It also makes sense to put the best one there, since it would be best equipped to fight back.
Or, if you have the resources, put the weakest one closest, with as many other better ones nearby as possible, so you can take the first hit (and thus be "justified", whatever that means) and then immediately fight back hard.
And indeed, that's likely the case. CVN-70 Carl Vinson and CVN-72 Abraham Lincoln are currently in the Gulf as well. And CVN-68 Nimitz is under way to relieve Lincoln - if the timing is right, both will be in the Gulf when the shit hits the fan, meaning four aircraft carriers (nearly 360 aircraft) plus the accompanying ships (four cruisers, eight destroyers, four attack submarines and various supply ships).
However, the USS Constitution hasn't really been a "war"ship since before the Civil War. It's mainly been a training or museum ship. The last time it was used as an active-duty combat vessel (as far as I can tell) was 1855, which would give it a 58-year combat life.
Which still beats the Enterprise's 51-year service, I guess. Point conceded.
Or C/SDL (for 2D stuff, OpenGL is often overkill).
Actually, given his C# background, XNA may make more sense. It's essentially C#.NET with extra gaming-oriented libraries and optimization. Runs natively on Windows XP+, the Xbox360, and one of the Windows Phone types, and there's probably a Mono-based project to make it run on non-MS systems.
Like any Microsoft environment, it's heavily documented and aimed at novices and amateurs. I've never used it much myself (I prefer C++/SDL or C++/OpenGL, myself), but I think it sounds like what the OP needs.
If developers can't find a way to improve games beyond the next generation, it's not because we've reached some peak of gaming possibilities, it's just because those particular developers have reached the peak of their imaginations.
Somewhere right now their is a young guy sitting somewhere who has an idea in the back of his head which will become the next great innovation in gaming. It will require a lot more computing power than the current generation of PC's, much less consoles. If he were to pitch it at EA, he would be laughed at. If he tried to explain it at a Game Developers Conference, he would be greeted by blank stares and derision. He's probably already used to hearing responses like "That can't be done", "Who would want THAT?", "That could never be done on a console", etc. But one day people will look back and say "Wow, how could they *not* have seen that that was the future?" and "How could they have been so arrogant as to think that gaming had peaked with the millionth variation of the FPS?".
I actually have an idea like this. I'll go ahead and practice my elevator pitch here:
Zombies have been a staple of FPS games since the beginning. You can't go much further back than Doom. But what makes a zombie scary?
It's not that they're undead. It's not that they're brainless, or that they can't always be killed. It's the numbers. A gamer can go one-on-one with anything. Look at how many JRPGs end with a boss fight against god, for crying out loud.
No game captures the sheer numbers of zombies. Killing Floor, Left 4 Dead, you'll see dozens on-screen, if that much.
I want millions. I want the entire population of New York City, all eight million people, turned into shambling, flesh-eating monsters. And I want the entire First Infantry Division there to fight them off. Real-time, with full AI. Minimum of thousands of people and un-people on screen at all times.
Now, we'll need a lot of CPU power for that. We'll have to make some sacrifices in the graphics department, and we'll need some *really* good programmers to optimize the hell out of it. Even then, we're beyond current tech, unless we cut it down to Doom-level graphics.
So start now. Give me a team, a small team, maybe two dozen or so people. Let us keep working at it until the technology catches up to us. 30 people working on a game for a decade costs the same as hiring 300 people to cram a game out in a year, and we'll give you better results.
I do this. Not with servers - I don't have any. But my home machines are named after Zelda characters.
The laptop? Farore, Goddess of Courage. Courage - boldly going where no man has gone before. Laptops - going where no computer has gone before.
The old gaming rig? Din, Goddess of Power. Also, coincidentally, named after the din it makes - those fans are LOUD.
The old desktop I slapped BSD on and use as a messing-around test server? Nayru, Goddess of Wisdom. Because you have to be smarter than the average user to use OpenBSD.
