I would never, *ever* buy cheap crap off pricewatch for a setting like this. These kind of "deals" tend to come back and bite you in the ass, especially because most hardware vendors tend to go cheapo on the ram. Cheap ram is the most frequent cause of unexplained, random crashes. I learned that lesson LONG ago. Go look at the lowest price for what you want on pricewatch, and expect to pay twice that if you want to be happy with it.
Lots of problems is exactly what this guy *doesn't* want. Cheap hardware is definately not the way to go in a business setting. Yes, you can get fast hardware cheap. But I don't care how fast your machine is, if it crashes 5 times a day because of cheap hardware, you would have been better off spending twice as much for slower, more stable hardware. I've actually stopped buying off pricewatch, I've gotten burned on bad cheap goods too many times. You get exactly what you pay for.
You're either crazy or just a masochist. Yes, it sounds cool and very geeky, but it's also rather impractical. The money your company would save by doing this in house would be lost on having to maintain them and pay you to set them all up (thus taking you away from your other duties.)
This would also take an insane amount of time. Sixty machines is a lot of boxen; optimistically it would take you an hour per machine to swap all the hardware around and reformat the drives and install Windows. In other words, you'd be down at least a week.
Order sixty new machines from an OEM and you're down 2 days tops. Plus you get the guarantee that the machines work (out of 60 boxes, you're bound to get some bad hardware) and you get a warranty from a reputable company, not to mention saving yourself a MAJOR headache.
If something goes wrong with one of the machines, you just call the vendor and straighten it out. If you roll you own, you have to spend time doing diagnostics, then tracking down the receipts, RMA from parts warehouses, limbo time for replacement parts.. All this time your company is paying you to not do the job they hired you for.
Sure, they can hire on another guy to help you, but then there goes all that money you saved having to pay his salary. So in the end, your company didn't really save any money, they just have 60 new machines with no comprehensive warranty, poor tech support, and probably a very frazzled and stressed admin. The geek factor sounds fun, but in reality, it would be more practical to order from a vendor.
C++ was once a poor design. Like all designs, it evolved into at least a workable language. The thing about C++ is that there are a LOT of APIs written in C++ and designed to use C++. C++ is also one of the most commonly used languages, while Perl, Python, etc are more niche languages. Yes, they're used in widespread commercial environments, but not to the extent of C++.
The problem with the languages you listed is that for the most part, they're scripting languages used via an interpreter. If you need fast execution speed, they're really not the best option. Granted, g++ isn't that great either, but let's not forget the entire world doesn't run unix. There are very good C++ compilers available that optimize much better than gcc.
Also, as I said above, they're niche languages. If you're writing a large project, you want to use a language that a lot of people feel comfortable with. C++ is pretty much the only language most universities use (some still use C, while some are moving to Java) so pretty much anyone with a CS degree will be fairly comfortable with the language.
C++ is a very robust and powerful language. The "it's too complex" argument is a poor one, anyone taking on a large project in C++ probably knows what they're doing, and if they don't, well, it'll be a good learning experience. C is very good at memory management in the fact that it gives the user complete control over the entire process. C++ extends on this (not to mention new and delete are much more powerful than malloc() and free(), as they can be overloaded;) being just as low-level as C while allowing the abstraction of an OOP model.
I do agree that C++ probably isn't the BEST way to do what it does, but eventually the world has to settle on something that's good enough and gets the job done. C++ is not nearly as portable as C, but well-written C++ can be just as fast (or even faster) than C. Knowing a language well is the key to writing good code in ANY language, not just C++. I think it's folly to dismiss such a legitimate language as C++ just because it has a few shortcomings. You probably won't get many jobs with that attitude.
And hey, at least it's not C#. : ) </ObligatoryMSBashing>
The GameBoy Advance and GameBoy Color both used reflective LCDs, and both with poor results. Yes, they're cheaper than normal LCDs because you don't need a backlight, but they're also horribly dark and the contrast is awful. The cries of bloody murder over the GBA screen should be evidence of this. On top of that, the things are fragile as hell, the only reason they work well in the GBA is because they're buried far below the casing. Reflective LCDs are a good idea, but they often need their own external light source in order to be usable (which defeats the purpose.) Hopefully nobody in their right mind would use one in an eBook thing.
