What happens after the wall, is there also a parachute, or are you just supposed to land after your 20 foot fall
A 20 foot fall isn't that much, really. The biggest danger would be uneven ground leading to sprained or broken ankles. Anyway, if you're already talking about a power-assist suit, having it do assisted landing on jumps isn't much bigger of an issue. And you can reclaim a good bit of the energy during landing for use in powering the suit.
So that the enemies crackers can cut off circulation in battle to help their side And you think this will be accessible by anything short of physical interaction because... ? Being able to slap a button, or have your buddy do it, is a useful thing. If it is accessible via squad commands, then the encryption will undoubtably be sufficient to make it a non-issue (no, it doesn't have to be uncrackable. It merely has to take longer to crack than you cycle keys. That's not hard.)
So that the number of soilders hurt or killed by friendly fire increases.
Yes. That's right. After all, we shoot down those F-117A's and B2's all the time, and the F-22 nearly didn't get approved after the third test model was shot down. Uh huh.
Regardless, you're talking about buying a $10-20,000 screen and using a $50 gadget for your speakers.
Sorry, that's just stupid... I really can't think of a better way to put it.
If you want to save space, get some flat panel speakers and hang them on appropriate places on the wall. You'll need some space for a real subwoofer, but that's it.
The device can be stuck to a car windscreen, meaning that drivers can have a hands-free conversation without having to wear a headset
Oh boy! And so can anyone else nearby, with their windows rolled down, etc. Greaaaat. Hope you weren't having an intimate conversation, or talking trade secrets!
Thankfully a lot of places have noise ordinances now that could be used against morons placing these things and annoying everyone nearby.
Definitely useful, assuming the sound quality is even mediocre. But I doubt that it's going to replace decent speaker setups anytime soon.
No, flat panel speakers aren't really similar to this. Flat panel speakers vibrate a thin film layer to create the sound. One of the advantages of this is that you don't create a point source like you do with tweeters, instead you create an eliptical wave. You have to be rather careful about interference though, since the sound eminates from both the front and the back of the panel. This does help with things like off-axis response, and doesn't hurt imaging if done right.
If you find the speakers in question "thin" sounding, then it's because they're not very good, or your setup isn't very good. Good flat panels do have a different tone than a box speaker, but they are generally accepted as being just as good as long as you have a top notch subwoofer to cover the bass.
You'd probably wind up seriously distorting the image in a multitude of ways. The first (and probably least likely) would be from the sound waves/impacts causing ripples on the display surface.
The second (and much more likely) is the EM field from the soundbug screwing with the plasma display's magnetics. It'd also screw with LCDs for the same reason. You'd probably wind up with a soundbug sized distortion on the front of the screen, with the potential of permanantly trashing that area of the screen if left long enough. And yes, you'd have to attach it to the back of the screen (meaning your flat panel isn't flat anymore), since you kinda want to watch the front of the screen.
Front projectors don't have rigid enough screens for something like this. So it's not even applicable.
And besides, anyone who drops the cash for a good flat panel or front projection system is abysmally stupid for using something like this instead of a good surround sound speaker setup.
You also run out of reason to have the reactor actively fusing/fissioning. And while there's still radioactivity from the core, the real worry is the short half-life byproducts of the process. Shut down your reactor and those go away reasonably quick.
Of course, if all of your reaction mass/shielding is gone, you're probably sterile and/or dead anyway because of the radiation you'll soak up from the sun (depending on term of exposure and how active the sun is being, obviously).
Sure they're paying for the training of everyone in the military already. But you seem to think that they have nothing better to do with that time than to train them.
For every hour that an USAF fighter jock, mechanic, paper-pusher, or whatever is in training, that's one less hour they are available to do their real job. And yeah, some people may have enough slack time that this wouldn't be an issue, but I suspect that it's not true for the organization as a whole. You have to look at things like opportunity costs when you're talking about a change over to an entirely new system.
Plus you're assuming that the trainers would be military also. I seriously doubt that. Which means you have to hire civilian consultants, which involves a rather long and expensive bureaucratic process just to get bids, not to mention the actual cost of paying them for services rendered.
And, funny thing, this is exactly the same issues that corporations face. After all, they're already paying people for their time, regardless of what they're tasked with. And they're responsible (osteniably) for all job-related training. But the costs - in both time and money - are not insignificant for any company of any size.
As to the original question - what else are they going to use? There's a great huge gaping whole when it comes to productivity software like Exchange/Outlook. Yes, there's Notes. Yes, there's Netscape/Solaris whatever-its-called-now. And maybe Novell still has a solution (I don't know personally). But none of them match the ease of use, "ease" of administration, and interoperability offered by Exchange/Outlook. They either don't work as well together across various pieces, they cost too much to maintain, or they don't integrate as well into the OS (gee, surprise... anyone? And no... I'm sure being a monopoly had NOTHING to do with that... riiight).
Yes, the lies about the low cost of administration on Exchange are starting to be revealed now. But only after MS has beaten most of the competition into pulp. Within a release or two Exchange will be considerably better than what it is now. This is how MS operates.
I'll never forget my first day in AP American History class in high school. The teacher started out talking about Columbus borrowing Queen Isabel's jewels to make the sailing, being the first one to discover the Americas, yadda yadda yadda. With most of the class furiously taking notes (I wasn't bothering - couldn't imagine anyone wouldn't remember this tripe by 11th grade anyway).