The latest addition, the old Mac Pro? Ganon. Both for being pretty damn powerful, and for "seducing me to the Dark Side" by being a Mac.
The Wii is Navi - small and annoying, but you put up with it because the game's so good. The Droid is Midna - small and bitchy, but you put up with it because... why did we put up with her again?
No, I'm not saying it's OK to hurl stones at anybody. What I'm saying is that the response should be proportional: slap them in cuffs and haul their ass off to jail. Not launch tear gas grenades into the entire crowd, not charging in bashing everyone you can see. Shrug it off, go in, take care of the individual(s), then continue as you were.
And, while I can't say I know how many times the police do their job properly (especially re: protesters), I *can* say that they get it massively wrong far too often. I recall, after the police went in to shut down Occupy Oakland, an active-duty Marine commented on how their tactics and actions would have gotten him court-martialed and discharged had he done the same in Iraq. Quite a few of their actions violated Geneva - and I remind you, this was in a "premeditated" incident. It wasn't a case of some jumpy rookie messing up, it was a case of either massive incompetence or massive malice. Possibly both.
Have you *seen* the stuff they're packing? Kevlar body armor, riot shields, fall face masks... anything short of a rifle or a molotov cocktail isn't going to significantly hurt them.
If your job is cashier at McDonalds, you're expected to be able to handle some irate customer yelling at you without flipping out. If your job is programmer at Ubersoft, you're expected to be able to handle a moronic boss yelling at you without losing your shit. And if your job is police officer armed up and suited for a riot, you're expected to be able to handle people yelling at you and tossing rocks without bringing out the shotguns and chemical weapons.
The police don't need better weapons. They need better brains. Problem is, between shitty funding, politics, and a fundamentally broken sense of justice in America, most of the police don't actually know how to handle this sort of thing. They're just as scared as the protesters are, but hey, they've got a badge, and someone handed them a billy club and a can of OC, so they're going to use it the same way any undertrained, terrified person would.
I never used 3.x. Or rather, I used it, then switched to Chrome until 4.x came out (there's a nasty bug that makes the browser stop rendering while updating Live Bookmarks - and I had nearly 150 of those, meaning once an hour or so, it would freeze up for about five minutes).
I did, however, keep a copy of 2.x installed on my then-secondary backup desktop (later became my tertiary backup desktop), because it has the lowest RAM and CPU usage, and said redundant desktop is almost a decade old. A 900mHz Athlon and 384MB of RAM is not quite sufficient to run FF4+. I'm not worried about security (384mb of RAM might technically be enough for Windows, but I'm not stupid enough to find out), and
However, I have no complaints about the current releases of Firefox on reasonably-modern machines. Well, the scrolling in bookmark folders is kind of wonky on OS X, but that's about it.
My advice to you is therefore dependent on how good your machine is. If it is at all modern (64-bit capable is probably a good rule of thumb), and above the power range of an Atom, I would advise you to upgrade to current and suck it up, or possibly convert to Chrome. If, however, you are sticking with it because you're running it on ancient crap, just deal with it being "unsupported". Or, hey, it's open-source, just backport the security patches yourself.
People deciding to reinvent the wheel instead of using one of the standard libraries to handle shit. There's countless instances of it. Because some programmers are morons, and they seem to accumulate at the large corporations.
Also, I checked, and apparently Windows stores time, internally, as 100-nanosecond intervals since 1 January 1601 00:00:00. It already uses 64-bit values for that, so it will have a Y60K Problem (if my math was correct, at least).
Listen, there's CS teachers out there nowadays who don't even know what an i486SX is, let alone have used one. I actually had to explain to one of my teachers what "extended memory" meant.
Your standards for "old-school" must be pretty damn strict. Let me guess: you started on the PDP-11, and you had to dial in with an acoustic modem, uphill, in the snow, both ways, and you remember writing stuff for 2BSD.
