The pixel density is higher than the eyes can see, unless it's taking up your full field of vision. But the other thing to keep in mind is that your eyes are essentially two cameras working in parallel. We subconsciously interpolate the information they're sending to create depth, but we also subconsciously interpolate the data to increase the resolution (and sharpen the image). Pick something in your room, take off your glasses if you wear them. It's relatively in focus, depending on how bad your prescription is. Now... close one eye, then the other. Notice that with both eyes open, the focus is better than it is with one eye closed, and it doesn't matter which eye is closed for that effect. Even if you're like me where one eye is near-sighted and the other is far-sighted. (My right is -0.50, my left is +0.25)
I don't know the exact numbers, but we'll use the number of 15 megapixels per eye... just because a single eye is 15MP doesn't mean that both eyes working in tandem is going to be 30MP. In Astronomy, you can drastically increase the resolution of a picture you're taking by taking a dozen pictures spread out over a large area. If they're at the same time, then you can interpolate the missing data and produce a *really* high resolution picture. I'd be surprised if we aren't subconsciously doing the same thing with our eyes.
I'm basing this on what I've heard and what I know. Do you have any evidence to counter it, or are you just using the debating technique of Argumentum ad ignorantiam?
Ah. Then all I need to do is provide a counter-example.... Fair enough.
I haven't owned a gaming console since the 8-bit NES. I got into computer gaming, and real life sports/other activities. I'm seriously considering buying a Wii. Whether or not I actually do buy one will depend on whether my apartment-mate can be convinced to fork over his share of the cost (which, given that Madden will be available for the Wii, is a distinct possibility). Neither of us have plans at all to buy either an XBox 360 or a PS3. Why? They're too expensive, especially for something I wouldn't use more than a few hours a week.
Oh, and before you start bitching about picture quality... I don't care. I honestly don't care whether my game console displays graphics at 1080p resolution or not. I've got a 65" High Def TV, and the only time I care about picture quality is when I'm watching sattelite TV or DVDs. When I'm playing a game, I'm not going to pause the action so I can ogle the scenery, or count the number of jaggies so I can write a blog posting about how crappy the anti-aliasing is, I'm going to, you know, play the game. I only care if it's fun. If it looks great, too, then wonderful. But I'm not going to spend more than twice as much on a console just to have it look better. Graphics simply aren't that important to me.
You're right... they aren't being innovative. They're going back to the 1980's with some of their thinking... Specifically... a game console for everybody (FamiCom anybody?), at a price that a huge portion of the market can easily afford. Oh, and cheaper games, too.
See... Nintendo has realized that you don't need high quality graphics to have fun. Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that the graphics in the Wii will be much improved over their older offerings, but they don't need to break the bank on an 8-core graphics processor that costs more than the rest of the system put together. Instead... they're focusing on making the games fun, and accessable. What a novel concept.
Where's the innovation? Where's the need for innovation? They've taken a page from Apple and thrown in an iTMS-like ROM download service. Last I checked, you can't download old XBox games for $5 from XBox Live. Do you honestly think that the price is going to remain constant, or that the 30 games they're announcing today are going to be it, forever, never to be increased? They've taken a page from WebTV, too. They've designed the thing so that you can browse the Internet with it. Why not? If there's an online service to purchase/download old games, it's connected to the 'net anyway. Neither of these are actual innovations, but can you please point me to another game console that implements these features and costs less than $300, taxes included? (and comes with a game...)
And the Wii-mote looks pretty fun to me. I'm looking forward to messing up my friends' game by grabbing and shaking his arm while we're in competition, or playing that sword game with it. Even that type of controller isn't a *new* idea... you've been able to buy computer mice that use the same technology for over 10 years.
the only way around the restore cd thing is to purchase a machine without windows on it and buy your own copy of windows.
Actually, my Compaq R4035CA laptop came with an OEM version of the XP Home CD, and a separate disc for all the other preinstalled crap. The Product Key sticker on the bottom of the laptop even worked with the XP CD... who wouldda thunk?
...and I'm not even speaking about the validity and effectiveness of a karma point system. I mean, a visual queue to tell people what content to believe or not? What happened to reasoning, critical thinking and the scientific process? Do we need to think for ourselves or rely on someone's visually appealing color code to know what or what not to trust?
Sometimes it's obvious when a factual error has been made. Say, for example, somebody changes the article on Monarch butterflies to claim that they feed on the blood of human babies. Anybody with an ounce of reason can see that it's a fallacious claim. But what if it's a minor factual error that can easily slip past your notice? Or worse... an outright lie that seems more reasonable than the truth? Say, for example, somebody claims that the volume of a mol of helium is 23.6L. Outside of people with an actual background and education in chemistry, nobody's going to notice that error. Critical thought or no, that's something you just have to know in order to see as wrong. Those with a background in Chemistry know that it's actually 22.4L. Those without have no clue.
And the problem arises when people then use that number as fact, without bothering to do research outside of Wikipedia. A *lot* of research papers, particularly in High School and Undergraduate studies, skimp on research. I know people who have never been to a library to research, and do all of it online. These are the people getting burned. Arguments over the morality or wisdom in doing all of your research in that manner aside, Wiki is fast becoming the prime source of research data. And that's why the people at Wiki are trying to find a way to improve their credibility.
You may also want to check out a SanDisk Sansa e130. Doesn't support Ogg/Vorbis, which is a pity, but easy enough to get around by using LAME to encode your music instead. It *does* support MP3, WAV, and WMA playback, including MS's PlaysForSure DRM crap. So why is it better?
I get 8-12 hours of playback, depending on sound level, from a single AAA battery. Meaning the battery is interchangeable, and I can use rechargeables. Great for long road trips where I can't plug the device in... just bring a couple of extra batteries. Also, it's got a built-in FM radio. Finally, it has a built-in SD cardreader. So even though the device is 512MB, it's easily upgradeable just by carrying around extra SD cards. And it shows up as a USB drive when I plug it into the computer (as does the SD cardreader... meaning it works in Linux).
