Main Entry: efficiency Pronunciation: i-'fi-sh&n-sE Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural -cies 1 : the quality or degree of being efficient 2 a : efficient operation b (1) : effective operation as measured by a comparison of production with cost (as in energy, time, and money) (2) : the ratio of the useful energy delivered by a dynamic system to the energy supplied to it
A more efficient CPU is one which does more work for a given amount of power, just as a more efficient automobile engine gets more miles per gallon, and a more efficient lightbulb produces more useful light per unit of energy.
It's just English, and fairly common English at that. What's so hard to understand?
If long-term operating cost is a concern when building a cluster or a supercomputer or a dishwasher or a jetplane or anything else, you'd better be using efficient parts. These are not necessarily low-power parts, but are merely those which produce the most work ("useful energy") for a given amount of energy input.
If there's any other way to look at it, please let Merriam and Webster know so that they might be able to include your views in the next New Collegiate. Thank you.
If I were Creative I'd start including massive amounts of RAM on my cards. Plus, I'd throw a CPU in there too, if there isn't one already
That game has already been played. Creative Labs won.
Somewhere around here, I've got a Soundblaster AWE 32 which sports an EMU 8000 DSP, and has a pair of 4-meg 30-pin SIMMs socketed on it for loading samples.
Last time I saw it, it was in the same drawer as the Ensoniq Soundscape. The Soundscape had, in addition to an EMU8k, a Motorola 68000 CPU. It was a nice card, and generally sounded better than the AWE. But it only had 2 megabytes of ROM and essentially zero useful RAM, so you were stuck with what Ensoniq thought were good samples.
It wasn't long after these two competing cards were released that Creative purchased Ensoniq, and did away with on-board RAM almost entirely as they cheapened their product lines. Creative Labs was thus victorious.
So, since they killed the RAM game years ago, now they fudge the output numbers. 8 or 9 channels of 192KHz 24-bit audio, and so on. Nevermind that it's completely useless technology for any enviroment which contains noisy devices like computers, as it does seem to be keeping the company afloat.
Printer connects to computer. Computer tells printer current date. Printer compares current date to expiration date supposedly in print cartridge's ROM.
Except, that doesn't seem to have happened. Which really was the whole point.
I recently bought a heavily-discounted HP Photosmart 7350 at a department store.
The reason it was cheap? It'd been sitting on the shelf for years and years...
Needless to say, both of the included print cartridges were expired.
The machine was perfectly willing to try and use them, with the only problem being that the Light Magenta color was inoperable. At no time did the printer, or its software, complain about this arrangement.
And at any rate, HP was more than willing to give me a new set of cartridges in exchange for a faxed copy of the receipt.
A couple of years ago, I put Slackware 8 on an NCR 386SL/25 notebook, for which I had no floppy or CD-ROM.
All you gotta do is pull the hard drive out and connect it to something more suitable. Adapters for attaching 2.5" notebook drives to desktop machines cost less than $5, and make the job easy.
Then just install the OS of your choice, and replace the drive into the notebook once you think you've got enough of it configured that it can access the network.
If what you say is true in the context of getting things done, I'd think we'd be seeing a -lot- more Slashdot articles about i8086, i80286, and M68000-based supercomputers. They're all low-power, and you can buy a bushel of them for next to nothing.
After all, for well-parallelizable problems, using more chips that are individually less powerful helps you with overall power consumption. No-brainer, that. But it's only one factor in the equation.
I think you've forgotten that the single reason people enjoy pissing away millions on supercomputers is that they'd like to, well, compute. And they'd like to do it fast.
Your definition of "actual cost" seems to mean a nickel for a CD, a half-dollar for time, and thirty-seven cents for a stamp. Over here in reality, it's rather obvious that nobody actually doing any distribution of GPL'd source has that same definition -- they all charge either significantly more, or nothing at all.
If a line must be drawn somewhere, then feel free to draw it. But nobody, so far, has done so and included it in the GNU GPL.
Well, let's see. You've got the individual's standard hourly wage, plus overhead. Overhead includes office space, equipment, electricity, insurance, retirement programs, coffee supplies, restroom facilities, and so on, and so forth.