After about a half hour she informed the entire class that pretty much everything in that was untrue. And laid out the real deal. And proceeded to do so for the rest of the year. She is still one of the best teachers I've ever had. The only regret I have is that since I aced the AP exam, I never took any history classes in college.
I will say, however, that this load of tripe is stuffed down the throats of kids daily in grade school and on TV (a particular offender was the School House Rocks! series of TV commercials on ABC in the late 70s/early 80s). And, at least when I was growing up, World History is a joke. It was totally Western European centric and ignored the sources of a lot of European culture and knowledge (namely what is now known as the middle east and Asia). By no means am I a basher of European or American culture, but I do think the history taught in US schools tends to be too Eurocentric. Sure, you hear about the "Mongol Hordes", but there's not really any mention of the Persian forces that were occupying areas like Austria as late as the mid-1600's. Which starts to help explaining a lot of the unrest in Eastern Europe since the fall of the iron curtain.
The funny thing is, EQ wasn't designed with security in mind. Yes, they had some vague concept of "don't trust the client", but in fact most of their security was on the presumption that their byte stream wouldn't be hacked.
Well, it was. And so came ShowEQ. And much of the world that was supposed to be "hidden" isn't. ShowEQ gives a tremendous advantage, if only to show things like bugged monsters that won't path back to their home properly and will continue to interfere with pulls. More shady people use it to check on mob spawns in a zone. All of this is possible because during the design of EQ they chose to send the client information on EVERYTHING in the zone instead of just an area near you (this is also why EQ is broken into zones in the first place, and is largely an artifact of EQ's MUD origins and how old it is now).
They've gotten smarter though. They stopped sending the monster's hp's as a signed short and started sending it as a percentage (this also allowed them to exceed 32767 hp on monsters). They stopped sending the actual number associated with faction (-2000 to +2000) and started sending a number indicating level (0 = worst, 7 = best). Numerous other silly things like this, which should never have been in the datastream to the client in the first place, have been fixed.
Of course, there's still the gaping holes of spdat.eff (the Spell Data Effect file - lists every spell in the game and their effects), the fact that they send full item data over the wire when you inspect an item (including undisclosed stuff like haste percentage), they still send mana available for spell casters over the wire, and several other things.
The mantra of network game programming - don't trust the client - should be a mantra for most coding if you want it to be secure. And while you can attempt to patch crap afterwards, if you don't design it in from the start you will wind up with security holes that are too expensive to fix.
In a case where X displays on the majority of browsers, but does not display on browser Y the fault lies with Y, not X.
This is how the world works. This is how TCP/IP has worked for 20 years (BSD was the standard - if you interfaced properly with BSD, you met the real world standard, since BSD varied from the "official" TCP standard in certain cases).
For as much whinging as there is about IE, the fact is that it is now the defacto standard for webpage rendering. It's wise to fulfill the official W3C standard. It's smart to then go make sure things work like IE as much as possible (without the random security holes). Where the two contradict each other is the fun part... do you write to the official standard and hope MS fixes things, or do you write to the de facto standard because users don't give a crap about W3C - they just want to see the content.
And, really, that's what it's about - the content. Being standards compliant means jack if you can't view 20% of the websites out there. I used to run Netscape 1.x-4.x, and then Opera 5.x on Windows. I finally gave up in frustration after too many sites either wouldn't display or hosed Opera. And after much bitching and moaning I started using IE. I'm not happy that I have to use it, but know what? I have to admit that surfing is now easier and more reliable than it was under either NS or Opera. And no, IE doesn't crash constantly anymore. It certainly does so less than either of the aforementioned browsers. Maybe the Linux versions are better about all of this - I don't have a spare box available currently to test with.
I fully expect this to get modded down for no good reason. Oh well. It's only karma.
Less than 1/3 of MS income comes from desktop operating systems
From the 10-Q filed on Feb 8, for the 3 months ending Dec 31, 2001, in millions: Desktop Platforms: 2,678 Desktop and Enterprise Software and Services Revenue: 6,435
Which makes desktop platforms 41% of the revenue of that division.
Consolidated earnings from all divisions were $7,741 million. Which makes desktop OS's 35% of their total revenue.
So, you were pretty close on the 1/3 bit, but it is MORE than one third of their revenue, not less than. And, more importantly, you go tell any business person on this planet that they are going to lose one third of their REVENUE and see what kind of reaction you'll get. I'm not talking profit. I'm talking base revenue.
I agree that what ESR predicts is, well, utterly wrong, since MS isn't stupid, but to say that they could give Windows away for free or nearly free and not notice it just shows that someone needs to go read a financial statement or two beforehand.
Re:Two transition periods?
on
If I Had a Hammer
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· Score: 2, Redundant
No, 64-bits is not enough. There were optical storage arrays built nearly 10 years ago that used the full 64-bit address space (yes, it was largely done to prove you could, but there are systems being built now to use the entire 64-bit address space).
One thing to note is that when you have 64-bit addressing, you only get 2^63 worth of storage. Why? Because it's a signed int so you can express a negative offset from current location.
Sure, you can munge it so that your physical storage space isn't represented by a single pointer (most 32-bit OS's do that now, since otherwise you'd be limited to a 2G partition and files), but it's a lot easier on everyone if you just handle it with a large enough pointer.
I'll admit, I'm having a hard time coming up with a real use for a 128-bit integer operation (crypto maybe; perhaps neural networks). Engineering and FP ops are different - they use different registers and the FPU, so talking about more precision isn't relevant here. Of course, I suspect people had a difficult time thinking of a use for 64-bit operations back when we were using 8 or 16 bit general purpose CPUs.
