id software runs a keyserver for all their games and 3rd party games that use the same key technology (mainly to prevent piracy, your key is similar to your userid/password. but it comes printed on your CD case). They could simply check the operating system used when authenticating the key since everyone who playes the game online must authenticate with the keyserver.
Since quake3 was a multiplayer only game, this would work great. return to castle wolfenstein is a single and multiplayer game, but most people that bought it bought it for multiplayer, so this could work just as well. the id keyserver could record to which key which operating system is attached, and gain data like that.
This might not show everyone, but itl be damn well better data than the numbers id got from their Q3 release non-simultaneously for PC/Mac/Linux. that is for damn sure.
"But I want an MP3 file, i.e., a non-propriatary file format, that I can do whatever I want with it."
If you want a non-propriatary format that you can do whatever you want with, certaintly don't go with MP3.
If you want CD Quality, download CD quality audio. Downloading an MP3, burning it, then ripping it, then converting to MP3 is worse than spinning analog tapes generationally.
There are non-lossy audio formats that exist. Shorten format can compress audio on average to 1/2 its origional size. This may not seem like much, but its enough in today's world. There are also other formats that are royalty free that do lossless compression at very good ratios such as 1/2 or even 1/3 (though, I forgot their name, but one or two do exist).
MP3, OGG, WMA, RA, etc.. were all designed to be the final product in your audio device, not the end user's master copy. If you purchase music in lossy-compressed format, you are buying less quality than you could purchase in full quality. these formats were ment for end users to rip/encode for usage in other technology, and for convenience. Sure, its good for downloading, but not when you have to pay real hard earned cash for low quality audio. What if you want to use your purchased MP3 to put in your low memory mp3 player? You must convert the 256+kbps stream into something closer to 128 or less in order to fit a decent amount of audio on the 64MB memory stick. If you do that with MP3, you are screwed. Ogg has capability to do this without generational loss, however it is not fully supported in current implementations.
In closing, if you pay money for MP3's et al, you are getting shafted because there are alternative higher quality formats for the same royalty prices. Maybe when the RIAA decides to package everything in compressed (and by that time, probably encrypted as well) format, then and only then will that be the highest quality available for consumers. Untill then, I'm sticking with uncompressed songs for my master copy.
Re:The sysadmins sound so... disturbing.
on
Largo Loving Linux
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· Score: 2
"Republicans are about saving money in government while providing necessary services."
Republican's dream for a "smaller government" has you so blinded you can't see your hand in front of you. When a Republican says big government, they mean social programs that help the poor and tax everybody (yea, the richer get taxed more by design).
When a Republican says small government, they mean more jails for small time fealonies and misdameanors, increased spending on the war against the American people(read: DEA et al), and less money to help the little guy (no college scholarships, no healthcare for elderly and poor children, etc.), all while raising taxes for the middle class to pay for the war against themselves, and more complicated tax law to allow for tax breaks for the wealthy (all while increasing the cost overhead of taxation).
Thats right folks, Republican's dream for a smaller government means more taxes for the poor and less for the rich. Increase government employment, spending, and beaurocracy to benefit large corporations and wealthy white christians. All while decreasing vital social programs that help the poorest people survive their daily lives. When a Republican talks about smaller government, he speaks about less restrictions on monopolies and guns(thats where they come up with "smaller"), and more restrictions on the little guy (such as outlawing harmless plants and mushrooms, or making it illegal to watch a DVD on Linux, and then spending billions of dollars a year on enforcement and jailtime).
If you disagree with this, that's fine. But rest assured that this is exactly what happens when Republicans get into office and try to make smaller government.
Don't lie to yourself, if you want smaller government, why don't you think about cutting costs where it hurts the budget the most and which causes the least negative impact on society. Do you honestly believe that the war on drugs has benefited society? Do you honestly believe that less restriction on coporations at the expense of society is good? Do you honestly believe that complicating the laws restricting personal freedoms (ex: DMCA) to keep failed businesses around another few years to line Republican's pockets is beneficial to society, or even "smaller" government???
"but you'll have to point out said posts if you really want to make your point, instead of generalizing about it"
If you don't agree with his premise about slashdot moderation, you probably don't know what you are talking about. If you don't read slashdot enough to be able to recall the posts he speaks of, then you are not informed/qualified enough on this topic to have this discussion listing all these (arguably obviouls) truisms.
If, on the other hand, you don't agree his argument is valid, say so. Don't go off putting words into his mouth about generalizing. When someone posts something that is factual, and you don't agree with it, that is not the definition of "invalid" or "generalization".
While uninformed and unsound arguments such as yours might seem right to people that don't know any better, they still degrade the quality of the world.
"That's like the crack dealer saying it's the addicts fault."
That's like starbucks saying it's the drinker's fault.
I'm not a crack dealer, but I can assure you it's not the dealer's fault that one of his customers is addicted. It's not like these people are forcing it down their throats on school playgrounds. Shit man, you are one of those "war on drugs needs to be extended to the death penalty" types of people. But you don't even realise that it costs our country more money, manpower, resources than any other government program in existance.
