This isn't the first time that there have been people trying to sell fuel cells to the public. Every year or so, Popular Science or Popular Mechanics will hype somebody's fuel cells. One year it's a hydrogen-powered camcorder or laptop battery system, so you can have longer lifespans. The next, it's a fuel cell car. The next, something else.
The problem is that they are a few months too late. California power, more or less, has stabalized. That would have been a great market for them to edge into.
I mean, really. I think fuel cells are a great idea. But where are you going to easily get the hydrogen? Sure, you can get a tank from the welding supply store, but you can get gas from any gas station and Compressed Natural Gas from most gas stations. There aren't any hydrogen pipelines to hook up to, like there are natural gas pipelines.
The real good model is a larger one that can produce substantial amounts of power off of a natural gas line. It just has to fit into a small trailer. You could solve a California-style power crunch (at least, until the Natural Gas lines run out of capacity) by parking a bunch of those all throughout the cities. Nobody gets up in arms about a power plant in their backyard because they don't even know it's there.
And remember, this is another stock listed on the famed Vancouver exchange. This is the same exchange where that company traded for 2 years before the founders realized that the company had no product and the demo was smoke-and-mirrors.;)
I checked the price and it seems like the cost difference between Cat-5 and Cat-5e is pretty minimal, and Cat-5e will be able to work with gigabit just fine over a reasonable range.
Generally, you want to avoid little hubs because:
1) Cheap little hubs tend to have short lifespans, break, have conflicts, etc. They are intended for people's houses, dorm rooms and impromptu networking, not for a business.
2) Little hubs don't perform so well compared to more ports on the managed switch.
3) Not everybody who needs multiple computers is tech savy. Take, for example, the salesperson who has a laptop for the road and a desktop for work.
4) You don't have all of the encryption, authentication, etc. options available for the little hubs.
5) If the little hub gets messed up, you have to walk to the cube instead of doing everything through a remote admin console.
6) It costs very little more to run the 3 or 4 drops than it does to run 1 drop. Cable costs pale in comparison to labor costs. It will cost much more to install more drops later when the hubs get to be too annoying.
7) Managed switch ports, for a good-sized network, are generally pretty cheap. Once you consider the potential hidden costs of a little hub (extra admin trouble, compatability problems, etc) it starts making sense to just use the managed switch ports.
I am not a network expert, so take this with a grain of salt.
Get the best cable you can get at a reasonable price installed everywhere. Don't get the super-duper-will-be-good-for-1000-gigabits sort of cable. But do wire the desktops with a decent Cat-5e that will let you run gigabit when the price comes down for it so you don't have to do it again. And you know that, at some point, many users will start to need gigabit performance on their desktop. It's inevatable.
Make sure that you follow fire safety code. Only certain types of cable can be run through the walls.
Cable management is a very important consideration. The best system is one that lets you add more wiring whenever you want, keeps the cables neat, etc. I know part of it is making sure that you have ample conduit space through the walls, so you can run more cables later on. I know that another part of it is having those faceplates that let you add more jacks.
Do try to wire every room, even if it seems stupid. You never know what will happen later on.
Don't run everything through the same conduit set. Running power cables next to network cables is dangerous, stupid, and not good for network reliability. I think that's also against most building code.
You might want to wire the phone cables with Cat-5 or better, stupid as it seems. IP telephony is taking off and those might end up being used to wire up netphones.
Get a raised floor where all of the servers and hubs will be.
Try to have things set up so that you have no long cable runs. This may mean several networking/telephone closets. I'm not sure what the good maximum length is, so somebody else will have to fill that in.
Keep a map of what is cabled where. And keep it up-to-date.
What happened was that everybody signed up to put an e- before everything. Some of it made sense, some of it didn't.
For example, it's a pretty good bet that if you have a catalog, having a website will be helpful. The computer catalog places are still seeing benefit from their sites, which is why they are still up.