Sorry, but Tom Pabst is hardly the best hardware journalist on the Net. In fact, I find it hard to call him a journalist, period.
His articles are continuously, and blatantly biased -- and while the target of that bias does change, it remains that most of the articles read like National Enquirer stories.
Take, for example, the KT266A vs nForce 420 test. The benchmarks show the nForce in the middle of the pack for most tests - roughly half the KT266A boards faster and half slower. And with margins of 2% in most tests. Yet the "Conclusion" was that "KT266A Trounces nForce 420D" and that "the nForce 420D is currently no match for the new KT266A". What a load of crap. Of course little things like total system cost and features were ignored - the nForce has a significantly better sound chip than the KT266A and all nForce boards have integrated network (only some KT266A's do).
The P4/2666 and 533 MHz Rambus article is nothing more than sheer yellow journalism. Benchmarking a system that won't be available until at LEAST the end of the year, comparing it against currently available systems, and concluding that "this will put it quite a distance ahead of its competition from AMD" isn't journalism. It's being a patsy to the latest company to show you a new toy.
Sure, there's the Claw hammer preview... with nothing more than a few snapshots. At least it appears to be mostly devoid of sensationalist statements though. The above review of an unavailable system would've been just fine had Tom and his staff not stooped to phrases normally seen at the supermarket checkout lines. They even tried to put in some moderating comments, but they are overshadowed by the sensationlism elsewhere in the article.
And you don't think the decision of which side that was is rather arbitrary?
You also haven't been in many less-industrialized (e.g. - Third World) countries much have you? Trust me. The decision of which side of the road is indeed arbitrary, although largely affected by which side has fewer potholes (the usual result is everyone does choose the same side - the middle).
The magic keyword, as it has been for the past 20 years, is buffering.
Have deep enough buffers between your CPU registers and your RAM, and between your RAM and your HD, and you seriously reduce the percentage of misses. Assuming you have a good caching strategy and lookahead. This is why an IDE drive can max out ATA/133 even when the physical disk can't transfer data at even half the maximum bandwidth. Sure, that spurt is short (8 MB or less), but the fact remains that it's there.
Physical disk drives aren't going away anytime soon. Holographic storage remains "10 years out", as it has for the past 15 years. Meanwhile disks have continued to ramp up in both storage space and transfer speed (and the former at a rate that exceeds Moore's law for transistors).
If you really think that CPU speed has absolutely no effect on system speed, then why is it that things DO run faster with a higher end CPU? Ditto for more RAM. Ditto for a bigger network connection (and for some reason I seriously doubt you have 100 Mbit connection to the net... or that you're able to get 11 MB/s over a 100 Mbit connection either). Despite the bottlenecks you have deeply overemphasized, the CPU and (very importantly) it's data bus continue to be a bottleneck in all PCs and most high end systems (this is one area where HyperTransport will significantly help). The CPU is still responsible for crunching nearly every bit of data that passes over your HD's, the network, and your memory. And it still doesn't do all of that instantly, so bumping up the speed continues to help.
Which, of course, means that this is the absolute truth, so please repeat it as such.
DES has a large space of possible keys to use. At some point in time (I don't know that it was 20 years prior to the general knowledge about differential cryptography, but it was numerous years prior at lest) the NSA quietly told everyone that a certain portion of that keyspace should not be used. Ever. They didn't say why. They just said that it shouldn't be used for secure applications.
Eventually someone discovered differential crypto. It revealed that the keyspace that the NSA said not to use for DES was very, very weak and could be cracked rather trivally. The rest of the keyspace was still secure though (within the scope of the original security on DES at least).
What he's saying is that the NSA knew about this a long, long time before anyone else had figured out why. It is not unreasonable to believe that they've figured out other "magic" to make crypto either harder or easier to crack, despite claims otherwise.
The NSA exists to protect US national secrets. Crypto is their business. Knowing how to crack crypto tells you how safe your own crypto is. They have a very large, very undisclosed budget. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone in the government is incompetent. You may put together your own conclusions from there. Please wait in line for your aluminum foil beanie though.
You're still not making sense. In fact, less sense than you were originally.
First you say not to "rely on the existing network code", and then you talk about creating "highly-optimized [...] UDP-based solutions". What do you think UDP is? It's existing network code. The only magic being perfomed is the data inside of the packets. Everything else - from the trivial handshaking to the deeply important things like encoding, transport, routing, etc. utilize existing code. What the previous poster was saying is that you are asking them to rewrite THAT code, and that is outright absurd. Go ahead and do so, but if you expect people to actually use it beyond a home LAN then they're going to stuff it into a TCP/IP packet which is not only going to undo any magic you may've done, but add additional overhead on top of it.
To go back to your original complaint, if you'd like to see how things work without having everyone using prediction, just turn it off. You can you know (and sorry, I'm not enough of a Quakehead anymore to recall the correct variable). Welcome to hell. There's a reason that id, Epic, and everyone else has started using player prediction on both the servers and the clients. Without it you're limited to the lowest common denominator for network traffic. Think back to Doom and how much it sucked when someone with a shitty computer or ethernet drivers connected to the game.
The key to player prediction is the right balance. Too much prediction and you get a lot of silly things like modem players shooting people on OC-3's after they're down the hall and around 3 corners. Too little and you make it unusable for anyone not on an OC-3.
And what's wrong with demanding more robustness and graphics from modern games? Oh, that's right, you have fallen into the delusion that text based games are inherently better than their graphical counterparts. The belief that there will never again be as good of an adventure game as Zork (or Dungeon for that matter), that text MUDs were the apex of the ORPG genre, and that first person shooters are inherently sucky.