First, let me list my old-school nerd qualifications, so you know I'm not just equating "old" with "unusable": * I remember when computers came in "beige", not "glossy black". * My first computer was a 486. I've used every version of Windows since 3.1. Yes, even ME. And Vista. * I remember 5.25" floppies on the Apple ][. I still have a box of 3.5" ones at my desk. * I can still imitate the sound of a dial-up modem connecting, from memory * I spend half my time on the command line. I regularly install Cygwin to make the Windows CLI both more usable and more familiar. * I compile my own kernels. On OpenBSD. * I've programmed in Assembly. And never want to again. * I keep an Athlon 900 system running as a personal "server" for messing around on. It's also my tertiary backup desktop, and I've needed a third level of redundancy. * My text editor of choice is EMACS (aka Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift). I know how to, and actually have had cause to, use ed. * I know who Captain Crunch is. The hacker, not the cereal mascot. * I can run through the first episode of Doom in under 10 minutes, without skipping any levels. I also remember Oregon Trail, Duck Hunt, and Galaga. * The computer I'm typing this at is nearly six years old.
So, now that I've proven my nerd cred, let's talk about CRTs. I actually just ditched my last one earlier this year - I'd kept one hooked up to the aforementioned Athlon system, in case I needed direct access to it (like if I'd borked the SSH config, or needed root login (which I disabled over SSH)).
Now, there are good CRT monitors. The eMac doesn't have one. I've used one, recently even. Tried putting Linux on it - failed (somehow couldn't find the CD drive to copy the install files from).
Compared to even the cheapest modern LCD, they're blurry as hell, have poor color reproduction, a poor viewing angle, and take up a lot of space (and power). And graphics is one area where you really want every pixel possible - a 1280x960 screen is cramped.
If they're still using the original mice, those are also those god-awful puck mice. That alone would make any reasonable user want a new computer.
The only good thing I can say about the eMac is that the BIOS-level CLI uses a Times Roman font. Nice touch. Very Apple. But that's the only nice thing I can say about using one of those machines.
Aw, and here I was expecting someone to have combined ultrasound "laser sound" tech with the inverse-signal noise-cancellation stuff Bose advertises the shit out of.
Hmm... that's actually a pretty cool idea. Someone should try it.
Not necessarily. It probably wouldn't have been a complete failure, but even software using epoch time internally can have problems.
Remember, you still have to put it into Regular Time to display to users. And take input in from users - if someone schedules a task for 2011-02-29, it should fail, but if it's scheduled for 2012-02-29 it should be allowed. And maybe there's business logic to figure out whether it's a weekend and such, which could easily be thrown off during the UNIX->Gregorian conversion...
Due for replacement? That's putting it mildly. Especially since: a) They're way unsupported, even by Open Source. First off, they're PowerPC chips - the highest version of Mac OS you can put on them is 10.5, which quite a lot of programs don't support - even some open-source ones. And I've tried installing Linux on an eMac - I never actually got it working. So their best option may be upgrading. b) The eMac was the "cheap, low-power" Apple computer. It used cheaper, lower-end parts, often already outdated (it used G4 chips until the end, while iMacs made the jump to G5 two years earlier). I can totally believe that they're unable to run Illustrator. Even current versions of Firefox might be a bit of a stretch, since I doubt the PPC builds are as heavily optimized as the x86 ones. Keep in mind, this is a machine with 256MB of RAM and, at best, a 1.4gHz, single-core processor, about on par with a Pentium II. Most of the students probably have more processing power in their phones. c) It's a freaking CRT screen. A 1280x960 CRT screen. I would absolutely hate trying to do graphics work on one of them.
First, understand that my "workload" is primarily gaming. That means relatively GPU-heavy loads, compared to what you might expect.
Second, understand that my primary gaming computer died recently, so I'm currently on a machine that is... not designed for gaming. Dual Xeons (dual-core each), 5GB of (fully-buffered, ECC) RAM, yes, very good for a server or such, and absolute overkill for any game I've found. I have no complaints on that end - even Minecraft, a game legendary amongst gamers for choking up most CPUs, is easily handled.
