"Effectively it only means that people with contracts preceding the portability tax can have their rate increased without an opportunity to be relieved from their contract. That sucks, I'm sure it adds up to a lot of money, but it's still only transitional, and ultimately I think that finite and limited amount of money will be worth it for consumers, even if it isn't fair."
1) The contracts make no difference. EVERY customer of most providers will be charged this fee, whether they know it or not. It was written into the law that the providers will add the fee to the bill after the price has been agreed upon. Check your cell phone bill, there is an additional regulatory fee on it. The law explicitally allows the providers to advertise $39.99 and then charge your CC $48.
2) This problem isn't only part of the "pre-portability era" people. This is another law that adds "regulatory" fees to bills. These are fees added to the bill that were not negotiated during contract signing. These are fees that the government grants the provider to collect directly into their own pockets. In other words, the cost of providing their services are tacked onto the sale price you already negotiated.
3) this is not a transitional fee. it is not finite. and it is not limited. The law is explicit in that the fee will be perpetual and not expire once providers have moved over. The fee will be added to everyone's bills even after the database upgrades are paid for.
4) You can't shop for providers in the US based on who charges the most reg. fees. There are no national providers who allow sales people to quote the actual cost of regulatory fees. In fact, it is the policy of AT&T Wireless and most other national providers (if not all) to lose a new customer before telling him his actual regulatory fee cost. This new law is what gives them that right which they normally would not have. This is why it is a regulatory fee, and not part of the advertised price. Because they advertise 39.99, and charge ~50.
The fees are price fixed by the largest providers.. They set the high fees, and drop the price of their monthly plans. Then smaller operations must match those fees in order to keep their advertised prices competative. This is EXACTLY why this law was lobbied FOR by the largest providers, not AGAINST (as much as they claim they don't like it)
It all boils down to the larger providers strongarming the mass public into thinking they are paying 39 dollars when they are actually paying $49. Once that is accomplished, every other provider (whose margins are already even thinner) must either:
- Follow suit - Come up with a completely new model that beats theirs somehow - or - - Go out of business
"This law is going to shake up the industry. You may even see one or two wireless carriers going under as a result. They've been predicting for years that the 5 major carriers would eventually boil down to 3. This may be the catalyst to make that happen."
Until consumer rights laws which: - Disallow SIM Locking on cellphones - Disallow lengthly contracts - Disallow Price fixing on handsets - Disallow Price fixing on roaming
are passed, the cellular providers will all win. The above bulleted items are only allowed in north america, and only because of hard lobbying by the providers.
In any other continent, you go to a cell phone store and buy phones OUTRIGHT, no plans to go with it, no contracts, you simply BUY the phone (at usually half of US MSRP price), then you call up a carrier of your choice start service. They give you a SIM and you stick it in your phone, boom, instantly it works. if you don't like their service after a few months, switch providers. Swap your your SIM card with a prepaid card from another provider, go to another country? Buy a prepaid SIM from that country and pay 5-10c/minute insted of 2$/minute.
Around here, cellular providers lock the handsets to their SIM card so you cannot take a handset from one provider to another, even if they use the same exact handset. Don't be fooled by some salesperson's claims that "the radio is 'optimally tuned' to our frequency" because that is just a load of BS. if you are using a GSM phone in the United States, consumer rights laws basically say you will get assraped by your provider. If you go overseas with a GSM Phone purchased within the United States, you can be sure that it will be useless because of the SIM card lock in place on the phone. You will be required to pay $2+/minute roaming charges for usage on your US Provider's sim card.
Number portability isn't gonna do anything except give cellular providers more revenue (they add 2$ to everyone's bill, on top of all other fees and taxes already being charged) and more customers. People won't be switching cellular providers fast, they will simply stay loyal to the providers that have been assraping them for their entire cellular lives.
This whole number portability has been a joke, whoever wrote the law must be in the pockets of the big 5. Free revenue, with negligable costs added in database management. there is NO network upgrade requirement. They don't have to go to each tower and hang new transmitters. they simply add a few tables to a fucking database sitting in their corporate bunker. and it costs them $2/month to do that per customer? perpetually? until the end of time? Just wait until they pass laws which disallow SIM locking, is that gonna cost us another $2/month regulatory hidden fee?
note: this is a rant, but facts presented are true.
The Linux Kernel explicitly allows you to distribute binary-only drivers with the kernel. This is an exception to the GPL that the Linux Kernel contains in its copyright clause.
Re:In about three months
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DVD-Rs go 8x
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There is no "plus" consortium. DVD+R(W) is wholely owned, patented, and dictated by sony.
Expose is so cool.. Its nice to know that we can finally switch between tasks with a single click of the mouse (and a quick press+hold of the function key)...
Now we are only 8 years behind the pesky windows taskbar.
SPOILER: Machines using humans for electricity...
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The Matrix: Resolutions
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The whole plot about the purpose of having humans in pods "generating" electricity for the machines was never explained.. The laws of thermodynamics do not allow for this, and that is why the movie seems to not be closed completely for me...
I believe there was another purpose for the matrix.. that purpose being for the humans and machines to live on earth in peace. The arthitect was trying to balance an equation which couldn't be balanced, and the oracle trying to unbalance it.. It was a power struggle between the programs within the matrix, and a freedom struggle by the humans.
