I have had Windows 2000 crash on me though from a buggy driver. This crash brought down the whole system btw. Most crashes in Unix like OSes do not bring down the whole system.
If you have a buggy driver in Unix it'll take down the entire system too (note -- X is not part of the Unix OS, unlike Windows' GUI, so a buggy graphics driver is a different story). Drivers run at ring 0 in both OS's and can cause major havok equally.
The only time you have to reboot Linux is for a kernel update.
Or a libc update. And while MS has made strides toward reducing reboots, they're still leagues away from every other OS on this point. Too much stuff has hooks into the kernel.
I'm pretty sure you couldn't plead the fifth in a civil court if you were brought up on tax fraud charges.
Er, you can't plead the 5th in civil court, but tax fraud is a criminal charge (government vs anyone), not a civil charge (non-government entity vs non-government entity).
I think every geek felt that way once, when the world was shiny and new.
Not really. I paid $4k for my first computer -- a 486DX/25 w/ 8MB of memory, 130MB hard drive, and 14" SVGA monitor. This was in 1990. I knew it wasn't going to last forever, although it did last about 4 years with a few upgrades (DX2/50 CPU, more memory, different video -- never 3D video though).
Some kids use their savings to buy a car in HS. I used it to buy a computer (I was on a freaking XT w/ EGA graphics... do you have any idea how slow Turbo Pascal 6.0 was on an XT?)
The replacement was, of course, much, much faster for much, much less.
Help me understand why gaming on a PC that costs $3000-$4000 makes more sense than gaming on a $200 console?
Sigh. This isn't even an apples and oranges comparison at this point. It's an apples and bicycles comparison.
To go to the heart of the argument -- console vs PC gaming. The two are completely different and serve different markets and needs. The PC is somewhat more expensive (yes... somewhat. I can build a PC capable of running all current games, as well as all games planned for release in the next couple years, for $617 ($525 w/o OS)), but can do considerably more than just play games. It also runs those games at resolutions and polygon counts that console gamers can only dream of -- even the Xbox on a HDTV is lower res. Some games -- FPS, most RTS or turn-based strategy games, and MMORPGs -- are simply best on PCs due to the better controls available. The networking, upgradability, and mod scene is far better on PCs as well (although consoles like the Xbox are making strides on those). Games are cheaper on PCs (which is countered by the lack of a rental or resale market, but not everyone rents or resells console games either).
Consoles are easy to setup and play, have a lower initial investment, and are far better for head-to-head playing. Some game types are far better on consoles -- particularly fighting games, platformers, driving games, and most sports games in general. The downsides are largely covered above (poor graphics, poor online support, poor/non-existent patching or mods, higher long-term cost).
But why, you ask, did I say it was an absurd comparison? Because you're trying to compare a console to a highly specialized laptop. Take that console, put a 15-17" LCD screen on it and then make it run purely from battery power for 1-3 hours. You might want to contemplate wireless networking too, in order to try and level the playing field a bit more. Let me know what the cost is then.
Oh, and a perfectly capable gaming laptop can be had for about $1500, as several people have posted. To be fair, a console is $99-$179... unless, of course, you want a memory card or more than one controller, or online support...
First time I'd ever heard of surge protectors in power strips too - yikes!
From previous posts, you're from somewhere in the UK.
None of the UK has weather like the SE USA does (yes, I've lived in both places... although I was very, very young when I lived in the UK). We have far more thunderstorms and tornados than just about anywhere else on the planet. Add to that extremely hard clay soil and (more recently) insect populations that consider insulation jackets to be good food and it's extremely hard to string power lines up... they're affected by the weather above ground and it's extremely expensive to bury them. Not to mention that the population density is considerably lower than it is in the UK, so you have to run a LOT more cable.
Most areas outside of the SE US do not have blackouts commonly (and even "commonly" is a misnomer -- I think it's been well over a year now since I lost power to my house. A tree falling through my roof during a hurricaine-spawned thunderstorm didn't even cut it out).
extremely poorly engineered due to lax regulations
Proof? Or are you just making this up? It's pretty clear that you don't have an electrical background.
I've even done some re-writing of light fixtures in our house myself - no degree/license required!
And why should one be? Electrical work isn't brain surgery. There's a few key things to remember (turn off the bloody power before doing anything!), and if you don't meet code then you may be unable to sell your place. I've rewired much of my house -- mainly because the owners before me didn't know what the hell they were doing. But even if they had caused a short, that wouldn't have had any impact beyond the main electrical box of my own house. DIY wiring is not going to cause a blackout, or even a brownout -- at least not one more widespread than your house (ok, if you screw with your mains you could do some bad things to the transformer on the street, but, frankly, you're more likely to just wind up dead -- I don't screw with mains).
I guess I'm suggesting that assuming that all electric devices are built to handle unreliable power (brownouts, spikes etc.) is perhaps country specifc
Uh.... no.
Go read the technical specs for some electronic equipment sometime. Anything designed to be plugged into the wall -- regardless of country -- is going to have a fairly wide tolerance (generally x +/- 10%, where x is the nominal voltage for that country) because AC is simply not stable. Just turning on or off a high drain appliance (refrigerator, AC) will cause a dip or spike in the voltage. That's just the way it works.
When my buddy first told me about this exciting new RISC idea one of the design goals was each instruction was to take a single instruction cycle to execute. Isn't this completely contrary to a deep pipeline?
No, in fact pipelining is central to the entire concept of RISC.
In traditional CISC there was no pipelining and operations could take anywhere from 2-n cycles to complete -- at the very least you would have to fetch the instruction (1 cycle) and decode the instruction (1 cycle; no, you can't decode it at the same time you fetch it -- you must wait 1 cycle for the address lines to settle, otherwise you cannot be sure of what you're actually reading). If it's a NOOP, there's no operation, but otherwise it takes 1+ cycles to actually execute -- not all operators ran in the same amount of time. If it needs data then you'd need to decode the address (1 cycle) and fetch (1 cycle -- if you're lucky). Given that some operators took multiple operands you can rinse and repeat the decode/fetch several times. Oh, and don't forget about the decode/store for the result. So, add all that up and you could expect an average instruction to run in no less than 7-9 cycles (fetch, decode, fetch, decode, execute, decode, store). And that's all presuming that you have a memory architecture that can actually produce instructions or data in a single clock cycle.
