A case is more than just a box holding your computer components in. Apple has known this for years. The compact G4 Cube was designed in such a way as to allow natural air convection to eliminate the need for a fan. The G5 is designed literally inside and out to maximize cooling through individual parts of the interior. Some components must be close together, others far apart, and at all times cooling must be kept in mind if you want it to run more than three days.
Cool cases look like regular cases with windows and neon. Cooler ones look like insects with glowing eyes. Really cool cases combine form and function, in the same way the best architecture does. Why not integrate a water-cooled case with a small Zen water bubbler outside? Or a super-slim case that can be mounted on the wall with an LCD monitor attached? Or a true "media PC" that looks, acts and works like just another stereo component? Or a kids' PC with rounded and rubberized edges and a color-changing chameleon skin?
These are the sort of mods that really show a person's skill -- both technically and artistically imaginative. You don't have to be as radical as the above suggestions to be a great case modder, but you should know that it takes more than neon and windows to make a case mod into art.
Wasn't it one of William Gibson's cyberpunk books where a character was running around with a custom laptop, where the case was made with wood, seashells and other all-organic materials? IIRC the maker did a small but good business with those sorts of things.
Companies like AlienWare are only scratching the surface of what kind of profits "custom hardware" can provide. There must be one or two low-profile shops in New York City or San Francisco that specialize custom jobs on hardware. If not, the first person to successfully market one to the rich geek elite has a killing to be made.
. In this ep, the Matrix was a repository of all Time Lord knowledge.
This sounds more like the Autobot Matrix of Leadership than Neo's Matrix. One probably shouldn't derive too much meaning from an obviously overused word.
they are very very good at putting pressure on suppliers to cut prices, because they are such a big volume seller.
In their retail outlets, yes. But I've never heard anything to indicate that wal-mart.com is anywhere near as successful. Since they're trying to sell music downloads, not music CDs, then unless they're proposing in-store kiosks with CD burners they'll have some trouble breaking in.
This will be worthwhile if for nothing else than finally giving all us nerds the "data crystals" we have always wanted from various crap sci-fi...
Data crystals are based on holographic data storage. Holographic memory has the advantage of preserving vast amounts of data throughout the volume of the crystal, not just on the surface, plus if it's chipped or broken each piece still retains the entire holographic image. It's completely different from any data storage method used today, including this one.
For various reasons, mostly cost and implementation, holographic data storage has never materialized. You can read a little more about it at HowStuffWorks and other places. (I googled for "holographic memory data storage" and found that page at the top.)
This will have the effect of IMPROVING security worldwide.
Perhaps, but it also has the effect of damaging a company's public image and stock price by making them look ineffective or unsafe for consumers' data. That's the only reason protection money is paid to hackers.
Any CEO with a brain knows that if a business is attacked once, it can be attacked more than once -- but appearing vulnerable to one's customers is just compounding the damage. Better, they reason, to pay off the extortionists and then beef up IT and network security.
DDoS attacks require a *lot* of hacked computers. Usually Microsoft OSes with low security settings.
It annoys me that MS's bad approach to security is now threatening businesses worldwide on two levels, first by exposing their own computers and then by exposing them to distributed attacks by the general populace. Even businesses that didn't have a single MS system in use are affected by one company's half-@$$ed security practices.
Not trying to troll, just making a genuine point. If consumer computers were security-locked by default, DDoS attacks would be infinitely more difficult to pull off.
I'm wondering what the error actually was -- it sounds like the sort of thing you get when you do an outer join between two database tables instead of an inner join.
A simple mistake, really, but something that obvious should have been caught before it went into production.
I, for one, am all for this. Providing machines with a way to reclaim their own heat energy for power is the only way to ensure we don't all end up jacked into a computer-generated Matrix so they can suck up ours.
Nokia will today be licking its wounds and doing a fair amount of worrying, with the revelation that the N-Gage's security has been cracked like an egg
"In other news, all of us here at CD Freaks have ten-inch penises and can eat shattered glass without feeling pain. Boo-ya!"
The idea that one actually had some involvement with their kids is historically kind of new.
Yeah, I'm sure it wasn't until the last century or two that humankind finally figured out that children who spend time with their mothers actually take longer to starve.