If that's not vague enough, add to the actual cost of source distribution any meetings (and the associated cost of the meetings' participants), plus the meeting space (which may or may not already exist), along with any steak, beer, and whores consumed while figuring out how to distribute the source.
All said and done, the actual cost incurred by Samsung to conclude the acts of figuring out how to get Joe Sixpack a copy of their kernel mods (which is plainly the first step of actually doing it) it could quite easily be a few thousand dollars. The GPL provides that they may recover that cost from individuals seeking source code.
Outrageous? Yes.
Unlikely? Of course.
"Whatever they feel like?" A bit of an exageration, perhaps. But even if taken literally: Who are you to say any different, lest you've got a copy of Samsung's books in front of you?
I've read the GPL enough times that I don't need it quoted to me. I understand it rather well, I think. And when you came along attempting to disprove my statements with quotations that I already know, the best word I could summon to describe you was "dipfuck."
But upon further reflection, I've hence decided that it is indeed not a very apt moniker with which to describe you. Therefore, instead of you being a dipfuck, I've determined that you, sir, are a shitworm: A varied and largely ubiquitous, parasitic thing that lives on the pre-digested shit of other, larger organisms.
I do hope you find this classification more satisfying.
They only need to make sources available to those who have the binaries and request the source from them.
And even then, they get to charge whatever they feel like to provide the source to those entitled to it.
So, in order to make a legitimate GPL gripe, you'll first have to unsuccessfully do the following:
1. Procure one of their Linux-based camcorders, or otherwise obtain and posess their kernel binary 2. Request the source code used to generate said binary from Samsung 3. Pony up when they demand payment for their time and materials
If and when you fail, you'll finally be able to direct the ire of the GPL nazis toward them. Otherwise, they're being compliant, per the GPL, even though it might feel all wrong.
It's just not very useful. In the US, output power on handheld cellular telephones limited to 600 milliwatts by the FCC, which is a pittance. Antenna gain is inherently crippled on portable devices such as cellular phones, which doesn't help a bit. Unless you want carry a parabolic reflector and a telescopic step ladder on which to stand, you're just not going to be able to cover significant distance.
To wit, I just did a few back-of-the-napkin calculations to figure out just how far away two 600mW phones can be with usable signal. The best answer I got was:
Not very bloody far.
This is why cell towers tend to be rather tall. And also why they have elaborate, expensive high-gain antenna arrays, connected to racks of really expensive DSP gear. And despite this, they still perform poorly enough that they pepper the landscape like spikes on a porcupine in order to work at all.
Oh. And let's not talk about spectrum use and mediation, k? With the clusterfuck that even low-power, largely uncommon 802.11 canbe, you can obviously forget about using ISM bands for this sort of wide-area, ad-hoc use. And since the FCC prevents you from using any of the other bands without a specific license, I suppose that you can just consider the notion to be totally fucked.
I mean: A half-assed way to talk to talk to the twelve other people in town who happen to have a compatible phone (none of whom I've ever met), with near-useless range and near-zero reliability. Since there's no cellphone provider in the world who would finance such a device, I've even gotta pay cash for the phone, but I'm still due to pay the same monthly rate as everyone else who got their phone for free with a contract. And then, I've got to persuade them to program it for their network so I can actually use the thing to call a real person that I actually know.
Oh. And since the only way to get reasonable range out of it is for people to relay other folks' phone calls, that means that my battery life will be dismal even if I'm *not* talking on my phone, because everyone else will still be talking through it.
Yeah. Sign me up.
You'll have better luck with FRSS 2-way radios, licensed VHF/UHF, or maybe an amatuer license. Nextel's Direct Connect (which is free to use, last I checked) is an obvious choice as well, but that doesn't involve as much of the "sticking-it-to-the-man" gusto as an integrated cellphone/PTP 2-way radio does.
If they're all set up as default, just log into each of them, spread them out onto non-overlapping channels as much as possible, and let it ride.
After that, whether you decide to use your own AP or one of the neighbors', it will at least be a bit faster.
(Oh. And the WRT54G with Sveasoft firmware permits you to set up the box as an 802.11b/g client device, while offering a number of different firewall and VLAN possibilities in order to keep the neighbors away from your network even though you're using theirs. If you don't already have one, pick one up at Walmart for $60.)