In RISC you pipeline all of that stuff and reduce the complexity of the instructions so that (optimally) you are executing 1 instruction/cycle as long as the pipelines are full. You have separate modules doing the decodes, fetches, stores, etc. (and in deep-pipeline architectures, like the P4, these steps are broken up even more). This lets you pump the hell out of the clockrate since there's less for each stage of the pipeline to actually do.
Modern CPUs have multiple everything -- multiple decoders, fetchers, execution units, etc. so it's actually possible to execute >1 cycle/cycle. Of course, the danger to the pipelining is that if you branch (like when a loop runs out or an if-then-else case) then all those instructions you've been decoding go out the window and you have to start all over from wherever the program is now executing (this is called a pipeline stall and is very costly; once you consider the memory delays it can cost hundreds of cycles). Branch prediction is used to try and mitigate this risk -- generally by executing both branches at the same time and only keeping the one that turns out to be valid.
Was I wrong to laugh when I heard hardware manufacturers claim, "sure, we make a CISC, but it has RISC-like elements.
Yes, because neither one exists anymore. CISC absorbed useful bits from RISC (like cache and pipelining) and RISC realized there was more to life than ADD/MUL/SHIFT/ROTATE (oversimplification of course). The PowerPC is allegedly a RISC chip, but go check on how many operators it actually has. And note that not all of them execute in one cycle. x86 is allegedly CISC, but, well... read on.
how wide are the Pentium 4 and Athlon microcode?
The x86 ISA has varying width. It's one of the many black marks against it. Of course, in reality, the word "microcode" isn't really applicable to most CPUs nowadays -- at least not for commonly used instructions. And to further muddy the picture both AMD and Intel don't actually execute x86 ISA. Instead there's a translation layer that converts x86 into a much more RISC-y internal ISA that's conducive to running at more than a few megahertz. AFAIK, the internal language is highly guarded by both companies.
If I am not mistaken the Transmeta was a very wide instruction word. And if I am not mistaken, doesn't that make it the opposite of a RISC?
Transmeta and Intel's Itanium use VLIW (very large instruction word) computing, which is supposed to make the hardware capable of executing multiple dependant or independant operations in one cycle. It does so by putting the onus on the compiler
Why can't we just include the dependancies? IS that so hard?
Good point, but it may actually be hard if your code is under a different license from a library you're using (namely, your code is more restrictive). But I'm not sure that's an issue either.
This breaks alot of programs and in an rpm system only one version of a library or program can be installed??
Well, there are ways around that. But if the program was linked against libfoo.so.a instead of libfoo.so.17.a then you're pretty well screwed.
This, BTW, is the exact same thing as "DLL hell" on Windows systems, where multiple copies of a DLL may be installed, or a program may rampantly overwrite the existing version with its own (even if it's older!). Same story, different name...
But still Its a bandaid solution for a big problem
Well, GenToo's emerge system is essentially the same as ports from what I understand. But you're right -- it's a bandaid solution. What's the real fix? I dunno. If programs were linked against the full name of their libraries (instead of the symlink/hardlink shortened name) then it'd probably fix itself. Package managers are certainly capable of telling when a library is still required by a package, and there's no reason to remove old versions of a library until it's no longer required. It'd take a lot of packages being reworked, and probably a lot of devtools as well (like autoconfig, automake, etc).
I need to write a compressed bitmap? Okay, then I include code to do so. I need to read a wav file ripped from a CD? Yup, my own code. Calculate an MD5? Inspired heavily on the RFC reference code, but essentially my own.
Man, I'm glad other industries aren't as stupid as the software engineering industry. Otherwise car manufacturers would have to have steel foundaries, cloth weaving, a slaughterhouse and tannery (for leather), and innumerable other ancillary businesses on site just to build a car. And, of course, everyone would have to know how to do absolutely everything.
What you're preaching is directly contrary to the practice of reusing code -- and not just your own. It's insane to reinvent the wheel every time you need to drive to the store -- but that's exactly what you're doing. It's one thing to understand the physics behind the wheel, or the foundary, or the paint shop. It's another to rebuild them from scratch.
I hope there's never a bug in your code... because if there is you're going to have to patch every single code base, and re-issue every single binary (since you prefer to link statically). All because you felt it was better to not trust others and do it yourself. Not to mention the vast amount of time burnt re-implementing that which already works, and works extremely well.
The code I'm working on uses a multitude of libraries -- STL, Boost (primarily for its shared_ptr's; we'd use more but much of it doesn't compile on our platform), OTL, libcurl, libxml, pcre, openssl, and others. In some cases we've ditched libraries and implemented our own solution (in particular, MQSeries, which sucked deeply). But to re-implement all of those libraries would literally add years to development. And to what purpose? To have a less feature complete, more buggy, less supportable code base?
And, yes, we've even used libraries sometimes when the library pretty much sucks. Case in point is cgicc, which we used because it's one of the few C/C++ libraries that interfaces "properly" with fastcgi. It's full of bugs, full of really idiotic #define's, and doesn't implement things quite right... but fixing it took much less time than rewriting it from scratch. Because it doesn't do everything wrong, and there's no reason to toss the baby out with the bath water.
No thanks. I'll happily replicate what's been done in every other scientific and engineering discipline -- to stand on the shoulders of giants while adding my own knowledge to the repository.
But when a package links against it for the sake of using a single function that the programmer could have reproduced in under ten lines of code... Well, that just screams "laziness" to me.
Sure. But that situation is pretty rare, at least among competent developers. If you're seeing that commonly, then you're using crap packages (and god knows there's a ton out there... I've ditched many packages because they had too many esoteric dependancies).
A HELOC, as with any other line of credit, is revokable upon change in status (like, oh say, becoming unemployed). Yes, banks generally don't notice this kind of thing, but if you got in serious trouble then things could become even worse when the bank finds out you failed to report a change of status prior to using the credit.
As it is, we pay roughly an additional 50% per month to pay down our principle... at going rates we probably have $80-100k in equity.
Really do need to better utilize the emergency fund money, but relying on a HELOC isn't what I'd want to do.
and why not, with the cost of a PS2/Xbox system less than just an average-quality video card
You can get an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro w/ 128MB for $120. That's more than a GameCube, but less than either system you mentioned.
