My brother snuck off last year during the holidays to "work" on the computer. When we finally retrieved him to our surprise he hadn't been wasting time on/., but instead had typed up a custom list of holiday terms for Pictionary. Unfortunately Grandpa had no idea what "Dah-Who-Doray" meant when he pulled it out of the hat.
ok, actually I bought about 10 of them on a trip to Taiwan. ThinkGeek.com has them for sale as well. The ones I bought were labeled SuperJoy 3000 and MegaJoy. They each claimed to hold thousands of games but in truth one type had 80 games and the other 125. After that the list began to repeat itself with odd entries, some of which represented cheat modes for games such as Contra.
As for the reponses in this thread claiming that these things are emmulators, they are crazy. These are not emmulators, they are repackaged hardware. It is much cheaper to make (and sell for $7) a 6502 based system to play Nintendo games than to make a handheld x86 gaming system intended purely to emmulate Nintendo games.
The very existence of the SCO case undermines Darl's argument that the GPL inhibits progress. It that were true, then Linux would not have progressed enough to be a bother to SCO. Oddly it seems that the GPL promotes progress better than SCO's model, since Linux is a superior product developed in less time. By that I mean absolute time rather than developer hours.
In any case Linux promotes progress (its own and that of other software projects) very nicely. Now if only the GUI would progress as fast as the Mac OS X GUI has in recent years.
The cash itself wasn't as important as the apparent vote of confidence and the fact that MS promised to continue developing IE. This was a signal to the industry that Apple was still important to MS. Oh, and they made money on that $150 million investment.
Apple didn't need the money, they have lots of cash.
Please tell my where you find this info on Mormons and a "13th tribe". I have never seen it. The Book of Mormon records the history of members of Ephraim and Manasseh who came to the western hemisphere, so Mormons don't believe that Native Americans are part of a 13th tribe, they believe that they are descendants of Joseph.
The whole thing with the 12 colonies of man and the 'lost' 13th colony is exactly like the Mormon belief of 12 tribes of man with a lost 13th tribe and how reuniting with that 13th tribe would be their salvation or something along those lines.
I am aware of no such doctorine. The idea of 12 tribes of Israel is straight from the Bible. Ten of those tribes were taken captive or "lost". There is nothing uniquely Mormon about that. There are LOTS of things about BSG that are references to the LDS faith and culture due to Glen A. Larson being a Mormon, but this is not one of them. There are plenty of websites with comprehensive lists of the similarities, so I won't try to out do them here. Google for Battlestar and Mormon and you'll get plenty of hits.
Odd that BSG got all the Mormon references and Magnum PI, Knight Rider (notice how KITT's light and sound are very Cylon?), and the A-Team didn't.
When I want to read something on AICN I get the front page up and then Ctrl-Left Click about a dozen times on the article I want to read in Mozilla. Sometimes one of those requests will actually get through and I can read the article. The fact that the site functions at all is amazing.
You would need "special code" in the game too, which would be pretty tough. M.U.L.E. had a four player option, but it wasn't networked. It involved sharing the joystick(s) and then using the keyboard for the auctions. A great game. I am surprised that there isn't some online version.
I would bet that many institutions could find a good use for a supercomputer. Airlines, for example, use them to come up with flight schedules and crew lists. Faster computers give them more flexibility. They can recalculate the schedule at will.
If supercomputers were ubiquitous, more uses would be found. So I don't see how "need" comes into the picture. Now who can afford one? That is a good question. If they were affordable you'd see needs popping up all over.
I have not had office space of my own for nearly 5 years. This meant that I either worked at home or checked into a cubicle when I went into the office. When I was starting out it was important for me to be in the office so that I could get to know my coworkers and they could get to know me. Now I live on the other side of the country from them and I happily work from home.
I have missed some of the social aspects of work, but most of my coworkers work from home as well now. So even if I showed up at the office nobody would be there. The company was able to consolidate the real estate they occupied. They now have about 1/4th the floorspace that they had before. Even that seems like too much some days.
I really doubt that they used Windows for Smart Cards. I think that the program was totally cancelled in 2001. However, I do not doubt that they spent that amount on the card deployment. Figure $10 per card (yes they could be a lot cheaper) and $25 per reader (again could be cheaper) and that only leaves $15 for development and installation. Yeah, it seems like the figure is low, depending on how they arrive at it. I really doubt that the cards themselves cost $50, unless they have some sort of secret 16 MB card running.NET... not likely.