But the idea that the humans were generating electricity is proposterous. I have said it since the begining of the Matrix series.. and I'll say it again. The laws of physics do not allow humans to generate enough electricity to even grow plants to feed themselves, much less have excess power to power the machines. There MUST be some alternative source of power... At maximum, if the power extraction worked at 100% efficiency, and plant growing worked at 100% efficiency (that is, ALL electricity produced was converted to light which grew plants) then there would be exactly enough food to go around for the people that were already alive. There would be no way to reproduce, and no way to have excess electricity.
I have heard arguments that the machines figured out quantum physics, etc.. but if they did that, why not have nuclear power generators? Why not have solar pannels in space? why not move to Mars? These questions all prove that humans were not needed to generate electricity...
Others tell me that is just a plot hole that I have to deal with, but if it is, then somebody didn't even attempt to do their homework. There are THOUSANDS of ways more efficient and easier to generate electricity without the sun than to harvest humans in pods. Yet so many people still think that is why the humans were inserted into the matrix. bogus.
That being said, where are all the machines in the real world? There are sentinels and crop growers, but these were all there to maintain the matrix. What about all the other mahcines that roam the world? Did they still exist? Or did the machines insert every program into the matrix so humand and machines could occupy the world together without conflict?
I think the whole idea they are trying to get across is theological. There are 2 worlds, the physical world, and the machine world (matrix). Just like before christ, there were 2 worlds, the supernatural (god[s]) world(s), and the natural (human/physical) world.
I believe there will be some more matrix movies.. not necessarilly named "matrix" but something else. I think the era of the matrix is ended in Revolutions, which is why the title is named such...
These are just all IMO... Please comment and argue and disagree:)
Apple appears to do more quality testing on their hard drives in that since Apple started shipping Macs with IDE drives, I have had two failures. Compare this with Wintel boxes like Dells where I have had close to ten IDE drive failures.
I'd be willing to bet... you deal with 5x as many Wintel boxes as you do apples..
Maybe you just don't know what you are talking about.. Apple uses the same exact Western Digital and Maxtor hard drives that dell, gateway, sony, ibm, compaq, whitebox uses. They come from the same factory, from the same companies, and are tested the same by the MFG. There is nothing you can say that will convince anyone with a clue that apple "tests" their IDE hard drives more than the competition. They use the EXACT SAME Model numbers. Your statements are just ridiculous.
This is starting to change with fast SATA drives however and I am looking forward to some new options with the G5.
You mac fanboys are all the same.. SATA is integrated in a variety of motherboards nowadays, and from a variety of OEM's systems (namely, Dell, but who cares about the names, its there and has been for a long time). And your maximum of 2 SATA drives per G5 system is a huge limitation. The thing is a $3,000 workstation for crying out loud. it's physically larger than any Dell systems... And only 2 HDD slots MAXIMUM.
In the end, you used the hard drive performance discussion to spout off idiotic fanboy comments about the mac that don't show anything beneficial for the platform. You could have explained how easy the OS is to use, or how high performance the new CPU is.. but insted you tried to take a stab at the Mac's superior storage capability... Here's a hint.. it isn't superior in this reguard. and hasn't been for a loooong time.
Re:Idiocy - bluetooth just taking off
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Is Bluetooth Dead?
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While this is partially true, you still must purchase a phone from cingular to use the service.. Cingular SIM's wont work in T-Mobile or ATT phones etc etc..
(or buy an unlocked phone overseas in asia) Only place I have seen unlocked phones in the US is on the black market.
Re:Idiocy - bluetooth just taking off
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Is Bluetooth Dead?
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"Really? It's certainly possible to buy pre-pay SIMs without a handset."
Mind pointing me to a provider that will sell you a prepaid sim?
Re:Idiocy - bluetooth just taking off
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Is Bluetooth Dead?
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I don't know what kind of phone sales person you friend talked to when he got his GSM phone, but around here we don't sell GSM only phones to people worried about coverage. We have tri-band TDMA/GSM GAIT phones for such customers where data is imprtant, and voice is even more. TDMA is already everywhere, and you probably didn't pickup your GSM signals because most roaming agreements for the GSM providers havn't been completed. I know it sounds silly, but wait 6 months and GSM coverage will pretty damn close to what you get with CDMA. All the TDMA providers are putting GSM equipment on their towers. and TDMA is everywhere. It is a matter of months before the GSM networks are opened up for roaming.
Re:Idiocy - bluetooth just taking off
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Is Bluetooth Dead?
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From what my ATT rep is telling me, cingular (i don't know offhand their coverage area) is opening up their GSM network for roaming within the next 6 months. that combined with ATT, T-Mobile roaming agreements will open up any coverage concerns you have had in the past. The same will be true for cingular and ATT plans as well...
Once these roaming agreements have been signed by each provider, you will have more coverage via GSM/GPRS than you will ever get via CDMA(sprint,verison) which is banned in at least my state, probably more.
Re:Idiocy - bluetooth just taking off
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Is Bluetooth Dead?
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· Score: 2, Informative
no.. you are wrong... many of the phones available in europe don't come for the US spectrum AT&T only has 1 (and 2 more on the way) here) GSM phones that do bluetooth, and its the largest phone you can buy physically, it also costs ~$300 unless you sign a 2 year contract. At least this is the case for AT&T Wireless.
