I wouldn't think you'd go to the trouble of building a really efficient computer without doing likewise with the monitor.
Well, for starters, obviously go with an LCD. Then, the real problem becomes figuring out the difference between
the wattage rating and the "real" draw.
Currently, for my primary, I have a BenQ FP222, which they spec at 49W (not too bad, most 22" panels rate
at 55W). It actually draws around half of that (which seems mostly influenced by how bright you want it), in my
experience. I would love to see a real-world comparison of a large number of 19-22" LCD panels, because
they all seem to publish draws far, far above what they really use; but no such list exists, that I know
of.
But when you say "go to the trouble", I can't help but think I haven't stressed enough how easily anyone
can build a decent low-power rig, without skimping on performance for anything except hardcore FPS gaming.
I really didn't do anything special, except picking a good CPU and not getting carried away with picking a
GPU massively overpowered for what I want (for reference, the NVidia 7300 series sips power, and a bit
higher end, the 8600 looks good if I had to build a new machine today).
Also, the motherboard you pick can have a HUGE influence on power consumption. For example, picking a board with the
ATi (now AMD) 790x chipset over any newer NForce chipset (680i, 780i, or really anything since the NForce 4) will
save you a whopping 40 watts alone. Yeah, 48W total - Your chipset can now eat more than the CPU itself!
As I've said to others, see my first reply in this thread. I refer to a modern dual-core >2GHz AMD
machine, with a reasonably modern GPU and all the toys you'd expect if you went out and bought a
new desktop PC today.
The amd cpu you mentioned is a laptop cpu. Turion == laptop cpu.
I actually mentioned two families of CPU, with the BE parts targetted
at the desktop market (though they do draw 45W rather than 35W).
I doesn't matter what case it is in, a laptop cpu is still a laptop
based computer.
No. A desktop with a LV CPU does not make it a laptop.
Laptops feel "weaker" than comparably-spec'd desktops for quite a few
reasons... From abysmal disk performance, to memory and peripherals that
go into low power modes after mere milliseconds of inactivity, to
soft-sound/modem/LAN/etc to save on parts and power. Not to mention the
near total lack of upgradeability.
Sure. Start with a VIA Epia LN10000EG (I personally use LogicSupply for
my mini-ITX shopping, they haven't screwed me yet). Toss in a gig of DDR2
533 RAM. Get the lowest wattage SeaSonic PSU you can find (or other known quality
unit - You will regret saving $30 here).
Get any ol' $20 ATX case with four (or more) external 5.25 bays. You obviously
don't need one with a PSU, but you'll find that it costs less to get one
with power and toss the stock unit.
Get a ThermalTake A2309 iCage (NewEgg carries these), the best $17 you'll
ever spend on computer parts. I put one of these (or something comparable)
into every machine I build, and it holds up to three HDDs (perfect with a
fourth bay holding your optical drive).
You may want to get a gigabit NIC card rather than using the onboard 10/100. You
could also get the... Hmmm... I think Epia EK12000EG, a similar board that has an
onboard gigabit NIC, but it costs almost twice the price for basically just that
one feature. You also will probably want to get a loose 12cm fan to blow in the
general direction of the CPU - Officially the LN10000EG works fanless, but in
practice it can get pretty warm.
And there you go... Everything you need except the actual drives, for under $250.
Toss in a DVD burner and a 500GB drive (currently the "sweet" price point) or
three, install your favorite Linux distro, and you have an instant home file/media
server drawing only 30-50W (depending mostly on what and how many HDDs you put in
it; you can also force-throttle the CPU in the BIOS to squeeze out a few more watts)
at the wall.
One warning about drives, though... I've had horrible luck with VIA's
SATA drivers for Linux. I'd recommend sticking with the PATA for now, or even
going so far as to run Windows if you must use the SATA port(s). And for
the record, I do not recommend the marginally-cheaper Epia clones such
as JetWay. I've only dealt with a few of them, but they without exception
have sucked, and hard.
No way your computer draws only 65W, unless you have a
VERY old computer or a shuttle that can barely do anything.