What you will most likely see is people dropping the e- prefix and the.com suffix from things. Same as they are not buying those funky mesh chairs anymore, making people wear nicer clothes, cutting back the absurd benefits, etc. Nobody wants to be associated with the possibility of becomming the next dot-bomb, e-bomb, or other such thing.
And this is the best way to keep your job and make smart decisions. If you are selling people only on the e- part of the name, that's bad. If you have a business plan for the feature that centers around things like "Making this paper-driven process accessible online so that you can kick back clearly wrong submissions without spending a real person's time, save time, not have to deal with so much paper, etc." and have an attached cost-benefit plan, then you are doing real business that leaverages computers.
And making things electronic will still be useful. If they can replace a staff of 100 low-level employees with an electronic system that requires a pair of servers and part of somebody's time to maintain it, that's saving money.
But putting a system that works fine as a paper-driven process, especially if your users are uneducated and computer-phobic, is a bad idea. Switching all of your databases over to using XML for no apparent reason other than hype is a bad idea. Changing the way a system works without a good appreciation for why it works that way is a bad idea. And that's the e-stuff that is bombing.
See, there are ways that Intel can work around this.
For one, even if they can win in court over Intel, a legal battle is expensive and annoying and can do them in even if they win.
For another, Intel no longer has a monopoly. AMD owns a substantial portion of the market. IBM/Sun/HP/CompaQ own a bunch of the server market. It will be much harder to prove an Intel monopoly than a MS monopoly.
And finally, some companies just love to cosy up to a single platform, contractual issues beside it. Perhaps Intel has been very nice to ServerWorks in the past and present. Perhaps it isn't the explicit threat of trouble, but more a desire to not end up like Via and have a chipset they will have legal troubles shipping.
Granted, I'd absolutely LOVE to see a good workstation-friendly ServerWorks chipset for either the P4 or Athlon that was aimed at the high-end hobyist market. But remember what happened to SGI when they went from hardcore hardware to lower-end stuff, hmm?
Mostly because the KT266A will be cheaper for the same performance and advantages. The major advantage of the dual DDR-SDRAM channels is to make the onboard video bite slightly less. If you are going to stuff it with an AGP video card, etc. you might as well just get the KT266A.
Not sure. ServerWorks might be avoiding an AMD motherboard for the simple fact that Intel has been making motions of ceeding the high-end Intel chipset market to them.
i.e. ServerWorks doesn't want to loose a license to the Pentium 4 and Itanium busses.;)
Regarding the 420 series and a built-in AGP card. It's likely that the cost difference between the two versions will be lower than the cost of a clearly better AGP card. This chipset is designed for a lower-end user. One who wouldn't be able to afford a GeForce 3 or a Radeon 7500, or at least doesn't want to spend the money on it.
Definately not what I would consider a performance motherboard, but I'd rate it better than an i810 or similar in terms of a chipset that has everything integrated. I mean, really, if you look at the benchmarks, your average PC manufacturer can make systems that don't need ethernet, sound, or video cards. And because it's all done by nVidia, you can bet that people who were preprogrammed by the local geek to loathe onboard Intel video will break programming and pick up an nForce based board because nVidia has got to be good, right?
Of course, the much touted dual-bus DDR-SDRAM doesn't net you too much performance over a single-bus DDR-SDRAM motherboard, mostly because it is more bandwidth than the CPU can pump. But it does make an onboard video card suck slightly less than trying to make a video card share a single PC133 SDRAM chanel.;)
It's great. I love my job. I also managed to get in right before the floor went out from under everybody.
My company is still fun. We had a doughnut-eating competition to raise money for the WTC bombing. Pranks are still played.
The problem is, there's a dotcom backlash. The real reason why dotcoms failed is because they weren't making any money. But people see the fancy chairs, the quirky offices, the couches, etc. as a symptom of the problem that there was. So the remaining tech companies are trying to show that they aren't like that.
I have to dress professionally to work, which means that the FCUK t-shirt, the OpenBSD t-shirt, the tie-dye t-shirt, and so on all have to stay home. Everybody wanted those funky mesh chairs, but we got Leap chairs instead. We have nice offices, not warehouse/factory space. Each office ends up with one hard leather couch set, not a fluffy funky couch set.