So your statements that you can get what you get in europe here are wrong. You can't.
In the united states, you must purchase your phone from your provider. The handset companies hard code the default signal locator to the provider and it cannot be changed. This is the reason that in the US, you can't just buy a SIM card for your GSM phone like you can in europe, but must buy a whole new phone for each time you switch providers. Therefore, you are stuck with what your provider has. AT&T wireless (the largest GSM provider in the US) has a large selection of phones, but they certaintly have NOTHING compared to what is available in europe and asia. Not even close.
The handset companies have the US cellular companies strongarmed, and this isn't changing any time soon. Untill there is an act of congress to forbid this type of uncompetative behaviour by the MFG's, you will get stuck buying a new phone for each provider you change to, and worst yet, stuck with the small choice that your cellular provider carries.
On top of all this BS, you have to deal with 1-2 year contracts with each provider, or face the consequences of paying double on rate plans. Thank the 200$ commission per telephone activation for this $175 early termination fee. Most cellular companies don't recoup their costs until the 9th month of service on mid range rate plans. Because they have to eat the cost of the expensive phone (between 50-100 dollars is lost for every new phone sold) and because they are in such a ratrace to get marketshare, they pay (don't ask me why) $200-$300 in commissions per sale, the 1-2 year contracts are the only way to survive.
The fact that Sprint and Verison are split off into CDMA only networks really drives the last nail into the coffin for reasonably cost efficient cellular service and equipment in the US. Don't ask me what Sprint and verison plan on doing when all the other providers phase out all their TDMA transmitters the dual band CDMA phones use for roaming. Hell, in some states, its illegal to deploy CDMA because their towers must be placed too close together. heh.
It just shows you what marketing dollars and anti-competative behaviour can do to an over ignorant population.
You don't need batteries. Pump your excess power back into the grid. Consume from the grid when you have no sunlight. Then you get as much electricity as you need, for a reduced rate. There is no storage involved in this process. This is by federal mandate that power companies must allow you to pump back into the grid and credit your account for it.
If your local power company won't alow you, get a lawyer.
I don't think they refuse. they probably just don't have the man power to do it. Academic demand for the mac isn't THAT big. And even in educational institutions it is still a minority. Especially in a lecture hall type environment.
I know IR is not the optimal solution, but that is what you get with a significant price drop over RF. The PRS system is 10x more expensive and it uses IR as well, and works no better (it does have more buttons tho). The system works decent, and as long as you have enough recievers setup in the lecture hall, you should reduce overload. There is a maximum of 25 users per reciever and you should place recievers around the room accordingly. For the price you can't beat it.
I wouldn't hold it against them that they don't have mac software for it. But they do offer links on their website for VirtualPC and USB to Serial adapters. Which has been tested and works with the system.
Our University used to have one of these systems that they paid thousands for... Then some people in our physics department figured they could make the same thing for about 1/10 the price. They designed an RF transmitter and reciever and wrote software (works via serial port, connects through cat5 cable, and recievers can be setup around the room daisy chained to eachother).
The remotes you pass out to the audience (students in our case) are the size of an ink pen. They are very inexpensive and the recievers are inexpensive as well. The drivers for the recievers and the polling software is all downloadable from their website...
If Linux 2.6 (or whatever they call it) deems any file as being executable just because of its flags -- executeable bit, etc. then it will continue to be a source of insecurity and will continue to lose out.
Re:There's more to it than 64-bit instructions
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Is Prescott 64-bit?
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One reason it is beneficial for AMD to have an on chip controller is that now they don't have to rely on 3rd parties (like VIA) to provide their performance... AMD isn't a chipset company. But they were forced to provide working north bridges for their Athlons because of crappy quality coming out of taiwan. Just look at the fact that the only stable chipsets available for the AMD platform used to be low performance AMD branded northbridges... Introduce nForce and the situation changed somewhat, but they arrived way after AMD64 was designed.
But the overall idea is 2 things:
1) higher performance memory interface (the new transmeta's do the same thing) 2) no reliance on 3rd party chip makers to provide AMD's platform with a high performance and stable memory interface.
Do you remember how unstable athlon systems were before nForce was out? I do. And it sucked. AMD's entire bad reputation of being unstable (including the K5 and K6-X product line) is directly caused by lack of quality in ALi,VIA, and SiS northbridges.
Nobody is going to be bypassing AMD's memory controller. Look at the past.. When have you seen a new northbridge that supported faster memory than the CPU origionally did.. Well, i remember the 333-> 400MHz transition. And the 400MHz motherboards with a 333MHz cpu actually degraded performance because the FSB and memory bus were not synched. In fact, there has never been any platform where the FSB was different than the memory bus on an officially supported level since athlon came out.. So why would this be a problem? The P4 situation is the same way, they keep the FSB synched with the memory bus.
When new memory technologys come out, you must BUY a new cpu to get that memory supported with any reasonable performance increase. This is true with the athlon64/Opteron, and it has ALWAYS been true for every CPU in the near past, including all Athlons,Durons,P3s, and P4s. The benefits of off die memory controllers has absolutely NOTHING to do with it being easier to support future memory technologies.
And HT was never designed nor marketed tward being a second processor. It's only reason for existance is because they wanted to fill their long pipeline with reasonably no effort. it worked, and so HT worked.
