I agree, I've had some concerns about big media taking down the PVR companies, and they are certainly prowling around looking for an angle. However, I never watched ANY television prior to buying a TiVo, and I've gotten more than my money's worth out of it already, so from a purely selfish personal perspective, if they do... well, it won't be a very big loss to me. In that respect, I'm the perfect example of somebody who will take my "business" elsewhere.
.NET was never a plan to take over the web, except perhaps in a last-minute marketing sense..NET was a combination of COM v3 and "Next Generation Windows Services" (NGWS) right up until it's release, and is primarily a new API for writing applications. The object remoting features (part of which are web services) are only a small part, and it's unfortunate that the whole thing is being so poorly represented by the half-conscious dweebs in marketing. Ignoring the anti-MS paranoia (justified or not),.NET itself is nice if you do Windows development -- and MOST of us do (just a statement of fact, nothing more).
MS is backing off from.NET because uptake was slower than they planned. In short, the marketing dweebs got it wrong, but I believe this happened because the NGWS initiative was started more than four years ago, and frankly they expected more pre-installed support based on their dominance at the time and the then-seemingly-boundless growth rate in the now-stalling PC retail marketplace. Backing off on the.NET marketing has nothing to do with how much the marketing cost them. They got their message to the only group they ever really wanted to reach -- developers. EVERY Microsoft developer I've ever met (and I know many hundreds) is chomping at the bit to use.NET, and not because of web services, and not because of the silly reasons ZDNet dreams up each week.
Palladium, on the other hand, isn't nice no matter how you look at it, but then, we agree that it's a Very Bad Thing, so there isn't much point in rambling on about that.
I have to say though, I can't think of a good reason to *expect* them to spend a lot of money on Palladium. They might if they had a reason, but I don't see the reason. In the public marketplace, it's really best if they keep it quiet. Their true "market" is big media companies, and selling to them isn't expensive compared to general-public media campaigns.
On the other hand, I *can* see them spending a lot of money pushing the trusted computing thing. It's easy to put a happy-land shiny-people spin on a term like "trusted computing", and while they insist they aren't connected, it's pretty easy for any half-competent geek to see how a trusted computing platform could support an essentially un-hackable media-restriction facility like Palladium. (Unhackable in theory, of course.) It all depends on how deep the hardware support is, which leads to the one major flaw in your faith in the marketplace -- government intervention. Judging from your replies so far, I suspect I don't have to go into any detail on THAT nasty subject...
I do still have a few VCR's, but only because they haven't broken yet. For "time shifting" I have a TiVo. Granted, the VCR hasn't gone away yet, but it's days are numbered: top-end consumer VCRs are now more expensive (barely) than the bottom-end recordable DVD drives. It's only a matter of time.
Veering back to the main point though -- I hope you're right about the market killing Pd, but I don't have that much faith in the average consumer to question what they're buying that closely. Hopefully I'm wrong.
They have the motherboard tray completely backwards. When you fold it open, the card slots are closest to the rest of the case, and the CPU end of the motherboard -- where all the connectors are -- is farthest away. There are a few exceptions of course, like an IT7 with RAID -- which still has non-RAID IDE connectors in the usual spot, but connector location is generally pretty standard these days.) That case is the least-useful arrangement imaginable for a number of reasons -- all of which could be addressed if they had rotated the motherboard 180 degrees.
First, your IDE cables have to reach a LOT farther than they would in a normal case -- at least twice as far. Second, your IDE cables would be stretching over your PCI cards. Third, in this configuration the power connectors for the board, fans, and CPU are as far away from the powersupply as you can get. I'm assuming their PSU has super-extra-long cables, but again, those cables are hanging across everything else, and some of us like to swap up to better-quality PSUs in the machines we build -- PSUs which do not normally have ultra-mega-long cables. Fourth, with the positioning of the PCI cards, you're working right up against the vertical tower portion of the case -- not a huge hassle, but something that a 180 would have fixed. Fifth, all those extra-long cables wadded up inside will impede airflow.
You are absolutely correct. We have some Supras in town for whom I have a great deal of respect. You'd never know they were fast by looking at them, they don't have a big old gReddy fart-can hanging off the back, and they don't look like a rolling Uncle Ben billboard from Osaka.