The Radeon X1900 powering the graphics? Not so much. 256MB of VRAM, 48 shader units. Ouch. (For comparison, the card I'm looking at for my replacement has 3GB of VRAM and 192 shader units (at about triple the clock speed)). It's even slower than you'd expect from a 5-year-old card, and it even lacks enough features that I can't even try to run certain games on it.
So yeah, my hard drive isn't under much stress. Gaming-wise, hard drive speed mainly matters for loading - and since I don't have the VRAM to load high-res textures or models, it's not a major bottleneck. 7200RPM is fine. Even as a boot disk, an SSD is unnecessary, since I'm running a proper, Unix-like OS that boots in under 30 seconds, instead of the five minutes Windows would take.
So for now, I'm ogling replacement computers. I've got my eye on one particular beast, and the only weakness I can find in it is the storage. I'll probably order it with a 64GB SSD to use as a boot/app drive, since the extra $100 isn't a big deal when ordering a $1,500 computer.
Before the floods, SSD prices were 10x higher than hard drives, per gigabyte. When the floods hit, hard drive prices nearly doubled, while SSD prices continued to slowly drop. That added up to SSDs being only 4-6x the per-gigabyte price of a hard drive, at least temporarily.
I've certainly noticed a lot more people buying and using SSDs. I'll probably do so myself at some point, once I have a computer that's primarily disc-latency-bound instead of CPU- or GPU-bound in most tasks.
(Deliberate) throttling is a result of not having enough resources to allow all your customers to use your product/service fully. It is sometimes necessary, in the case of truly explosive growth in usage.
But, adding more users to an already overused service is tantamount to false advertising. If you say "25mbps", people expect to be able to use that fully.
Therefore, I would allow companies to engage in throttling, but forbid them to add any new subscribers while the throttling is in place.
It's a logical solution. Companies will be able to use throttling when it is truly necessary, but will have a strong disincentive against overusing throttling. Either they'll upgrade their resources to the point that throttling is no longer necessary, or they'll lose (and not be able to replace) enough customers (through regular churn) that throttling is again unneeded.
All this is (going by the summary - article's still loading) is notification. "Hey, we noticed your machine seems to be infected with a virus and is part of a spam-spewing botnet. Here's some links to antimalware that'll clear that right up". "Hey, we noticed a lot of traffic from spyware sending every keystroke back to totally-a-legit-site,cn, you might want to scan for that". "Hey, you seem to be torrenting massive files 24/7, here's some MAFIAA propaganda telling you to stop copying those floppies".
Seriously? No Lisp (or lisp-like) hacker (in the classical, "neat hack" sense (as opposed to the Faux-News "hackers stealing all your identities!" (or even the related but distinct "haxxor"))) worth his salt would be caught dead using only two nested parens. Real LISP Hackers (see previous nested comments) use at least ((2 * n)^(log n)) nested parentheses.
I'm assuming he's somehow identified the IPs accessing the torrent. Not legal-quality data, but good enough for market research.
$10K software being downloaded by a broke college student isn't potentially costing a customer - he couldn't afford it, they're not losing a sale. That same software being downloaded by an employee at some big faceless multinational corporation is different: BFMC inc. could easily afford it, and is used to dealing with software licenses like that. That one isn't a definite sale (they could choose someone else's $9.5K software), but it is a possible sale.
I was using something called "hyperbole", a rhetorical device whereby a statement is exaggerated for stronger emotional response and greater emphasis, or sometimes for comedic effect. In this case, I took a relatively common but distasteful browser that some have to support, and exaggerated that to one even more out-of-date and useless.
Slashdot Mirror
It also makes sense to put the best one there, since it would be best equipped to fight back.
Or, if you have the resources, put the weakest one closest, with as many other better ones nearby as possible, so you can take the first hit (and thus be "justified", whatever that means) and then immediately fight back hard.
