The discovery of Sedna and 2003 UB313, both of which are very close to Pluto in size. This means Pluto is the same category of small rocky planets as Sedna and 2003 UB313, so it can't be considered the same category of planets as the other eight known planets.
I do like the nVidia cards because their "official release" ForceWare drivers are stable, fast, and work very well with almost every nVidia chipset out there (even if the driver is overkill for the older nVidia chipsets).
Mostly because they let the producers of Stargate SG-1 at least complete the season now in production. One remembers the fiasco of Farscape and how they cancelled the show by leaving way too many storylines dangling from the completed Season 4.
Desalinating water used to be an expensive, complicated process, but the developments in nanotechnology we could see a dramatic decrease in the price of such processing over the next 10-15 years, especially with new types of filters that are far more effective than even reverse-osmosis filters.
Between another series of civil wars all over the Middle East practically inevitable and daily production capacity already at a limit, oil prices are very likely to double in the next two years.
However, the price of crude oil is rapidly approaching the point where it becomes an elastic (demand sensitive to price) commodity--any higher and the demand will start to fall, which means if OPEC overprices oil they could end up holding the bag on too muc overpriced oil.
Also, at current prices there is huge incentive to introduce vastly better means of extracting oil such as steam injection and using heaters to liquefy highly-viscous forms of crude oil found in many parts of the world, which means a lot of supposedly unproductive oilfields suddenly become productive again. In the former Soviet Union, the introduction of modern Western oil extraction techniques have resulted in dramatic improvements in yield in oilfields in the former Soviet Central Asian republics and in the Caspian Sea. And you wonder why China National Petroleum Corporation is trying to possibly negotiate a deal with Vietnam and the Philippines so they could extract oil from the Spratley Islands between Vietnam and the Philippines, whose underwater reserves are estimated to be around 300 billion barrels alone.
The thing that really scares OPEC is the announcement last year that a division of Royal Dutch Shell demonstrated they could extract out crude oil in liquid form in situ from oil shale found in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Utah by using steam injection and directly heating the shale rock itself. By improving this technology, this could free up two trillion barrels of crude oil found in the oil shale in the USA, more oil than the ENTIRE Middle East combined! A modified version of this technology also means we could extract oil from the oil tar sands of Alberta province in Canada and along the Orinocco River in Venezuela without having to mine out the tar sands, possibly opening up several hundred billion barrels of crude oil for extraction. (In short, the most powerful member of OPEC could end up be Venezuela, of all things!)
Given the cash position of Microsoft, I can just see the big amount of money they might just offer to the likes of Garth Brooks, Led Zeppelin, and the Beatles just to have downloadable music from these artists available only in DRM-protected.WMA format, which would only work on any player that supports protected.WMA files and Microsoft's new Zune player.
I've seen the current Sony Grand WEGA SXRD KDS-60A2000 and that thing has a spectacular picture--amazing sharpness, excellent color and virtually no "rainbow effect" blurring that plagues earlier DLP sets. Once Sony combines their SXRD LCoS technology with an LED light source, this will be the ultimate solution for rear-projection TV's, since there will be essentially no moving parts except for the case cooling fan(s).
DLP takes up too much space, needs an expensive, failure prone projection lamp and has too many moving parts.
Fortunately, the issue of short projection lamp life is going away with the arrival of DLP rear-projection TV's that use LED's as a light source instead of a single lamp shining on a fast-spinning mechanical wheel. This has the advantage of 1) extremely long light source life and 2) virtually no "rainbow effect" motion blurring.
I do think that LCoS with an LED light source is the ultimate answer, since these two will allow for complete dispensing of any moving parts other than the case cooling fan.
Apple does have a point in this case. Because the iPod is so highly associated with Apple Computer, they need to make sure that the actual iPod word is copyright protected correctly to make sure other companies don't intentionally make money of a copyrighted word. After all, the current Linspire Linux distribution was originally called Lindows but since Microsoft expressed concern that this name too closely resembled the Windows trademarked name, that caused the creation of the current Linspire name.