Provide an email address and I'll send you a picture of a Kill-A-Watt
reading in the high-50W range with the CPU pegged (and in the low 40s
idle). I respect your pessimism, but really do run two such systems;
One even has something vaguely resembling a decent GPU, though
no doubt the hardcore gamers would sneer heartily at it (not that
I care, as I said, as I mostly prefer RPG and RTS over FPS).
As for "older", AMD has two entire lines of modern, dual-core chips
running between 31W (Turion) and 45W ("BE" parts). While true that dual
2.3Ghz cores don't rock the world anymore, as I said, they perform so much
more than "okay" that I don't see myself upgrading for at least
another two years (barring any revolutionary advances in CPU technology
before then, which looks exceedingly unlikely IMO).
Not to mention your power supply is at max 85% efficient.
I've had enough crappy low-end PSUs take out systems in the past that I
buy only the best now - And as a side effect of "quality", you tend to
get "efficiency". I personally favor SeaSonic's hardware, of which the
newer ones push 88% efficient; Though yes, the ones I have now only
claim 85%.
Regardless, keep in mind that that number applies multiplicatively
to whatever your CPU and GPU (and the negligible rest) draw... 0.85*(35+16)
wastes only 9W, while 0.85*(120+107) wastes over 40W. Just think about
that for a sec - A carelessly designed midrange PC can easily waste, just
in PSU losses, my total light-use draw.
or a shuttle that can barely do anything.
I run one of those (well, a home-built EPIA system) as my home
file server. 22W at-the-wall (not counting the bank of HDDs
except the boot drive), and it can perform its one and only
real "task" (saturating a gigabit network connection) juuuuuust
fine.
don't you think it's an outrageous and indefensible statement to
suggest that a company (or individual for that matter) would take
pleasure in seeing a soldier injured?
You mean like insurance companies who award bonuses based on number
of policies dropped to avoid big payouts?
Or, let's get blunt here, how about manufacturers of military hardware?
They exist for the purpose of maiming and killing soldiers - Sure,
soldiers on the "other" side (as though that magically excuses atrocities
against humanity) but still for the purpose of blowing people up.
I agree, "politics" has nothing to do with it - War and all its trappings
has no justification beyond "personal defense". When TweedleDum (R)
and TweedleDee (D) put on the dog-and-pony for us regarding the War on
Islam, they both leave only the thinnest veil of euphemisms between
"defense" and "taking pleasure in seeing soldiers injured".
Intel's own spec sheet shows the best of these (and only a single
one at that) with a TDP of 65W.
Call me a pessimist, but my two main systems peak at less than that
at the wall, and I have yet to find them too slow for any given
task (though I admittedly don't do much "twitch" gaming).
It's sad that the industry is still sticking to the x86 instruction set.
Why? Once upon a time, the x86 ISA had too few registers. Today, that problem
has vanished (simply by throwing more GP registers at the problem) - And even
then, so few people actually see the problem (and I say that as
one of the increasingly rare guys who still codes in ASM on occasion) as to make
it a non-issue, more a matter of trivia than actual import.
The Power/PowerPC architecture was good
I know I risk a holy-war here, but: No, not really. PPC didn't suck, and
held its own for its era. But it didn't scale well, it always cost
significantly more for a given level of performance, and even its biggest
advantage, "Vector" processing (aka SIMD), vanished with the introduction
of the original MMX into the x86 line. After that point, only clock speed
and number of execution units mattered (and of course price, never forget
price), and the PPC simply fell further and further behind. Apple "switched"
for a damned good reason, and "Intel Inside" doesn't describe it.
It should've been replaced a long time ago with a pure RISC instruction
set especially now with the quest for less power-hungry chips
First of all, all modern chips have a native RISC-like core with an
x86 frontend implemented entirely in microcode - So if the world still wanted
PPC, Intel could release a C2D tomorrow that exported that as the visible
interface. Arguing CISC vs RISC in today's world has as much meaning as
arguing over case colors.
Second, the CPU's ISA has no (direct) effect on power consumption. RISC
processors traditionally drew less power because they simply had fewer
transistors (and a painfully small instruction set to show for it). A "modern"
RISC processor, with multiple cores, multiple deep pipelined execution units,
a variety of FP and SIMD units, and multiple levels of fairly large cache, would
draw power comparably to anything currently available from AMD or Intel.
Finally, this battle died with DEC and SGI and MIPS. Let it rest in peace.
