It's too bad that the monoitor has such a gigantic bezel. (And by "bezel", I mean the frame around the monitor) It's ugly, and it make placing multiple monitors side by side less useful.
In fact, this is sort of a generic question: Why do current LCDs have a bezel, and can OLED technology remove the need for a bezel totally? I thought that the bezel was somehow related to the backlighting, and since OLEDs didn't have backlighting, they could be nearly frameless. But I might have just imagined that. Somebody's got to know.
Time for another episode of "Smack the poster"
on
Users Conned by Cable Con
·
· Score: 2, Informative
For once, the editors are okay here. Break it down:
The "Cable Con" part referred to in the title: "You can get free PPV, if you buy this thingy. Con your cable comany!"
However, those people who think they are going to con themselves get conned, because they actually bought a worthless piece of crap. See how the users got conned by a cable con?
Unfortunately, the new book (and the example passage) sounds like an excellent history book, but a terrible science book. Kids need to get the fundamentals of science somewhere, and while I agree that making science more interesting will help, if the book doesn't delve into details and tries to tell a story, it will be a bad thing.
From the article: Textbooks often are collections of facts and vocabulary words
Yes. If you don't get this in school, where are you going to get it?
Wonder why so many people believe in crystals and angels and aromatherapy? Poor grounding in basic science, and an ignorance of the fundamentals.
What? Telengard was written in Basic; I remember one of my first true hacker moments was discovering that if you saved and the tape drive was unplugged, the program would crash to the basic prompt, and you would be able to change the code. (Exp = Exp * 100 was a popular mod to add after killing a monster).
(a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
I've seen you post with this signature a few times, and I just have to ask: What's a deltic? As far as I can tell, you're claiming to be some sort of a train.
Each company probably has an internal do-not-call list. For example, I had a little "incident" with MCI. I later (and rather politely) requested to be put on their do-not-call list, and they've actually never called me since. If it's just a few companies that are calling you, I'd try going that route.
This doesn't change the fact that MCI is a bunch of asshats, though.
Can you please explain what do you mean by "repair"?
DRAM manufacturers include a small amount of extra memory on the die; there are a few "extra" rows and columns on the die. There is also a system of fuses which allows you to remove a row or column from the main array, and and also replace it with a row or column from the redundant area. These fuses are blown using a laser, prior to packaging.
The manufacturer tests the device, identifies the bad cells, and then "swaps" out a row or a column with a good row or column from the redundant area.
This is a little vague; manufacturers are very guarded about revealing the specifics of how they do this. Some manufacturers may have a smaller number of redundant cells, but have a very flexible system of row/column swapping. Others may dedicate more memory to the redundant system, but have a more restricted (but less complex) sytem of swapping in rows and columns. For example, restrictions on "even" or "odd" rows being swapped with the same type from the redundant array. In reality, the systems are usually way more complicated than just rows and columns (half rows, restricted use rows, pairs of rows, etc) but you get the idea.
In a modern DRAM device, every device needs to go through this process. (It's much cheaper to devote a small space to redundant columns and go through repair than to try to make a device that had a 0% cell failure rate.)
There are some things in the article that are pretty out of date:
To reduce the test time, parallel chip testing usually is accomplished with eight to 16 chips in a row.
That's pretty low parallelism; there are memory testers out there that test over 200 devices at a time right now. And even the older, more common systems are probably testing 64 in parallel.
A special ink jet color marks the good dies.
This hasn't been true for years. Each device's pass/fail status is stored in a database, along with all other test results, and the whole process is automated enough that good die are binned out automatically. No need to physically mark the chip.
Due to the imperfection of the process, a percentage of the DRAM die contains some faulty cells.
That percentage is 100%. At modern memory sizes, you never get a perfect device without going through repair.
Best quote from the site: But don't all qualified scientists and astronomers agree that there is a moon? Indeed, but shouldn't one be suspicious of such unanimity, when universities are supposed to be forums for open debate of controversial issues. Sweet.
