I've installed my last three heatsinks, including my current Zalman CNPS6000AlCu, with pink TIM wax pads. TIM pads are cheap, neat, and don't require you to get crap all over your hands during application. I'll never go back to the goop game.
Since it doesn't make a difference what the hell you use to stick your heatsink onto your CPU--hell, toothpaste works just as well as AS-3--I'll stick with the easy stuff.
Re:A time of leaps and bounds
on
Secret Empire
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Chaperoning black projects does not bring glory to the chaperones. As is explained in Ben Rich's excellent book Skunk Works, the Blackbird series was shitcanned not because we grew weaker as a nation or because we lost some kind of technical prowess, but rather because it drew (tons of) money away from other, flashier projects that the Congress and the general public could actually be told about--like the XB-70 (whose engines would have created a bigger return on Soviet radar than anything else in our entire military inventory, thus making it even more useless for attacking sophisticated targets than our current "triumph of form over function" champion, the B1).
Few generals like black projects. What good is a project that you can't wave under other generals' noses?
Let us not forget the Star Wars Technical Commentaries, a collection of near industry-quality analyses of Star Wars tech, put toghether by a Ph.D with a lot of time on his hands.
There's a couple of weeks of engrossing reading there. Highlights include Warships of the Empire, The Endor Holocaust (an interesting examination of probably ecological fallout on the sanctuary moon due to the explosion of the Death Star II), and The Injuries of Darth Vader.
I dunno--I think I trust their abilities as programmers. If I recall correctly, it's the same core team that coded Second Reality and made us all crap our collective pants, back in The Day.
There's a substantial thread on Ars Technica's forums that contains a ton of benchmark results. What it boils down to is that if you have a decent processor (Athlon XP 1600+ or better) and an NVidia GF4 Ti4600, you'll end up with something like 1500-1700 3DMarks. If you pull the GF4 out and slap in a Radeon 9700 Pro (and get the appropriate drivers installed, of course), your score would shoot up to over 4000 3DMarks.
I've got a Ti4600, and 3DMark 2003 runs like ass. Fortunately, Splinter Cell plays just fine, so I'll ignore the benchmark and get on with actually using the computer.
Houston Transtar does traffic monitoring, as well. They use the signals from EZTags (you know, those things you stick on your window that automatically pay a toll for you on toll roads) to measure aggregate traffic speed, and then display it all on a nifty, color-coded map. Accidents get notated with little "!" marks and you can see information on lane closures. They also have histograms available, so you can see what the average speed at any given time of day is supposed to be, and live views from the traffic-monitoring cameras all over the city. Check it out.
In the P2P situation, there's no demonstration that the copyright holder actually lost the "value" of the copied works.
I call straw man. The downloader of the copied work received utility from the work--enjoyment, intellectual fulfillment, a sick sense of satisfaction that the copied work sucks, or whatever. It doesn't matter whether or not the downloader would have paid for the work--he now has it, and the only way you're supposed to be able to get the work is to pay for it. Therefore, the owner of the work has lost money.
Note that if you still have your original copy of Starcon2, it is possible to play it under Windows XP or 2k, with full sound, by running it under DosBox, an MS-DOS emulator.
Ironic that this bit of news gets posted to Slashdot not two days after I finish playing through the game!
I stay on Windows because I've been using one flavor or another of it for years. I have a large amount of learning time invested in it and I think I have it figured out pretty well. I support Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000 at work, and I use Windows XP at home.
I know how to use it. It plays all the games I want to play. It browses the web. When my mom can't check her e-mail, I can Remote Desktop into her computer and fix her problems for her.
Could Linux serve me just as well? Probably. Do I already know how to use it? No. Do I have any incentive to learn? Well...beyond the principle of the thing, I really don't. Three semesters of C in collge taught me that I'm not a programmer, so a huge chunk of what I understand it the big attraction of Linux--that I can rip a program apart and make it work My Way if I don't like it--doesn't apply to me.
Hey, I love Linux. I'm sure it's great, and after reading Slashdot for almost three years I can tell you a whole lot of good things about it. I don't use it because I've got a good thing going with Windows. I'm comfortable, and we fear change. It's cold outside, and the wolves are after me.
You know what I think we should do about cellular phones in public...