Read that article carefully. It is pretty clear that primary insurance is somewhat limited and that the government is insuring the rest of it in case bad things happen. So yes they are insured, but private companies won't insure them for the full cost of a disaster. As the original poster said, private companies won't fully insure a plant.
Lisbon built this fancy new subway/bus/train station for the Expo there about 5 years ago. I was there for a month studying, and lived near the station. They had spared no expense, it was really an impressive facility. They had these screens up all over that were really nice at the time. LCD, widscreen, and pretty large. I saw one of them working once and the rest of the time they all showed the BSOD every time I saw them.
Authentec fingerprint sensors use RF signals to read the fingerprint from the inside of your skin, not the surface. This makes it hard to use a non-live finger. I have seen people with rubber and jelly fingers fool optical sensors. An Authentec sensor doesn't even see this as a finger. These same people with the fake fingers admit that the best they can do with Authentec sensors is use a pencil to rub carbon all over their jelly finger and then use that to try to enroll. The resulting image doesn't even look like a fingerprint.
IBM makes the G5 for Apple. It also uses similiar processor in its own machines. And yes, they can cram a lot of them into a small amount of space and still deal with the heat. If you had read the article you might have noticed the following:
Meanwhile, IBM is working on a monster supercomputer that will easily rank as the world's fastest supercomputer when it comes online next year. Blue Gene/L will be capable of performing 360 trillion calculations per second, or 360 teraflops.
Commissioned by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Blue Gene/L will be based on 130,000 processors.
Not only will it be the fastest, but Blue Gene/L will also be the most compact, IBM said.
IBM has managed to cram 1,024 PowerPC 440GX processors into a slanted cabinet the size of a dishwasher. The unit -- described by IBM as a small-scale prototype of Blue Gene/L -- is already ranked 73rd in the new Top500 list.
When finished, Blue Gene/L will be about the size of half a tennis court. "That's very small considering how powerful it is," said IBM spokesman Adam Emery.
By contrast, the Earth Simulator's 5,120 processors would fill four tennis courts.
You haven't been paying attention to all the/. banner ads for this then, have you?
I was in Taiwan two years ago and bought about 10 similar systems (no LCD display) to give as Christmas presents. They were pretty cheap, and each came with about 80 NES games. The controller plugs right into the RCA inputs of the TV, and oddly, the controller is a light gun as well, so Duck Hunt and Wild Gunman work. The best games were Super Mario Bros. 2 and Tetris. They didn't include any memory hogs such as Zelda or Ultima III. Several of the games were unplayably bad, and I had never heard of many of them. The controllers got flakey after a while, but nothing you couldn't fix by opening it up and tweaking things.
They were a lot of fun. Certainly worth the $15 each that I paid for them.
Sorry, replied to the wrong post. I know that YOU know that, didn't think our "mentat" friend was aware of it. You would think that a mentat would have no need for OSX though.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the link! You are correct.
Seems to have brought the ACs out too.
Didn't Justin leave several months ago? Slashdot says he did!
My brother snuck off last year during the holidays to "work" on the computer. When we finally retrieved him to our surprise he hadn't been wasting time on /., but instead had typed up a custom list of holiday terms for Pictionary. Unfortunately Grandpa had no idea what "Dah-Who-Doray" meant when he pulled it out of the hat.
As for the reponses in this thread claiming that these things are emmulators, they are crazy. These are not emmulators, they are repackaged hardware. It is much cheaper to make (and sell for $7) a 6502 based system to play Nintendo games than to make a handheld x86 gaming system intended purely to emmulate Nintendo games.
In any case Linux promotes progress (its own and that of other software projects) very nicely. Now if only the GUI would progress as fast as the Mac OS X GUI has in recent years.
Apple didn't need the money, they have lots of cash.
Please tell my where you find this info on Mormons and a "13th tribe". I have never seen it. The Book of Mormon records the history of members of Ephraim and Manasseh who came to the western hemisphere, so Mormons don't believe that Native Americans are part of a 13th tribe, they believe that they are descendants of Joseph.
I am aware of no such doctorine. The idea of 12 tribes of Israel is straight from the Bible. Ten of those tribes were taken captive or "lost". There is nothing uniquely Mormon about that. There are LOTS of things about BSG that are references to the LDS faith and culture due to Glen A. Larson being a Mormon, but this is not one of them. There are plenty of websites with comprehensive lists of the similarities, so I won't try to out do them here. Google for Battlestar and Mormon and you'll get plenty of hits.