Heck, I knew what you meant, and you do make a good point. On the other hand, in most Vipers -- often even those with pretty serious modifications -- the HP and TQ numbers are usually very close.:)
Why I prefer a big block to any riceboy one-point-whatever-liter engine is RPMs. The racing is fun, but I can also cruise comfortably all day at 100 MPH at 2000 RPM. Sure riceboy can cruise all day at 100 MPH too, but his little mousewheel is turning 4000 RPM to do it. That wear-and-tear adds up fast. After eight hours of driving (don't scoff, I once did 19 hours averaging 96 MPH) riceboy's engine has turned over nearly one million times more. The valves have banged around, the plugs have fired hundreds of thousands of times more. It's no wonder all the high-HP Japanese cars in town always seem to be in the shop...
Yeah, I probably should have added a disclaimer. Obviously not all shops are crooked -- but in my limited experience (which does cover all the popular shops in a city of about 2 million people) the number of virus-scare replies does seem to be on the high side.
Both types of racing require plenty of skill. I believe road racing requires quite a bit more skill, but drag racing well is actually very hard, and gets harder as the car's capabilities increase.
I have many, many Viper owning friends who are very accustomed to thrashing everything else on road courses. You have to step up to Challenge-class 360's and modified Porsches before the playing field is leveled against a daily driver Viper with the most basic mods (tubes & filters). Probably brakes are the only place where those two examples would far outclass a Viper, and the really good amatuer drivers I know would disagree with me there, too. On the other hand, there isn't a Japanese car made today that can compare to the suspension on a Viper. Straight out the factory door, it's as close to a ready-to-road-race car as you can get, except perhaps Porsches. In fact, road racing is what I had in mind when I wrote that, not drag racing.
I enjoy watching drag racing, but I don't find the endless waiting-in-line very much fun. Especially when the race only lasts a few seconds (best recorded bone-stock quarter-mile time for a Viper is 11.23, by the way).
But road racing -- that'll get your adrenaline flowing!
Besides, that last part of my original post was just a little joke -- not intended to spark a bunch of replies -- y'know, so my links weren't such obvious karma whoring...;)
...and that's not a troll or flamebait. I mean, it's really a dumb question.
It isn't that hard to make the decision to leave a computer out of your friggin bedroom, unless you live in a dorm room, an efficiency or studio apartment, or something along those lines.
I don't understand what makes this question at all interesting.
You don't like computers in your bedroom?
Neither do we.
So we didn't put any in there.
The ONLY reason I'm in favor of this is because all the repair shops in town tell everybody they have a virus. Many of my computer-using friends aren't all that PC-literate, and they've learned that with each passing year I get a little more grumpy about fixing their machine AGAIN. In actuality I'm getting more grumpy about them still not learning a damned thing about the machines they rely upon so heavily. Sigh. But I digress.:)
I've noticed that when they call a repair shop, no matter what silly little problem they might be seeing, the shop almost always concludes that the person may have a virus, and should bring it in right away (oh, and there will be a nominal $25-$50 fee to check it out). In the past two years I have seen the virus scare tactic used when people's machines:
(1) ran out of disk space -- I've seen that one three times now,
(2) had a dead modem,
(3) had an AGP slot going on the fritz,
(4) had a power switch that was flaking out,
(5) had a spent inkjet cartridge -- my favorite... oh yeah, it's a virus...
So that's seven incidents in two years with responses from everything ranging from CompUSA to the local nerd-on-the-corner. Usually I'd start out just recommending they call somebody else, but when they hit the third or fourth place claiming it was a virus, I'd break down and fix it for them -- and hopefully educate them a little in the process. (So far I've only seen one case where somebody actually had any actual mal-ware, and in that case her moron boyfriend had downloaded a fake porn EXE which proceeded to delete files. Idiot.)
On top of the virus scam, I've seen a number of very minor problems in which the shop told the person they needed a whole new computer, when it was really just a bad video card or something equally simple. I think they reserve the Big Whammy of a new machine for the scary times when the computer doesn't seem to do anything at all when the user hits the power.
These experiences have forced me to conclude that most computer repair people are either fantastically (and improbably) incompetent, or they're just outright con artists looking to scam money from people who don't know any better.