You sir are just uninformed about marijuana. Sure, if you smoke it like people smoke cigarettes a pack a day, you would be quite a loser. But no loser is going to be able to afford $100/day on marijuana.
The worst thing marijuana does in the long term is to your lungs. And that is less than cigarettes (according to european studies. It is illegal to study marijuana medically or scientifically by anybody other than the government in the United States [which is next to nothing])
The brain cell damage has been considered negligable when compared to alcoholism. And the "dumbness" of marijuana has been studied to wear off in ~less than 2 weeks for an addicted person after he/she quits. The worst symptom of marijuana use is overeating, oversleeping, and impared concept of time. Short term memory is affected, but only during usage (restored within 2 weeks of non-usage).
To top it all off, there is no scientific evidence of permanent brain damage due to the usage of marijuana, and there is no scientific evidence of percentage of brain cells that are damaged. Anybody that is telling you it kills brain cells is probably right, but it is not backed up by any form of medical or scientific data.
"This cpu only saves power when there is no processing to be done."
I am under the impression this CPU scales its clock and voltage depending on the load it is given. If the CPU is running at low load (say 10%), it throttles the clock down and lowers the voltage to predefined discrete clocks untill the CPU is under heaver load (say, 50%), but at lower clock, and thus less wasted cycles and lower power.
For instance, what about a corporoate server farm that serves to all its employees/customers. Normal business hours are certaintly going to be heavy load, but what about at night, where the servers must still be available, but only a few requests now and then are needed? what if you have a website that uses 10 servers for DB/web/cache (like slashdot) that is at 80% load during the day, but 5% load during the night hours(I'm don't really know what./'s load looks like, these numbers are just examples).
I'm not a server admin, so bear with me. I don't really know how you could expect all your CPU's to be loaded all of the time?
You are so right about the AC Adapters. Same goes for 12V Car adapters it goes from 12vDC-> AC -> 12vDC, ridiculous.
Solar power is interesting. It solves so many problems, but produces so many (smaller but overwhelming) more. the AC/DC problem is a big one, and to my knowledge there really isn't a "good" fix for it. Someone needs to sell quality ATX PSU's that run off DC current. Then we could start running server farms off solar power!!
"the deal with laptops is the stupid adapters waste watts converting the juice, tons of waste heat off those things."
I have seen DC->DC laptop power supplies(for cars 12v DC powersource), but they are all designed to specific laptops, so not all laptop models are supported. check http://www.fedco-electronics.com they make/sell a few.
"1) For desktop systems power is cheap and readily available and 2) For most desktop systems, the CPU consumes a small fraction of the entire system power. Even the fastest P4 uses like 70 watts, where the entire system might consume something like 250-350 watts. So even if we reduced the CPU wattage to zero, we still would only get about a 1/4 or less improvement in overall system power. "
Ohhhh Kayyy...I'll have to go ahead and... disagree with you on that... yea...
Joking aside:
1) My parents own a house out in the woods that we go to sometimes to stay. It has no electricity. The only power available is solar energy and a generator. What if I want a desktop computer, or more than one, up there? I suppose I could use a laptop. but still, this machine is going to have more features and possibly better power management and definately use less power. When your household has a maximum # of watts you can use at any given time, then this becomes a BIG issue.
2)Do you think it is financially viable to have 1, 2, 3, more 70W light bulbs running continuously inside your house? Unless you have a grow room full of dank bud, I would hope not. So that 70W could be saved while the CPU is idle, or half idle, or 1/4 idle... (which is nearly 100% of the time). My household has 5 computers combined, 3 of which run 24/7. It woud be nice for them to use CPU power only when needed. (The same principle holds true to your energy star monitor that goes into sleep mode and "instantly" wakes up upon use). After all power saving features are enabled while in idle state (fans slowed, monitor sleeps, hard drives spin down, cpu slows, etc..) that 300W just turned into 10-50W, somewhat like a nightlight. When under half load, sure, the HDD spins up, monitor uses 20-300W (CRT v LCD) but you can still reduce the electricity used even while you USE the machine. If you are word processing, and you have 3 cpu's running in your house, you could be using 10W per cpu insted of 70W per cpu.
Other uses are in the server room. Obviously, TCO is a big concern, and the electrical bill is a very very large part of the TCO. Remember, the Crusoe CPU was designed and is marketed mainly because of this exact feature.
"Can you effeciently farm out quake/UT/Morrowind/Maple/Matlab/etc to multiple processors?"
The answer is yes... sortof...
Quake/UT are 3d First Person Shooter games. This means that as far as the client side goes (Joe sixpack's computer) there is no immediate advantage. Most processing power is done on rendering in real time, which can't be done on more than one host (however, its still possible to do it on more than one video card, or multiple CPU systems in SMP mode).