Hey, I know many of the other comments on this article are going to be filled with haters ripping on AMD and their new chip, but I for one was hella impressed that UT2k3 was running so well under such adverse conditions. Once all the pieces start to fall into place, this could be sweet chip.
First of all, didn't "tallyrand" just make the almost exact same comment, two posts up from yours? (Aight, he didn't mention _Silence_ by name, but he did link to it.)
Second, yes, you both have a point, but man, you don't gots to be so sarcastic about it. Jeez man, you almost made me cry.
Third, I would argue that Hannibal has a panache, a certain flair, and Gollum and Lorre do not fit into that category. "Creepy" was clearly the wrong choice of words on my part; perhaps a better choice would have been "snivelling". To re-iterate: I don't think that the academy would be likely to vote for an actor that played a snivelling, sycophantic, servile wretch, no matter how good a job the actor did. And while Hannibal is clearly creepy, I don't think he fits my ammended description at all.
Of course, I don't have as vast a knowledge of movies as many, so I'd be happy to hear about counterexamples.
You can actually watch the original version of Lord of the Rings which starred Peter Lorre as Gollum. And yes, somehow, this version of the movie was actually released before the books were.:)
Gollum won't get nominated for the same reasons that Peter Lorre never got any significant award. No matter how good the actor is at playing the part, and no matter how important the role is to the movie, it's just not the type of role that gets nominations. It's not anti-CGI bigotry, it's anti-creepy-guy bigotry.
2.2 million...it will be interesting to see what happends when who ever did this starts to sell them in bulk. Who is going to be responsible? The Credit Card companies or the site that got hosed?
My credit card has been re-issued twice due to it being stolen en masse from a web site. The first time it was stolen from CD Universe and the second time it was, ahem, another company. In both cases, it was just an incredible pain in the ass to me.
In the first incident, I was in Best Buy, and my card was denied because it was marked as stolen, which is a good thing, except when the people are all looking at you like you're the thief. The second incident, I had ordered gifts from a bunch of sites when I was told my card was being rejected, and I had to call each site and get them to use a different card. Not the easiest thing in the world to do for some sites.
In any case, in both incident, hundreds of thousands of numbers were stolen, and both victims just told the issuing companies, and most issuing companies cancelled the numbers. I suspect even though this is 10x as many cards, they'll still do the same thing. The potential liablity is too great to do otherwise.
On the other hand, this might be enough to get the companies thinking about coming up with a better, less theft-prone system.
Seriously, you actually sang the song and danced around? If that's what it takes to get into the "up-with-people" club I guess I would rather eat the soggy potato chips and drink the warm cans of Coke than admit to that fact. Hell, I'd even rather drink warm cans of Sam's Club Diet Cola, and that stuff tastes like ass even when chilled.
I'm half tempted to try to post something that points out that your name is sort of like "Seinfeld"....
Did you know your name is sort of like Seinfeld? But with a "Z"? When you called me a grouch, didn't you really mean "zoup nazi?" Zlashdot's sort of like a site about nothing, isn't it. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
It is indeed a gaming site that's been around for a long time, run by a guy named Blue, but the site is also a joking pun on the name of television show. It's the same type of thing when a store is called "Buy the Book" or "Chez Guevara" or "Wok N Roll". Although my best search efforts fail to turn up the post at the moment, Blue has mentioned this fact in the past.
Yes, the name of the website is a reference to Blue's Clues. Once again, taking someone else's joke and just making it painfully obvious gets modded up.
Yes, yes, mod me down, I'm offtopic, but it almost causes me physical pain to see someone get credit for a joke that was already made.
Slashdot Mirror
Way to get the joke.
It's too bad that the monoitor has such a gigantic bezel. (And by "bezel", I mean the frame around the monitor) It's ugly, and it make placing multiple monitors side by side less useful.
In fact, this is sort of a generic question: Why do current LCDs have a bezel, and can OLED technology remove the need for a bezel totally? I thought that the bezel was somehow related to the backlighting, and since OLEDs didn't have backlighting, they could be nearly frameless. But I might have just imagined that. Somebody's got to know.