The guy who said use graphite is absolutely right, it's the best way to get your axle to spin. That said, don't use "wheel nails" as he indicates -- use an actual axle running through a hole drilled into the body. Find the most rigid, lightweight "rod" you can for an axle. Get the graphite that comes in a squeeze tube, which makes it easy to squirt into the axle hole. Make the hole relatively tight (bouncing around is wasted motion) but not tight enough to restrict rotation or make it unreasonably difficult to add graphite. Be aware that graphite is powdery, messy stuff, so carry the car in a big ziploc or something along those lines.
Put all your weight in the middle, and as low as possible. If you put it up front, your rear wheels end up being a drag. Max out the weight as everybody suggested, it does help it run more smoothly. Just hollow out the shell as much as you dare, melt lead fishing weights into it, and goo the whole thing over with silicone to make it stay in place. I have a shoebox in a closet that I just happened to open a few months ago that has 25 year old cars in which the siliconed weights are still securely in place. The nice thing about lead is that you can actually re-melt it and experiment with distribution prior to siliconing it into the final location. For testing we'd just temporarily tape it in place using something strong like electrical tape.
I'll go counter to everything everybody else said: Aerodynamics didn't seem to matter at all. Many decades ago I consistently won with *everything* I built -- specifically, that included a big boxy "fire truck" design festooned with all sorts of plastic "equipment". I never took anything less than first place in the 20 or 25 cars I built and ran over a period of several years. I doubt the cars go fast enough or run far enough for aero to matter -- it's all weight distribution and free rotation of your wheels.
That said, most of my car bodies still followed a basic low-wedge shape, with a wide rounded-bottom groove down the middle. This was easy to build, sort of looked aerodynamic, and removed as much high-riding wood weight as possible, leaving as much low-riding lead weight available as possible. I've tried shaving weight off EVERYWHERE, in some cases even trimming wheels down to flat discs (leading to new rules in our group requiring the use of specific wheels from a kit).
"Real" car designs are boring, everybody does those. Go for the abstract. Confuse your opponents.:)
I can think of at least two things which might qualify as prior art.
First of all, in the late 80's there was that awful color-changing clothing. Mostly it was a body-heat thing, so it wasn't truly controllable, but I only mention it as a point of reference -- around the same time I very clearly remember articles in magazines like PopSci telling us how we'd all soon have clothing which would allow us to change the colors at a whim. Right after we hopped out of our flying cars, I presume. In any case, even if it never came to be, I distinctly remember the concept, and I'm having trouble seeing how it differs materially (no pun intended) from this idea.
Second, auto manufacturers have demonstrated color-changing panels for various applications. I have actually seen these in operation. These are probably even closer to the description.
The US/Mexico border is huge. So large in fact that no one can use the entire border to cross over into the US. Therefore the border cannot be crossed illegally.
You misunderstand what people are saying. In TIA terms, you only described this nonsensical scenario: "The volume of data which must be processed is huge. Therefore, a criminal could not possibly generate crime-related data." Clearly that doesn't make any sense.
What you should have said was: "The border is huge, therefore the border cannot be effectively patrolled." This would be an effective comparison to the point people are trying to make.
Interestingly, that comparison works well at first glance, since the border really is very ineffectively patrolled. However, there is another flaw in the comparison. The size of the border is a known and unchanging value, and it isn't very large relative to the resources that would be required to more effectively monitor it. In the case of TIA data, the size is unpredictable, continuously growing, and appears to be much larger than anyone could realistically expect to monitor -- that's the argument anyway, and it's a reasonable position.
Unfortunately, that argument is used to dismiss the importance of TIA, which is a critical mistake. The most important point to recognize is that whether they can succeed or not, they have no right to make the attempt, and the fact that an attempt is being made is very alarming and should be opposed.
Every time id comes out with a new version of Quake, I wonder why they don't offer a screensaver mode. It should take one of them maybe two hours of keyboard time... maybe a day if they do network-bot-autoplay (they'd need some kind of autodiscovery, fairly trivial). On slower PCs the load/shutdown times would suck until the average gamer's PC caught up with the high-end of the target platforms (and now, god-knows-how-many-years-later, something like Q1 ought to load up pretty damned fast).
