Sure, you're not running the hottest computer if you have one from 2005 but at least you don't feel like you belong in a technical museum anymore.
It's because CPU development is nearly dead. now they mostly just pack in more cores and a faster FSB. I went looking to upgrade my several-year-old core 2 Duo E8400... and found out nothing was available that was truely faster for gaming than what I had... at least not for less than $1000.
Good luck finding actual CD-quality music in games today!
There are a large number of games that use Ogg Vorbis, and vorbis using a recent encoder in 128kbps is so close to cd audio that most people can't ABX it, especially on crappy pc audio equipment.
I have a fairly expensive audio setup and I can't ABX vorbis at 112kbps under most circumstances. This isn't 1998, we aren't using xing mp3. "CD-Quality" for purposes such as game soundtracks certainly doesn't require 1440kbps.
Hell at the very worst you could use FLAC and get decoded bit-identical results compresed to 600-900kbps for most encodings. Redbook is dead for a reason.
That's because Creative is the Bose of the computer world. The bulk of the "premium" cost of creative products goes into advertising and packaging (and frivilous litigation! anybody remember Aureal?) trying to convince you that they're the best, and that's why you're paying that premium.
After I learned this the hard way (ouch wallet), I did purchase a few $15 OEM SBlive cards at computer shows over the years, but never any of their premium packaged BS.
The sad thing is, the EMU10K chip CAN be awesome when surrounded by quality components instead of hype. I still use my E-MU 1212m card as the DAC for both of my computers.
Getting a GUS and SB16 to coexist peacefully under Dos, windows 3.1, and Windows 95 is probably the apex triumph of my dos/win 9x hardware troubleshooting youth.
IRQs, DMAs, and win.ini/system.ini can rot in hell.
On the other hand, I suppose it prepared me for linux...
If CP was not so regulated and forbidden, there would be a lot less children harmed in the making of it.
Isn't that the arguement for legalizing drugs?
Are you making some ironic comparison of the two that's wooshing over my head, or are you actually suggesting that the solution to child porn is to leaglize and regulate it?
so, if I don't want to share my bandwidth, the site I'm trying to view from has the option to give me a crappy version (or no version at all) of what I'm trying to view.
Wow. That'll kill flash faster than steve jobs ever could. "give us your bandwidth or no cookie".
if you call microsoft asking for support for something that they have EOL'd, they will be very happy to point you towards a microsoft-trained and microsoft-certified consultant tech in your area who has the expertise to help you.
Trust me, MS is still getting their money, one way or another.
yeah yeah, I know, I already apologized. That's what happens when you're at work with no copy of the book handy.
To be fair, it really is a drug store. You go there to buy over-the-counter drugs. There are pharmacists there, but very likely no chemists (or at least nobody with an advanced degree in chemistry). The chemists work in development labratories for phizer, proctor and gamble, etc.
I'm not hating on british culture. I'll even out the scale by admiting that americans mispronounce the word "aluminium" horribly.
When I'm quoting a post about the total perspective vortex, I figured I was pretty safe. I was working under the assumption that anybody who didn't know what we were talking about would have vacated this part of the comments already.
I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. I'll rephrase.
AC was asking if it'd be possible to be looking at a galaxy that turned out to be the milky way in the past, and thus it might be possible for us to be looking at earth in it's past form.
Granting for the sake of argument that the theory that the universe wraps-around on itself is true (which I don't personally believe it is), even if the galaxy we're looking at WAS the milky way, it'd be impossible to be looking at earth as earth wouldn't be forming in that galaxy for another 4.1 billion years or so.
Can you point me to some papers on this? To my knowledge general realativity breaks down on what the "edge of the galaxy" looks like, and you needed quantum mechanics and "imaginary time" to start begining to explain it.
Either that or Stephen Hawking's explanation of this topic was above my head, which is possible.
Current models suggest that the initial inflationary period of the univerise after the big bang was well in excess of the speed of light. WAY in excess actually.