I guess the main thing is that the fun is between you and your cow-orkers, not a corporate mandate.
For one, the government would most likely be going after the manufacturers of encryption software instead of the users of encryption software.
Which means the law will be useless because encryption is already out.
The backdoor will probably be in the form of a key or a series of keys that one or more entities has. To make it seem better, multiple authorities will have portions of the key, so that you can't just grab one repository.
You can do statistical analysises and generally figure out if something has a likelyhood of being encrypted. It's a cold-war technology that probably got much usage back then. But it's not the kind of thing you could deploy across the entire network.
Now, I'm not a privacy whacko. I don't encrypt my hard drive. I'm not anti-government. I'm generally pretty pragmatic. But even I don't think that we should have backdoors on encryption software. Does the government have backdoors on our safes? Do the cops have a key to my appartment's door?
Well, if you don't care too much about performance, don't even bother with a 'real' IDE RAID card, just do software RAID. The reason why people use the hardware RAID cards like the higher end IDE RAID cards and the SCSI RAID cards is because it's faster.
So you can cut the cost of a good IDE raid card and just put an extra IDE controller card in your psuedo-NAS box so you can have 8 drives. Or you can put that off until later.
You should also consider getting a DAT drive and a bunch of DAT tapes, to back things up, just in case something massively bad happens to your system. RAID 5 is not perfect, and if your system catches on fire because of too much dust in the power supply, it'll be helpful.
For one, half of the fun of Legos was all of the different pieces. If you just have two pieces, your creativity is impaired.
Besides, all of the different pieces keep kids buying more and going back to the store, which bodes well for the future of the company creating said parts.
*sigh* I miss construx. The difference in construction abilities between construx and legos was cool. You could construct different sorts of items with different attributes in each set. And both had mechanical/motorized/lit up capabilities.
It can also be said that people are entitled to payment for their efforts. If I was considering working in the field of cancer screening, but everybody in that field wasn't getting paid because nobody honored the patents, I'd work somewhere else.
If a bunch of biotech research firms working on a cure for cancer went under because they couldn't recoup the research investments necessary to develop new products, that would also be a bad thing.
The problem with medical patents is that medicine is one of those fields where the doctors and researchers are working in the public interest. So, I would consider charging an insane patent licensing fee, just because you could, for a test to be legal but highly unethical.
Keep a close and cynical eye, I say, on the biotech boom. Biotech is the next dotcom boom.
The US airlock can host both Russian and US spacesuits. The Russian airlock can only support Russian spacesuits.
The problem is that both spacesuits have different diagnostic gear, different mounting racks, different requirements, etc. So it adds greatly to the complexity to support both spacesuits. And neither country wants to give up their own spacesuits, so you hafta support both.
Actually, that is true that Junkbuster is also a choice, the choice not to load advertising banners. So I stand corrected on that.
I also think that, in order for Junkbuster to be really useful, it would have to heavily modify a page. Again, I feel for the site owners and figure that they have a right to put banner advertisements on their pages in return for putting it up for free, so I don't actively try to install Junkbuster. But then, I'm a pragmatic moderate who thinks that the web should eventually make money for people and doesn't mind some advertising.
And, no, I don't think SmartTags are allright. The and in my above message is a logical AND, not a conversational AND. If you both hate SmartTags and love Junkbuster, then and only then, are you running the possibility of being a hypocrate.
Actually, I don't think so, at least in this case.
Loving Junkbuster to get rid of ads and hating Smart Tags because they change content is being a hypocrate.
But disabling popups is, at least the way I look at it, different. You are not actually changing the content, just preventing a response to said content.
I like the 0.9.4 version very much simply because I can cut off 99% of the annoying popups while allowing the one or two useful, or at least, impossible to avoid, popups. Like when somebody has a web app that sometimes pops up a tip window in response to clicking on a link instead of a whole new page.