A bit OT, but whatever. People seem to think that "capitalism" is all good and we should be as capitalist as possible. If one were to have a pure capitalist system, it would very much be anarchy. Many people have the idea that "socialism = bad; capitalism = good" where the best choice is actually a mix of the two.
Oh, I agree that writing code is still a significant part of CS, but it's not the most important part. Hell, the only real difference between a CS major and a math major is the notation (logical syntax vs code syntax.)
What I took from this article was that the student merely asked a question about the assignment, not copied code. If he copied code, then yes, I'll agree, that's cheating, but so long as your brain has to do the translation from concept to code, I consider that original work.
Computer Science is not about being a codemonkey. Computer science is not even about writing code. This is why many intro classes are taught in languages which really aren't used outside of academia (Scheme, Haskell, Pascal, etc) because they're supposed to introduce the theories involved in CS, not subject students to endless mountains of code. Sometimes it's hard to understand the lectures, the books are often of no help, so sometimes it helps to consult a friend who may have more background knowledge in the area to gain a better understanding of the concepts being taught or to clear up a question about syntax.
It's wrong to expect every student to enter college on the same level, some may have gone to a better high school than others, or whatever. I see no problem in talking with another student to gain a better understanding of the concept so long as the student does his/her own work. Writing code is grunt work anyway, any idiot can pick up a book on C++ and learn it, you go to college to learn how to apply the code. You can just as easily test the understanding of an algorithm on a test as you can with a program (i.e. the condition of a given list after n shellsort passes, etc.) That's more important than these all-holy "coding abilities."
Heh, I thought the ending was very powerful. Honestly, the only characters you gave a shit about were Rei, Shinji and Asuka, and well.. if you've seen EoE, you know the relationship between them in the end. Maybe Anno didn't intend it, but his "revenge" piece ended up being one of the most powerful pieces of animation I've ever seen.
I used to review games for a rather large online RPG site. None of this stuff ever happened, and this was when people thought the net meant money. We were lucky to get review copies of the games, let alone to fly in an F-16. We had to buy our own E3 press passes, the games, everything. Most of the site's budget went to bandwidth, then to games. Nobody got paid, we reviewed the games because we enjoyed playing them.
After playing so many games, you start noticing what to look for, and it bugs you not to tell other people. Heck, I got the shit flamed out of me for giving Zelda 64 an 8.5 (which I still think it deserved.) I want to know where this "playola" was, and why didn't I get any? I have a feeling that this may be an isolated incident, because I know a lot of game reviewers working for prominent newspapers/websites, and none of them even hear stories of this stuff. Sure, there are some perks, usually a trip to E3 or Comdex or some other large expo, but nothing on the magnitude this guy is claiming.
If there are people out there who get this kind of treatment, it's sad. Most gamers I know don't even read reviews, game purchases are decided on word-of-mouth. Jedi Knight 2 is a perfect example. I didn't buy it because of the reviews, I bought it because everyone I knew was really excited about it and it looked cool to me. After I bought it I discovered it got rave reviews, but that was an afterthought. Gamers have an eye for spotting a good game, we don't need a reviewer to tell us what's good and what's not. Besides, mainstream media coverage of games is often horrible. I'll take word-of-mouth anyday.
Yes, they did suck. But there's a reason for that. Gainax actually ran out of money, so when they got around to the last two episodes, they had to do SOMETHING. Basically they took a bunch of concept sketches and put them to some strange voiceover so they could fulfill a 26 episode contract. The next two movies were their attempt to raise money for End of Evangelion, the real episodes 25 and 26. It turns out they ended up making a killing off the series and especially EoE, so their financial woes were over. I'll agree that they suck, but I also know that they weren't really what Gainax wanted to do with the series, but what they were forced to do. I still want the boxed set though.:)
Well, FOTR also had a lot more going on than they could possibly show on screen. Keep in mind that it's based on a very well-known and loved book, and Peter Jackson was very faithful to the book. They probably filmed a lot more than ended up in the final movie, just because there was so much material to work with. They just had to choose what condensed down to a reasonably long movie while still remaining faithful to the original story and vision of the movie.