Of course, Carmack reads/. sometimes... let's keep our fingers crossed for Doom III...:)
Heck, I'd probably pay a little extra, now that I think about it.
"I'll write up the requirements while you start coding, go!"
LOL, that's hilarious. And it's exactly how our Systems Analysts work. In my company (Fortune 50 company) the Analysts are just business people who wanted a taste of the IT budget. A week or so of training, and voila, they're presented with the mantle and all the rights conferred thereunto. And this is not unique to my current employer, I've seen this at many large companies.
I rest much of the blame on the Human Resources department.
'cos you know, Sun isn't doing ANY [sun.com] R&D [sun.com], they're just suing Microsoft in hopes that the money gained will hide the fact that they're not innovating.
Big deal. In this case, there is no question, Sun is relying on litigation to further promote their product. If you want to argue about who does more research, it's well-known that Microsoft spends billions on research. You have to step up to one of the real giants like IBM before you'll find more pure research.
First, although XML seems more 'open', in reality it is simply a higher-level encoding that may or may not be easier to understand but is guaranteed to both take longer to parse and take up more space than the conventional.doc format because of the size of the tags, making this a downgrade 'optimization' of both speed and size -- where is the win here?
Funny. I just made a "hello world" document using Word 2000 and it was 19 KB.;-)
Funny, I just used my Kenworth semi to run up to the store for a gallon of milk, and it burned $4 in diesel. On the other hand, my wife's car isn't going to fare so well hauling 80,000 pounds of furniture cross-country.
It's called "using the right tool for the job". In another window I have a 40-page, 60,000 character business requirements document open which contains at least 10 or 15 charts and diagrams, miscellaneous graphics, and a whole bunch of formatting, and the DOC file is only 280K. Seems reasonable to me.
(I just love the car/computer analogy tradition...)
That's a good point, those clearance item deals are the way to go for computer audio. For my wife I picked up a Harmon Kardon AVR-45 for only $100 and a pair of 150W Yamaha speakers for $80 each in a similar deal. Prior to that she was running through a cheapy $120 Aiwa bookshelf stereo (the crappy things that look like separate components but it really isn't) and even those blew away "computer speakers". Now the Aiwa is running on the computer in the garage.:)
If he's actually an audiophile, he won't be interested in "computer speakers", and regardless, he won't want to listen to audio from his PC anyway -- and when he does, he won't be expecting even the basic quality an audiophile demands/expects/prefers. Not that I claim to be an audiophile (my hearing sucks), but I have plenty of friends who really are, so I've learned a lot about how these people think. That's assuming he's an audiophile, and not just "a guy who likes music a lot" (I can relate).
The best thing you can do is buy a cheap external amplifier and spend most of the money on real home-stereo speakers. The cheapest external amp and the cheapest home stereo speakers are going to sound 100 times better than any crappy little desktop setup. If your budget is more flexible than you indicated in the article, consider dropping about $100 for a nice, very basic amp by somebody decent like Pioneer, and spend another $200 or so on some regular home stereo speakers.
Don't listen to the standard geek line about shelling out tons of money for crappy little desktop speakers. Even the ones with separate subs sound awful in comparison to real stereo equipment.
And if he's actually an audiophile according to the picky, traditional definition of the word, get him a gift certificate, suggest he buys a real amp, a really nice sound card, and some good speakres, and let him go "test drive" some equipment...
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MS is backing off from .NET because uptake was slower than they planned. In short, the marketing dweebs got it wrong, but I believe this happened because the NGWS initiative was started more than four years ago, and frankly they expected more pre-installed support based on their dominance at the time and the then-seemingly-boundless growth rate in the now-stalling PC retail marketplace. Backing off on the .NET marketing has nothing to do with how much the marketing cost them. They got their message to the only group they ever really wanted to reach -- developers. EVERY Microsoft developer I've ever met (and I know many hundreds) is chomping at the bit to use .NET, and not because of web services, and not because of the silly reasons ZDNet dreams up each week.
Palladium, on the other hand, isn't nice no matter how you look at it, but then, we agree that it's a Very Bad Thing, so there isn't much point in rambling on about that.
