat people's disease because it removes their desire to work?
Thank you, Aventis, for making sure people everywhere still have Sleeping Sickness as a reason to get up and go to work in the morning. I know it makes me work *extra* hard!
That's there, too. I didn't mean to imply unnecessary litigation was the *only* reason your costs were high-- we're being screwed from multiple directions.
I'm not sure if I'm being trolled here or not. (odds are good with "you stupid fuck" as the lead-in, though...) If I am, you win. I replied.
Nonetheless, I doubt Aventis would have any liability in drugs manufactured by a third party, whether they owned the patent or not. And this is beside the point, anyway-- to the best of my knowledge, there were no liability issues with this drug in the first place. For cripes' sake, the drug it replaced killed or brain-damaged half the people it was given to (and is still manufactured and used in Africa), and this one is mild enough to be used for *cosmetics*. What were they worried about liability for?
Not only is the litigation off-the-deep-end crazy here, but drugs that are necessary but less profitable than things like Viagra sometimes simply disappear off the market.
Take Eflornithine, the best drug available for treating Sleeping Sickness. Obviously, Sleeping Sickness is not a big problem in the US, where we all have lots of money to buy drugs. It's a problem in Africa, where they don't. So what did Aventis, the manufacturer do? They stopped making it in 1995. It took SIX YEARS for the WHO to manage to talk Aventis into letting someone else manufacture it in 2001.
To recap: a drug company SAT ON A VITAL DRUG for SIX YEARS because they didn't find it "profitable enough," yet wouldn't let anybody else manufacture it to save lives.
The other drugs for treating Sleeping Sickness are nearly as bad as the disease. A huge fraction of the people treated with melarsoprol die when it causes reactive encephalopathy (convulsions, coma, etc...) and those that live often have brain damage.
Of course, the second Aventis discovered (recently) that the drug can be used to remove unwanted facial hair in women (now THERE is a profitable use for a drug!) they cranked right back up into production. Saving lives? Not profitable enough-- we won't make it. Facial hair removal? Crank up the factories!!
It appears since this fiasco that Aventis has cleaned up their act and is donating $5M a year worth of the drug to Doctors Without Borders-- but how many died unnecessarily?
And on the litigation front, I know an EM resident who is being sued by the sons of a patient (all three are lawyers). They are upset because the hospital wanted to move the woman, whose condition was stable, out of the ICU and into long-term hospice care. These assholes are why your medical costs are so high.
Sorry for the rant-- this stuff makes me incredibly angry.
Sadly, I have already backed the wrong horse, by buying an HDTV early enough that it didn't have digital inputs. "Sure," I thought to myself, "It's not digital, but I'll bet component analog is the lowest-common-denominator standard that will work with everything down the road." Unfortunately, we already know for certain that HD-DVD won't output HD on component outputs or DVI. Sony doesn't seem like the type of company who'd open things up, either, so I'm not holding my breath there.
I guess I won't be buying a HD disc player of any sort until after I wear out my TV, unless hell freezes over and Sony comes out and supports HD on component outputs.
Wrong horse, indeed. I can't even buy either of the players yet, and I'm already screwed by obsolescence. Thanks, guys!
You don't want a 17' turbine, then, I think. The bigger they are, the slower they spin-- you want a nice little 3' turbine that spins like an airplane propeller. It has to be fast enough that it blurs, and they think it's just air.
Alternatively, you could just get a big picture window. Or a cat.
It looks like they've locked themselves out of a sale from me-- I have an HDTV set, but it's a slightly older one with only analog component inputs. I was really looking forward to HD media of some flavor, but it won't be this one, and I imagine I'm not alone. I wonder what percentage of deployed HDTVs are analog-only, and how many of those folks would be willing to upgrade after such a short time?
They're still selling sets like this, too.
My gut instinct says the same thing, but I'm practical about things and won't call it "fact" until I've seen some numbers.
Mmmm... beer.
I'd be interested to hear this, too. I'm a non-preaching "engineer vegitarian" by way of the reasoning that it's more efficient for me to eat the plants than it is to feed them to an animal who burns off most of the energy maintaining body temperature before it gets to us.
Anything that improves the efficiency of our food chain is good news. Of course, if this is *more* energy-intensive than just raising a cow, it's silly.
The grandparent has it right. If anyone is breaking any rules here, it is clearly the guy with the unsecured AP who is publicly sharing an internet connection which he (presumably) signed an agreement not to share.
Cities, apartment complexes, and suburbs are so saturated with wifi anymore it is impossible for the average person with a laptop to distinguish the legitimate open APs from those that are open but aren't "fair game". Some ISPs allow sharing (I believe speakeasy is one), some don't. Near many neighborhoods (or directly below many apartments) are stores that run free, open APs. How is the average person with a laptop going to tell which of the 15 APs he can see from where he's sitting is legit if none of them have descriptive labelling, and they all allow him online?
We have trouble with this at our house-- we're in a sprawling suburb in Indiana, but there are 9 open APs in range from our house. My fiancee's laptop often drops the encrypted connection to our AP, and preferentially prompts to reconnect to the next-door neighbors open AP. Heck, windows used to go right ahead and auto-connect to their network. Is microsoft "pirating internet access" because their software did this automatically?
If you leave your network wide open against the policies of your ISP, it's your own damn fault. YOU are the pirate, not the guy who was granted permission to use your network. Even a simple MAC allow-list would serve the purpose of indicating that this network was not for public consumption.
Same here. She likes (and still plays) the Lucasarts-type adventure games. She likes Zelda, but is irritated by fighting the bosses, and the action sequences in general-- to her, they are adventure games with an annoying action component she tolerates.
ScummVM is fantastic for getting the oldies up and running, and thank goodness there are still a few companies putting out new adventure games. Although I play nearly everything, this genre was always high on my list, too, and it's sad it has become the abandoned backwater of the gaming industry.
I figured after I finished up my Engineering degree that I'd jump through the hoops so I could call myself a Professional Engineer, but it was pretty silly. I took the first test, and passed, which I think makes me an EIT (it's been a while). But there simply wasn't a test at the time for software engineers. You could take your choice of test from any of the other engineering disciplines, but does it really help certify you as a Computer Engineer to take a Chemical Engineering or Mechanical Engineering test? I think I took ME. Does anybody know if this has actually changed? I'm not about to take the second half of the exam without some sort of reasonable test that is actually applicable to software engineering.
It is a Lithium Tantalite crystal. Perhaps marketing will rebrand it "Dilitium(tm)" once the system is workable outside the lab.
Hey-- everybody's different. I could have lived without having to work for a living in Shenmue... carrying crates every morning to earn $60 isn't exactly what I want in a video game. I get enough dull crap at my *real* job, and it pays better.
I just eat first. Your body gets used to that, too, and it's significantly less annoying and performance-killing than attempting a morning bike ride on an empty stomach.