However, on the Quake/UT server side, everything changes. Most of the multiplayer games are limited by 1) network bandwidth and 2) cpu power when it comes to scaling (limits usually around ~32 users). Battlefield 1942 (kindof like RTCW) is an excellent example of a game that could dramatically imporve by distributed computing. For one thing, that game's server is dramatically CPU limited. You can't get more than ~32 clients(out of a 64 person max) out of a server with acceptable results, even on a 100Mbit switched LAN. However, if you could distribute out the server, have maybe 2, 3, 20 servers, each in charge of 1/2, 1/3, 1/20th of the users in the game (sortof like IRC chat) then you could successfully scale to any # of users without having any CPU scaling issues. I think everquest might have a hint of this type of technology.
I don't know the answer about things like Maple or Matlab, but I'm pretty sure they could at least take advantage of distributed computing a little. (again, depends on how you use it)
This isn't a troll, just a general observation about ticketmaster as a company.
My latest experience with them, trying to buy phish tickets, ended up in disaster. Not only did ticketmaster manage to sell out of their 60,000 tickets (spread over 4 days of shows for phish on dec 31,jan1,2,3) in just under 30 minutes to nobody except scalpers via their main website. The claim is that no tickets were sold to anybody anywhere except via credit card through the website, no phone orders, no walk in's. Yet the website was unavailable the entire 30 minute period, yet they still sold all their tickets? This isn't the only time this has happened, just the most recent for me.
If you get advice from ticketmaster, take it with a grain of salt. They can't even sell tickets properly and legit. They don't know how to run a high load web server, and they don't even bother to attempt to spread the load out. anybody that would treat their multimillion dollar contracts as that unimportant as to not have a properly working website is not going to give you sound advice.
My advice? If you want open source advice, don't ask people that don't even know how to run a website.
Assuming when he says "vector" he means "way" of infection, which is a direction, or pathway, then yes, it is a vector. Wether or not the magnitude is 1, 0, or any other number doesn't matter. Even if it has no magnitude (0), it can still be a vector. In one dimension, vectors are represented without direction, only magnitude(or, one might say, it is represented with a direction AND magnitude, if you count the negative sign as direction and magnitude as only positive values).
If the above doesn't convince you, lets look deeper into the problem. The definition of "vector" says...
vector (vek'ter) n.
1. Mathematics.
a. A quantity, such as velocity, completely
specified by a magnitude and a direction.
b. A one-dimensional array.
c. An element of a vector space.
2. Pathology. An organism, such as a mosquito or tick, that carries disease-causing microorganisms from one host to another.
3. Genetics. A bacteriophage, plasmid, or other agent that transfers genetic material from one cell to another.
4. A force or influence. 5. A course or direction, as of an airplane.
So definition #5 is one vector without magnitude. But more interestingly, definition #2 is yet another likely meaning for his usage of "vector" in the parent post. Both definitions would be gramatically correct, opposite what you are implying.
"Who wants to spend Christmas afternoon downloading Windows drivers??"
What is the difference in downloading drivers for Windows, or drivers for Mac? Answer: nothing. both must be downloaded. both must be installed. You obviously don't know the actual difference between the two platforms. Oh well.
vi vs. emacs.. gee, let me think, emacs is a POS, its like comparing a piece of shit with something that doesn't smell like ass. emacs even has the word MAC in it, which also signifies that its fucking shit (like the iMac). I don't see how there could be a war between 2 things that aren't even remotely relevant to eachother...
GNOME v KDE? gime a break, SUN is the only people that are using GNOME. Nobody gives a fuck about it. if it weren't for redshit and sun, GNOME would have died before 2.0, like it should have.
anybody that doesn't believe the above is a fucking moron.
"You had to open the case to do this. And now that oxygen has entered the case, the device will detect that you have tampered with it and will refuse to play copy-restricted media. "
Simple: use a lazer and detector to detect the movement of the cone. If you buy the highest quality device that will play the music, you can get an exact copy with whatever resolution/precision you need(provided you have a sufficiently high quality lazer and detector). This exact copy could be run through algorithms yet to be developed that will produce music stream that makes the same speaker make the same exact movements to the desired precision. You could use an evolving feedback loop to generate a perfect signal, in which you would read the data once with the lazer, encode it, feed it back through, noticing the differences, and work from there. This would take time being that each feedback session would last the entire time of the music being played, but it is still do able and with somewhath inexpensive equipment( relative to high end stero recording equipment and microphones).
"Back in the day when G3's came out, G3's were legitimately beating PII chips at the same clock at virtually every benchmark. The G3-500Mhz could squarely trounce a PIII-650Mhz in non-Photoshop benchmarks. It was a good time to be a mac users;) *remenisce*"
While I agree with the first half, it still wasn't a "good time to be a mac user". You see, when they were beating the PII clock for clock, the G3 that Apple sold was ~1/2 the clock for the same price as a PII. So you were paying more for half the clock, but slightly better performance/clock. In the long run, you still paid more. When the PII 450MHz came out, the fastest G3 was ~300MHz.