And indeed, that's likely the case. CVN-70 Carl Vinson and CVN-72 Abraham Lincoln are currently in the Gulf as well. And CVN-68 Nimitz is under way to relieve Lincoln - if the timing is right, both will be in the Gulf when the shit hits the fan, meaning four aircraft carriers (nearly 360 aircraft) plus the accompanying ships (four cruisers, eight destroyers, four attack submarines and various supply ships).
However, the USS Constitution hasn't really been a "war"ship since before the Civil War. It's mainly been a training or museum ship. The last time it was used as an active-duty combat vessel (as far as I can tell) was 1855, which would give it a 58-year combat life.
Which still beats the Enterprise's 51-year service, I guess. Point conceded.
Or C/SDL (for 2D stuff, OpenGL is often overkill).
Actually, given his C# background, XNA may make more sense. It's essentially C#.NET with extra gaming-oriented libraries and optimization. Runs natively on Windows XP+, the Xbox360, and one of the Windows Phone types, and there's probably a Mono-based project to make it run on non-MS systems.
Like any Microsoft environment, it's heavily documented and aimed at novices and amateurs. I've never used it much myself (I prefer C++/SDL or C++/OpenGL, myself), but I think it sounds like what the OP needs.
If developers can't find a way to improve games beyond the next generation, it's not because we've reached some peak of gaming possibilities, it's just because those particular developers have reached the peak of their imaginations.
Somewhere right now their is a young guy sitting somewhere who has an idea in the back of his head which will become the next great innovation in gaming. It will require a lot more computing power than the current generation of PC's, much less consoles. If he were to pitch it at EA, he would be laughed at. If he tried to explain it at a Game Developers Conference, he would be greeted by blank stares and derision. He's probably already used to hearing responses like "That can't be done", "Who would want THAT?", "That could never be done on a console", etc. But one day people will look back and say "Wow, how could they *not* have seen that that was the future?" and "How could they have been so arrogant as to think that gaming had peaked with the millionth variation of the FPS?".
I actually have an idea like this. I'll go ahead and practice my elevator pitch here:
Zombies have been a staple of FPS games since the beginning. You can't go much further back than Doom. But what makes a zombie scary?
It's not that they're undead. It's not that they're brainless, or that they can't always be killed. It's the numbers. A gamer can go one-on-one with anything. Look at how many JRPGs end with a boss fight against god, for crying out loud.
No game captures the sheer numbers of zombies. Killing Floor, Left 4 Dead, you'll see dozens on-screen, if that much.
I want millions. I want the entire population of New York City, all eight million people, turned into shambling, flesh-eating monsters. And I want the entire First Infantry Division there to fight them off. Real-time, with full AI. Minimum of thousands of people and un-people on screen at all times.
Now, we'll need a lot of CPU power for that. We'll have to make some sacrifices in the graphics department, and we'll need some *really* good programmers to optimize the hell out of it. Even then, we're beyond current tech, unless we cut it down to Doom-level graphics.
So start now. Give me a team, a small team, maybe two dozen or so people. Let us keep working at it until the technology catches up to us. 30 people working on a game for a decade costs the same as hiring 300 people to cram a game out in a year, and we'll give you better results.
I do this. Not with servers - I don't have any. But my home machines are named after Zelda characters.
The laptop? Farore, Goddess of Courage. Courage - boldly going where no man has gone before. Laptops - going where no computer has gone before.
The old gaming rig? Din, Goddess of Power. Also, coincidentally, named after the din it makes - those fans are LOUD.
The old desktop I slapped BSD on and use as a messing-around test server? Nayru, Goddess of Wisdom. Because you have to be smarter than the average user to use OpenBSD.
The latest addition, the old Mac Pro? Ganon. Both for being pretty damn powerful, and for "seducing me to the Dark Side" by being a Mac.