LOTR will suffer a lot of time-based editing, where the scenes are great and would add a lot to the movie, except they just don't have the screen time to use. I heard (don't quote me on this, I may be remembering incorrectly) that only about half of the scenes they shot for the LOTR movies will actually make it to the screen. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a 15 hour long LOTR DVD box set 3 years from now. The studio knows these movies deserve that kind of treatment (not to mention they'd be ecstatic to sell it to us again;) so I don't think it'd be too much of a stretch (especially with so much quality footage ending up on the cutting room floor in the interest of time.) I know I'll buy it, along with the majority of the rest of you. : )
Apple's LCD prices are insane. They're very cool, but for the price of one of the 23" cinema displays, I can get 2 high-end 21" CRTs (and video cards to drive them.) $3500 is a lot of dough to waste on a computer monitor, especially when there are alternatives that are just as good (high end CRT displays will match any LCD image quality and eye-strain wise, without the drawbacks of LCDs.)
My father runs an ad agency on Macs. When they bought some new G4s, they went out and bought some Sony professional CRTs, not the Apple LCD displays. Why? Price really wasn't an issue; they'll make far more money off these machines than they could ever spend on them, but it was simply that the high-end CRTs are exactly what they need. No need to be flashy and try to impress people with some funky flat LCD, just get some professional monitors that work well.
Also, LCDs develop burn-in rather quickly (24 hours or less, iirc) and expensive CRTs(though still cheaper than LCDs) won't burn in for months. They have an automated network backup system that powers down the computers every night, so they leave them running every night from whenever they leave to go home till about 9pm. I'm not saying LCDs are bad, I just wouldn't buy one for a workhorse computer or a gaming machine. Too expensive, and I'd get better results with a CRT.
At 85hz, my CRT isn't too bad on the eyes. My laptop strains my eyes much more, though that could just be because of the smaller overall size of the screen.
Often this is the case with new technology. Blue LEDs and blue lasers were like this for a while, but now both are to the point where their lifetime is viable. Same with OLEDs. They're close, but not quite there yet. They're already seeing use in commercial applications (some cell phones have OLED displays) but they're often in places where the short lifetime isn't so much of a problem (i.e. a cell phone display is going to be off when the phone is not in use.) They're not there yet, but that doesn't mean they won't be in 2 years.
Heh, same thing in a sub. If your ballast tanks go, you're fucked. Also, at 1000 feet, the pressure is high enough to crush a human, bones and all. Yes, we have divers that go that deep, but they wear special pressure suits so that they don't implode. Though I'd imagine our seafaring technology has improved to the point where we can safely have a sub underwater (1000 feet isn't even that deep.)
And for $76 million, it BETTER have a support contract.;)
No, the firmware they're referring to is that of the drive. CD and DVD drives have firmware as well, and these are usually user-flashable. In the case of DVD drives, it usually contains what region the drive is (thus you can often make a drive all-region if you have the correct firmware patch.) So if it fucks up your drive, you just re-flash it. Granted, this is a pain in the ass, but it's not catastrophic.
Open Firmware in fact is rather hard to overwrite. You really have to try (read: know what you're doing) to do it. I've fucked around with OF a good deal, enough do know you're not going to destroy it beyond repair without knowing full well that you could. It's like a PC BIOS, the only way to wreck it is to flash it with the wrong flashfile (and the flashers usually have checks to make sure you don't do this.) Check what you're talking about before you get all hysterical about this. It's not very nice, but it's no Chernobyl.
This operates under the assumption that EULAs mean anything. AFAIK, clickthrough EULAs are not considered an enforcible legal contract (I can accidentally hit "Enter" and not read it. It's hard to "accidentally" sign a contract, a signature means purposeful consent.) Essentially, they mean absolutely nothing.
