You're focusing on one very specific segment of the OS market, namely games.
Yes. I am focusing on games. Because in every other realm that computers are used, there exist alternatives for Linux that, in many cases, are so good that I'm using the ports of Linux software on my Winbox. Graphics editing? GIMP. Instant messaging? GAIM. Video editing? avidemux. Audio editing? Audacity. Office? I'm using OpenOffice.Org, but I've also used Abiword and several other alternatives. It's really only in gaming that there's any competition at all in the OS market, because every OS does all the other tasks quite well.
But you're absolutely right. Porting a game from Win32 to Linux is a pain in the butt, largely because of DirectX. But the lack of support for mainstream games is the only reason to stick with Windows that can't be easily countered. Not everybody wants to play games like Battle for Wesnoth all the time. (though I do really like that game....)
And, you know what? I must admit that I would take the machine that had the connection to the internet regardless of what current OS it had on it.
And herein lies... I'll take the OS I hate if it means that I can play my video games. And I'm not the only person who thinks that way. Until hardware manufacturers start taking Linux seriously and come up with decent video drivers (the sound and networking drivers for all of my systems work fine), then Linux won't be a player in the games market. Likewise... even if there's decent video drivers for Linux, there's still the problem where game producers don't take either Linux or MacOS seriously. Software like Cedega will probably do wonders for that situation in the long run, but you still have the problem of decent video drivers.
Overcome those hurdles, and Windows will no longer be relevant. Until that time, though, it's very much relevant, and no amount of OSS evangelism is going to fix that.
You are right about one thing, though... the connection to the Internet is a deal-breaker. It's just that every OS is the current generation has the ability to connect to the Internet, and a wide variety of options for software that uses it. Heck... most of us can probably get the Internet on our phone. It may be a deal-breaker, but it's an irrelevant one.
Naw. It's FUD. I've been running Vista on my laptop for a while, now, and it's nowhere near as bad as they make it seem.
First off... It's possible to turn Aero off. What a concept... but there's actually a very W2K-like interface in there. It'll actually turn itself off if it thinks your system isn't up to snuff. And the non-aero interface is just as zippy as ever. (yeah... I know). Even with Aero turned on (woo, eye candy. I prefer compositing in X.Org...), it's reasonably zippy. Keep in mind it's still beta software, and will be going through some code optimizations between now and the release. Somehow, though, I think most businesses don't really care so much about eye candy as they do some of the other "features" in Vista. The code execution protection is a big one... it's very difficult to run untrusted code, especially in the 64-bit version of Vista, and the focus on security is paramount. They've made some huge improvements in the security of the OS and the measures that are available to prevent users from running programs the admins don't want. I'm not gonna say it's impossible to get a virus in Vista. I know that's a lie. But I am going to say that MS has finally gotten half a clue when it comes to security, and have changed the default pass to an untrusted one. By default, you have administrative rights, but you have to explicitly allow every change to the system configuration. I call it the "Mom" code. And it's ridiculously easy to set up regular users that can't change anything, and can't even run programs that aren't explicitly allowed. That, alone, will probably sell Vista to a lot of IT managers. I know that functionality has been around since NT4, but I'm grateful that untrusted is now the norm.
As to the specs of my laptop? Athlon64 3500+ (2.2GHz), 1GB of RAM, and the video card is a 128MB Radeon XPress 200M. Right now, I've got it set up for 128MB Sideport (built-in) and 128MB borrowed from system memory, but that's because I play video games on the thing, not because I need the extra memory for Aero, which runs fine with 128MB.
Also, I have Vista running on a machine I put together for a friend's daughter. That box was cobbled together from component parts that reached the trashpile at some point in the last year for me... AthlonXP 2200+ (1.4GHz), 1GB PC2400 RAM, and a 256MB Radeon 9550. It's probably not worth more than $150, and it runs Vista just fine. Aero even works.
So yeah. Coming from somebody who's actually seen Vista, the article is unadulterated bullshit. Of a finer purity than MS usually puts out.