That was an interesting project but if you start getting inquiries from the government or one Linda Moulton Howe (who has a major interest in crop circles and regularly reports on them for the Coast to Coast AM radio show), run for it!:-)
I also prefer wired keyboards and mouse pointers because at least these devices will work with almost no issues with radio frequency (RF) interference. These RF interference problems can possibly stop the functionality of the keyboard and/or mouse pointer until you resolve the RF interference problem, which is not as easy to correct as many people think given the amount of consumer home electronics in a house and interference from some microwave ovens.
However, I think the improved iPod Nanos with the larger flash memory capacities and a redesigned, scratch-resistant case may not arrive until Apple can get enough large-capacity flash memory from the likes of Samsung and other flash-memory manufacturers.
I will hazard a guess that the new iPod Nanos won't arrive until some time the fall of this year--likely late fall.
Have we seen Linux-based cellphones being offered from cellphone companies operating in the USA? I don't read about such phones from Sprint/Nextel, Verizon, Cingular, T Mobile, Metro PCS, and so on....
If this is part of the normal Microsoft Update process, you can configure Windows XP to notify of updates and manually go into the Microsoft Update website to "uncheck" updating to Internet Explorer 7.0 as part of the regular security updates.
Actually, due to a massive power failure in the Queens borough of New York City, it appears a LOT of Internet sites are not working properly this morning. It could be a while before things get back to normal.:-(
Here's the thing about AMD's PR numbers for their Athlon CPU's: they are far more representative of true level of CPU performance than the old Cyrix PR numbers. If you note all the tests done by Tom's Hardware and Anandtech with the Athlon XP CPU some years ago, note that the Athlon XP 2400+ CPU running at a much lower CPU clock rate than the Northwood-core Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz CPU had almost the exact performance on speed test and real-time application programs. The reason is simple: AMD's CPU core processed CPU instructions far more efficiently per clock cycle than the Pentium 4 CPU at the same clock speed.
ATI's motherboard chipsets will be sold to OEM's under the AMD label instead of the ATI label.
I think ATI's motherboard chipset business is what AMD really wants. This way, they don't have to wait for nVidia to come out with the latest nForce motherboard chipsets when it can be developed in-house using ATI's own technology.
However, expect the ATI name to remain for graphics card chipsets due to the name recognition factor of the ATI brand.
Smaller market share gives attackers less incentive to attack.
I have to disagree on that, especially since we're seeing more and more high-end servers running Linux. An expert programmer who knows Linux intimately could bring down a lot of systems without warning fairly quickly unless everyone is "on their toes" checking every aspect of the code for possible vulnerabilities all the time.
You can say it was overrated, but look how how online web sites actually has influenced elections recently. You do remember the infamous Rathergate scandal, where an attempt to denigrate President Bush during the 2004 election campaign got stopped because people on the Internet in a matter of hours showed that the evidence was a fraud? That scandal showed that the mass media better start being on their toes because quick analysis by online sites could have devestating results.
With the price of portable music players rapidly dropping, politicians doing podcasts may be a lot more effective than people think by 2008.
Will Microsoft license their new player technology for third party hardware and software support?
We should ask this question because if the likes of Creative Labs, iRiver, Samsung, Sandisk, Philips, etc. can license the technology of Microsoft's new player it could end up being a lot more formidable challenge to Apple than you think. Of course, I expect the legal online music download sites that support DRM-controlled.WMA files to offer support for this new technology, too.
By the way, expect the new player to support.MP3 format, mostly because podcasts usually use the.MP3 format.
Also, what do you mean by "excellent on-die cache control"?
One of the things that made the Pentium III-M such a wonderful chip was that it really took advantage of the on-chip L2 cache memory to offer surprisingly good performance despite the relatively low CPU clock speeds. It's that excellent interfacing with the L2 cache that was retained for the Core Duo (and likely Conroe-core Core Duo 2) CPU's.