Yes, this implies that there may be galaxies further away than we can see, outside of our horizon of cause or effect. Heady stuff.
To the best of my knowledge, the only thing that's really going to change the general makeup of a galaxy is coliding with another galaxy.
Even give or take a few hundred thousand supernovas that seed the galaxy with heavier elements, It's still going to look pretty similar to us from this distance (assuming we were capable of looking at it at different periods in time, which we can not really do). The dense parts are still going to be dense. the sparse parts are still going to be sparse, etc.
Unless of course it's got a Type III civilization in it. That's a whole other ball of wax.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
luckily they called it SXDF-XCLJ0218-0510 in their own, alien, langugage, which means that when we first encounter them, we'll just pick something that sounds vaguely, but not really all that close, to what they're saying.
Well problem 1 with that is the fact that the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, and thus looking at a galaxy that is 9.6 billion years ago we can't see anything that would have formed in the last 4.5 bilion years.
Problem 2 is that you are proposing that the universe (in this case space) is finite, but has no boundries... and wraps around on itself. While you are not the first to propose this theory, to the best of my knowledge we currently have no evidence that this may be the case, nor any mathmatical model on why it should be the case.
Actually yes, it really really was. I worked for a long time to get my windows games working under Linux, and the best I could do was get a mostly working WoW through newer versions of wine (older versions had graphical corruption). I could resort to virtualbox to run games like alpha centauri and civ2. I simply was unable to run newish games, period.
So I gave up. I dual boot now. Windows for games, Linux for everything else.
Not everybody uses Windows because they're lazy, ignorant to marketing, or even want to. Sometimes it's the only thing that actually works.
Once you start a trip to mars the stuff you take with you is ALL YOU ARE GOING TO GET.
for the trip there, certainly.
Once you're there? not at all! In fact, the only way to realistically do anything even approaching a cost-effective trip to mars is to produce as much as possible from the Martian resources. In fact, the only thing you really need to take with you is a good bit of hydrogen. You can use that Hydrogen to react with martian CO2 to produce water, methane, and oxygen.
It sounds complicated, but the chemical processes have really been around since the 1800s.
We know what kind of radiation exposure to expect.
we know what to expect from 6 months of micro gravity (not that we can't simulate some gravity with some centripetal force).
we know what kind of psychological effects to expect from keeping 4-6 people in close confines for 6 months.
we know what to expect from keeping people away from their families for 3 years.
we know what to expect from mars itself as far as landing. We have a much better idea than we did just 5 years ago where we'd want to land and why.
It sounds to me that you don't want to go until you can guarantee 100% success. name one voyage of discovery/exploration that EVER had that guarantee?
Hell we can't even guarantee that a $700 stimulus bill will affect the economy in a positive way, but we sure as hell spent that, and that was in a single year. A well planned mission to mars is $50 billion over 10 years for THREE trips. That's three chances to be successful no less.
psst, that's like 10% of Nasa's operating budget
Re:Why Mars and not the Moon?
on
Gardening On Mars
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The VAST majority of failed Mars missions failed during automated landing, not during transit.
Granted, we weren't sending air-breathing meatbags before, but let me ask you this question: What's the big problem with risks?
It's a 10 year project, no more. If we target a longer development cycle, politics will interfere.
We're quite lucky that Kennedy targeted "this decade" for the moon landing, giving us 9 years to get there. Nixon and congress were already guttong apollo by the time we actaully landed on the moon. If kennedy had said "1979" instead, then by 1969 we would have just been finishing up the mercury flights as the entire program was canceled.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, you're not running the hottest computer if you have one from 2005 but at least you don't feel like you belong in a technical museum anymore.
It's because CPU development is nearly dead. now they mostly just pack in more cores and a faster FSB. I went looking to upgrade my several-year-old core 2 Duo E8400... and found out nothing was available that was truely faster for gaming than what I had... at least not for less than $1000.
10 years ago this situation would be unthinkable.