I don't have a problem with people tracking my online usage with cookies, because I figure they are entitled to some information about my browsing habits in return for putting up their sites. I don't even mind banner adverts, even though the only ones I'd have a remote chance of wanting to buy based on a banner advert is Thinkgeek. I just hate popups.
We really do need new space suits for the ISS. I suspect that they primarily got hit with budget cutting to reduce the cost of the station to something that won't cause it to be canned for being too expensive.
The main annoyance with the current suits is that they operate at pure oxygen at a reduced pressure. This can very easily cause "The Bends", so you need to have an overnight pre-breathe.
Jerry Pournelle argues that we need a zero-pre-breathe suit that is easy to deal with. Why? Because that way, you could assemble structures in space. For the long truss structure for the ISS, we are sending up integrated chunks. If EVA planning was easier and we send up ironworkers instead of scientists, we could send up components of a space structure in any booster, large or small, and assemble them into a completed structure. This makes more sense when you consider that it is far easier to create a reusable launch vehicle that has a quarter of the cargo-carying capacity of the shuttle than one that has the cargo-carying capacity of the shuttle.
It's also good because you can have your final product as lightly constructed as a butterfly.
I only half agree with Jerry Pournelle, instead figuring that what we need more is a large inflatable hangar. That way, you don't need to deal with your parts floating into orbit and becomming part of the space debris problem, you don't need any sort of space suit, and you don't need to deal with maintaining the space suits.
I really would love it if somebody could reference some real research about skintight spacesuits for my reference files. I mean, if we ever want more people in space, an inexpensive skintight spacesuit would be great so that every room could have a few ready in case of depresurization.
I have heard that it's best to have a blue background and a yellow text and somebody did scientific research to prove this.
I have not seen such research, actually, but blue backrground and yellow or white text is actually pretty relaxing. My Apple IIgs (I'm dating myself here, too) had a blue background and white text.
I think the reasoning behind this is that:
Blue, generally, promotes relaxation
Having the screen area being more evenly illuminated, but still distinguishable, is handy.
The eye isn't particularly sensitive to blue, so it isn't especially distracting.
To this end, if memory serves it was Jerry Pournelle, suggested to MS that they include an option in office that didn't involve a black-on-white display, so there is a little checkbox that lets you have a blue background and white text hidden away in the prefs.
Also, on paper, a white background with black text is more very much accepted as being more readable than the other way around. However, this is not always the case on the PC, because a solid area of white is where you start to notice the refresh rate of the monitor.
Generally the computer industry has a pretty crappy record of making a card do more than one thing at a time. Notice that, with the exception of cards that integrate the various video i/o functionality, it's one function, one card, in terms of consumer available hardware. Combination modem/ethernet cards never really cought on, and the first ones had annoying quirks to them.
Unless somebody deliberately made a chipset that could go either way, I suspect that a combo-card would be a collision of the guts of a wireless and wired ethernet card with a CardBus bridge to link them. As a result, you would likely end up paying the cost for both cards, plus a premium and be aimed more to be a convenience item instead of a budget item.
Plus, many laptops aimed at business will have built-in ethernet, meaning that it is of limited market interest.
There are SO many ways to rig an evaluation without resorting to such lame techniques as showing a completely rigged video.;)
For example, if you know the exact paramaters of a data set, you can optimize your compressor for just that data set. Like, for example, allocating a lot of bits to pink in a pr0n pic.
You can get insane compression with fractal/wavelet algorythims if you sit down and figure them out by hand or brute force.
And then, there of course is a question of what's on the system running things.
I mean, seriously, you could store four mini-streams and composite them to form the "real" stream. If you think of it that way, Flash already gives you streaming full-screen video over a 28.8 modem.
Oh yeah, and I forgot about doing really high-quality resizing to make less pixels look like more..;)
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True, and you could get free hot water to replace the hot water heater, depending on which type of fuel cell you were using. ;)
This isn't the first time that there have been people trying to sell fuel cells to the public. Every year or so, Popular Science or Popular Mechanics will hype somebody's fuel cells. One year it's a hydrogen-powered camcorder or laptop battery system, so you can have longer lifespans. The next, it's a fuel cell car. The next, something else.
