7) If you own a mac, you can have an OS installed on the iPod and boot your Mac in a fix.
Since I've had two problems with my PC with Win2000 having boot problems because of a mildly corrupted HD. The 1st time I was at home and could yank the HD and put it into a desktop machine to clean up the HD. The second time I was in a time crunch (thank goodness for Knoppix, or I wouldn't have gotten anything done for 2 hours). Eventually I booted from the win2000 boot disk and fixed the HD (2 hours, yikes). It would have been nice to had the boot from firewire capability that the Macs have.
Multiplan STARTED on the Mac, which Microsoft bought out and made into Excel. It was only available on the Mac for quite a while before a port was made to the PC. MacWrite was always available on the Mac and would easily fit on one 800k disk along with the entire OS, and it was far better than WordPerfect or Word and offered true WYSIWYG. WriteNow came along shortly afterwards (1988 I believe) and was better than any other word processor, and was lightening fast too since it was written almost entirely in assembly (and only on the Mac). WriteNow could paginate on the fly unlike the MS Word of the day where you had to select "paginate" to sort of see how the document looked (and was no guarantee that it would print the same way). Some people perfered the CLI back then, but the biggest reason for slow acceptance was the price differential between PCs and Macs. The software was far superior and the Macs came with networking right out of the box and were downright easy to install and setup (and in 1987 too). So yes, the IBM PC users were morons and I was downright shocked when the computer folks wanted us to switch from Macs to 486s with windows 3.1. What a step back for those that did, but I was able to keep my Mac and my productivity.
a. If your a windows 2000 or XP user, you can hibernate the machine and boot into the game. Kill power on the game and "un" hibernate right back where you left off in windows. I do this all the time with Knoppix. Much less painful than the "old days" of shutdown and reboot into DOS, etc.
2. This is the way consoles work today. Insert CD, hit power, play game, kill power. My guess is the boot time on this CD is a bit longer than the boot time on a console, but for those people that mostly play games on PCs at home (and real work on PCs at work), this sounds like an excellent dual-use capability with zero downside (other than a potentially longer boot time).
3. Great way to try out games without having to load onto your harddrive. For some strange reason, my company would only let me get a 30GB HD for my new laptop (6 months old). I have so much work related stuff in that 30GB that I don't have room for MP3s, much less games, so I'm forced to run games like Quake 3 arena on
4. WE are all NOT like YOU. Who really cares if any one person does or does not like this method. Free enterprize and the market economy at work. It will either fail or succeed on it's own popularity or lack there of. Me, I'll be in line for the flexibility.
I'm leaning more and more towards the Knoppix CD as the main OS on my server. Unmount drives, kill power, insert new Knoppix discs (or game disc) and reboot to new OS, game, whatever. No OS virus problems, no installs, the OS runs virtually forever anyway on my servers, so I don't much care about the boot time. Seems like in the next 2-3 years an ideal system would be booting from CD-DVD ROM and having a 2-5 GB flash storage device for common data and maybe a removable SATA optical or magnetic HD for mass storage.
I don't think you could come up will a real good reason why the people are split. Or if you did, somebody would yell some political correctness jargon. Also, our side (the weapons developers) believe we have the ethics on our side as well as history (think Poland, etc. during WWII). You can claim ethics on both sides of the argument and will never come to closure and certainly doesn't explain why a professionally educated physicists lean towards not protecting their country, and professionally trained engineers (some, not all) may lean the other way. It also certainly doesn't explain why physicists before WWII were willing to come over to the US and Britain and help us develop weapons to defeat their prior homelands. The idea was assumably 'ethical' in their minds before the war and certainly there were many physicists who made the A-bomb who didn't have conscience problems afterwards (although we hear more about the people who couldn't live with what they had developed, but that bias can be explained by sensationalism in media). Interesting questions and certainly no clear answers.
However, the fact that there is a split does not answer the question of what the reason for why there should be such a split.
But it is interesting that there is a distinct split. Your original statement was between essentially professionally trained people and untrained people, where I was also stating that the split is apparent even between trained professions.
