Yes, that's right, a federal budget growth of more than 10% per year, with no new revenue to offset spending. Who was it that we were supposed to elect to get fiscal responsibility?
I really wish Mark Warner were running for president.
Okay, I can appreciate the ability to render using OpenGL in hardware for programs which are (a) on non-Windows workstations or (b) have no support for DirectX. However, why do you give a rats ass about sub-pixel, or even pixel-level, accuracy for cards which are rendering realtime for workstations graphics? It's not like users can actually see, or need to see, that type of effect. Unless you're recording off the video output (why?) instead of rendering to a completed file, it won't matter - and you would always render to a file instead of capturing the video out for a final presentation.
Now, if you're talking real time broadcast...why are you even looking at affordable - that's mission critical kinds of stuff.
Actually, I'm fighting with this now. My CAD tech needs a new workstation, and I really don't want to spend the money on a card which is expensive simply because it's a lower-volume business application. Besides, we use AutoCAD, which is developing their DirectX engine instead of their OpenGL implementation (That and we do almost exclusively 2D work.). If there's a business reason to spend an extra $300, I'm all ears.
I have a relative who does a lot of MS work (server install, maintenance for hire, troubleshooting), and is pretty damned good at it. He put 2008 on his laptop last spring after being completely disappointed with Vista. He told me it was actually very good, with performance and usability bonuses over 2003 on identical hardware. He still runs it as his preferred laptop OS.
Just take your iPhone in and Verizon will set you up with an account on their system. Costs per month will be about the same, give or take $30, unless you dont' get unlimited wireless (but you would anyway, right?).
Oh. What's that? You can't use even an unlocked phone on Verizon? Really? Their system isn't the de facto world standard for cell phones? So you'd have to design a special radio version for Verizon, and then a different one for the rest of the world? Hmmm...that's stupid. Oh well - I'm sure they'll be happy to send you a bill every month anyway, even if you can't use te network. As long as your check cashes, it's all good.
Two, three competing cell phone formats? Huge areas of the country which are entirely cut off from cell service. No, lets get our communications up to at least third world standards before we start taking on the third world's water and healthcare problems. Hell, let's get a grip on our own healthcare, too, while we're at it.
And a televison show about plumbing repairs is copyrightable, even if it is broadcast live. This is law, worse yet - copyright law and broadcast law combined - it rarely follows logic or common sense.
The interesting part is that my turning on the TV as no bearing on what comes on the screen. It's the broadcaster who is sending the pictures out. If the broadcaster doesn't send the information to me, I get snow. It's a push-only format, and as such any license should be between the content creator and the broadcaster.
All of this is moot, as there is no license involved but rather laws. There's no EULA with my kitchen knife set that forbids me from using it to carve up school children, or my wife, but I can get into a lot of trouble if I do so.
It's an Apple ][ - those brackets are absolutely necessary. Trust me.
Now get off my lawn, and don't come back until you can code in 6502 machine language hex codes - I don't want any of you assembly language sissies hanging around here.
Mythbusters tried a ghetto version of this with poor results. That's an awful lot of momentum flying about near your head. Then again, it's not like traditional rocket packs score high marks in the "don't strap explosives to your body" school of self preservation.
For most of the US population, the price of housing means absolutely nothing to them. What matters is what your monthly payment will be. As interest rates dropped and alternative mortgages (int only, 40+yr terms, ARMs with low intro rates) the "cost" of housing stayed the same - aka 25-35% of your gross income - resulting in an increase in capital cost. People couldn't afford any more money out of their pockets, but the magic of amortization and fancy intro terms allowed them to purchase a home valued at a higher price.
By never planning on paying off a house, you're really just renting - hoping the "market" will go up and you'll flip into the next bigger place when your equity increases enough to afford the downpayment.
Me? I'm almost out of the game. If the stock market hadn't dropped precipitously this month, I'd have paid off the rest of my house about now. As it is, I'll wait a couple months for a rebound. Sure, I won't have the deduction - but I won't be paying the interest either. Playing on borrowed money is still risk, whether it's houses, stocks, or derivatives. Personally, I can't wait to opt out of that game.
Google as had some real nice interface features (some of mgail, the drag-your-route in gMaps). Now pair that with the manic geek-energy that HTC seems to have for producing PDA phones, and I'm ready to line up with my $600. I've got an HTC Hermes, and while it's got it's issues, it's a damned good PDA phone (I happen to like a keyboard, thankyouverymuch). Decouple HTC from Microsoft and the stylus-driven interface and you're heading towards a great product for those of us who just want to get work done.
