Sun named their product line after a natural phenomenon, a spark, and is now going after any one using the natural phenomenon's namesake?
No. Sun Microsystems is a member of Sparc International, along with a slew of other companies (TI, Hitachi, Fujitsu, etc, etc -- http://www.sparc.org/members.html), but Sparc International != Sun.
I'm no MS fan, but I don't disagree with the decision per se. The less the government does to regulate the market, the better. Still, I wouldn't have been sad if they were broken up.
But it's not like Microsoft is off the hook now or anything. They're certainly not going to drop the whole case, it's just a question of what the penalties will be. And just because the DOJ isn't pursuing the break-up doesn't mean the court can't decide that that's what they want to do anyways.
Got a URL for that G-3 spec? With most rifles pushing between 2000-3000 fps, that number seems really, really high unless that's some odd design, but the G-3 has been around for quite some time..
This is particularly touchy with me, since I spent this morning working from home getting some coding done. My chair and desk are probably not up to OSHA standards, but no one's forcing me to work from home, either.
OSHA is a splendid example of the mess the US government is in. Much like EPA (Oh, don't get me started on the EPA...), they essentially have no accountability to anyone, and can, for all intents and purposes, make up whatever screwy rules they want. (I'm especially bitter about the EPA doing the same thing; Milwaukee, WI is in the same EPA "zone" as Gary, Indiana. So, we get stuck with the regulations for a high-pollution zone, most notably the incredibly shitty reformulated gas that lowers some emissions, raises some others, drops your power by as much as 10%, and drops your fuel economy by 5-9 mpg. (at least, it does in the last 5 car's I've owned, ranging from a '76 TransAm to a '91 turbo Eagle Talon) Why? Because OSHA says so, and there's not a damn thing anyone can really do about it. But I digress.
Interesting tidbit heard on the radio about this whole fiasco: The number of people claiming deductions on their taxes for home office / telecommuting has exploded in the last few years, and the IRS is concerned about revenue, so they nudge OSHA to issue some statement like this in hopes of scaring employers into eliminating telecommuting. I'm torn on this one: I despise OSHA, and the IRS (who, admittedly, have gotten a _little_ better in the last 2-3 years), but I'm also reminded of the saying "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetance".
Yes, organizations like OSHA have a small, limited use in preventing sweat-shop conditions in factories and the like, but for chrissakes, my previous employed was fined by OSHA for not having Material Safety Data Sheets for freekin' White-Out in the secretaries' desks. Yes, if you're moving crates of lye or drain cleaner, you need to know what's in there, and what to do if you pour a gallon of it in your eye, but WHITEOUT and Lysol? Come on.
The point I'm getting at, really, is that this declaration by OSHA is just a symptom of a much, much more serious problem with OSHA, the EPA, FEMA(*), etc. Government organizations with no accountability to anyone and no representation by anyone affected.
(Slightly off-topic: (*) FEMA is scary. I'd dig up links, but if you care, they're easy to find.)
I've heard this, too -- 5 or 6 years ago sounds about right. As I recall, they took took a tank of gasses (which I don't recall the details of, but I'm sure someone will post a followup), and zapped it with a Tesla coil, and amino acids were found. Interesting, but not anywhere close to the scope of this experiment.
As far as consulting religious-leader-types about this, well, that's just silly. Even if they decide against it, how much longer do you really think it'll be before someone _else_ decides to try?
Back in high school, I owned a '76 Trans Am. Fun, fun car to drive: 455 cubic inches, bored to 462, 4 speed manual tranny, 3.53 positraction rear end, quarter-ton racing clutch... Not too great in rush hour, but fun none-the-less.