Joke taken, but on a more serious note, it costs companies a lot of money to hire someone new for any
even moderately skilled non-manual-labor position. For a typical mid-career Software Engineer the search itself
can cost thousands, signing bonuses and/or headhunters can run into the tens of thousands; and then, the company needs
to expect up to six months of sub-optimal performance as the newbie gets familiar with the company's specific proceedures
and domain of knowledge, which will also actively reduce the task-specific performance of whatever form of "mentor"
the company provides to get the newbie up to speed.
The FP should keep that in mind (and his own past performance with the company) when deciding whether to sign or
give an ultimatum. Just by already working there, he has FAR more leverage than he may realize (and indeed, than
the company wants him to realize). He should also consider whether or not he cares - Personally, I wouldn't
call six months all that bad (it may take that long to find a non-crap new job anyway), but I would at least
push back a bit to test the waters.
If NBC had finally "gotten" it, their shows would still be available on iTunes.
Believe it or not, not everyone uses iTunes for all their digital media purchases.
Personally, I still buy traditional media and rip it myself. I don't actually ever
listen to an original CD or watch an original DVD, I just like having a physical backup,
as opposed to nothing more than a license and some DRM'd bits (though you could argue that
I have nothing but a shiny plastic disc and a license to a CD or DVD, good luck
revoking that license without my willing participation).
So yeah, we can both say NBC hasn't quite caught the right bus yet. But at least
they've started looking, and iTunes doesn't run the only coach in town...
and you have to watch it within 48 hours of downloading
...Until DVD Jon or similar gets annoyed by that...
those times and places where you're "not likely to have internet access" are a bit limited.
Jokes aside, I'd say that NBC has finally seen the light - The future of the Internet doesn't
look like TV, as traditional media execs always hoped; More that the future of TV looks like
YouTube.
If NBC has finally "gotten" it, good for them. This first laughable attempt at giving people
what they want may have a few flaws. I don't know, I won't use it even having a capable
machine, because I don't watch anything on NBC (used to watch The Office until they turned it
into a tedious little soap opera; and SNL, well, TiVo'd I'll watch part of it, but if they
won't let you skip commercials, they probably don't let you skip the 90% of really dumb sketches,
either). But still, good to see them trying.
What happens when you push the button on the electronic screen? Can you tell me?
You either decrease the resistance or increase the capacitance (or in some
cases, disrupt an actual standing ultrasonic "sound" wave) between two
fine meshes of wires running through the touchscreen. The touchscreen
controller debounces this and reports it (either as serial input or by
keystroke emulation) to the host device. The host device runs an OS
(most likely QNX or PSOS or VX - Or yes, even Linux) that polls the input
and reports it to the voting app. The app then reacts by checking who
the most recent service tech wanted to win, and adjusting any user errors
accordingly. Then the app asks the OS to record the vote, and the OS commits
it to whatever (preferably but not necessarily write-once) media it has for
that purpose.
Really quite simple, if you break it down into each small step of the process.
One player with rapid/spread could play basically forever, beating
Red Falcon over and over and over without ever losing a life (since
the difficulty doesn't appear to change each time).
I must have beat that sucker at least 20 times in a row on one guy,
once upon a time, only stopping because I got bored rather than actually
dying. Two player? Completely unneccesary.
There's been a real shift away from giving credit where
credit is due because things are bought and paid for.
How many people do you give credit to, though?
A modern large-scale entertainment project could easily have thousands
of people who worked on it. Should the credits take longer than rest of
the movie (or game)?
Also, how do you define who "worked" on it and who didn't? If Random-Intern-Guy gets
in because he wrote two lines of code, what about Secretary-Goddess who acted behind
the scenes to coordinate a "team" of dozens of engineers in the complete absence of
anything resembling competant management involvement? How about the guy that keeps
the office coffee pot full, thus singlehandedly keeping the project on schedule?
Credits waste the audience's time. With the exception of a few superstars, I don't
care who performed a given task in a game (or movie). And the few who do
matter, I'll know, regardless of credit.
On a related note, compare this to other works of similar scale in slightly
different categories... At my job, I spend about half my time doing software
development, for which no one gets "credits" in what we release to
our customers. This doesn't bother me (I still get paid and it still goes on
my resume), and in fact, I prefer it as a strong privacy advocate.