(ba-da-da-ba-da-da-ba-da-da-ba-BO-NAN-ZA!!)
Oh, excuse me for a second.
Hey, what's up?
Naw, I'm just posting on Slashdot.
Slashdot. You know. It's like, a big web site thingy. People post comments and stuff. It's kind of like the Roman senate if the Roman senate had been populated by thirty thousand incensed midgets.
Yeah, I know. I TOTALLY get that all the time.
Cell phones. We're talking about cellular phones in public places.
I *KNOW*! That TOTALLY drives me insane. Like, when you're talking to someone and their phone rings and they start talking on their phone instead of to you?
Totally. So, what's up with you? How's it going....
I have to take issue with anyone dismissing a storyline that takes 60 hours to complete and includes different plots for different character classes as nothing more than "a dog and pony show". I had a great time with the single-player campaign, and on its merit alone recommended the game to my father. He'll likely never play on-line, but he is immensely enjoying the single-player campaign.
I've played it through twice so far, with different characters each time, and I'll likely do it a third time. Perhaps I'll play on-line some day, but what I've experienced of on-line play over the last four years has destroyed what little bit of faith in humanity that my tech support day job hadn't already taken care of.
We can either know the candidate for whom any given person voted, or we can know the mechanism by which any given person voted, but we can't know both.
To: Hedy Baker, hedy_baker@forgent.com To: Alexa Coy, alexa_coy@forgent.com
Just wanted to let you know that, re: your JPEG patents and licensing, you guys are FREAKING NUTS. Perhaps when I have to pay money for the air I breathe, the light that reflects off of my retinas, along with a per-step licensing fee to whomever currently owns the IP rights for "walking," I would consider it valid to have to pay for something that is already as ubiquitous as JPEG imaging. In short, you'll get money from me when you pry it from the clutching fingers of my cold, dead corpse.
"The servers run in parallel and major jobs are broken down for each server. It is networked together with 100Gbps ethernet and Foundry networking switches...."
A hundred gigabits per second? Dude! Sign me the hell up!
I'm not sure which is worse--that the employees were forced to use AOL e-mail at work, or that top level people at Time were using e-mail to send final page proofs that were apparently of a massive size.
Do these people not have FTP? Is their IT department asleep at the wheel?
Performed the same task in WinXP with a Kodak DX3900--plugged it into the USB port without any drivers. The camera was immediately mounted as a drive and I could start fiddling with my pictures. No drivers, no fuss, no problem.
I'm not a programmer, so I can't speak for that type of animal, but among the support staff in my two previous jobs--you know, the much-embittered guys that answer helpdesk pages and go to lusers' desks and fix problems--there has been a high degree of extra-work fraternization.
We hung out on weekends, and we'd go drinking after work if the day had been particularly stressful. Quite often we'd swap luser stories.
I think the World War I guy-in-the-trenches mentality that is forced onto a lot of support guys brings about hard and fast friendships.
I bought my 75GXP because it was recommended on Ars Technica's system guide, and because it reviewed favorably on StorageReview.com. It provided me with over a half-year of trouble-free service.
Unfortunately, I too had my 75GXP die. The first signs of trouble showed up about seven months after I bought it. At random intervals, the drive would make strange, non-normal noises (it almost sounded like a head or something skipping across the platters, which is impossible...right?).
The Real Problem happened a few weeks later when I had to install WinME (don't laugh--I had a good reason at the time). I moved all my data to a second HDD, but WinME's install failed almost before it started. A full surface scan via Scandisk produced classic bad HDD noises (CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-wrrrrr. CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-wrrrrr. Repeat infinitely).
IBM's drive diagnostic program reported that the drive was indeed bad, and gave me a cryptic error code that I no longer have written down. I RMA'd the drive via IBM's automated web RMA process and received a new (refurbished) one less than two weeks later. That was in March, and the new drive has given me no problems.
Yet.
Perhaps now is a good time to start looking at StorageReview again...
If you'll excuse me, I'm going to sit over in the corner with my copies of _Strangers From the Sky_, _Final Frontier_, and _The Final Reflection_ and weep until the hurt goes away.
Slashdot Mirror
I've installed my last three heatsinks, including my current Zalman CNPS6000AlCu, with pink TIM wax pads. TIM pads are cheap, neat, and don't require you to get crap all over your hands during application. I'll never go back to the goop game.