Interesting you should ask. There is a big split between scientist and workers in munition factories, and even between scientist (notably physicist) and engineers. This split happened around the time the A-bomb was being developed. From that time forward there has been a split in the scientific community, with a vast majority of the physicist refusing to work on high tech military equipment. The physicist even form groups (like the American Physical Society) which tends towards being pacifists and generally loath the military and all the associated hardware. 100 years ago you would have scientist and physicists developing all sorts of systems. Now the physicists tend to take the left/liberal approach and chuck rocks at the engineers, who are predominantly the ones doing leading edge work like missile defense, guided projectiles, UAVs, etc. It was interesting during the Strategic Defense Initiative to see only a handful of physicists actually participating in the design/work (notable people like Edward Teller, Greg Canavan, etc.). Compare this to the number of physicist working on the A-bomb (hundreds). The engineers were performing most of the actual development work while the physicist were chucking negative comments against the work. The American Physical Society just released a document (Boost-Phase Intercept Systems for National Missile Defense-July 2003) basically stating why boost-phase intercepts are not possible/feasible, just like prior documents "proving" midcourse based missile defense can't work (even though they are currently gearing up to field a system next year). The document is obviously politically slanted towards their viewpoints (as is their recent history) and has some GLARING errors (kill vehicle mass assumptions, guidance methods, etc.)
So there is a readily observable split between the physicists and other people along the line of ethics and politics that isn't easily explained away, but is apparent non the less.
It is absolutely wise. The biggest thing is the cost of cargo rated rockets versus man rated rockets. There is a whole level of safety, checks, build processes, etc. that go with building any rocket which will launch a human. The second most expensive rockets are the systems that launch expensive satellites into orbit (multi million dollar satellites). For resupply the space station you would only need the most basic of rocket systems, especially for things like food, water, clothing, movies, music, etc. If you lose the bird, oh well, you probably spent more for the rocket than for the contents. A $100k-200k rocket system could be developed to do the work horse tasks and launch them once a week or so with new supplies. The more expensive electronic components and science experiments could be sent up on more reliable systems. We could also make us of assets currently sitting around, for example Minuteman II, and III, Peacekeeper, and Poseidon rocket motors. These launches would be on the order of $10 million, but would carry significantly more than the smaller rocket systems and are very reliable. Rockets made reasonably small and in sufficient quantity can be very cost effective. An example would be the MLRS booster motor which is pumped out for about $2000 each (motor, folding fins, nozzle, ignitor assembly). They wouldn't make it to orbit with any real payload, but it gives you an idea of cost savings from quantity production.
Since Microsoft's service packs are close to beta or alpha products to begin with, why would anyone use a leaked or pre-release version of something Microsoft was planning on releasing. I rememeber (and I'm sure many, many others do too) the absolute fun to be had by installing the first few service packs on NT 4.0. What a game of roulette that was! Has anyone ever tried to uninstall a service pack on 2000 or XP? I see they have that option now (and the 100MB of extra system file cruft from the prior files stored on the HD) and was wondering if they actually work, or does it cause even more headaches. An actual uninstall feature on NT 4.0 would have been very welcome in leu of reinstalling from the get-go all over again. I'm real hesitant to even install a service pack these days, but have never worked up the courage to UNinstall a service pack, although I must admit I've haven't needed to lately either.
All the details have been pulled and the following remark inserted:
"And yes, sorry, there used to be more details here. I didn't realize yesterday's presentation was supposed to be confidential. When I found out, I pulled the details. Honest mistake."
require a big bright power-hungry light source running behind the LCD to make it glow
The light source part is correct, but the "power-hungry" part isn't true. Current backlighting is performed with either White LED's, electrolum, or flourescent tubes, with the flourescent tubes actually being a bit less power-hungry, but, obviously, a little more fragile. The only efficiency is gained by directly viewing the light source (the Light-Emitting-Diode (LED) part of OLED) instead of indirect light via reflection by the current backlighting methods. The big gain is in the Organic (O of OLED) part of the process, which in this case refers to organic plastics (ie, cheap plastics). Great technology, and I'm glad their finally shipping mainstream products, but the parent article and one of the linked articles imply great power savings, which isn't so. Slight efficiency gains, but not leap forward technology in power savings.