You laugh... but the reason I retired from fixing friends' computers was similar to that.... She called me up complaining that her computer was running a little slow. The result of a virus scan? 4 files on her computer *weren't* infected with something. Over 118,000 infected files, comprising more than 1000 known viruses.
"You don't play video games, right?"
"Uh, no. I just want it for Internet, downloading, and chatting."
"Oookay... Let me introduce you to this thing called Linux."
And as you said it doesn't have to do HD so in the broadest terms possible it only needs a 1/4 of the power under the hood to render the same scene (I know I'm going to suffer for making such a horrible generalisation...) vs a HD rendering.
Not suffer, so much as have something gently pointed out:)
Standard Definition has a resolution of 320x200 pixels (through an RCA cable), or 64,000 dots. S-Video can carry up to 800x600 pixel, or 480,000 dots. 1080p carries a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, or 2,073,600 pixels. If you're talking about just rendering the dots, then yes, about 1/4 of the processing power is needed to draw an S-Video picture versus a 1080p picture. BUT... as you increase the number of pixels on screen, you increase exponentially the amount of processing you need to do in order to properly render a 3D image... because of raytracing. Granted, the quality of rendering in a video game isn't anywhere near the quality you'd see in a top notch rendered scene, but you still have to do some calculation to figure out what part of a texture is reflecting off what part of your water, or how the lighting is affecting the shadows you're rendering. It's not simply a question of rendering at low resolution and then resizing the picture to high resolution, though I wouldn't be surprised if some titles for PS3/X-Box360 actually end up taking that lazy way out.
Modern video cards take shortcuts, because they simply don't make a video card that's capable of fully rendering a scene in high def, in real time. The consoles will use the same shortcuts... stuff like algorithms that decide what polys are obscured and not rendering those polys. But by increasing the number of polys on screen, you're still drastically increasing the amount of processing power you need in order to render the scene. By a factor much greater than just 4.
Generally, though, you're right. The Wii can afford to be significantly less powerful (and less costly) because they aren't bothering to make the system play at high def resolutions. It's a simple concept, really: most people who buy a console want something that works and is fun. They aren't very likely to buy a $4000 TV when a $500 TV (that's the same screen size but not high def) will do the trick. It's really only a very small niche that will ever see the difference between SDTV and HDTV in the near future. And even if you do see the difference, you need to ask yourself a simple question: do I care more about gameplay value, or eye candy? Eye candy is nice, but it's not going to get me to keep playing a game.
I've never had a problem with my 160GB 7200.9 Barracuda (SATA). But it's also sitting right on top of two exhaust fans (which exhaust directly out of the computer) and has never gotten over 25 degrees celcius. If you're wondering, the case is an Antec Overture II. The drive has a jumper that when closed limits the drive speed to 150mb/s, and when open lets it fly at 300mb/s. I've got it open, but my motherboard doesn't support the 300mb/s SATA. That could also be a contributing factor to the device's track record.
I have a feeling that aside from drives that are dead out of the box, the huge majority of problems that people are experiencing are a combonation of crappy drivers/firmware, and crappy heat management.
I'd prefer to think of that as the realist camp. It's not that I think we'll never build computers that can match the processing power of the human brain, it's that I don't think most AI technologists realize just how much processing the human brain is doing in real time. If nothing else holds back computers, I doubt we'll be able to approach the memory bandwidth to handle all the data that we get from our 5 senses. Do you realize how many millions of pressure sensors there are on your body? How many millions of hot/cold sensors? How many millions of optical and light/dark sensors there are in your eye? How many millions of taste sensors you have? How powerful your conscious sense of smell is? Your unconscious sense of smell (pheromones)?
Like I said... I don't doubt that eventually we'll develop a computer that can match the processing power of the human brain. But I doubt it'll be soon. It *might* be within my lifetime, but I'm not holding my breath on that one... The brain isn't magical, it's a trillion-core symmetric computer with a staggering memory retention and bandwidth, and a programming so complicated that we're nowhere near matching it. Oh, and that's not mentionning that the brain doesn't work in binary switches, either. It works in chemical switches, with about 50 possible states running in parallel.... Some day, we'll beat out the human brain with a computer. Humans are just too arrogant to believe that we can't, and so somebody will eventually do it. But it's not going to be tomorrow.