One thing though: isn't the Conroe-core CPU's actually based heavily on the excellent Pentium III-M low-power CPU's with its excellent on-die cache control? It appears that Intel has finally come out with an excellent CPU core that is not only great for the latest games, but also can tackle higher-end multimedia file editing at reasonable speeds (as anyone who tries to do Photoshop image editing or Premiere video files can attest).
If Al Qaeda really wanted to destroy the US economy, they would quit futzing around with the high risk / low reward threats on US soil and just walk a nuke into one of the massive tech centers and level the entire industrial complex.
Actually, here in the USA the really scary scenario is an improvised nuclear device (IND) attack on a critical railroad marshalling yard such as BNSF's Barstow Yard in Barstow, CA or Union Pacific's Bailey Yard in North Platte, NE, both of which are extremely critical to transcontinental railroad freight movements; the same would apply to Memphis International Airport in Tennessee for FedEx and Louisville International Airport in Kentucky for UPS. Such an attack would cripple the US economy for years.
I may be wearing a tinfoil hat saying this, but India has a next-door neighbor armed with nuclear weapons.
Who's to say some Indian-based Muslim terrorist group managed to get a 20 kT nuclear device built in Pakistan, sneak it into India, and then detonated it at Bangalore, India's technology center? The resulting detonation could kill up to one million people and deal a massive setback to India's technological progress.
We all hope that Indian security forces are extremely well-aware of this potential terrorist threat.
Correction: all of them render correctly, and if they don't, it deserves a bug report.
One of the things that really bothered me about the old Netscape Navigator 4.x versions was that it rendered many web pages totally different than how Internet Explorer 3.x/4.x versions did. Small wonder why Internet Explorer became so popular.
But with Firefox, that's a different story. It appears that the programmers did a far better job of proper page rendering, so difficult-to-render web pages like ESPN.com's main web page render just about identically in terms of web page elements in both IE 6.01 SP1 and Firefox.
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The discovery of Sedna and 2003 UB313, both of which are very close to Pluto in size. This means Pluto is the same category of small rocky planets as Sedna and 2003 UB313, so it can't be considered the same category of planets as the other eight known planets.
I do like the nVidia cards because their "official release" ForceWare drivers are stable, fast, and work very well with almost every nVidia chipset out there (even if the driver is overkill for the older nVidia chipsets).
Mostly because they let the producers of Stargate SG-1 at least complete the season now in production. One remembers the fiasco of Farscape and how they cancelled the show by leaving way too many storylines dangling from the completed Season 4.
Desalinating water used to be an expensive, complicated process, but the developments in nanotechnology we could see a dramatic decrease in the price of such processing over the next 10-15 years, especially with new types of filters that are far more effective than even reverse-osmosis filters.
Between another series of civil wars all over the Middle East practically inevitable and daily production capacity already at a limit, oil prices are very likely to double in the next two years.
However, the price of crude oil is rapidly approaching the point where it becomes an elastic (demand sensitive to price) commodity--any higher and the demand will start to fall, which means if OPEC overprices oil they could end up holding the bag on too muc overpriced oil.
Also, at current prices there is huge incentive to introduce vastly better means of extracting oil such as steam injection and using heaters to liquefy highly-viscous forms of crude oil found in many parts of the world, which means a lot of supposedly unproductive oilfields suddenly become productive again. In the former Soviet Union, the introduction of modern Western oil extraction techniques have resulted in dramatic improvements in yield in oilfields in the former Soviet Central Asian republics and in the Caspian Sea. And you wonder why China National Petroleum Corporation is trying to possibly negotiate a deal with Vietnam and the Philippines so they could extract oil from the Spratley Islands between Vietnam and the Philippines, whose underwater reserves are estimated to be around 300 billion barrels alone.