;)
The problem is that they are a few months too late. California power, more or less, has stabalized. That would have been a great market for them to edge into.
I mean, really. I think fuel cells are a great idea. But where are you going to easily get the hydrogen? Sure, you can get a tank from the welding supply store, but you can get gas from any gas station and Compressed Natural Gas from most gas stations. There aren't any hydrogen pipelines to hook up to, like there are natural gas pipelines.
The real good model is a larger one that can produce substantial amounts of power off of a natural gas line. It just has to fit into a small trailer. You could solve a California-style power crunch (at least, until the Natural Gas lines run out of capacity) by parking a bunch of those all throughout the cities. Nobody gets up in arms about a power plant in their backyard because they don't even know it's there.
And remember, this is another stock listed on the famed Vancouver exchange. This is the same exchange where that company traded for 2 years before the founders realized that the company had no product and the demo was smoke-and-mirrors.
I checked the price and it seems like the cost difference between Cat-5 and Cat-5e is pretty minimal, and Cat-5e will be able to work with gigabit just fine over a reasonable range.
Or was I forgetting something?
Generally, you want to avoid little hubs because:
1) Cheap little hubs tend to have short lifespans, break, have conflicts, etc. They are intended for people's houses, dorm rooms and impromptu networking, not for a business.
2) Little hubs don't perform so well compared to more ports on the managed switch.
3) Not everybody who needs multiple computers is tech savy. Take, for example, the salesperson who has a laptop for the road and a desktop for work.
4) You don't have all of the encryption, authentication, etc. options available for the little hubs.
5) If the little hub gets messed up, you have to walk to the cube instead of doing everything through a remote admin console.
6) It costs very little more to run the 3 or 4 drops than it does to run 1 drop. Cable costs pale in comparison to labor costs. It will cost much more to install more drops later when the hubs get to be too annoying.
7) Managed switch ports, for a good-sized network, are generally pretty cheap. Once you consider the potential hidden costs of a little hub (extra admin trouble, compatability problems, etc) it starts making sense to just use the managed switch ports.
I am not a network expert, so take this with a grain of salt.
Get the best cable you can get at a reasonable price installed everywhere. Don't get the super-duper-will-be-good-for-1000-gigabits sort of cable. But do wire the desktops with a decent Cat-5e that will let you run gigabit when the price comes down for it so you don't have to do it again. And you know that, at some point, many users will start to need gigabit performance on their desktop. It's inevatable.
Make sure that you follow fire safety code. Only certain types of cable can be run through the walls.
Cable management is a very important consideration. The best system is one that lets you add more wiring whenever you want, keeps the cables neat, etc. I know part of it is making sure that you have ample conduit space through the walls, so you can run more cables later on. I know that another part of it is having those faceplates that let you add more jacks.
Do try to wire every room, even if it seems stupid. You never know what will happen later on.
Don't run everything through the same conduit set. Running power cables next to network cables is dangerous, stupid, and not good for network reliability. I think that's also against most building code.
You might want to wire the phone cables with Cat-5 or better, stupid as it seems. IP telephony is taking off and those might end up being used to wire up netphones.
Get a raised floor where all of the servers and hubs will be.
Try to have things set up so that you have no long cable runs. This may mean several networking/telephone closets. I'm not sure what the good maximum length is, so somebody else will have to fill that in.
Keep a map of what is cabled where. And keep it up-to-date.
The Apache::ASP will, AFAIK, only work with PERL ASP code. ChiliSoft will do VBScript ASP code.
i.e. you either use ChiliSoft or do a rewrite of your code base.
The ActiveScripting people have some good options under Windows that might be helpful if you want to maximize code reuse.
What happened was that everybody signed up to put an e- before everything. Some of it made sense, some of it didn't.
.com suffix from things. Same as they are not buying those funky mesh chairs anymore, making people wear nicer clothes, cutting back the absurd benefits, etc. Nobody wants to be associated with the possibility of becomming the next dot-bomb, e-bomb, or other such thing.