Now they are just tweaking the concept to reduce bottleneks with reasonable cost in their next generation of HT.
Afterall, if you really want dual CPU's, HT will never give you what you want. HT was never designed for CPU bound SMP applications. Never.
Except that it's been proven that aluminum vs steel case makes absolutely no difference as far as heat transfer is concerned. There's no thermal coupling between the case and the hot components.
Don't know what planet you have been on for all these years, but nobody has proven anything remotely close to what you say... If anything, your claim has been DIS-proven.
Aluminum cases DO help move heat from inside your case. Both from the hot air inside the case, and from the hot hard drives in the aluminum drive cages.
Steal is NOT good at moving heat, especially from a stack of high RPM Hard drives... It isn't ANYTHING compared to a thick aluminum drive cage.
hard drive cooling is the main pro for aluminum cases, but there is more. Heat builds up in most cases in certain pockets.. dead zones where no air is flowing.. they are usually near the top of the case.. Not all cases have them, and most people who are into cooling prevent them. But most newbie overclockers don't know what a dead zone is. An aluminum case definately can lower the temperature of these zones by several degrees simply by transfering the heat from the air, through the case panneling, to the outside via conduction.
You may say "well, if you have this problem with hot air buildup inside your case, you have improper case cooling" and I will say.. "do as much as you can with as little airflow as possible and as slow fans as possible to reduce dust buildup"
If every case had a slow spinning 120mm fan in front and 120mm fan in back of the case, and they were all aluminum, and everyone's heatsink were 80-90mm with copper inlays, cooling would be a pretty insignificant problem.
But they aren't, and that is why most people sit there with 7200 RPM 60mm case fans trying to exhaust all the hot air in their plastic panneling case. This is the point of diminishing returns, when you must replace fans every 6 months and blow out your case every 1 month just to keep your case cooled properly.
Your monther bought Geforce FX video cards and 3D FPS video games the day they came out....
oops, then she wouldn't be able to run linux..
Your story makes no difference. Gaming will not come to linux with more users, because gaming must exist on linux before people can switch to gaming on linux. nVidia and ATI drove the nail in Linux's 3D coffin a good long while ago.
Not to mention that the retail copy of Quake3 for Linux didn't come out to stores for 3 months after win32... and that it wasn't on sale for promo anywhere like the windows version was....... oops, I guess none of you bothered to check the shelves before making BS claims about shitty sales. Quake3 for Linux would have been a hit if it was priced at the same levels and sold at the same time. It wasn't, and it wasn't so it didn't. period.
The problem is, while geeks talk the talk, they don't walk the walk with their wallets.
no... the problem is that Loki got fucked by nVidia's and ATI's drivers. period. If you remember correctly, nVidia's 3d drivers were beta when Loki went bust, and they sucked. Not only that, but current linux nvidia drivers don't even use the platform standard DRI interface. You can't expect casual gamers to spend all their time getting 3d working for some BS game, and that is where the money comes from.. casual gamers.
And the state of drivers, and 3d graphics on high end consumer cards in general on Linux is just bogus, and completely ridiculous.
id ports to Linux on principle, and their engines are the best. One reason I haven't really played many non id games in the past couple years... (i still run them mostly on windows tho, its a small price to pay for the better performance you get with nvidia/ati's win32 drivers.)
Let me make my only point clear as day: Linux 3D for video games today is shit. No engine company is going to make any money supporting Linux when there is no hardware out there to run their game.
Re:64bit performance gains...
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AMD64 Preview
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32 bit not being faster than 64 bit on the same CPU is NOT the point
It isn't? It sure as hell is my point. And you replied to it. So you are making an OT point. in which case you deserve an OT moderation...
My origional post was CLEARLY stating performance enhancements going to 64 bit mode ON THE AMD64 PROCESSOR. It states that in the FIRST paragraph of my post. READ IT again.
If I was talking about 64 bitness over 32 bitness in general, on different architectures, then you might have a point. But I wasn't so you don't.
It's what you could have done with 32 bit & the same die area with a 1MB cache and onboard dual channel memory controller extra registers etc and NO 64 bit support with a dedicated 32 bit CPU that is the valid comparrison of the relative merits
On the same die area, they probably could have made a pimp ass 32 bit cpu that killed the P4. But they didn't. Insted they made a 64 bit CPU that had a 32 bit legacy mode, that killed the P4 in both modes. Nobody is going to recompile their programs to support those extra registers if they are still in x86-32 land. So you hypothetical CPU is pretty much worthless, and AMD64's CPU in 32 bit mode is effectively what you would be getting with this makebelieve CPU. (Its microarchitecture is almost identical to the Athlon XP, but with the 64 bit extentions added on top, extra cache, and on die memory/HT controller)
Ah so George Bush does not have the right to say "Bring em on!"?
Well, legally he does have the right (or does he? US Soldiers were killed and injured directly because of this comment, doesn't look legal to me)... but lets look at it in other terms... Lets look at the moral right. What is good for George Bush's people? What will kill his soldiers and what won't. What moral obligation does he have to keep his soldiers out of harms way? Should he also say on TV "hey fuckers in north korea, BRING THE NUKES ON BITCH!!!!"???? Does he have that right?