As an aside, what this will ultimately accomplish is to force colleges and universities to altogether block on-campus access to these clients. The "right to use unused bandwidth" is the problem here. My school tolerates Kazaa by enforcing weekly download caps, so if you run kazaa for a day or two with downloads enabled, you get booted to another subnet which is about as fast as dialup. Anything like this would lead them to disable Kazaa altogether, probably by using some sort of selective port allow firewall. Students will bitch and moan, and it'll be BDE's fault (and BDE will fail, as most of Kazaa's users are college students.) So even if this actually happens, it won't last for long.
Then for what reason does the hammer head still feel more heavily attracted to the ground when held in your hand? Hold the hammer loosely, and it still falls, head first. This has less to do with the force of gravity than the CENTER of gravity. It's located in the head, and is pulling the object down from the head. The cat is pulled from the center of its mass, which is located lower in its body. High school and college intro physics classes are often oversimplified, they use symmetrical boxes or spheres rather than objects with strange centers of gravity. This is also the same reason an SUV is more likely to tip over than a sports car. Gravity pulls on the center of the object, so when it's rotated, it has to be turned less to fall over on its side.
Actually I believe it has more to do with the weight distribution of a cat. When cats get fat, most of it goes to their underbelly, so when they fall, that side falls first because it weighs more, changing their center of gravity. The same reason if you drop a hammer from any decent height, the head will always hit first. The percieved time thing would just lower their reaction time, not actually enable them to right themselves and stop it there. Of course, I could just be talking out my ass.
Obviously you've never dealt with a public school system. Refuse using the machines? You get written up and sent to the principal for disobeying the teacher. Tell the board anything? They don't listen to teachers or parents, let alone students. Teachers are often just as powerless as the students in administration matters. Unfortunately, public schools often operate on the assumption that the people on top are ALWAYS right.
The school board of any decently large school district is generally disinterested in actually educating students or making things work well, most school board members are just there as a springboard for higher political office. They generally don't give a fuck about the students or education, so they lower test standards and claim that test scores have improved. If it makes them look good to "protect our children from evil" by blocking out these sites, they'll do it. School systems don't operate like normal organizations; the students' opinion carries next to no weight at all, as "it is up to us adults who know better to protect the students from what they don't know." Total BS, but that's the way public school works.
Heh, the Drafthouse is like $5 (or free, if you go at midnight) and the food is hardly "fancy" (unless you consider burgers and wings "fancy.") Prices are along the line of a cheap sit-down restaurant (Chili's, TGI Fridays, etc,) i.e. just a bit more than fast-food, but not as much as a fancy restaurant. Hardly a fancy dinner theater.;)
Actually (I didn't read the damn article before posting, bad karma whore) this is at the Drafthouse North. I've never been to the one up north so I can't comment on that one, but it would be cool if they allow you to order food over the network, as opposed to having to wait for a waiter to come collect your order. Anyway, most of the stuff still applies, but you get the drift. They're also showing Revolution OS at the North location right now, so check that out if you live in Austin.
Personally, having watched/eaten at the Drafthouse many times, you rarely go just to watch the movie. It's just not that kind of place. The Drafthouse is famous for Something Weird Wednesdays where admittance is free, they show a really awful B-movie flick, everyone (mostly college students) gets fantastically drunk, and all is good. Also, being a combination restaurant/theater, there are waiters running down the aisles throughout the movie. It's a pain in the ass to park in downtown Austin, not to mention the seats blow, the screen sucks, sound is marginally better, etc. The food is good, the beer is cold, but there are much better movie theaters in Austin if all you want to do is watch a movie. You go to the Drafthouse if you want to watch an older movie while eating/getting plastered.
That said, the Drafthouse also rents out to corporations for board meetings, etc, anything someone would need a medium-sized place to go during the day. I suspect that's the main reason for the 802.11. It wouldn't surprise me if they turn off the 802.11 at night, when they do public movie showings. There are a lot of places in Austin with 802.11 (coffee houses, the entire University of Texas, etc) so this isn't that revolutionary.