Who cares how many ISPs operate on a given cable system?
The free market exists, because around here, Time Warner'a Roadrunner service (and the shirt-tailing "competitive" providers like Earthlink) gets to compete with, at least, the following:
- DSL from any of almost all of the national vendors - Wireless service from several local/regional WISPs - Satellite - The fuckton of local dialup providers - The bigger fuckton of national dialup providers - Verizon 1x cellular service - ISDN - A large and random smattering of free and non-free hotspots
Tell me: How is this not a competitive, free market?
Now, for some reason, despite all of this competition, all of the services listed suck from time to time. Regulation would make it less sucky, in that one would be able to swing the long arm of the government at these providers (which are increasingly necessary utilities), and get problems solved post-haste.
Until then, residential broadband internet service will never be anything but an expensive and fickle toy.
Are you saying that you're satisfied with your ISP being able to can your account at a whim, charge whatever they feel like, and deliver service which is as poor as a bum on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial?
In order to subscribe to Roadrunner, I had to sign a lengthy contract. This contract states, basically, that I can do anything I want with their network, as long as I don't do very much of it, it doesn't piss anyone off or break any hairbrained laws, and that they'll be happy to disconnect service for any reason at all, including no reason at all, without limitation or any means of recourse, while I'm obligated to pay them whatever it is they feel like asking this month.
It's a nasty contract.
At least when Ma Bell fucks up my phone in some way I can call the PUC and they'll crack heads at SBC on my behalf.
On the other hand, I've never had to. Since childhood, every single time (except when a wayward truck knocked down a cable behind the house) that I've picked up a phone in my house, I've gotten a dialtone.
But the PUC doesn't care about Roadrunner. And while the service here is generally extremely good, it does suffer failures from time to time. Sometimes these issues are fixed fairly quickly, other times they might last for several hours or a couple of days. And under no circumstances will their usual tech support people ever admit fault with the network.
As long as there's no legal reason for them to keep their shit running smoothly and not lie about it when it does break, that will continue to be the case.
Believe it or not, there are times when free market competition is insufficient to garner satisfactory service.
Cost of a softmod can be zero (if you can borrow a memory card, some way to cable it to your PC, and the requisite game - or just the proper savegame itself already on a card), or minimal (if you have buy everything instead). I've got about $30 wrapped up in my softmod, but instead of an otherwise-useless mod chip I got an Xbox port for my PC, a USB port for my Xbox, and an 8MB Xbox memory card. This is all stuff that I wanted anyway.
My experience with XBMC thus-far has been minimal, as I've only had the box for a few days and yet haven't loaded a proper NTSC crosshatch into it to check the geometry.
But it uses mplayer for playback, which is a known Good Thing(tm), and includes a very versatile set of basic video calibration configurables. Have you tried adjusting it so that it's more to your liking?
I've got about the same goal as the submitter: All of my music exists on the computer, but I still have to find, load, and refile CDs in the living room to play any of it on the cool stereo and chill out on the couch with music.
Since that sucked, I decided to fix it. I built a reasonable machine with a composite NTSC output from stuff I had laying around. Tried Frevo, MythTV, and a few other things. They were all varying levels of terrible at playing music.
MythTV was a complete bitch to compile, making periodic upgrades more time-consuming than, well, anything I can think of off-hand.
Freevo was a little easier to compile, and its Python plugin interface seemed fairly flexible, but the interface was absolutely dog-slow.
Both were featureless in terms of music-playing ability.
The other things mostly centered around putting a computer monitor in the livingroom, but all (yes: all) available Linux software for playing music is either just as hard to make work as MythTV, or completely lacks any characteristics which would make a component MP3 player desirous (organization, speed, organization, mouseless operation, organization, legible fonts, and organization).
During this lengthy try-out process, I kept thinking to myself, "For fuck's sake, Wal-Mart has a cheap Linksys box with a pair of speakers, and RCA output, and 802.11g networking. I bet it's easy to set up, and works better than anything I've tried so far."
If time were money, I've already spent enough of it fucking around with everyone's brother's broken music playing software to afford an X-Box, an extra controller, a handful of games, and a modchip.