Then Apple started publishing all these Photoshop benchmarks to alter the results. Even though the PII at 450MHz beat the G3 at 300MHz in almost everything, Apple started publishing benchmarks with a Dell v. Apple where a 450MHz dell with IDE and 128MB ram lost to a G3 with 256MB ram and SCSI hard drives where the G3 won only photoshop benchmarks, and only the ones that were memory or disk intensive. So apple proudly published these 2 DISK and RAM benchmarks, and concluded "yep, the G3 is faster" then went on a publishing spree for these results... all this while the G3 computer they were showing costed about 2x as much as the Dell in the benchmark.
What's trollish about this? It's just a name, You are the troll, and anybody with half a brain could see it. you post anonymously because you don't want to look like even more of a fucking jackass. oh well...
BTW, go READ the link I posted. Or, maybe you did, and that's why you don't wanna "dig up reports" cos there aren't any. idiot.
You sir are wrong. But you can think what you like. Telephone tech support ends at 90 days. You can extend it via Apple Care Protection Plan to 3 years. (OOPS, I MADE A MISTAKE, I SAID 30 DAYS, BUT IT IS ACTUALLY 90 DAYS!!! sue me)
Proof that you are a posting incorrect and inflamatory information with your +2 bonus:
"You can use this telephone assistance for 90 days from the date of purchase for most Apple products. Please be prepared to provide the product's serial number." apple.com
I'm sorry you are wrong, but you are. Shit happens, and it doesn't always happen to the right people (then again, sometimes it does:)
Go dig up your reports, Apple computers come with 90 days telephone support. CC# required thereafter. Read your warranty. Call up tech support. See what they say. Don't misrepresent what is reality.
"The rest of your post had several obvious flaws in it, but I'm ignoring those"
Care to point out the problems? There are no "obvious flaws" in my post. Everything technical listed is accurate and unslanted. If there are some spelling or gramatical errors I missed, I'm sorry. If you can't back up your statements, then why bother posting?
Just thought I would point out some inacuracy in your statements about iMac vs low end x86 hardware. After reading this post, I hope you will be convinced that the iMac hardware is not superior, or even comparable to equivilently priced x86 hardware...
"The monitor on the iMac is way way way sharper, and edges and corners can be used."
You can buy a $150 monitor off the street that does 1024x768 at 85+ Hz refresh. The iMac monitor (the best CRT iMac) can only do 1024x768 at 70Hz. Get a clue, 70Hz is NOT USEABLE!!!! Go talk to your eye doctor and he will tell you straight out that the iMac CRT is not safe to use at its highest resolution. (I did, he told me to avoid anything less than 80Hz, though most people I know try to get above 90)
The iMac CRT is effectively limited to 800x600, which is a joke for a modern machine.
"The built in speakers on the iMac while they suck suck less then the speakers on the PC. I expect the sound hardware on the iMac is better too, but I don't know 'cause the speakers on the PC hide it."
It is doubtfull that the iMac speakers suck less than the PC ones. You can purchase any type of speakers for the PC you want, as well as for the mac. I will admit the iMac built in speakers are among the top for quality of default speakers in all-in-one's, they are NOT superior to most name brand[dell/gateway] OEM's default external speakers. As far as the sound hardware, that all depends on the machine you buy. I can say for sure that you can get better sound with a PCI card in a PC for ~$50 than the iMac will offer in the near future. Though, the possibility exists to have an external sound device (ie, SB Extigy, etc..) that interfaces via USB port. These types of devices are the only possibility of high quality/features sound in an iMac. These devices also START at $200 price point.
"I don't see a reason the hard drive on the Mac would work better..."
I don't either. In fact, the iMac hard drive is a 5400RPM drive to keep heat and noise down. In most x86 systems, the hard drive is cooled properly by having airspace near it, and/or having it mounted on thick metal which is part of the chasis to dissipate the heat(unlike the iMac), and operates farther away from the user (noise constraints), so it is a 7200RPM drive with much much much more performance (the G4 towers offer 7200RPM drives as well, but you are comparing an iMac, and so am I)
"I don't see a reason the [RAM] on the Mac would work better..."
I don't either. In fact, on the iMac, it uses SDR SDRAM. On the CRT mac, it is a 64 bit 100MHz bus. I believe on the LCD, it is 133MHz 64bit bus. It's hard to find a 100MHz bus on modern x86 hardware today, and PC133 is on its way out the door. Most x86 machines have 100MHz or 133MHz 64bit DDR memory (effectively 64bit at 200 or 266MHz) or more even at the sub $999 price point.
The rest of your post seems somewhat correct, though slanted. I guess that is what happens when people that don't know much about hardware get really vocal about it. Oh well...
As for support calls, FYI, Apple charges your CC if you want to call their tech support line if the machine is older than 30 days. Even for hardware failures (they refund the CC if they later determine it was actually a failed piece of hardware). BTW, that is also the worst end user support in the industry.
Slashdot Mirror
id software runs a keyserver for all their games and 3rd party games that use the same key technology (mainly to prevent piracy, your key is similar to your userid/password. but it comes printed on your CD case). They could simply check the operating system used when authenticating the key since everyone who playes the game online must authenticate with the keyserver.