(When the clutch on the Trans Am went out, I ended up getting a '76 Chevy Monza. Picture a car a little bigger than an Escort with a 5.0 liter V-8. No positraction, but a fun car nonetheless. Made it easy to find the mid-late 70's Camaros with the same 305 engines, and just slaughter 'em off the line, since they're toting another 500lbs of weight)
I ended up having to get rid of it since I couldn't afford to keep fixing it, and driving 30 miles to and from work getting 10 mpg just wasn't feasible, and I had a second car (Mazda 323) anyways. I missed that Trans Am for a long, long time, until I got my current car:
1991 Eagle Talon TSi AWD. It absolutely rocks. The amount of support available on the internet is unmatched by any other car, period. And the potential for upgrading the 1990-1999 Talon/Eclipse/Laser (They're all basically the same car, referred to as "DSM's" for Diamond Star Motors,a collaberation between Mopar and Mitsubishi) is just amazing. All-wheel drive absolutely rocks in the winter (especially after driving that Trans Am..) I've spent about 500 bucks upgrading the Talon, and it's _easily_ faster than my Trans Am ever was, all out of 2.0 liters and 4 cylinders. If there's a car for hackers, it's a turbo DSM. (The old Trans Am did a standing quarter-mile in about 14.2 seconds, my Talon's best is 13.70. Half a second doesn't sound like much, but in drag racing, it's an eternity). 500 bucks (new exhaust, and a boost controller to raise the turbo from 9psi to 15, or 19-20ish on race gas) and I've taken a 190 horsepower 4-cylinder up to about 275.
I recently picked up an '85 Audi 5000S turbo for an amazingly good price for the purpose of restoring/rebuilding most of it. Turbo cars are just too much fun.
Maybe if I didn't live in Wisconsin I'd be more inclined to pick up a 'classic' muscle car to work on again, but after 2 winters in the Trans Am, I'm a little hesitant to do it. Still, if one popped up for the right price, I don't think I could turn down a '72 Trans Am Super-Duty. Drop $800 on a GOOD set of tires, another $1500 for a supercharger.. Mmm.
Mazda wasn't the only, and certainly not the first company to use a rotary engine in a passenger car. Mercedes and/or Aston Martin had them in the 50's for a limited time. Wish I could remember more specifically.
As for seeing a lot more of them, I doubt it. There's a couple problems with them in today's consumer market: 1) They burn oil. (Not a lot, mind you, but it's pretty much by design that they burn some to keep the rotors lubricated) 2) Ever heard an RX-7 down the dragstrip? As the RPMs go up, Wankels get loud . 3) They tend to put out a bit more pollutants than a reciprocating engine does, and the fuel efficiency doesn't look too good compared to a piston engine of the same displacement. (Power output, on the other hand, is great, depending on how you choose to measure the displacement of a rotary engine. Technically, an RX-7 is considered a 1.3 liter engine, but in reality, it's more like a 2.6 or a 3.9, depending on who you ask.) They also tend to wear faster than a "normal" engine, requiring more frequent rebuilds (especially turbo/supercharged versions)
As a mechanical hack, though, trying to visualize a 3-rotor (eg, Mazda 20B) engine spinning makes my head hurt. They're especially nifty for the lack of moving drivetrain parts: No valves, no cams, no timing belts...
On less than 100Mhz FSB speeds, the PCI bus runs at 1/2 the bus speed, eg, 33Mhz for a 66Mhz system bus -- at 100+ speeds, the motherboard makers set the PCI to run at 1/3 the bus speed, so at the officially supported (66, 100) speeds, the PCI stays at 33Mhz, and everything is happy. When you up the bus speed to 75Mhz, for example, the PCI cards are running at 37.5 - over 10% faster. At 83Mhz bus speeds, your PCI bus is clipping along over 40. OTOH, if you clock a 100Mhz FSB chip at, say, 113, you get 13Mhz on the bus, but you're not pushing the PCI bus as hard for it.
Fancy-schmancy 3D cards really won't do you much good at all if all you're doing is 2D stuff like CTP. Heck, an ISA SVGA card would probably suit your needs just fine. 3D accelerators are _mostly_ just for gamers, and then mostly FPS games. (How many screen shots are there of Q3A compared to just about _anything_ else for new 3d cards?)