Of course, we will ignore the thousands upon thousands of MUDs, text-based adventure games, and so forth that outright sucked because they didn't have a cohesive world, storyline, had a broken interface, impossible-to-decipher riddles, broken code, or any one of a number of other issues. Clearly the fact that successful games usually had all of the above in working order doesn't mean anything.
Do you work for Hollywood? You know, that group of "big brains" that thinks the next Big Thing is to make computer generated movies, since Pixar and Dreamworks have been so successful (and thus ignoring that Toy Story, Bug's Life, Shrek, and Monster's, Inc. succeeded due to a combination of script, acting, direction, AND technology; not technology alone).
Yes, I played a text mud long, long ago. And found it boring and uninteresting. I quit after a couple weeks at best. Verant, on the other hand, has commanded $10/mo from me for nearly three years because EverQuest, despite it's flaws, has proved to be enjoyable for the most part. There are tons of things in EQ that annoy me, but the good bits outweigh the bad most of the time (and when they don't, I take a break, as I'm doing currently).
Future MMORPG designers not only have to get the carrot-stick model right (which is pretty much the only thing I think Verant did), but also incorporate a rich world, an intriguing storyline (as much as you can given the MM part), a good interface, and a rich graphical world. Oh, and yes, it'll have to be robust too. Or you'll have to have deep pockets to run in the red until it becomes robust (c.f. Anarchy Online - I hear it doesn't suck rocks now. I don't care to find out.)
And, slightly offtopic, but one of the biggest challenges they'll find is convincing jaded MMORPG players to come to them. I know that after playing EQ I have no desire to play another MMORPG, since I understand exactly how much of a time investment it implies.
Agree with several of the posters above - you don't have a clue.
Assume that J.Spammer sends out some spam advertising a get-rich-quick scheme, which you only have to pay $50 to get the info emailed to you.
J.Spammer then sends this out to 10 billion email addresses. Yes, that's well over the population of the planet at this time.
J.Spammer then receives exactly one positive reply from some idiot who wants the get-rich-quick scheme.
Net profit? About $50. Because it cost absolutely nothing to send out all those emails. And J can do this as much as he wants, as often as he wants until he either gets shut down by his ISP or has become rich from his own get-rich-quick scheme.
Yeah, you're limited by your bandwidth for the outgoing spam. Big deal. Yeah, you have to somehow get and "maintain" (read: keep adding to... maybe delete ones that are perpetually bounces since that just wastes your spamming time) that list of emails to spam, as well as some software that can effectively spam that many addresses. Whoop-de-do. There are freeware tools to do both.
There's a reason that a lot of companies are switching from direct mail campaigns to direct email campaigns. The cost of business for the latter is next to nothing, particularly when compared to the former. And the response rate is irrelevant - just one response will show a profit. And no matter what you may think, there is a response rate. Big ISPs learn this the hard way - they start blocking known spam sites and start getting complaints from customers about not receiving ads in their email anymore.
Capitalism only works as a solution to a problem if you can make the problem unprofitable. Currently there is no way to do that with Spam. And, sadly, I can't think of a reasonable way myself either, because legislation isn't likely to work either.
I like it... they do often review obscenely priced equipment, but they at least admit it's obscenely priced, and they review "low end" equipment (the past 3 issues have each had a near or sub $10k projector -- with the reviewer looking forward to even less expensive models in the future) fairly often.
In general there's a half dozen or so paragraph sized reviews on a couple pages and then between 4 and 10 full fledged reviews in the body of the magazine. They have several regular columns, the best of which I consider to be the one on Home Theater design/building and PCinema (there's better info on avsforum, but SGHT is doing a good job of bringing a cutting edge technology that will revolutionize home theater to more people).
Of course, the best way to decide is to check it out yourself. Peruse a few issues at a local bookstore or go to your local library and see if they have it in the stacks or on microfiche.
Actually the digital channels are just as "wide" as the analog ones they are supposed to replace.
The difference is that with modern technology you can stuff a whole lot more into the same bandwidth.
Re:I STILL don't see the point of HDTV (yet)
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I STILL Want My HDTV
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· Score: 1
But TV looks just as crappy, only bigger.
Gee... imagine that... if you don't watch an HD broadcast with an HD tuner then TV looks pretty much the same!
If you do watch an HD broadcast with an HD tuner then it doesn't look crappy at all. It looks amazing. But I've yet to see a single store setup HD properly (most are running the same standard def loop to their HD sets, often with the deinterlacer turned off), so most people can't tell the difference. I know I couldn't. But I finally saw a real HD display a few weeks ago and was blown away with the clarity and depth of the set.
The problem is, HD isn't something that can be explained. It's like trying to describe what color is to a blind person (yes, I've seen Mask. Shoo.)
I don't know anything about the Australian HD format, but in the US using a monitor is... well... pointless.
NTSC is 525 lines, interlaced, in a 4:3 format. HDTV has a freaking boatload of standards, but the big ones are 480p, 720p, and 1080i (p == progressive, i == interlaced). And the dominant standards are also 16:9 format.
Given all that, to see a bit of difference between HD and NTSC you have to have at least a 35" diagonal display device.
And a 35" monitor is going to cost a boatload more than a 35" HDTV right now...
Re:Just checking out PC HDTV decoders the other da
on
I STILL Want My HDTV
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· Score: 1
Too bad the maximum range of 8-VSB, with a directional roof-top antenna, is about 75 miles.