Yes, that's only part of the system, but you can put together a very good system (AthXP 2500+, nForce2 MB, 512MB DDR3200, 40G HD, above video card, case, keyboard, mouse) for $525 ($617 once you include XP Home). Still much more than a console, but you can use it for a lot more than a console too. It'll also have better graphics, better networking capabilities, and can be used for things other than playing games (like posting on/.).
Of course, there are advantages to consoles too. They're a hell of a lot easier to setup and maintain. There are some games that have never done well on a PC -- fighting games for example. If you have friends who come over to play then having 2-4 people play head-to-head or cooperatively on a console is a helluva lot easier than it is with PCs, and the games are designed toward it too.
Consoles are closing ground in some areas, particularly networking. But they'll forever have controller issues, since some games just do better with a keyboard/mouse setup (and while they may be available on consoles, they'll always be rare). They'll probably be behind in graphics as well, since the absolute limit (in the US) is 1080i or 720p, both of which are easily surpassed by PCs currently. And while they may initially push more polygons, evolving technology on PCs will always eclipse the consoles within 6-12 months.
I mostly game on PCs, but I do have a PS2 now and it's definitely better suited to some kinds of gaming. They each have their place, and I hope each continues to exist for a long, long time.
In a supposedly down economy, where people are losing jobs left and right, how do we come up with the cash and time to buy both PC games and consoles?
Uh, because not everyone is unemployed?
If you're unemployed then, yeah, buying a new game console (or a new gaming video card for your PC) might not be the smartest thing. Yeah, you won't be able to play Ninja Gaiden, or Doom3, or whatever, but that's really the least of your worries.
If you are employed, and have sufficient savings (my wife and I have enough savings for 6 months of unemployment with absolutely 0 income; I hope we never have to use it), then you can certainly "splurge" on a new toy.
I've looked at it, but it's useless to me ATM because it's not available for Windows. My work box is Windows (despite the fact that I'm a Unix C++ developer) and that's not going to change -- too many company tools that I need to use that are Windows only. I suspect a vast number of others are in the same situation. I find it humorous that everyone immediately suggested Evolution -- with only a few people acknowledging the platform limitations.
PostgreSQL or mySQL and you are set...
Ok, I may hate Access with a burning passion (I do database programming as well, currently Oracle), but there's no way in hell that either of those are a replacement for it. Yes, they are both solid databases with more features (DB-wise) than Access, but they lack a front end -- which is what's critical to Access and makes it usable by hordes of people (and gets it misused as well).
Now, let me know when Mozilla will do calendar, appointment book, task list, and email integration.
And before you flame me as a troll - I use Firefox at home and work and Thunderbird at home. Work requires I use Outlook, and it's because of those features that it has value. I don't find its email capabilities particularly wonderful by themselves, not to mention the slew of virus vulnerabilities (but that's ok, because we paid for, at a considerable expense, a mail server virus scanner). Despite the drawbacks there is very little that is actually competitive with Outlook/Exchange. And most of the alternatives (Notes, for example) suck even more. Yes, there are some OSS solutions out there as well, but they're not up to the same level in functionality as Outlook/Exchange. And that's a pretty sad statement.
Does this mean I might lose tech tv on my Directv satellite?
According to the splash on the G4 site it means that G4 will be expanded to "44 million cable and satellite homes nationwide". Given that currently all of 0 Dish or DirecTV homes currently receive G4 I'd guess that the merged G4/TechTV will simply replace TechTV.
I'd also guess that there will be no rate changes for providers until their contract runs out (however long the contract w/ TechTV was). At that point Comcast could try to gouge for G4, but lets be honest -- it's not a major selling point.
As these large companies such as Time Warner, Comcast etc., start buying up more interesting programming such as tech tv, I think we will start to see a homogenizing affect.
I agree. It's really absurd that the government is allowing vertical monopolies in the broadcasting realm. I suppose that, to a large extent, they always existed with the three major networks, but it certainly seems to be getting worse, not better. Recent FCC rulings in this realm haven't helped things either, particularly the ones that allow not only vertical monopolies (production to distribution) but horizontal ones (TV, radio, print all owned by the same company).
It would be nice if it were more like a discovery channel for tech stuff.
Er... TechTV is.
What, you think Discovery Channel (and its progeny) are hardcore science/history/etc.? Please. I enjoy a lot of programs on those channels, but I also know they're about as well respected by "serious" historians and in-field scientists as The Screen Savers is respected by real techies.
I don't know how much different the standard is for HDTV between different countries
Oh, that's simple.
The US has a HD digital broadcast standard.
The rest of the world doesn't.
And they're not adopting ATSC.
Japan has a high-definition standard, but it's analog based. Parts of Europe have digital broadcasting, but not HD. Both countries are looking into HD digital transmission standards, and have rejected ATSC already (Europe has just as much of a NIH syndrome as the US does; I'm not quite sure why Japan is looking at a different standard).
I'm sure if pros and the like don't have to choose between NTSC, PAL, and SECAM, there will also be quite a few happy people out there
The forthcoming format differences are likely to make the pros pine for the days when it was simpler. The only plus is that since it'll all be in a digital format initially anyway it'll be easier to convert to other formats.
Good technology (lasted 50 years), allowed the market, not the government, to push adaptation.
So, by the same analogy, the horse beats the everliving crap out of the car. It lasted several thousand (or tens of thousands) of years and allowed the market (not the government) to push adaptation. Of course, try and ride a horse down an interstate nowadays. Damn government!
Heck, I bet we won't be using automobiles even 1000 years from now! What a crappy invention.
Of course, you handily ignore that NTSC was government mandated. The broadcast spectrum certainly wasn't allocated by the market. And the primary cause for moving to HD is the same -- to reallocate the broadcast spectrum (which won't go for anywhere near as much as the government was hoping for, but it will still have some important societal benefits -- namely increasing the spectrum available to emergency services, which are seriously hurting).
You also ignore that the ATSC standard was put forth by a commercial consortium, not designed and dictated by the government. Yes, the government asked for a new, high-def, digital standard. And that was about it.
We will still be using ATSC in 50 years? Doubtful. At least not without a bunch of extensions. Technology is simply moving too fast for such things to remain stagnant so long.