(Then again, no offense intended, but those Virge cards are crap.:) If all you do is 2D, and you'd like smoother Xwindows, or better depth / resolution, buying a new Voodoo3 would be a waste of your money. Try digging around for a slightly used Millenium II -- There's probably PCI ones going for pennies now, and you won't be disappointed.)
>2.5GHz is a little tough to do with standard technology.
Hard to do, and if you thought that old Alpha ran warm, 2.5GHz should not only keep your coffee warm, you can probably bake a potato inside the case.:P
For 2-d stuff, as I recall, the Millenium II's were just about the best 2d cards out there for a good amount of time. You could probably get a PCI version fairly cheap, and AGP probably isn't going to do much for you 2d/wise, anyways.
Matrox is also generally very, very nice about giving out driver information, too, which I have to give them a few bonus points for.:)
Someone mentioned the signal strength out of the Matrox cards was excellent, too. I run mine through a 12-meg Voodoo2 card, and there's _no_ loss of image quality at 1600x1200. (Sigh. At least there _wasn't_ before my 19" monitor died a premature death.)
"Overclocking is stupid. Why should I overclock AMD 233? My PC scrolls text fast[sic] than I can read. Any processor on the market is fast enough for about anything. And the gamers are sick people anyways, if you want a fast machine buy one. Don't pretend your slow CPU will work as reliably and fast as the CPU with a higher clock speed. Geez, they buy a PIII and already think about overclocking it.."
Nonsense.
What ever happened to trying to do something to see if it can be done? I tend to view overclocking like hot-rodding a car. My P2/300 (On a Deschute core, no less) has been up and happy for the last week as a 3x112. Do I notice a difference? Yeah, I might be getting another couple FPS in Quake, but that's not the point. Is it less reliable? Shrug. Maybe. Would I overclock a server? Of course not. Heck, with cheaper chips (Cyrix, etc), an arguement could be made for _underclocking_ them to keep the heat down. But that's not the point.
As for the "If you want a fast machine, buy one" comment, I'd be more than happy to if you'll send me the extra couple hundred bucks for that P3/550 instead of the 450, but when you're talking about parts that are identical besides the rating they received from a factory, I'll take my chances on the 450 any day, and take the extra $200 for more RAM.
"Geez, they buy PIII and already think about overclocking it.."
Yep. And if I bought a new Porsche 911, I'd be putting a bigger exhaust, bigger fuel injectors, and turning up the boost within a few days, too.
The more I think about it, the more I see computers and cars the same way. Yeah, I always want a newer, faster one, but I'll still tweak what I've got 'till it complains too bitterly. I can't afford a brand-new 3000GT-VR4, but my 9 year old car will still whip it in the race of your choice. I can't afford a P3/550, either, but my 3x112 P2 is a heckuva lot faster than a 4.5x66 anyways.
As long as my P2/336 keeps running, hey, I got a free 12Mhz of bus speed. (Actually, since it's an older core P2, I've got a free 47Mhz.)
My computer will be "fast enough" right about the same time my car is. Those 3 or 4 minutes spent mp3-encoding or calculating or rendering continue to be unbearable.
> If you don't know how to get somewhere, getting a faster car will not help you get there.
No offense, but that's a lousy analogy, especially when you're talking about the kinds of massive simulations being referred to. Take a major metropolitan area. Somewhere in a 15x15 city block area is a big red "X". Neither of us knows where exactly the "X" is, other than the 15x15 block area, and we'll know when we find it. If I take a U-haul moving truck, and you take a Ferrari, barring speed limits, stop signs, pedestrians, and other such annoyances, who stands a better chance of finding it first?
First off, I'm most thrilled that the RIAA will "allow" MP3's to continue to exist. Gee, thanks.
Can anyone think of a copy-protection scheme, software, hardware, data, or music that can't/hasn't been broken? Floppies can be bootstrapped, serial number formulas can be broken, hardware chips (ala PSX) can be tossed in, executables can be hex edited... I honestly can't think of one.
No doubt. I got sick of all the Netscape 4.x's crashing and locking up all the time, and just went back to NS 3.04. Works great. Never needs restarting, doesn't both with the mail and news clients I never use, and the only difference I've noticed is pages with style sheets look funny. Oh well.