I have to say though, I can't think of a good reason to *expect* them to spend a lot of money on Palladium. They might if they had a reason, but I don't see the reason. In the public marketplace, it's really best if they keep it quiet. Their true "market" is big media companies, and selling to them isn't expensive compared to general-public media campaigns.
On the other hand, I *can* see them spending a lot of money pushing the trusted computing thing. It's easy to put a happy-land shiny-people spin on a term like "trusted computing", and while they insist they aren't connected, it's pretty easy for any half-competent geek to see how a trusted computing platform could support an essentially un-hackable media-restriction facility like Palladium. (Unhackable in theory, of course.) It all depends on how deep the hardware support is, which leads to the one major flaw in your faith in the marketplace -- government intervention. Judging from your replies so far, I suspect I don't have to go into any detail on THAT nasty subject...
Veering back to the main point though -- I hope you're right about the market killing Pd, but I don't have that much faith in the average consumer to question what they're buying that closely. Hopefully I'm wrong.
They're called "DVD players".
First, your IDE cables have to reach a LOT farther than they would in a normal case -- at least twice as far. Second, your IDE cables would be stretching over your PCI cards. Third, in this configuration the power connectors for the board, fans, and CPU are as far away from the powersupply as you can get. I'm assuming their PSU has super-extra-long cables, but again, those cables are hanging across everything else, and some of us like to swap up to better-quality PSUs in the machines we build -- PSUs which do not normally have ultra-mega-long cables. Fourth, with the positioning of the PCI cards, you're working right up against the vertical tower portion of the case -- not a huge hassle, but something that a 180 would have fixed. Fifth, all those extra-long cables wadded up inside will impede airflow.
You are absolutely correct. We have some Supras in town for whom I have a great deal of respect. You'd never know they were fast by looking at them, they don't have a big old gReddy fart-can hanging off the back, and they don't look like a rolling Uncle Ben billboard from Osaka.
Why I prefer a big block to any riceboy one-point-whatever-liter engine is RPMs. The racing is fun, but I can also cruise comfortably all day at 100 MPH at 2000 RPM. Sure riceboy can cruise all day at 100 MPH too, but his little mousewheel is turning 4000 RPM to do it. That wear-and-tear adds up fast. After eight hours of driving (don't scoff, I once did 19 hours averaging 96 MPH) riceboy's engine has turned over nearly one million times more. The valves have banged around, the plugs have fired hundreds of thousands of times more. It's no wonder all the high-HP Japanese cars in town always seem to be in the shop...
Yeah, I'll stick with the big engine, thanks.
Yeah, I probably should have added a disclaimer. Obviously not all shops are crooked -- but in my limited experience (which does cover all the popular shops in a city of about 2 million people) the number of virus-scare replies does seem to be on the high side.
I have many, many Viper owning friends who are very accustomed to thrashing everything else on road courses. You have to step up to Challenge-class 360's and modified Porsches before the playing field is leveled against a daily driver Viper with the most basic mods (tubes & filters). Probably brakes are the only place where those two examples would far outclass a Viper, and the really good amatuer drivers I know would disagree with me there, too. On the other hand, there isn't a Japanese car made today that can compare to the suspension on a Viper. Straight out the factory door, it's as close to a ready-to-road-race car as you can get, except perhaps Porsches. In fact, road racing is what I had in mind when I wrote that, not drag racing.
I enjoy watching drag racing, but I don't find the endless waiting-in-line very much fun. Especially when the race only lasts a few seconds (best recorded bone-stock quarter-mile time for a Viper is 11.23, by the way).
But road racing -- that'll get your adrenaline flowing!
Besides, that last part of my original post was just a little joke -- not intended to spark a bunch of replies -- y'know, so my links weren't such obvious karma whoring... ;)
It isn't that hard to make the decision to leave a computer out of your friggin bedroom, unless you live in a dorm room, an efficiency or studio apartment, or something along those lines.
I don't understand what makes this question at all interesting.
You don't like computers in your bedroom?
Neither do we.
So we didn't put any in there.
Hope that helps.
here
there
everywhere
And remember the two rules:
Oh yeah, and the third rule:
Anyway, I hope you find the other links useful. Lots of information (of varying quality) in those threads.