There were other large explosions long before that happened. During the seige of Ft. George outside of Niagara On The Lake, Ontario, in 1812, for example, an artillery shell hit a magazine. The resulting explosion was described as "resembling a large cauliflower", and was seen from as much as 30 miles away. The fort itself was levelled, and an American general was killed by debris from the explosion more than 15 miles away (a shard of wood stabbed him in the heart). Sound like something that's typically associated with nuclear explosions?
I think he's a little more worried about the external memory performance than internal.... It doesn't matter if the CPU can move data in bursts up to 1 Tb/s, if it's only got 8MB of cache on-chip, and relies on the rest from the system bus, that's going to amount to a whole lot of unused CPU cycles while you wait for the system bus to catch up to the CPU. No doubt it'll be more than 8MB of cache for a behemoth like this, but do you really think they're going to be able to squeeze, say, 2MB per core without burning down the house?
Did you even read your Wiki article? It says pretty clearly that sales did dip initially, but they picked up and brought Osbourne back into the black. What killed Osbourne, according to your link, was some bad management decisions on how to deal with $150,000 worth of surplus hardware, and an unexpected jump in the price of their screens.
Ahh... but you missed the finer point of this one... This one has exactly the same title, the same submitter, and the same text as the other one. So either the submitter double-submitted, or Timothy (who approved the other one) screwed up and didn't remove it from the queue. Come to think of it, Timothy probably screwed up by not checking the queue to see if there was a dupe of the article he'd just approved....
All of those technologies were developed on volunteers who had no viable alternative. If a doctor believes a patient has a better chance of recovering/surviving an existing procedure than they do from a new experimental procedure, then it is malpractice to apply the experimental procedure, regardless of whether or not the patient volunteers. This is different in other professions, where researchers are free to seek out volunteers who are willing to do things not in their own best interest, but doctors are held to a higher standard than other researchers.
Y'know... bedrest, fluids, and aspirin make a perfectly viable alternative for most viral and bacterial infections. An otherwise healthy adult has an incredibly powerful immune response to most of the bugs that can get you sick. Come to it... grinning and bearing the pain of, say, childbirth or a broken leg is a perfectly viable alternative. Humans were doing it for millenia. But somebody, sometime, had to be the guinea pig who discovered that hemlock will kill you. And somebody, sometime, had to be the one that they first tried aspirin on. At some point in history, those were experimental treatments.
And before you go off on some tangent about how that was hundreds, or thousands of years ago, I'll point this out to you: Aspirin is a very useful anti-inflammatory. It's been used for a couple hundred years to treat a wide variety of things, including inflammation due to arthritis. I'm currently on Diclofenac Sodium. It's a drug that's been developped in the last 10 years to treat... you guessed it... arthritis. Diclo is being used to treat inflammation, minor to moderate pain, and it's seeing some pretty wide use in sports-related injuries. It's actually a pretty neat little wonderdrug, but less than 10 years ago, it was an experimental new treatment in a time when a perfectly viable alternative existed. Ibeuprophen? Also developped within the last 40 years as an alternative to Aspirin and Acetaminophen. Acetaminophen itself was developped in the last hundred years as... an alternative to Aspirin.
And how about organ transplants? There were ways to perform kidney dialysis before the development of the modern dialysis machine. And Iron Lungs? There are perfectly survivable alternatives to a whole lot of the organ transplants that we are now doing as a matter of routine. They may not give the same quality of life as, say, a new kidney would, but they're certainly viable. But somebody had to take a risk with a patient's life to develop the technique for how to perform those surgeries. It's not like you can look ahead a few pages to see how it turns out: these now routine surgeries were experimental at some point.
Medical science would most emphatically *not* be where it is today without doctors trying out experimental procedures and drugs when perfectly "viable alternatives" already existed. It may sound incredibly cold and callous to you, but the medical profession is well aware that sometimes you have to lose a patient in order to advance knowledge. As long as you're not maliciously trying something that you know will harm the patient, and as long as there's a reasonable chance of success, it's not unethical to try something new.