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What happens after the wall, is there also a parachute, or are you just supposed to land after your 20 foot fall
A 20 foot fall isn't that much, really. The biggest danger would be uneven ground leading to sprained or broken ankles. Anyway, if you're already talking about a power-assist suit, having it do assisted landing on jumps isn't much bigger of an issue. And you can reclaim a good bit of the energy during landing for use in powering the suit.
So that the enemies crackers can cut off circulation in battle to help their side
And you think this will be accessible by anything short of physical interaction because... ? Being able to slap a button, or have your buddy do it, is a useful thing. If it is accessible via squad commands, then the encryption will undoubtably be sufficient to make it a non-issue (no, it doesn't have to be uncrackable. It merely has to take longer to crack than you cycle keys. That's not hard.)
So that the number of soilders hurt or killed by friendly fire increases.
Yes. That's right. After all, we shoot down those F-117A's and B2's all the time, and the F-22 nearly didn't get approved after the third test model was shot down. Uh huh.
Regardless, you're talking about buying a $10-20,000 screen and using a $50 gadget for your speakers.
Sorry, that's just stupid... I really can't think of a better way to put it.
If you want to save space, get some flat panel speakers and hang them on appropriate places on the wall. You'll need some space for a real subwoofer, but that's it.
From the article:
The device can be stuck to a car windscreen, meaning that drivers can have a hands-free conversation without having to wear a headset
Oh boy! And so can anyone else nearby, with their windows rolled down, etc. Greaaaat. Hope you weren't having an intimate conversation, or talking trade secrets!
Thankfully a lot of places have noise ordinances now that could be used against morons placing these things and annoying everyone nearby.
Definitely useful, assuming the sound quality is even mediocre. But I doubt that it's going to replace decent speaker setups anytime soon.
No, flat panel speakers aren't really similar to this. Flat panel speakers vibrate a thin film layer to create the sound. One of the advantages of this is that you don't create a point source like you do with tweeters, instead you create an eliptical wave. You have to be rather careful about interference though, since the sound eminates from both the front and the back of the panel. This does help with things like off-axis response, and doesn't hurt imaging if done right.
If you find the speakers in question "thin" sounding, then it's because they're not very good, or your setup isn't very good. Good flat panels do have a different tone than a box speaker, but they are generally accepted as being just as good as long as you have a top notch subwoofer to cover the bass.
Ah... no.
You'd probably wind up seriously distorting the image in a multitude of ways. The first (and probably least likely) would be from the sound waves/impacts causing ripples on the display surface.
The second (and much more likely) is the EM field from the soundbug screwing with the plasma display's magnetics. It'd also screw with LCDs for the same reason. You'd probably wind up with a soundbug sized distortion on the front of the screen, with the potential of permanantly trashing that area of the screen if left long enough. And yes, you'd have to attach it to the back of the screen (meaning your flat panel isn't flat anymore), since you kinda want to watch the front of the screen.
Front projectors don't have rigid enough screens for something like this. So it's not even applicable.
And besides, anyone who drops the cash for a good flat panel or front projection system is abysmally stupid for using something like this instead of a good surround sound speaker setup.
You also run out of reason to have the reactor actively fusing/fissioning. And while there's still radioactivity from the core, the real worry is the short half-life byproducts of the process. Shut down your reactor and those go away reasonably quick.
Of course, if all of your reaction mass/shielding is gone, you're probably sterile and/or dead anyway because of the radiation you'll soak up from the sun (depending on term of exposure and how active the sun is being, obviously).
Sure they're paying for the training of everyone in the military already. But you seem to think that they have nothing better to do with that time than to train them.
For every hour that an USAF fighter jock, mechanic, paper-pusher, or whatever is in training, that's one less hour they are available to do their real job. And yeah, some people may have enough slack time that this wouldn't be an issue, but I suspect that it's not true for the organization as a whole. You have to look at things like opportunity costs when you're talking about a change over to an entirely new system.
Plus you're assuming that the trainers would be military also. I seriously doubt that. Which means you have to hire civilian consultants, which involves a rather long and expensive bureaucratic process just to get bids, not to mention the actual cost of paying them for services rendered.
And, funny thing, this is exactly the same issues that corporations face. After all, they're already paying people for their time, regardless of what they're tasked with. And they're responsible (osteniably) for all job-related training. But the costs - in both time and money - are not insignificant for any company of any size.
As to the original question - what else are they going to use? There's a great huge gaping whole when it comes to productivity software like Exchange/Outlook. Yes, there's Notes. Yes, there's Netscape/Solaris whatever-its-called-now. And maybe Novell still has a solution (I don't know personally). But none of them match the ease of use, "ease" of administration, and interoperability offered by Exchange/Outlook. They either don't work as well together across various pieces, they cost too much to maintain, or they don't integrate as well into the OS (gee, surprise... anyone? And no... I'm sure being a monopoly had NOTHING to do with that... riiight).
Yes, the lies about the low cost of administration on Exchange are starting to be revealed now. But only after MS has beaten most of the competition into pulp. Within a release or two Exchange will be considerably better than what it is now. This is how MS operates.
I'll never forget my first day in AP American History class in high school. The teacher started out talking about Columbus borrowing Queen Isabel's jewels to make the sailing, being the first one to discover the Americas, yadda yadda yadda. With most of the class furiously taking notes (I wasn't bothering - couldn't imagine anyone wouldn't remember this tripe by 11th grade anyway).