('course, for extra-super stability, just use Lynx. Why bother with all those.jpg's when you can just get nice, clean, pure text.)
1. >know the person which made the record Not really. Digital copies are pretty good. I'm guessing there's a pretty good-sized amount of people that are -really- into tape trading with DAT decks and CD burners.
2. >get this person to invest some time for making the copy True, but the majority of "die-hard fans" are pretty generous about it. Lots will do it pretty much for free, or help people get started by offering 2-for-1,3-for-one, etc trades.
3. >invest some money for the medium True, but blank tapes are super-cheap, the price of blank CD's has gone down a heckuva lot in the last couple years. Ultra-purists can use DAT, but honestly, I don't have slightest clue how DAT prices have been. The recorders sure aren't cheap, though. 90 minutes of decent-quality blank cassette tape is still a heckuva lot cheaper than the hard drive space to record 90 minutes of 128kbit.mp3's.
I'm guessing you're not a Dead fan... It's really not that hard to find good quality recordings, either on the Internet or at record stores or "head shops". Granted, some of those copies were illegal (eg, live shows copied onto CD with laser-printed cd jackets, then sold for $50+ at some swap-meet show)... Last I checked, there were a couple stores in the area with a list of a couple _hundred_ shows that they would copy for you for free, provided you brought them decent blank tapes to put them on. Heck of a deal.:)
Bands that allow taping of live shows tend to develop pretty loyal followings, it seems. Once people start collecting tapes/mp3s, they tend to accumulate them in huge quantities; but they still go out and buy the new studio releases. (Not really applicable to the Dead, I suppose, but for Phish, Dave Matthews, etc.) The bands that do it are (AFAIK) bands that really put on a better show live, have lots of songs, and do extended jams in concert. I really have to wonder how much the record companies figure on losing on people taping live shows compared to getting a huge, loyal fan base.
I don't think it's so much the chipset as the BREQ pins on the CPU itself. Physically, it's missing the pins on the CPU to do more than dual processor configs. The Celerons, being P2-based, have the pin necessary, it's just running at the wrong voltage levels, thus the soldering. If I had a couple hundred bucks burning a hole in my pocket, I'd try drilling and soldering a mobo for dual Celerons, but I'm not quite gutsy enough to start adding pin-outs and circuitry to them.:)
In short, you couldn't get the extra BREQs for multiple processors without changing the entire CPU, and then you'd have to convince the Slot 1 that they were there.
But T.R.A. had an especially good quote, which I can't recall verbatim, but went along the lines of "One of the biggest accomplishments in modern mathematics would be finding a way to factor large prime numbers."
Huh. Well, yeah, I guess it would be...
(I think they edited this in the 2nd printing of the book, though.)
Why is source code important?
on
Linux on CNN
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· Score: 1
Security. With, say, a Windows IRC client, you can't just grep through the source code for any tricks or trojans. It'd be awfully hard to sneak in some code to, say, upload your/etc/passwd to some hotmail.com account without anyone noticing. With, say, Windows software, it'd be quite possible to just send your registry info, your name, etc, etc. Oh wait. Microsoft already _did_ that. Oh, wait. So did Blizzard... Hmm. Having the source code makes it relatively easy to grep for things like strcpy() and other security holes along those lines.
Source code is also a really handy way to learn programming. Download a library, compile it, flip through some of the example programs, grep through some.h files to find obscure #defines and the like. Lots faster than reading 400k of documentation when you're just looking for one thing. (which comes to mind mostly because I finally got around to playing with libggi last night.)
Slashdot Mirror
Sun named their product line after a natural phenomenon, a spark, and is now going after any one using the natural phenomenon's namesake?
No. Sun Microsystems is a member of Sparc International, along with a slew of other companies (TI, Hitachi, Fujitsu, etc, etc -- http://www.sparc.org/members.html), but Sparc International != Sun.