There is nothing unethical about performing an experimental procedure on a volunteer. That's how medical knowledge gets advanced. Regardless of the outcome of this procedure, it'll help give insight into how to go about doing it in the future. It will save lives.
I mean... by your standards, we wouldn't have organ transplants, modern surgery, anaesthetics, any of the wonderdrugs we now consider must-haves, antibiotics, and a whole slew of other things that had to be tried on somebody first. How many lives have been saved by, say, penicillin? *somebody* had to be the first guinea pig. You think that was unethical?
Personally, I'd like to know what surgical procedure can be done in the 30s or so they have before gravity "returns". They are doing it with a parabolic flight trajectory, right?
Traditionally, Internet service is horribly overpriced in North America. Thanks to legislated monopolies that only have the illusion of being deregulated, broadband Internet service is virtually a non-entity where ultimately you're buying your DSL or cable service from the same provider*, and has actually become *more* expensive in the last 10 years, not less.
* In Canada, for example, Bell Nexxia owns the phone lines. It doesn't matter if you're subscribing to service from Telus, Sympatico, or a local provider like Magma, Cyberus, or FreeNet in the Ottawa area, you're still buying the exact same 3mbit/800kbit service which ultimately comes from Bell Nexxia. Likewise, Rogers Telecommunications owns the cable lines, and it doesn't matter who you're buying the cable Internet service from, ultimately it is just a rebranded Rogers connection.
But the authors are still there, and it's still copyrighted.
You're absolutely right. It is copyrighted. I'm not defending what they did, I'm just saying that it makes better sense from a corporate point of view to keep their source closed.
You're incredibly naive if you think an unmodified Linux kernel is capable of running an embedded device like that....
In other words, it *is* like it's something they wrote. They stood on the shoulders of others, but they still had to do their own work to get it to work with their hardware and do what they want it to do. Seeing as they use off the shelf wireless chipsets, ethernet controllers, and such, there's absolutely nothing to stop a competitor from using the source code they would have to release under the GPL to manufacture a cheaper alternative that is functionally identical. It makes much better fiscal sense for them to switch to a different kernel and modify their own source to suit it.
The problem with a spectrometer is that the more you have in the substance you're testing, the harder it is to detect a single substance. It's not like every chemical has a single line that shows up on a spectrometer scan... actually, everything has several lines that show up. The more complex a substance is (and the heavier the atoms that make it up), the more lines appear. Pure Iron (Fe), for example, has 43 lines that show up on its spectrum. And drinking water isn't pure H2O. Not by a long shot... pure H2O tastes soapy, bland. Like there's something wrong with it. Our tap water has lots of stuff in it already that isn't harmful. Mineral content, and additives like chlorine and fluoride.
Now... they could establish a baseline and subtract that, but there's so much stuff already in drinking water that you'd probably have a hard time telling one thing from the next. What you think could be cyanide may actually be a higher than normal silica content. There's really no way to be sure that what you're seeing on a spectrometer is dangerous without doing a proper series of tests on it, and there's no way to do those tests fast enough to cut off the water supply. The result is that you would need to set the sensitivity *way* too high and end up getting a lot of false positives... when you're dealing with contaminated water supply, a false positive is far more desirable than a false negative.
But here's a system that costs a *lot* less to implement, and because you're using living beings that are much more sensitive to poisons than humans are, you'll see the effect of a toxin long before the concentration is high enough to seriously harm a human.
Even for Windows. I tested the proof of concept PDFs in FoxIt PDF reader (http://foxitsoftware.com/), and none of them worked. The flaws aren't in the PDF format itself, they're in Adobe's implementation of it.
You're right... I am mixing terminology a little. But that's because of the difference in media that we're talking about here. Optical resolution has very little to do with the number of pixels being displayed, and has more to do with the fuzzy boundaries between objects when viewing them at a distance. If the angle between objects is too little, then the light from them will superimpose and you'll get interference. If they're close enough, they'll appear as one. Resolution refers to how far apart the objects have to be (or how large the angle between them has to be) in order to perceive them as distinct objects. To "resolve" them.