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I would never, *ever* buy cheap crap off pricewatch for a setting like this. These kind of "deals" tend to come back and bite you in the ass, especially because most hardware vendors tend to go cheapo on the ram. Cheap ram is the most frequent cause of unexplained, random crashes. I learned that lesson LONG ago. Go look at the lowest price for what you want on pricewatch, and expect to pay twice that if you want to be happy with it.
Lots of problems is exactly what this guy *doesn't* want. Cheap hardware is definately not the way to go in a business setting. Yes, you can get fast hardware cheap. But I don't care how fast your machine is, if it crashes 5 times a day because of cheap hardware, you would have been better off spending twice as much for slower, more stable hardware. I've actually stopped buying off pricewatch, I've gotten burned on bad cheap goods too many times. You get exactly what you pay for.
You're either crazy or just a masochist. Yes, it sounds cool and very geeky, but it's also rather impractical. The money your company would save by doing this in house would be lost on having to maintain them and pay you to set them all up (thus taking you away from your other duties.)
This would also take an insane amount of time. Sixty machines is a lot of boxen; optimistically it would take you an hour per machine to swap all the hardware around and reformat the drives and install Windows. In other words, you'd be down at least a week.
Order sixty new machines from an OEM and you're down 2 days tops. Plus you get the guarantee that the machines work (out of 60 boxes, you're bound to get some bad hardware) and you get a warranty from a reputable company, not to mention saving yourself a MAJOR headache.
If something goes wrong with one of the machines, you just call the vendor and straighten it out. If you roll you own, you have to spend time doing diagnostics, then tracking down the receipts, RMA from parts warehouses, limbo time for replacement parts.. All this time your company is paying you to not do the job they hired you for.
Sure, they can hire on another guy to help you, but then there goes all that money you saved having to pay his salary. So in the end, your company didn't really save any money, they just have 60 new machines with no comprehensive warranty, poor tech support, and probably a very frazzled and stressed admin. The geek factor sounds fun, but in reality, it would be more practical to order from a vendor.
C++ was once a poor design. Like all designs, it evolved into at least a workable language. The thing about C++ is that there are a LOT of APIs written in C++ and designed to use C++. C++ is also one of the most commonly used languages, while Perl, Python, etc are more niche languages. Yes, they're used in widespread commercial environments, but not to the extent of C++.
The problem with the languages you listed is that for the most part, they're scripting languages used via an interpreter. If you need fast execution speed, they're really not the best option. Granted, g++ isn't that great either, but let's not forget the entire world doesn't run unix. There are very good C++ compilers available that optimize much better than gcc.
Also, as I said above, they're niche languages. If you're writing a large project, you want to use a language that a lot of people feel comfortable with. C++ is pretty much the only language most universities use (some still use C, while some are moving to Java) so pretty much anyone with a CS degree will be fairly comfortable with the language.
C++ is a very robust and powerful language. The "it's too complex" argument is a poor one, anyone taking on a large project in C++ probably knows what they're doing, and if they don't, well, it'll be a good learning experience. C is very good at memory management in the fact that it gives the user complete control over the entire process. C++ extends on this (not to mention new and delete are much more powerful than malloc() and free(), as they can be overloaded;) being just as low-level as C while allowing the abstraction of an OOP model.
I do agree that C++ probably isn't the BEST way to do what it does, but eventually the world has to settle on something that's good enough and gets the job done. C++ is not nearly as portable as C, but well-written C++ can be just as fast (or even faster) than C. Knowing a language well is the key to writing good code in ANY language, not just C++. I think it's folly to dismiss such a legitimate language as C++ just because it has a few shortcomings. You probably won't get many jobs with that attitude.
And hey, at least it's not C#. : ) </ObligatoryMSBashing>
CPPReference.com is also a very nice ref site.
The GameBoy Advance and GameBoy Color both used reflective LCDs, and both with poor results. Yes, they're cheaper than normal LCDs because you don't need a backlight, but they're also horribly dark and the contrast is awful. The cries of bloody murder over the GBA screen should be evidence of this. On top of that, the things are fragile as hell, the only reason they work well in the GBA is because they're buried far below the casing. Reflective LCDs are a good idea, but they often need their own external light source in order to be usable (which defeats the purpose.) Hopefully nobody in their right mind would use one in an eBook thing.