Any time you tell an enemy to "bring it on" and its not you who will be injured directly by such comments, but someone else. you absolutely do NOT have the right to make such statements. And this includes any human being, not just George Fucking Bush.
Re:Opcode depreciation
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AMD64 Preview
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Slashdot Mirror
"Effectively it only means that people with contracts preceding the portability tax can have their rate increased without an opportunity to be relieved from their contract. That sucks, I'm sure it adds up to a lot of money, but it's still only transitional, and ultimately I think that finite and limited amount of money will be worth it for consumers, even if it isn't fair."
1) The contracts make no difference. EVERY customer of most providers will be charged this fee, whether they know it or not. It was written into the law that the providers will add the fee to the bill after the price has been agreed upon. Check your cell phone bill, there is an additional regulatory fee on it. The law explicitally allows the providers to advertise $39.99 and then charge your CC $48.
2) This problem isn't only part of the "pre-portability era" people. This is another law that adds "regulatory" fees to bills. These are fees added to the bill that were not negotiated during contract signing. These are fees that the government grants the provider to collect directly into their own pockets. In other words, the cost of providing their services are tacked onto the sale price you already negotiated.
3) this is not a transitional fee. it is not finite. and it is not limited. The law is explicit in that the fee will be perpetual and not expire once providers have moved over. The fee will be added to everyone's bills even after the database upgrades are paid for.
4) You can't shop for providers in the US based on who charges the most reg. fees. There are no national providers who allow sales people to quote the actual cost of regulatory fees. In fact, it is the policy of AT&T Wireless and most other national providers (if not all) to lose a new customer before telling him his actual regulatory fee cost. This new law is what gives them that right which they normally would not have. This is why it is a regulatory fee, and not part of the advertised price. Because they advertise 39.99, and charge ~50.
The fees are price fixed by the largest providers.. They set the high fees, and drop the price of their monthly plans. Then smaller operations must match those fees in order to keep their advertised prices competative. This is EXACTLY why this law was lobbied FOR by the largest providers, not AGAINST (as much as they claim they don't like it)
It all boils down to the larger providers strongarming the mass public into thinking they are paying 39 dollars when they are actually paying $49. Once that is accomplished, every other provider (whose margins are already even thinner) must either:
- Follow suit
- Come up with a completely new model that beats theirs somehow
- or -
- Go out of business
guess which one they choose?
"This law is going to shake up the industry. You may even see one or two wireless carriers going under as a result. They've been predicting for years that the 5 major carriers would eventually boil down to 3. This may be the catalyst to make that happen."
Until consumer rights laws which:
- Disallow SIM Locking on cellphones
- Disallow lengthly contracts
- Disallow Price fixing on handsets
- Disallow Price fixing on roaming
are passed, the cellular providers will all win. The above bulleted items are only allowed in north america, and only because of hard lobbying by the providers.
In any other continent, you go to a cell phone store and buy phones OUTRIGHT, no plans to go with it, no contracts, you simply BUY the phone (at usually half of US MSRP price), then you call up a carrier of your choice start service. They give you a SIM and you stick it in your phone, boom, instantly it works. if you don't like their service after a few months, switch providers. Swap your your SIM card with a prepaid card from another provider, go to another country? Buy a prepaid SIM from that country and pay 5-10c/minute insted of 2$/minute.
Around here, cellular providers lock the handsets to their SIM card so you cannot take a handset from one provider to another, even if they use the same exact handset. Don't be fooled by some salesperson's claims that "the radio is 'optimally tuned' to our frequency" because that is just a load of BS. if you are using a GSM phone in the United States, consumer rights laws basically say you will get assraped by your provider. If you go overseas with a GSM Phone purchased within the United States, you can be sure that it will be useless because of the SIM card lock in place on the phone. You will be required to pay $2+/minute roaming charges for usage on your US Provider's sim card.
Number portability isn't gonna do anything except give cellular providers more revenue (they add 2$ to everyone's bill, on top of all other fees and taxes already being charged) and more customers. People won't be switching cellular providers fast, they will simply stay loyal to the providers that have been assraping them for their entire cellular lives.
This whole number portability has been a joke, whoever wrote the law must be in the pockets of the big 5. Free revenue, with negligable costs added in database management. there is NO network upgrade requirement. They don't have to go to each tower and hang new transmitters. they simply add a few tables to a fucking database sitting in their corporate bunker. and it costs them $2/month to do that per customer? perpetually? until the end of time? Just wait until they pass laws which disallow SIM locking, is that gonna cost us another $2/month regulatory hidden fee?
note: this is a rant, but facts presented are true.
No they don't.
The Linux Kernel explicitly allows you to distribute binary-only drivers with the kernel. This is an exception to the GPL that the Linux Kernel contains in its copyright clause.
There is no "plus" consortium. DVD+R(W) is wholely owned, patented, and dictated by sony.
Expose is so cool.. Its nice to know that we can finally switch between tasks with a single click of the mouse (and a quick press+hold of the function key)...
Now we are only 8 years behind the pesky windows taskbar.
The whole plot about the purpose of having humans in pods "generating" electricity for the machines was never explained.. The laws of thermodynamics do not allow for this, and that is why the movie seems to not be closed completely for me...