For distribution to the end-user, you will definitely want a package of some kind. I'm assuming that your end users won't be able to log in with a prompt, but may have some kind of web-based management, right? If you distribute your upgrades/patches as.deb packages (maybe renamed to.bin since that's what users have been conditionned to expect), then it makes things a whole lot easier... among other things, it would facilitate downloading the upgrade from a location other than where the product is: not all users have Internet connections at home, even in this day and age. You may also want to look into implementing something like Slackpackages, since they ignore dependancy. (They're basically just a tarball... you can install them manually by unzipping/tarring the file from / and then looking in the/install directory and manually executing any scripts there)
For actual development... you're gonna *need* to use SubVersion or CVS. Cover your ass. Also, not having it makes managing a project a royal pain in the ass.
Can you name any ancient civilization of that era that isn't gone?
The Indians. Their civilization formed around the same time as the Egyptians, and though they've modernized their technology, they still hold many links to their ancient roots, especially in terms of societal structure.
See... ancient civilizations don't disappear... they evolve. They either adapt, or they get conquered. In a lot of cases, they get conquered, absorb some elements of the occupying army, and then reappear when they get their freedom back, only to be reconquered a few hundred years later. There isn't a Pharoah in Egypt these days, nor is there a supreme Rajah in India, but elements of those cultures are still there today, just as elements of the ancient Roman and Greek cultures are still present in modern Italian and Greek society.
I'd agree with you if they were foreign diplomats. But if I visited the UK and committed crimes according to their laws over there, are you saying that they wouldn't have the right to arrest me?
Yes... but we're not talking about committing a crime on US soil, we're talking about doing something that the US considers a crime, on English soil.
Think of it this way: In the nation of Elbonia, a law gets passed prohibiting you from using a toilet on Sunday. Can they legally arrest you for having shat on Sunday when you visit their country, even if you don't do it while on their turf?
My guess is that a crack will be available in the next 6 months. Long before I have any intention of buying either HD-DVD or BluRay... Despite the fact that I'd have to buy several hundred DVDs all over again, I'm gonna sit back, make some popcorn, and wait to see which emerges the victor before I even consider upgrading. Heck... I didn't even buy a DVD burner until a month ago (well ok, a year ago... my laptop came with one). I'm not a luddite, I just don't see the point in buying into a new technology until I need it. The current generation of DVD is good enough. My monitor supports HDCP (Gateway 2185W LCD), but that was hardly a determining factor when I bought it.
As for the graphics card... since DVD playback is in 2D and the decoding is usually done at the CPU-level, the only reason I can think of to need a high end video card is because older video cards' GPUs simply aren't compatible with HDCP. According to ATI's website, for example, the Radeon 9550 core and the X1K core are the only GPUs they manufacture (and have ever manufactured) that are even HDCP-capable, let alone HDCP-ready. They don't yet manufacture a video card that actually supports HDCP, and suggest that you should check with the people rebranding their product to see which, if any, support HDCP.
I don't use Sendmail because I consider it overly complex.
Please don't get the impression that I'm trying to evangelize you... but Sendmail used to be overly complex. More recent versions are actually pretty good from the configuration perspective, especially if you're using a binary distribution such as a slackpackage or deb package. It's really just a question of changing your sendmail.mc file, and compiling it. Copy to the right location, and restart Sendmail. Poof. It's done.
Enabling a RBL or RHBL in Sendmail is as simple as adding a line to the end of your configuration file:
Personally... I found that Sendmail was the mail package that "just worked" for me. I tried qmail, PostFix, and a bunch of other ones, and by far, Sendmail with Procmail was the easiest to set up filters and other configuration.
Urbanesq.com Inc. ("Urbanesq") was incorporated August 25, 2000 under the laws of the Province of Canada. Effective October 18, 2001, Urbanesq completed a merger with Koala International Wireless Inc. ("Koala"), a public company incorporated in the State of Nevada...changed the name of the Company to Trimax Corporation...
Err... Canada's actual name is the Dominion of Canada, not the Province of Canada. Provinces are political divisions within the country.... Just to begin punching holes in it, that is....
Maybe you have a simplistic Compaq with one green hole named mic.
We grown-up folks have an actual sound card which uses more than one input and may include S-VIDEO, etc.,
The GP was not mentioning it for simple Compaq folks like you. It was meant for "us"
Points for creativity. Of some sort... My laptop happens to be a Compaq, but my desktop has an Audigy. Funny that. It still has a jack labelled mic which, for some reason, actually works like a microphone should. They're even colour-coded and everything, kinda like just about every sound card made in the last 5 years. Even the onboard sound that most motherboards have is programmable for which jack does what... It even works under Linux, too. When in doubt, RTFM. You may find that your sound card isn't quite as confusing as you make it out to be. But then, maybe I'm just weird. Tech. companies are funny that way... they actually want you to be able to *use* their product. Who wouldda thought?
It's not *my* fault the GP, or you, for that matter, can't be bothered to actually figure out what he's got and how to use it. Personally, I never really found it all that confusing.