The thing that really scares OPEC is the announcement last year that a division of Royal Dutch Shell demonstrated they could extract out crude oil in liquid form in situ from oil shale found in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Utah by using steam injection and directly heating the shale rock itself. By improving this technology, this could free up two trillion barrels of crude oil found in the oil shale in the USA, more oil than the ENTIRE Middle East combined! A modified version of this technology also means we could extract oil from the oil tar sands of Alberta province in Canada and along the Orinocco River in Venezuela without having to mine out the tar sands, possibly opening up several hundred billion barrels of crude oil for extraction. (In short, the most powerful member of OPEC could end up be Venezuela, of all things!)
Given the cash position of Microsoft, I can just see the big amount of money they might just offer to the likes of Garth Brooks, Led Zeppelin, and the Beatles just to have downloadable music from these artists available only in DRM-protected .WMA format, which would only work on any player that supports protected .WMA files and Microsoft's new Zune player.
I've seen the current Sony Grand WEGA SXRD KDS-60A2000 and that thing has a spectacular picture--amazing sharpness, excellent color and virtually no "rainbow effect" blurring that plagues earlier DLP sets. Once Sony combines their SXRD LCoS technology with an LED light source, this will be the ultimate solution for rear-projection TV's, since there will be essentially no moving parts except for the case cooling fan(s).
DLP takes up too much space, needs an expensive, failure prone projection lamp and has too many moving parts.
Fortunately, the issue of short projection lamp life is going away with the arrival of DLP rear-projection TV's that use LED's as a light source instead of a single lamp shining on a fast-spinning mechanical wheel. This has the advantage of 1) extremely long light source life and 2) virtually no "rainbow effect" motion blurring.
I do think that LCoS with an LED light source is the ultimate answer, since these two will allow for complete dispensing of any moving parts other than the case cooling fan.
Apple does have a point in this case. Because the iPod is so highly associated with Apple Computer, they need to make sure that the actual iPod word is copyright protected correctly to make sure other companies don't intentionally make money of a copyrighted word. After all, the current Linspire Linux distribution was originally called Lindows but since Microsoft expressed concern that this name too closely resembled the Windows trademarked name, that caused the creation of the current Linspire name.
That was an interesting project but if you start getting inquiries from the government or one Linda Moulton Howe (who has a major interest in crop circles and regularly reports on them for the Coast to Coast AM radio show), run for it! :-)
I also prefer wired keyboards and mouse pointers because at least these devices will work with almost no issues with radio frequency (RF) interference. These RF interference problems can possibly stop the functionality of the keyboard and/or mouse pointer until you resolve the RF interference problem, which is not as easy to correct as many people think given the amount of consumer home electronics in a house and interference from some microwave ovens.
However, I think the improved iPod Nanos with the larger flash memory capacities and a redesigned, scratch-resistant case may not arrive until Apple can get enough large-capacity flash memory from the likes of Samsung and other flash-memory manufacturers.
I will hazard a guess that the new iPod Nanos won't arrive until some time the fall of this year--likely late fall.
Have we seen Linux-based cellphones being offered from cellphone companies operating in the USA? I don't read about such phones from Sprint/Nextel, Verizon, Cingular, T Mobile, Metro PCS, and so on....
If this is part of the normal Microsoft Update process, you can configure Windows XP to notify of updates and manually go into the Microsoft Update website to "uncheck" updating to Internet Explorer 7.0 as part of the regular security updates.
Actually, due to a massive power failure in the Queens borough of New York City, it appears a LOT of Internet sites are not working properly this morning. It could be a while before things get back to normal. :-(
Here's the thing about AMD's PR numbers for their Athlon CPU's: they are far more representative of true level of CPU performance than the old Cyrix PR numbers. If you note all the tests done by Tom's Hardware and Anandtech with the Athlon XP CPU some years ago, note that the Athlon XP 2400+ CPU running at a much lower CPU clock rate than the Northwood-core Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz CPU had almost the exact performance on speed test and real-time application programs. The reason is simple: AMD's CPU core processed CPU instructions far more efficiently per clock cycle than the Pentium 4 CPU at the same clock speed.
