Microsoft said in a statement that it reached the 1 million mark for Xbox Live users three times faster than other subscription services, such as Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and TiVo Inc.
Does an XBox live account count for the box or is it seperate for each controller? If it's just for the box then perhaps they counted accounts and multiplied by 4.
Only DC power sources I can think of are batteries and solar panels, neither of which are very relevant on power-grid level.
Really? You did know turbine generators (such as Arizona's) can be made for DC instead of AC? DC generators and motors are a heck of a lot easier to make (I did it in 5th grade). A DC motor or generator is just a coil of wire spinning over a magnet. AC motors and generators are a different trick.
Tesla was the first person to ever push for AC power distribution. The reason why DC was favored was technical: no one knew how to generate AC current. Sure they knew AC could be useful to overcome the low-voltage resistance problem, but AC was still just on paper back then (barring of course neat tricks with capacitors and inductors such as Tesla is well known for). It wasn't until Tesla went on a walk one day and a design for an AC motor just popped into his head in full 3D (true story).
So I hope you understand how basic DC power sources are. Now lets talk about devices that use DC power...
First of all there's any digital device. Computers are supplied with 5V or 12V DC sources. It's the clock in the device that modulates the frequency so AC doesn't do it any favors.
Any device with a motor in it can easily be made with a DC motor. That takes care of all blenders, power tools, electric cars, etc.
There's nothing special about the wiring in your stoves and lightbulbs that DC current would change anything about, LED's even require DC. Flourescent lights might be a trial but since they already come with a modulator it'd just be a matter of throwing in a converter.
When it boils down to it there's only one single application that requires AC power... a speaker that produces a 60Hz tone. I've never seen an amplifier that didn't convert AC to DC before turning it back into AC for the speaker. I might also add that a speaker would work with DC current if the power is cycled in rapid succession, but this would be only half the effect of AC.
In short, AC is useful while DC is natural. I'd suggest looking into DC appliances (truck stops are good sources) if you ever plan on living completely off the grid. 12VDC is a pretty popular source of power.
Our power is A/C because there has to be a lot of voltage on the line in order to make it travel long distances and A/C can be stepped up to high voltages...
But. Arizona runs their 750kV lines D/C. For long distances there's more loss with A/C than with D/C once you get the voltage up high enough because at some point the polarity between the lines will become great enough to induce capacitance between the lines making A/C less and less efficient as the voltage goes up.
In summary, A/C is only suited for pedestrian applications. If you want enough power to, say, jump start the Tokamak and the power plant is 100 miles away... you'll want D/C.
--Matthew
FYI: My dad happens to teach people how to use nuclear power plants.
How is it that the Canadian Green Party's responses coincided so perfectly with my own (and I believe many other/.ers) opinions?
I ask because I'm from that country parked due south of Canada and I can't seem to find a party I agree with so well, much less one that responds to a questionaire such as the Canadians have. Did I miss the U.S. Copyright questionaire or is it so pitling of an issue in this country no one cares to ask or tell?
You should read your own post. First you accuse the mainstream media of left-wing bias, then you say air america is the left's attempt to get their message out. Why would the left need air america if the mainstream media was biased towards the liberal view?
I think he had a problem organizing the history of the issue. For the longest time media has been generally liberal. Since at least Vietnam it's been like this. HNN used to be the only full time news network and they were the perfect example. More recently several other stations have sprung up airing full time news.
Everyone complains about the way Fox skews things in its own particular way, but according to Nielson ratings it's skewing in the direction most people want. Other news stations use the term "conservative" a lot more often than they ever say "liberal" (a guessed observation since I've never heard "liberal" said on CNN or MSNBC). Fox happens to run counter to this clearly identifying themselves as conservative by using words such as "liberal" and by being very critical of Democratic agendas, much more so than Republican.
I think the reason why Air America was started had to do with people with an American "liberal" agenda not liking the rising appeal of "conservative" news programming. So far, yes, Air America has been little more than whining. My girlfriend is a strong Democrat while I used to consider myself Republican though now have mixed feelings about them. I listened to Air America for about a week hoping to hear enough from my girlfriend's side of the issue to understand things better. Originally I was upset by the things I was hearing, but very soon after I suppose I was numbed by the sensationalism of it. Then it starting annoying me to hear so much complaining. I realized that if I listened to it for too long I'd be likely to start parrotting the little facts and tidbits offered by the programs, and I'd probably use them just as out of context as Air America does, and people would become extremely annoyed of me. My girlfriend is a very smart girl so I'm forced to differentiate her from the Air America crowd.
You must PAY for other people's goods and services.