Your working on older technology. The newer Compact Flash (CF) cards are much faster than just a year or two ago. The newer digital camera's have been forcing the CF cards to faster speeds. I definately wouldn't want to wait 6-7 seconds to store a 6 megapixel image. The new CF cards can write about 3-5 MB/sec sustained and read at up to 20MB/sec. Some manufactures claim higher write speeds, but I haven't confirmed this fact myself. Watch the claims closely, some manufactures quote the read speed and pretend it is the write speed. The best place to get hard data is from the digital camera sites that test actual units rigorously and give you the exact part number. The best high speed CF card is still the IBM Microdrives though FYI.
"Multiple CD burners would be brought in, and the live CDs would probably sell for around $15"
No story here. The above sentence describes the entire process. Certainly not "instant" and $15 dollars is not pirating. I personally have never liked live albums and wouldn't even pay $5 for one, much less the 'standard' price of $15.
This is a weak story. A point is made about MS being forced into compatibility, but no facts to back up the claim. Journalism at it's finest. I'll make my own conjecture: Microsoft will put out a compatible/standard product when they see SIGNIFICANT decrease in market share or lost revenue. They haven't got X-Box right, nor Windows CE, but a few billion dollars later, a few strong-arm deals later, a few revision later, they'll have a story and a product and the sheep will make it a standard.
Another fine tidbit is that Matlab is far easier to learn and REMEMBER. I've used both Matlab and Mathematica extensively and I always have to go back to the book after I leave Mathematica for a month or two. The syntax is a killer. Matlab has some of that (just like C, C++), but it is definately easier to pick back up. There is also a significantly better presence on the internet with Matlab over Mathematica or Maple. If you have to do symbolic computations then Mathematica and Maple are the only solutions, but for math, vectors, matrices, ease-of-use, and other math problems for which there is a toolbox (library) available, then Matlab wins hands down.
How far we've fallen from the day when men like Washinton, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt fought for and to protect the central ideas of American Democracy.
How far we've fallen to consider that Washinton, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt would have fought for a democracy. They would have recoiled in horror at the thought. Especially since they instituted a consitutional republic. You might be right if the Roosevelt to which you refer is the Franklin variety, who was indeed for a democracy. However, the other 3 and the Teddy version definately were not in favor.
FYI: A republic is a government in which the supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law. Democracy is basically mob rule or 50.000001% wins, damn the laws, damn the minority which in this example would be 49.999999% of the people (hence the term mob rule).
One quote from another famous person from the same line of thinking: "Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property, and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death." James Madison
The quoted article is tame in comparison to what happened in Rapid City, SD in 1972. Cloud seeding was also suspected. The following link describes the flood and the 238 deaths: www.crh.noaa.gov/
We're all familiar with the Saturday Night Live skit where you tell the "faithful" to get a life. Most of us think that is amusing as well, but how close to reality is your actual view of the die-hard fans? You've done other roles, would you wish the same fan response from those jobs too?
I never mentioned whether the action was "ok, moral, or helpful", just that it is perfectly legal. The corporations don't have the same rights as people and what is more germane, they don't act like people. The vast majority of US corporations (and others throughtout the world) are concerned with the bottom line (quarterly, yearly, whatever), which means that they will do whatever they have to legally as long as it maximizes profits. Your post is self-contradictory. You state that my "assumption that laws are the only way to get _people_ to act decently", but then say I assume "corporations have rights as people". We are NOT talking about people. We are discussing a corporation. While it is true a single, morally upright individual that controls (>50%, etc) a corporation will tend to rule as befits his standards, but this is the exception in large corporations rather than the rule. The only two large corporations that appear to follow this (that I know of) are Walmart and Campbell's soup. The rest are essentially ruled by the laws ONLY. They maximize profit within the set of laws that are are on the books.