Since it doesn't make a difference what the hell you use to stick your heatsink onto your CPU--hell, toothpaste works just as well as AS-3--I'll stick with the easy stuff.
Chaperoning black projects does not bring glory to the chaperones. As is explained in Ben Rich's excellent book Skunk Works, the Blackbird series was shitcanned not because we grew weaker as a nation or because we lost some kind of technical prowess, but rather because it drew (tons of) money away from other, flashier projects that the Congress and the general public could actually be told about--like the XB-70 (whose engines would have created a bigger return on Soviet radar than anything else in our entire military inventory, thus making it even more useless for attacking sophisticated targets than our current "triumph of form over function" champion, the B1).
Few generals like black projects. What good is a project that you can't wave under other generals' noses?
I have this one mod point left, and I'd really like to mod the parent down as "Troll", but for some reason I can't find the drop-down box...
Let us not forget the Star Wars Technical Commentaries, a collection of near industry-quality analyses of Star Wars tech, put toghether by a Ph.D with a lot of time on his hands.
There's a couple of weeks of engrossing reading there. Highlights include Warships of the Empire, The Endor Holocaust (an interesting examination of probably ecological fallout on the sanctuary moon due to the explosion of the Death Star II), and The Injuries of Darth Vader.
I dunno--I think I trust their abilities as programmers. If I recall correctly, it's the same core team that coded Second Reality and made us all crap our collective pants, back in The Day.
There's a substantial thread on Ars Technica's forums that contains a ton of benchmark results. What it boils down to is that if you have a decent processor (Athlon XP 1600+ or better) and an NVidia GF4 Ti4600, you'll end up with something like 1500-1700 3DMarks. If you pull the GF4 out and slap in a Radeon 9700 Pro (and get the appropriate drivers installed, of course), your score would shoot up to over 4000 3DMarks.
I've got a Ti4600, and 3DMark 2003 runs like ass. Fortunately, Splinter Cell plays just fine, so I'll ignore the benchmark and get on with actually using the computer.
Houston Transtar does traffic monitoring, as well. They use the signals from EZTags (you know, those things you stick on your window that automatically pay a toll for you on toll roads) to measure aggregate traffic speed, and then display it all on a nifty, color-coded map. Accidents get notated with little "!" marks and you can see information on lane closures. They also have histograms available, so you can see what the average speed at any given time of day is supposed to be, and live views from the traffic-monitoring cameras all over the city. Check it out.
In the P2P situation, there's no demonstration that the copyright holder actually lost the "value" of the copied works.
I call straw man. The downloader of the copied work received utility from the work--enjoyment, intellectual fulfillment, a sick sense of satisfaction that the copied work sucks, or whatever. It doesn't matter whether or not the downloader would have paid for the work--he now has it, and the only way you're supposed to be able to get the work is to pay for it. Therefore, the owner of the work has lost money.
Hey, it's easier.
Note that if you still have your original copy of Starcon2, it is possible to play it under Windows XP or 2k, with full sound, by running it under DosBox, an MS-DOS emulator.
Ironic that this bit of news gets posted to Slashdot not two days after I finish playing through the game!
I stay on Windows because I've been using one flavor or another of it for years. I have a large amount of learning time invested in it and I think I have it figured out pretty well. I support Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000 at work, and I use Windows XP at home.
I know how to use it. It plays all the games I want to play. It browses the web. When my mom can't check her e-mail, I can Remote Desktop into her computer and fix her problems for her.
Could Linux serve me just as well? Probably. Do I already know how to use it? No. Do I have any incentive to learn? Well...beyond the principle of the thing, I really don't. Three semesters of C in collge taught me that I'm not a programmer, so a huge chunk of what I understand it the big attraction of Linux--that I can rip a program apart and make it work My Way if I don't like it--doesn't apply to me.
Hey, I love Linux. I'm sure it's great, and after reading Slashdot for almost three years I can tell you a whole lot of good things about it. I don't use it because I've got a good thing going with Windows. I'm comfortable, and we fear change. It's cold outside, and the wolves are after me.
You know what I think we should do about cellular phones in public...
(ba-da-da-ba-da-da-ba-da-da-ba-BO-NAN-ZA!!)
Oh, excuse me for a second.
Hey, what's up?