ATI's motherboard chipsets will be sold to OEM's under the AMD label instead of the ATI label.
I think ATI's motherboard chipset business is what AMD really wants. This way, they don't have to wait for nVidia to come out with the latest nForce motherboard chipsets when it can be developed in-house using ATI's own technology.
However, expect the ATI name to remain for graphics card chipsets due to the name recognition factor of the ATI brand.
Smaller market share gives attackers less incentive to attack.
I have to disagree on that, especially since we're seeing more and more high-end servers running Linux. An expert programmer who knows Linux intimately could bring down a lot of systems without warning fairly quickly unless everyone is "on their toes" checking every aspect of the code for possible vulnerabilities all the time.
You can say it was overrated, but look how how online web sites actually has influenced elections recently. You do remember the infamous Rathergate scandal, where an attempt to denigrate President Bush during the 2004 election campaign got stopped because people on the Internet in a matter of hours showed that the evidence was a fraud? That scandal showed that the mass media better start being on their toes because quick analysis by online sites could have devestating results.
With the price of portable music players rapidly dropping, politicians doing podcasts may be a lot more effective than people think by 2008.
Will Microsoft license their new player technology for third party hardware and software support?
.WMA files to offer support for this new technology, too.
.MP3 format, mostly because podcasts usually use the .MP3 format.
We should ask this question because if the likes of Creative Labs, iRiver, Samsung, Sandisk, Philips, etc. can license the technology of Microsoft's new player it could end up being a lot more formidable challenge to Apple than you think. Of course, I expect the legal online music download sites that support DRM-controlled
By the way, expect the new player to support
Also, what do you mean by "excellent on-die cache control"?
One of the things that made the Pentium III-M such a wonderful chip was that it really took advantage of the on-chip L2 cache memory to offer surprisingly good performance despite the relatively low CPU clock speeds. It's that excellent interfacing with the L2 cache that was retained for the Core Duo (and likely Conroe-core Core Duo 2) CPU's.
One thing though: isn't the Conroe-core CPU's actually based heavily on the excellent Pentium III-M low-power CPU's with its excellent on-die cache control? It appears that Intel has finally come out with an excellent CPU core that is not only great for the latest games, but also can tackle higher-end multimedia file editing at reasonable speeds (as anyone who tries to do Photoshop image editing or Premiere video files can attest).
Actually, here in the USA the really scary scenario is an improvised nuclear device (IND) attack on a critical railroad marshalling yard such as BNSF's Barstow Yard in Barstow, CA or Union Pacific's Bailey Yard in North Platte, NE, both of which are extremely critical to transcontinental railroad freight movements; the same would apply to Memphis International Airport in Tennessee for FedEx and Louisville International Airport in Kentucky for UPS. Such an attack would cripple the US economy for years.
I may be wearing a tinfoil hat saying this, but India has a next-door neighbor armed with nuclear weapons.
Who's to say some Indian-based Muslim terrorist group managed to get a 20 kT nuclear device built in Pakistan, sneak it into India, and then detonated it at Bangalore, India's technology center? The resulting detonation could kill up to one million people and deal a massive setback to India's technological progress.
We all hope that Indian security forces are extremely well-aware of this potential terrorist threat.
Correction: all of them render correctly, and if they don't, it deserves a bug report.
One of the things that really bothered me about the old Netscape Navigator 4.x versions was that it rendered many web pages totally different than how Internet Explorer 3.x/4.x versions did. Small wonder why Internet Explorer became so popular.
But with Firefox, that's a different story. It appears that the programmers did a far better job of proper page rendering, so difficult-to-render web pages like ESPN.com's main web page render just about identically in terms of web page elements in both IE 6.01 SP1 and Firefox.