So, there's an X-Box, a controller, and some games sitting under the Christmas tree, waiting for the Big Day.
What chip would Slashdot suggest that I put in the thing? I'm leaning toward the v2 SmartXX, just now, mostly because XBMC supports an LCD module with it. Is there any compelling reason to choose any one over any of the others?
Sure. 37.5 Watts? When? At noon? When the panels are facing away from the sun? During the night? When, exactly, is that 37.5 Watt figure useful? (Answer: It is not. Nobody gives a shit what the theoretical average output power of the cells might be. Except, perhaps, you.)
They expressed their figures in Watt-hours/day because that's how it makes the most sense for the topic at-hand. All that matters here is how much energy the solar cell provides during the course of one day, which can then be easily compared with the expected power requirements of upcoming missions, storage losses, and a bunch of stuff that I don't care to bother myself with.
This is Slashdot. Do you you want the units to be dumbed down into meaningless dribble for you to numbly consume and nod toward, or do you want them to have value?
I suppose you think Watts are easier to digest, because everyone knows what a Watt is.
Then again, everyone knows what a calorie is, too, and people digest 'em all the time. Would you rather they say that the panels are capable of producing 537.40327 calories per minute? Nevermind that the number is accurate and the unit is common - it's just about fucking worthless for getting any work done.
I mean, personally, I'm a big fan of horsepower, fortnights, cubits, and the like as units of measure, just because it's fun to say them. But that doesn't mean I'm going to publish that my multi-billion-dollar alien rover is extracting 16.896878 horsepower-hours per fortnight from Sol, even if it is mathematically true.
The typical description of enterprise-level support is thus: Being forced to pay a fuckton of money to be able to call a telephone number, whereupon one gets to speak to five different people who have never even actually touched the product in question, and one person who has, but who still has no idea how to solve your problem. Eventually, that person will leave a message for an engineer, who will either a) rectify the problem immediately or b) deny that it exists.
There are obvious variations of this, depending on the amount of money your enterprise has already divested itself of in the name of the nonfunctional enterprise-level product. These variations may include cross-shipped product replacement (look! another one that's just as broke as the first!), and/or having Fedex deliver a monkeyboy to remove and reinstall the cabling on your behalf.
I might be missing something, but I'm pretty sure that any ignorance on my part has already been made up for by all the cash in my pocket that never got spent on superfluous hoops through which to jump.
All of this arguing about how exclusive licensing is bad for consumers, good for EA, doubleplus good for the NFL, and so on.
It's a football video game. As in, a computer simulation of the actual game known to Americans as "football." As in, WTF?
You wanna play football? Get yourself a $6.88 ball from Wal-Mart, find yourself a few friends, and go play football.
For an even better game, try printing the names of real teams and players on your uniform, so you can be like REAL football players.
Oh, wait - that's just silly. But then, that silliness of team and player names is the only thing we're talking about here.
C'mon, Slashdot, I expected better of you. If this is something Really Important to your daily livelihood, then just do this: patch NFL Gameday, put the diffs up on BT somewhere, and shut the hell up.
The whiney group-hug stuff (OMG! The NFL sells to the highest bidder! I'm so upset! What do they think they're trying to do, make money or something? How will SCEA survive? Think of the children!) is a little embarassing.
So just stop. Get up off of the couch (the computer is far enough, but outside would be better) and do something about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, for fuck's sake:
Main Entry: efficiency
Pronunciation: i-'fi-sh&n-sE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -cies
1 : the quality or degree of being efficient
2 a : efficient operation b (1) : effective operation as measured by a comparison of production with cost (as in energy, time, and money) (2) : the ratio of the useful energy delivered by a dynamic system to the energy supplied to it
A more efficient CPU is one which does more work for a given amount of power, just as a more efficient automobile engine gets more miles per gallon, and a more efficient lightbulb produces more useful light per unit of energy.
It's just English, and fairly common English at that. What's so hard to understand?
If long-term operating cost is a concern when building a cluster or a supercomputer or a dishwasher or a jetplane or anything else, you'd better be using efficient parts. These are not necessarily low-power parts, but are merely those which produce the most work ("useful energy") for a given amount of energy input.
If there's any other way to look at it, please let Merriam and Webster know so that they might be able to include your views in the next New Collegiate. Thank you.