Odd that BSG got all the Mormon references and Magnum PI, Knight Rider (notice how KITT's light and sound are very Cylon?), and the A-Team didn't.
When I want to read something on AICN I get the front page up and then Ctrl-Left Click about a dozen times on the article I want to read in Mozilla. Sometimes one of those requests will actually get through and I can read the article. The fact that the site functions at all is amazing.
You would need "special code" in the game too, which would be pretty tough. M.U.L.E. had a four player option, but it wasn't networked. It involved sharing the joystick(s) and then using the keyboard for the auctions. A great game. I am surprised that there isn't some online version.
Turn it on its side and play Tetris!
Then turn out the lights and crank up the volume. Your very own laser show. I hope that you have some Pink Floyd handy.
If supercomputers were ubiquitous, more uses would be found. So I don't see how "need" comes into the picture. Now who can afford one? That is a good question. If they were affordable you'd see needs popping up all over.
I have missed some of the social aspects of work, but most of my coworkers work from home as well now. So even if I showed up at the office nobody would be there. The company was able to consolidate the real estate they occupied. They now have about 1/4th the floorspace that they had before. Even that seems like too much some days.
I really doubt that they used Windows for Smart Cards. I think that the program was totally cancelled in 2001. However, I do not doubt that they spent that amount on the card deployment. Figure $10 per card (yes they could be a lot cheaper) and $25 per reader (again could be cheaper) and that only leaves $15 for development and installation. Yeah, it seems like the figure is low, depending on how they arrive at it. I really doubt that the cards themselves cost $50, unless they have some sort of secret 16 MB card running .NET... not likely.
Read that article carefully. It is pretty clear that primary insurance is somewhat limited and that the government is insuring the rest of it in case bad things happen. So yes they are insured, but private companies won't insure them for the full cost of a disaster. As the original poster said, private companies won't fully insure a plant.
Lisbon built this fancy new subway/bus/train station for the Expo there about 5 years ago. I was there for a month studying, and lived near the station. They had spared no expense, it was really an impressive facility. They had these screens up all over that were really nice at the time. LCD, widscreen, and pretty large. I saw one of them working once and the rest of the time they all showed the BSOD every time I saw them.
It would work if they used it quickly. I am unaware of any testing. Want to volunteer?
Authentec fingerprint sensors use RF signals to read the fingerprint from the inside of your skin, not the surface. This makes it hard to use a non-live finger. I have seen people with rubber and jelly fingers fool optical sensors. An Authentec sensor doesn't even see this as a finger. These same people with the fake fingers admit that the best they can do with Authentec sensors is use a pencil to rub carbon all over their jelly finger and then use that to try to enroll. The resulting image doesn't even look like a fingerprint.
IBM makes the G5 for Apple. It also uses similiar processor in its own machines. And yes, they can cram a lot of them into a small amount of space and still deal with the heat. If you had read the article you might have noticed the following:
Meanwhile, IBM is working on a monster supercomputer that will easily rank as the world's fastest supercomputer when it comes online next year. Blue Gene/L will be capable of performing 360 trillion calculations per second, or 360 teraflops.
Commissioned by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Blue Gene/L will be based on 130,000 processors.
Not only will it be the fastest, but Blue Gene/L will also be the most compact, IBM said.
IBM has managed to cram 1,024 PowerPC 440GX processors into a slanted cabinet the size of a dishwasher. The unit -- described by IBM as a small-scale prototype of Blue Gene/L -- is already ranked 73rd in the new Top500 list.
When finished, Blue Gene/L will be about the size of half a tennis court. "That's very small considering how powerful it is," said IBM spokesman Adam Emery.
By contrast, the Earth Simulator's 5,120 processors would fill four tennis courts.
I was in Taiwan two years ago and bought about 10 similar systems (no LCD display) to give as Christmas presents. They were pretty cheap, and each came with about 80 NES games. The controller plugs right into the RCA inputs of the TV, and oddly, the controller is a light gun as well, so Duck Hunt and Wild Gunman work. The best games were Super Mario Bros. 2 and Tetris. They didn't include any memory hogs such as Zelda or Ultima III. Several of the games were unplayably bad, and I had never heard of many of them. The controllers got flakey after a while, but nothing you couldn't fix by opening it up and tweaking things.
They were a lot of fun. Certainly worth the $15 each that I paid for them.
Sorry, replied to the wrong post. I know that YOU know that, didn't think our "mentat" friend was aware of it. You would think that a mentat would have no need for OSX though.
Try again. Apple ships a working X11 now.
btw, I know that.