:)
I believe there was another purpose for the matrix.. that purpose being for the humans and machines to live on earth in peace. The arthitect was trying to balance an equation which couldn't be balanced, and the oracle trying to unbalance it.. It was a power struggle between the programs within the matrix, and a freedom struggle by the humans.
But the idea that the humans were generating electricity is proposterous. I have said it since the begining of the Matrix series.. and I'll say it again. The laws of physics do not allow humans to generate enough electricity to even grow plants to feed themselves, much less have excess power to power the machines. There MUST be some alternative source of power... At maximum, if the power extraction worked at 100% efficiency, and plant growing worked at 100% efficiency (that is, ALL electricity produced was converted to light which grew plants) then there would be exactly enough food to go around for the people that were already alive. There would be no way to reproduce, and no way to have excess electricity.
I have heard arguments that the machines figured out quantum physics, etc.. but if they did that, why not have nuclear power generators? Why not have solar pannels in space? why not move to Mars? These questions all prove that humans were not needed to generate electricity...
Others tell me that is just a plot hole that I have to deal with, but if it is, then somebody didn't even attempt to do their homework. There are THOUSANDS of ways more efficient and easier to generate electricity without the sun than to harvest humans in pods. Yet so many people still think that is why the humans were inserted into the matrix. bogus.
That being said, where are all the machines in the real world? There are sentinels and crop growers, but these were all there to maintain the matrix. What about all the other mahcines that roam the world? Did they still exist? Or did the machines insert every program into the matrix so humand and machines could occupy the world together without conflict?
I think the whole idea they are trying to get across is theological. There are 2 worlds, the physical world, and the machine world (matrix). Just like before christ, there were 2 worlds, the supernatural (god[s]) world(s), and the natural (human/physical) world.
I believe there will be some more matrix movies.. not necessarilly named "matrix" but something else. I think the era of the matrix is ended in Revolutions, which is why the title is named such...
These are just all IMO... Please comment and argue and disagree
Apple appears to do more quality testing on their hard drives in that since Apple started shipping Macs with IDE drives, I have had two failures. Compare this with Wintel boxes like Dells where I have had close to ten IDE drive failures.
I'd be willing to bet... you deal with 5x as many Wintel boxes as you do apples..
Maybe you just don't know what you are talking about.. Apple uses the same exact Western Digital and Maxtor hard drives that dell, gateway, sony, ibm, compaq, whitebox uses. They come from the same factory, from the same companies, and are tested the same by the MFG. There is nothing you can say that will convince anyone with a clue that apple "tests" their IDE hard drives more than the competition. They use the EXACT SAME Model numbers. Your statements are just ridiculous.
This is starting to change with fast SATA drives however and I am looking forward to some new options with the G5.
You mac fanboys are all the same.. SATA is integrated in a variety of motherboards nowadays, and from a variety of OEM's systems (namely, Dell, but who cares about the names, its there and has been for a long time). And your maximum of 2 SATA drives per G5 system is a huge limitation. The thing is a $3,000 workstation for crying out loud. it's physically larger than any Dell systems... And only 2 HDD slots MAXIMUM.
In the end, you used the hard drive performance discussion to spout off idiotic fanboy comments about the mac that don't show anything beneficial for the platform. You could have explained how easy the OS is to use, or how high performance the new CPU is.. but insted you tried to take a stab at the Mac's superior storage capability... Here's a hint.. it isn't superior in this reguard. and hasn't been for a loooong time.
While this is partially true, you still must purchase a phone from cingular to use the service.. Cingular SIM's wont work in T-Mobile or ATT phones etc etc..
(or buy an unlocked phone overseas in asia)
Only place I have seen unlocked phones in the US is on the black market.
"Really? It's certainly possible to buy pre-pay SIMs without a handset."
Mind pointing me to a provider that will sell you a prepaid sim?
I don't know what kind of phone sales person you friend talked to when he got his GSM phone, but around here we don't sell GSM only phones to people worried about coverage. We have tri-band TDMA/GSM GAIT phones for such customers where data is imprtant, and voice is even more. TDMA is already everywhere, and you probably didn't pickup your GSM signals because most roaming agreements for the GSM providers havn't been completed. I know it sounds silly, but wait 6 months and GSM coverage will pretty damn close to what you get with CDMA. All the TDMA providers are putting GSM equipment on their towers. and TDMA is everywhere. It is a matter of months before the GSM networks are opened up for roaming.
From what my ATT rep is telling me, cingular (i don't know offhand their coverage area) is opening up their GSM network for roaming within the next 6 months. that combined with ATT, T-Mobile roaming agreements will open up any coverage concerns you have had in the past. The same will be true for cingular and ATT plans as well...
Once these roaming agreements have been signed by each provider, you will have more coverage via GSM/GPRS than you will ever get via CDMA(sprint,verison) which is banned in at least my state, probably more.
no.. you are wrong... many of the phones available in europe don't come for the US spectrum AT&T only has 1 (and 2 more on the way) here) GSM phones that do bluetooth, and its the largest phone you can buy physically, it also costs ~$300 unless you sign a 2 year contract. At least this is the case for AT&T Wireless.
So your statements that you can get what you get in europe here are wrong. You can't.