Of course it's truly silent as sold.... A computer without a CPU, optical drives, or a hard drive isn't going to make a lot of noise.:-)
Silencing your PC is an easy thing to do, though. Just about any PC can be made silent, too... Just replace your case fans with variable speed fans, and your CPU, GPU, and Northbridge fans with passive heatsinks. At the low speed, the fans won't make a lot of noise at all. Even with a "silent" PC, though, there's going to be noise. I mean... here's what I've thrown in my system:
Case: Antec Overture II Mobo: Gigabyte K8NSC-939 (Northbridge sink replaced with a Zalman passive sink) Proc: Athlon64 3000+ (Heatsink replaced with an Arctic Cooling Silencer64 Ultra TC) VC: Radeon X1300 AGP 256MB (VGA, S-Video and DVI out, with an adaptor for the S-Video for RCA and Component, and a DVI-VGA adaptor) HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (SATA, 160GB) Optical: NEC 3550a DVD-RW (silver) Wireless: your choice, really. I went with an Asus WL-138g
Now. Here's what I've learned from experience... At idle, sitting the same distance from both my PC and my Laptop, the laptop makes more noise. Truly silencing my PC isn't going to be possible for two reasons: 1, I still need an optical drive. Especially if it's going to be used as a multimedia PC. Silent optical drives do not exist. There's several options out there for *quiet* optical drives, but silent ones do not exist. Aren't even possible with current optical drive design. (Are possible by redesigning the drive so that the laser moves, but the disc doesn't, which would come at a major sacrifice of drive speed). I *could* have gone with a Plextor 716. Would have, too, except that it isn't available with a silver bezel. I went with the NEC for purely aesthetic reasons, and was willing to sacrifice a little to get it.
2, If I were to dispense with active case fans, I would face a serious heat problem. It's possible to get rid of my exhaust fans, and it's possible to replace the PSU with one that doesn't have an active fan (well, possible on any other case, but the Overture series uses a custom/proprietary PSU), but most stereo/multimedia equipment gets put into a cabinet without a lot of ventilation. Coupled with higher end processors and video cards that generate a lot of heat, you have a problem that needs to be addressed. Passive cooling on a heatsink is only good when there's good ventilation, so you have to decide which fan makes more noise: the CPU fan or the case fan.
It's entirely possible to build a computer with no moving parts. But that computer will be lacking more than a few things that will keep it from being viable: an optical drive, enough hard drive space to store your movies/music, and a whole lot of power. By contrast, it's possible to build a quiet PC like mine. It's not silent, but it is quiet enough that I can hear a pin drop from across the room when I'm sitting a foot away from it.
PS: I could also have gotten a quieter system by opting for a different case/motherboard. I made a few choices for aesthetic reasons, though... I still have to live with the thing, and it's eye pleasing.
1. I don't know anybody who actually gets excited about windows or is a big fan of windows. It's usually "it's what I use at work." or "I've just gotten used to it." or "The software I want to use is windows-based." or "All my customers use it" or something like that. Nobody ever seems to say "Wow! I can't wait to get the new version of windows!" or "I'm so glad I'm not using OSX anymore!"
I can't really argue against that. OS/X beats Windows hands down from a user-friendly point of view, and also from an eye candy point of view. It just looks better, and for the average user, it works better. I do, however, know a few Windows evangelists. Annoying, but you do have to understand that in a well-managed system, Windows can be just as stable as Linux or OS/X. In a well-managed system. With properly written drivers, and stable hardware. Hey wait... that's exactly why OS/X and Linux tend to be stable.... The real stability problem with Windows comes from MS's decision to run drivers in kernel space instead of userspace, and they've finally fixed that screwup with Vista. It's about frigging time, but I'm not going to run to the store to buy a copy when it's released.
2. Microsoft has said they will never have this long a delay between Windows versions. Um...is that a good thing? That you'll need to upgrade again and again? Look at OSX. The new version is still 10.x. It's not a complete re-iteration. The same can be said about many unix distros. It's *good* when an operating system is flexable and modular enough that it does not constantly need to be completely rewritten.
Yeah. Have you looked at what they did with Vista? Back around 1998, MS realised that the 9X kernel was a piece of crap. That's why ME was the last piece of junk they ever released on that kernel (NT 5 wasn't ready when they released ME). XP had the same kernel as 2K: NT 5. That's why you couldn't install XP Home as an upgrade over 2K Pro: XP Home has a single CPU build of NT 5.1, and 2K Pro has a SMP build of the same kernel. They realized that NT wasn't really much better either, because the problem was having a macrokernel and running drivers in kernel space. It's great, when the drivers are stable. But MS wasn't writing the drivers, vendors were. And many hardware vendors have a nasty habit of producing crappy drivers, which caused all kinds of stability problems in their OS that couldn't legitimately be attributed to their own code; except that they'd elected to run 3rd party code with the same privilege as the kernel. The prevailing wisdom when they came up with that braindead idea was that it was faster to run a macrokernel with support for everything, because you didn't need to load drivers. Try running Windows using only WHQL-signed drivers, and it's a completely different experience from using unsigned drivers.
In order to change the driver architecture, though, MS had to rewrite the kernel. They went with a modular kernel that runs drivers in userspace. It's much easier to maintain such a kernel, because there's less crap that can go wrong at the kernel level. I've seen errors that would cause a BSOD in NT happen to a Vista machine. A fatal exception OE caused by a crappy video driver, actually. That would take down anything currently commercially available from MS. But Vista shrugged. It gave me an error message, I clicked OK, and it restarted the video driver. The screen didn't even flicker, and the streaming music from Club977 that I was listening to at the time didn't even stutter.
It's a *huge* improvement. But it's also a *huge* rewrite from their previous kernel architecture. And that's why it's been so long. They probably plan on taking a page from Apple's book when they say that new versions won't be that long between again. Assuming that Vista's kernel doesn't develop some horribly crippling quirks (and the jury's still out on that), they won't need to do a complete rewrite again. They'll be in the same place Apple has been for the la
Linux doesn't work that way. Of course, Linux also has a significantly lower memory overhead, usually, and is also a lot more conservative about how it allocates memory. Usually, a system won't actually start swapping unless you have a huge number of programs open, or you have very little physical memory.
