A little vague and uncertain, aren't you? The laser's specifications are disclosed in the gamecube's manual. From those specifications, you can deduce the expected health effects.
By the way, the gamecube's laser produces visible light. (668nm)
Class I lasers are limited to 0.4 mW. sourceThe Gamecube laser would be a class II device, were it not for the safety interlock. OSHA explains
Since lasers are not classified on beam access during service, most all Class I industrial lasers will consist of a higher class (high power) laser enclosed in a properly interlocked and labeled protective enclosure. In some cases, the enclosure may be a room (walk-in protective housing) which requires a means to prevent operation when operators are inside the room.
In the UK, there have already been a number of serious measles epidemics (with attendant deaths) because parents are overplaying the risk of the MMR vaccine. Now, it seems to me that nicotine addiction, while serious, can be avoided in a manner that measles exposure cannot. Mass vaccinations against heroin have marginal utility for the vast majority of recipients, while exposing those same recipients to any number of side-effects.
Beginner and Expert Modes? Are you crazy? Right off the bat, this divides the User Interface choices into a "simple", user-friendly design that coddles the user, and an "expert" interface that reveals all of the baroque complexity. And since the user interface designers will be reassured by the fact that their users will be properly segregated, there will be no incentive to encourage consistency between the two worlds.
Then, when the user believes that he is no longer a beginner but a user worth of some respect, and flicks that global switch, he will find himself put in his place, properly confounded by a truly arcane "expert" interface.
Didn't Pete Townsend ( The Who) get into a certain amount of trouble when his curiosity got the better of him? Vigilantism can result in unpleasant legal complications for the vigilante.
I'm not sure that I understand what you are saying... when examining politics, in general realities are far more relavent than ideals. Take the entire history of Communism (which on paper is a great ideal) and how it was applied in reality, for example. I'm probably missing your point.
You are, although as a poster I do have a certain obligation to write clearly and eloquently. Perhaps this analogy will suffice.
Both the US and Zimbabwe have had problems with their elections, either by deliberate design or accident of fate. Mugabe defends his rather heavy handed electioneering tactics, in part by pointing the United States as a fellow election rigger. Apologists for the United States can point to the ZANU-PF as much more of a threat to democracy than the Florida elections board.
But wouldn't it be better to judge these elections against the ideal of a "free and fair election?" In the same vein, it would be more helpful to judge politicians against an ideal rather than against their milieu. Using this standard,
An Arab moderate is a moderate who happens to be an Arab An American despot is a despot who happens to be an American.
Simple, yes? I would, of course, prefer an Arab moderate.
Now, of course, we can look at Hitler and Mussolin, and others almost as paragons of evil-- a standard now present politician could possibly match. But we should also remember that these "paragons of evil" were able to persuade followers to their cause-- that they were once mere men who were able to persuade others to give them power, and that fascism was once compelling political philosophy.
Is Bush a fascist? You'd have to look at the politics of the early Mussolini to find out. If it is proto-fascism, is it dangerous? Maybe. Maybe not.
What makes you think American despotism would be democratic? What makes you think American despotism would guarantee freedom of speech?
It's rather short sighted to think that political must be judged only against each other instead of against ideals. The choice should not be between Bush or Stalin-- Bush or Hitler-- Bush or Pol Pot, but Bush against a more capable, less power hungry leader.
Anyway, I would rather live under the most despotic American ruler than even the most moderate Arab leader. There's a reason for that and it ain't fascism!
Perhaps, it's stupidity.
Since you're australian, perhaps the operative question should be:
"Would you rather live under the most despotic American ruler or under the most moderate Australian leader?"
I've heard that the international versions of CNN at least concentrate of news-- the domestic versions are more interested in talk shows and tabloid news. (But I haven't watched either one in a long time. I prefer NPR and newspapers.)
I do think however, Apple should have some sort of adapter available for people who already have an optical cable, to plug in the the AX.