I own two axims. My daughter and wife now use them to play games. They were really promising little devices...until Dell decided to drop them. Now they're just historical notes. A really like my axim, but I just don't think they're cut out for the market.
Now, if you put HTC and Google together - I'm listening.
...and the Axim is the top currently selling pda from Dell.
Half baked and abandoned hardware - yeah, that's what I really want in a device.
Sorry, but there has got to be a better hardware vendor to choose than Dell for such a venture. Dell consumer is about high turnover and commodity parts that can be changed with the wind when prices fluctuate - not what I want in a phone builder. Doesn't Nokia or Moto want a piece of this kind of action?
While I'm not an RF engineer, the equation is an unbalanced one for down- and uploads. The downlink transmitter must coverer an immense area, whereas the uplink side can be aimed. As a result you can use an extremely high gain directional antenna from your home to the main tower to achieve lower power requirements. There might even be a layered service at several different wavelengths - higher freqs for those with LOS, lower for those without.
Portable devices are more troublesome, but there is the possibility of using the cell phone networks for uplink and TV for downlink. That would, of course, require interoperability and coordination between providers...which we all know would never occur.
I will admit that I'm no student of History, but had the Americans not bee involved I have no doubt the Axis would have won.
Between to nearly-matched powers, the one who ignores the rules will always win. It gives a decided advantage. Even vastly outmatched opponents can greatly increase their chances of winning by not following rules. And if your intent is truly to win, then the aftermath of such decisions doesn't matter. As it has been proven through history, the winners make the rules following the conclusion.
Were it not for the public outcry, the whole middle east thing could have been basically settled by turning the area into radioactive glass. Of course, there would have been repercussions. We didn't just want to win, though, we wanted everybody to think we were doing some great favor to the world. It's that rules thing popping up again, only this time there's a reason to follow them, and it's primarily economic (okay, and self preserving, given the possibility of fallout clouds and nuclear winter...but those are really just nits when you're talking about genocide).
Wars are won by those who do not follow the "rules." There are no rules in war. If there were, then there would be a third party far more powerful than either side who could enforce said rules. If there was, then that power could enforce a solution to the conflict that started the war, and there would be no need for war. Said power would also not need answer to anyone, and would be exempt from said rules (having no one capable of enforcing them).
Ultimately though, the real long-term value of the Radeon HD 3870 X2 will be determined by AMD's driver team. That doesn't really bode well, given the clusterfuck that the CCC drivers tend to be.
I guess I'm getting older. To me a "school kid" is anyone still in college, or recently graduated. Here in the US, I suspect that the younger crowd (say, 15-30) is still more active than the 30-40 crowd, though I can see expecting some bleed into the 30something crowd. The younger generation has both the iTunes (and other) online stores, and a great deal of disposable income. Those who grew up without online stores would have been "trained" to look other places online. Through a combination of that "training" and needing to make ends meet without an allowance from mommy and daddy, I can see how that set would be into P2P.
What, you're not going to screen luggage for large quantities of explosives or other contraband? Marshals are just for the dangerous passengers - the ones we're talking about screening - and to speed the check through process. Up until 2001, we did a pretty good job of preventing planes from blowing up; all this extra theater seems to be aimed at preventing a takeover of an airborne plane.
And you may be on the high side of the population in general at 10-20%. You're right that most people have computer wouldn't be able to get online without their ISPs Flash-based installation CD and a quick start guide comprised mostly of pictures. They're not going to fins P2P networks very easily, and many don't even know they exist - much less the names. Folks here on/. make up quite a small percentage, and though most (all, I presume) of us know about and probably participate in at least casual P2P activities (legal and otherwise) it certainly isn't representative of the population at large.
I wouldn't be surprised if all the poster's friends are in school, or recent graduates. That's where most of the P2P action is. Kind of funny actually, as that's where the bulk of the sneakernet P2P ocurred in the 60s/70s/80s.
At last check, there were about 28k commercial flights per day. If undercover marshalls (2) were on one in three flights, and could reasonably cover two flights per day, at 100k burderned annual salary and 200 working days per year, I get 1.7B per year. If we assume 40% management overhead for training, supervision, and scheduling, we're up to 2.4B. I'll add 8% profit, as I will be CEO of the new corporation, so that's 2.6B.
That's 2.4B below the current TSA budget. No more security checkpoints in the airport, and a one-in-three chance that any plane is going to have armed guards. All that at half the current cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that's right, a federal budget growth of more than 10% per year, with no new revenue to offset spending. Who was it that we were supposed to elect to get fiscal responsibility?