The Wii is Navi - small and annoying, but you put up with it because the game's so good. The Droid is Midna - small and bitchy, but you put up with it because... why did we put up with her again?
No, I'm not saying it's OK to hurl stones at anybody. What I'm saying is that the response should be proportional: slap them in cuffs and haul their ass off to jail. Not launch tear gas grenades into the entire crowd, not charging in bashing everyone you can see. Shrug it off, go in, take care of the individual(s), then continue as you were.
And, while I can't say I know how many times the police do their job properly (especially re: protesters), I *can* say that they get it massively wrong far too often. I recall, after the police went in to shut down Occupy Oakland, an active-duty Marine commented on how their tactics and actions would have gotten him court-martialed and discharged had he done the same in Iraq. Quite a few of their actions violated Geneva - and I remind you, this was in a "premeditated" incident. It wasn't a case of some jumpy rookie messing up, it was a case of either massive incompetence or massive malice. Possibly both.
Have you *seen* the stuff they're packing? Kevlar body armor, riot shields, fall face masks... anything short of a rifle or a molotov cocktail isn't going to significantly hurt them.
If your job is cashier at McDonalds, you're expected to be able to handle some irate customer yelling at you without flipping out. If your job is programmer at Ubersoft, you're expected to be able to handle a moronic boss yelling at you without losing your shit. And if your job is police officer armed up and suited for a riot, you're expected to be able to handle people yelling at you and tossing rocks without bringing out the shotguns and chemical weapons.
The police don't need better weapons. They need better brains. Problem is, between shitty funding, politics, and a fundamentally broken sense of justice in America, most of the police don't actually know how to handle this sort of thing. They're just as scared as the protesters are, but hey, they've got a badge, and someone handed them a billy club and a can of OC, so they're going to use it the same way any undertrained, terrified person would.
I never used 3.x. Or rather, I used it, then switched to Chrome until 4.x came out (there's a nasty bug that makes the browser stop rendering while updating Live Bookmarks - and I had nearly 150 of those, meaning once an hour or so, it would freeze up for about five minutes).
I did, however, keep a copy of 2.x installed on my then-secondary backup desktop (later became my tertiary backup desktop), because it has the lowest RAM and CPU usage, and said redundant desktop is almost a decade old. A 900mHz Athlon and 384MB of RAM is not quite sufficient to run FF4+. I'm not worried about security (384mb of RAM might technically be enough for Windows, but I'm not stupid enough to find out), and
However, I have no complaints about the current releases of Firefox on reasonably-modern machines. Well, the scrolling in bookmark folders is kind of wonky on OS X, but that's about it.
My advice to you is therefore dependent on how good your machine is. If it is at all modern (64-bit capable is probably a good rule of thumb), and above the power range of an Atom, I would advise you to upgrade to current and suck it up, or possibly convert to Chrome. If, however, you are sticking with it because you're running it on ancient crap, just deal with it being "unsupported". Or, hey, it's open-source, just backport the security patches yourself.
People deciding to reinvent the wheel instead of using one of the standard libraries to handle shit. There's countless instances of it. Because some programmers are morons, and they seem to accumulate at the large corporations.
Also, I checked, and apparently Windows stores time, internally, as 100-nanosecond intervals since 1 January 1601 00:00:00. It already uses 64-bit values for that, so it will have a Y60K Problem (if my math was correct, at least).
Wait, you had an actual lawyer look at it?
That's more than Congress did.
Listen, there's CS teachers out there nowadays who don't even know what an i486SX is, let alone have used one. I actually had to explain to one of my teachers what "extended memory" meant.
Your standards for "old-school" must be pretty damn strict. Let me guess: you started on the PDP-11, and you had to dial in with an acoustic modem, uphill, in the snow, both ways, and you remember writing stuff for 2BSD.
First, let me list my old-school nerd qualifications, so you know I'm not just equating "old" with "unusable":
* I remember when computers came in "beige", not "glossy black".