By contrast, computer resolution refers specifically to the number of pixels being displayed. Given the audience, I'm using the word in the computer sense, not the optical sense.
Slashdot Mirror
So... you're boycotting Slashdot by posting on it?
Yes. I am focusing on games. Because in every other realm that computers are used, there exist alternatives for Linux that, in many cases, are so good that I'm using the ports of Linux software on my Winbox. Graphics editing? GIMP. Instant messaging? GAIM. Video editing? avidemux. Audio editing? Audacity. Office? I'm using OpenOffice.Org, but I've also used Abiword and several other alternatives. It's really only in gaming that there's any competition at all in the OS market, because every OS does all the other tasks quite well.
But you're absolutely right. Porting a game from Win32 to Linux is a pain in the butt, largely because of DirectX. But the lack of support for mainstream games is the only reason to stick with Windows that can't be easily countered. Not everybody wants to play games like Battle for Wesnoth all the time. (though I do really like that game....)
And herein lies... I'll take the OS I hate if it means that I can play my video games. And I'm not the only person who thinks that way. Until hardware manufacturers start taking Linux seriously and come up with decent video drivers (the sound and networking drivers for all of my systems work fine), then Linux won't be a player in the games market. Likewise... even if there's decent video drivers for Linux, there's still the problem where game producers don't take either Linux or MacOS seriously. Software like Cedega will probably do wonders for that situation in the long run, but you still have the problem of decent video drivers.
Overcome those hurdles, and Windows will no longer be relevant. Until that time, though, it's very much relevant, and no amount of OSS evangelism is going to fix that.
You are right about one thing, though... the connection to the Internet is a deal-breaker. It's just that every OS is the current generation has the ability to connect to the Internet, and a wide variety of options for software that uses it. Heck... most of us can probably get the Internet on our phone. It may be a deal-breaker, but it's an irrelevant one.
Does that mean they're using MAME for their emulation of old games? That may explain why it's able to run C64 games as well.... :-)
Naw. It's FUD. I've been running Vista on my laptop for a while, now, and it's nowhere near as bad as they make it seem.
First off... It's possible to turn Aero off. What a concept... but there's actually a very W2K-like interface in there. It'll actually turn itself off if it thinks your system isn't up to snuff. And the non-aero interface is just as zippy as ever. (yeah... I know). Even with Aero turned on (woo, eye candy. I prefer compositing in X.Org...), it's reasonably zippy. Keep in mind it's still beta software, and will be going through some code optimizations between now and the release. Somehow, though, I think most businesses don't really care so much about eye candy as they do some of the other "features" in Vista. The code execution protection is a big one... it's very difficult to run untrusted code, especially in the 64-bit version of Vista, and the focus on security is paramount. They've made some huge improvements in the security of the OS and the measures that are available to prevent users from running programs the admins don't want. I'm not gonna say it's impossible to get a virus in Vista. I know that's a lie. But I am going to say that MS has finally gotten half a clue when it comes to security, and have changed the default pass to an untrusted one. By default, you have administrative rights, but you have to explicitly allow every change to the system configuration. I call it the "Mom" code. And it's ridiculously easy to set up regular users that can't change anything, and can't even run programs that aren't explicitly allowed. That, alone, will probably sell Vista to a lot of IT managers. I know that functionality has been around since NT4, but I'm grateful that untrusted is now the norm.
As to the specs of my laptop? Athlon64 3500+ (2.2GHz), 1GB of RAM, and the video card is a 128MB Radeon XPress 200M. Right now, I've got it set up for 128MB Sideport (built-in) and 128MB borrowed from system memory, but that's because I play video games on the thing, not because I need the extra memory for Aero, which runs fine with 128MB.
Also, I have Vista running on a machine I put together for a friend's daughter. That box was cobbled together from component parts that reached the trashpile at some point in the last year for me... AthlonXP 2200+ (1.4GHz), 1GB PC2400 RAM, and a 256MB Radeon 9550. It's probably not worth more than $150, and it runs Vista just fine. Aero even works.
So yeah. Coming from somebody who's actually seen Vista, the article is unadulterated bullshit. Of a finer purity than MS usually puts out.
