Camouflage can work in two ways. Blending in OR pretending to be something different. Perhaps even standing out in such a way that everybody ignores you. If you had to be on the street unnoticed in broad daylight what would work better, a camo outfit OR looking like a homeless beggar?
By your logic, ANYTHING could be a fucking bomb. The trash can could be (or contain) a bomb. The mailbox could. Maybe that ATM that's broken isn't a real ATM. Maybe that pile of newspapers isn't a real pile of newspapers. Maybe that beggar is a TERRORIST!!!!!
The fact is, THERE AREN'T MANY TERRORISTS. Terrorist attacks ARE NOT AND HAVE NEVER BEEN COMMON IN THE US.
9/11 happened with innocent box-cutters when everyone knows they are harmless. If the hijackers had carried machine guns they might not have succeeded (then again, this is airport security we are talking about).
9/11 happened because you cannot stop 9/11. Determined and resourceful people are trying to attack us, and, sooner or later, they will succeed. Terrorists could swallow explosives to get past security. They could use heat-seaking missles to hit jets. They could short a notebook battery and start a fire in the lavatory after stealing the fire extinguishers. They could open a cabin hatch in midflight.
We cannot stop terrorism. That's not to say that we shouldn't try to make it is difficult as possible for the terrorists. But we shouldn't become paranoid or live in fear trying to cover every last possibility. That's impossible.
Now, what shape/look would a terrorist bomb have?
It would look like any other IED - some kind of timing or remote detonation device along with explosives. It doesn't really matter what it looks like, though, because it would be HIDDEN. You don't put explosives in plain sight - there's too much of a chance of them being discovered. You hide them in a vehicle, a mailbox, a trash can, or any of the millions of other out-of-sight places in a city.
If you had to stick on in a public place would you just carry a box of TNT with TNT written on it with you onto a train and hope nobody notices OR would you try to hide it in someway.
The point is that you don't put it in a public place at all. IT MAKES NO SENSE for terrorists to call attention to their devices with bright flashing lights. Whether or not individuals belieive that they are bombs, having your devices so plainly visible makes them infinitely easier to find and diffuse than if they were hidden.
Think of this from the police perspective: if you knew that bombs had been planted in your city, would you want them to be:
A - Brightly lit and placed in conspicuous locations B - Nondescript devices (e.g. a cardboard box) hidden in trashcans or mailboxes
Which is easier to detect? Which is easier to find?
Every. Last. One. of them involves violence and combat?
Wow. That's sad.
Most video games do, particularly high-budget games which are likely to win awards. It's difficult to add depth to puzzle/card/city-builder games (though there have been some notable exceptions), so most high-budget games are those which simulate "reality" (either our world or a fantasy world). Once you've done that, the question becomes: what do you do in this dream world? The answer is simple: you do something you can't do in the real world. You fight an alien invasion, become a special agent, complete mythical quests, engage in futuristic arena combat, steal cars, or build an empire.
Non-violent games generally fall into a few categories: sports (Madden is one of the top selling games, year after year), racing (GT3 is the best selling PS2 game), card/casino (Hold 'Em is insanely popular online, and Solitare is the most distributed and played video game ever), builder/tycoon, and puzzle.
Sports games don't do well on PCs. They play better with controllers and on a big screen with friends. Racing games - ditto - few have a wheel, and no one wants to play a racing game with a keyboard. Card/casino and puzzle games are unlikely to make a Top 20 list (not that they are bad, they just aren't typically deep big-budget titles). As for builder/tycoon games, there have been some standout titles (Sim City, for one), but there hasn't been anything spectacular in the last 5 years - mostly just sequels and rehashes.
So, what does that leave? RTS, FPS, RPG, and MMO games. Guess what? They almost always involve at least a minimal amount of violence.
We did leave one insanely popular PC game out, though. The Sims is the best-selling PC title of all time, and it isn't really violent at all.
Well, that may be true, but it's not the case with Vista. Vista builds have been more or less publically available since Beta 2 through the CPP. It's hard to distribute different builds to different people when 5 million people are running your beta OS.
Nice try, but Vista can already do that. It's called "previous versions".
I'm sure in 6 months, someone will claim that Microsoft ripped off time machine. Just like they "ripped off" Dashboard (HINT: Konfabulator did pretty much the EXACT SAME THING before Dashboard did, and Stardock DesktopX did it before Konfabulator).
You should only have to upgrade your optical drive to view HD content.
Wrong. Decoding H.264 at HD-DVD or Blu-Ray bitrates requires some serious horsepower. My 2.2GHz Athlon 64, for example, just can't hack it. You either need hardware acceleration (high end GPU) or a fast CPU (probably dual-core).