Case in point... my laptop has 1GB of RAM. Not really that much by modern standards, if you ask me, but not really important, either. On the laptop, I have had, at the same time, GAIM, gxine (listening to streaming audio from Club977), GIMP (like Photoshop), and running through Cedega, Guild Wars. On a system with an Athlon64 3500+ and 1GB of RAM, there was absolutely no swapping happening at all. Now, I've got 2GB of SWAP set up on that laptop, but with that much stuff open at the same time, it says something that there's no swapping happening.
By comparison, my desktop machine runs Windows XP Professional (yes, it's legal). Said machine has an Athlon64 3000+, so it's pretty much comparable to the laptop at that end. It also has 2GB of physical RAM. Also, where the laptop has a Radeon XPress 200M 128MB, the desktop has a Radeon X1300 256MB. Strangely, under XP Pro, I have had my system slow down to an absolute crawl while playing a single instance of Guild Wars (and having nothing else running), because I had set the swap to start at 32MB and grow to up to 1024MB. Why? Because even though Windows had twice the physical RAM of my laptop, and even though Windows didn't have nearly as many programs open, Windows still felt the need to increase the size of my swap file because it was doing swapping. Ultimately, I set the swap on that machine to be permanently 1024MB.
The Winbox has a *lot* more overhead, and the Windows OS is significantly more liberal in its memory use and memory distribution. It's not as good at garbage collection. And before somebody points it out... the lappy is running Linux 2.6.17.8, with X.Org 6.9 and XFCE 4.3.90 with compositing enabled (and full transparency effects), and ClamAV 0.88.2, on top of SSH server, cpu frequency scaling (the Conservative governor, usually underclocking to 1GHz from 2.2GHz peak). The Windows machine, at startup, is running AVG Antivirus, RKLauncher, Window Shade 1.2, and... Windows.
As to the actual question posed... it's been answered dozens of times, but I may as well chime in with my $0.02. As you can probably guess, how much virtual memory you need depends on what you're doing, and what OS you're using. Under Linux, with a respectable amount of memory and reasonable use, I would say you don't need virtual memory at all. By Respectable, I'd say 1GB+. If you're running less than 1GB of RAM, or if you're going to do some heavy use, I'd say 1:1 Physical:Virtual, with a caveat: Physical + Virtual should probably be at least 1GB. Under Windows? Let the system manage it, most of the time. Just make sure that you don't let the system give you so much virtual memory that Physical + Virtual > 4GB... All versions of Windows that are currently available only create memory addressing space for 4GB, and any more than that simply won't be used. Vista changes how memory is addressed, but it's not on the market yet.:)
* Leaden, ugly dialogue. * Clichéd, central-casting characters. * Puerile, distasteful attitudes towards women and sexuality. * Convoluted, boring plots. * A nasty, racist political agenda. * A pervading sense that the writer simply doesn't understand people and has never really met any.
I'm not gonna deny that Heinlein had some seriously bad books under his belt. Personally, I couldn't stomach Starship Troopers, for example, and an entire litany of other books he wrote. The thing is, he wrote a very large number of books, and *some* of what he wrote is very good. I really enjoyed Revolt in 2100, for example.
As for any racist political agenda, you're looking at his work with a modern perspective. You're entitled to do that, but before you write his work off as trying to forward some insidious agenda, you need to understand that at the time he wrote, it was considered normal, and Heinlein's estate has been good at preserving what he wrote, unlike certain other authors from the period....
Like Agatha Christie... Ever read her book, Ten Little Nigger Boys? Don't like that title? How about Ten Little Indians? Nope? What about And Then There Were None? Three titles, one book.
There are actually geeks who don't speak Klingon. They're called Stargate geeks, and can probably speak at you in Goa'uld instead. Kree!:-)
But yeah. I didn't read the article for exactly the same reason. Y'know what I want out of Linux? Support for my Texas Instruments SD controller, and a decent 3d driver for my ATI video cards. The laptop has a Radeon XPress 200M, and the desktop has an X1300 AGP. The desktop, of course, is running Windows XP Professional. Funny that... I'm a gamer; if there was a reasonably good video driver, I'd run Cedega. The laptop, however, is running Zenwalk. Everything *else* on the lappy just works, and I only ever boot into Windows to use the card reader. See... my digital camera has a 1GB XD card, and I prefer not to run the batteries down by connecting it through USB (which works). Likewise, my MP3 player has an SD port, and I prefer to copy the data to the card using *gasp* my card reader.
Get my card reader working right, and I'm happy. I can live without games (or rather, I can live with games like Supertux and Battle for Wesnoth). But I need the card reader.
It also doesn't explain why there's more broadband adoption (and a better variety of services available) in a country like Canada, which has a larger land area than the USA, and about 1/10th the population. The roadblock to broadband adoption in Canada is availability, not lack of demand, and rural wireless networks are doing wonders for that. A local company here in Ottawa, for example, offers 3mbit symmetric wireless connectivity for 40 CAD/month. Said company offers wireless connections up to 20mbit and fibre connections up to 100mbit.
Population density has very little to do with something like internet adoption (and broadband adoption). Contemporary society is a very well educated society, and is generally aware of what's available. Even if it's an oversimplification of the facts, like "I'll be able to download mp3's faster", they're aware of why broadband is better. The problem is that the industry in the US is stagnating. They aren't trying very hard at all to make the service available outside of urban centres, and even when they do make it available, they don't make it cost-effective enough to encourage adoption. They're making too much money off dialup service, which is dirt cheap to operate, and yet for some reason still costs as much as 25 USD/month for unlimited. (You can get dialup for free in Ottawa, too.)
So why will the 32 bit version allow you to install unsigned drivers? Just something to help existing XP users upgrade?
32-bit Windows will complain when you try to install unsigned drivers, but it's a different kernel. First, it gives you a clickthrough that says "install anyway", and second, it doesn't have boot-time signature checking when it decides whether or not to load a driver. Don't forget that 64-bit Windows is a very recent development, comparatively speaking. Your guess is as good as mine as to *why* MS didn't backport that functionality, or why MS didn't implement it in Vista 32-bit, though.