I've noticed that when they call a repair shop, no matter what silly little problem they might be seeing, the shop almost always concludes that the person may have a virus, and should bring it in right away (oh, and there will be a nominal $25-$50 fee to check it out). In the past two years I have seen the virus scare tactic used when people's machines:
(1) ran out of disk space -- I've seen that one three times now,
(2) had a dead modem,
(3) had an AGP slot going on the fritz,
(4) had a power switch that was flaking out,
(5) had a spent inkjet cartridge -- my favorite... oh yeah, it's a virus...
So that's seven incidents in two years with responses from everything ranging from CompUSA to the local nerd-on-the-corner. Usually I'd start out just recommending they call somebody else, but when they hit the third or fourth place claiming it was a virus, I'd break down and fix it for them -- and hopefully educate them a little in the process. (So far I've only seen one case where somebody actually had any actual mal-ware, and in that case her moron boyfriend had downloaded a fake porn EXE which proceeded to delete files. Idiot.)
On top of the virus scam, I've seen a number of very minor problems in which the shop told the person they needed a whole new computer, when it was really just a bad video card or something equally simple. I think they reserve the Big Whammy of a new machine for the scary times when the computer doesn't seem to do anything at all when the user hits the power.
These experiences have forced me to conclude that most computer repair people are either fantastically (and improbably) incompetent, or they're just outright con artists looking to scam money from people who don't know any better.
Insightful... Wish I had some mod points today.
Hmmmm, maybe THAT's why my big boxy fire engine won. :)
Put all your weight in the middle, and as low as possible. If you put it up front, your rear wheels end up being a drag. Max out the weight as everybody suggested, it does help it run more smoothly. Just hollow out the shell as much as you dare, melt lead fishing weights into it, and goo the whole thing over with silicone to make it stay in place. I have a shoebox in a closet that I just happened to open a few months ago that has 25 year old cars in which the siliconed weights are still securely in place. The nice thing about lead is that you can actually re-melt it and experiment with distribution prior to siliconing it into the final location. For testing we'd just temporarily tape it in place using something strong like electrical tape.
I'll go counter to everything everybody else said: Aerodynamics didn't seem to matter at all. Many decades ago I consistently won with *everything* I built -- specifically, that included a big boxy "fire truck" design festooned with all sorts of plastic "equipment". I never took anything less than first place in the 20 or 25 cars I built and ran over a period of several years. I doubt the cars go fast enough or run far enough for aero to matter -- it's all weight distribution and free rotation of your wheels.
That said, most of my car bodies still followed a basic low-wedge shape, with a wide rounded-bottom groove down the middle. This was easy to build, sort of looked aerodynamic, and removed as much high-riding wood weight as possible, leaving as much low-riding lead weight available as possible. I've tried shaving weight off EVERYWHERE, in some cases even trimming wheels down to flat discs (leading to new rules in our group requiring the use of specific wheels from a kit).
"Real" car designs are boring, everybody does those. Go for the abstract. Confuse your opponents. :)
First of all, in the late 80's there was that awful color-changing clothing. Mostly it was a body-heat thing, so it wasn't truly controllable, but I only mention it as a point of reference -- around the same time I very clearly remember articles in magazines like PopSci telling us how we'd all soon have clothing which would allow us to change the colors at a whim. Right after we hopped out of our flying cars, I presume. In any case, even if it never came to be, I distinctly remember the concept, and I'm having trouble seeing how it differs materially (no pun intended) from this idea.
Second, auto manufacturers have demonstrated color-changing panels for various applications. I have actually seen these in operation. These are probably even closer to the description.
You misunderstand what people are saying. In TIA terms, you only described this nonsensical scenario: "The volume of data which must be processed is huge. Therefore, a criminal could not possibly generate crime-related data." Clearly that doesn't make any sense.
What you should have said was: "The border is huge, therefore the border cannot be effectively patrolled." This would be an effective comparison to the point people are trying to make.
Interestingly, that comparison works well at first glance, since the border really is very ineffectively patrolled. However, there is another flaw in the comparison. The size of the border is a known and unchanging value, and it isn't very large relative to the resources that would be required to more effectively monitor it. In the case of TIA data, the size is unpredictable, continuously growing, and appears to be much larger than anyone could realistically expect to monitor -- that's the argument anyway, and it's a reasonable position.