A bit OT, but whatever. People seem to think that "capitalism" is all good and we should be as capitalist as possible. If one were to have a pure capitalist system, it would very much be anarchy. Many people have the idea that "socialism = bad; capitalism = good" where the best choice is actually a mix of the two.
Oh, I agree that writing code is still a significant part of CS, but it's not the most important part. Hell, the only real difference between a CS major and a math major is the notation (logical syntax vs code syntax.)
What I took from this article was that the student merely asked a question about the assignment, not copied code. If he copied code, then yes, I'll agree, that's cheating, but so long as your brain has to do the translation from concept to code, I consider that original work.
Computer Science is not about being a codemonkey. Computer science is not even about writing code. This is why many intro classes are taught in languages which really aren't used outside of academia (Scheme, Haskell, Pascal, etc) because they're supposed to introduce the theories involved in CS, not subject students to endless mountains of code. Sometimes it's hard to understand the lectures, the books are often of no help, so sometimes it helps to consult a friend who may have more background knowledge in the area to gain a better understanding of the concepts being taught or to clear up a question about syntax.
It's wrong to expect every student to enter college on the same level, some may have gone to a better high school than others, or whatever. I see no problem in talking with another student to gain a better understanding of the concept so long as the student does his/her own work. Writing code is grunt work anyway, any idiot can pick up a book on C++ and learn it, you go to college to learn how to apply the code. You can just as easily test the understanding of an algorithm on a test as you can with a program (i.e. the condition of a given list after n shellsort passes, etc.) That's more important than these all-holy "coding abilities."
Heh, I thought the ending was very powerful. Honestly, the only characters you gave a shit about were Rei, Shinji and Asuka, and well.. if you've seen EoE, you know the relationship between them in the end. Maybe Anno didn't intend it, but his "revenge" piece ended up being one of the most powerful pieces of animation I've ever seen.
I used to review games for a rather large online RPG site. None of this stuff ever happened, and this was when people thought the net meant money. We were lucky to get review copies of the games, let alone to fly in an F-16. We had to buy our own E3 press passes, the games, everything. Most of the site's budget went to bandwidth, then to games. Nobody got paid, we reviewed the games because we enjoyed playing them.
After playing so many games, you start noticing what to look for, and it bugs you not to tell other people. Heck, I got the shit flamed out of me for giving Zelda 64 an 8.5 (which I still think it deserved.) I want to know where this "playola" was, and why didn't I get any? I have a feeling that this may be an isolated incident, because I know a lot of game reviewers working for prominent newspapers/websites, and none of them even hear stories of this stuff. Sure, there are some perks, usually a trip to E3 or Comdex or some other large expo, but nothing on the magnitude this guy is claiming.
If there are people out there who get this kind of treatment, it's sad. Most gamers I know don't even read reviews, game purchases are decided on word-of-mouth. Jedi Knight 2 is a perfect example. I didn't buy it because of the reviews, I bought it because everyone I knew was really excited about it and it looked cool to me. After I bought it I discovered it got rave reviews, but that was an afterthought. Gamers have an eye for spotting a good game, we don't need a reviewer to tell us what's good and what's not. Besides, mainstream media coverage of games is often horrible. I'll take word-of-mouth anyday.
Yes, they did suck. But there's a reason for that. Gainax actually ran out of money, so when they got around to the last two episodes, they had to do SOMETHING. Basically they took a bunch of concept sketches and put them to some strange voiceover so they could fulfill a 26 episode contract. The next two movies were their attempt to raise money for End of Evangelion, the real episodes 25 and 26. It turns out they ended up making a killing off the series and especially EoE, so their financial woes were over. I'll agree that they suck, but I also know that they weren't really what Gainax wanted to do with the series, but what they were forced to do. I still want the boxed set though. :)
Heh, I know the feeling. Ah well, it may be bad on the self esteem, but it's excellent for the spank bank. ;)
Well, FOTR also had a lot more going on than they could possibly show on screen. Keep in mind that it's based on a very well-known and loved book, and Peter Jackson was very faithful to the book. They probably filmed a lot more than ended up in the final movie, just because there was so much material to work with. They just had to choose what condensed down to a reasonably long movie while still remaining faithful to the original story and vision of the movie.