And where in the world did I suggest "money=speech"? More money can certainly aid in getting your speech heard far and wide, but there is definately not a linear relationship.
In other news... Bill Gates was spotted taking deeps breaths of PUBLIC AIR. It's rumored he even drinks water.
I'm surprized that anyone is the focus of this story. This is NO story. MS,and the other companies are executing their rights within the law to give money to political candidates. They are obviously reporting the results too, otherwise we wouldn't know the amounts. Get over it people, or do something about the preceived problem (like vote for decent candidates and monitor their activities and report to others what the senators/representatives/presidents are doing). Saying MS can't donate money is like those people that say Christians can't hold public office. Them's the rules folks. Live with them or change the constitution. Better yet, don't let your money get into Bill's hands and he won't have that amount to donate away!
Austria gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/linux/Mandrake/iso/ (Vienna)
Czech Republic mandrake.redbox.cz/Mandrake/iso/
ftp.fi.muni.cz/pub/linux/mandrake/iso/ (Brno)
France fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/Mandrake/iso/ (Lyon) ftp.ciril.fr/pub/linux/mandrake/iso/ (Nancy)
United States ftp.cs.ucr.edu/pub/mirrors/mandrake/Mandra ke/iso/ (California) ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Linux/Mandra ke/mandrake/is o (NY) mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/Mandrake/iso/ (Illinois)
All mirrors are hammered, of course! I was able to get on in Australia, but good luck.
Actually there is already a much superior solution on the Macs available (in terms of quality), but it is not a true PVR. There are two firewire boxes out there that take analog in and send it to the firewire port. One is Sony and I don't rememeber the other. These boxes basically act like a mini-DV player (without the tape recorder). You can also use a Canon ZR-40 and 45 camcorder (one of the few on the market with analog inputs) and run the firewire port straight into the mac. No need to go from analog in - to tape - and then transfer to Mac. Use iMovie to convert the captured file (mini-DV format) into MPEG 4 now (with the just released QT6). iMovie is trivial to use, but does take a significant amount of time, even on a high-end machine.
One fun thing I do is capture PC output to my Mac. I can run the PC through the Sony box and see the PC output on the Mac screen. Tickles me everytime I do it for some reason. A poor man's computer-TV tuner could be made by taking an old VCR and using it's internal tuner to feed the Sony analog inputs and watch TV on the Mac. Course, a poor man probably wouldn't own a Mac......
I bought this card mostly to use it to capture analog source into my computer. I was sorry from the very start. The install was terrible and I am definately not a newbie. It went downhill from there. The remote concept is fantastic. I saw the remote and since I have my TV hooked up to a computer in the living room, I thought I'd finally have something to control the volumn of DVD's since I have an old Hafler pre-amp with no remote capabilities. So I try running ATI's DVD program and it doesn't work over a network (my DVD's are stored on a Mandrake server HD in my office). The movie was totally unwatchable. So I switched to another program, and I lost all the remote audio capabilities. I did finally get the remote to work with PowerDVD, but DIVX and Windows Media player...forget it. So the remote was of limited usefullness.
I tried to capture next. Horrible. The sound wasn't synced with the video on most attempts. The video had a thin line at the top which turned out to be the desktop behind the "full-screen" capture view. Most of the dark scenes had a faint haze line running from left-to-right.
The software took forever to load. ALL of ATI's programs were slow. Oh, did I mention that all the included software (Ulead's and ATI's) used stupid buttons instead of menus. So you either have to get the book out to figure out which stupid button does which stupid function. Or you spend 5 minutes mousing over each button to read the mouse-over popup description. If you used the software every day, sure you would eventually memorize all the buttons, but for the casual users, it is an annoying experience. Also, the free (although slight nagware) Aist program MovieXone software is much more capable and intuitive. For instance, to do a simple crop of a video in Ulead you have to spend 20 minutes to finally figure out that you specify a crop at the beginning and the end of the clip. The default is to crop at the beginning and slowly widen the crop back to full screen at the end of the clip. WHAT??? This is a crop we are talking about. I expect crops, wipes, brightness, contrast, cutting and pasting controls to be the most basic of functions that should practically be performed automagically, not something where you have to lug out the manual.