..And hey, I'm a moron for submitting that without including this link:
1 .cfm
http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae39
Eventually (and probably sooner than you'd think) you run into the limits of how fast the signals can travel in the CPU.
I'm no MS fan, but I don't disagree with the decision per se. The less the government does to regulate the market, the better. Still, I wouldn't have been sad if they were broken up.
But it's not like Microsoft is off the hook now or anything. They're certainly not going to drop the whole case, it's just a question of what the penalties will be. And just because the DOJ isn't pursuing the break-up doesn't mean the court can't decide that that's what they want to do anyways.
Got a URL for that G-3 spec? With most rifles pushing between 2000-3000 fps, that number seems really, really high unless that's some odd design, but the G-3 has been around for quite some time..
Re: Episode numbering
All is explained pretty good at
http://www.snpp.com
(The first part of the number is the season, but they bounce around quite a bit. In short,
Season one: 7Gxx
two: 7Fxx
three: 8Fxx
four: 9Fxx
five: 1Fxx
six: 2Fxx
seven: 3Fxx
eight: 4Fxx
nine: 5Fxx
ten: AABFxx
eleven: BABFxx
As an aside: Any remember off-hand which seasons The Simpsons had Conan writing for them?
This is particularly touchy with me, since I spent this morning working from home getting some coding done. My chair and desk are probably not up to OSHA standards, but no one's forcing me to work from home, either.
OSHA is a splendid example of the mess the US government is in. Much like EPA (Oh, don't get me started on the EPA...), they essentially have no accountability to anyone, and can, for all intents and purposes, make up whatever screwy rules they want. (I'm especially bitter about the EPA doing the same thing; Milwaukee, WI is in the same EPA "zone" as Gary, Indiana. So, we get stuck with the regulations for a high-pollution zone, most notably the incredibly shitty reformulated gas that lowers some emissions, raises some others, drops your power by as much as 10%, and drops your fuel economy by 5-9 mpg. (at least, it does in the last 5 car's I've owned, ranging from a '76 TransAm to a '91 turbo Eagle Talon) Why? Because OSHA says so, and there's not a damn thing anyone can really do about it. But I digress.
Interesting tidbit heard on the radio about this whole fiasco: The number of people claiming deductions on their taxes for home office / telecommuting has exploded in the last few years, and the IRS is concerned about revenue, so they nudge OSHA to issue some statement like this in hopes of scaring employers into eliminating telecommuting. I'm torn on this one: I despise OSHA, and the IRS (who, admittedly, have gotten a _little_ better in the last 2-3 years), but I'm also reminded of the saying "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetance".
Yes, organizations like OSHA have a small, limited use in preventing sweat-shop conditions in factories and the like, but for chrissakes, my previous employed was fined by OSHA for not having Material Safety Data Sheets for freekin' White-Out in the secretaries' desks. Yes, if you're moving crates of lye or drain cleaner, you need to know what's in there, and what to do if you pour a gallon of it in your eye, but WHITEOUT and Lysol? Come on.
The point I'm getting at, really, is that this declaration by OSHA is just a symptom of a much, much more serious problem with OSHA, the EPA, FEMA(*), etc. Government organizations with no accountability to anyone and no representation by anyone affected.
(Slightly off-topic:
(*) FEMA is scary. I'd dig up links, but if you care, they're easy to find.)
I've heard this, too -- 5 or 6 years ago sounds about right. As I recall, they took took a tank of gasses (which I don't recall the details of, but I'm sure someone will post a followup), and zapped it with a Tesla coil, and amino acids were found. Interesting, but not anywhere close to the scope of this experiment.
As far as consulting religious-leader-types about this, well, that's just silly. Even if they decide against it, how much longer do you really think it'll be before someone _else_ decides to try?
No, your history teacher was wrong. Ford just perfected the assembly line.
Back in high school, I owned a '76 Trans Am. Fun, fun car to drive: 455 cubic inches, bored to 462, 4 speed manual tranny, 3.53 positraction rear end, quarter-ton racing clutch... Not too great in rush hour, but fun none-the-less.