;) so I don't think it'd be too much of a stretch (especially with so much quality footage ending up on the cutting room floor in the interest of time.) I know I'll buy it, along with the majority of the rest of you. : )
LOTR will suffer a lot of time-based editing, where the scenes are great and would add a lot to the movie, except they just don't have the screen time to use. I heard (don't quote me on this, I may be remembering incorrectly) that only about half of the scenes they shot for the LOTR movies will actually make it to the screen. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a 15 hour long LOTR DVD box set 3 years from now. The studio knows these movies deserve that kind of treatment (not to mention they'd be ecstatic to sell it to us again
Apple's LCD prices are insane. They're very cool, but for the price of one of the 23" cinema displays, I can get 2 high-end 21" CRTs (and video cards to drive them.) $3500 is a lot of dough to waste on a computer monitor, especially when there are alternatives that are just as good (high end CRT displays will match any LCD image quality and eye-strain wise, without the drawbacks of LCDs.)
My father runs an ad agency on Macs. When they bought some new G4s, they went out and bought some Sony professional CRTs, not the Apple LCD displays. Why? Price really wasn't an issue; they'll make far more money off these machines than they could ever spend on them, but it was simply that the high-end CRTs are exactly what they need. No need to be flashy and try to impress people with some funky flat LCD, just get some professional monitors that work well.
Also, LCDs develop burn-in rather quickly (24 hours or less, iirc) and expensive CRTs(though still cheaper than LCDs) won't burn in for months. They have an automated network backup system that powers down the computers every night, so they leave them running every night from whenever they leave to go home till about 9pm. I'm not saying LCDs are bad, I just wouldn't buy one for a workhorse computer or a gaming machine. Too expensive, and I'd get better results with a CRT.
At 85hz, my CRT isn't too bad on the eyes. My laptop strains my eyes much more, though that could just be because of the smaller overall size of the screen.
Often this is the case with new technology. Blue LEDs and blue lasers were like this for a while, but now both are to the point where their lifetime is viable. Same with OLEDs. They're close, but not quite there yet. They're already seeing use in commercial applications (some cell phones have OLED displays) but they're often in places where the short lifetime isn't so much of a problem (i.e. a cell phone display is going to be off when the phone is not in use.) They're not there yet, but that doesn't mean they won't be in 2 years.
Heh, same thing in a sub. If your ballast tanks go, you're fucked. Also, at 1000 feet, the pressure is high enough to crush a human, bones and all. Yes, we have divers that go that deep, but they wear special pressure suits so that they don't implode. Though I'd imagine our seafaring technology has improved to the point where we can safely have a sub underwater (1000 feet isn't even that deep.)
;)
And for $76 million, it BETTER have a support contract.
No, the firmware they're referring to is that of the drive. CD and DVD drives have firmware as well, and these are usually user-flashable. In the case of DVD drives, it usually contains what region the drive is (thus you can often make a drive all-region if you have the correct firmware patch.) So if it fucks up your drive, you just re-flash it. Granted, this is a pain in the ass, but it's not catastrophic.
Open Firmware in fact is rather hard to overwrite. You really have to try (read: know what you're doing) to do it. I've fucked around with OF a good deal, enough do know you're not going to destroy it beyond repair without knowing full well that you could. It's like a PC BIOS, the only way to wreck it is to flash it with the wrong flashfile (and the flashers usually have checks to make sure you don't do this.) Check what you're talking about before you get all hysterical about this. It's not very nice, but it's no Chernobyl.
This operates under the assumption that EULAs mean anything. AFAIK, clickthrough EULAs are not considered an enforcible legal contract (I can accidentally hit "Enter" and not read it. It's hard to "accidentally" sign a contract, a signature means purposeful consent.) Essentially, they mean absolutely nothing.