For once, the editors are okay here. Break it down:
The "Cable Con" part referred to in the title: "You can get free PPV, if you buy this thingy. Con your cable comany!"
However, those people who think they are going to con themselves get conned, because they actually bought a worthless piece of crap. See how the users got conned by a cable con?
Unfortunately, the new book (and the example passage) sounds like an excellent history book, but a terrible science book. Kids need to get the fundamentals of science somewhere, and while I agree that making science more interesting will help, if the book doesn't delve into details and tries to tell a story, it will be a bad thing.
From the article: Textbooks often are collections of facts and vocabulary words
Yes. If you don't get this in school, where are you going to get it?
Wonder why so many people believe in crystals and angels and aromatherapy? Poor grounding in basic science, and an ignorance of the fundamentals.
For example, no games to speak of use BASIC
What? Telengard was written in Basic; I remember one of my first true hacker moments was discovering that if you saved and the tape drive was unplugged, the program would crash to the basic prompt, and you would be able to change the code. (Exp = Exp * 100 was a popular mod to add after killing a monster).
(a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
I've seen you post with this signature a few times, and I just have to ask: What's a deltic? As far as I can tell, you're claiming to be some sort of a train.
Each company probably has an internal do-not-call list. For example, I had a little "incident" with MCI. I later (and rather politely) requested to be put on their do-not-call list, and they've actually never called me since. If it's just a few companies that are calling you, I'd try going that route.
This doesn't change the fact that MCI is a bunch of asshats, though.
Can you please explain what do you mean by "repair"?
DRAM manufacturers include a small amount of extra memory on the die; there are a few "extra" rows and columns on the die. There is also a system of fuses which allows you to remove a row or column from the main array, and and also replace it with a row or column from the redundant area. These fuses are blown using a laser, prior to packaging.
The manufacturer tests the device, identifies the bad cells, and then "swaps" out a row or a column with a good row or column from the redundant area.
This is a little vague; manufacturers are very guarded about revealing the specifics of how they do this. Some manufacturers may have a smaller number of redundant cells, but have a very flexible system of row/column swapping. Others may dedicate more memory to the redundant system, but have a more restricted (but less complex) sytem of swapping in rows and columns. For example, restrictions on "even" or "odd" rows being swapped with the same type from the redundant array. In reality, the systems are usually way more complicated than just rows and columns (half rows, restricted use rows, pairs of rows, etc) but you get the idea.
In a modern DRAM device, every device needs to go through this process. (It's much cheaper to devote a small space to redundant columns and go through repair than to try to make a device that had a 0% cell failure rate.)
There are some things in the article that are pretty out of date:
To reduce the test time, parallel chip testing usually is accomplished with eight to 16 chips in a row.
That's pretty low parallelism; there are memory testers out there that test over 200 devices at a time right now. And even the older, more common systems are probably testing 64 in parallel.
A special ink jet color marks the good dies.
This hasn't been true for years. Each device's pass/fail status is stored in a database, along with all other test results, and the whole process is automated enough that good die are binned out automatically. No need to physically mark the chip.
Due to the imperfection of the process, a percentage of the DRAM die contains some faulty cells.
That percentage is 100%. At modern memory sizes, you never get a perfect device without going through repair.
Not only is the moon landing a hoax, but I've just been informed the moon itself is a hoax.
Best quote from the site: But don't all qualified scientists and astronomers agree that there is a moon? Indeed, but shouldn't one be suspicious of such unanimity, when universities are supposed to be forums for open debate of controversial issues. Sweet.
Hey, America's already Been There, Done That.
Here's what we discovered.
Surely the word 'foneblog' is even worse.
Unfortunately these cars don't have enough "muscles" as compared to the "more traditional" gas-only cars.
Check out the concept Honda Dualnote. Hybrid, 400 HP, and 40mpg gas mileage. Sweet! Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like it will ever make it to production.
Learn to start dealing with it now.