The only game that's worse is Pac Man. I have played that game, in total,
for hundreds of hours, but I never managed to reach the end.
You want to talk about unmemorable "endings"? Pac-Man has none. It just
crashes after 255 levels
(scroll down to the end of the page).
Then again, if that had happened to me back in the prime of Pac-Man, I'd
have thought it a random crash rather than "the end", and probably blown an
aneurysm. So I guess you could call that memorable, in its own way...
I hope that these two are pulled out of office, there's better
things for the DOJ to be doing.
Oddly, Leahy usually counts as one of the best pro-privacy, pro-bill-o'-rights,
anti-big-brother senators. It really surprises me to see his name attached to this
atrocity.
Enough so, that it makes me wonder if we've missed something about this
bill that makes it not quite as bad as it sounds - Like capping liability
at some absurdly low level ("Yup, ya got me, will you take a check or
should I just pay the $20 fine in cash?") or similar.
So, hypothetically, if they were all sent a form tomorrow saying "Sign this,
and you're legally here" and they all did, you'd be fine with their existence
(because they're now legal)?
Yes, actually, and that form already has a name: "W4".
Okay, class, now who can tell me what box #2 on a US W4 form asks for?
So, let me get this straight: Your ONE AND ONLY problem with them is their legal status.
I don't think many people have claimed that, but it gets trickier
in that some people can't mentally separate "racism" from "statistics".
The only reason you can try to disguise this as a racial issue, betrays the
very problem you would gloss over - Canadian immigrants come here legally,
contribute to society, and try to adapt to US culture. Western European immigrants come here legally,
contribute to society, and try to adapt to US culture. South (NOT "Central") American immigrants (hmm, largely
the same race as the one you'd accuse us of disliking) tend to come here
legally, contribute to society, and try to adapt to US culture.
And what rather conspicuous category does that leave? Y'know, the ones who tend to
sneak in illegally, drain societal resources, and hold street marches (using our
first amendment right to flaunt their true level of interest in obeying our laws)
waving Mexican flags in our faces and demanding we teach their anchors in Spanish
(My apologies to all the actual Spaniards who cringe at the association of their beautiful
language with the debase patois spoken South-of-the-Border)?
And what valuable skills do these fine and upstanding folks bring to the plate to justify
their citizenship? Virtually none except a willingness to do manual labor cheaper
than the traditional standby, early-teen males.
So you'd cry racism? No, my misguided friend, not racism. Some of us just
dislike parasitic infetions.
Yes - assuming you define the death rate as no. deaths/no. births
then it will be less than 100% and will remain so while the population
is above zero
That presumes that fewer woman/baby combos have died in (unsuccessful)
childbirth, than people currently alive today.
Considering that SciAm debunked the myth that we now have more people
alive today than have ever lived before (they estimate the planet has
seen 106 billion people), of which we can consider half of those females,
and considering that throughout most of human history women had between
a 1-in-3 and 1-in-4 chance of dying during childbirth, that means that
somewhere between 13 and 17 billion people have died during-but-before
birth.
Thus, applying your definition, we have a greater than 100% death rate.;)
does an elected official that most people don't
even know count as a "public figure"?
In most places, these people have more power than the rest of
local government combined. They usually control over
two-thirds of the town/city budget, they have the power to
make the life of anyone with children a living hell, and they
usually have so little oversight as to make them nearly
bulletproof in a scandal.
Even if you don't have kids, you damned well better have an
interest in what goes on with your local school board (unless
you don't care how rapidly your excise and property
taxes go up).
Actually, you
could go one further and argue that the FP author has
committed that fallacy, even while the referent of his hand-waved
"all this" doesn't.
Interesting... Not only has he misused the phrase, but he
simultaneously committed the logical fallacy to which he
accidentally referred.
Slashdot Mirror
Since AT&T has been spying on everyone since spring of 2000, why not ask them for copies of Whitehouse and NRC.com emails?
Whoever modded this "funny" clearly doesn't "get" it.
+5 "insightful (and scary as hell)", not "funny".
I wouldn't think you'd go to the trouble of building a really efficient computer without doing likewise with the monitor.