The big deal is that if we really do find life that evolved separately from terran life, it throws a *huge* quandary for some philosophies and a lot of world religion
No it doesn't. Please... I'm an atheist, just finished beating down some bible thumper on another site for arguing that evolution was bunk, but the existence of microbial (or even non-intelligent macro) life wouldn't be a huge quandry.
In this case some religions could even use it as a pro-God point. Yes, there was life on Mars, but it was not favored by the Creator and thus died out.
Intelligent life elsewhere in the universe may cause a bump in religion (at least as far as Judeo-Christian-Muslim theology goes; most other religions aren't as self-centered), but I doubt even that would destroy it. Belief in a higher being (or beings) has been part of humanity since well before the written record. And, most importantly, the central concept of most religions is faith -- such that no reasoning for or against it can counter that faith.
I think the original poster in this thread had a great idea about transaction keys for authorization. In my case and with a credit card too, they would have gotten only 1 key and been only able to make one charge.
So then go get a card that allows you to do that. There are several on the market right now. I distinctly recall AmEx offering single-use faux card numbers (that tie back to your real card, but only through their system). They were touted as being used for "eCommerce", but there's no reason they wouldn't be accepted for any use.
There are also issues with reoccurring charges, with storing card numbers on merchant sites, with chargebacks (I'm sorry, that card number isn't authorized anymore...), and (most importantly) consumer education.
we're still paying to cover those losses through interest and other charges the credit card companies have.
Maybe you are. You know how much I've paid in interest and service fees in my life? $0. I don't carry a balance, I don't use cards that have annual fees, and when I have had an issue with a payment being applied late I've had the card company revoke the charge -- or else I'll revoke my use of their card. And, yes, I've been using credit cards for over a decade.
In that time I've had credit card fraud exactly once -- this last December. My wife and I noticed it at about the same time our card issuer did. Account closed, new card issued, end of story.
Well, hand-written checks do provide a hard copy signed piece of evidence that can be produced in court if necessary.
Not anymore. Very few checks are still processed manually anymore. Within 3-4 years that number will drop to zero. Instead the check is entered into an electronic system and the money is transferred by ACH. The physical check may never be used again and is often destroyed by the merchant at that point. In some cases the bank wants at least an electronic image of the check, but that's not required either.
On top of that, writing a check runs the risk of having the check washed and someone using the washed check to initiate either an ACH or just write bad checks on your account. Now you have all the dangers of some scumbag having your account number with none of the protections.
Write checks only when necessary. Credit cards are your absolute best bets for any kind of payment -- just be sure to pay them off in full every month. Consider them nothing more than an easier form of cash or check, not as an extension to your bank account.
And, yes, credit cards are better than paying with cash. If someone rips you off and you paid them with cash, what do you think your odds of ever getting your money back are?
I got double charged, at a pizza place incedentially, in one of those new "instant check" tranactions where they just use your checking account number to get your money.
Whoa.
Completely different from a credit card. Don't use "instant check" crap (frankly, don't use checks at all if you can help it) and don't use fake VISA/MC cards (the check cards, which are tied directly to your banking account). They don't have the same consumer protections that credit cards do. In the case of the former there's no requirements for any consumer protection whatsoever. Double charge? Too damn bad. Overcharge? That's nice. Bad information reported? Well, you can fight that one, but have fun! In all cases the consumer is presumed wrong and the system infallible. In the case of the check cards, most claim to have the protections of the credit cards, but they don't. Not really. If something is falsely charged to a check card they have up to 10 working days to resolve it. In the meantime, you're out the money -- hope you still have enough to cover your mortgage, car payment, etc. in the meantime. And if, after 10 days, they rule against you there's pretty much jack shit you can do at that point.
q[If not for the accountant at the pizza place I would have been forced to pay the extra money or have my credit rating ruined.]q
And if this had been a real credit card transaction then they would've had to show two distinct authorizations on the account. And most pizza places have you sign the credit swipe when you get your pizza, so they would've had to show two signatures as well. (And if they don't have you sign, well, then they better be prepared for a higher number of chargebacks from the credit card company). See the difference yet?
With the minor caveat that the first must actually work in the real world, while the latter only has to be sewn onto a zipperless jumpsuit.
Vocera need to have a conversation with the folk at Apple.
Well, I'm mad at Apple for not producing an 80GB iPod the size of my wristwatch. For minimal extra investment they could've had something that isn't so big and bulky and would actually hold my entire music collection. They clearly should've talked to the people at Paramount.
a little calculation shows me I'm at least 500 miles away here in Toronto
Well, since you want to play the tinfoil hat game -- you're dead.
For a bioweapon to be truely effective it has to have a reasonable infection and transmission period -- followed by rapid death. If the transmission period is too short then it won't spread because carriers will die before they can infect others. (Which is why a lot of really nasty viruses, like Ebola, are rare and have small kill clusters). If a military grade bioweapon got out without warning then you run a high risk of being infected by someone on a plane. Want to avoid it? Move to a small town at least a couple hundred miles away from any large city. AKA - the middle of nowhere.
Alternately, you could actually do some research on BSL4 facilities. Do you think that researching things like hantavirus, Ebola, lyme disease, antibiotic resistant strains of strep and TB, and other contagious and (currently) incurable diseases isn't worthwhile?
Of course, you'll just tug your tinfoil cap on tighter and claim that all they're really doing is bioweapons research. Sure. Whatever.
No, I'm not claiming they don't do bioweapon research (particularly Fort Dietrich), but a lot of that research is in how to defeat enemy bioweapons. Or your own, for that matter. Bioweapons have a nasty habit of indiscriminantly infecting everyone -- not just your "enemy". Which is why they are technically illegal to use in warfare.
Then I saw that one was a bar that offered FREE BEER WITH EVERY PACKERS TOUCHDOWN and I was like... blisssssss... I'm there. It really *did* put the best results first.
Unfortunately they only run that promotion during the spring and summer...
For the good of the community:) [...] Results: Slashdot's editors are facists. Launch conditions were 48,500 feet and 125 knots. All systems performed as expected and the vehicle landed successfully while demonstrating the maximum cross wind landing capability.
If it's for the good of the community, then don't put in your personal opinion in the middle of the post.
There may have been more random crap in there, this was the first one I saw. Feel free to remod the karma whore appropriately.
Slashdot Mirror
I have had Windows 2000 crash on me though from a buggy driver. This crash brought down the whole system btw. Most crashes in Unix like OSes do not bring down the whole system.