You laugh... but the reason I retired from fixing friends' computers was similar to that.... She called me up complaining that her computer was running a little slow. The result of a virus scan? 4 files on her computer *weren't* infected with something. Over 118,000 infected files, comprising more than 1000 known viruses.
"You don't play video games, right?"
"Uh, no. I just want it for Internet, downloading, and chatting."
"Oookay... Let me introduce you to this thing called Linux."
Crystals grow. And outside of Star Trek, they aren't alive....
This was on my Hubble Site block at the upper-right corner of my Slashdot page 2 weeks ago.... Really on the ball on this one. Truly.
Not suffer, so much as have something gently pointed out
Standard Definition has a resolution of 320x200 pixels (through an RCA cable), or 64,000 dots. S-Video can carry up to 800x600 pixel, or 480,000 dots. 1080p carries a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, or 2,073,600 pixels. If you're talking about just rendering the dots, then yes, about 1/4 of the processing power is needed to draw an S-Video picture versus a 1080p picture. BUT... as you increase the number of pixels on screen, you increase exponentially the amount of processing you need to do in order to properly render a 3D image... because of raytracing. Granted, the quality of rendering in a video game isn't anywhere near the quality you'd see in a top notch rendered scene, but you still have to do some calculation to figure out what part of a texture is reflecting off what part of your water, or how the lighting is affecting the shadows you're rendering. It's not simply a question of rendering at low resolution and then resizing the picture to high resolution, though I wouldn't be surprised if some titles for PS3/X-Box360 actually end up taking that lazy way out.
Modern video cards take shortcuts, because they simply don't make a video card that's capable of fully rendering a scene in high def, in real time. The consoles will use the same shortcuts... stuff like algorithms that decide what polys are obscured and not rendering those polys. But by increasing the number of polys on screen, you're still drastically increasing the amount of processing power you need in order to render the scene. By a factor much greater than just 4.
Generally, though, you're right. The Wii can afford to be significantly less powerful (and less costly) because they aren't bothering to make the system play at high def resolutions. It's a simple concept, really: most people who buy a console want something that works and is fun. They aren't very likely to buy a $4000 TV when a $500 TV (that's the same screen size but not high def) will do the trick. It's really only a very small niche that will ever see the difference between SDTV and HDTV in the near future. And even if you do see the difference, you need to ask yourself a simple question: do I care more about gameplay value, or eye candy? Eye candy is nice, but it's not going to get me to keep playing a game.
If you want your boomerang to come back, well first you've got to throw it.
your hearing can still be damaged by a loud enough noise, even if it's in a frequency range you can't hear....
I've never had a problem with my 160GB 7200.9 Barracuda (SATA). But it's also sitting right on top of two exhaust fans (which exhaust directly out of the computer) and has never gotten over 25 degrees celcius. If you're wondering, the case is an Antec Overture II. The drive has a jumper that when closed limits the drive speed to 150mb/s, and when open lets it fly at 300mb/s. I've got it open, but my motherboard doesn't support the 300mb/s SATA. That could also be a contributing factor to the device's track record.
I have a feeling that aside from drives that are dead out of the box, the huge majority of problems that people are experiencing are a combonation of crappy drivers/firmware, and crappy heat management.
I'd prefer to think of that as the realist camp. It's not that I think we'll never build computers that can match the processing power of the human brain, it's that I don't think most AI technologists realize just how much processing the human brain is doing in real time. If nothing else holds back computers, I doubt we'll be able to approach the memory bandwidth to handle all the data that we get from our 5 senses. Do you realize how many millions of pressure sensors there are on your body? How many millions of hot/cold sensors? How many millions of optical and light/dark sensors there are in your eye? How many millions of taste sensors you have? How powerful your conscious sense of smell is? Your unconscious sense of smell (pheromones)?