Well, for starters, obviously go with an LCD. Then, the real problem becomes figuring out the difference between the wattage rating and the "real" draw.
Currently, for my primary, I have a BenQ FP222, which they spec at 49W (not too bad, most 22" panels rate at 55W). It actually draws around half of that (which seems mostly influenced by how bright you want it), in my experience. I would love to see a real-world comparison of a large number of 19-22" LCD panels, because they all seem to publish draws far, far above what they really use; but no such list exists, that I know of.
But when you say "go to the trouble", I can't help but think I haven't stressed enough how easily anyone can build a decent low-power rig, without skimping on performance for anything except hardcore FPS gaming. I really didn't do anything special, except picking a good CPU and not getting carried away with picking a GPU massively overpowered for what I want (for reference, the NVidia 7300 series sips power, and a bit higher end, the 8600 looks good if I had to build a new machine today).
Also, the motherboard you pick can have a HUGE influence on power consumption. For example, picking a board with the ATi (now AMD) 790x chipset over any newer NForce chipset (680i, 780i, or really anything since the NForce 4) will save you a whopping 40 watts alone. Yeah, 48W total - Your chipset can now eat more than the CPU itself!
You're using a very apples-to-oranges comparison
As I've said to others, see my first reply in this thread. I refer to a modern dual-core >2GHz AMD machine, with a reasonably modern GPU and all the toys you'd expect if you went out and bought a new desktop PC today.
The amd cpu you mentioned is a laptop cpu. Turion == laptop cpu.
I actually mentioned two families of CPU, with the BE parts targetted at the desktop market (though they do draw 45W rather than 35W).
I doesn't matter what case it is in, a laptop cpu is still a laptop based computer.
No. A desktop with a LV CPU does not make it a laptop.
Laptops feel "weaker" than comparably-spec'd desktops for quite a few reasons... From abysmal disk performance, to memory and peripherals that go into low power modes after mere milliseconds of inactivity, to soft-sound/modem/LAN/etc to save on parts and power. Not to mention the near total lack of upgradeability.
Can you share details?
Sure. Start with a VIA Epia LN10000EG (I personally use LogicSupply for my mini-ITX shopping, they haven't screwed me yet). Toss in a gig of DDR2 533 RAM. Get the lowest wattage SeaSonic PSU you can find (or other known quality unit - You will regret saving $30 here).
Get any ol' $20 ATX case with four (or more) external 5.25 bays. You obviously don't need one with a PSU, but you'll find that it costs less to get one with power and toss the stock unit.
Get a ThermalTake A2309 iCage (NewEgg carries these), the best $17 you'll ever spend on computer parts. I put one of these (or something comparable) into every machine I build, and it holds up to three HDDs (perfect with a fourth bay holding your optical drive).
You may want to get a gigabit NIC card rather than using the onboard 10/100. You could also get the... Hmmm... I think Epia EK12000EG, a similar board that has an onboard gigabit NIC, but it costs almost twice the price for basically just that one feature. You also will probably want to get a loose 12cm fan to blow in the general direction of the CPU - Officially the LN10000EG works fanless, but in practice it can get pretty warm.
And there you go... Everything you need except the actual drives, for under $250. Toss in a DVD burner and a 500GB drive (currently the "sweet" price point) or three, install your favorite Linux distro, and you have an instant home file/media server drawing only 30-50W (depending mostly on what and how many HDDs you put in it; you can also force-throttle the CPU in the BIOS to squeeze out a few more watts) at the wall.
One warning about drives, though... I've had horrible luck with VIA's SATA drivers for Linux. I'd recommend sticking with the PATA for now, or even going so far as to run Windows if you must use the SATA port(s). And for the record, I do not recommend the marginally-cheaper Epia clones such as JetWay. I've only dealt with a few of them, but they without exception have sucked, and hard.
it's not possible that your machine is less than 65W at the wall unless it's a laptop, which is hardly a fair comparison
See my other response on this topic. Not just possible, really pretty easy, with some care.
Also, TDP is not really a good measure of power efficiency.
Agreed, if for no other reason than because it means different things to different companies. But I did say "at the wall", and I meant it.
Don't get me wrong, I truly applaud Intel's attampts to reduce power consumption. But for me personally, they have a looooong way further to go.