If you have a buggy driver in Unix it'll take down the entire system too (note -- X is not part of the Unix OS, unlike Windows' GUI, so a buggy graphics driver is a different story). Drivers run at ring 0 in both OS's and can cause major havok equally.
The only time you have to reboot Linux is for a kernel update.
Or a libc update. And while MS has made strides toward reducing reboots, they're still leagues away from every other OS on this point. Too much stuff has hooks into the kernel.
I'm pretty sure you couldn't plead the fifth in a civil court if you were brought up on tax fraud charges.
Er, you can't plead the 5th in civil court, but tax fraud is a criminal charge (government vs anyone), not a civil charge (non-government entity vs non-government entity).
I think every geek felt that way once, when the world was shiny and new.
Not really. I paid $4k for my first computer -- a 486DX/25 w/ 8MB of memory, 130MB hard drive, and 14" SVGA monitor. This was in 1990. I knew it wasn't going to last forever, although it did last about 4 years with a few upgrades (DX2/50 CPU, more memory, different video -- never 3D video though).
Some kids use their savings to buy a car in HS. I used it to buy a computer (I was on a freaking XT w/ EGA graphics... do you have any idea how slow Turbo Pascal 6.0 was on an XT?)
The replacement was, of course, much, much faster for much, much less.
Help me understand why gaming on a PC that costs $3000-$4000 makes more sense than gaming on a $200 console?
Sigh. This isn't even an apples and oranges comparison at this point. It's an apples and bicycles comparison.
To go to the heart of the argument -- console vs PC gaming. The two are completely different and serve different markets and needs. The PC is somewhat more expensive (yes... somewhat. I can build a PC capable of running all current games, as well as all games planned for release in the next couple years, for $617 ($525 w/o OS)), but can do considerably more than just play games. It also runs those games at resolutions and polygon counts that console gamers can only dream of -- even the Xbox on a HDTV is lower res. Some games -- FPS, most RTS or turn-based strategy games, and MMORPGs -- are simply best on PCs due to the better controls available. The networking, upgradability, and mod scene is far better on PCs as well (although consoles like the Xbox are making strides on those). Games are cheaper on PCs (which is countered by the lack of a rental or resale market, but not everyone rents or resells console games either).
Consoles are easy to setup and play, have a lower initial investment, and are far better for head-to-head playing. Some game types are far better on consoles -- particularly fighting games, platformers, driving games, and most sports games in general. The downsides are largely covered above (poor graphics, poor online support, poor/non-existent patching or mods, higher long-term cost).
But why, you ask, did I say it was an absurd comparison? Because you're trying to compare a console to a highly specialized laptop. Take that console, put a 15-17" LCD screen on it and then make it run purely from battery power for 1-3 hours. You might want to contemplate wireless networking too, in order to try and level the playing field a bit more. Let me know what the cost is then.
Oh, and a perfectly capable gaming laptop can be had for about $1500, as several people have posted. To be fair, a console is $99-$179... unless, of course, you want a memory card or more than one controller, or online support...
First time I'd ever heard of surge protectors in power strips too - yikes!
From previous posts, you're from somewhere in the UK.
None of the UK has weather like the SE USA does (yes, I've lived in both places... although I was very, very young when I lived in the UK). We have far more thunderstorms and tornados than just about anywhere else on the planet. Add to that extremely hard clay soil and (more recently) insect populations that consider insulation jackets to be good food and it's extremely hard to string power lines up... they're affected by the weather above ground and it's extremely expensive to bury them. Not to mention that the population density is considerably lower than it is in the UK, so you have to run a LOT more cable.
Most areas outside of the SE US do not have blackouts commonly (and even "commonly" is a misnomer -- I think it's been well over a year now since I lost power to my house. A tree falling through my roof during a hurricaine-spawned thunderstorm didn't even cut it out).
extremely poorly engineered due to lax regulations
Proof? Or are you just making this up? It's pretty clear that you don't have an electrical background.
I've even done some re-writing of light fixtures in our house myself - no degree/license required!
And why should one be? Electrical work isn't brain surgery. There's a few key things to remember (turn off the bloody power before doing anything!), and if you don't meet code then you may be unable to sell your place. I've rewired much of my house -- mainly because the owners before me didn't know what the hell they were doing. But even if they had caused a short, that wouldn't have had any impact beyond the main electrical box of my own house. DIY wiring is not going to cause a blackout, or even a brownout -- at least not one more widespread than your house (ok, if you screw with your mains you could do some bad things to the transformer on the street, but, frankly, you're more likely to just wind up dead -- I don't screw with mains).
I guess I'm suggesting that assuming that all electric devices are built to handle unreliable power (brownouts, spikes etc.) is perhaps country specifc
Uh.... no.
Go read the technical specs for some electronic equipment sometime. Anything designed to be plugged into the wall -- regardless of country -- is going to have a fairly wide tolerance (generally x +/- 10%, where x is the nominal voltage for that country) because AC is simply not stable. Just turning on or off a high drain appliance (refrigerator, AC) will cause a dip or spike in the voltage. That's just the way it works.
When my buddy first told me about this exciting new RISC idea one of the design goals was each instruction was to take a single instruction cycle to execute. Isn't this completely contrary to a deep pipeline?
.
No, in fact pipelining is central to the entire concept of RISC.
In traditional CISC there was no pipelining and operations could take anywhere from 2-n cycles to complete -- at the very least you would have to fetch the instruction (1 cycle) and decode the instruction (1 cycle; no, you can't decode it at the same time you fetch it -- you must wait 1 cycle for the address lines to settle, otherwise you cannot be sure of what you're actually reading). If it's a NOOP, there's no operation, but otherwise it takes 1+ cycles to actually execute -- not all operators ran in the same amount of time. If it needs data then you'd need to decode the address (1 cycle) and fetch (1 cycle -- if you're lucky). Given that some operators took multiple operands you can rinse and repeat the decode/fetch several times. Oh, and don't forget about the decode/store for the result. So, add all that up and you could expect an average instruction to run in no less than 7-9 cycles (fetch, decode, fetch, decode, execute, decode, store). And that's all presuming that you have a memory architecture that can actually produce instructions or data in a single clock cycle.