(When the clutch on the Trans Am went out, I ended up getting a '76 Chevy Monza. Picture a car a little bigger than an Escort with a 5.0 liter V-8. No positraction, but a fun car nonetheless. Made it easy to find the mid-late 70's Camaros with the same 305 engines, and just slaughter 'em off the line, since they're toting another 500lbs of weight)
I ended up having to get rid of it since I couldn't afford to keep fixing it, and driving 30 miles to and from work getting 10 mpg just wasn't feasible, and I had a second car (Mazda 323) anyways. I missed that Trans Am for a long, long time, until I got my current car:
1991 Eagle Talon TSi AWD. It absolutely rocks. The amount of support available on the internet is unmatched by any other car, period. And the potential for upgrading the 1990-1999 Talon/Eclipse/Laser (They're all basically the same car, referred to as "DSM's" for Diamond Star Motors,a collaberation between Mopar and Mitsubishi) is just amazing. All-wheel drive absolutely rocks in the winter (especially after driving that Trans Am..) I've spent about 500 bucks upgrading the Talon, and it's _easily_ faster than my Trans Am ever was, all out of 2.0 liters and 4 cylinders. If there's a car for hackers, it's a turbo DSM. (The old Trans Am did a standing quarter-mile in about 14.2 seconds, my Talon's best is 13.70. Half a second doesn't sound like much, but in drag racing, it's an eternity). 500 bucks (new exhaust, and a boost controller to raise the turbo from 9psi to 15, or 19-20ish on race gas) and I've taken a 190 horsepower 4-cylinder up to about 275.
I recently picked up an '85 Audi 5000S turbo for an amazingly good price for the purpose of restoring/rebuilding most of it. Turbo cars are just too much fun.
Maybe if I didn't live in Wisconsin I'd be more inclined to pick up a 'classic' muscle car to work on again, but after 2 winters in the Trans Am, I'm a little hesitant to do it. Still, if one popped up for the right price, I don't think I could turn down a '72 Trans Am Super-Duty. Drop $800 on a GOOD set of tires, another $1500 for a supercharger.. Mmm.
At the risk of being woefully off-topic:
Mazda wasn't the only, and certainly not the first company to use a rotary engine in a passenger car. Mercedes and/or Aston Martin had them in the 50's for a limited time. Wish I could remember more specifically.
As for seeing a lot more of them, I doubt it. There's a couple problems with them in today's consumer market: 1) They burn oil. (Not a lot, mind you, but it's pretty much by design that they burn some to keep the rotors lubricated) 2) Ever heard an RX-7 down the dragstrip? As the RPMs go up, Wankels get loud . 3) They tend to put out a bit more pollutants than a reciprocating engine does, and the fuel efficiency doesn't look too good compared to a piston engine of the same displacement. (Power output, on the other hand, is great, depending on how you choose to measure the displacement of a rotary engine. Technically, an RX-7 is considered a 1.3 liter engine, but in reality, it's more like a 2.6 or a 3.9, depending on who you ask.) They also tend to wear faster than a "normal" engine, requiring more frequent rebuilds (especially turbo/supercharged versions)
As a mechanical hack, though, trying to visualize a 3-rotor (eg, Mazda 20B) engine spinning makes my head hurt. They're especially nifty for the lack of moving drivetrain parts: No valves, no cams, no timing belts...
On less than 100Mhz FSB speeds, the PCI bus runs at 1/2 the bus speed, eg, 33Mhz for a 66Mhz system bus -- at 100+ speeds, the motherboard makers set the PCI to run at 1/3 the bus speed, so at the officially supported (66, 100) speeds, the PCI stays at 33Mhz, and everything is happy. When you up the bus speed to 75Mhz, for example, the PCI cards are running at 37.5 - over 10% faster. At 83Mhz bus speeds, your PCI bus is clipping along over 40. OTOH, if you clock a 100Mhz FSB chip at, say, 113, you get 13Mhz on the bus, but you're not pushing the PCI bus as hard for it.