No way your computer draws only 65W, unless you have a VERY old computer or a shuttle that can barely do anything.
Provide an email address and I'll send you a picture of a Kill-A-Watt reading in the high-50W range with the CPU pegged (and in the low 40s idle). I respect your pessimism, but really do run two such systems; One even has something vaguely resembling a decent GPU, though no doubt the hardcore gamers would sneer heartily at it (not that I care, as I said, as I mostly prefer RPG and RTS over FPS).
As for "older", AMD has two entire lines of modern, dual-core chips running between 31W (Turion) and 45W ("BE" parts). While true that dual 2.3Ghz cores don't rock the world anymore, as I said, they perform so much more than "okay" that I don't see myself upgrading for at least another two years (barring any revolutionary advances in CPU technology before then, which looks exceedingly unlikely IMO).
Not to mention your power supply is at max 85% efficient.
I've had enough crappy low-end PSUs take out systems in the past that I buy only the best now - And as a side effect of "quality", you tend to get "efficiency". I personally favor SeaSonic's hardware, of which the newer ones push 88% efficient; Though yes, the ones I have now only claim 85%.
Regardless, keep in mind that that number applies multiplicatively to whatever your CPU and GPU (and the negligible rest) draw... 0.85*(35+16) wastes only 9W, while 0.85*(120+107) wastes over 40W. Just think about that for a sec - A carelessly designed midrange PC can easily waste, just in PSU losses, my total light-use draw.
or a shuttle that can barely do anything.
I run one of those (well, a home-built EPIA system) as my home file server. 22W at-the-wall (not counting the bank of HDDs except the boot drive), and it can perform its one and only real "task" (saturating a gigabit network connection) juuuuuust fine.
don't you think it's an outrageous and indefensible statement to suggest that a company (or individual for that matter) would take pleasure in seeing a soldier injured?
You mean like insurance companies who award bonuses based on number of policies dropped to avoid big payouts?
Or, let's get blunt here, how about manufacturers of military hardware? They exist for the purpose of maiming and killing soldiers - Sure, soldiers on the "other" side (as though that magically excuses atrocities against humanity) but still for the purpose of blowing people up.
I agree, "politics" has nothing to do with it - War and all its trappings has no justification beyond "personal defense". When TweedleDum (R) and TweedleDee (D) put on the dog-and-pony for us regarding the War on Islam, they both leave only the thinnest veil of euphemisms between "defense" and "taking pleasure in seeing soldiers injured".
Intel's own spec sheet shows the best of these (and only a single one at that) with a TDP of 65W.
Call me a pessimist, but my two main systems peak at less than that at the wall, and I have yet to find them too slow for any given task (though I admittedly don't do much "twitch" gaming).
It's sad that the industry is still sticking to the x86 instruction set.
Why? Once upon a time, the x86 ISA had too few registers. Today, that problem has vanished (simply by throwing more GP registers at the problem) - And even then, so few people actually see the problem (and I say that as one of the increasingly rare guys who still codes in ASM on occasion) as to make it a non-issue, more a matter of trivia than actual import.
The Power/PowerPC architecture was good
I know I risk a holy-war here, but: No, not really. PPC didn't suck, and held its own for its era. But it didn't scale well, it always cost significantly more for a given level of performance, and even its biggest advantage, "Vector" processing (aka SIMD), vanished with the introduction of the original MMX into the x86 line. After that point, only clock speed and number of execution units mattered (and of course price, never forget price), and the PPC simply fell further and further behind. Apple "switched" for a damned good reason, and "Intel Inside" doesn't describe it.
It should've been replaced a long time ago with a pure RISC instruction set especially now with the quest for less power-hungry chips
First of all, all modern chips have a native RISC-like core with an x86 frontend implemented entirely in microcode - So if the world still wanted PPC, Intel could release a C2D tomorrow that exported that as the visible interface. Arguing CISC vs RISC in today's world has as much meaning as arguing over case colors.
Second, the CPU's ISA has no (direct) effect on power consumption. RISC processors traditionally drew less power because they simply had fewer transistors (and a painfully small instruction set to show for it). A "modern" RISC processor, with multiple cores, multiple deep pipelined execution units, a variety of FP and SIMD units, and multiple levels of fairly large cache, would draw power comparably to anything currently available from AMD or Intel.