In RISC you pipeline all of that stuff and reduce the complexity of the instructions so that (optimally) you are executing 1 instruction/cycle as long as the pipelines are full. You have separate modules doing the decodes, fetches, stores, etc. (and in deep-pipeline architectures, like the P4, these steps are broken up even more). This lets you pump the hell out of the clockrate since there's less for each stage of the pipeline to actually do.
Modern CPUs have multiple everything -- multiple decoders, fetchers, execution units, etc. so it's actually possible to execute >1 cycle/cycle. Of course, the danger to the pipelining is that if you branch (like when a loop runs out or an if-then-else case) then all those instructions you've been decoding go out the window and you have to start all over from wherever the program is now executing (this is called a pipeline stall and is very costly; once you consider the memory delays it can cost hundreds of cycles). Branch prediction is used to try and mitigate this risk -- generally by executing both branches at the same time and only keeping the one that turns out to be valid.
Was I wrong to laugh when I heard hardware manufacturers claim, "sure, we make a CISC, but it has RISC-like elements
Yes, because neither one exists anymore. CISC absorbed useful bits from RISC (like cache and pipelining) and RISC realized there was more to life than ADD/MUL/SHIFT/ROTATE (oversimplification of course). The PowerPC is allegedly a RISC chip, but go check on how many operators it actually has. And note that not all of them execute in one cycle. x86 is allegedly CISC, but, well... read on.
how wide are the Pentium 4 and Athlon microcode?
The x86 ISA has varying width. It's one of the many black marks against it. Of course, in reality, the word "microcode" isn't really applicable to most CPUs nowadays -- at least not for commonly used instructions. And to further muddy the picture both AMD and Intel don't actually execute x86 ISA. Instead there's a translation layer that converts x86 into a much more RISC-y internal ISA that's conducive to running at more than a few megahertz. AFAIK, the internal language is highly guarded by both companies.
If I am not mistaken the Transmeta was a very wide instruction word. And if I am not mistaken, doesn't that make it the opposite of a RISC?
Transmeta and Intel's Itanium use VLIW (very large instruction word) computing, which is supposed to make the hardware capable of executing multiple dependant or independant operations in one cycle. It does so by putting the onus on the compiler
Why can't we just include the dependancies? IS that so hard?
Good point, but it may actually be hard if your code is under a different license from a library you're using (namely, your code is more restrictive). But I'm not sure that's an issue either.
This breaks alot of programs and in an rpm system only one version of a library or program can be installed??
Well, there are ways around that. But if the program was linked against libfoo.so.a instead of libfoo.so.17.a then you're pretty well screwed.
This, BTW, is the exact same thing as "DLL hell" on Windows systems, where multiple copies of a DLL may be installed, or a program may rampantly overwrite the existing version with its own (even if it's older!). Same story, different name...
But still Its a bandaid solution for a big problem
Well, GenToo's emerge system is essentially the same as ports from what I understand. But you're right -- it's a bandaid solution. What's the real fix? I dunno. If programs were linked against the full name of their libraries (instead of the symlink/hardlink shortened name) then it'd probably fix itself. Package managers are certainly capable of telling when a library is still required by a package, and there's no reason to remove old versions of a library until it's no longer required. It'd take a lot of packages being reworked, and probably a lot of devtools as well (like autoconfig, automake, etc).
I need to write a compressed bitmap? Okay, then I include code to do so. I need to read a wav file ripped from a CD? Yup, my own code. Calculate an MD5? Inspired heavily on the RFC reference code, but essentially my own.
Man, I'm glad other industries aren't as stupid as the software engineering industry. Otherwise car manufacturers would have to have steel foundaries, cloth weaving, a slaughterhouse and tannery (for leather), and innumerable other ancillary businesses on site just to build a car. And, of course, everyone would have to know how to do absolutely everything.
What you're preaching is directly contrary to the practice of reusing code -- and not just your own. It's insane to reinvent the wheel every time you need to drive to the store -- but that's exactly what you're doing. It's one thing to understand the physics behind the wheel, or the foundary, or the paint shop. It's another to rebuild them from scratch.
I hope there's never a bug in your code... because if there is you're going to have to patch every single code base, and re-issue every single binary (since you prefer to link statically). All because you felt it was better to not trust others and do it yourself. Not to mention the vast amount of time burnt re-implementing that which already works, and works extremely well.
The code I'm working on uses a multitude of libraries -- STL, Boost (primarily for its shared_ptr's; we'd use more but much of it doesn't compile on our platform), OTL, libcurl, libxml, pcre, openssl, and others. In some cases we've ditched libraries and implemented our own solution (in particular, MQSeries, which sucked deeply). But to re-implement all of those libraries would literally add years to development. And to what purpose? To have a less feature complete, more buggy, less supportable code base?
And, yes, we've even used libraries sometimes when the library pretty much sucks. Case in point is cgicc, which we used because it's one of the few C/C++ libraries that interfaces "properly" with fastcgi. It's full of bugs, full of really idiotic #define's, and doesn't implement things quite right... but fixing it took much less time than rewriting it from scratch. Because it doesn't do everything wrong, and there's no reason to toss the baby out with the bath water.
No thanks. I'll happily replicate what's been done in every other scientific and engineering discipline -- to stand on the shoulders of giants while adding my own knowledge to the repository.
But when a package links against it for the sake of using a single function that the programmer could have reproduced in under ten lines of code... Well, that just screams "laziness" to me.
Sure. But that situation is pretty rare, at least among competent developers. If you're seeing that commonly, then you're using crap packages (and god knows there's a ton out there... I've ditched many packages because they had too many esoteric dependancies).
A HELOC, as with any other line of credit, is revokable upon change in status (like, oh say, becoming unemployed). Yes, banks generally don't notice this kind of thing, but if you got in serious trouble then things could become even worse when the bank finds out you failed to report a change of status prior to using the credit.
As it is, we pay roughly an additional 50% per month to pay down our principle... at going rates we probably have $80-100k in equity.
Really do need to better utilize the emergency fund money, but relying on a HELOC isn't what I'd want to do.
and why not, with the cost of a PS2/Xbox system less than just an average-quality video card
/.).
You can get an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro w/ 128MB for $120. That's more than a GameCube, but less than either system you mentioned.