The ATI box advertises full 720x480 capture capability, but Ulead Studio (the included software package) said my hardware only supported 356x240, except from a DV camera source.
So I took it back to the store. I didn't even try the 3D game capabilities since I didn't like the idea of a $200 paperweight. My next attempt will be to get a DV camera and record my analog tapes to the camera and then upload through 1394 Firewire in full resolution glory.
Actually the styrofoam has nothing to do with cushioning the landing. It is for thermal protection of the electronics and batteries. It gets REAL cold up there at 100,000ft and some radiosonde's use heaters.
Extra tidbits:
There are two major type of balloons. One is latex which is milky/clear and basically goes to altitude and eventually pops. The other is a aluminized mylar which RADAR tracks to get wind velocity estimates as the balloon ascends. The mylar balloon has a few hundred 'spikes' on the surface which help stabilize the balloon in flight and reduce the balloon induced 'tumbling' motion.
AMPS is the "next generation" of weather balloons and employs GPS to track the balloon instead of RADAR. Same mylar balloon with spikes, but not aluminized (so it can receive the GPS signals better).
Space Data is largely old Orbital employees which is also based in Phoenix (Chandler suburb actually).
I actually have a few friends that work at Space Data (as well as Orbital).
Someone mentioned the Helios solar flying airplane as competition for this balloon idea. Look at the numbers. The $15m a year on balloons and electronics wouldn't even by a Helios, much less maintain it. Solar cells, fuel cells, exotic lightweight materials. Nice science project that will eventually lead to something commercial, but not anytime 'real soon'.
It could be either the motherboard or the OS which is collecting and writing stall data. About the only conclusion to be truly drawn so far is that it is unlikely an AMD defect. I'm sure AMD would like this to be the case too!
Slashdot Mirror
Since I've had two problems with my PC with Win2000 having boot problems because of a mildly corrupted HD. The 1st time I was at home and could yank the HD and put it into a desktop machine to clean up the HD. The second time I was in a time crunch (thank goodness for Knoppix, or I wouldn't have gotten anything done for 2 hours). Eventually I booted from the win2000 boot disk and fixed the HD (2 hours, yikes). It would have been nice to had the boot from firewire capability that the Macs have.
Someone already took 6
Other than being about 100% wrong....
Multiplan STARTED on the Mac, which Microsoft bought out and made into Excel. It was only available on the Mac for quite a while before a port was made to the PC. MacWrite was always available on the Mac and would easily fit on one 800k disk along with the entire OS, and it was far better than WordPerfect or Word and offered true WYSIWYG. WriteNow came along shortly afterwards (1988 I believe) and was better than any other word processor, and was lightening fast too since it was written almost entirely in assembly (and only on the Mac). WriteNow could paginate on the fly unlike the MS Word of the day where you had to select "paginate" to sort of see how the document looked (and was no guarantee that it would print the same way). Some people perfered the CLI back then, but the biggest reason for slow acceptance was the price differential between PCs and Macs. The software was far superior and the Macs came with networking right out of the box and were downright easy to install and setup (and in 1987 too). So yes, the IBM PC users were morons and I was downright shocked when the computer folks wanted us to switch from Macs to 486s with windows 3.1. What a step back for those that did, but I was able to keep my Mac and my productivity.
2. This is the way consoles work today. Insert CD, hit power, play game, kill power. My guess is the boot time on this CD is a bit longer than the boot time on a console, but for those people that mostly play games on PCs at home (and real work on PCs at work), this sounds like an excellent dual-use capability with zero downside (other than a potentially longer boot time).