Finally, this battle died with DEC and SGI and MIPS. Let it rest in peace.
Joke taken, but on a more serious note, it costs companies a lot of money to hire someone new for any even moderately skilled non-manual-labor position. For a typical mid-career Software Engineer the search itself can cost thousands, signing bonuses and/or headhunters can run into the tens of thousands; and then, the company needs to expect up to six months of sub-optimal performance as the newbie gets familiar with the company's specific proceedures and domain of knowledge, which will also actively reduce the task-specific performance of whatever form of "mentor" the company provides to get the newbie up to speed.
The FP should keep that in mind (and his own past performance with the company) when deciding whether to sign or give an ultimatum. Just by already working there, he has FAR more leverage than he may realize (and indeed, than the company wants him to realize). He should also consider whether or not he cares - Personally, I wouldn't call six months all that bad (it may take that long to find a non-crap new job anyway), but I would at least push back a bit to test the waters.
If NBC had finally "gotten" it, their shows would still be available on iTunes.
Believe it or not, not everyone uses iTunes for all their digital media purchases.
Personally, I still buy traditional media and rip it myself. I don't actually ever listen to an original CD or watch an original DVD, I just like having a physical backup, as opposed to nothing more than a license and some DRM'd bits (though you could argue that I have nothing but a shiny plastic disc and a license to a CD or DVD, good luck revoking that license without my willing participation).
So yeah, we can both say NBC hasn't quite caught the right bus yet. But at least they've started looking, and iTunes doesn't run the only coach in town...
Check the books; that's got to be some kind of record.
Nah - Sometimes servers get Slashdotted before a single post makes it in.
And now that we have the Firehose, it wouldn't surprise me to start seeing the occasional story Slashdotted before even making it to the FP.
Since you can't transfer it
... Yet ...
...Until DVD Jon or similar gets annoyed by that...
and you have to watch it within 48 hours of downloading
those times and places where you're "not likely to have internet access" are a bit limited.
Jokes aside, I'd say that NBC has finally seen the light - The future of the Internet doesn't look like TV, as traditional media execs always hoped; More that the future of TV looks like YouTube.
If NBC has finally "gotten" it, good for them. This first laughable attempt at giving people what they want may have a few flaws. I don't know, I won't use it even having a capable machine, because I don't watch anything on NBC (used to watch The Office until they turned it into a tedious little soap opera; and SNL, well, TiVo'd I'll watch part of it, but if they won't let you skip commercials, they probably don't let you skip the 90% of really dumb sketches, either). But still, good to see them trying.
What happens when you push the button on the electronic screen? Can you tell me?
You either decrease the resistance or increase the capacitance (or in some cases, disrupt an actual standing ultrasonic "sound" wave) between two fine meshes of wires running through the touchscreen. The touchscreen controller debounces this and reports it (either as serial input or by keystroke emulation) to the host device. The host device runs an OS (most likely QNX or PSOS or VX - Or yes, even Linux) that polls the input and reports it to the voting app. The app then reacts by checking who the most recent service tech wanted to win, and adjusting any user errors accordingly. Then the app asks the OS to record the vote, and the OS commits it to whatever (preferably but not necessarily write-once) media it has for that purpose.
Really quite simple, if you break it down into each small step of the process.
One player gets spread
...Game over.
One player with rapid/spread could play basically forever, beating Red Falcon over and over and over without ever losing a life (since the difficulty doesn't appear to change each time).
I must have beat that sucker at least 20 times in a row on one guy, once upon a time, only stopping because I got bored rather than actually dying. Two player? Completely unneccesary.
There's been a real shift away from giving credit where credit is due because things are bought and paid for.
How many people do you give credit to, though?
A modern large-scale entertainment project could easily have thousands of people who worked on it. Should the credits take longer than rest of the movie (or game)?
Also, how do you define who "worked" on it and who didn't? If Random-Intern-Guy gets in because he wrote two lines of code, what about Secretary-Goddess who acted behind the scenes to coordinate a "team" of dozens of engineers in the complete absence of anything resembling competant management involvement? How about the guy that keeps the office coffee pot full, thus singlehandedly keeping the project on schedule?