If I were Creative I'd start including massive amounts of RAM on my cards. Plus, I'd throw a CPU in there too, if there isn't one already
That game has already been played. Creative Labs won.
Somewhere around here, I've got a Soundblaster AWE 32 which sports an EMU 8000 DSP, and has a pair of 4-meg 30-pin SIMMs socketed on it for loading samples.
Last time I saw it, it was in the same drawer as the Ensoniq Soundscape. The Soundscape had, in addition to an EMU8k, a Motorola 68000 CPU. It was a nice card, and generally sounded better than the AWE. But it only had 2 megabytes of ROM and essentially zero useful RAM, so you were stuck with what Ensoniq thought were good samples.
It wasn't long after these two competing cards were released that Creative purchased Ensoniq, and did away with on-board RAM almost entirely as they cheapened their product lines. Creative Labs was thus victorious.
So, since they killed the RAM game years ago, now they fudge the output numbers. 8 or 9 channels of 192KHz 24-bit audio, and so on. Nevermind that it's completely useless technology for any enviroment which contains noisy devices like computers, as it does seem to be keeping the company afloat.
Is it really so hard?
Printer connects to computer. Computer tells printer current date. Printer compares current date to expiration date supposedly in print cartridge's ROM.
Except, that doesn't seem to have happened. Which really was the whole point.
I recently bought a heavily-discounted HP Photosmart 7350 at a department store.
The reason it was cheap? It'd been sitting on the shelf for years and years...
Needless to say, both of the included print cartridges were expired.
The machine was perfectly willing to try and use them, with the only problem being that the Light Magenta color was inoperable. At no time did the printer, or its software, complain about this arrangement.
And at any rate, HP was more than willing to give me a new set of cartridges in exchange for a faxed copy of the receipt.
Non-issue, anyone?
That's not such a big deal, really.
A couple of years ago, I put Slackware 8 on an NCR 386SL/25 notebook, for which I had no floppy or CD-ROM.
All you gotta do is pull the hard drive out and connect it to something more suitable. Adapters for attaching 2.5" notebook drives to desktop machines cost less than $5, and make the job easy.
Then just install the OS of your choice, and replace the drive into the notebook once you think you've got enough of it configured that it can access the network.
total-perf = #proc * perf-per-proc
total-power = #proc * power-per-proc
Isn't that just a fancy way of saying that more efficient chips are more practical in this context, and thus reinforcing my singular point?
Are you arguing for me, or against me? Do you even know?
I think you all forgot to switch on your sarcasm detectors this morning...
Bzzt.
If what you say is true in the context of getting things done, I'd think we'd be seeing a -lot- more Slashdot articles about i8086, i80286, and M68000-based supercomputers. They're all low-power, and you can buy a bushel of them for next to nothing.
After all, for well-parallelizable problems, using more chips that are individually less powerful helps you with overall power consumption. No-brainer, that. But it's only one factor in the equation.
I think you've forgotten that the single reason people enjoy pissing away millions on supercomputers is that they'd like to, well, compute. And they'd like to do it fast.
Efficiency rules.
HTH
Who said anything about eBay? Or PayPal, for that matter?
TFA doesn't say by what means the used software title was aquired, nor how payment was tendered.
For all we know, he traded a twelve-pack of beer for it with his next-door neighbor.
Get some sunshine. Ebay is not the only venue via which used items change hands.
Good reply.
But I question it.
Your definition of "actual cost" seems to mean a nickel for a CD, a half-dollar for time, and thirty-seven cents for a stamp. Over here in reality, it's rather obvious that nobody actually doing any distribution of GPL'd source has that same definition -- they all charge either significantly more, or nothing at all.
If a line must be drawn somewhere, then feel free to draw it. But nobody, so far, has done so and included it in the GNU GPL.
Most cheap PC vendors are still including ball mice.
My boss bought his wife a semi-high-end Gateway BTX machine a couple of months ago, which came with the standard cheap ball mouse.
The low-end Dells that we buy at work with some frequency all come with ball mice.
According to compgeeks.com, there's a price disparity of about $2 between the two types.
It's an ugly world, isn't it?