Fancy-schmancy 3D cards really won't do you much good at all if all you're doing is 2D stuff like CTP. Heck, an ISA SVGA card would probably suit your needs just fine. 3D accelerators are _mostly_ just for gamers, and then mostly FPS games. (How many screen shots are there of Q3A compared to just about _anything_ else for new 3d cards?)
:) If all you do is 2D, and you'd like smoother Xwindows, or better depth / resolution, buying a new Voodoo3 would be a waste of your money. Try digging around for a slightly used Millenium II -- There's probably PCI ones going for pennies now, and you won't be disappointed.)
(Then again, no offense intended, but those Virge cards are crap.
Hard to do, and if you thought that old Alpha ran warm, 2.5GHz should not only keep your coffee warm, you can probably bake a potato inside the case. :P
For 2-d stuff, as I recall, the Millenium II's were just about the best 2d cards out there for a good amount of time. You could probably get a PCI version fairly cheap, and AGP probably isn't going to do much for you 2d/wise, anyways.
:)
Matrox is also generally very, very nice about giving out driver information, too, which I have to give them a few bonus points for.
Someone mentioned the signal strength out of the Matrox cards was excellent, too. I run mine through a 12-meg Voodoo2 card, and there's _no_ loss of image quality at 1600x1200. (Sigh. At least there _wasn't_ before my 19" monitor died a premature death.)
I am an idiot, for I feed trolls.
"Overclocking is stupid. Why should I overclock AMD 233? My PC scrolls text fast[sic] than I can read. Any processor on the market is fast enough for about anything. And the gamers are sick people anyways, if you want a fast machine buy one. Don't pretend your slow CPU will work as reliably and fast as the CPU with a higher clock speed. Geez, they buy a PIII and already think about overclocking it.."
Nonsense.
What ever happened to trying to do something to see if it can be done? I tend to view overclocking like hot-rodding a car. My P2/300 (On a Deschute core, no less) has been up and happy for the last week as a 3x112. Do I notice a difference? Yeah, I might be getting another couple FPS in Quake, but that's not the point. Is it less reliable? Shrug. Maybe. Would I overclock a server? Of course not. Heck, with cheaper chips (Cyrix, etc), an arguement could be made for _underclocking_ them to keep the heat down. But that's not the point.
As for the "If you want a fast machine, buy one" comment, I'd be more than happy to if you'll send me the extra couple hundred bucks for that P3/550 instead of the 450, but when you're talking about parts that are identical besides the rating they received from a factory, I'll take my chances on the 450 any day, and take the extra $200 for more RAM.
"Geez, they buy PIII and already think about overclocking it.."
Yep. And if I bought a new Porsche 911, I'd be putting a bigger exhaust, bigger fuel injectors, and turning up the boost within a few days, too.
The more I think about it, the more I see computers and cars the same way. Yeah, I always want a newer, faster one, but I'll still tweak what I've got 'till it complains too bitterly. I can't afford a brand-new 3000GT-VR4, but my 9 year old car will still whip it in the race of your choice. I can't afford a P3/550, either, but my 3x112 P2 is a heckuva lot faster than a 4.5x66 anyways.
As long as my P2/336 keeps running, hey, I got a free 12Mhz of bus speed. (Actually, since it's an older core P2, I've got a free 47Mhz.)
My computer will be "fast enough" right about the same time my car is. Those 3 or 4 minutes spent mp3-encoding or calculating or rendering continue to be unbearable.
> If you don't know how to get somewhere, getting a faster car will not help you get there.
No offense, but that's a lousy analogy, especially when you're talking about the kinds of massive simulations being referred to. Take a major metropolitan area. Somewhere in a 15x15 city block area is a big red "X". Neither of us knows where exactly the "X" is, other than the 15x15 block area, and we'll know when we find it. If I take a U-haul moving truck, and you take a Ferrari, barring speed limits, stop signs, pedestrians, and other such annoyances, who stands a better chance of finding it first?
First off, I'm most thrilled that the RIAA will "allow" MP3's to continue to exist. Gee, thanks.