For example, it's a pretty good bet that if you have a catalog, having a website will be helpful. The computer catalog places are still seeing benefit from their sites, which is why they are still up.
What you will most likely see is people dropping the e- prefix and the
And this is the best way to keep your job and make smart decisions. If you are selling people only on the e- part of the name, that's bad. If you have a business plan for the feature that centers around things like "Making this paper-driven process accessible online so that you can kick back clearly wrong submissions without spending a real person's time, save time, not have to deal with so much paper, etc." and have an attached cost-benefit plan, then you are doing real business that leaverages computers.
And making things electronic will still be useful. If they can replace a staff of 100 low-level employees with an electronic system that requires a pair of servers and part of somebody's time to maintain it, that's saving money.
But putting a system that works fine as a paper-driven process, especially if your users are uneducated and computer-phobic, is a bad idea. Switching all of your databases over to using XML for no apparent reason other than hype is a bad idea. Changing the way a system works without a good appreciation for why it works that way is a bad idea. And that's the e-stuff that is bombing.
See, there are ways that Intel can work around this.
For one, even if they can win in court over Intel, a legal battle is expensive and annoying and can do them in even if they win.
For another, Intel no longer has a monopoly. AMD owns a substantial portion of the market. IBM/Sun/HP/CompaQ own a bunch of the server market. It will be much harder to prove an Intel monopoly than a MS monopoly.
And finally, some companies just love to cosy up to a single platform, contractual issues beside it. Perhaps Intel has been very nice to ServerWorks in the past and present. Perhaps it isn't the explicit threat of trouble, but more a desire to not end up like Via and have a chipset they will have legal troubles shipping.
Granted, I'd absolutely LOVE to see a good workstation-friendly ServerWorks chipset for either the P4 or Athlon that was aimed at the high-end hobyist market. But remember what happened to SGI when they went from hardcore hardware to lower-end stuff, hmm?
Mostly because the KT266A will be cheaper for the same performance and advantages. The major advantage of the dual DDR-SDRAM channels is to make the onboard video bite slightly less. If you are going to stuff it with an AGP video card, etc. you might as well just get the KT266A.
Naw, it's smart business.
;)
;)
Consider all of the laid off ex-dotcommers who don't have large disposable incomes right now.
Playstations for the poor!!!
Not sure. ServerWorks might be avoiding an AMD motherboard for the simple fact that Intel has been making motions of ceeding the high-end Intel chipset market to them.
;)
i.e. ServerWorks doesn't want to loose a license to the Pentium 4 and Itanium busses.
Regarding the 420 series and a built-in AGP card. It's likely that the cost difference between the two versions will be lower than the cost of a clearly better AGP card. This chipset is designed for a lower-end user. One who wouldn't be able to afford a GeForce 3 or a Radeon 7500, or at least doesn't want to spend the money on it.
It's very interesting to see that chipset out.
;)
Definately not what I would consider a performance motherboard, but I'd rate it better than an i810 or similar in terms of a chipset that has everything integrated. I mean, really, if you look at the benchmarks, your average PC manufacturer can make systems that don't need ethernet, sound, or video cards. And because it's all done by nVidia, you can bet that people who were preprogrammed by the local geek to loathe onboard Intel video will break programming and pick up an nForce based board because nVidia has got to be good, right?
Of course, the much touted dual-bus DDR-SDRAM doesn't net you too much performance over a single-bus DDR-SDRAM motherboard, mostly because it is more bandwidth than the CPU can pump. But it does make an onboard video card suck slightly less than trying to make a video card share a single PC133 SDRAM chanel.
I'm working at a company that's still growing.
It's great. I love my job. I also managed to get in right before the floor went out from under everybody.
My company is still fun. We had a doughnut-eating competition to raise money for the WTC bombing. Pranks are still played.
The problem is, there's a dotcom backlash. The real reason why dotcoms failed is because they weren't making any money. But people see the fancy chairs, the quirky offices, the couches, etc. as a symptom of the problem that there was. So the remaining tech companies are trying to show that they aren't like that.
