Or, as the consensus on/. seems to be, we could just kill all the spammers in ritualistic fashion.
It could be the next extreme reality show for TV... Fear Factor Spam Edition! Have them go through the trials, eat pig rectums and get covered in bees, then the winner gets to shoot the other participants in the head - and then of course, we off the winner too!
If you're using OEM Windows you are not a serious enough user to complain about the extras.
What does the OEM license have to do with anything ? Other than being tied to a proprietary BIOS slug, there's absolutely no difference between OEM, Retail or VLK Windows. It's the exact same OS, whether it comes preinstalled or in a lame little shrinkwrap package on the side.
I think what you meant to say is : "If you're entrusting your tech support to BB, you are not a serious enough user to complain about the extras."
Bloatware Removal Threatens uncompetitive PC Industry Profits
There, much better.
It threatens HP, Dell, Lenovo and whoever else makes their margins on the bloatware. For the tens of thousands of honest mom & pop shops, bloatware is a non-event.
The funny thing is a lot of these small-time PC shops usually deliver a better machine at a better price than the big guys, while still making a modest but livable profit. They don't get Microsoft Payola, they don't have much buying power, but they still churn out millions of excellent PCs day after day, with no idiotic coupon-hunting or english-as-a-seventh-language tech support.
So the question is: how the hell can the big guys fail so hard while the nobodies are doing just fine ?
Your numbers make sense, sure, but the costs reach much further than just the cop issuing the ticket:
- What about the administrative people who don't directly generate revenue, yet have to handle all that paperwork ?
- What about the justice of the peace that has to sit in court all day, hearing all the people who fight their ticket (and often win) ?
- What about *YOUR* time wasted dealing with all that bullshit, and everyone else's time stuck in traffic because there's a radar cop blocking a lane with a batch of victims ? What about the handful of cops who get severely injured or killed as a direct result of traffic abuse ?
Even if each cop brings in $15k worth of fines, it's still not profitable. It is a drain, a parasitic shunting of funds.
Didn't help, as I've hacking since I was in diapers. I already do what I can to maximize the limited bandwidth, what I'm saying is there is a distinct need for greater bandwidth, and I know first-hand that it could be easily achieved, were it not for silly old-world business practices that are effectively stalling technological progress. I'm basically pissed off that the world is being shackled to the past over a bunch of made-up numbers on a balance sheet.
It's true... the problem is that Atari was, much like Nintendo, a major player in the software market. Giving away open documentation would have enabled 3rd parties to compete with Atari on the software front, which they saw as a threat.
Meanwhile, the PC flourished not on technical merits, but on developer support. Where would the PC be today, if the average VB moron didn't have the ability to write and distribute random apps ?
I am Canadian, and I can tell you first-hand the Quebec government is a joke. Everything in Quebec is cheap, but the taxes are ridiculously high. I'm sure their software expenses aren't helping at all, but it's just a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the old-school catholic mindset that pervades this province.
Baby bonuses, wide-spread welfare handouts, ineffective education, and a very ignorant aversion to birth control. Think of all the things you hate about the southern states, and most of them apply to Quebec.
The other problem, which I think is more like a symptom, is brain drain. If you're an educated, intelligent, competent and hard-working tech/developer, there are few good places to work in Quebec. There are a lot of shitty jobs, and a lot of OK jobs with horrendously low salaries, so what's a smart guy to do ? Move! That's what I did. Of course that leaves nobody for the government to hire to deploy and support open-source software, so they just pay some sleazy contractor a ton of money to make the problem go away.
If the system is so far gone that it made this natural born Quebecer hate his own roots, how can we expect outsiders to care ?
The problem with SLI is you spend 4x the money to get a 20-30% boost, maybe 50% if the game is particularly sloppy in its graphics pipeline, and often 0% if the game doesn't support SLI at all - hell, some of them even crash under SLI.