Since quake3 was a multiplayer only game, this would work great. return to castle wolfenstein is a single and multiplayer game, but most people that bought it bought it for multiplayer, so this could work just as well. the id keyserver could record to which key which operating system is attached, and gain data like that.
This might not show everyone, but itl be damn well better data than the numbers id got from their Q3 release non-simultaneously for PC/Mac/Linux. that is for damn sure.
"But I want an MP3 file, i.e., a non-propriatary file format, that I can do whatever I want with it."
If you want a non-propriatary format that you can do whatever you want with, certaintly don't go with MP3.
If you want CD Quality, download CD quality audio. Downloading an MP3, burning it, then ripping it, then converting to MP3 is worse than spinning analog tapes generationally.
There are non-lossy audio formats that exist. Shorten format can compress audio on average to 1/2 its origional size. This may not seem like much, but its enough in today's world. There are also other formats that are royalty free that do lossless compression at very good ratios such as 1/2 or even 1/3 (though, I forgot their name, but one or two do exist).
MP3, OGG, WMA, RA, etc.. were all designed to be the final product in your audio device, not the end user's master copy. If you purchase music in lossy-compressed format, you are buying less quality than you could purchase in full quality. these formats were ment for end users to rip/encode for usage in other technology, and for convenience. Sure, its good for downloading, but not when you have to pay real hard earned cash for low quality audio. What if you want to use your purchased MP3 to put in your low memory mp3 player? You must convert the 256+kbps stream into something closer to 128 or less in order to fit a decent amount of audio on the 64MB memory stick. If you do that with MP3, you are screwed. Ogg has capability to do this without generational loss, however it is not fully supported in current implementations.
In closing, if you pay money for MP3's et al, you are getting shafted because there are alternative higher quality formats for the same royalty prices. Maybe when the RIAA decides to package everything in compressed (and by that time, probably encrypted as well) format, then and only then will that be the highest quality available for consumers. Untill then, I'm sticking with uncompressed songs for my master copy.
"Republicans are about saving money in government while providing necessary services."
Republican's dream for a "smaller government" has you so blinded you can't see your hand in front of you. When a Republican says big government, they mean social programs that help the poor and tax everybody (yea, the richer get taxed more by design).
When a Republican says small government, they mean more jails for small time fealonies and misdameanors, increased spending on the war against the American people(read: DEA et al), and less money to help the little guy (no college scholarships, no healthcare for elderly and poor children, etc.), all while raising taxes for the middle class to pay for the war against themselves, and more complicated tax law to allow for tax breaks for the wealthy (all while increasing the cost overhead of taxation).
Thats right folks, Republican's dream for a smaller government means more taxes for the poor and less for the rich. Increase government employment, spending, and beaurocracy to benefit large corporations and wealthy white christians. All while decreasing vital social programs that help the poorest people survive their daily lives. When a Republican talks about smaller government, he speaks about less restrictions on monopolies and guns(thats where they come up with "smaller"), and more restrictions on the little guy (such as outlawing harmless plants and mushrooms, or making it illegal to watch a DVD on Linux, and then spending billions of dollars a year on enforcement and jailtime).
If you disagree with this, that's fine. But rest assured that this is exactly what happens when Republicans get into office and try to make smaller government.
Don't lie to yourself, if you want smaller government, why don't you think about cutting costs where it hurts the budget the most and which causes the least negative impact on society. Do you honestly believe that the war on drugs has benefited society? Do you honestly believe that less restriction on coporations at the expense of society is good? Do you honestly believe that complicating the laws restricting personal freedoms (ex: DMCA) to keep failed businesses around another few years to line Republican's pockets is beneficial to society, or even "smaller" government???
Get real, buddy.
"but you'll have to point out said posts if you really want to make your point, instead of generalizing about it"
If you don't agree with his premise about slashdot moderation, you probably don't know what you are talking about. If you don't read slashdot enough to be able to recall the posts he speaks of, then you are not informed/qualified enough on this topic to have this discussion listing all these (arguably obviouls) truisms.
If, on the other hand, you don't agree his argument is valid, say so. Don't go off putting words into his mouth about generalizing. When someone posts something that is factual, and you don't agree with it, that is not the definition of "invalid" or "generalization".
While uninformed and unsound arguments such as yours might seem right to people that don't know any better, they still degrade the quality of the world.
"You don't find that sort of variety just anywhere."
:)
Yea I do.
"That's like the crack dealer saying it's the addicts fault."
That's like starbucks saying it's the drinker's fault.
I'm not a crack dealer, but I can assure you it's not the dealer's fault that one of his customers is addicted. It's not like these people are forcing it down their throats on school playgrounds. Shit man, you are one of those "war on drugs needs to be extended to the death penalty" types of people. But you don't even realise that it costs our country more money, manpower, resources than any other government program in existance.
You sir are just uninformed about marijuana. Sure, if you smoke it like people smoke cigarettes a pack a day, you would be quite a loser. But no loser is going to be able to afford $100/day on marijuana.