I really wish Mark Warner were running for president.
Okay, I can appreciate the ability to render using OpenGL in hardware for programs which are (a) on non-Windows workstations or (b) have no support for DirectX. However, why do you give a rats ass about sub-pixel, or even pixel-level, accuracy for cards which are rendering realtime for workstations graphics? It's not like users can actually see, or need to see, that type of effect. Unless you're recording off the video output (why?) instead of rendering to a completed file, it won't matter - and you would always render to a file instead of capturing the video out for a final presentation.
Now, if you're talking real time broadcast...why are you even looking at affordable - that's mission critical kinds of stuff.
Actually, I'm fighting with this now. My CAD tech needs a new workstation, and I really don't want to spend the money on a card which is expensive simply because it's a lower-volume business application. Besides, we use AutoCAD, which is developing their DirectX engine instead of their OpenGL implementation (That and we do almost exclusively 2D work.). If there's a business reason to spend an extra $300, I'm all ears.
I have a relative who does a lot of MS work (server install, maintenance for hire, troubleshooting), and is pretty damned good at it. He put 2008 on his laptop last spring after being completely disappointed with Vista. He told me it was actually very good, with performance and usability bonuses over 2003 on identical hardware. He still runs it as his preferred laptop OS.
Just take your iPhone in and Verizon will set you up with an account on their system. Costs per month will be about the same, give or take $30, unless you dont' get unlimited wireless (but you would anyway, right?).
Oh. What's that? You can't use even an unlocked phone on Verizon? Really? Their system isn't the de facto world standard for cell phones? So you'd have to design a special radio version for Verizon, and then a different one for the rest of the world? Hmmm...that's stupid. Oh well - I'm sure they'll be happy to send you a bill every month anyway, even if you can't use te network. As long as your check cashes, it's all good.
Two, three competing cell phone formats? Huge areas of the country which are entirely cut off from cell service. No, lets get our communications up to at least third world standards before we start taking on the third world's water and healthcare problems. Hell, let's get a grip on our own healthcare, too, while we're at it.
And a televison show about plumbing repairs is copyrightable, even if it is broadcast live. This is law, worse yet - copyright law and broadcast law combined - it rarely follows logic or common sense.
The interesting part is that my turning on the TV as no bearing on what comes on the screen. It's the broadcaster who is sending the pictures out. If the broadcaster doesn't send the information to me, I get snow. It's a push-only format, and as such any license should be between the content creator and the broadcaster.
All of this is moot, as there is no license involved but rather laws. There's no EULA with my kitchen knife set that forbids me from using it to carve up school children, or my wife, but I can get into a lot of trouble if I do so.
It's an Apple ][ - those brackets are absolutely necessary. Trust me.
Now get off my lawn, and don't come back until you can code in 6502 machine language hex codes - I don't want any of you assembly language sissies hanging around here.
Mythbusters tried a ghetto version of this with poor results. That's an awful lot of momentum flying about near your head. Then again, it's not like traditional rocket packs score high marks in the "don't strap explosives to your body" school of self preservation.
Who let Richard Gere's gerbil post to slashdot?
For most of the US population, the price of housing means absolutely nothing to them. What matters is what your monthly payment will be. As interest rates dropped and alternative mortgages (int only, 40+yr terms, ARMs with low intro rates) the "cost" of housing stayed the same - aka 25-35% of your gross income - resulting in an increase in capital cost. People couldn't afford any more money out of their pockets, but the magic of amortization and fancy intro terms allowed them to purchase a home valued at a higher price.
By never planning on paying off a house, you're really just renting - hoping the "market" will go up and you'll flip into the next bigger place when your equity increases enough to afford the downpayment.
Me? I'm almost out of the game. If the stock market hadn't dropped precipitously this month, I'd have paid off the rest of my house about now. As it is, I'll wait a couple months for a rebound. Sure, I won't have the deduction - but I won't be paying the interest either. Playing on borrowed money is still risk, whether it's houses, stocks, or derivatives. Personally, I can't wait to opt out of that game.
Google as had some real nice interface features (some of mgail, the drag-your-route in gMaps). Now pair that with the manic geek-energy that HTC seems to have for producing PDA phones, and I'm ready to line up with my $600. I've got an HTC Hermes, and while it's got it's issues, it's a damned good PDA phone (I happen to like a keyboard, thankyouverymuch). Decouple HTC from Microsoft and the stylus-driven interface and you're heading towards a great product for those of us who just want to get work done.