* My first computer was a 486. I've used every version of Windows since 3.1. Yes, even ME. And Vista.
* I remember 5.25" floppies on the Apple ][. I still have a box of 3.5" ones at my desk.
* I can still imitate the sound of a dial-up modem connecting, from memory
* I spend half my time on the command line. I regularly install Cygwin to make the Windows CLI both more usable and more familiar.
* I compile my own kernels. On OpenBSD.
* I've programmed in Assembly. And never want to again.
* I keep an Athlon 900 system running as a personal "server" for messing around on. It's also my tertiary backup desktop, and I've needed a third level of redundancy.
* My text editor of choice is EMACS (aka Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift). I know how to, and actually have had cause to, use ed.
* I know who Captain Crunch is. The hacker, not the cereal mascot.
* I can run through the first episode of Doom in under 10 minutes, without skipping any levels. I also remember Oregon Trail, Duck Hunt, and Galaga.
* The computer I'm typing this at is nearly six years old.
So, now that I've proven my nerd cred, let's talk about CRTs. I actually just ditched my last one earlier this year - I'd kept one hooked up to the aforementioned Athlon system, in case I needed direct access to it (like if I'd borked the SSH config, or needed root login (which I disabled over SSH)).
Now, there are good CRT monitors. The eMac doesn't have one. I've used one, recently even. Tried putting Linux on it - failed (somehow couldn't find the CD drive to copy the install files from).
Compared to even the cheapest modern LCD, they're blurry as hell, have poor color reproduction, a poor viewing angle, and take up a lot of space (and power). And graphics is one area where you really want every pixel possible - a 1280x960 screen is cramped.
If they're still using the original mice, those are also those god-awful puck mice. That alone would make any reasonable user want a new computer.
The only good thing I can say about the eMac is that the BIOS-level CLI uses a Times Roman font. Nice touch. Very Apple. But that's the only nice thing I can say about using one of those machines.
Aw, and here I was expecting someone to have combined ultrasound "laser sound" tech with the inverse-signal noise-cancellation stuff Bose advertises the shit out of.
Hmm... that's actually a pretty cool idea. Someone should try it.
My bad - meant to type III. Keys seem to be sticking a bit today...
Not necessarily. It probably wouldn't have been a complete failure, but even software using epoch time internally can have problems.
Remember, you still have to put it into Regular Time to display to users. And take input in from users - if someone schedules a task for 2011-02-29, it should fail, but if it's scheduled for 2012-02-29 it should be allowed. And maybe there's business logic to figure out whether it's a weekend and such, which could easily be thrown off during the UNIX->Gregorian conversion...
Due for replacement? That's putting it mildly. Especially since:
a) They're way unsupported, even by Open Source. First off, they're PowerPC chips - the highest version of Mac OS you can put on them is 10.5, which quite a lot of programs don't support - even some open-source ones. And I've tried installing Linux on an eMac - I never actually got it working. So their best option may be upgrading.
b) The eMac was the "cheap, low-power" Apple computer. It used cheaper, lower-end parts, often already outdated (it used G4 chips until the end, while iMacs made the jump to G5 two years earlier). I can totally believe that they're unable to run Illustrator. Even current versions of Firefox might be a bit of a stretch, since I doubt the PPC builds are as heavily optimized as the x86 ones. Keep in mind, this is a machine with 256MB of RAM and, at best, a 1.4gHz, single-core processor, about on par with a Pentium II. Most of the students probably have more processing power in their phones.
c) It's a freaking CRT screen. A 1280x960 CRT screen. I would absolutely hate trying to do graphics work on one of them.
Simpler explanation: Santorum is completely crazy, and this is just more evidence of his madness.
First, understand that my "workload" is primarily gaming. That means relatively GPU-heavy loads, compared to what you might expect.
Second, understand that my primary gaming computer died recently, so I'm currently on a machine that is... not designed for gaming. Dual Xeons (dual-core each), 5GB of (fully-buffered, ECC) RAM, yes, very good for a server or such, and absolute overkill for any game I've found. I have no complaints on that end - even Minecraft, a game legendary amongst gamers for choking up most CPUs, is easily handled.