Unfortunately, that argument is used to dismiss the importance of TIA, which is a critical mistake. The most important point to recognize is that whether they can succeed or not, they have no right to make the attempt, and the fact that an attempt is being made is very alarming and should be opposed.
Every time id comes out with a new version of Quake, I wonder why they don't offer a screensaver mode. It should take one of them maybe two hours of keyboard time... maybe a day if they do network-bot-autoplay (they'd need some kind of autodiscovery, fairly trivial). On slower PCs the load/shutdown times would suck until the average gamer's PC caught up with the high-end of the target platforms (and now, god-knows-how-many-years-later, something like Q1 ought to load up pretty damned fast).
Of course, Carmack reads /. sometimes... let's keep our fingers crossed for Doom III... :)
Heck, I'd probably pay a little extra, now that I think about it.
LOL, that's hilarious. And it's exactly how our Systems Analysts work. In my company (Fortune 50 company) the Analysts are just business people who wanted a taste of the IT budget. A week or so of training, and voila, they're presented with the mantle and all the rights conferred thereunto. And this is not unique to my current employer, I've seen this at many large companies.
I rest much of the blame on the Human Resources department.
18K is relatively warm compared to where they expected it would become superconductive (like 2K).
Though I'll grant that "18K" by itself doesn't make a good figure to quote for the /. submission.
Big deal. In this case, there is no question, Sun is relying on litigation to further promote their product. If you want to argue about who does more research, it's well-known that Microsoft spends billions on research. You have to step up to one of the real giants like IBM before you'll find more pure research.
http://research.microsoft.com
Funny. I just made a "hello world" document using Word 2000 and it was 19 KB. ;-)
Funny, I just used my Kenworth semi to run up to the store for a gallon of milk, and it burned $4 in diesel. On the other hand, my wife's car isn't going to fare so well hauling 80,000 pounds of furniture cross-country.
It's called "using the right tool for the job". In another window I have a 40-page, 60,000 character business requirements document open which contains at least 10 or 15 charts and diagrams, miscellaneous graphics, and a whole bunch of formatting, and the DOC file is only 280K. Seems reasonable to me.
(I just love the car/computer analogy tradition...)
That's a good point, those clearance item deals are the way to go for computer audio. For my wife I picked up a Harmon Kardon AVR-45 for only $100 and a pair of 150W Yamaha speakers for $80 each in a similar deal. Prior to that she was running through a cheapy $120 Aiwa bookshelf stereo (the crappy things that look like separate components but it really isn't) and even those blew away "computer speakers". Now the Aiwa is running on the computer in the garage. :)
If he's actually an audiophile, he won't be interested in "computer speakers", and regardless, he won't want to listen to audio from his PC anyway -- and when he does, he won't be expecting even the basic quality an audiophile demands/expects/prefers. Not that I claim to be an audiophile (my hearing sucks), but I have plenty of friends who really are, so I've learned a lot about how these people think. That's assuming he's an audiophile, and not just "a guy who likes music a lot" (I can relate). The best thing you can do is buy a cheap external amplifier and spend most of the money on real home-stereo speakers. The cheapest external amp and the cheapest home stereo speakers are going to sound 100 times better than any crappy little desktop setup. If your budget is more flexible than you indicated in the article, consider dropping about $100 for a nice, very basic amp by somebody decent like Pioneer, and spend another $200 or so on some regular home stereo speakers. Don't listen to the standard geek line about shelling out tons of money for crappy little desktop speakers. Even the ones with separate subs sound awful in comparison to real stereo equipment. And if he's actually an audiophile according to the picky, traditional definition of the word, get him a gift certificate, suggest he buys a real amp, a really nice sound card, and some good speakres, and let him go "test drive" some equipment...
Yeah, and a big thanks for all that additional information you provided.
At least I gave it a shot.
Want my TRUE take on the whole satellite thing? Stick to MP3s. ;)
Guess Forbes (or Fortune or whatever it was) was wrong.
They definitely made a big deal out of XM needing more satellites. I wonder if the companies had/have plans to go global maybe?