Good luck finding actual CD-quality music in games today!
There are a large number of games that use Ogg Vorbis, and vorbis using a recent encoder in 128kbps is so close to cd audio that most people can't ABX it, especially on crappy pc audio equipment.
I have a fairly expensive audio setup and I can't ABX vorbis at 112kbps under most circumstances. This isn't 1998, we aren't using xing mp3. "CD-Quality" for purposes such as game soundtracks certainly doesn't require 1440kbps.
Hell at the very worst you could use FLAC and get decoded bit-identical results compresed to 600-900kbps for most encodings. Redbook is dead for a reason.
That's because Creative is the Bose of the computer world. The bulk of the "premium" cost of creative products goes into advertising and packaging (and frivilous litigation! anybody remember Aureal?) trying to convince you that they're the best, and that's why you're paying that premium.
After I learned this the hard way (ouch wallet), I did purchase a few $15 OEM SBlive cards at computer shows over the years, but never any of their premium packaged BS.
The sad thing is, the EMU10K chip CAN be awesome when surrounded by quality components instead of hype. I still use my E-MU 1212m card as the DAC for both of my computers.
I had the original GUS.
Getting a GUS and SB16 to coexist peacefully under Dos, windows 3.1, and Windows 95 is probably the apex triumph of my dos/win 9x hardware troubleshooting youth.
IRQs, DMAs, and win.ini/system.ini can rot in hell.
On the other hand, I suppose it prepared me for linux...
wait a moment...
If CP was not so regulated and forbidden, there would be a lot less children harmed in the making of it.
Isn't that the arguement for legalizing drugs?
Are you making some ironic comparison of the two that's wooshing over my head, or are you actually suggesting that the solution to child porn is to leaglize and regulate it?
so, if I don't want to share my bandwidth, the site I'm trying to view from has the option to give me a crappy version (or no version at all) of what I'm trying to view.
Wow. That'll kill flash faster than steve jobs ever could. "give us your bandwidth or no cookie".
if you call microsoft asking for support for something that they have EOL'd, they will be very happy to point you towards a microsoft-trained and microsoft-certified consultant tech in your area who has the expertise to help you.
Trust me, MS is still getting their money, one way or another.
yeah yeah, I know, I already apologized. That's what happens when you're at work with no copy of the book handy.
To be fair, it really is a drug store. You go there to buy over-the-counter drugs. There are pharmacists there, but very likely no chemists (or at least nobody with an advanced degree in chemistry). The chemists work in development labratories for phizer, proctor and gamble, etc.
I'm not hating on british culture. I'll even out the scale by admiting that americans mispronounce the word "aluminium" horribly.
let me guess, it's called "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" in your parts, isn't it...
Actually it is, but that's not my fault.
My mistake on the quote, I didn't have the book in front of me so I relied on a quotations page that was apparently in error.
or, more to the point:
"oops, my bad."
When I'm quoting a post about the total perspective vortex, I figured I was pretty safe. I was working under the assumption that anybody who didn't know what we were talking about would have vacated this part of the comments already.
I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. I'll rephrase.
AC was asking if it'd be possible to be looking at a galaxy that turned out to be the milky way in the past, and thus it might be possible for us to be looking at earth in it's past form.
Granting for the sake of argument that the theory that the universe wraps-around on itself is true (which I don't personally believe it is), even if the galaxy we're looking at WAS the milky way, it'd be impossible to be looking at earth as earth wouldn't be forming in that galaxy for another 4.1 billion years or so.
Can you point me to some papers on this? To my knowledge general realativity breaks down on what the "edge of the galaxy" looks like, and you needed quantum mechanics and "imaginary time" to start begining to explain it.
Either that or Stephen Hawking's explanation of this topic was above my head, which is possible.
how much older are you looking for?
Current models suggest that the initial inflationary period of the univerise after the big bang was well in excess of the speed of light. WAY in excess actually.