Do you realize that it would be possible under our current patent system to patent the process of "capitalizing all letters of specific words in a document in order to emphasize importance." Granted, there is a lot of prior art for this specific case, but the point stands. When patents are allowed on inventions that occur naturally to intuition it becomes more and more impossible to find where one has stepped over the boundaries. Our system is silly.
I'm a big fan of Ayn Rand and if her work isn't a prime example of how capitalism needs to work I don't know what is. I wish I was an expert on all of her works but I know that never in the books of hers that I have read has there ever been mention of a patent on anything. Ask Coca-Cola to let you have a look at it's patent on the coke making process and I think you'll begin to understand the important difference between the patenting of physical devices and patenting procedures.
Methinks that the EU might be a good place to look into for some fun IT work if they regard the US system like that.
Think on it: Within the EU software ideas will run wild, everyone having access to nuance inventions in their software, whilst over here in the US you won't be allowed to measure the length of a click, run an application within another, nor make an entire window transparent without getting permission from someone else (possibly paying for it).
I wonder how long it will be before free Elvis albums won't be the only product of Europe States-side corporations will try to block.
--
Up through college in the US, everything else anywhere else.
if the worm decided to frag the system after multiplying several dozen times?
I didn't see anyone else mention the holy fucking mess this would create.
Forget TCOs, what about way of life? If you think worms and virii are always going to keep their hosts alive you're talking like a flu victim who hasn't heard of smallpox.
So Brian, we here at Netcraft have been polling around the internet for some time now and since the web server your organization produces has become a major player in our statistics we'd like to know what you think about how our company has grown...
Sasser, unlike a virus which travels through e-mails and attachments, spreads directly from the internet.
For shame. Try this instead:
Sasser, unlike a virus that travels through e-mails and attachments, spreads directly from the internet.
See, now doesn't that make sense? The sad thing is that I only know to look for those because MSWord's grammar check complains about them all the time.
I'd probably use "emerge -uDav world" just to see whether or not you really want to upgrade so soon, you probably don't though.
XFree86, glibc, gcc, gnome, kde, xfce, portage, and all the kernels look like they might have been bumped a version. You'll need to pick the wisest update order for what you need.
One of the updates is from kernel 2.6.5-r1 to 2.6.6_rc1. The way gentoo has handled it on my system, it'll just download the source code for you and you'll be able to compile it at your leisure. I'd upgrade gcc and glibc before compiling a new kernel.
I've gotten used to having to fix other people's computers. As soon as I get on one I have a set list I always install ASAP so those people won't bother me anymore.
Spybot Search and Destroy Ad-Aware Mozilla McAfee VirusScan Home Gaim BSPlayer uxtheme.dll
Then I remove the 40+ icons on their desktop and put the important ones in their quicklaunch bar, that goes at the top of the screen.
Then I tell Windows it should automatically update for them.
Then I smack on a MacOS theme and they feel better because they think I gave them MacOSX (Sad, but true.)
The most important part to the whole install is setting the Mozilla link so it has the IExplorer icon.
It has always been safe to set the programs I install as default or so they are disguised as what the user is used to. I've never been able to talk people off of MusicMatch in favor of anything without offensive memory problems, and replacing MSOffice with OpenOffice causes hysterics.
Our department of computing (university) suggests people use the underground version of Kazaa Light over Kazaa but at the same time they prosecute users who share too much music, so I've been showing people bittorrent. When that doesn't work I show them some free porn websites.
I'm pretty sure the Longhorn GUI is graphic hardware accelerated. Watching three DVD windows move around the screen at 50% alpha shading so you could see the movie underneath when they overlapped sure impressed me. With only 10% cpu usage to drive the demo I sorta feel bad for X11. Isn't Aqua (for OSX) also GPU driven?
Am I going to have to have a special partition on the harddrive or will the disc be ready to dump save-games in some file on whatever filesystem I might be running? I could be running some pretty interesting filesystems...
Sure I could use a USB drive to save my games... Is that where I'm supposed to save all the game patches and whatever proxy settings I might need to play the game online?
Surely you'll want the game to remember settings for that computer that you've personally tweaked...
I already carry around a disc with Steam-CounterStrike install files and a winex install in case I need it. I can install everything, play the game, remove everything, and be gone without rebooting the computer. I can even leave the game on there and come back to play it later without having to run anything from a CD, and the campus computer types just do a remote ghost install when they notice and don't like it.
My university has been filtering out any and all Windows executables or compressed files from its email system for a couple months now. Even though they sadly missed.scr files last week I think this approach is perfect.