3. Great way to try out games without having to load onto your harddrive. For some strange reason, my company would only let me get a 30GB HD for my new laptop (6 months old). I have so much work related stuff in that 30GB that I don't have room for MP3s, much less games, so I'm forced to run games like Quake 3 arena on
4. WE are all NOT like YOU. Who really cares if any one person does or does not like this method. Free enterprize and the market economy at work. It will either fail or succeed on it's own popularity or lack there of. Me, I'll be in line for the flexibility.
I'm leaning more and more towards the Knoppix CD as the main OS on my server. Unmount drives, kill power, insert new Knoppix discs (or game disc) and reboot to new OS, game, whatever. No OS virus problems, no installs, the OS runs virtually forever anyway on my servers, so I don't much care about the boot time. Seems like in the next 2-3 years an ideal system would be booting from CD-DVD ROM and having a 2-5 GB flash storage device for common data and maybe a removable SATA optical or magnetic HD for mass storage.
I don't think you could come up will a real good reason why the people are split. Or if you did, somebody would yell some political correctness jargon. Also, our side (the weapons developers) believe we have the ethics on our side as well as history (think Poland, etc. during WWII). You can claim ethics on both sides of the argument and will never come to closure and certainly doesn't explain why a professionally educated physicists lean towards not protecting their country, and professionally trained engineers (some, not all) may lean the other way. It also certainly doesn't explain why physicists before WWII were willing to come over to the US and Britain and help us develop weapons to defeat their prior homelands. The idea was assumably 'ethical' in their minds before the war and certainly there were many physicists who made the A-bomb who didn't have conscience problems afterwards (although we hear more about the people who couldn't live with what they had developed, but that bias can be explained by sensationalism in media). Interesting questions and certainly no clear answers.
But it is interesting that there is a distinct split. Your original statement was between essentially professionally trained people and untrained people, where I was also stating that the split is apparent even between trained professions.
So there is a readily observable split between the physicists and other people along the line of ethics and politics that isn't easily explained away, but is apparent non the less.
It is absolutely wise. The biggest thing is the cost of cargo rated rockets versus man rated rockets. There is a whole level of safety, checks, build processes, etc. that go with building any rocket which will launch a human. The second most expensive rockets are the systems that launch expensive satellites into orbit (multi million dollar satellites). For resupply the space station you would only need the most basic of rocket systems, especially for things like food, water, clothing, movies, music, etc. If you lose the bird, oh well, you probably spent more for the rocket than for the contents. A $100k-200k rocket system could be developed to do the work horse tasks and launch them once a week or so with new supplies. The more expensive electronic components and science experiments could be sent up on more reliable systems. We could also make us of assets currently sitting around, for example Minuteman II, and III, Peacekeeper, and Poseidon rocket motors. These launches would be on the order of $10 million, but would carry significantly more than the smaller rocket systems and are very reliable. Rockets made reasonably small and in sufficient quantity can be very cost effective. An example would be the MLRS booster motor which is pumped out for about $2000 each (motor, folding fins, nozzle, ignitor assembly). They wouldn't make it to orbit with any real payload, but it gives you an idea of cost savings from quantity production.
Since Microsoft's service packs are close to beta or alpha products to begin with, why would anyone use a leaked or pre-release version of something Microsoft was planning on releasing. I rememeber (and I'm sure many, many others do too) the absolute fun to be had by installing the first few service packs on NT 4.0. What a game of roulette that was! Has anyone ever tried to uninstall a service pack on 2000 or XP? I see they have that option now (and the 100MB of extra system file cruft from the prior files stored on the HD) and was wondering if they actually work, or does it cause even more headaches. An actual uninstall feature on NT 4.0 would have been very welcome in leu of reinstalling from the get-go all over again. I'm real hesitant to even install a service pack these days, but have never worked up the courage to UNinstall a service pack, although I must admit I've haven't needed to lately either.
I've checked the Google cache too, NOT THERE
All the details have been pulled and the following remark inserted:
"And yes, sorry, there used to be more details here. I didn't realize yesterday's presentation was supposed to be confidential. When I found out, I pulled the details. Honest mistake."