HTC is the partner that I'd like to see.
I own two axims. My daughter and wife now use them to play games. They were really promising little devices...until Dell decided to drop them. Now they're just historical notes. A really like my axim, but I just don't think they're cut out for the market.
Now, if you put HTC and Google together - I'm listening.
...and the Axim is the top currently selling pda from Dell.
Half baked and abandoned hardware - yeah, that's what I really want in a device.
Sorry, but there has got to be a better hardware vendor to choose than Dell for such a venture. Dell consumer is about high turnover and commodity parts that can be changed with the wind when prices fluctuate - not what I want in a phone builder. Doesn't Nokia or Moto want a piece of this kind of action?
While I'm not an RF engineer, the equation is an unbalanced one for down- and uploads. The downlink transmitter must coverer an immense area, whereas the uplink side can be aimed. As a result you can use an extremely high gain directional antenna from your home to the main tower to achieve lower power requirements. There might even be a layered service at several different wavelengths - higher freqs for those with LOS, lower for those without.
Portable devices are more troublesome, but there is the possibility of using the cell phone networks for uplink and TV for downlink. That would, of course, require interoperability and coordination between providers...which we all know would never occur.
I will admit that I'm no student of History, but had the Americans not bee involved I have no doubt the Axis would have won.
Between to nearly-matched powers, the one who ignores the rules will always win. It gives a decided advantage. Even vastly outmatched opponents can greatly increase their chances of winning by not following rules. And if your intent is truly to win, then the aftermath of such decisions doesn't matter. As it has been proven through history, the winners make the rules following the conclusion.
Were it not for the public outcry, the whole middle east thing could have been basically settled by turning the area into radioactive glass. Of course, there would have been repercussions. We didn't just want to win, though, we wanted everybody to think we were doing some great favor to the world. It's that rules thing popping up again, only this time there's a reason to follow them, and it's primarily economic (okay, and self preserving, given the possibility of fallout clouds and nuclear winter...but those are really just nits when you're talking about genocide).
When copyright was instituted in the US in 1790, the term was 14 years, with an option to renew for an additional 14 years.
Wars are won by those who do not follow the "rules." There are no rules in war. If there were, then there would be a third party far more powerful than either side who could enforce said rules. If there was, then that power could enforce a solution to the conflict that started the war, and there would be no need for war. Said power would also not need answer to anyone, and would be exempt from said rules (having no one capable of enforcing them).
You only need to take one step sideways to tell 2d from 3d. ;-)
I guess I'm getting older. To me a "school kid" is anyone still in college, or recently graduated. Here in the US, I suspect that the younger crowd (say, 15-30) is still more active than the 30-40 crowd, though I can see expecting some bleed into the 30something crowd. The younger generation has both the iTunes (and other) online stores, and a great deal of disposable income. Those who grew up without online stores would have been "trained" to look other places online. Through a combination of that "training" and needing to make ends meet without an allowance from mommy and daddy, I can see how that set would be into P2P.
What, you're not going to screen luggage for large quantities of explosives or other contraband? Marshals are just for the dangerous passengers - the ones we're talking about screening - and to speed the check through process. Up until 2001, we did a pretty good job of preventing planes from blowing up; all this extra theater seems to be aimed at preventing a takeover of an airborne plane.
And you may be on the high side of the population in general at 10-20%. You're right that most people have computer wouldn't be able to get online without their ISPs Flash-based installation CD and a quick start guide comprised mostly of pictures. They're not going to fins P2P networks very easily, and many don't even know they exist - much less the names. Folks here on /. make up quite a small percentage, and though most (all, I presume) of us know about and probably participate in at least casual P2P activities (legal and otherwise) it certainly isn't representative of the population at large.
I wouldn't be surprised if all the poster's friends are in school, or recent graduates. That's where most of the P2P action is. Kind of funny actually, as that's where the bulk of the sneakernet P2P ocurred in the 60s/70s/80s.
At last check, there were about 28k commercial flights per day. If undercover marshalls (2) were on one in three flights, and could reasonably cover two flights per day, at 100k burderned annual salary and 200 working days per year, I get 1.7B per year. If we assume 40% management overhead for training, supervision, and scheduling, we're up to 2.4B. I'll add 8% profit, as I will be CEO of the new corporation, so that's 2.6B.
That's 2.4B below the current TSA budget. No more security checkpoints in the airport, and a one-in-three chance that any plane is going to have armed guards. All that at half the current cost.