Try downloading a 1080p trailer from Apple sometime. Notice how, even with the fastest software decoder (CoreAVC, although libavcodec comes close), your formerly fast CPU can barely manage to keep up. Now consider that Blu-Ray/HD-DVD have considerably higher bitrates.
If you're running Vista, however, your older monitor that is missing the HDCP (that has absolutely NOTHING to do with quality) will have to be replaced despite it's full ability to display HD content.
IF said content uses the image constraint token, then yes, you will need HDCP, or your content will be downscaled to 960x540 (the same resolution as many "HD" XVID HDTV rips, mind you). It works the same way on a standalone HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player. Apple's implementation will doubtless work the same way as well, because it's mandated by the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray licensing groups.
You should have masked mysql. If you are running a server with important things running you also need to consider every emerge when you do it. Learn to always emerge -av things.
No, I should run a distro where I don't have to be on the defense against stupid design choices. I should choose a distro where stable really means stable.
I know that apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade (on Debian Stable) is unlikely to break anything. Testing is still prudent, but you know that nothing so insanely stupid as an incompatible database upgrade is going to occur. PHP4 and PHP5, for example, are separate packages in Debian. So are MySQL 4 and MySQL 5, Apache and Apache2, and any other package with significantly different versions. Running updates doesn't drastically change your environment. That's a good thing.
The problem with Gentoo Linux is not the system itself, it's the stereotypes that people put against it.
The problem with Gentoo is that Gentoo users assume that most people care about configuration options. They assume that people want the most up-to-date packages. They assume that there's no reason to have stable, long-term supported releases.
The vast majority of the market wants something that's not a moving target. I can install Debian or CentOS, keep it up to date with yum or apt-get, and never worry about something breaking because a new version of some package was installed.
I'm sure you can do this with Gentoo. But that's not the point. I don't want a distro that makes more work for me. I don't want to "keep track of their libraries with revdep-rebuild". I don't want to screw around with make.conf or/etc/portage.
ISVs don't want everyone to be running different binaries. It's hard enough to debug without having to worry that one of your customers has changed their compile flags for glibc.
The day you can remove the fan and heatsink from a running AMD CPU and it will simply carry on running throttled down until the fan and heatsink are replaced, they will be ready for "professional" use.
This just isn't true, nor is it really relavent. Intel CPUs do throttle if you have - say - a fan failure, but the throttling is not enough to keep the CPU stable without a heatsink.
I have pulled the heatsink from an old Northwood, and, let me say this - the results are not pretty. The system crashed almost immediately.
The Tom's Hardware tests you are probably referring to were pretty clearly faked.
And, more to the point, when was the last time that you saw heatsink fell of of a system while it was operating? Fan failures, yes. Heatsinks falling off - not unless the box is dropkicked.
The AMD was slightly unstable
Was it? Tell that to the people who have been running Opterons successfully for years in server environments. Tell that to Dell, to HP, to Sun, to IBM, or to the millions of people who use AMD CPUs every day.
One of the reasons AMD were cheaper, bang for buck, is they left out all the extra stuff Intel did not, like on chip thermal management so it didn't catch fire when the heatsink / fan failed.
AMD CPUs have had on-die thermal management since Athlon 64, and chipset-implemented thermal management since the Athlon XP.
Intel's thermal montior (TM1) feature has been the source of hell for lots of users. It's a good idea, poorly implemented - instead of halting the system or producing an error, the system continues to run - poorly. It makes it difficult to diagnose whether or not the heatsink is working properly, unless you use tools which detect throttling, which, unfortunately, aren't bult in to Windows.
It really depends on what you're doing. Wikipedia, for example, serves a tremendous number of hits with PHP and a very minimal (for Wikipedia's size) server setup.
Even a modest server should be able to hit ~ 100 pageviews/sec, depending on the database load and code complexity of your application.
If you're doing something that requires code execution speed, you're probably better off looking at Java or possibly even ASP.NET.
We hams use distance of the wave to indicate frequency
Well, technically, you're indicating wavelength, but considering that the speed of light doesn't change very much when going through air, it doesn't really matter.
I have a decade-old iMac (ruby) that runs the very latest version of Macintosh OSX.
Well, considering that the "ruby" iMac was released in July 2000, it's hardly a "decade old".
Well, try getting Vista to run on a Pentium 2 with 128 MB of RAM on a 10 GB HDD, which is what was state of the art when the Apple iMac came out.
Yeah, but you can't run Tiger on the original iMac. You need an iMac DV or better, and one with a DVD drive at that. You probably could run Vista on an Athlon 1GHz system with 256MiB of memory, which was decently common when your iMac was released.