Incidentally, you forgot to argue that your "historical" approach to parenting was somehow better than loving and teaching them on an ongoing basis. Simply saying it's "unhealthy" don't make it so.
The government report that TV destroys braincells was compiled without a study, no evidence, nothing.
I have sufficient anecdotal evidence that kids who watch television continue on to buy crappy music, get addicted to mindless sitcoms and are motivated by advertisers to crave worthless crap in order to look more like their favorite celebrities. If that's not brain damage, I don't know what is.
On a side note, does it disturb anyone else that a mere 5 people control such weighty decision affecting telecommunications?
There are only nine people on the U.S. Supreme Court who decide whether laws governing your school, your privacy, or your right to have an abortion are constitutional or not. Get used to it.
Once again, you guys assume it doesn't count if it's not in your backyard.
Well, thanks for the information. The next time this American wants to watch South Korean programming in his car, he'll know just where to import the tech and be the "first on the block".
With hundreds of channels of entertainment, from the Disney Channel to HBO, to keep them occupied, they're silent. "It's like you don't even have them. You can baby-sit and drive at the same time,'' Montag said.
I have my own kids -- four of them now. I grew up in a family of five kids, two parents. So I know full well what it's like to have them arguing, complaining, fighting, and griping all through a long car trip.
But I still maintain that drugging them into submission with non-stop video signals is not the best solution. It's easy enough to get into that habit at home -- sit the kids in front of the TV after school until dinner, then after dinner until bedtime. They're entertained, you have peace and quiet. Then when they get older, you wonder why they're thirty pounds overweight before they've hit puberty and never do their homework at night.
TV, either in the car or at home, should be a privilege. Give it to them when they've earned it, and turn it off when it's done. I prefer a DVD player to satellite TV, because (1) there's no commercials, (2) I can control what they do and don't watch, and (3) when the show's over, it's over--there's nothing "coming up next" unless I say there is.
Our kids would be overjoyed to have satellite TV in the car for our periodic 3-hour drives to my in-laws. Instead we give them toys, books, children's music, and Magna-Doodle drawing boards. Works just as well, the noise is minimal, and their brains actually continue to develop instead of just rotting away inside their skulls.
Think of professional athletes as getting ungodly amounts of hazard pay. It's one thing to get $1.5 million for, say, singing on stage with a backup band. It's another to get the same amount of money to run around on a grassy field with nearly two dozen other strong, athletic, testosterone-addled men trying to take the ball from you or die trying.
Another way to look at it is: pro athletes are paid fairly, but our military ground troops are paid far, far too little.
"Dinosaur" could have been great, but it suffered from bad pacing. The first 20-30 minutes of the film were about the main character and the lemurs doing nothing much, and only after all that time did the meteor strike and the real plot began. The result was that the main storyline was reduced to less than an hour, and it was so full of cliches and "Land Before Time" derivatives it couldn't make up for the loss.
"Dinosaur" looked beautiful, no doubt, and it had as good a message as any Disney production. But as a movie it left much to be desired.
Yes, I can be disappointed that they didn't answer the "layers" question
Oh, for Pete's sake... for the last time, people, the Oracle told us how Neo stopped the Sentinels. The One is powerful enough to connect to the Matrix, and through it the entire network of machines, without being physically plugged into it. She said it right on camera, with no distractions, so everyone could hear it. It was right in the goddamned movie.
Whether you accept the explanation as sufficient depends on how much disbelief you're willing to suspend, but please keep in mind that while the Matrix movies are many things, hard sci-fi is not one of them.
Why do you think internet explorer doesn't block ads by default?
Because the developers are lazy and behind the curve. It's already been commented that popup blocking will be included in IE 7 for Longhorn -- two years from now.
IIRC, battery life in the 2nd-gen iPods was about 50% longer than the 3rd-gen ones, if not more. That was a sacrifice Apple made for the smaller size. If battery life is your only complaint, buy a used 2nd-gen online.
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A case is more than just a box holding your computer components in. Apple has known this for years. The compact G4 Cube was designed in such a way as to allow natural air convection to eliminate the need for a fan. The G5 is designed literally inside and out to maximize cooling through individual parts of the interior. Some components must be close together, others far apart, and at all times cooling must be kept in mind if you want it to run more than three days.