Credits waste the audience's time. With the exception of a few superstars, I don't care who performed a given task in a game (or movie). And the few who do matter, I'll know, regardless of credit.
On a related note, compare this to other works of similar scale in slightly different categories... At my job, I spend about half my time doing software development, for which no one gets "credits" in what we release to our customers. This doesn't bother me (I still get paid and it still goes on my resume), and in fact, I prefer it as a strong privacy advocate.
The only game that's worse is Pac Man. I have played that game, in total, for hundreds of hours, but I never managed to reach the end.
You want to talk about unmemorable "endings"? Pac-Man has none. It just crashes after 255 levels (scroll down to the end of the page).
Then again, if that had happened to me back in the prime of Pac-Man, I'd have thought it a random crash rather than "the end", and probably blown an aneurysm. So I guess you could call that memorable, in its own way...
I hope that these two are pulled out of office, there's better things for the DOJ to be doing.
Oddly, Leahy usually counts as one of the best pro-privacy, pro-bill-o'-rights, anti-big-brother senators. It really surprises me to see his name attached to this atrocity.
Enough so, that it makes me wonder if we've missed something about this bill that makes it not quite as bad as it sounds - Like capping liability at some absurdly low level ("Yup, ya got me, will you take a check or should I just pay the $20 fine in cash?") or similar.
To date, consumers have put more than 145 million numbers on the Registry, indicating they do not want to receive calls from telemarketers at home.
Now if only they'd remove the exemptions for charities and politicians, I'd call this a job well done.
So, hypothetically, if they were all sent a form tomorrow saying "Sign this, and you're legally here" and they all did, you'd be fine with their existence (because they're now legal)?
Yes, actually, and that form already has a name: "W4".
Okay, class, now who can tell me what box #2 on a US W4 form asks for?
So, let me get this straight: Your ONE AND ONLY problem with them is their legal status.
I don't think many people have claimed that, but it gets trickier in that some people can't mentally separate "racism" from "statistics".
The only reason you can try to disguise this as a racial issue, betrays the very problem you would gloss over - Canadian immigrants come here legally, contribute to society, and try to adapt to US culture. Western European immigrants come here legally, contribute to society, and try to adapt to US culture. South (NOT "Central") American immigrants (hmm, largely the same race as the one you'd accuse us of disliking) tend to come here legally, contribute to society, and try to adapt to US culture.
And what rather conspicuous category does that leave? Y'know, the ones who tend to sneak in illegally, drain societal resources, and hold street marches (using our first amendment right to flaunt their true level of interest in obeying our laws) waving Mexican flags in our faces and demanding we teach their anchors in Spanish (My apologies to all the actual Spaniards who cringe at the association of their beautiful language with the debase patois spoken South-of-the-Border)?
And what valuable skills do these fine and upstanding folks bring to the plate to justify their citizenship? Virtually none except a willingness to do manual labor cheaper than the traditional standby, early-teen males.
So you'd cry racism? No, my misguided friend, not racism. Some of us just dislike parasitic infetions.
Yes - assuming you define the death rate as no. deaths/no. births then it will be less than 100% and will remain so while the population is above zero
;)
That presumes that fewer woman/baby combos have died in (unsuccessful) childbirth, than people currently alive today.
Considering that SciAm debunked the myth that we now have more people alive today than have ever lived before (they estimate the planet has seen 106 billion people), of which we can consider half of those females, and considering that throughout most of human history women had between a 1-in-3 and 1-in-4 chance of dying during childbirth, that means that somewhere between 13 and 17 billion people have died during-but-before birth.
Thus, applying your definition, we have a greater than 100% death rate.
does an elected official that most people don't even know count as a "public figure"?
In most places, these people have more power than the rest of local government combined. They usually control over two-thirds of the town/city budget, they have the power to make the life of anyone with children a living hell, and they usually have so little oversight as to make them nearly bulletproof in a scandal.
Even if you don't have kids, you damned well better have an interest in what goes on with your local school board (unless you don't care how rapidly your excise and property taxes go up).
but these sites are too useful to just ignore like that.
Wanna bet?
Interesting... Not only has he misused the phrase, but he simultaneously committed the logical fallacy to which he accidentally referred.