After about a half hour she informed the entire class that pretty much everything in that was untrue. And laid out the real deal. And proceeded to do so for the rest of the year. She is still one of the best teachers I've ever had. The only regret I have is that since I aced the AP exam, I never took any history classes in college.
I will say, however, that this load of tripe is stuffed down the throats of kids daily in grade school and on TV (a particular offender was the School House Rocks! series of TV commercials on ABC in the late 70s/early 80s). And, at least when I was growing up, World History is a joke. It was totally Western European centric and ignored the sources of a lot of European culture and knowledge (namely what is now known as the middle east and Asia). By no means am I a basher of European or American culture, but I do think the history taught in US schools tends to be too Eurocentric. Sure, you hear about the "Mongol Hordes", but there's not really any mention of the Persian forces that were occupying areas like Austria as late as the mid-1600's. Which starts to help explaining a lot of the unrest in Eastern Europe since the fall of the iron curtain.
The funny thing is, EQ wasn't designed with security in mind. Yes, they had some vague concept of "don't trust the client", but in fact most of their security was on the presumption that their byte stream wouldn't be hacked.
Well, it was. And so came ShowEQ. And much of the world that was supposed to be "hidden" isn't. ShowEQ gives a tremendous advantage, if only to show things like bugged monsters that won't path back to their home properly and will continue to interfere with pulls. More shady people use it to check on mob spawns in a zone. All of this is possible because during the design of EQ they chose to send the client information on EVERYTHING in the zone instead of just an area near you (this is also why EQ is broken into zones in the first place, and is largely an artifact of EQ's MUD origins and how old it is now).
They've gotten smarter though. They stopped sending the monster's hp's as a signed short and started sending it as a percentage (this also allowed them to exceed 32767 hp on monsters). They stopped sending the actual number associated with faction (-2000 to +2000) and started sending a number indicating level (0 = worst, 7 = best). Numerous other silly things like this, which should never have been in the datastream to the client in the first place, have been fixed.
Of course, there's still the gaping holes of spdat.eff (the Spell Data Effect file - lists every spell in the game and their effects), the fact that they send full item data over the wire when you inspect an item (including undisclosed stuff like haste percentage), they still send mana available for spell casters over the wire, and several other things.
The mantra of network game programming - don't trust the client - should be a mantra for most coding if you want it to be secure. And while you can attempt to patch crap afterwards, if you don't design it in from the start you will wind up with security holes that are too expensive to fix.
In a case where X displays on the majority of browsers, but does not display on browser Y the fault lies with Y, not X.
This is how the world works. This is how TCP/IP has worked for 20 years (BSD was the standard - if you interfaced properly with BSD, you met the real world standard, since BSD varied from the "official" TCP standard in certain cases).
For as much whinging as there is about IE, the fact is that it is now the defacto standard for webpage rendering. It's wise to fulfill the official W3C standard. It's smart to then go make sure things work like IE as much as possible (without the random security holes). Where the two contradict each other is the fun part... do you write to the official standard and hope MS fixes things, or do you write to the de facto standard because users don't give a crap about W3C - they just want to see the content.
And, really, that's what it's about - the content. Being standards compliant means jack if you can't view 20% of the websites out there. I used to run Netscape 1.x-4.x, and then Opera 5.x on Windows. I finally gave up in frustration after too many sites either wouldn't display or hosed Opera. And after much bitching and moaning I started using IE. I'm not happy that I have to use it, but know what? I have to admit that surfing is now easier and more reliable than it was under either NS or Opera. And no, IE doesn't crash constantly anymore. It certainly does so less than either of the aforementioned browsers. Maybe the Linux versions are better about all of this - I don't have a spare box available currently to test with.
I fully expect this to get modded down for no good reason. Oh well. It's only karma.
Less than 1/3 of MS income comes from desktop operating systems
From the 10-Q filed on Feb 8, for the 3 months ending Dec 31, 2001, in millions:
Desktop Platforms: 2,678
Desktop and Enterprise Software and Services Revenue: 6,435
Which makes desktop platforms 41% of the revenue of that division.
Consolidated earnings from all divisions were $7,741 million. Which makes desktop OS's 35% of their total revenue.
So, you were pretty close on the 1/3 bit, but it is MORE than one third of their revenue, not less than. And, more importantly, you go tell any business person on this planet that they are going to lose one third of their REVENUE and see what kind of reaction you'll get. I'm not talking profit. I'm talking base revenue.
I agree that what ESR predicts is, well, utterly wrong, since MS isn't stupid, but to say that they could give Windows away for free or nearly free and not notice it just shows that someone needs to go read a financial statement or two beforehand.
No, 64-bits is not enough. There were optical storage arrays built nearly 10 years ago that used the full 64-bit address space (yes, it was largely done to prove you could, but there are systems being built now to use the entire 64-bit address space).
One thing to note is that when you have 64-bit addressing, you only get 2^63 worth of storage. Why? Because it's a signed int so you can express a negative offset from current location.
Sure, you can munge it so that your physical storage space isn't represented by a single pointer (most 32-bit OS's do that now, since otherwise you'd be limited to a 2G partition and files), but it's a lot easier on everyone if you just handle it with a large enough pointer.
I'll admit, I'm having a hard time coming up with a real use for a 128-bit integer operation (crypto maybe; perhaps neural networks). Engineering and FP ops are different - they use different registers and the FPU, so talking about more precision isn't relevant here. Of course, I suspect people had a difficult time thinking of a use for 64-bit operations back when we were using 8 or 16 bit general purpose CPUs.