Cool cases look like regular cases with windows and neon. Cooler ones look like insects with glowing eyes. Really cool cases combine form and function, in the same way the best architecture does. Why not integrate a water-cooled case with a small Zen water bubbler outside? Or a super-slim case that can be mounted on the wall with an LCD monitor attached? Or a true "media PC" that looks, acts and works like just another stereo component? Or a kids' PC with rounded and rubberized edges and a color-changing chameleon skin?
These are the sort of mods that really show a person's skill -- both technically and artistically imaginative. You don't have to be as radical as the above suggestions to be a great case modder, but you should know that it takes more than neon and windows to make a case mod into art.
Wasn't it one of William Gibson's cyberpunk books where a character was running around with a custom laptop, where the case was made with wood, seashells and other all-organic materials? IIRC the maker did a small but good business with those sorts of things.
Companies like AlienWare are only scratching the surface of what kind of profits "custom hardware" can provide. There must be one or two low-profile shops in New York City or San Francisco that specialize custom jobs on hardware. If not, the first person to successfully market one to the rich geek elite has a killing to be made.
. In this ep, the Matrix was a repository of all Time Lord knowledge.
This sounds more like the Autobot Matrix of Leadership than Neo's Matrix. One probably shouldn't derive too much meaning from an obviously overused word.
they are very very good at putting pressure on suppliers to cut prices, because they are such a big volume seller.
In their retail outlets, yes. But I've never heard anything to indicate that wal-mart.com is anywhere near as successful. Since they're trying to sell music downloads, not music CDs, then unless they're proposing in-store kiosks with CD burners they'll have some trouble breaking in.
This will be worthwhile if for nothing else than finally giving all us nerds the "data crystals" we have always wanted from various crap sci-fi...
Data crystals are based on holographic data storage. Holographic memory has the advantage of preserving vast amounts of data throughout the volume of the crystal, not just on the surface, plus if it's chipped or broken each piece still retains the entire holographic image. It's completely different from any data storage method used today, including this one.
For various reasons, mostly cost and implementation, holographic data storage has never materialized. You can read a little more about it at HowStuffWorks and other places. (I googled for "holographic memory data storage" and found that page at the top.)
This will have the effect of IMPROVING security worldwide.
Perhaps, but it also has the effect of damaging a company's public image and stock price by making them look ineffective or unsafe for consumers' data. That's the only reason protection money is paid to hackers.
Any CEO with a brain knows that if a business is attacked once, it can be attacked more than once -- but appearing vulnerable to one's customers is just compounding the damage. Better, they reason, to pay off the extortionists and then beef up IT and network security.
DDoS attacks require a *lot* of hacked computers. Usually Microsoft OSes with low security settings.
It annoys me that MS's bad approach to security is now threatening businesses worldwide on two levels, first by exposing their own computers and then by exposing them to distributed attacks by the general populace. Even businesses that didn't have a single MS system in use are affected by one company's half-@$$ed security practices.
Not trying to troll, just making a genuine point. If consumer computers were security-locked by default, DDoS attacks would be infinitely more difficult to pull off.
I'm wondering what the error actually was -- it sounds like the sort of thing you get when you do an outer join between two database tables instead of an inner join.
A simple mistake, really, but something that obvious should have been caught before it went into production.
I would have bid, but I make it a policy not to bid on auctions from sellers with zero feedback. You never know who you're buying from these days.
They can send a payload into space for under $10 million, but they still can't fix their crappy home page design?
I, for one, am all for this. Providing machines with a way to reclaim their own heat energy for power is the only way to ensure we don't all end up jacked into a computer-generated Matrix so they can suck up ours.
Nokia will today be licking its wounds and doing a fair amount of worrying, with the revelation that the N-Gage's security has been cracked like an egg
"In other news, all of us here at CD Freaks have ten-inch penises and can eat shattered glass without feeling pain. Boo-ya!"
The idea that one actually had some involvement with their kids is historically kind of new.
Yeah, I'm sure it wasn't until the last century or two that humankind finally figured out that children who spend time with their mothers actually take longer to starve.
Incidentally, you forgot to argue that your "historical" approach to parenting was somehow better than loving and teaching them on an ongoing basis. Simply saying it's "unhealthy" don't make it so.