My optical cable came with a little plastic adaptor that snaps onto a normal TOSLINK connector. It's shaped like a tiny funnel, and probably costs pennies to manufacture. I imagine that most optical cables already come with something similar.
Including that sort of adaptor would serve little purpose other than to remind customers that Apple didn't see fit to include a proper cable...
I find the mini-->RCA adaptors to be less than completely reliable. A misaligned connection is rather annoying, particularly when the audio signal is encoded with dolby surround. The optical connection is a nice touch, though.
To extend this wretched analogy further, one could compare the basic laws of physics to gcc (pre 2.95)-- the development of which is jealously guarded by God/RMS, and applied technology to other bits of software... It won't be long now until our programming skills are sufficient to fork gcc for our own purposes. Naturally, there have been problems with the Eisntsein/Teller/Sakharov patch...
If only the right of the consumer to add hardcore content to movies was recognized... Unfortunately, the act is written in such a way as to only free up censors. The report of the the registrar of copyrights is interesting, inasmuch as she asserts the existence of moral rights, deploring a recent Supreme Court decision, Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., which ruled that the Lanham Act does not prevent the unaccredited copying of an uncopyrighted work.
Which is precisely why I am glad That G-d is in charge of creation and not RMS.
One can believe that various deities are in charge of various aspects of creation, and we puny humans shouldn't disturb them. Or one can seek to understand the underlying mechanisms of the universe with an eye towards eventually mastering them. Humans have tended to the latter path, and today, we no longer think of lightning as various bolts tossed around by Thor, but as a logical consequence of certain electromagnetic laws.
It is our understanding of electromagnetism, inter alia, that has enabled us to build personal computers. It is the free exchange of information in scientific journals that us has enabled this understanding. While scientific journals have, of late, begun to enforce heavy handed copyright rules, the authors of journal articles freely build upon the works of others with the expectation that their works will, in turn be cited by authors building upon them.
It should be fairly obvious that this "open" spirit of enquiry has provided more material benefits than the "closed" development model advocated by various priest hoods.
Patents are a tit for tat system. The inventor discloses an invention with enough specificity that others will be able to duplicate the design, improve upon it, or simply learn from t. In return, the patentee is granted a monopoly on the production of the patented object or its derivatives, for a limited period. If the disclosure is not substantial, novel, or complete, then the inventor has no right to stake a claim.
What is it with patent attorneys and their fetish for the word "plurality"? It seems to me that the language of software patents is entirely divorced from the language of software designers...
It's a rather complicated patent, with many claims, some dating to 1996, some dating to 2000. Untangling the applicability of prior art will be a difficult job.
The 376 claim patent emphasizes its utility in "pushing" new content to a subscriber of a electronic magazine. A relic of the dot-com boom, perhaps?
6,557,054 was granted on April 29, 2003, from a April 20, 2000 filing, but some of the claims were based on applications filed as early as Apr. 29, 1996, and over the course of those years, it's brought in several dot-com fads.
It depends on how many threads and processes are used. As it turns out, most 3d games are single threaded, with the exception of the audio. So, a dualie might be able to offload system functions and audio onto the second cpu-- a few frames per second faster, perhaps, but no great improvement. On the other hand, you might be able to run a few recompilation runs in the background, provided memory is not in contention.
The dual G5s have a slightly more intelligent memory architecture, so contention for memory bandwidth might not be such a problem.
The days of DirectX-only cards are long behind us. ATI supports OpenGL just fine, thank you.
OpenGL just happens to expose the design choices made by ATI and nVidia more readily, because most of the advanced functionality is exposed through vendor specific extensions. Later, the OpenGL Architectural Review Board may adopt them as ARB extensions, which signals to rest of the vendors that they should really think about implementing them, if they haven't already...
Carmack has griped before about nVidia's inconsistent floating point behavior-- certain nVidia cards ran the ARB standard code path quite slowly, and thus required custom code paths to achieve decent performance. But this gripe was 18 months ago, perhaps the pendulum has swung back.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that a laser pointer is particularly safe.