Meanwhile you can buy a cheap board, and a single card one step up, that will deliver steady performance across all games with far less compatibility/tweaking issues to worry about.
I can't help but roll my eyes and belittle people when they blow $200-300 on a board, then buy a pair of mid-range cards "because they ran out of money". There's absolutely no sense in having two 9600GT's in SLI, when a used 8800GTS at half the price can beat the SLI, yet a few hundred imbeciles do it every day.
Is it just me, or is Intel "releasing" a new chipset every 6 months that does fuckall better than the last one ? It's like they've gotten an NVidia DNA transplant.
Just like the Geforce 9 and GT2 have been craptacular rehashes of existing tech, the X38/X48 and now X58 are errily similar and in many cases worse performers than the P35 they're supposed to replace.
X38 was supposed to have "unofficial" SLI support. X48 too. Now X58 has "official" SLI. Big whoop! Given the inflated price of these boards, I suspect many people will continue buying NVidia boards at an equally inflated price, but with the guarantee of the latest and greatest SLI support.
I'm really unimpressed with both parties on this one. Driver modders have already demonstrated that NVidia's "secret SLI tech" is nothing but a software-enforced restriction. Any board with proper bus topology can handle two GPUs via point-to-point communication. NVidia created the problem artificially, and they want money to kinda sorta make it go away.... methinks they should lay off the legal team and spend that money on R&D so they just might come up with a product that is worth my money to upgrade, you know - their core business!
True phase-change cooling usually costs a grand for the kit, then you still have to gut your chassis to fit the ginormous cooling colon^H^Humn. Plus it's noisy as hell. It would require substantial improvements in both areas before ever being considered for general use in PCs.
This fluorinert jobby is probably whisper quiet, but I don't see anyone racing to order one. In a Cray, the liquid made sense because they were huge machines and it wasn't realistic to even try to cool them with air. Today's computers are reduced to a single board, with a few very localized heat sources.
Having a big body of liquid will actually hinder the heat dissipation, because the liquid moves far slower than air, and your CPU is putting out 100+ watts of heat in a tiny area, or in my case 350 watts, turning the area near the CPU into a mini deep fryer - definitely not cool!
Given how today's air coolers can run whisper quiet (at stock speeds and voltages), I just don't see where immersion cooling could possibly fit in the PC market. It doesn't work any better than a high-end air cooler (Ninja or TRUE120), doesn't overclock anywhere near as well as TEC+water setups or phase change, and costs 50 times more.
Let me guess: you've never read anything about microprocessor engineering, have you ?
What you describe is what every non-engineer dreams of. You want a chip that any idiot can reprogram, without knowing the "less simple" ways of FPGAs. That's kind of like saying you want a car that gets 200 miles to the gallon, can park in a shoebox and carry 20 kids in the back seat - oh, and it drives itself automagically so your kids can take themselves to soccer practice without bugging you.
The reason why no one ever builds such monstrosities is because there is simply no point to it, when you can have purpose-built chips designed and fabbed for a fraction of the cost. People don't stop breathing just because their device needs 2 distinct chips instead of one jesus-truck.
it would cost more to try and police the populace in general than the state would make back in the tax
Traffic fines cost more than what they earn back, but that doesn't mean they're going to be vanishing anytime soon. Governments aren't interested in running more efficiently at the individual level, they're mostly interested in giving themselves raises and creating more jobs for their friends and family. If a use tax enforcement were to spend 30% more than they reclaim, it's a 30% net waste, but supporters will say it creates X jobs and stimulates Y part of the economy.
If we got rid of all the dead weight and circle-jerk finances in government, we'd be left with very small and powerless governments that would be more like associated contractors than all-knowing tyrannical machines. A guy can dream, can't he ?
Ya that's what irks me about all uplinks... 1mbit would have been plenty in the 90's, but this is the age of P2P and VPN and telework. It's real f'ing annoying to have to wait 2 hours just to transfer a big document between my home and office PCs.