People receiving their email shouldn't expect an executable, the server should have filtered them all out. The upshot to this is that the email server only really has a bandwidth problem on the download side, the uploads should be stripped of unnecessary attachments.
I know there are exploits in these too, but media such as pictures and text documents should be the only thing allowed. Clemson students don't get and image.jpg.pif files anymore. If someone wants to share an executable they put it on their webspace and give to URL to their friends.
Mother of god! Do they count empty tracks too??? If they sold Nine Inch Nails' album Broken as a single album it would cost a fortune. There's music on tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 98 and 99! And how do they bill single tracks that have seriously long empty space between the last song and a hidden song? How would they bill that one artist's track that's 4 minutes of silence?
I used to wonder if that sort of thing was possible until the middle of last week. Clemson's email system has been getting viriidotted on top of its continual spamdotting (a useful pair of suffixes) since Wednesday. To this day there's a 4 hour wait before someone on the other side of campus gets your email. The backup mailserver happens to also be a webserver for a whole host of things on the Clemson subdomain. A systems guy on the CLUG list says even that was being stressed which would make you think the webserver side of the machine isn't running as fast as usual. Clemson has no dearth of IT apparati, the pair are 8 and 6 processor Suns.
As opposed to the network traffic caused by MyDoom.C? I would think that a countervirus launched at MyDoom.A would have prevented B, C, and any later generations, especially when considering the number of complaints I read about hosed systems when Microsoft sends out its version of the patches. Hearing people complain about "that damn Microsoft patch that's going around" would be a more interesting way to lay blame at the feet of the software maker than "that damn virus that I can't wait for Microsoft to save me from with an update."
Where's my l33t h4x0r hero who writes the antivirus that finds MyDoom backdoors, infects the computer to reproduce the antiviral a dozen times to other violated systems, and then closes port 3127 just before it kills its processes?
Slashdot Mirror
According to the web oracle itself Yahoo blows Google out of the water:
Google: 58,900,000 hits
Yahoo: 139,000,000 hits
MSN: 50,900,000 hits
Microsoft said in a statement that it reached the 1 million mark for Xbox Live users three times faster than other subscription services, such as Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and TiVo Inc.
Does an XBox live account count for the box or is it seperate for each controller? If it's just for the box then perhaps they counted accounts and multiplied by 4.
--Matthew
Everyone,
I plan on taking a flight from Atlanta to Chicago on the 30th. Please don't call in and report that that flight has been hijacked.
Thanks.
--Matthew
Only DC power sources I can think of are batteries and solar panels, neither of which are very relevant on power-grid level.
Really? You did know turbine generators (such as Arizona's) can be made for DC instead of AC? DC generators and motors are a heck of a lot easier to make (I did it in 5th grade). A DC motor or generator is just a coil of wire spinning over a magnet. AC motors and generators are a different trick.
Tesla was the first person to ever push for AC power distribution. The reason why DC was favored was technical: no one knew how to generate AC current. Sure they knew AC could be useful to overcome the low-voltage resistance problem, but AC was still just on paper back then (barring of course neat tricks with capacitors and inductors such as Tesla is well known for). It wasn't until Tesla went on a walk one day and a design for an AC motor just popped into his head in full 3D (true story).
So I hope you understand how basic DC power sources are. Now lets talk about devices that use DC power...
First of all there's any digital device. Computers are supplied with 5V or 12V DC sources. It's the clock in the device that modulates the frequency so AC doesn't do it any favors.
Any device with a motor in it can easily be made with a DC motor. That takes care of all blenders, power tools, electric cars, etc.
There's nothing special about the wiring in your stoves and lightbulbs that DC current would change anything about, LED's even require DC. Flourescent lights might be a trial but since they already come with a modulator it'd just be a matter of throwing in a converter.
When it boils down to it there's only one single application that requires AC power... a speaker that produces a 60Hz tone. I've never seen an amplifier that didn't convert AC to DC before turning it back into AC for the speaker. I might also add that a speaker would work with DC current if the power is cycled in rapid succession, but this would be only half the effect of AC.
In short, AC is useful while DC is natural. I'd suggest looking into DC appliances (truck stops are good sources) if you ever plan on living completely off the grid. 12VDC is a pretty popular source of power.
--Matthew
Our power is A/C because there has to be a lot of voltage on the line in order to make it travel long distances and A/C can be stepped up to high voltages...
But. Arizona runs their 750kV lines D/C. For long distances there's more loss with A/C than with D/C once you get the voltage up high enough because at some point the polarity between the lines will become great enough to induce capacitance between the lines making A/C less and less efficient as the voltage goes up.