Like I said... I don't doubt that eventually we'll develop a computer that can match the processing power of the human brain. But I doubt it'll be soon. It *might* be within my lifetime, but I'm not holding my breath on that one... The brain isn't magical, it's a trillion-core symmetric computer with a staggering memory retention and bandwidth, and a programming so complicated that we're nowhere near matching it. Oh, and that's not mentionning that the brain doesn't work in binary switches, either. It works in chemical switches, with about 50 possible states running in parallel.... Some day, we'll beat out the human brain with a computer. Humans are just too arrogant to believe that we can't, and so somebody will eventually do it. But it's not going to be tomorrow.
In the spirit of one-upmanship... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion
There were other large explosions long before that happened. During the seige of Ft. George outside of Niagara On The Lake, Ontario, in 1812, for example, an artillery shell hit a magazine. The resulting explosion was described as "resembling a large cauliflower", and was seen from as much as 30 miles away. The fort itself was levelled, and an American general was killed by debris from the explosion more than 15 miles away (a shard of wood stabbed him in the heart). Sound like something that's typically associated with nuclear explosions?
I think he's a little more worried about the external memory performance than internal.... It doesn't matter if the CPU can move data in bursts up to 1 Tb/s, if it's only got 8MB of cache on-chip, and relies on the rest from the system bus, that's going to amount to a whole lot of unused CPU cycles while you wait for the system bus to catch up to the CPU. No doubt it'll be more than 8MB of cache for a behemoth like this, but do you really think they're going to be able to squeeze, say, 2MB per core without burning down the house?
Did you even read your Wiki article? It says pretty clearly that sales did dip initially, but they picked up and brought Osbourne back into the black. What killed Osbourne, according to your link, was some bad management decisions on how to deal with $150,000 worth of surplus hardware, and an unexpected jump in the price of their screens.
Ahh... but you missed the finer point of this one... This one has exactly the same title, the same submitter, and the same text as the other one. So either the submitter double-submitted, or Timothy (who approved the other one) screwed up and didn't remove it from the queue. Come to think of it, Timothy probably screwed up by not checking the queue to see if there was a dupe of the article he'd just approved....
Y'know... bedrest, fluids, and aspirin make a perfectly viable alternative for most viral and bacterial infections. An otherwise healthy adult has an incredibly powerful immune response to most of the bugs that can get you sick. Come to it... grinning and bearing the pain of, say, childbirth or a broken leg is a perfectly viable alternative. Humans were doing it for millenia. But somebody, sometime, had to be the guinea pig who discovered that hemlock will kill you. And somebody, sometime, had to be the one that they first tried aspirin on. At some point in history, those were experimental treatments.
And before you go off on some tangent about how that was hundreds, or thousands of years ago, I'll point this out to you: Aspirin is a very useful anti-inflammatory. It's been used for a couple hundred years to treat a wide variety of things, including inflammation due to arthritis. I'm currently on Diclofenac Sodium. It's a drug that's been developped in the last 10 years to treat... you guessed it... arthritis. Diclo is being used to treat inflammation, minor to moderate pain, and it's seeing some pretty wide use in sports-related injuries. It's actually a pretty neat little wonderdrug, but less than 10 years ago, it was an experimental new treatment in a time when a perfectly viable alternative existed. Ibeuprophen? Also developped within the last 40 years as an alternative to Aspirin and Acetaminophen. Acetaminophen itself was developped in the last hundred years as... an alternative to Aspirin.
And how about organ transplants? There were ways to perform kidney dialysis before the development of the modern dialysis machine. And Iron Lungs? There are perfectly survivable alternatives to a whole lot of the organ transplants that we are now doing as a matter of routine. They may not give the same quality of life as, say, a new kidney would, but they're certainly viable. But somebody had to take a risk with a patient's life to develop the technique for how to perform those surgeries. It's not like you can look ahead a few pages to see how it turns out: these now routine surgeries were experimental at some point.
Medical science would most emphatically *not* be where it is today without doctors trying out experimental procedures and drugs when perfectly "viable alternatives" already existed. It may sound incredibly cold and callous to you, but the medical profession is well aware that sometimes you have to lose a patient in order to advance knowledge. As long as you're not maliciously trying something that you know will harm the patient, and as long as there's a reasonable chance of success, it's not unethical to try something new.