(Incidentally, you *can* disable the boot-time signature checking and force x64 Windows to install and use unsigned drivers. It's just a little more difficult.)
64-bit Windows won't allow you to install a driver that isn't digitally signed. The signature includes a checksum to ensure the driver hasn't been tampered with, and a serial number that identifies the driver number and version with WHQL.
There are ways to force an unsigned driver to install in x64 Windows. Heck, when I was running Vista, I had to do that in order to get my sound card to work. My guess, however, would be that the High Def decoding/display will be crippled in that circumstance.
Of course, MS seems to be labouring under the notion that Windows Media Player is, and will continue to be, the only player capable of playing DVDs in Vista. It probably won't take very long for the makers of VLC to add that functionality, and we'll be back where we are today, only with more expensive DVDs.:)
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The pixel density is higher than the eyes can see, unless it's taking up your full field of vision. But the other thing to keep in mind is that your eyes are essentially two cameras working in parallel. We subconsciously interpolate the information they're sending to create depth, but we also subconsciously interpolate the data to increase the resolution (and sharpen the image). Pick something in your room, take off your glasses if you wear them. It's relatively in focus, depending on how bad your prescription is. Now... close one eye, then the other. Notice that with both eyes open, the focus is better than it is with one eye closed, and it doesn't matter which eye is closed for that effect. Even if you're like me where one eye is near-sighted and the other is far-sighted. (My right is -0.50, my left is +0.25)
I don't know the exact numbers, but we'll use the number of 15 megapixels per eye... just because a single eye is 15MP doesn't mean that both eyes working in tandem is going to be 30MP. In Astronomy, you can drastically increase the resolution of a picture you're taking by taking a dozen pictures spread out over a large area. If they're at the same time, then you can interpolate the missing data and produce a *really* high resolution picture. I'd be surprised if we aren't subconsciously doing the same thing with our eyes.
Ah. Then all I need to do is provide a counter-example.... Fair enough.
I haven't owned a gaming console since the 8-bit NES. I got into computer gaming, and real life sports/other activities. I'm seriously considering buying a Wii. Whether or not I actually do buy one will depend on whether my apartment-mate can be convinced to fork over his share of the cost (which, given that Madden will be available for the Wii, is a distinct possibility). Neither of us have plans at all to buy either an XBox 360 or a PS3. Why? They're too expensive, especially for something I wouldn't use more than a few hours a week.
Oh, and before you start bitching about picture quality... I don't care. I honestly don't care whether my game console displays graphics at 1080p resolution or not. I've got a 65" High Def TV, and the only time I care about picture quality is when I'm watching sattelite TV or DVDs. When I'm playing a game, I'm not going to pause the action so I can ogle the scenery, or count the number of jaggies so I can write a blog posting about how crappy the anti-aliasing is, I'm going to, you know, play the game. I only care if it's fun. If it looks great, too, then wonderful. But I'm not going to spend more than twice as much on a console just to have it look better. Graphics simply aren't that important to me.
You're right... they aren't being innovative. They're going back to the 1980's with some of their thinking... Specifically... a game console for everybody (FamiCom anybody?), at a price that a huge portion of the market can easily afford. Oh, and cheaper games, too.
See... Nintendo has realized that you don't need high quality graphics to have fun. Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that the graphics in the Wii will be much improved over their older offerings, but they don't need to break the bank on an 8-core graphics processor that costs more than the rest of the system put together. Instead... they're focusing on making the games fun, and accessable. What a novel concept.
Where's the innovation? Where's the need for innovation? They've taken a page from Apple and thrown in an iTMS-like ROM download service. Last I checked, you can't download old XBox games for $5 from XBox Live. Do you honestly think that the price is going to remain constant, or that the 30 games they're announcing today are going to be it, forever, never to be increased? They've taken a page from WebTV, too. They've designed the thing so that you can browse the Internet with it. Why not? If there's an online service to purchase/download old games, it's connected to the 'net anyway. Neither of these are actual innovations, but can you please point me to another game console that implements these features and costs less than $300, taxes included? (and comes with a game...)
And the Wii-mote looks pretty fun to me. I'm looking forward to messing up my friends' game by grabbing and shaking his arm while we're in competition, or playing that sword game with it. Even that type of controller isn't a *new* idea... you've been able to buy computer mice that use the same technology for over 10 years.
Oh, I wish I had mod points. That's hilarious :-)
Actually, my Compaq R4035CA laptop came with an OEM version of the XP Home CD, and a separate disc for all the other preinstalled crap. The Product Key sticker on the bottom of the laptop even worked with the XP CD... who wouldda thunk?
Sometimes it's obvious when a factual error has been made. Say, for example, somebody changes the article on Monarch butterflies to claim that they feed on the blood of human babies. Anybody with an ounce of reason can see that it's a fallacious claim. But what if it's a minor factual error that can easily slip past your notice? Or worse... an outright lie that seems more reasonable than the truth? Say, for example, somebody claims that the volume of a mol of helium is 23.6L. Outside of people with an actual background and education in chemistry, nobody's going to notice that error. Critical thought or no, that's something you just have to know in order to see as wrong. Those with a background in Chemistry know that it's actually 22.4L. Those without have no clue.
And the problem arises when people then use that number as fact, without bothering to do research outside of Wikipedia. A *lot* of research papers, particularly in High School and Undergraduate studies, skimp on research. I know people who have never been to a library to research, and do all of it online. These are the people getting burned. Arguments over the morality or wisdom in doing all of your research in that manner aside, Wiki is fast becoming the prime source of research data. And that's why the people at Wiki are trying to find a way to improve their credibility.
He's probably thinking of the good time he could have with $200 and a weekend in Vegas.