If only I could run an ethernet cable to the local exchange down the street:P How hard could it possibly be ?
I frankly don't see why they're bothering with this project at all. The way things are going, the human race may not even exist in 2000 years, and if by some random meteor storm that takes out all of the world's military superpowers we actually manage to survive, biblical texts will not be of any help.
Thing is, the Chinese people don't see it the same way as you and I, because this is how it's been for years. Boil a frog slowly...
Free speech is a delicate battle in the rest of the world, because it gets in the way of government power mongers. In China, they've had power mongers forever, so the concept of free speech does not exist at all - it gets squashed anytime it pops up, "to protect society".
It's a whole different world over there, one that's very difficult for us to completely understand.
Dude! The fact that the olympics are in China in the first place is a huge political stunt. Everyone knew this kind of shit would happen, but still, the IOC wanted to give China a chance to show the world how it had changed for the better. Indeed, a few political/human-rights issues were at the heart of that deal, but as soon as China had secured the olympics, they went right back to their abusive habits. They got what they wanted, and they decided to show the world they're nobody's bitch.
Downloading something is a pretty modest show of solidarity because hardly anyone will notice.
I know the Olympics aren't supposed to be "politicized", but let's not be hypocrites: it's ALL about politics, and the fact that they are in Beijing this year is a huge political stunt.
If a bunch of athletes want to protest China's activities, I think they should go all the way and have a walk off. Just get to the starting line, wait for the buzzer, then stand there like an idiot until the others finish their run. All eyes will be on that one person, and the media will be all over them, ready to deliver that protester's sound bite around the world to billions of TV drones.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, as the consensus on /. seems to be, we could just kill all the spammers in ritualistic fashion.
It could be the next extreme reality show for TV... Fear Factor Spam Edition! Have them go through the trials, eat pig rectums and get covered in bees, then the winner gets to shoot the other participants in the head - and then of course, we off the winner too!
If you're using OEM Windows you are not a serious enough user to complain about the extras.
What does the OEM license have to do with anything ? Other than being tied to a proprietary BIOS slug, there's absolutely no difference between OEM, Retail or VLK Windows. It's the exact same OS, whether it comes preinstalled or in a lame little shrinkwrap package on the side.
I think what you meant to say is : "If you're entrusting your tech support to BB, you are not a serious enough user to complain about the extras."
Bloatware Removal Threatens uncompetitive PC Industry Profits
There, much better.
It threatens HP, Dell, Lenovo and whoever else makes their margins on the bloatware. For the tens of thousands of honest mom & pop shops, bloatware is a non-event.
The funny thing is a lot of these small-time PC shops usually deliver a better machine at a better price than the big guys, while still making a modest but livable profit. They don't get Microsoft Payola, they don't have much buying power, but they still churn out millions of excellent PCs day after day, with no idiotic coupon-hunting or english-as-a-seventh-language tech support.
So the question is: how the hell can the big guys fail so hard while the nobodies are doing just fine ?
We might finally have an opportunity to understand why the catholic church had to kill so many people over the past two millenia ?
---I---CAN'T---WAIT---!
Just because the bank doesn't charge you eight dollars a month, does not mean you're not paying for banking. You just have a good socialized model.
Your numbers make sense, sure, but the costs reach much further than just the cop issuing the ticket:
- What about the administrative people who don't directly generate revenue, yet have to handle all that paperwork ?
- What about the justice of the peace that has to sit in court all day, hearing all the people who fight their ticket (and often win) ?
- What about *YOUR* time wasted dealing with all that bullshit, and everyone else's time stuck in traffic because there's a radar cop blocking a lane with a batch of victims ? What about the handful of cops who get severely injured or killed as a direct result of traffic abuse ?
Even if each cop brings in $15k worth of fines, it's still not profitable. It is a drain, a parasitic shunting of funds.