Well, let's see. You've got the individual's standard hourly wage, plus overhead. Overhead includes office space, equipment, electricity, insurance, retirement programs, coffee supplies, restroom facilities, and so on, and so forth.
If that's not vague enough, add to the actual cost of source distribution any meetings (and the associated cost of the meetings' participants), plus the meeting space (which may or may not already exist), along with any steak, beer, and whores consumed while figuring out how to distribute the source.
All said and done, the actual cost incurred by Samsung to conclude the acts of figuring out how to get Joe Sixpack a copy of their kernel mods (which is plainly the first step of actually doing it) it could quite easily be a few thousand dollars. The GPL provides that they may recover that cost from individuals seeking source code.
Outrageous? Yes.
Unlikely? Of course.
"Whatever they feel like?" A bit of an exageration, perhaps. But even if taken literally: Who are you to say any different, lest you've got a copy of Samsung's books in front of you?
I've read the GPL enough times that I don't need it quoted to me. I understand it rather well, I think. And when you came along attempting to disprove my statements with quotations that I already know, the best word I could summon to describe you was "dipfuck."
But upon further reflection, I've hence decided that it is indeed not a very apt moniker with which to describe you. Therefore, instead of you being a dipfuck, I've determined that you, sir, are a shitworm: A varied and largely ubiquitous, parasitic thing that lives on the pre-digested shit of other, larger organisms.
I do hope you find this classification more satisfying.
HAND.
Right.
Which is why I said "time and materials."
You don't think Samsung employees work for free, do you?
Dipfuck.
I call bullshit.
The rest of the world ("normal people") should come up with ways of making it easier for themselves to interact with those with autism.
They only need to make sources available to those who have the binaries and request the source from them.
And even then, they get to charge whatever they feel like to provide the source to those entitled to it.
So, in order to make a legitimate GPL gripe, you'll first have to unsuccessfully do the following:
1. Procure one of their Linux-based camcorders, or otherwise obtain and posess their kernel binary
2. Request the source code used to generate said binary from Samsung
3. Pony up when they demand payment for their time and materials
If and when you fail, you'll finally be able to direct the ire of the GPL nazis toward them. Otherwise, they're being compliant, per the GPL, even though it might feel all wrong.
Nice idea.
It's just not very useful. In the US, output power on handheld cellular telephones limited to 600 milliwatts by the FCC, which is a pittance. Antenna gain is inherently crippled on portable devices such as cellular phones, which doesn't help a bit. Unless you want carry a parabolic reflector and a telescopic step ladder on which to stand, you're just not going to be able to cover significant distance.
To wit, I just did a few back-of-the-napkin calculations to figure out just how far away two 600mW phones can be with usable signal. The best answer I got was:
Not very bloody far.
This is why cell towers tend to be rather tall. And also why they have elaborate, expensive high-gain antenna arrays, connected to racks of really expensive DSP gear. And despite this, they still perform poorly enough that they pepper the landscape like spikes on a porcupine in order to work at all.
Oh. And let's not talk about spectrum use and mediation, k? With the clusterfuck that even low-power, largely uncommon 802.11 can be, you can obviously forget about using ISM bands for this sort of wide-area, ad-hoc use. And since the FCC prevents you from using any of the other bands without a specific license, I suppose that you can just consider the notion to be totally fucked.
I mean: A half-assed way to talk to talk to the twelve other people in town who happen to have a compatible phone (none of whom I've ever met), with near-useless range and near-zero reliability. Since there's no cellphone provider in the world who would finance such a device, I've even gotta pay cash for the phone, but I'm still due to pay the same monthly rate as everyone else who got their phone for free with a contract. And then, I've got to persuade them to program it for their network so I can actually use the thing to call a real person that I actually know.
Oh. And since the only way to get reasonable range out of it is for people to relay other folks' phone calls, that means that my battery life will be dismal even if I'm *not* talking on my phone, because everyone else will still be talking through it.
Yeah. Sign me up.
You'll have better luck with FRSS 2-way radios, licensed VHF/UHF, or maybe an amatuer license. Nextel's Direct Connect (which is free to use, last I checked) is an obvious choice as well, but that doesn't involve as much of the "sticking-it-to-the-man" gusto as an integrated cellphone/PTP 2-way radio does.