You may also want to check out a SanDisk Sansa e130. Doesn't support Ogg/Vorbis, which is a pity, but easy enough to get around by using LAME to encode your music instead. It *does* support MP3, WAV, and WMA playback, including MS's PlaysForSure DRM crap. So why is it better?
I get 8-12 hours of playback, depending on sound level, from a single AAA battery. Meaning the battery is interchangeable, and I can use rechargeables. Great for long road trips where I can't plug the device in... just bring a couple of extra batteries. Also, it's got a built-in FM radio. Finally, it has a built-in SD cardreader. So even though the device is 512MB, it's easily upgradeable just by carrying around extra SD cards. And it shows up as a USB drive when I plug it into the computer (as does the SD cardreader... meaning it works in Linux).
For distribution to the end-user, you will definitely want a package of some kind. I'm assuming that your end users won't be able to log in with a prompt, but may have some kind of web-based management, right? If you distribute your upgrades/patches as .deb packages (maybe renamed to .bin since that's what users have been conditionned to expect), then it makes things a whole lot easier... among other things, it would facilitate downloading the upgrade from a location other than where the product is: not all users have Internet connections at home, even in this day and age. You may also want to look into implementing something like Slackpackages, since they ignore dependancy. (They're basically just a tarball... you can install them manually by unzipping/tarring the file from / and then looking in the /install directory and manually executing any scripts there)
For actual development... you're gonna *need* to use SubVersion or CVS. Cover your ass. Also, not having it makes managing a project a royal pain in the ass.
The Indians. Their civilization formed around the same time as the Egyptians, and though they've modernized their technology, they still hold many links to their ancient roots, especially in terms of societal structure.
See... ancient civilizations don't disappear... they evolve. They either adapt, or they get conquered. In a lot of cases, they get conquered, absorb some elements of the occupying army, and then reappear when they get their freedom back, only to be reconquered a few hundred years later. There isn't a Pharoah in Egypt these days, nor is there a supreme Rajah in India, but elements of those cultures are still there today, just as elements of the ancient Roman and Greek cultures are still present in modern Italian and Greek society.
Yes... but we're not talking about committing a crime on US soil, we're talking about doing something that the US considers a crime, on English soil.
Think of it this way: In the nation of Elbonia, a law gets passed prohibiting you from using a toilet on Sunday. Can they legally arrest you for having shat on Sunday when you visit their country, even if you don't do it while on their turf?
My guess is that a crack will be available in the next 6 months. Long before I have any intention of buying either HD-DVD or BluRay... Despite the fact that I'd have to buy several hundred DVDs all over again, I'm gonna sit back, make some popcorn, and wait to see which emerges the victor before I even consider upgrading. Heck... I didn't even buy a DVD burner until a month ago (well ok, a year ago... my laptop came with one). I'm not a luddite, I just don't see the point in buying into a new technology until I need it. The current generation of DVD is good enough. My monitor supports HDCP (Gateway 2185W LCD), but that was hardly a determining factor when I bought it.
As for the graphics card... since DVD playback is in 2D and the decoding is usually done at the CPU-level, the only reason I can think of to need a high end video card is because older video cards' GPUs simply aren't compatible with HDCP. According to ATI's website, for example, the Radeon 9550 core and the X1K core are the only GPUs they manufacture (and have ever manufactured) that are even HDCP-capable, let alone HDCP-ready. They don't yet manufacture a video card that actually supports HDCP, and suggest that you should check with the people rebranding their product to see which, if any, support HDCP.
Please don't get the impression that I'm trying to evangelize you... but Sendmail used to be overly complex. More recent versions are actually pretty good from the configuration perspective, especially if you're using a binary distribution such as a slackpackage or deb package. It's really just a question of changing your sendmail.mc file, and compiling it. Copy to the right location, and restart Sendmail. Poof. It's done.
Enabling a RBL or RHBL in Sendmail is as simple as adding a line to the end of your configuration file:
Personally... I found that Sendmail was the mail package that "just worked" for me. I tried qmail, PostFix, and a bunch of other ones, and by far, Sendmail with Procmail was the easiest to set up filters and other configuration.
Ironically... those WWII-era bikes don't get nearly the fuel economy of a modern bike. :-)
But yes. It's a case of thinking like, "It works, why should I buy a new one?"
Err... Canada's actual name is the Dominion of Canada, not the Province of Canada. Provinces are political divisions within the country.... Just to begin punching holes in it, that is....
Maybe you have a simplistic Compaq with one green hole named mic.
We grown-up folks have an actual sound card which uses more than one input and may include S-VIDEO, etc.,
The GP was not mentioning it for simple Compaq folks like you. It was meant for "us"
Points for creativity. Of some sort... My laptop happens to be a Compaq, but my desktop has an Audigy. Funny that. It still has a jack labelled mic which, for some reason, actually works like a microphone should. They're even colour-coded and everything, kinda like just about every sound card made in the last 5 years. Even the onboard sound that most motherboards have is programmable for which jack does what... It even works under Linux, too. When in doubt, RTFM. You may find that your sound card isn't quite as confusing as you make it out to be. But then, maybe I'm just weird. Tech. companies are funny that way... they actually want you to be able to *use* their product. Who wouldda thought?
It's not *my* fault the GP, or you, for that matter, can't be bothered to actually figure out what he's got and how to use it. Personally, I never really found it all that confusing.
For some odd reason, the one labelled "Microphone" usually seems to work for me.... I must be strange.