The worst thing marijuana does in the long term is to your lungs. And that is less than cigarettes (according to european studies. It is illegal to study marijuana medically or scientifically by anybody other than the government in the United States [which is next to nothing])
The brain cell damage has been considered negligable when compared to alcoholism. And the "dumbness" of marijuana has been studied to wear off in ~less than 2 weeks for an addicted person after he/she quits. The worst symptom of marijuana use is overeating, oversleeping, and impared concept of time. Short term memory is affected, but only during usage (restored within 2 weeks of non-usage).
To top it all off, there is no scientific evidence of permanent brain damage due to the usage of marijuana, and there is no scientific evidence of percentage of brain cells that are damaged. Anybody that is telling you it kills brain cells is probably right, but it is not backed up by any form of medical or scientific data.
I'm not sure I follow..
./'s load looks like, these numbers are just examples).
"This cpu only saves power when there is no processing to be done."
I am under the impression this CPU scales its clock and voltage depending on the load it is given. If the CPU is running at low load (say 10%), it throttles the clock down and lowers the voltage to predefined discrete clocks untill the CPU is under heaver load (say, 50%), but at lower clock, and thus less wasted cycles and lower power.
For instance, what about a corporoate server farm that serves to all its employees/customers. Normal business hours are certaintly going to be heavy load, but what about at night, where the servers must still be available, but only a few requests now and then are needed? what if you have a website that uses 10 servers for DB/web/cache (like slashdot) that is at 80% load during the day, but 5% load during the night hours(I'm don't really know what
I'm not a server admin, so bear with me. I don't really know how you could expect all your CPU's to be loaded all of the time?
You are so right about the AC Adapters. Same goes for 12V Car adapters it goes from 12vDC-> AC -> 12vDC, ridiculous.
Solar power is interesting. It solves so many problems, but produces so many (smaller but overwhelming) more. the AC/DC problem is a big one, and to my knowledge there really isn't a "good" fix for it. Someone needs to sell quality ATX PSU's that run off DC current. Then we could start running server farms off solar power!!
"the deal with laptops is the stupid adapters waste watts converting the juice, tons of waste heat off those things."
I have seen DC->DC laptop power supplies(for cars 12v DC powersource), but they are all designed to specific laptops, so not all laptop models are supported. check http://www.fedco-electronics.com they make/sell a few.
"1) For desktop systems power is cheap and readily available and
2) For most desktop systems, the CPU consumes a small fraction of the entire system power. Even the fastest P4 uses like 70 watts, where the entire system might consume something like 250-350 watts. So even if we reduced the CPU wattage to zero, we still would only get about a 1/4 or less improvement in overall system power.
"
Ohhhh Kayyy...I'll have to go ahead and... disagree with you on that... yea...
Joking aside:
1) My parents own a house out in the woods that we go to sometimes to stay. It has no electricity. The only power available is solar energy and a generator. What if I want a desktop computer, or more than one, up there? I suppose I could use a laptop. but still, this machine is going to have more features and possibly better power management and definately use less power. When your household has a maximum # of watts you can use at any given time, then this becomes a BIG issue.
2)Do you think it is financially viable to have 1, 2, 3, more 70W light bulbs running continuously inside your house? Unless you have a grow room full of dank bud, I would hope not. So that 70W could be saved while the CPU is idle, or half idle, or 1/4 idle... (which is nearly 100% of the time). My household has 5 computers combined, 3 of which run 24/7. It woud be nice for them to use CPU power only when needed. (The same principle holds true to your energy star monitor that goes into sleep mode and "instantly" wakes up upon use). After all power saving features are enabled while in idle state (fans slowed, monitor sleeps, hard drives spin down, cpu slows, etc..) that 300W just turned into 10-50W, somewhat like a nightlight. When under half load, sure, the HDD spins up, monitor uses 20-300W (CRT v LCD) but you can still reduce the electricity used even while you USE the machine. If you are word processing, and you have 3 cpu's running in your house, you could be using 10W per cpu insted of 70W per cpu.
Other uses are in the server room. Obviously, TCO is a big concern, and the electrical bill is a very very large part of the TCO. Remember, the Crusoe CPU was designed and is marketed mainly because of this exact feature.
"Can you effeciently farm out quake/UT/Morrowind/Maple/Matlab/etc to multiple processors?"
The answer is yes... sortof...
Quake/UT are 3d First Person Shooter games. This means that as far as the client side goes (Joe sixpack's computer) there is no immediate advantage. Most processing power is done on rendering in real time, which can't be done on more than one host (however, its still possible to do it on more than one video card, or multiple CPU systems in SMP mode).