Didn't help, as I've hacking since I was in diapers. I already do what I can to maximize the limited bandwidth, what I'm saying is there is a distinct need for greater bandwidth, and I know first-hand that it could be easily achieved, were it not for silly old-world business practices that are effectively stalling technological progress. I'm basically pissed off that the world is being shackled to the past over a bunch of made-up numbers on a balance sheet.
It's true... the problem is that Atari was, much like Nintendo, a major player in the software market. Giving away open documentation would have enabled 3rd parties to compete with Atari on the software front, which they saw as a threat.
Meanwhile, the PC flourished not on technical merits, but on developer support. Where would the PC be today, if the average VB moron didn't have the ability to write and distribute random apps ?
I am Canadian, and I can tell you first-hand the Quebec government is a joke. Everything in Quebec is cheap, but the taxes are ridiculously high. I'm sure their software expenses aren't helping at all, but it's just a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the old-school catholic mindset that pervades this province.
Baby bonuses, wide-spread welfare handouts, ineffective education, and a very ignorant aversion to birth control. Think of all the things you hate about the southern states, and most of them apply to Quebec.
The other problem, which I think is more like a symptom, is brain drain. If you're an educated, intelligent, competent and hard-working tech/developer, there are few good places to work in Quebec. There are a lot of shitty jobs, and a lot of OK jobs with horrendously low salaries, so what's a smart guy to do ? Move! That's what I did. Of course that leaves nobody for the government to hire to deploy and support open-source software, so they just pay some sleazy contractor a ton of money to make the problem go away.
If the system is so far gone that it made this natural born Quebecer hate his own roots, how can we expect outsiders to care ?
The problem with SLI is you spend 4x the money to get a 20-30% boost, maybe 50% if the game is particularly sloppy in its graphics pipeline, and often 0% if the game doesn't support SLI at all - hell, some of them even crash under SLI.
Meanwhile you can buy a cheap board, and a single card one step up, that will deliver steady performance across all games with far less compatibility/tweaking issues to worry about.
I can't help but roll my eyes and belittle people when they blow $200-300 on a board, then buy a pair of mid-range cards "because they ran out of money". There's absolutely no sense in having two 9600GT's in SLI, when a used 8800GTS at half the price can beat the SLI, yet a few hundred imbeciles do it every day.
Is it just me, or is Intel "releasing" a new chipset every 6 months that does fuckall better than the last one ? It's like they've gotten an NVidia DNA transplant.
Just like the Geforce 9 and GT2 have been craptacular rehashes of existing tech, the X38/X48 and now X58 are errily similar and in many cases worse performers than the P35 they're supposed to replace.
X38 was supposed to have "unofficial" SLI support. X48 too. Now X58 has "official" SLI. Big whoop! Given the inflated price of these boards, I suspect many people will continue buying NVidia boards at an equally inflated price, but with the guarantee of the latest and greatest SLI support.
I'm really unimpressed with both parties on this one. Driver modders have already demonstrated that NVidia's "secret SLI tech" is nothing but a software-enforced restriction. Any board with proper bus topology can handle two GPUs via point-to-point communication. NVidia created the problem artificially, and they want money to kinda sorta make it go away.... methinks they should lay off the legal team and spend that money on R&D so they just might come up with a product that is worth my money to upgrade, you know - their core business!
You must be new here.
Prior art is like kryptonite to the Patent Office.
$400 ? I'd love to see a link.
True phase-change cooling usually costs a grand for the kit, then you still have to gut your chassis to fit the ginormous cooling colon^H^Humn. Plus it's noisy as hell. It would require substantial improvements in both areas before ever being considered for general use in PCs.
This fluorinert jobby is probably whisper quiet, but I don't see anyone racing to order one. In a Cray, the liquid made sense because they were huge machines and it wasn't realistic to even try to cool them with air. Today's computers are reduced to a single board, with a few very localized heat sources.
Having a big body of liquid will actually hinder the heat dissipation, because the liquid moves far slower than air, and your CPU is putting out 100+ watts of heat in a tiny area, or in my case 350 watts, turning the area near the CPU into a mini deep fryer - definitely not cool!