In the united states, you must purchase your phone from your provider. The handset companies hard code the default signal locator to the provider and it cannot be changed. This is the reason that in the US, you can't just buy a SIM card for your GSM phone like you can in europe, but must buy a whole new phone for each time you switch providers. Therefore, you are stuck with what your provider has. AT&T wireless (the largest GSM provider in the US) has a large selection of phones, but they certaintly have NOTHING compared to what is available in europe and asia. Not even close.
The handset companies have the US cellular companies strongarmed, and this isn't changing any time soon. Untill there is an act of congress to forbid this type of uncompetative behaviour by the MFG's, you will get stuck buying a new phone for each provider you change to, and worst yet, stuck with the small choice that your cellular provider carries.
On top of all this BS, you have to deal with 1-2 year contracts with each provider, or face the consequences of paying double on rate plans. Thank the 200$ commission per telephone activation for this $175 early termination fee. Most cellular companies don't recoup their costs until the 9th month of service on mid range rate plans. Because they have to eat the cost of the expensive phone (between 50-100 dollars is lost for every new phone sold) and because they are in such a ratrace to get marketshare, they pay (don't ask me why) $200-$300 in commissions per sale, the 1-2 year contracts are the only way to survive.
The fact that Sprint and Verison are split off into CDMA only networks really drives the last nail into the coffin for reasonably cost efficient cellular service and equipment in the US. Don't ask me what Sprint and verison plan on doing when all the other providers phase out all their TDMA transmitters the dual band CDMA phones use for roaming. Hell, in some states, its illegal to deploy CDMA because their towers must be placed too close together. heh.
It just shows you what marketing dollars and anti-competative behaviour can do to an over ignorant population.
You don't need batteries. Pump your excess power back into the grid. Consume from the grid when you have no sunlight. Then you get as much electricity as you need, for a reduced rate. There is no storage involved in this process. This is by federal mandate that power companies must allow you to pump back into the grid and credit your account for it.
If your local power company won't alow you, get a lawyer.
I don't think they refuse. they probably just don't have the man power to do it. Academic demand for the mac isn't THAT big. And even in educational institutions it is still a minority. Especially in a lecture hall type environment.
I know IR is not the optimal solution, but that is what you get with a significant price drop over RF. The PRS system is 10x more expensive and it uses IR as well, and works no better (it does have more buttons tho). The system works decent, and as long as you have enough recievers setup in the lecture hall, you should reduce overload. There is a maximum of 25 users per reciever and you should place recievers around the room accordingly. For the price you can't beat it.
I wouldn't hold it against them that they don't have mac software for it. But they do offer links on their website for VirtualPC and USB to Serial adapters. Which has been tested and works with the system.
Our University used to have one of these systems that they paid thousands for... Then some people in our physics department figured they could make the same thing for about 1/10 the price. They designed an RF transmitter and reciever and wrote software (works via serial port, connects through cat5 cable, and recievers can be setup around the room daisy chained to eachother).
The remotes you pass out to the audience (students in our case) are the size of an ink pen. They are very inexpensive and the recievers are inexpensive as well. The drivers for the recievers and the polling software is all downloadable from their website...
have a look: H-ITT
The recievers are around 80-100 dollars, and the remotes are very inexpensive (i believe our bookstore sells them for like $15 or $20)
If Linux 2.6 (or whatever they call it) deems any file as being executable just because of its flags -- executeable bit, etc. then it will continue to be a source of insecurity and will continue to lose out.
One reason it is beneficial for AMD to have an on chip controller is that now they don't have to rely on 3rd parties (like VIA) to provide their performance... AMD isn't a chipset company. But they were forced to provide working north bridges for their Athlons because of crappy quality coming out of taiwan. Just look at the fact that the only stable chipsets available for the AMD platform used to be low performance AMD branded northbridges... Introduce nForce and the situation changed somewhat, but they arrived way after AMD64 was designed.
But the overall idea is 2 things:
1) higher performance memory interface (the new transmeta's do the same thing)
2) no reliance on 3rd party chip makers to provide AMD's platform with a high performance and stable memory interface.
Do you remember how unstable athlon systems were before nForce was out? I do. And it sucked. AMD's entire bad reputation of being unstable (including the K5 and K6-X product line) is directly caused by lack of quality in ALi,VIA, and SiS northbridges.
Nobody is going to be bypassing AMD's memory controller. Look at the past.. When have you seen a new northbridge that supported faster memory than the CPU origionally did.. Well, i remember the 333-> 400MHz transition. And the 400MHz motherboards with a 333MHz cpu actually degraded performance because the FSB and memory bus were not synched. In fact, there has never been any platform where the FSB was different than the memory bus on an officially supported level since athlon came out.. So why would this be a problem? The P4 situation is the same way, they keep the FSB synched with the memory bus.
When new memory technologys come out, you must BUY a new cpu to get that memory supported with any reasonable performance increase. This is true with the athlon64/Opteron, and it has ALWAYS been true for every CPU in the near past, including all Athlons,Durons,P3s, and P4s. The benefits of off die memory controllers has absolutely NOTHING to do with it being easier to support future memory technologies.
And HT was never designed nor marketed tward being a second processor. It's only reason for existance is because they wanted to fill their long pipeline with reasonably no effort. it worked, and so HT worked.
Now they are just tweaking the concept to reduce bottleneks with reasonable cost in their next generation of HT.
Afterall, if you really want dual CPU's, HT will never give you what you want. HT was never designed for CPU bound SMP applications. Never.