Hey, I know many of the other comments on this article are going to be filled with haters ripping on AMD and their new chip, but I for one was hella impressed that UT2k3 was running so well under such adverse conditions. Once all the pieces start to fall into place, this could be sweet chip.
Does the "Average" Hardcore Gamer think that $459 is too much to pay for a video card?
This is why you see so much about these high-end video cards:
Yes, of course it is too much to spend.
But man, oh man, it would be cool to have one.
First of all, didn't "tallyrand" just make the almost exact same comment, two posts up from yours? (Aight, he didn't mention _Silence_ by name, but he did link to it.)
Second, yes, you both have a point, but man, you don't gots to be so sarcastic about it. Jeez man, you almost made me cry.
Third, I would argue that Hannibal has a panache, a certain flair, and Gollum and Lorre do not fit into that category. "Creepy" was clearly the wrong choice of words on my part; perhaps a better choice would have been "snivelling". To re-iterate: I don't think that the academy would be likely to vote for an actor that played a snivelling, sycophantic, servile wretch, no matter how good a job the actor did. And while Hannibal is clearly creepy, I don't think he fits my ammended description at all.
Of course, I don't have as vast a knowledge of movies as many, so I'd be happy to hear about counterexamples.
You can actually watch the original version of Lord of the Rings which starred Peter Lorre as Gollum. And yes, somehow, this version of the movie was actually released before the books were. :)
Gollum won't get nominated for the same reasons that Peter Lorre never got any significant award. No matter how good the actor is at playing the part, and no matter how important the role is to the movie, it's just not the type of role that gets nominations. It's not anti-CGI bigotry, it's anti-creepy-guy bigotry.
2.2 million...it will be interesting to see what happends when who ever did this starts to sell them in bulk. Who is going to be responsible? The Credit Card companies or the site that got hosed?
My credit card has been re-issued twice due to it being stolen en masse from a web site. The first time it was stolen from CD Universe and the second time it was, ahem, another company. In both cases, it was just an incredible pain in the ass to me.
In the first incident, I was in Best Buy, and my card was denied because it was marked as stolen, which is a good thing, except when the people are all looking at you like you're the thief. The second incident, I had ordered gifts from a bunch of sites when I was told my card was being rejected, and I had to call each site and get them to use a different card. Not the easiest thing in the world to do for some sites.
In any case, in both incident, hundreds of thousands of numbers were stolen, and both victims just told the issuing companies, and most issuing companies cancelled the numbers. I suspect even though this is 10x as many cards, they'll still do the same thing. The potential liablity is too great to do otherwise.
On the other hand, this might be enough to get the companies thinking about coming up with a better, less theft-prone system.
Seriously, you actually sang the song and danced around? If that's what it takes to get into the "up-with-people" club I guess I would rather eat the soggy potato chips and drink the warm cans of Coke than admit to that fact. Hell, I'd even rather drink warm cans of Sam's Club Diet Cola, and that stuff tastes like ass even when chilled.
I'm half tempted to try to post something that points out that your name is sort of like "Seinfeld"....
Did you know your name is sort of like Seinfeld? But with a "Z"? When you called me a grouch, didn't you really mean "zoup nazi?" Zlashdot's sort of like a site about nothing, isn't it. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
...but that would be totally obvious.
It is indeed a gaming site that's been around for a long time, run by a guy named Blue, but the site is also a joking pun on the name of television show. It's the same type of thing when a store is called "Buy the Book" or "Chez Guevara" or "Wok N Roll". Although my best search efforts fail to turn up the post at the moment, Blue has mentioned this fact in the past.
Yes, the name of the website is a reference to Blue's Clues. Once again, taking someone else's joke and just making it painfully obvious gets modded up.
Yes, yes, mod me down, I'm offtopic, but it almost causes me physical pain to see someone get credit for a joke that was already made.
How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?
(With apologies to Asimov.)
If you took the same precautions I did, how do you think you got into the spam-generals addressbook?
Co-worker unknowingly installed spyware on their computer which harvested my email address out of their email software address book. Sucks.