However, on the Quake/UT server side, everything changes. Most of the multiplayer games are limited by 1) network bandwidth and 2) cpu power when it comes to scaling (limits usually around ~32 users). Battlefield 1942 (kindof like RTCW) is an excellent example of a game that could dramatically imporve by distributed computing. For one thing, that game's server is dramatically CPU limited. You can't get more than ~32 clients(out of a 64 person max) out of a server with acceptable results, even on a 100Mbit switched LAN. However, if you could distribute out the server, have maybe 2, 3, 20 servers, each in charge of 1/2, 1/3, 1/20th of the users in the game (sortof like IRC chat) then you could successfully scale to any # of users without having any CPU scaling issues. I think everquest might have a hint of this type of technology.
I don't know the answer about things like Maple or Matlab, but I'm pretty sure they could at least take advantage of distributed computing a little. (again, depends on how you use it)
This isn't a troll, just a general observation about ticketmaster as a company.
My latest experience with them, trying to buy phish tickets, ended up in disaster. Not only did ticketmaster manage to sell out of their 60,000 tickets (spread over 4 days of shows for phish on dec 31,jan1,2,3) in just under 30 minutes to nobody except scalpers via their main website. The claim is that no tickets were sold to anybody anywhere except via credit card through the website, no phone orders, no walk in's. Yet the website was unavailable the entire 30 minute period, yet they still sold all their tickets? This isn't the only time this has happened, just the most recent for me.
If you get advice from ticketmaster, take it with a grain of salt. They can't even sell tickets properly and legit. They don't know how to run a high load web server, and they don't even bother to attempt to spread the load out. anybody that would treat their multimillion dollar contracts as that unimportant as to not have a properly working website is not going to give you sound advice.
My advice? If you want open source advice, don't ask people that don't even know how to run a website.
If the above doesn't convince you, lets look deeper into the problem. The definition of "vector" says...
vector (vek'ter) n.
1. Mathematics. 2. Pathology. An organism, such as a mosquito or tick, that carries disease-causing microorganisms from one host to another.
3. Genetics. A bacteriophage, plasmid, or other agent that transfers genetic material from one cell to another.
4. A force or influence.
5. A course or direction, as of an airplane.
So definition #5 is one vector without magnitude. But more interestingly, definition #2 is yet another likely meaning for his usage of "vector" in the parent post. Both definitions would be gramatically correct, opposite what you are implying.
that is a seperate issue, the main issue has to do with the metal case surrounding the antenna..
"Who wants to spend Christmas afternoon downloading Windows drivers??"
What is the difference in downloading drivers for Windows, or drivers for Mac? Answer: nothing. both must be downloaded. both must be installed. You obviously don't know the actual difference between the two platforms. Oh well.
"sitting here with my wireless iBook.... Works great."
;-)
Good thing you don't have a wireless TiBook. 20-50ft and its out of range (YMMV). Though, Apple won't admit it
(this is not an apple troll, do not moderate this message)
vi vs. emacs.. gee, let me think, emacs is a POS, its like comparing a piece of shit with something that doesn't smell like ass. emacs even has the word MAC in it, which also signifies that its fucking shit (like the iMac). I don't see how there could be a war between 2 things that aren't even remotely relevant to eachother...
GNOME v KDE? gime a break, SUN is the only people that are using GNOME. Nobody gives a fuck about it. if it weren't for redshit and sun, GNOME would have died before 2.0, like it should have.
anybody that doesn't believe the above is a fucking moron.
"You had to open the case to do this. And now that oxygen has entered the case, the device will detect that you have tampered with it and will refuse to play copy-restricted media. "
Simple: use a lazer and detector to detect the movement of the cone. If you buy the highest quality device that will play the music, you can get an exact copy with whatever resolution/precision you need(provided you have a sufficiently high quality lazer and detector). This exact copy could be run through algorithms yet to be developed that will produce music stream that makes the same speaker make the same exact movements to the desired precision. You could use an evolving feedback loop to generate a perfect signal, in which you would read the data once with the lazer, encode it, feed it back through, noticing the differences, and work from there. This would take time being that each feedback session would last the entire time of the music being played, but it is still do able and with somewhath inexpensive equipment( relative to high end stero recording equipment and microphones).
I'm with you man... this chick isn't even hot. I don't see what is the big deal, especially since she uses a fucking POS mac. get real.
NOTE: NATB (not a troll, bitches)
"The field of cosmology is a bust, and is never likely to produce anything..."
Such harsh comments coming from an IT Guru.
I guess your infinite experience in the cosmology field has brought you to this conclusion, or are you just too stupid to know any better?
"Back in the day when G3's came out, G3's were legitimately beating PII chips at the same clock at virtually every benchmark. The G3-500Mhz could squarely trounce a PIII-650Mhz in non-Photoshop benchmarks. It was a good time to be a mac users ;) *remenisce*"
While I agree with the first half, it still wasn't a "good time to be a mac user". You see, when they were beating the PII clock for clock, the G3 that Apple sold was ~1/2 the clock for the same price as a PII. So you were paying more for half the clock, but slightly better performance/clock. In the long run, you still paid more. When the PII 450MHz came out, the fastest G3 was ~300MHz.