A little vague and uncertain, aren't you? The laser's specifications are disclosed in the gamecube's manual. From those specifications, you can deduce the expected health effects.
By the way, the gamecube's laser produces visible light. (668nm)
source (lengthy pdf)
Class I lasers are limited to 0.4 mW. sourceThe Gamecube laser would be a class II device, were it not for the safety interlock. OSHA explains
In the UK, there have already been a number of serious measles epidemics (with attendant deaths) because parents are overplaying the risk of the MMR vaccine. Now, it seems to me that nicotine addiction, while serious, can be avoided in a manner that measles exposure cannot. Mass vaccinations against heroin have marginal utility for the vast majority of recipients, while exposing those same recipients to any number of side-effects.
Beginner and Expert Modes? Are you crazy? Right off the bat, this divides the User Interface choices into a "simple", user-friendly design that coddles the user, and an "expert" interface that reveals all of the baroque complexity. And since the user interface designers will be reassured by the fact that their users will be properly segregated, there will be no incentive to encourage consistency between the two worlds.
Then, when the user believes that he is no longer a beginner but a user worth of some respect, and flicks that global switch, he will find himself put in his place, properly confounded by a truly arcane "expert" interface.
I take it that if you're caught in a similar situation, you'll come up with a much better excuse?
Didn't Pete Townsend ( The Who) get into a certain amount of trouble when his curiosity got the better of him? Vigilantism can result in unpleasant legal complications for the vigilante.
I'm not sure that I understand what you are saying... when examining politics, in general realities are far more relavent than ideals. Take the entire history of Communism (which on paper is a great ideal) and how it was applied in reality, for example. I'm probably missing your point.
You are, although as a poster I do have a certain obligation to write clearly and eloquently. Perhaps this analogy will suffice.
Both the US and Zimbabwe have had problems with their elections, either by deliberate design or accident of fate. Mugabe defends his rather heavy handed electioneering tactics, in part by pointing the United States as a fellow election rigger. Apologists for the United States can point to the ZANU-PF as much more of a threat to democracy than the Florida elections board.
But wouldn't it be better to judge these elections against the ideal of a "free and fair election?" In the same vein, it would be more helpful to judge politicians against an ideal rather than against their milieu. Using this standard,
An Arab moderate is a moderate who happens to be an Arab
An American despot is a despot who happens to be an American.
Simple, yes? I would, of course, prefer an Arab moderate.
Now, of course, we can look at Hitler and Mussolin, and others almost as paragons of evil-- a standard now present politician could possibly match. But we should also remember that these "paragons of evil" were able to persuade followers to their cause-- that they were once mere men who were able to persuade others to give them power, and that fascism was once compelling political philosophy.
Is Bush a fascist? You'd have to look at the politics of the early Mussolini to find out. If it is proto-fascism, is it dangerous? Maybe. Maybe not.
What makes you think American despotism would be democratic? What makes you think American despotism would guarantee freedom of speech?
It's rather short sighted to think that political must be judged only against each other instead of against ideals. The choice should not be between Bush or Stalin-- Bush or Hitler-- Bush or Pol Pot, but Bush against a more capable, less power hungry leader.
Anyway, I would rather live under the most despotic American ruler than even the most moderate Arab leader. There's a reason for that and it ain't fascism!
Perhaps, it's stupidity.
Since you're australian, perhaps the operative question should be:
"Would you rather live under the most despotic American ruler or under the most moderate Australian leader?"
I've heard that the international versions of CNN at least concentrate of news-- the domestic versions are more interested in talk shows and tabloid news. (But I haven't watched either one in a long time. I prefer NPR and newspapers.)
Their local service plans undercut verizon's, or at least they did until Verizon started upping their line charge fees.
I do think however, Apple should have some sort of adapter available for people who already have an optical cable, to plug in the the AX.
My optical cable came with a little plastic adaptor that snaps onto a normal TOSLINK connector. It's shaped like a tiny funnel, and probably costs pennies to manufacture. I imagine that most optical cables already come with something similar.