As an aside, what this will ultimately accomplish is to force colleges and universities to altogether block on-campus access to these clients. The "right to use unused bandwidth" is the problem here. My school tolerates Kazaa by enforcing weekly download caps, so if you run kazaa for a day or two with downloads enabled, you get booted to another subnet which is about as fast as dialup. Anything like this would lead them to disable Kazaa altogether, probably by using some sort of selective port allow firewall. Students will bitch and moan, and it'll be BDE's fault (and BDE will fail, as most of Kazaa's users are college students.) So even if this actually happens, it won't last for long.
Then for what reason does the hammer head still feel more heavily attracted to the ground when held in your hand? Hold the hammer loosely, and it still falls, head first. This has less to do with the force of gravity than the CENTER of gravity. It's located in the head, and is pulling the object down from the head. The cat is pulled from the center of its mass, which is located lower in its body. High school and college intro physics classes are often oversimplified, they use symmetrical boxes or spheres rather than objects with strange centers of gravity. This is also the same reason an SUV is more likely to tip over than a sports car. Gravity pulls on the center of the object, so when it's rotated, it has to be turned less to fall over on its side.
Actually I believe it has more to do with the weight distribution of a cat. When cats get fat, most of it goes to their underbelly, so when they fall, that side falls first because it weighs more, changing their center of gravity. The same reason if you drop a hammer from any decent height, the head will always hit first. The percieved time thing would just lower their reaction time, not actually enable them to right themselves and stop it there. Of course, I could just be talking out my ass.
Obviously you've never dealt with a public school system. Refuse using the machines? You get written up and sent to the principal for disobeying the teacher. Tell the board anything? They don't listen to teachers or parents, let alone students. Teachers are often just as powerless as the students in administration matters. Unfortunately, public schools often operate on the assumption that the people on top are ALWAYS right.
The school board of any decently large school district is generally disinterested in actually educating students or making things work well, most school board members are just there as a springboard for higher political office. They generally don't give a fuck about the students or education, so they lower test standards and claim that test scores have improved. If it makes them look good to "protect our children from evil" by blocking out these sites, they'll do it. School systems don't operate like normal organizations; the students' opinion carries next to no weight at all, as "it is up to us adults who know better to protect the students from what they don't know." Total BS, but that's the way public school works.
Heh, the Drafthouse is like $5 (or free, if you go at midnight) and the food is hardly "fancy" (unless you consider burgers and wings "fancy.") Prices are along the line of a cheap sit-down restaurant (Chili's, TGI Fridays, etc,) i.e. just a bit more than fast-food, but not as much as a fancy restaurant. Hardly a fancy dinner theater. ;)
Actually (I didn't read the damn article before posting, bad karma whore) this is at the Drafthouse North. I've never been to the one up north so I can't comment on that one, but it would be cool if they allow you to order food over the network, as opposed to having to wait for a waiter to come collect your order. Anyway, most of the stuff still applies, but you get the drift. They're also showing Revolution OS at the North location right now, so check that out if you live in Austin.
Personally, having watched/eaten at the Drafthouse many times, you rarely go just to watch the movie. It's just not that kind of place. The Drafthouse is famous for Something Weird Wednesdays where admittance is free, they show a really awful B-movie flick, everyone (mostly college students) gets fantastically drunk, and all is good. Also, being a combination restaurant/theater, there are waiters running down the aisles throughout the movie. It's a pain in the ass to park in downtown Austin, not to mention the seats blow, the screen sucks, sound is marginally better, etc. The food is good, the beer is cold, but there are much better movie theaters in Austin if all you want to do is watch a movie. You go to the Drafthouse if you want to watch an older movie while eating/getting plastered.
That said, the Drafthouse also rents out to corporations for board meetings, etc, anything someone would need a medium-sized place to go during the day. I suspect that's the main reason for the 802.11. It wouldn't surprise me if they turn off the 802.11 at night, when they do public movie showings. There are a lot of places in Austin with 802.11 (coffee houses, the entire University of Texas, etc) so this isn't that revolutionary.
Anyway, just my $0.02.