The light source part is correct, but the "power-hungry" part isn't true. Current backlighting is performed with either White LED's, electrolum, or flourescent tubes, with the flourescent tubes actually being a bit less power-hungry, but, obviously, a little more fragile. The only efficiency is gained by directly viewing the light source (the Light-Emitting-Diode (LED) part of OLED) instead of indirect light via reflection by the current backlighting methods. The big gain is in the Organic (O of OLED) part of the process, which in this case refers to organic plastics (ie, cheap plastics). Great technology, and I'm glad their finally shipping mainstream products, but the parent article and one of the linked articles imply great power savings, which isn't so. Slight efficiency gains, but not leap forward technology in power savings.
Your working on older technology. The newer Compact Flash (CF) cards are much faster than just a year or two ago. The newer digital camera's have been forcing the CF cards to faster speeds. I definately wouldn't want to wait 6-7 seconds to store a 6 megapixel image. The new CF cards can write about 3-5 MB/sec sustained and read at up to 20MB/sec. Some manufactures claim higher write speeds, but I haven't confirmed this fact myself. Watch the claims closely, some manufactures quote the read speed and pretend it is the write speed. The best place to get hard data is from the digital camera sites that test actual units rigorously and give you the exact part number. The best high speed CF card is still the IBM Microdrives though FYI.
No story here. The above sentence describes the entire process. Certainly not "instant" and $15 dollars is not pirating. I personally have never liked live albums and wouldn't even pay $5 for one, much less the 'standard' price of $15.
This is a weak story. A point is made about MS being forced into compatibility, but no facts to back up the claim. Journalism at it's finest. I'll make my own conjecture: Microsoft will put out a compatible/standard product when they see SIGNIFICANT decrease in market share or lost revenue. They haven't got X-Box right, nor Windows CE, but a few billion dollars later, a few strong-arm deals later, a few revision later, they'll have a story and a product and the sheep will make it a standard.
Another fine tidbit is that Matlab is far easier to learn and REMEMBER. I've used both Matlab and Mathematica extensively and I always have to go back to the book after I leave Mathematica for a month or two. The syntax is a killer. Matlab has some of that (just like C, C++), but it is definately easier to pick back up. There is also a significantly better presence on the internet with Matlab over Mathematica or Maple. If you have to do symbolic computations then Mathematica and Maple are the only solutions, but for math, vectors, matrices, ease-of-use, and other math problems for which there is a toolbox (library) available, then Matlab wins hands down.
How far we've fallen from the day when men like Washinton, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt fought for and to protect the central ideas of American Democracy.
How far we've fallen to consider that Washinton, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt would have fought for a democracy. They would have recoiled in horror at the thought. Especially since they instituted a consitutional republic. You might be right if the Roosevelt to which you refer is the Franklin variety, who was indeed for a democracy. However, the other 3 and the Teddy version definately were not in favor.
FYI: A republic is a government in which the supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law.
Democracy is basically mob rule or 50.000001% wins, damn the laws, damn the minority which in this example would be 49.999999% of the people (hence the term mob rule).
One quote from another famous person from the same line of thinking: "Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property, and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death." James Madison
The quoted article is tame in comparison to what happened in Rapid City, SD in 1972. Cloud seeding was also suspected. The following link describes the flood and the 238 deaths:
www.crh.noaa.gov/
This link tells a bit more on the cloud seeding:
news.mpr.org/
Another article
starryskies.com
The cloud seeding wasn't proven, as it wasn't in many other cases, but public pressured forced SDSM&T to stop doing the experiments all the same.
We're all familiar with the Saturday Night Live skit where you tell the "faithful" to get a life. Most of us think that is amusing as well, but how close to reality is your actual view of the die-hard fans? You've done other roles, would you wish the same fan response from those jobs too?
And where in the world did I suggest "money=speech"? More money can certainly aid in getting your speech heard far and wide, but there is definately not a linear relationship.