The government report that TV destroys braincells was compiled without a study, no evidence, nothing.
I have sufficient anecdotal evidence that kids who watch television continue on to buy crappy music, get addicted to mindless sitcoms and are motivated by advertisers to crave worthless crap in order to look more like their favorite celebrities. If that's not brain damage, I don't know what is.
Signed and subtitled, the effort is made for a larger community.
I hate subtitles. They get in the way. I even delete Spanish-language programming from my TV remote when I find it.
On a side note, does it disturb anyone else that a mere 5 people control such weighty decision affecting telecommunications?
There are only nine people on the U.S. Supreme Court who decide whether laws governing your school, your privacy, or your right to have an abortion are constitutional or not. Get used to it.
Once again, you guys assume it doesn't count if it's not in your backyard.
Well, thanks for the information. The next time this American wants to watch South Korean programming in his car, he'll know just where to import the tech and be the "first on the block".
With hundreds of channels of entertainment, from the Disney Channel to HBO, to keep them occupied, they're silent. "It's like you don't even have them. You can baby-sit and drive at the same time,'' Montag said.
I have my own kids -- four of them now. I grew up in a family of five kids, two parents. So I know full well what it's like to have them arguing, complaining, fighting, and griping all through a long car trip.
But I still maintain that drugging them into submission with non-stop video signals is not the best solution. It's easy enough to get into that habit at home -- sit the kids in front of the TV after school until dinner, then after dinner until bedtime. They're entertained, you have peace and quiet. Then when they get older, you wonder why they're thirty pounds overweight before they've hit puberty and never do their homework at night.
TV, either in the car or at home, should be a privilege. Give it to them when they've earned it, and turn it off when it's done. I prefer a DVD player to satellite TV, because (1) there's no commercials, (2) I can control what they do and don't watch, and (3) when the show's over, it's over--there's nothing "coming up next" unless I say there is.
Our kids would be overjoyed to have satellite TV in the car for our periodic 3-hour drives to my in-laws. Instead we give them toys, books, children's music, and Magna-Doodle drawing boards. Works just as well, the noise is minimal, and their brains actually continue to develop instead of just rotting away inside their skulls.
I don't ever remember a company spending so much effort and money on an attempt to remove functionality and desirability from their products.
Agreed. Usually Microsoft removes those things from their software and makes money. Ironically, they call it an "upgrade."
Think of professional athletes as getting ungodly amounts of hazard pay. It's one thing to get $1.5 million for, say, singing on stage with a backup band. It's another to get the same amount of money to run around on a grassy field with nearly two dozen other strong, athletic, testosterone-addled men trying to take the ball from you or die trying.
Another way to look at it is: pro athletes are paid fairly, but our military ground troops are paid far, far too little.
"Dinosaur" could have been great, but it suffered from bad pacing. The first 20-30 minutes of the film were about the main character and the lemurs doing nothing much, and only after all that time did the meteor strike and the real plot began. The result was that the main storyline was reduced to less than an hour, and it was so full of cliches and "Land Before Time" derivatives it couldn't make up for the loss.
"Dinosaur" looked beautiful, no doubt, and it had as good a message as any Disney production. But as a movie it left much to be desired.
South Park is nearly 100% CG
Technically, yes, it is. However, the animation still originates with pens and paper cutouts which are scanned in to be manipulated and animated.
Yes, I can be disappointed that they didn't answer the "layers" question
Oh, for Pete's sake... for the last time, people, the Oracle told us how Neo stopped the Sentinels. The One is powerful enough to connect to the Matrix, and through it the entire network of machines, without being physically plugged into it. She said it right on camera, with no distractions, so everyone could hear it. It was right in the goddamned movie.
Whether you accept the explanation as sufficient depends on how much disbelief you're willing to suspend, but please keep in mind that while the Matrix movies are many things, hard sci-fi is not one of them.
Why do you think internet explorer doesn't block ads by default?
Because the developers are lazy and behind the curve. It's already been commented that popup blocking will be included in IE 7 for Longhorn -- two years from now.
IIRC, battery life in the 2nd-gen iPods was about 50% longer than the 3rd-gen ones, if not more. That was a sacrifice Apple made for the smaller size. If battery life is your only complaint, buy a used 2nd-gen online.