Can anyone think of a copy-protection scheme, software, hardware, data, or music that can't/hasn't been broken? Floppies can be bootstrapped, serial number formulas can be broken, hardware chips (ala PSX) can be tossed in, executables can be hex edited... I honestly can't think of one.
No doubt. I got sick of all the Netscape 4.x's crashing and locking up all the time, and just went back to NS 3.04. Works great. Never needs restarting, doesn't both with the mail and news clients I never use, and the only difference I've noticed is pages with style sheets look funny. Oh well.
.jpg's when you can just get nice, clean, pure text.)
('course, for extra-super stability, just use Lynx. Why bother with all those
1.
.mp3's.
:)
>know the person which made the record
Not really. Digital copies are pretty good. I'm guessing there's a pretty good-sized amount of people that are -really- into tape trading with DAT decks and CD burners.
2.
>get this person to invest some time for making the copy
True, but the majority of "die-hard fans" are pretty generous about it. Lots will do it pretty much for free, or help people get started by offering 2-for-1,3-for-one, etc trades.
3.
>invest some money for the medium
True, but blank tapes are super-cheap, the price of blank CD's has gone down a heckuva lot in the last couple years. Ultra-purists can use DAT, but honestly, I don't have slightest clue how DAT prices have been. The recorders sure aren't cheap, though. 90 minutes of decent-quality blank cassette tape is still a heckuva lot cheaper than the hard drive space to record 90 minutes of 128kbit
I'm guessing you're not a Dead fan... It's really not that hard to find good quality recordings, either on the Internet or at record stores or "head shops". Granted, some of those copies were illegal (eg, live shows copied onto CD with laser-printed cd jackets, then sold for $50+ at some swap-meet show)... Last I checked, there were a couple stores in the area with a list of a couple _hundred_ shows that they would copy for you for free, provided you brought them decent blank tapes to put them on. Heck of a deal.
Bands that allow taping of live shows tend to develop pretty loyal followings, it seems. Once people start collecting tapes/mp3s, they tend to accumulate them in huge quantities; but they still go out and buy the new studio releases. (Not really applicable to the Dead, I suppose, but for Phish, Dave Matthews, etc.) The bands that do it are (AFAIK) bands that really put on a better show live, have lots of songs, and do extended jams in concert. I really have to wonder how much the record companies figure on losing on people taping live shows compared to getting a huge, loyal fan base.
I don't think it's so much the chipset as the BREQ pins on the CPU itself. Physically, it's missing the pins on the CPU to do more than dual processor configs. The Celerons, being P2-based, have the pin necessary, it's just running at the wrong voltage levels, thus the soldering. If I had a couple hundred bucks burning a hole in my pocket, I'd try drilling and soldering a mobo for dual Celerons, but I'm not quite gutsy enough to start adding pin-outs and circuitry to them. :)
In short, you couldn't get the extra BREQs for multiple processors without changing the entire CPU, and then you'd have to convince the Slot 1 that they were there.
But T.R.A. had an especially good quote, which I can't recall verbatim, but went along the lines of
"One of the biggest accomplishments in modern mathematics would be finding a way to factor large prime numbers."
Huh. Well, yeah, I guess it would be...
(I think they edited this in the 2nd printing of the book, though.)
Security. With, say, a Windows IRC client, you can't just grep through the source code for any tricks or trojans. It'd be awfully hard to sneak in some code to, say, upload your /etc/passwd to some hotmail.com account without anyone noticing. With, say, Windows software, it'd be quite possible to just send your registry info, your name, etc, etc. Oh wait. Microsoft already _did_ that. Oh, wait. So did Blizzard... Hmm. Having the source code makes it relatively easy to grep for things like strcpy() and other security holes along those lines.
.h files to find obscure #defines and the like. Lots faster than reading 400k of documentation when you're just looking for one thing. (which comes to mind mostly because I finally got around to playing with libggi last night.)
Source code is also a really handy way to learn programming. Download a library, compile it, flip through some of the example programs, grep through some