Wah.
If they're all set up as default, just log into each of them, spread them out onto non-overlapping channels as much as possible, and let it ride.
After that, whether you decide to use your own AP or one of the neighbors', it will at least be a bit faster.
(Oh. And the WRT54G with Sveasoft firmware permits you to set up the box as an 802.11b/g client device, while offering a number of different firewall and VLAN possibilities in order to keep the neighbors away from your network even though you're using theirs. If you don't already have one, pick one up at Walmart for $60.)
Who cares how many ISPs operate on a given cable system?
The free market exists, because around here, Time Warner'a Roadrunner service (and the shirt-tailing "competitive" providers like Earthlink) gets to compete with, at least, the following:
- DSL from any of almost all of the national vendors
- Wireless service from several local/regional WISPs
- Satellite
- The fuckton of local dialup providers
- The bigger fuckton of national dialup providers
- Verizon 1x cellular service
- ISDN
- A large and random smattering of free and non-free hotspots
Tell me: How is this not a competitive, free market?
Now, for some reason, despite all of this competition, all of the services listed suck from time to time. Regulation would make it less sucky, in that one would be able to swing the long arm of the government at these providers (which are increasingly necessary utilities), and get problems solved post-haste.
Until then, residential broadband internet service will never be anything but an expensive and fickle toy.
Are you saying that you're satisfied with your ISP being able to can your account at a whim, charge whatever they feel like, and deliver service which is as poor as a bum on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial?
In order to subscribe to Roadrunner, I had to sign a lengthy contract. This contract states, basically, that I can do anything I want with their network, as long as I don't do very much of it, it doesn't piss anyone off or break any hairbrained laws, and that they'll be happy to disconnect service for any reason at all, including no reason at all, without limitation or any means of recourse, while I'm obligated to pay them whatever it is they feel like asking this month.
It's a nasty contract.
At least when Ma Bell fucks up my phone in some way I can call the PUC and they'll crack heads at SBC on my behalf.
On the other hand, I've never had to. Since childhood, every single time (except when a wayward truck knocked down a cable behind the house) that I've picked up a phone in my house, I've gotten a dialtone.
But the PUC doesn't care about Roadrunner. And while the service here is generally extremely good, it does suffer failures from time to time. Sometimes these issues are fixed fairly quickly, other times they might last for several hours or a couple of days. And under no circumstances will their usual tech support people ever admit fault with the network.
As long as there's no legal reason for them to keep their shit running smoothly and not lie about it when it does break, that will continue to be the case.
Believe it or not, there are times when free market competition is insufficient to garner satisfactory service.
Cost of a softmod can be zero (if you can borrow a memory card, some way to cable it to your PC, and the requisite game - or just the proper savegame itself already on a card), or minimal (if you have buy everything instead). I've got about $30 wrapped up in my softmod, but instead of an otherwise-useless mod chip I got an Xbox port for my PC, a USB port for my Xbox, and an 8MB Xbox memory card. This is all stuff that I wanted anyway.
My experience with XBMC thus-far has been minimal, as I've only had the box for a few days and yet haven't loaded a proper NTSC crosshatch into it to check the geometry.
But it uses mplayer for playback, which is a known Good Thing(tm), and includes a very versatile set of basic video calibration configurables. Have you tried adjusting it so that it's more to your liking?
*shrug*
I bought an Xbox for that purpose. Works just dandy playing every sort of media known to man, and cost $350 less than this mythical Apple machine.
Right on.
I've got about the same goal as the submitter: All of my music exists on the computer, but I still have to find, load, and refile CDs in the living room to play any of it on the cool stereo and chill out on the couch with music.
Since that sucked, I decided to fix it. I built a reasonable machine with a composite NTSC output from stuff I had laying around. Tried Frevo, MythTV, and a few other things. They were all varying levels of terrible at playing music.
MythTV was a complete bitch to compile, making periodic upgrades more time-consuming than, well, anything I can think of off-hand.
Freevo was a little easier to compile, and its Python plugin interface seemed fairly flexible, but the interface was absolutely dog-slow.
Both were featureless in terms of music-playing ability.