Also note that you are probably below the minimum system requirements from Apple, which require 256MiB of memory - unless, of course, you have upgraded the memory on your iMac.
Come back when you have some clue what you're talking about.
That's ironic coming from someone who doesn't understand the age of his hardware.
What's that you say? Apple doesn't support legacy hardware?
No, they don't. Unless you consider all PowerPC Macs "legacy", there has been surprisingly little variation in Apple hardware since the iMac. XP has support for things like ISA (PCI is 13 years old!) and APM (ACPI is 10 years old!). Vista still supports Win16 applications (Win32 is 12+ years old!).
I also like the idea of including taxes in posted prices
I don't - the tax is not something that you are paying to the retailer, it is something that you are paying to the state. If the government is going to force businesses to take my money on its behalf, it should at least be clear that the government's take is not part of the price from the retailer's perspective.
Living in Boulder without a car, I can corroborate this. I should add that Boulder's us transit system (operated jointly by the city and the regional transportation district) is one of the best systems for any city its size.
There's a regular(10-15 minutes) circulator bus operating in both directions (counterclockwise and clockwise), which connects the malls (29th Street and Pearl), the university (CU), and "The Hill" (a region just west of the university).
There is a bus which runs along Broadway, linking NIST with the university and the Pearl St. Mall. There are busses going to Superior/Louisville/Broomfield/Westminster/Denver (from 5am-midnight every 15-30 mins), the airport (3:30am to 10p, every 30 mins), Longmont, Golden (M-F only), and just about anywhere else in the region (if you're willing to connect in Denver).
There's a free Park & Ride with 800 spaces, commuter rail and BRT coming in 2012, and quite a bit more.
Don't assume that public transit is purely a European fixture. It's alive and well in the US - we have just spent the last 50 years ignoring it.
the energy cost from constructing solar panels keeps them net-energy-negative for about a decade (!) and when they die out after just over a decade (!) you have to dispose of them, and per megawatt hour generated you'll have to dispose of a heck of a lot more solar panels than radioactive waste
I'm a fan of nuclear power too, but this is just wrong. Typical PV systems will operate for over 30 years, and produce more than 10 times their production energy cost in usable energy during that lifetime.
Everyone I know of that pirates software does it quite knowingly.
You don't know very many people, then. There are a lot of people who have been sold pirated Windows by disreputable system builders. That's the entire point of WGA and "How to Tell" - a dedicated enough pirate will always bypass it, but someone who doesn't know that their copy of Windows is illegal will probably be asking their OEM a few pointed questions.
Is WGA a pain in the ass? Absolutely. But so are product keys, activation, and all of the other antipiracy methods used in the past. If they bother you, you are welcome to use a version of Windows without activation (Windows 2000), or, perhaps better yet, another OS altogether. But, clearly, most people aren't bugged enough to care.
I can say, however, that WGA is a huge pain in the ass to pirates in Vista. There's always a good chance that a new patch will update WGA and deauthorize your computer, at which time you have 30 days to either crack WGA again or buy a legal copy.
I can also say that I have never seen WGA trigger on a legal copy of Windows. That's not to say that it doesn't happen, but it seems to be quite rare. A lot of the people I see complaining are using "borrowed" corporate keys.
Paying 200-300 bucks for a personal installation of windows for only ONE computer is incredibly lame.
That's why you buy the OEM version - Vista Home Premium OEM, for example, is $129 from Amazon.
Give us more than ONE FREAKIN KEY
Microsoft has just such a program - buy an upgrade or full retail copy of Vista Ultimate and you can buy additional licenses (up to 4) of Vista Home Premium for $49 each.
In terms of IPC it matches the AMD offerings fairly well.
Actually, the C2D has considerably better (~20%) IPC than the Athlon 64. K8L is supposed to close this gap, but it's not coming until (at least) the second half of 2007.
which by that time AMD will be 65nm working on 45nm parts
FYI, AMD is already shipping 65nm parts for revenue, and is already working on its 45nm process.
From all the know-it-alls who think that they can 'short' one of these stocks to be on the 'other-side' of the gamble.
People please consider that the posters on Slashdot are NOT very good at trading. Such a lack of knowledge is quite frankly bothersome in a community where so many people analyze everything to the bitter end. Yet, when money is involved everyone thinks they have the secret to making it work right.
Tell me, exactly what brokerage do you use that allows you to short OTC, and.PK(pink sheet) stocks? For the rest of the real world, OTC and PK are legally impossible to short trade legit. One of the exceptions is if you short sell a stock that actually WAS listed and then became de-listed by the exchange it is on. The world of money and finance is as complicated and incomprehensible to most techies, as computers are to most non-techies.