Of course it's truly silent as sold.... A computer without a CPU, optical drives, or a hard drive isn't going to make a lot of noise. :-)
Silencing your PC is an easy thing to do, though. Just about any PC can be made silent, too... Just replace your case fans with variable speed fans, and your CPU, GPU, and Northbridge fans with passive heatsinks. At the low speed, the fans won't make a lot of noise at all. Even with a "silent" PC, though, there's going to be noise. I mean... here's what I've thrown in my system:
Case: Antec Overture II
Mobo: Gigabyte K8NSC-939 (Northbridge sink replaced with a Zalman passive sink)
Proc: Athlon64 3000+ (Heatsink replaced with an Arctic Cooling Silencer64 Ultra TC)
VC: Radeon X1300 AGP 256MB (VGA, S-Video and DVI out, with an adaptor for the S-Video for RCA and Component, and a DVI-VGA adaptor)
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (SATA, 160GB)
Optical: NEC 3550a DVD-RW (silver)
Wireless: your choice, really. I went with an Asus WL-138g
Now. Here's what I've learned from experience... At idle, sitting the same distance from both my PC and my Laptop, the laptop makes more noise. Truly silencing my PC isn't going to be possible for two reasons:
1, I still need an optical drive. Especially if it's going to be used as a multimedia PC. Silent optical drives do not exist. There's several options out there for *quiet* optical drives, but silent ones do not exist. Aren't even possible with current optical drive design. (Are possible by redesigning the drive so that the laser moves, but the disc doesn't, which would come at a major sacrifice of drive speed). I *could* have gone with a Plextor 716. Would have, too, except that it isn't available with a silver bezel. I went with the NEC for purely aesthetic reasons, and was willing to sacrifice a little to get it.
2, If I were to dispense with active case fans, I would face a serious heat problem. It's possible to get rid of my exhaust fans, and it's possible to replace the PSU with one that doesn't have an active fan (well, possible on any other case, but the Overture series uses a custom/proprietary PSU), but most stereo/multimedia equipment gets put into a cabinet without a lot of ventilation. Coupled with higher end processors and video cards that generate a lot of heat, you have a problem that needs to be addressed. Passive cooling on a heatsink is only good when there's good ventilation, so you have to decide which fan makes more noise: the CPU fan or the case fan.
It's entirely possible to build a computer with no moving parts. But that computer will be lacking more than a few things that will keep it from being viable: an optical drive, enough hard drive space to store your movies/music, and a whole lot of power. By contrast, it's possible to build a quiet PC like mine. It's not silent, but it is quiet enough that I can hear a pin drop from across the room when I'm sitting a foot away from it.
PS: I could also have gotten a quieter system by opting for a different case/motherboard. I made a few choices for aesthetic reasons, though... I still have to live with the thing, and it's eye pleasing.
I can't really argue against that. OS/X beats Windows hands down from a user-friendly point of view, and also from an eye candy point of view. It just looks better, and for the average user, it works better. I do, however, know a few Windows evangelists. Annoying, but you do have to understand that in a well-managed system, Windows can be just as stable as Linux or OS/X. In a well-managed system. With properly written drivers, and stable hardware. Hey wait... that's exactly why OS/X and Linux tend to be stable.... The real stability problem with Windows comes from MS's decision to run drivers in kernel space instead of userspace, and they've finally fixed that screwup with Vista. It's about frigging time, but I'm not going to run to the store to buy a copy when it's released.
Yeah. Have you looked at what they did with Vista? Back around 1998, MS realised that the 9X kernel was a piece of crap. That's why ME was the last piece of junk they ever released on that kernel (NT 5 wasn't ready when they released ME). XP had the same kernel as 2K: NT 5. That's why you couldn't install XP Home as an upgrade over 2K Pro: XP Home has a single CPU build of NT 5.1, and 2K Pro has a SMP build of the same kernel. They realized that NT wasn't really much better either, because the problem was having a macrokernel and running drivers in kernel space. It's great, when the drivers are stable. But MS wasn't writing the drivers, vendors were. And many hardware vendors have a nasty habit of producing crappy drivers, which caused all kinds of stability problems in their OS that couldn't legitimately be attributed to their own code; except that they'd elected to run 3rd party code with the same privilege as the kernel. The prevailing wisdom when they came up with that braindead idea was that it was faster to run a macrokernel with support for everything, because you didn't need to load drivers. Try running Windows using only WHQL-signed drivers, and it's a completely different experience from using unsigned drivers.
In order to change the driver architecture, though, MS had to rewrite the kernel. They went with a modular kernel that runs drivers in userspace. It's much easier to maintain such a kernel, because there's less crap that can go wrong at the kernel level. I've seen errors that would cause a BSOD in NT happen to a Vista machine. A fatal exception OE caused by a crappy video driver, actually. That would take down anything currently commercially available from MS. But Vista shrugged. It gave me an error message, I clicked OK, and it restarted the video driver. The screen didn't even flicker, and the streaming music from Club977 that I was listening to at the time didn't even stutter.
It's a *huge* improvement. But it's also a *huge* rewrite from their previous kernel architecture. And that's why it's been so long. They probably plan on taking a page from Apple's book when they say that new versions won't be that long between again. Assuming that Vista's kernel doesn't develop some horribly crippling quirks (and the jury's still out on that), they won't need to do a complete rewrite again. They'll be in the same place Apple has been for the la
Linux doesn't work that way. Of course, Linux also has a significantly lower memory overhead, usually, and is also a lot more conservative about how it allocates memory. Usually, a system won't actually start swapping unless you have a huge number of programs open, or you have very little physical memory.
:)
Case in point... my laptop has 1GB of RAM. Not really that much by modern standards, if you ask me, but not really important, either. On the laptop, I have had, at the same time, GAIM, gxine (listening to streaming audio from Club977), GIMP (like Photoshop), and running through Cedega, Guild Wars. On a system with an Athlon64 3500+ and 1GB of RAM, there was absolutely no swapping happening at all. Now, I've got 2GB of SWAP set up on that laptop, but with that much stuff open at the same time, it says something that there's no swapping happening.