In summary, A/C is only suited for pedestrian applications. If you want enough power to, say, jump start the Tokamak and the power plant is 100 miles away... you'll want D/C.
--Matthew
FYI: My dad happens to teach people how to use nuclear power plants.
I'll probably be using a laptop for the rest of my life, do any of the USB or 1394 cards work in Linux?
How is it that the Canadian Green Party's responses coincided so perfectly with my own (and I believe many other /.ers) opinions?
I ask because I'm from that country parked due south of Canada and I can't seem to find a party I agree with so well, much less one that responds to a questionaire such as the Canadians have. Did I miss the U.S. Copyright questionaire or is it so pitling of an issue in this country no one cares to ask or tell?
Looking where to aim my vote,
Matthew
Trivial Pursuit
You should read your own post. First you accuse the mainstream media of left-wing bias, then you say air america is the left's attempt to get their message out. Why would the left need air america if the mainstream media was biased towards the liberal view?
I think he had a problem organizing the history of the issue. For the longest time media has been generally liberal. Since at least Vietnam it's been like this. HNN used to be the only full time news network and they were the perfect example. More recently several other stations have sprung up airing full time news.
Everyone complains about the way Fox skews things in its own particular way, but according to Nielson ratings it's skewing in the direction most people want. Other news stations use the term "conservative" a lot more often than they ever say "liberal" (a guessed observation since I've never heard "liberal" said on CNN or MSNBC). Fox happens to run counter to this clearly identifying themselves as conservative by using words such as "liberal" and by being very critical of Democratic agendas, much more so than Republican.
I think the reason why Air America was started had to do with people with an American "liberal" agenda not liking the rising appeal of "conservative" news programming. So far, yes, Air America has been little more than whining. My girlfriend is a strong Democrat while I used to consider myself Republican though now have mixed feelings about them. I listened to Air America for about a week hoping to hear enough from my girlfriend's side of the issue to understand things better. Originally I was upset by the things I was hearing, but very soon after I suppose I was numbed by the sensationalism of it. Then it starting annoying me to hear so much complaining. I realized that if I listened to it for too long I'd be likely to start parrotting the little facts and tidbits offered by the programs, and I'd probably use them just as out of context as Air America does, and people would become extremely annoyed of me. My girlfriend is a very smart girl so I'm forced to differentiate her from the Air America crowd.
You must PAY for other people's goods and services.
Do you realize that it would be possible under our current patent system to patent the process of "capitalizing all letters of specific words in a document in order to emphasize importance." Granted, there is a lot of prior art for this specific case, but the point stands. When patents are allowed on inventions that occur naturally to intuition it becomes more and more impossible to find where one has stepped over the boundaries. Our system is silly.
I'm a big fan of Ayn Rand and if her work isn't a prime example of how capitalism needs to work I don't know what is. I wish I was an expert on all of her works but I know that never in the books of hers that I have read has there ever been mention of a patent on anything. Ask Coca-Cola to let you have a look at it's patent on the coke making process and I think you'll begin to understand the important difference between the patenting of physical devices and patenting procedures.
Methinks that the EU might be a good place to look into for some fun IT work if they regard the US system like that.
Think on it: Within the EU software ideas will run wild, everyone having access to nuance inventions in their software, whilst over here in the US you won't be allowed to measure the length of a click, run an application within another, nor make an entire window transparent without getting permission from someone else (possibly paying for it).
I wonder how long it will be before free Elvis albums won't be the only product of Europe States-side corporations will try to block.
--
Up through college in the US, everything else anywhere else.
if the worm decided to frag the system after multiplying several dozen times?
I didn't see anyone else mention the holy fucking mess this would create.
Forget TCOs, what about way of life? If you think worms and virii are always going to keep their hosts alive you're talking like a flu victim who hasn't heard of smallpox.
So Brian, we here at Netcraft have been polling around the internet for some time now and since the web server your organization produces has become a major player in our statistics we'd like to know what you think about how our company has grown...
Sasser, unlike a virus which travels through e-mails and attachments, spreads directly from the internet.
For shame. Try this instead:
Sasser, unlike a virus that travels through e-mails and attachments, spreads directly from the internet.
See, now doesn't that make sense? The sad thing is that I only know to look for those because MSWord's grammar check complains about them all the time.
I'd probably use "emerge -uDav world" just to see whether or not you really want to upgrade so soon, you probably don't though.
XFree86, glibc, gcc, gnome, kde, xfce, portage, and all the kernels look like they might have been bumped a version. You'll need to pick the wisest update order for what you need.