Except that it's been proven that aluminum vs steel case makes absolutely no difference as far as heat transfer is concerned. There's no thermal coupling between the case and the hot components.
Don't know what planet you have been on for all these years, but nobody has proven anything remotely close to what you say... If anything, your claim has been DIS-proven.
Aluminum cases DO help move heat from inside your case. Both from the hot air inside the case, and from the hot hard drives in the aluminum drive cages.
Steal is NOT good at moving heat, especially from a stack of high RPM Hard drives... It isn't ANYTHING compared to a thick aluminum drive cage.
hard drive cooling is the main pro for aluminum cases, but there is more. Heat builds up in most cases in certain pockets.. dead zones where no air is flowing.. they are usually near the top of the case.. Not all cases have them, and most people who are into cooling prevent them. But most newbie overclockers don't know what a dead zone is. An aluminum case definately can lower the temperature of these zones by several degrees simply by transfering the heat from the air, through the case panneling, to the outside via conduction.
You may say "well, if you have this problem with hot air buildup inside your case, you have improper case cooling" and I will say.. "do as much as you can with as little airflow as possible and as slow fans as possible to reduce dust buildup"
If every case had a slow spinning 120mm fan in front and 120mm fan in back of the case, and they were all aluminum, and everyone's heatsink were 80-90mm with copper inlays, cooling would be a pretty insignificant problem.
But they aren't, and that is why most people sit there with 7200 RPM 60mm case fans trying to exhaust all the hot air in their plastic panneling case. This is the point of diminishing returns, when you must replace fans every 6 months and blow out your case every 1 month just to keep your case cooled properly.
Your monther bought Geforce FX video cards and 3D FPS video games the day they came out....
oops, then she wouldn't be able to run linux..
Your story makes no difference. Gaming will not come to linux with more users, because gaming must exist on linux before people can switch to gaming on linux. nVidia and ATI drove the nail in Linux's 3D coffin a good long while ago.
my 2 cents.
Not to mention that the retail copy of Quake3 for Linux didn't come out to stores for 3 months after win32... and that it wasn't on sale for promo anywhere like the windows version was.... ... oops, I guess none of you bothered to check the shelves before making BS claims about shitty sales. Quake3 for Linux would have been a hit if it was priced at the same levels and sold at the same time. It wasn't, and it wasn't so it didn't. period.
The problem is, while geeks talk the talk, they don't walk the walk with their wallets.
no... the problem is that Loki got fucked by nVidia's and ATI's drivers. period. If you remember correctly, nVidia's 3d drivers were beta when Loki went bust, and they sucked. Not only that, but current linux nvidia drivers don't even use the platform standard DRI interface. You can't expect casual gamers to spend all their time getting 3d working for some BS game, and that is where the money comes from.. casual gamers.
And the state of drivers, and 3d graphics on high end consumer cards in general on Linux is just bogus, and completely ridiculous.
id ports to Linux on principle, and their engines are the best. One reason I haven't really played many non id games in the past couple years... (i still run them mostly on windows tho, its a small price to pay for the better performance you get with nvidia/ati's win32 drivers.)
Let me make my only point clear as day: Linux 3D for video games today is shit. No engine company is going to make any money supporting Linux when there is no hardware out there to run their game.
32 bit not being faster than 64 bit on the same CPU is NOT the point
It isn't? It sure as hell is my point. And you replied to it. So you are making an OT point. in which case you deserve an OT moderation...
My origional post was CLEARLY stating performance enhancements going to 64 bit mode ON THE AMD64 PROCESSOR. It states that in the FIRST paragraph of my post. READ IT again.
If I was talking about 64 bitness over 32 bitness in general, on different architectures, then you might have a point. But I wasn't so you don't.
It's what you could have done with 32 bit & the same die area with a 1MB cache and onboard dual channel memory controller extra registers etc and NO 64 bit support with a dedicated 32 bit CPU that is the valid comparrison of the relative merits
On the same die area, they probably could have made a pimp ass 32 bit cpu that killed the P4. But they didn't. Insted they made a 64 bit CPU that had a 32 bit legacy mode, that killed the P4 in both modes. Nobody is going to recompile their programs to support those extra registers if they are still in x86-32 land. So you hypothetical CPU is pretty much worthless, and AMD64's CPU in 32 bit mode is effectively what you would be getting with this makebelieve CPU. (Its microarchitecture is almost identical to the Athlon XP, but with the 64 bit extentions added on top, extra cache, and on die memory/HT controller)
Ah so George Bush does not have the right to say "Bring em on!"?
Well, legally he does have the right (or does he? US Soldiers were killed and injured directly because of this comment, doesn't look legal to me)... but lets look at it in other terms... Lets look at the moral right. What is good for George Bush's people? What will kill his soldiers and what won't. What moral obligation does he have to keep his soldiers out of harms way? Should he also say on TV "hey fuckers in north korea, BRING THE NUKES ON BITCH!!!!"???? Does he have that right?
Any time you tell an enemy to "bring it on" and its not you who will be injured directly by such comments, but someone else. you absolutely do NOT have the right to make such statements. And this includes any human being, not just George Fucking Bush.
from dictionary.com....
deprecated
The words are the same, and I used it correctly wrt US English rules... In other countries, this might be different.