Naw, I'm just posting on Slashdot.
Slashdot. You know. It's like, a big web site thingy. People post comments and stuff. It's kind of like the Roman senate if the Roman senate had been populated by thirty thousand incensed midgets.
Yeah, I know. I TOTALLY get that all the time.
Cell phones. We're talking about cellular phones in public places.
I *KNOW*! That TOTALLY drives me insane. Like, when you're talking to someone and their phone rings and they start talking on their phone instead of to you?
Totally. So, what's up with you? How's it going....
I have to take issue with anyone dismissing a storyline that takes 60 hours to complete and includes different plots for different character classes as nothing more than "a dog and pony show". I had a great time with the single-player campaign, and on its merit alone recommended the game to my father. He'll likely never play on-line, but he is immensely enjoying the single-player campaign.
I've played it through twice so far, with different characters each time, and I'll likely do it a third time. Perhaps I'll play on-line some day, but what I've experienced of on-line play over the last four years has destroyed what little bit of faith in humanity that my tech support day job hadn't already taken care of.
We can either know the candidate for whom any given person voted, or we can know the mechanism by which any given person voted, but we can't know both.
To: Hedy Baker, hedy_baker@forgent.com
To: Alexa Coy, alexa_coy@forgent.com
Just wanted to let you know that, re: your JPEG patents and licensing, you guys are FREAKING NUTS. Perhaps when I have to pay money for the air I breathe, the light that reflects off of my retinas, along with a per-step licensing fee to whomever currently owns the IP rights for "walking," I would consider it valid to have to pay for something that is already as ubiquitous as JPEG imaging. In short, you'll get money from me when you pry it from the clutching fingers of my cold, dead corpse.
Laughing at you,
JB
"The servers run in parallel and major jobs are broken down for each server. It is networked together with 100Gbps ethernet and Foundry networking switches...."
A hundred gigabits per second? Dude! Sign me the hell up!
At least, George thinks so!
I'm not sure which is worse--that the employees were forced to use AOL e-mail at work, or that top level people at Time were using e-mail to send final page proofs that were apparently of a massive size.
Do these people not have FTP? Is their IT department asleep at the wheel?
...then grilled each one at 300,325,350,375,400,425 and 450 degrees...
My God, that is one powerful oven.
Performed the same task in WinXP with a Kodak DX3900--plugged it into the USB port without any drivers. The camera was immediately mounted as a drive and I could start fiddling with my pictures. No drivers, no fuss, no problem.
I'm not a programmer, so I can't speak for that type of animal, but among the support staff in my two previous jobs--you know, the much-embittered guys that answer helpdesk pages and go to lusers' desks and fix problems--there has been a high degree of extra-work fraternization.
We hung out on weekends, and we'd go drinking after work if the day had been particularly stressful. Quite often we'd swap luser stories.
I think the World War I guy-in-the-trenches mentality that is forced onto a lot of support guys brings about hard and fast friendships.
I'd be suspicious about investing in a company whose name could be mispronounced "fume-ass".
I bought my 75GXP because it was recommended on Ars Technica's system guide, and because it reviewed favorably on StorageReview.com. It provided me with over a half-year of trouble-free service.
Unfortunately, I too had my 75GXP die. The first signs of trouble showed up about seven months after I bought it. At random intervals, the drive would make strange, non-normal noises (it almost sounded like a head or something skipping across the platters, which is impossible...right?).
The Real Problem happened a few weeks later when I had to install WinME (don't laugh--I had a good reason at the time). I moved all my data to a second HDD, but WinME's install failed almost before it started. A full surface scan via Scandisk produced classic bad HDD noises (CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-wrrrrr. CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-wrrrrr. Repeat infinitely).
IBM's drive diagnostic program reported that the drive was indeed bad, and gave me a cryptic error code that I no longer have written down. I RMA'd the drive via IBM's automated web RMA process and received a new (refurbished) one less than two weeks later. That was in March, and the new drive has given me no problems.
Yet.
Perhaps now is a good time to start looking at StorageReview again...
If you'll excuse me, I'm going to sit over in the corner with my copies of _Strangers From the Sky_, _Final Frontier_, and _The Final Reflection_ and weep until the hurt goes away.
No, I think he's talking about Amiga. And damn but they were nice.