One of the updates is from kernel 2.6.5-r1 to 2.6.6_rc1. The way gentoo has handled it on my system, it'll just download the source code for you and you'll be able to compile it at your leisure. I'd upgrade gcc and glibc before compiling a new kernel.
I've gotten used to having to fix other people's computers. As soon as I get on one I have a set list I always install ASAP so those people won't bother me anymore.
Spybot Search and Destroy
Ad-Aware
Mozilla
McAfee VirusScan Home
Gaim
BSPlayer
uxtheme.dll
Then I remove the 40+ icons on their desktop and put the important ones in their quicklaunch bar, that goes at the top of the screen.
Then I tell Windows it should automatically update for them.
Then I smack on a MacOS theme and they feel better because they think I gave them MacOSX (Sad, but true.)
The most important part to the whole install is setting the Mozilla link so it has the IExplorer icon.
It has always been safe to set the programs I install as default or so they are disguised as what the user is used to. I've never been able to talk people off of MusicMatch in favor of anything without offensive memory problems, and replacing MSOffice with OpenOffice causes hysterics.
Our department of computing (university) suggests people use the underground version of Kazaa Light over Kazaa but at the same time they prosecute users who share too much music, so I've been showing people bittorrent. When that doesn't work I show them some free porn websites.
--Townsend
I'm pretty sure the Longhorn GUI is graphic hardware accelerated. Watching three DVD windows move around the screen at 50% alpha shading so you could see the movie underneath when they overlapped sure impressed me. With only 10% cpu usage to drive the demo I sorta feel bad for X11. Isn't Aqua (for OSX) also GPU driven?
The plugin/standalone ripper Streamripper has given me gigs of DI.FM rips without that problem. Check it out.
How am I going to save my game?
Am I going to have to have a special partition on the harddrive or will the disc be ready to dump save-games in some file on whatever filesystem I might be running? I could be running some pretty interesting filesystems...
Sure I could use a USB drive to save my games... Is that where I'm supposed to save all the game patches and whatever proxy settings I might need to play the game online?
Surely you'll want the game to remember settings for that computer that you've personally tweaked...
I already carry around a disc with Steam-CounterStrike install files and a winex install in case I need it. I can install everything, play the game, remove everything, and be gone without rebooting the computer. I can even leave the game on there and come back to play it later without having to run anything from a CD, and the campus computer types just do a remote ghost install when they notice and don't like it.
My university has been filtering out any and all Windows executables or compressed files from its email system for a couple months now. Even though they sadly missed .scr files last week I think this approach is perfect.
People receiving their email shouldn't expect an executable, the server should have filtered them all out. The upshot to this is that the email server only really has a bandwidth problem on the download side, the uploads should be stripped of unnecessary attachments.
I know there are exploits in these too, but media such as pictures and text documents should be the only thing allowed. Clemson students don't get and image.jpg.pif files anymore. If someone wants to share an executable they put it on their webspace and give to URL to their friends.
Mother of god! Do they count empty tracks too???
If they sold Nine Inch Nails' album Broken as a single album it would cost a fortune. There's music on tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 98 and 99!
And how do they bill single tracks that have seriously long empty space between the last song and a hidden song?
How would they bill that one artist's track that's 4 minutes of silence?
Step 1: Get a whole bunch of beavers and bring them up to your house.
... you get where I'm going with this.
Step 2: Introduce them to each other, let the sparks fly.
Step 3: Get a hydroelectric turbine and a post hole borer.
I used to wonder if that sort of thing was possible until the middle of last week. Clemson's email system has been getting viriidotted on top of its continual spamdotting (a useful pair of suffixes) since Wednesday. To this day there's a 4 hour wait before someone on the other side of campus gets your email. The backup mailserver happens to also be a webserver for a whole host of things on the Clemson subdomain. A systems guy on the CLUG list says even that was being stressed which would make you think the webserver side of the machine isn't running as fast as usual. Clemson has no dearth of IT apparati, the pair are 8 and 6 processor Suns.
As opposed to the network traffic caused by MyDoom.C? I would think that a countervirus launched at MyDoom.A would have prevented B, C, and any later generations, especially when considering the number of complaints I read about hosed systems when Microsoft sends out its version of the patches. Hearing people complain about "that damn Microsoft patch that's going around" would be a more interesting way to lay blame at the feet of the software maker than "that damn virus that I can't wait for Microsoft to save me from with an update."
It must have been said before:
Where's my l33t h4x0r hero who writes the antivirus that finds MyDoom backdoors, infects the computer to reproduce the antiviral a dozen times to other violated systems, and then closes port 3127 just before it kills its processes?