Then Apple started publishing all these Photoshop benchmarks to alter the results. Even though the PII at 450MHz beat the G3 at 300MHz in almost everything, Apple started publishing benchmarks with a Dell v. Apple where a 450MHz dell with IDE and 128MB ram lost to a G3 with 256MB ram and SCSI hard drives where the G3 won only photoshop benchmarks, and only the ones that were memory or disk intensive. So apple proudly published these 2 DISK and RAM benchmarks, and concluded "yep, the G3 is faster" then went on a publishing spree for these results... all this while the G3 computer they were showing costed about 2x as much as the Dell in the benchmark.
Hope this gives people the rest of the truth.
hahah
Go look at the FAQ, you can't change usernames.
What's trollish about this? It's just a name, You are the troll, and anybody with half a brain could see it. you post anonymously because you don't want to look like even more of a fucking jackass. oh well...
BTW, go READ the link I posted. Or, maybe you did, and that's why you don't wanna "dig up reports" cos there aren't any. idiot.
I just realised i've been trolled. Fuck Me.
You sir are wrong. But you can think what you like. Telephone tech support ends at 90 days. You can extend it via Apple Care Protection Plan to 3 years. (OOPS, I MADE A MISTAKE, I SAID 30 DAYS, BUT IT IS ACTUALLY 90 DAYS!!! sue me)
Proof that you are a posting incorrect and inflamatory information with your +2 bonus:
"You can use this telephone assistance for 90 days from the date of purchase for most Apple products. Please be prepared to provide the product's serial number." apple.com
I'm sorry you are wrong, but you are. Shit happens, and it doesn't always happen to the right people (then again, sometimes it does:)
Go dig up your reports, Apple computers come with 90 days telephone support. CC# required thereafter. Read your warranty. Call up tech support. See what they say. Don't misrepresent what is reality.
"The rest of your post had several obvious flaws in it, but I'm ignoring those"
Care to point out the problems? There are no "obvious flaws" in my post. Everything technical listed is accurate and unslanted. If there are some spelling or gramatical errors I missed, I'm sorry. If you can't back up your statements, then why bother posting?
"Really? Are you high?"
:)
sorry, yes
Just thought I would point out some inacuracy in your statements about iMac vs low end x86 hardware. After reading this post, I hope you will be convinced that the iMac hardware is not superior, or even comparable to equivilently priced x86 hardware...
"The monitor on the iMac is way way way sharper, and edges and corners can be used."
You can buy a $150 monitor off the street that does 1024x768 at 85+ Hz refresh. The iMac monitor (the best CRT iMac) can only do 1024x768 at 70Hz. Get a clue, 70Hz is NOT USEABLE!!!! Go talk to your eye doctor and he will tell you straight out that the iMac CRT is not safe to use at its highest resolution. (I did, he told me to avoid anything less than 80Hz, though most people I know try to get above 90)
The iMac CRT is effectively limited to 800x600, which is a joke for a modern machine.
"The built in speakers on the iMac while they suck suck less then the speakers on the PC. I expect the sound hardware on the iMac is better too, but I don't know 'cause the speakers on the PC hide it."
It is doubtfull that the iMac speakers suck less than the PC ones. You can purchase any type of speakers for the PC you want, as well as for the mac. I will admit the iMac built in speakers are among the top for quality of default speakers in all-in-one's, they are NOT superior to most name brand[dell/gateway] OEM's default external speakers. As far as the sound hardware, that all depends on the machine you buy. I can say for sure that you can get better sound with a PCI card in a PC for ~$50 than the iMac will offer in the near future. Though, the possibility exists to have an external sound device (ie, SB Extigy, etc..) that interfaces via USB port. These types of devices are the only possibility of high quality/features sound in an iMac. These devices also START at $200 price point.
"I don't see a reason the hard drive on the Mac would work better..."
I don't either. In fact, the iMac hard drive is a 5400RPM drive to keep heat and noise down. In most x86 systems, the hard drive is cooled properly by having airspace near it, and/or having it mounted on thick metal which is part of the chasis to dissipate the heat(unlike the iMac), and operates farther away from the user (noise constraints), so it is a 7200RPM drive with much much much more performance (the G4 towers offer 7200RPM drives as well, but you are comparing an iMac, and so am I)
"I don't see a reason the [RAM] on the Mac would work better..."
I don't either. In fact, on the iMac, it uses SDR SDRAM. On the CRT mac, it is a 64 bit 100MHz bus. I believe on the LCD, it is 133MHz 64bit bus. It's hard to find a 100MHz bus on modern x86 hardware today, and PC133 is on its way out the door. Most x86 machines have 100MHz or 133MHz 64bit DDR memory (effectively 64bit at 200 or 266MHz) or more even at the sub $999 price point.
The rest of your post seems somewhat correct, though slanted. I guess that is what happens when people that don't know much about hardware get really vocal about it. Oh well...
As for support calls, FYI, Apple charges your CC if you want to call their tech support line if the machine is older than 30 days. Even for hardware failures (they refund the CC if they later determine it was actually a failed piece of hardware). BTW, that is also the worst end user support in the industry.