I have to dress professionally to work, which means that the FCUK t-shirt, the OpenBSD t-shirt, the tie-dye t-shirt, and so on all have to stay home. Everybody wanted those funky mesh chairs, but we got Leap chairs instead. We have nice offices, not warehouse/factory space. Each office ends up with one hard leather couch set, not a fluffy funky couch set.
I guess the main thing is that the fun is between you and your cow-orkers, not a corporate mandate.
For one, the government would most likely be going after the manufacturers of encryption software instead of the users of encryption software.
Which means the law will be useless because encryption is already out.
The backdoor will probably be in the form of a key or a series of keys that one or more entities has. To make it seem better, multiple authorities will have portions of the key, so that you can't just grab one repository.
You can do statistical analysises and generally figure out if something has a likelyhood of being encrypted. It's a cold-war technology that probably got much usage back then. But it's not the kind of thing you could deploy across the entire network.
Now, I'm not a privacy whacko. I don't encrypt my hard drive. I'm not anti-government. I'm generally pretty pragmatic. But even I don't think that we should have backdoors on encryption software. Does the government have backdoors on our safes? Do the cops have a key to my appartment's door?
Well, if you don't care too much about performance, don't even bother with a 'real' IDE RAID card, just do software RAID. The reason why people use the hardware RAID cards like the higher end IDE RAID cards and the SCSI RAID cards is because it's faster.
So you can cut the cost of a good IDE raid card and just put an extra IDE controller card in your psuedo-NAS box so you can have 8 drives. Or you can put that off until later.
You should also consider getting a DAT drive and a bunch of DAT tapes, to back things up, just in case something massively bad happens to your system. RAID 5 is not perfect, and if your system catches on fire because of too much dust in the power supply, it'll be helpful.
I'm not banking on the massive success of this...
For one, half of the fun of Legos was all of the different pieces. If you just have two pieces, your creativity is impaired.
Besides, all of the different pieces keep kids buying more and going back to the store, which bodes well for the future of the company creating said parts.
*sigh* I miss construx. The difference in construction abilities between construx and legos was cool. You could construct different sorts of items with different attributes in each set. And both had mechanical/motorized/lit up capabilities.
What happened to them, anyways?
True.
It can also be said that people are entitled to payment for their efforts. If I was considering working in the field of cancer screening, but everybody in that field wasn't getting paid because nobody honored the patents, I'd work somewhere else.
If a bunch of biotech research firms working on a cure for cancer went under because they couldn't recoup the research investments necessary to develop new products, that would also be a bad thing.
The problem with medical patents is that medicine is one of those fields where the doctors and researchers are working in the public interest. So, I would consider charging an insane patent licensing fee, just because you could, for a test to be legal but highly unethical.
Keep a close and cynical eye, I say, on the biotech boom. Biotech is the next dotcom boom.
first post!!!
Actually, that's not entirely true.
The US airlock can host both Russian and US spacesuits. The Russian airlock can only support Russian spacesuits.
The problem is that both spacesuits have different diagnostic gear, different mounting racks, different requirements, etc. So it adds greatly to the complexity to support both spacesuits. And neither country wants to give up their own spacesuits, so you hafta support both.
Actually, that is true that Junkbuster is also a choice, the choice not to load advertising banners. So I stand corrected on that.
I also think that, in order for Junkbuster to be really useful, it would have to heavily modify a page. Again, I feel for the site owners and figure that they have a right to put banner advertisements on their pages in return for putting it up for free, so I don't actively try to install Junkbuster. But then, I'm a pragmatic moderate who thinks that the web should eventually make money for people and doesn't mind some advertising.
And, no, I don't think SmartTags are allright. The and in my above message is a logical AND, not a conversational AND. If you both hate SmartTags and love Junkbuster, then and only then, are you running the possibility of being a hypocrate.
Actually, I don't think so, at least in this case.