Sorry, but Tom Pabst is hardly the best hardware journalist on the Net. In fact, I find it hard to call him a journalist, period.
His articles are continuously, and blatantly biased -- and while the target of that bias does change, it remains that most of the articles read like National Enquirer stories.
Take, for example, the KT266A vs nForce 420 test. The benchmarks show the nForce in the middle of the pack for most tests - roughly half the KT266A boards faster and half slower. And with margins of 2% in most tests. Yet the "Conclusion" was that "KT266A Trounces nForce 420D" and that "the nForce 420D is currently no match for the new KT266A". What a load of crap. Of course little things like total system cost and features were ignored - the nForce has a significantly better sound chip than the KT266A and all nForce boards have integrated network (only some KT266A's do).
The P4/2666 and 533 MHz Rambus article is nothing more than sheer yellow journalism. Benchmarking a system that won't be available until at LEAST the end of the year, comparing it against currently available systems, and concluding that "this will put it quite a distance ahead of its competition from AMD" isn't journalism. It's being a patsy to the latest company to show you a new toy.
Sure, there's the Claw hammer preview... with nothing more than a few snapshots. At least it appears to be mostly devoid of sensationalist statements though. The above review of an unavailable system would've been just fine had Tom and his staff not stooped to phrases normally seen at the supermarket checkout lines. They even tried to put in some moderating comments, but they are overshadowed by the sensationlism elsewhere in the article.
And you don't think the decision of which side that was is rather arbitrary?
You also haven't been in many less-industrialized (e.g. - Third World) countries much have you? Trust me. The decision of which side of the road is indeed arbitrary, although largely affected by which side has fewer potholes (the usual result is everyone does choose the same side - the middle).
The magic keyword, as it has been for the past 20 years, is buffering.
Have deep enough buffers between your CPU registers and your RAM, and between your RAM and your HD, and you seriously reduce the percentage of misses. Assuming you have a good caching strategy and lookahead. This is why an IDE drive can max out ATA/133 even when the physical disk can't transfer data at even half the maximum bandwidth. Sure, that spurt is short (8 MB or less), but the fact remains that it's there.
Physical disk drives aren't going away anytime soon. Holographic storage remains "10 years out", as it has for the past 15 years. Meanwhile disks have continued to ramp up in both storage space and transfer speed (and the former at a rate that exceeds Moore's law for transistors).
If you really think that CPU speed has absolutely no effect on system speed, then why is it that things DO run faster with a higher end CPU? Ditto for more RAM. Ditto for a bigger network connection (and for some reason I seriously doubt you have 100 Mbit connection to the net... or that you're able to get 11 MB/s over a 100 Mbit connection either). Despite the bottlenecks you have deeply overemphasized, the CPU and (very importantly) it's data bus continue to be a bottleneck in all PCs and most high end systems (this is one area where HyperTransport will significantly help). The CPU is still responsible for crunching nearly every bit of data that passes over your HD's, the network, and your memory. And it still doesn't do all of that instantly, so bumping up the speed continues to help.
Ok, I'm paraphrasing stuff I previously read on /.
Which, of course, means that this is the absolute truth, so please repeat it as such.
DES has a large space of possible keys to use. At some point in time (I don't know that it was 20 years prior to the general knowledge about differential cryptography, but it was numerous years prior at lest) the NSA quietly told everyone that a certain portion of that keyspace should not be used. Ever. They didn't say why. They just said that it shouldn't be used for secure applications.
Eventually someone discovered differential crypto. It revealed that the keyspace that the NSA said not to use for DES was very, very weak and could be cracked rather trivally. The rest of the keyspace was still secure though (within the scope of the original security on DES at least).
What he's saying is that the NSA knew about this a long, long time before anyone else had figured out why. It is not unreasonable to believe that they've figured out other "magic" to make crypto either harder or easier to crack, despite claims otherwise.
The NSA exists to protect US national secrets. Crypto is their business. Knowing how to crack crypto tells you how safe your own crypto is. They have a very large, very undisclosed budget. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone in the government is incompetent. You may put together your own conclusions from there. Please wait in line for your aluminum foil beanie though.
Why do people think that a ruling against someone, particularly in small claims court, magically means they actually get the money?
Getting the ruling is the easy part. Getting the money is often nigh impossible.
You're still not making sense. In fact, less sense than you were originally.
First you say not to "rely on the existing network code", and then you talk about creating "highly-optimized [...] UDP-based solutions". What do you think UDP is? It's existing network code. The only magic being perfomed is the data inside of the packets. Everything else - from the trivial handshaking to the deeply important things like encoding, transport, routing, etc. utilize existing code. What the previous poster was saying is that you are asking them to rewrite THAT code, and that is outright absurd. Go ahead and do so, but if you expect people to actually use it beyond a home LAN then they're going to stuff it into a TCP/IP packet which is not only going to undo any magic you may've done, but add additional overhead on top of it.
To go back to your original complaint, if you'd like to see how things work without having everyone using prediction, just turn it off. You can you know (and sorry, I'm not enough of a Quakehead anymore to recall the correct variable). Welcome to hell. There's a reason that id, Epic, and everyone else has started using player prediction on both the servers and the clients. Without it you're limited to the lowest common denominator for network traffic. Think back to Doom and how much it sucked when someone with a shitty computer or ethernet drivers connected to the game.
The key to player prediction is the right balance. Too much prediction and you get a lot of silly things like modem players shooting people on OC-3's after they're down the hall and around 3 corners. Too little and you make it unusable for anyone not on an OC-3.