Yes, that's only part of the system, but you can put together a very good system (AthXP 2500+, nForce2 MB, 512MB DDR3200, 40G HD, above video card, case, keyboard, mouse) for $525 ($617 once you include XP Home). Still much more than a console, but you can use it for a lot more than a console too. It'll also have better graphics, better networking capabilities, and can be used for things other than playing games (like posting on
Of course, there are advantages to consoles too. They're a hell of a lot easier to setup and maintain. There are some games that have never done well on a PC -- fighting games for example. If you have friends who come over to play then having 2-4 people play head-to-head or cooperatively on a console is a helluva lot easier than it is with PCs, and the games are designed toward it too.
Consoles are closing ground in some areas, particularly networking. But they'll forever have controller issues, since some games just do better with a keyboard/mouse setup (and while they may be available on consoles, they'll always be rare). They'll probably be behind in graphics as well, since the absolute limit (in the US) is 1080i or 720p, both of which are easily surpassed by PCs currently. And while they may initially push more polygons, evolving technology on PCs will always eclipse the consoles within 6-12 months.
I mostly game on PCs, but I do have a PS2 now and it's definitely better suited to some kinds of gaming. They each have their place, and I hope each continues to exist for a long, long time.
In a supposedly down economy, where people are losing jobs left and right, how do we come up with the cash and time to buy both PC games and consoles?
Uh, because not everyone is unemployed?
If you're unemployed then, yeah, buying a new game console (or a new gaming video card for your PC) might not be the smartest thing. Yeah, you won't be able to play Ninja Gaiden, or Doom3, or whatever, but that's really the least of your worries.
If you are employed, and have sufficient savings (my wife and I have enough savings for 6 months of unemployment with absolutely 0 income; I hope we never have to use it), then you can certainly "splurge" on a new toy.
Have you tried Ximian Evolution?
I've looked at it, but it's useless to me ATM because it's not available for Windows. My work box is Windows (despite the fact that I'm a Unix C++ developer) and that's not going to change -- too many company tools that I need to use that are Windows only. I suspect a vast number of others are in the same situation. I find it humorous that everyone immediately suggested Evolution -- with only a few people acknowledging the platform limitations.
PostgreSQL or mySQL and you are set...
Ok, I may hate Access with a burning passion (I do database programming as well, currently Oracle), but there's no way in hell that either of those are a replacement for it. Yes, they are both solid databases with more features (DB-wise) than Access, but they lack a front end -- which is what's critical to Access and makes it usable by hordes of people (and gets it misused as well).
Hmm, is Mozilla still free ?
Yup.
Now, let me know when Mozilla will do calendar, appointment book, task list, and email integration.
And before you flame me as a troll - I use Firefox at home and work and Thunderbird at home. Work requires I use Outlook, and it's because of those features that it has value. I don't find its email capabilities particularly wonderful by themselves, not to mention the slew of virus vulnerabilities (but that's ok, because we paid for, at a considerable expense, a mail server virus scanner). Despite the drawbacks there is very little that is actually competitive with Outlook/Exchange. And most of the alternatives (Notes, for example) suck even more. Yes, there are some OSS solutions out there as well, but they're not up to the same level in functionality as Outlook/Exchange. And that's a pretty sad statement.
Does this mean I might lose tech tv on my Directv satellite?
According to the splash on the G4 site it means that G4 will be expanded to "44 million cable and satellite homes nationwide". Given that currently all of 0 Dish or DirecTV homes currently receive G4 I'd guess that the merged G4/TechTV will simply replace TechTV.
I'd also guess that there will be no rate changes for providers until their contract runs out (however long the contract w/ TechTV was). At that point Comcast could try to gouge for G4, but lets be honest -- it's not a major selling point.
As these large companies such as Time Warner, Comcast etc., start buying up more interesting programming such as tech tv, I think we will start to see a homogenizing affect.
I agree. It's really absurd that the government is allowing vertical monopolies in the broadcasting realm. I suppose that, to a large extent, they always existed with the three major networks, but it certainly seems to be getting worse, not better. Recent FCC rulings in this realm haven't helped things either, particularly the ones that allow not only vertical monopolies (production to distribution) but horizontal ones (TV, radio, print all owned by the same company).
It would be nice if it were more like a discovery channel for tech stuff.
Er... TechTV is.
What, you think Discovery Channel (and its progeny) are hardcore science/history/etc.? Please. I enjoy a lot of programs on those channels, but I also know they're about as well respected by "serious" historians and in-field scientists as The Screen Savers is respected by real techies.
I don't know how much different the standard is for HDTV between different countries
Oh, that's simple.
The US has a HD digital broadcast standard.
The rest of the world doesn't.
And they're not adopting ATSC.
Japan has a high-definition standard, but it's analog based. Parts of Europe have digital broadcasting, but not HD. Both countries are looking into HD digital transmission standards, and have rejected ATSC already (Europe has just as much of a NIH syndrome as the US does; I'm not quite sure why Japan is looking at a different standard).
I'm sure if pros and the like don't have to choose between NTSC, PAL, and SECAM, there will also be quite a few happy people out there
The forthcoming format differences are likely to make the pros pine for the days when it was simpler. The only plus is that since it'll all be in a digital format initially anyway it'll be easier to convert to other formats.
Good technology (lasted 50 years), allowed the market, not the government, to push adaptation.
So, by the same analogy, the horse beats the everliving crap out of the car. It lasted several thousand (or tens of thousands) of years and allowed the market (not the government) to push adaptation. Of course, try and ride a horse down an interstate nowadays. Damn government!
Heck, I bet we won't be using automobiles even 1000 years from now! What a crappy invention.
Of course, you handily ignore that NTSC was government mandated. The broadcast spectrum certainly wasn't allocated by the market. And the primary cause for moving to HD is the same -- to reallocate the broadcast spectrum (which won't go for anywhere near as much as the government was hoping for, but it will still have some important societal benefits -- namely increasing the spectrum available to emergency services, which are seriously hurting).
You also ignore that the ATSC standard was put forth by a commercial consortium, not designed and dictated by the government. Yes, the government asked for a new, high-def, digital standard. And that was about it.
We will still be using ATSC in 50 years? Doubtful. At least not without a bunch of extensions. Technology is simply moving too fast for such things to remain stagnant so long.