Loving Junkbuster to get rid of ads and hating Smart Tags because they change content is being a hypocrate.
But disabling popups is, at least the way I look at it, different. You are not actually changing the content, just preventing a response to said content.
I like the 0.9.4 version very much simply because I can cut off 99% of the annoying popups while allowing the one or two useful, or at least, impossible to avoid, popups. Like when somebody has a web app that sometimes pops up a tip window in response to clicking on a link instead of a whole new page.
I don't have a problem with people tracking my online usage with cookies, because I figure they are entitled to some information about my browsing habits in return for putting up their sites. I don't even mind banner adverts, even though the only ones I'd have a remote chance of wanting to buy based on a banner advert is Thinkgeek. I just hate popups.
We really do need new space suits for the ISS. I suspect that they primarily got hit with budget cutting to reduce the cost of the station to something that won't cause it to be canned for being too expensive.
The main annoyance with the current suits is that they operate at pure oxygen at a reduced pressure. This can very easily cause "The Bends", so you need to have an overnight pre-breathe.
Jerry Pournelle argues that we need a zero-pre-breathe suit that is easy to deal with. Why? Because that way, you could assemble structures in space. For the long truss structure for the ISS, we are sending up integrated chunks. If EVA planning was easier and we send up ironworkers instead of scientists, we could send up components of a space structure in any booster, large or small, and assemble them into a completed structure. This makes more sense when you consider that it is far easier to create a reusable launch vehicle that has a quarter of the cargo-carying capacity of the shuttle than one that has the cargo-carying capacity of the shuttle.
It's also good because you can have your final product as lightly constructed as a butterfly.
I only half agree with Jerry Pournelle, instead figuring that what we need more is a large inflatable hangar. That way, you don't need to deal with your parts floating into orbit and becomming part of the space debris problem, you don't need any sort of space suit, and you don't need to deal with maintaining the space suits.
I really would love it if somebody could reference some real research about skintight spacesuits for my reference files. I mean, if we ever want more people in space, an inexpensive skintight spacesuit would be great so that every room could have a few ready in case of depresurization.
I have heard that it's best to have a blue background and a yellow text and somebody did scientific research to prove this.
I have not seen such research, actually, but blue backrground and yellow or white text is actually pretty relaxing. My Apple IIgs (I'm dating myself here, too) had a blue background and white text.
I think the reasoning behind this is that:
To this end, if memory serves it was Jerry Pournelle, suggested to MS that they include an option in office that didn't involve a black-on-white display, so there is a little checkbox that lets you have a blue background and white text hidden away in the prefs.
Also, on paper, a white background with black text is more very much accepted as being more readable than the other way around. However, this is not always the case on the PC, because a solid area of white is where you start to notice the refresh rate of the monitor.
Generally the computer industry has a pretty crappy record of making a card do more than one thing at a time. Notice that, with the exception of cards that integrate the various video i/o functionality, it's one function, one card, in terms of consumer available hardware. Combination modem/ethernet cards never really cought on, and the first ones had annoying quirks to them.
Unless somebody deliberately made a chipset that could go either way, I suspect that a combo-card would be a collision of the guts of a wireless and wired ethernet card with a CardBus bridge to link them. As a result, you would likely end up paying the cost for both cards, plus a premium and be aimed more to be a convenience item instead of a budget item.
Plus, many laptops aimed at business will have built-in ethernet, meaning that it is of limited market interest.
There are SO many ways to rig an evaluation without resorting to such lame techniques as showing a completely rigged video. ;)
;)
For example, if you know the exact paramaters of a data set, you can optimize your compressor for just that data set. Like, for example, allocating a lot of bits to pink in a pr0n pic.
You can get insane compression with fractal/wavelet algorythims if you sit down and figure them out by hand or brute force.
And then, there of course is a question of what's on the system running things.
I mean, seriously, you could store four mini-streams and composite them to form the "real" stream. If you think of it that way, Flash already gives you streaming full-screen video over a 28.8 modem.
Oh yeah, and I forgot about doing really high-quality resizing to make less pixels look like more..