The Radeon X1900 powering the graphics? Not so much. 256MB of VRAM, 48 shader units. Ouch. (For comparison, the card I'm looking at for my replacement has 3GB of VRAM and 192 shader units (at about triple the clock speed)). It's even slower than you'd expect from a 5-year-old card, and it even lacks enough features that I can't even try to run certain games on it.
So yeah, my hard drive isn't under much stress. Gaming-wise, hard drive speed mainly matters for loading - and since I don't have the VRAM to load high-res textures or models, it's not a major bottleneck. 7200RPM is fine. Even as a boot disk, an SSD is unnecessary, since I'm running a proper, Unix-like OS that boots in under 30 seconds, instead of the five minutes Windows would take.
So for now, I'm ogling replacement computers. I've got my eye on one particular beast, and the only weakness I can find in it is the storage. I'll probably order it with a 64GB SSD to use as a boot/app drive, since the extra $100 isn't a big deal when ordering a $1,500 computer.
I think it had more of an impact on SSD adoption.
Before the floods, SSD prices were 10x higher than hard drives, per gigabyte. When the floods hit, hard drive prices nearly doubled, while SSD prices continued to slowly drop. That added up to SSDs being only 4-6x the per-gigabyte price of a hard drive, at least temporarily.
I've certainly noticed a lot more people buying and using SSDs. I'll probably do so myself at some point, once I have a computer that's primarily disc-latency-bound instead of CPU- or GPU-bound in most tasks.
Here's my modest proposal:
(Deliberate) throttling is a result of not having enough resources to allow all your customers to use your product/service fully. It is sometimes necessary, in the case of truly explosive growth in usage.
But, adding more users to an already overused service is tantamount to false advertising. If you say "25mbps", people expect to be able to use that fully.
Therefore, I would allow companies to engage in throttling, but forbid them to add any new subscribers while the throttling is in place.
It's a logical solution. Companies will be able to use throttling when it is truly necessary, but will have a strong disincentive against overusing throttling. Either they'll upgrade their resources to the point that throttling is no longer necessary, or they'll lose (and not be able to replace) enough customers (through regular churn) that throttling is again unneeded.
No, North and South Dakota finally settled their differences and re-united.
Even if so, it's not problematic.
All this is (going by the summary - article's still loading) is notification. "Hey, we noticed your machine seems to be infected with a virus and is part of a spam-spewing botnet. Here's some links to antimalware that'll clear that right up". "Hey, we noticed a lot of traffic from spyware sending every keystroke back to totally-a-legit-site,cn, you might want to scan for that". "Hey, you seem to be torrenting massive files 24/7, here's some MAFIAA propaganda telling you to stop copying those floppies".
Seriously? No Lisp (or lisp-like) hacker (in the classical, "neat hack" sense (as opposed to the Faux-News "hackers stealing all your identities!" (or even the related but distinct "haxxor"))) worth his salt would be caught dead using only two nested parens. Real LISP Hackers (see previous nested comments) use at least ((2 * n)^(log n)) nested parentheses.
I'm assuming he's somehow identified the IPs accessing the torrent. Not legal-quality data, but good enough for market research.
$10K software being downloaded by a broke college student isn't potentially costing a customer - he couldn't afford it, they're not losing a sale. That same software being downloaded by an employee at some big faceless multinational corporation is different: BFMC inc. could easily afford it, and is used to dealing with software licenses like that. That one isn't a definite sale (they could choose someone else's $9.5K software), but it is a possible sale.
I was using something called "hyperbole", a rhetorical device whereby a statement is exaggerated for stronger emotional response and greater emphasis, or sometimes for comedic effect. In this case, I took a relatively common but distasteful browser that some have to support, and exaggerated that to one even more out-of-date and useless.