Including that sort of adaptor would serve little purpose other than to remind customers that Apple didn't see fit to include a proper cable...
I find the mini-->RCA adaptors to be less than completely reliable. A misaligned connection is rather annoying, particularly when the audio signal is encoded with dolby surround. The optical connection is a nice touch, though.
doesn't the cavit have an optical input?
To extend this wretched analogy further, one could compare the basic laws of physics to gcc (pre 2.95)-- the development of which is jealously guarded by God/RMS, and applied technology to other bits of software... It won't be long now until our programming skills are sufficient to fork gcc for our own purposes. Naturally, there have been problems with the Eisntsein/Teller/Sakharov patch...
If only the right of the consumer to add hardcore content to movies was recognized... Unfortunately, the act is written in such a way as to only free up censors.
The report of the the registrar of copyrights is interesting, inasmuch as she asserts the existence of moral rights, deploring a recent Supreme Court decision, Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., which ruled that the Lanham Act does not prevent the unaccredited copying of an uncopyrighted work.
Either way, there's an implicit invitation to reverse engineer, read the source code, and contribute patches.
Which is precisely why I am glad That G-d is in charge of creation and not RMS.
One can believe that various deities are in charge of various aspects of creation, and we puny humans shouldn't disturb them. Or one can seek to understand the underlying mechanisms of the universe with an eye towards eventually mastering them. Humans have tended to the latter path, and today, we no longer think of lightning as various bolts tossed around by Thor, but as a logical consequence of certain electromagnetic laws.
It is our understanding of electromagnetism, inter alia, that has enabled us to build personal computers. It is the free exchange of information in scientific journals that us has enabled this understanding. While scientific journals have, of late, begun to enforce heavy handed copyright rules, the authors of journal articles freely build upon the works of others with the expectation that their works will, in turn be cited by authors building upon them.
It should be fairly obvious that this "open" spirit of enquiry has provided more material benefits than the "closed" development model advocated by various priest hoods.
Patents are a tit for tat system. The inventor discloses an invention with enough specificity that others will be able to duplicate the design, improve upon it, or simply learn from t. In return, the patentee is granted a monopoly on the production of the patented object or its derivatives, for a limited period. If the disclosure is not substantial, novel, or complete, then the inventor has no right to stake a claim.
What is it with patent attorneys and their fetish for the word "plurality"? It seems to me that the language of software patents is entirely divorced from the language of software designers...
It's a rather complicated patent, with many claims, some dating to 1996, some dating to 2000. Untangling the applicability of prior art will be a difficult job.
The 376 claim patent emphasizes its utility in "pushing" new content to a subscriber of a electronic magazine. A relic of the dot-com boom, perhaps?
6,557,054 was granted on April 29, 2003, from a April 20, 2000 filing, but some of the claims were based on applications filed as early as Apr. 29, 1996, and over the course of those years, it's brought in several dot-com fads.
It depends on how many threads and processes are used. As it turns out, most 3d games are single threaded, with the exception of the audio. So, a dualie might be able to offload system functions and audio onto the second cpu-- a few frames per second faster, perhaps, but no great improvement. On the other hand, you might be able to run a few recompilation runs in the background, provided memory is not in contention.
The dual G5s have a slightly more intelligent memory architecture, so contention for memory bandwidth might not be such a problem.
what the...
The days of DirectX-only cards are long behind us. ATI supports OpenGL just fine, thank you.
OpenGL just happens to expose the design choices made by ATI and nVidia more readily, because most of the advanced functionality is exposed through vendor specific extensions. Later, the OpenGL Architectural Review Board may adopt them as ARB extensions, which signals to rest of the vendors that they should really think about implementing them, if they haven't already...
Carmack has griped before about nVidia's inconsistent floating point behavior-- certain nVidia cards ran the ARB standard code path quite slowly, and thus required custom code paths to achieve decent performance.
But this gripe was 18 months ago, perhaps the pendulum has swung back.