And what's wrong with demanding more robustness and graphics from modern games? Oh, that's right, you have fallen into the delusion that text based games are inherently better than their graphical counterparts. The belief that there will never again be as good of an adventure game as Zork (or Dungeon for that matter), that text MUDs were the apex of the ORPG genre, and that first person shooters are inherently sucky.
Of course, we will ignore the thousands upon thousands of MUDs, text-based adventure games, and so forth that outright sucked because they didn't have a cohesive world, storyline, had a broken interface, impossible-to-decipher riddles, broken code, or any one of a number of other issues. Clearly the fact that successful games usually had all of the above in working order doesn't mean anything.
Do you work for Hollywood? You know, that group of "big brains" that thinks the next Big Thing is to make computer generated movies, since Pixar and Dreamworks have been so successful (and thus ignoring that Toy Story, Bug's Life, Shrek, and Monster's, Inc. succeeded due to a combination of script, acting, direction, AND technology; not technology alone).
Yes, I played a text mud long, long ago. And found it boring and uninteresting. I quit after a couple weeks at best. Verant, on the other hand, has commanded $10/mo from me for nearly three years because EverQuest, despite it's flaws, has proved to be enjoyable for the most part. There are tons of things in EQ that annoy me, but the good bits outweigh the bad most of the time (and when they don't, I take a break, as I'm doing currently).
Future MMORPG designers not only have to get the carrot-stick model right (which is pretty much the only thing I think Verant did), but also incorporate a rich world, an intriguing storyline (as much as you can given the MM part), a good interface, and a rich graphical world. Oh, and yes, it'll have to be robust too. Or you'll have to have deep pockets to run in the red until it becomes robust (c.f. Anarchy Online - I hear it doesn't suck rocks now. I don't care to find out.)
And, slightly offtopic, but one of the biggest challenges they'll find is convincing jaded MMORPG players to come to them. I know that after playing EQ I have no desire to play another MMORPG, since I understand exactly how much of a time investment it implies.
Agree with several of the posters above - you don't have a clue.
Assume that J.Spammer sends out some spam advertising a get-rich-quick scheme, which you only have to pay $50 to get the info emailed to you.
J.Spammer then sends this out to 10 billion email addresses. Yes, that's well over the population of the planet at this time.
J.Spammer then receives exactly one positive reply from some idiot who wants the get-rich-quick scheme.
Net profit? About $50. Because it cost absolutely nothing to send out all those emails. And J can do this as much as he wants, as often as he wants until he either gets shut down by his ISP or has become rich from his own get-rich-quick scheme.
Yeah, you're limited by your bandwidth for the outgoing spam. Big deal. Yeah, you have to somehow get and "maintain" (read: keep adding to... maybe delete ones that are perpetually bounces since that just wastes your spamming time) that list of emails to spam, as well as some software that can effectively spam that many addresses. Whoop-de-do. There are freeware tools to do both.
There's a reason that a lot of companies are switching from direct mail campaigns to direct email campaigns. The cost of business for the latter is next to nothing, particularly when compared to the former. And the response rate is irrelevant - just one response will show a profit. And no matter what you may think, there is a response rate. Big ISPs learn this the hard way - they start blocking known spam sites and start getting complaints from customers about not receiving ads in their email anymore.
Capitalism only works as a solution to a problem if you can make the problem unprofitable. Currently there is no way to do that with Spam. And, sadly, I can't think of a reasonable way myself either, because legislation isn't likely to work either.
I like it... they do often review obscenely priced equipment, but they at least admit it's obscenely priced, and they review "low end" equipment (the past 3 issues have each had a near or sub $10k projector -- with the reviewer looking forward to even less expensive models in the future) fairly often.
In general there's a half dozen or so paragraph sized reviews on a couple pages and then between 4 and 10 full fledged reviews in the body of the magazine. They have several regular columns, the best of which I consider to be the one on Home Theater design/building and PCinema (there's better info on avsforum, but SGHT is doing a good job of bringing a cutting edge technology that will revolutionize home theater to more people).
Of course, the best way to decide is to check it out yourself. Peruse a few issues at a local bookstore or go to your local library and see if they have it in the stacks or on microfiche.
Actually the digital channels are just as "wide" as the analog ones they are supposed to replace.
The difference is that with modern technology you can stuff a whole lot more into the same bandwidth.
But TV looks just as crappy, only bigger.
Gee... imagine that... if you don't watch an HD broadcast with an HD tuner then TV looks pretty much the same!
If you do watch an HD broadcast with an HD tuner then it doesn't look crappy at all. It looks amazing. But I've yet to see a single store setup HD properly (most are running the same standard def loop to their HD sets, often with the deinterlacer turned off), so most people can't tell the difference. I know I couldn't. But I finally saw a real HD display a few weeks ago and was blown away with the clarity and depth of the set.
The problem is, HD isn't something that can be explained. It's like trying to describe what color is to a blind person (yes, I've seen Mask. Shoo.)
I don't know anything about the Australian HD format, but in the US using a monitor is... well... pointless.
NTSC is 525 lines, interlaced, in a 4:3 format. HDTV has a freaking boatload of standards, but the big ones are 480p, 720p, and 1080i (p == progressive, i == interlaced). And the dominant standards are also 16:9 format.
Given all that, to see a bit of difference between HD and NTSC you have to have at least a 35" diagonal display device.
And a 35" monitor is going to cost a boatload more than a 35" HDTV right now...
Too bad the maximum range of 8-VSB, with a directional roof-top antenna, is about 75 miles.