Yes, this implies that there may be galaxies further away than we can see, outside of our horizon of cause or effect. Heady stuff.
To the best of my knowledge, the only thing that's really going to change the general makeup of a galaxy is coliding with another galaxy.
Even give or take a few hundred thousand supernovas that seed the galaxy with heavier elements, It's still going to look pretty similar to us from this distance (assuming we were capable of looking at it at different periods in time, which we can not really do). The dense parts are still going to be dense. the sparse parts are still going to be sparse, etc.
Unless of course it's got a Type III civilization in it. That's a whole other ball of wax.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
luckily they called it SXDF-XCLJ0218-0510 in their own, alien, langugage, which means that when we first encounter them, we'll just pick something that sounds vaguely, but not really all that close, to what they're saying.
Like, say, Peking.
Well problem 1 with that is the fact that the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, and thus looking at a galaxy that is 9.6 billion years ago we can't see anything that would have formed in the last 4.5 bilion years.
Problem 2 is that you are proposing that the universe (in this case space) is finite, but has no boundries... and wraps around on itself. While you are not the first to propose this theory, to the best of my knowledge we currently have no evidence that this may be the case, nor any mathmatical model on why it should be the case.
I bet you wonder why you get downranked, don't you?
Don't use Windows. Was that so hard?
Actually yes, it really really was. I worked for a long time to get my windows games working under Linux, and the best I could do was get a mostly working WoW through newer versions of wine (older versions had graphical corruption). I could resort to virtualbox to run games like alpha centauri and civ2. I simply was unable to run newish games, period.
So I gave up. I dual boot now. Windows for games, Linux for everything else.
Not everybody uses Windows because they're lazy, ignorant to marketing, or even want to. Sometimes it's the only thing that actually works.
Too busy to read TFA... but how the hell are they infecting firmware? That seems like a huge oversight by Linksys, Netgear, etc.
It's like they're parking a tank in front of your house to defend you from the bad guys, and then leaving the keys to the tank in the ignition.
Wait, do tanks use keys?
Wait pt 2, did I just make a car analogy?
Once you start a trip to mars the stuff you take with you is ALL YOU ARE GOING TO GET.
for the trip there, certainly.
Once you're there? not at all! In fact, the only way to realistically do anything even approaching a cost-effective trip to mars is to produce as much as possible from the Martian resources. In fact, the only thing you really need to take with you is a good bit of hydrogen. You can use that Hydrogen to react with martian CO2 to produce water, methane, and oxygen.
It sounds complicated, but the chemical processes have really been around since the 1800s.
why are you so confidant the trip wont succeed?
We know what kind of radiation exposure to expect.
we know what to expect from 6 months of micro gravity (not that we can't simulate some gravity with some centripetal force).
we know what kind of psychological effects to expect from keeping 4-6 people in close confines for 6 months.
we know what to expect from keeping people away from their families for 3 years.
we know what to expect from mars itself as far as landing. We have a much better idea than we did just 5 years ago where we'd want to land and why.
It sounds to me that you don't want to go until you can guarantee 100% success. name one voyage of discovery/exploration that EVER had that guarantee?
Hell we can't even guarantee that a $700 stimulus bill will affect the economy in a positive way, but we sure as hell spent that, and that was in a single year. A well planned mission to mars is $50 billion over 10 years for THREE trips. That's three chances to be successful no less.
psst, that's like 10% of Nasa's operating budget
The VAST majority of failed Mars missions failed during automated landing, not during transit.
Granted, we weren't sending air-breathing meatbags before, but let me ask you this question: What's the big problem with risks?
you're actually right on the money.
It's a 10 year project, no more. If we target a longer development cycle, politics will interfere.
We're quite lucky that Kennedy targeted "this decade" for the moon landing, giving us 9 years to get there. Nixon and congress were already guttong apollo by the time we actaully landed on the moon. If kennedy had said "1979" instead, then by 1969 we would have just been finishing up the mercury flights as the entire program was canceled.