The big deal is that if we really do find life that evolved separately from terran life, it throws a *huge* quandary for some philosophies and a lot of world religion
No it doesn't. Please... I'm an atheist, just finished beating down some bible thumper on another site for arguing that evolution was bunk, but the existence of microbial (or even non-intelligent macro) life wouldn't be a huge quandry.
In this case some religions could even use it as a pro-God point. Yes, there was life on Mars, but it was not favored by the Creator and thus died out.
Intelligent life elsewhere in the universe may cause a bump in religion (at least as far as Judeo-Christian-Muslim theology goes; most other religions aren't as self-centered), but I doubt even that would destroy it. Belief in a higher being (or beings) has been part of humanity since well before the written record. And, most importantly, the central concept of most religions is faith -- such that no reasoning for or against it can counter that faith.
I think the original poster in this thread had a great idea about transaction keys for authorization. In my case and with a credit card too, they would have gotten only 1 key and been only able to make one charge.
So then go get a card that allows you to do that. There are several on the market right now. I distinctly recall AmEx offering single-use faux card numbers (that tie back to your real card, but only through their system). They were touted as being used for "eCommerce", but there's no reason they wouldn't be accepted for any use.
There are also issues with reoccurring charges, with storing card numbers on merchant sites, with chargebacks (I'm sorry, that card number isn't authorized anymore...), and (most importantly) consumer education.
we're still paying to cover those losses through interest and other charges the credit card companies have.
Maybe you are. You know how much I've paid in interest and service fees in my life? $0. I don't carry a balance, I don't use cards that have annual fees, and when I have had an issue with a payment being applied late I've had the card company revoke the charge -- or else I'll revoke my use of their card. And, yes, I've been using credit cards for over a decade.
In that time I've had credit card fraud exactly once -- this last December. My wife and I noticed it at about the same time our card issuer did. Account closed, new card issued, end of story.
Well, hand-written checks do provide a hard copy signed piece of evidence that can be produced in court if necessary.
Not anymore. Very few checks are still processed manually anymore. Within 3-4 years that number will drop to zero. Instead the check is entered into an electronic system and the money is transferred by ACH. The physical check may never be used again and is often destroyed by the merchant at that point. In some cases the bank wants at least an electronic image of the check, but that's not required either.
On top of that, writing a check runs the risk of having the check washed and someone using the washed check to initiate either an ACH or just write bad checks on your account. Now you have all the dangers of some scumbag having your account number with none of the protections.
Write checks only when necessary. Credit cards are your absolute best bets for any kind of payment -- just be sure to pay them off in full every month. Consider them nothing more than an easier form of cash or check, not as an extension to your bank account.
And, yes, credit cards are better than paying with cash. If someone rips you off and you paid them with cash, what do you think your odds of ever getting your money back are?
I got double charged, at a pizza place incedentially, in one of those new "instant check" tranactions where they just use your checking account number to get your money.
Whoa.
Completely different from a credit card. Don't use "instant check" crap (frankly, don't use checks at all if you can help it) and don't use fake VISA/MC cards (the check cards, which are tied directly to your banking account). They don't have the same consumer protections that credit cards do. In the case of the former there's no requirements for any consumer protection whatsoever. Double charge? Too damn bad. Overcharge? That's nice. Bad information reported? Well, you can fight that one, but have fun! In all cases the consumer is presumed wrong and the system infallible. In the case of the check cards, most claim to have the protections of the credit cards, but they don't. Not really. If something is falsely charged to a check card they have up to 10 working days to resolve it. In the meantime, you're out the money -- hope you still have enough to cover your mortgage, car payment, etc. in the meantime. And if, after 10 days, they rule against you there's pretty much jack shit you can do at that point.
q[If not for the accountant at the pizza place I would have been forced to pay the extra money or have my credit rating ruined.]q
And if this had been a real credit card transaction then they would've had to show two distinct authorizations on the account. And most pizza places have you sign the credit swipe when you get your pizza, so they would've had to show two signatures as well. (And if they don't have you sign, well, then they better be prepared for a higher number of chargebacks from the credit card company). See the difference yet?
Which would you rather carry, this or this?
With the minor caveat that the first must actually work in the real world, while the latter only has to be sewn onto a zipperless jumpsuit.
Vocera need to have a conversation with the folk at Apple.
Well, I'm mad at Apple for not producing an 80GB iPod the size of my wristwatch. For minimal extra investment they could've had something that isn't so big and bulky and would actually hold my entire music collection. They clearly should've talked to the people at Paramount.
And where's my damn holodeck anyway?
a little calculation shows me I'm at least 500 miles away here in Toronto
Well, since you want to play the tinfoil hat game -- you're dead.
For a bioweapon to be truely effective it has to have a reasonable infection and transmission period -- followed by rapid death. If the transmission period is too short then it won't spread because carriers will die before they can infect others. (Which is why a lot of really nasty viruses, like Ebola, are rare and have small kill clusters). If a military grade bioweapon got out without warning then you run a high risk of being infected by someone on a plane. Want to avoid it? Move to a small town at least a couple hundred miles away from any large city. AKA - the middle of nowhere.
Alternately, you could actually do some research on BSL4 facilities. Do you think that researching things like hantavirus, Ebola, lyme disease, antibiotic resistant strains of strep and TB, and other contagious and (currently) incurable diseases isn't worthwhile?
Of course, you'll just tug your tinfoil cap on tighter and claim that all they're really doing is bioweapons research. Sure. Whatever.
No, I'm not claiming they don't do bioweapon research (particularly Fort Dietrich), but a lot of that research is in how to defeat enemy bioweapons. Or your own, for that matter. Bioweapons have a nasty habit of indiscriminantly infecting everyone -- not just your "enemy". Which is why they are technically illegal to use in warfare.
Then I saw that one was a bar that offered FREE BEER WITH EVERY PACKERS TOUCHDOWN and I was like... blisssssss... I'm there. It really *did* put the best results first.
Unfortunately they only run that promotion during the spring and summer...
For the good of the community :)
[...]
Results:
Slashdot's editors are facists.
Launch conditions were 48,500 feet and 125 knots. All systems performed as expected and the vehicle landed successfully while demonstrating the maximum cross wind landing capability.
If it's for the good of the community, then don't put in your personal opinion in the middle of the post.
There may have been more random crap in there, this was the first one I saw. Feel free to remod the karma whore appropriately.