There is nothing unethical about performing an experimental procedure on a volunteer. That's how medical knowledge gets advanced. Regardless of the outcome of this procedure, it'll help give insight into how to go about doing it in the future. It will save lives.
I mean... by your standards, we wouldn't have organ transplants, modern surgery, anaesthetics, any of the wonderdrugs we now consider must-haves, antibiotics, and a whole slew of other things that had to be tried on somebody first. How many lives have been saved by, say, penicillin? *somebody* had to be the first guinea pig. You think that was unethical?
Personally, I'd like to know what surgical procedure can be done in the 30s or so they have before gravity "returns". They are doing it with a parabolic flight trajectory, right?
Traditionally, Internet service is horribly overpriced in North America. Thanks to legislated monopolies that only have the illusion of being deregulated, broadband Internet service is virtually a non-entity where ultimately you're buying your DSL or cable service from the same provider*, and has actually become *more* expensive in the last 10 years, not less.
* In Canada, for example, Bell Nexxia owns the phone lines. It doesn't matter if you're subscribing to service from Telus, Sympatico, or a local provider like Magma, Cyberus, or FreeNet in the Ottawa area, you're still buying the exact same 3mbit/800kbit service which ultimately comes from Bell Nexxia. Likewise, Rogers Telecommunications owns the cable lines, and it doesn't matter who you're buying the cable Internet service from, ultimately it is just a rebranded Rogers connection.
You're absolutely right. It is copyrighted. I'm not defending what they did, I'm just saying that it makes better sense from a corporate point of view to keep their source closed.
You're incredibly naive if you think an unmodified Linux kernel is capable of running an embedded device like that....
In other words, it *is* like it's something they wrote. They stood on the shoulders of others, but they still had to do their own work to get it to work with their hardware and do what they want it to do. Seeing as they use off the shelf wireless chipsets, ethernet controllers, and such, there's absolutely nothing to stop a competitor from using the source code they would have to release under the GPL to manufacture a cheaper alternative that is functionally identical. It makes much better fiscal sense for them to switch to a different kernel and modify their own source to suit it.
The problem with a spectrometer is that the more you have in the substance you're testing, the harder it is to detect a single substance. It's not like every chemical has a single line that shows up on a spectrometer scan... actually, everything has several lines that show up. The more complex a substance is (and the heavier the atoms that make it up), the more lines appear. Pure Iron (Fe), for example, has 43 lines that show up on its spectrum. And drinking water isn't pure H2O. Not by a long shot... pure H2O tastes soapy, bland. Like there's something wrong with it. Our tap water has lots of stuff in it already that isn't harmful. Mineral content, and additives like chlorine and fluoride.
Now... they could establish a baseline and subtract that, but there's so much stuff already in drinking water that you'd probably have a hard time telling one thing from the next. What you think could be cyanide may actually be a higher than normal silica content. There's really no way to be sure that what you're seeing on a spectrometer is dangerous without doing a proper series of tests on it, and there's no way to do those tests fast enough to cut off the water supply. The result is that you would need to set the sensitivity *way* too high and end up getting a lot of false positives... when you're dealing with contaminated water supply, a false positive is far more desirable than a false negative.
But here's a system that costs a *lot* less to implement, and because you're using living beings that are much more sensitive to poisons than humans are, you'll see the effect of a toxin long before the concentration is high enough to seriously harm a human.
Even for Windows. I tested the proof of concept PDFs in FoxIt PDF reader (http://foxitsoftware.com/), and none of them worked. The flaws aren't in the PDF format itself, they're in Adobe's implementation of it.
You're right... I am mixing terminology a little. But that's because of the difference in media that we're talking about here. Optical resolution has very little to do with the number of pixels being displayed, and has more to do with the fuzzy boundaries between objects when viewing them at a distance. If the angle between objects is too little, then the light from them will superimpose and you'll get interference. If they're close enough, they'll appear as one. Resolution refers to how far apart the objects have to be (or how large the angle between them has to be) in order to perceive them as distinct objects. To "resolve" them.
By contrast, computer resolution refers specifically to the number of pixels being displayed. Given the audience, I'm using the word in the computer sense, not the optical sense.