By comparison, my desktop machine runs Windows XP Professional (yes, it's legal). Said machine has an Athlon64 3000+, so it's pretty much comparable to the laptop at that end. It also has 2GB of physical RAM. Also, where the laptop has a Radeon XPress 200M 128MB, the desktop has a Radeon X1300 256MB. Strangely, under XP Pro, I have had my system slow down to an absolute crawl while playing a single instance of Guild Wars (and having nothing else running), because I had set the swap to start at 32MB and grow to up to 1024MB. Why? Because even though Windows had twice the physical RAM of my laptop, and even though Windows didn't have nearly as many programs open, Windows still felt the need to increase the size of my swap file because it was doing swapping. Ultimately, I set the swap on that machine to be permanently 1024MB.
The Winbox has a *lot* more overhead, and the Windows OS is significantly more liberal in its memory use and memory distribution. It's not as good at garbage collection. And before somebody points it out... the lappy is running Linux 2.6.17.8, with X.Org 6.9 and XFCE 4.3.90 with compositing enabled (and full transparency effects), and ClamAV 0.88.2, on top of SSH server, cpu frequency scaling (the Conservative governor, usually underclocking to 1GHz from 2.2GHz peak). The Windows machine, at startup, is running AVG Antivirus, RKLauncher, Window Shade 1.2, and... Windows.
As to the actual question posed... it's been answered dozens of times, but I may as well chime in with my $0.02. As you can probably guess, how much virtual memory you need depends on what you're doing, and what OS you're using. Under Linux, with a respectable amount of memory and reasonable use, I would say you don't need virtual memory at all. By Respectable, I'd say 1GB+. If you're running less than 1GB of RAM, or if you're going to do some heavy use, I'd say 1:1 Physical:Virtual, with a caveat: Physical + Virtual should probably be at least 1GB. Under Windows? Let the system manage it, most of the time. Just make sure that you don't let the system give you so much virtual memory that Physical + Virtual > 4GB... All versions of Windows that are currently available only create memory addressing space for 4GB, and any more than that simply won't be used. Vista changes how memory is addressed, but it's not on the market yet.
I'm not gonna deny that Heinlein had some seriously bad books under his belt. Personally, I couldn't stomach Starship Troopers, for example, and an entire litany of other books he wrote. The thing is, he wrote a very large number of books, and *some* of what he wrote is very good. I really enjoyed Revolt in 2100, for example.
As for any racist political agenda, you're looking at his work with a modern perspective. You're entitled to do that, but before you write his work off as trying to forward some insidious agenda, you need to understand that at the time he wrote, it was considered normal, and Heinlein's estate has been good at preserving what he wrote, unlike certain other authors from the period....
Like Agatha Christie... Ever read her book, Ten Little Nigger Boys? Don't like that title? How about Ten Little Indians? Nope? What about And Then There Were None? Three titles, one book.
Err, yeah.... I'll just go over there now....
There are actually geeks who don't speak Klingon. They're called Stargate geeks, and can probably speak at you in Goa'uld instead. Kree!
But yeah. I didn't read the article for exactly the same reason. Y'know what I want out of Linux? Support for my Texas Instruments SD controller, and a decent 3d driver for my ATI video cards. The laptop has a Radeon XPress 200M, and the desktop has an X1300 AGP. The desktop, of course, is running Windows XP Professional. Funny that... I'm a gamer; if there was a reasonably good video driver, I'd run Cedega. The laptop, however, is running Zenwalk. Everything *else* on the lappy just works, and I only ever boot into Windows to use the card reader. See... my digital camera has a 1GB XD card, and I prefer not to run the batteries down by connecting it through USB (which works). Likewise, my MP3 player has an SD port, and I prefer to copy the data to the card using *gasp* my card reader.
Get my card reader working right, and I'm happy. I can live without games (or rather, I can live with games like Supertux and Battle for Wesnoth). But I need the card reader.
It also doesn't explain why there's more broadband adoption (and a better variety of services available) in a country like Canada, which has a larger land area than the USA, and about 1/10th the population. The roadblock to broadband adoption in Canada is availability, not lack of demand, and rural wireless networks are doing wonders for that. A local company here in Ottawa, for example, offers 3mbit symmetric wireless connectivity for 40 CAD/month. Said company offers wireless connections up to 20mbit and fibre connections up to 100mbit.
Population density has very little to do with something like internet adoption (and broadband adoption). Contemporary society is a very well educated society, and is generally aware of what's available. Even if it's an oversimplification of the facts, like "I'll be able to download mp3's faster", they're aware of why broadband is better. The problem is that the industry in the US is stagnating. They aren't trying very hard at all to make the service available outside of urban centres, and even when they do make it available, they don't make it cost-effective enough to encourage adoption. They're making too much money off dialup service, which is dirt cheap to operate, and yet for some reason still costs as much as 25 USD/month for unlimited. (You can get dialup for free in Ottawa, too.)
32-bit Windows will complain when you try to install unsigned drivers, but it's a different kernel. First, it gives you a clickthrough that says "install anyway", and second, it doesn't have boot-time signature checking when it decides whether or not to load a driver. Don't forget that 64-bit Windows is a very recent development, comparatively speaking. Your guess is as good as mine as to *why* MS didn't backport that functionality, or why MS didn't implement it in Vista 32-bit, though.
(Incidentally, you *can* disable the boot-time signature checking and force x64 Windows to install and use unsigned drivers. It's just a little more difficult.)
64-bit Windows won't allow you to install a driver that isn't digitally signed. The signature includes a checksum to ensure the driver hasn't been tampered with, and a serial number that identifies the driver number and version with WHQL.
:)
There are ways to force an unsigned driver to install in x64 Windows. Heck, when I was running Vista, I had to do that in order to get my sound card to work. My guess, however, would be that the High Def decoding/display will be crippled in that circumstance.
Of course, MS seems to be labouring under the notion that Windows Media Player is, and will continue to be, the only player capable of playing DVDs in Vista. It probably won't take very long for the makers of VLC to add that functionality, and we'll be back where we are today, only with more expensive DVDs.