Given how today's air coolers can run whisper quiet (at stock speeds and voltages), I just don't see where immersion cooling could possibly fit in the PC market. It doesn't work any better than a high-end air cooler (Ninja or TRUE120), doesn't overclock anywhere near as well as TEC+water setups or phase change, and costs 50 times more.
Step 1: Read about crays
Step 2: Pay Billco £100,000
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit
It's immersion cooling. Pour liquid, add pump and radiator/bong, submit to slashdot.
We were doing this in the 90's!
Let me guess: you've never read anything about microprocessor engineering, have you ?
What you describe is what every non-engineer dreams of. You want a chip that any idiot can reprogram, without knowing the "less simple" ways of FPGAs. That's kind of like saying you want a car that gets 200 miles to the gallon, can park in a shoebox and carry 20 kids in the back seat - oh, and it drives itself automagically so your kids can take themselves to soccer practice without bugging you.
The reason why no one ever builds such monstrosities is because there is simply no point to it, when you can have purpose-built chips designed and fabbed for a fraction of the cost. People don't stop breathing just because their device needs 2 distinct chips instead of one jesus-truck.
it would cost more to try and police the populace in general than the state would make back in the tax
Traffic fines cost more than what they earn back, but that doesn't mean they're going to be vanishing anytime soon. Governments aren't interested in running more efficiently at the individual level, they're mostly interested in giving themselves raises and creating more jobs for their friends and family. If a use tax enforcement were to spend 30% more than they reclaim, it's a 30% net waste, but supporters will say it creates X jobs and stimulates Y part of the economy.
If we got rid of all the dead weight and circle-jerk finances in government, we'd be left with very small and powerless governments that would be more like associated contractors than all-knowing tyrannical machines. A guy can dream, can't he ?
* The plug-charger should be a USB port providing wall wart.
You mean, like, a hub ?
Proof that today's /. pwnies need a sarcasm detector.
I, for one, welcome our faceless minifig overlords!
Ya that's what irks me about all uplinks... 1mbit would have been plenty in the 90's, but this is the age of P2P and VPN and telework. It's real f'ing annoying to have to wait 2 hours just to transfer a big document between my home and office PCs.
If only I could run an ethernet cable to the local exchange down the street :P How hard could it possibly be ?
I frankly don't see why they're bothering with this project at all. The way things are going, the human race may not even exist in 2000 years, and if by some random meteor storm that takes out all of the world's military superpowers we actually manage to survive, biblical texts will not be of any help.
Hotlinking FAIL!
Thing is, the Chinese people don't see it the same way as you and I, because this is how it's been for years. Boil a frog slowly...
Free speech is a delicate battle in the rest of the world, because it gets in the way of government power mongers. In China, they've had power mongers forever, so the concept of free speech does not exist at all - it gets squashed anytime it pops up, "to protect society".
It's a whole different world over there, one that's very difficult for us to completely understand.
Dude! The fact that the olympics are in China in the first place is a huge political stunt. Everyone knew this kind of shit would happen, but still, the IOC wanted to give China a chance to show the world how it had changed for the better. Indeed, a few political/human-rights issues were at the heart of that deal, but as soon as China had secured the olympics, they went right back to their abusive habits. They got what they wanted, and they decided to show the world they're nobody's bitch.
How ironic.
Downloading something is a pretty modest show of solidarity because hardly anyone will notice.
I know the Olympics aren't supposed to be "politicized", but let's not be hypocrites: it's ALL about politics, and the fact that they are in Beijing this year is a huge political stunt.
If a bunch of athletes want to protest China's activities, I think they should go all the way and have a walk off. Just get to the starting line, wait for the buzzer, then stand there like an idiot until the others finish their run. All eyes will be on that one person, and the media will be all over them, ready to deliver that protester's sound bite around the world to billions of TV drones.
Now that's an act of protest!