I'm surprized that anyone is the focus of this story. This is NO story. MS,and the other companies are executing their rights within the law to give money to political candidates. They are obviously reporting the results too, otherwise we wouldn't know the amounts. Get over it people, or do something about the preceived problem (like vote for decent candidates and monitor their activities and report to others what the senators/representatives/presidents are doing). Saying MS can't donate money is like those people that say Christians can't hold public office. Them's the rules folks. Live with them or change the constitution. Better yet, don't let your money get into Bill's hands and he won't have that amount to donate away!
ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/Mandrake/iso
Austria
gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/linux/Mandrake/iso
Czech Republic
mandrake.redbox.cz/Mandrake/iso/
ftp.fi.muni.cz/pub/linux/mandrake/iso/ (Brno)
France
fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/Mandrake/iso/ (Lyon)
ftp.ciril.fr/pub/linux/mandrake/iso/ (Nancy)
United States
ftp.cs.ucr.edu/pub/mirrors/mandrake/Mandr
ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Linux/Mandr
mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/Mandrake/iso/ (Illinois)
All mirrors are hammered, of course!
I was able to get on in Australia, but good luck.
One fun thing I do is capture PC output to my Mac. I can run the PC through the Sony box and see the PC output on the Mac screen. Tickles me everytime I do it for some reason. A poor man's computer-TV tuner could be made by taking an old VCR and using it's internal tuner to feed the Sony analog inputs and watch TV on the Mac. Course, a poor man probably wouldn't own a Mac......
I tried to capture next. Horrible. The sound wasn't synced with the video on most attempts. The video had a thin line at the top which turned out to be the desktop behind the "full-screen" capture view. Most of the dark scenes had a faint haze line running from left-to-right.
The software took forever to load. ALL of ATI's programs were slow. Oh, did I mention that all the included software (Ulead's and ATI's) used stupid buttons instead of menus. So you either have to get the book out to figure out which stupid button does which stupid function. Or you spend 5 minutes mousing over each button to read the mouse-over popup description. If you used the software every day, sure you would eventually memorize all the buttons, but for the casual users, it is an annoying experience. Also, the free (although slight nagware) Aist program MovieXone software is much more capable and intuitive. For instance, to do a simple crop of a video in Ulead you have to spend 20 minutes to finally figure out that you specify a crop at the beginning and the end of the clip. The default is to crop at the beginning and slowly widen the crop back to full screen at the end of the clip. WHAT??? This is a crop we are talking about. I expect crops, wipes, brightness, contrast, cutting and pasting controls to be the most basic of functions that should practically be performed automagically, not something where you have to lug out the manual.
The ATI box advertises full 720x480 capture capability, but Ulead Studio (the included software package) said my hardware only supported 356x240, except from a DV camera source.
So I took it back to the store. I didn't even try the 3D game capabilities since I didn't like the idea of a $200 paperweight. My next attempt will be to get a DV camera and record my analog tapes to the camera and then upload through 1394 Firewire in full resolution glory.
Extra tidbits:
There are two major type of balloons. One is latex which is milky/clear and basically goes to altitude and eventually pops. The other is a aluminized mylar which RADAR tracks to get wind velocity estimates as the balloon ascends. The mylar balloon has a few hundred 'spikes' on the surface which help stabilize the balloon in flight and reduce the balloon induced 'tumbling' motion.
AMPS is the "next generation" of weather balloons and employs GPS to track the balloon instead of RADAR. Same mylar balloon with spikes, but not aluminized (so it can receive the GPS signals better).
Space Data is largely old Orbital employees which is also based in Phoenix (Chandler suburb actually).
I actually have a few friends that work at Space Data (as well as Orbital).
Someone mentioned the Helios solar flying airplane as competition for this balloon idea. Look at the numbers. The $15m a year on balloons and electronics wouldn't even by a Helios, much less maintain it. Solar cells, fuel cells, exotic lightweight materials. Nice science project that will eventually lead to something commercial, but not anytime 'real soon'.
It could be either the motherboard or the OS which is collecting and writing stall data. About the only conclusion to be truly drawn so far is that it is unlikely an AMD defect. I'm sure AMD would like this to be the case too!