The other things mostly centered around putting a computer monitor in the livingroom, but all (yes: all) available Linux software for playing music is either just as hard to make work as MythTV, or completely lacks any characteristics which would make a component MP3 player desirous (organization, speed, organization, mouseless operation, organization, legible fonts, and organization).
During this lengthy try-out process, I kept thinking to myself, "For fuck's sake, Wal-Mart has a cheap Linksys box with a pair of speakers, and RCA output, and 802.11g networking. I bet it's easy to set up, and works better than anything I've tried so far."
If time were money, I've already spent enough of it fucking around with everyone's brother's broken music playing software to afford an X-Box, an extra controller, a handful of games, and a modchip.
So, there's an X-Box, a controller, and some games sitting under the Christmas tree, waiting for the Big Day.
What chip would Slashdot suggest that I put in the thing? I'm leaning toward the v2 SmartXX, just now, mostly because XBMC supports an LCD module with it. Is there any compelling reason to choose any one over any of the others?
Sure. 37.5 Watts? When? At noon? When the panels are facing away from the sun? During the night? When, exactly, is that 37.5 Watt figure useful? (Answer: It is not. Nobody gives a shit what the theoretical average output power of the cells might be. Except, perhaps, you.)
They expressed their figures in Watt-hours/day because that's how it makes the most sense for the topic at-hand. All that matters here is how much energy the solar cell provides during the course of one day, which can then be easily compared with the expected power requirements of upcoming missions, storage losses, and a bunch of stuff that I don't care to bother myself with.
This is Slashdot. Do you you want the units to be dumbed down into meaningless dribble for you to numbly consume and nod toward, or do you want them to have value?
I suppose you think Watts are easier to digest, because everyone knows what a Watt is.
Then again, everyone knows what a calorie is, too, and people digest 'em all the time. Would you rather they say that the panels are capable of producing 537.40327 calories per minute? Nevermind that the number is accurate and the unit is common - it's just about fucking worthless for getting any work done.
I mean, personally, I'm a big fan of horsepower, fortnights, cubits, and the like as units of measure, just because it's fun to say them. But that doesn't mean I'm going to publish that my multi-billion-dollar alien rover is extracting 16.896878 horsepower-hours per fortnight from Sol, even if it is mathematically true.
It's just not useful.
The typical description of enterprise-level support is thus: Being forced to pay a fuckton of money to be able to call a telephone number, whereupon one gets to speak to five different people who have never even actually touched the product in question, and one person who has, but who still has no idea how to solve your problem. Eventually, that person will leave a message for an engineer, who will either a) rectify the problem immediately or b) deny that it exists.
There are obvious variations of this, depending on the amount of money your enterprise has already divested itself of in the name of the nonfunctional enterprise-level product. These variations may include cross-shipped product replacement (look! another one that's just as broke as the first!), and/or having Fedex deliver a monkeyboy to remove and reinstall the cabling on your behalf.
I might be missing something, but I'm pretty sure that any ignorance on my part has already been made up for by all the cash in my pocket that never got spent on superfluous hoops through which to jump.
That said, I've been rather pleased with SA.
Half-height? Bah. I think that's more properly dubbed a "laptop drive."
Half-height drives, rather, are of course about half the height of a full-height drive. See here.
HTH.
All of this arguing about how exclusive licensing is bad for consumers, good for EA, doubleplus good for the NFL, and so on.
It's a football video game. As in, a computer simulation of the actual game known to Americans as "football." As in, WTF?
You wanna play football? Get yourself a $6.88 ball from Wal-Mart, find yourself a few friends, and go play football.
For an even better game, try printing the names of real teams and players on your uniform, so you can be like REAL football players.
Oh, wait - that's just silly. But then, that silliness of team and player names is the only thing we're talking about here.
C'mon, Slashdot, I expected better of you. If this is something Really Important to your daily livelihood, then just do this: patch NFL Gameday, put the diffs up on BT somewhere, and shut the hell up.
The whiney group-hug stuff (OMG! The NFL sells to the highest bidder! I'm so upset! What do they think they're trying to do, make money or something?
How will SCEA survive? Think of the children!) is a little embarassing.
So just stop. Get up off of the couch (the computer is far enough, but outside would be better) and do something about it.
Thank you.