Everyone likes to joke at the person who used the CD player for a cup holder, or cant figure something that comes so easily to you. Then when those people are gone, you make fun of their ignorance. Guess what, any comment about short selling one of these stocks makes YOU the person who gets made fun of when the backs turn. And deservingly so, if you knew how rediculous the comment of 'short-selling' spam stocks was, you would laugh your ass off too. Maybe as much as you did when you first heard the 'CD tray for a cup-holder' joke.
Having fun yet?
Wow, someone feels pissy today. Strangely, I don't feel any worse for having made the 'CD tray for a cup-holder' joke.
See, the difference is that nearly every person in the business world in this country uses a computer every day. Oh, and tray-load CD drives have been around for over 20 years - and they are fund on something as regular as a DVD player. It's reasonable to expect that someone would know how to use the tool that they are required to use every day.
I don't expect a typical computer user to know how to program. That's what understanding why you cant short pink sheet stocks is like. I do, however, expect them to understand that the optical drives that have been common in nearly every PC, not to mention most CD and DVD players, are not designed to be used as a cupholder. It's like understanding that you drive on the right.
People please consider that the posters on Slashdot are NOT very good at trading. Such a lack of knowledge is quite frankly bothersome in a community where so many people analyze everything to the bitter end. Yet, when money is involved everyone thinks they have the secret to making it work right.
Slashdot is frequently misinformed about a broad range of topics. Most of us don't know jackshit about medicine or law either. But that's OK - the few of us who ARE doctors or lawyers can correct the rest, as several other posters in this article (including you!) have already done. I guess it's bothersome to you that misinformed users are learning from well-informed users, which, considering how you seem to like to lord your superior knowledge over everyone else, would make perfect sense.
It has the best typography you will see on a screen anywhere other than Mac OS X.
While Mac OS does indeed have an impressive font renderer, at small font sizes - like those used in a smartphone - Microsoft's renderer, combined with their boring-but-readable fonts, make for an impressively readable display.
Your iPhone has complete (COMPLETE!) support for HTML 4.01, CSS 2.1, JavaScript 1.8, DOM Level 1, PNG 1.0, JPEG 1.0
So does Opera 8 for mobile phones (Windows Mobile and Symbian). Seriously - has anyone talking about how "revolutionary" this is actually owned a PDA phone in the last 2 years?
You aren't supposed to run Google Maps on a PC... you're supposed to run it out of your pocket.
Which is why J2ME devices and the Treo already have native support. No, you can't do the fancy "zoom by pinching" thing, but you can scroll around with your stylus just fine.
Oh, and WM5 devices have Live Search, which is better executed than Google's mobile client anyway.
The iPhone does a lot more than any other smart phone because it has an iPod dock connector which enables you to use something like 3000+ accessories just by plugging them in
I can use over 3000+ accessories with my phone without plugging them in. It's called Bluetooth.
For sync & charge, I have a standard mini-USB connector - the same one used on every new Motorola phone, the same one used by my digital camera, by a number of (non-iPod) MP3 players, and by the TI-89. One cable that connects everything - isn't that a better idea than all of these stupid proprietary connectors?
Wrong. It's a WiFi PDA, that also happens to be able to make use of the most widely deployed data network in the US as well in-between deep WiFi data pools.
Wrong. It's a Sidekick-like device. Name one PDA that you can't load 3rd-party software on. Hell, most phones can run J2ME applications!
The iPhone is like the Sidekick - a stylish, closed device that only runs the applications that Apple (and presumably Cingular) approve.
That's why no-one understands why it's going to be a success, because they don't understand that finally someone has done a followup to the Palm Pilot, adding cell phone ablities, that people would want to actually buy.
It's not a follow up to the Palm Pilot with phone capabilities. Apparently, you've never used a Treo 180g - it is a Palm OS 3.5 device with a GSM phone, GPRS, and Graffiti. It failed miserably because most people hate Graffiti.
The people who really want an iPhone are not really Apple fanatics at all, we are exiled Palm fans!
Apparently, you haven't used a smartphone for the last 5 years. There are WM smartphones without keyboards (and, yes, they have Graffiti - it's just called "Block Recognizer"). There are Palm OS devices (e.g. the LifeDrive) without keyboards. There are even Symbian devices without keyboards (Sony Erricson P900) and with Graffiti.
Guess what? The iPhone doesn't have Graffiti! It doesn't run Palm OS, it doesn't run third-party apps, and it doesn't even have a stylus! It is in no way a "followup" to the Palm OS devices you knew and loved. The industry has been doing "followup" devices for 8 years - from the Qualcomm PDQ to the latest Treo 680.
Is the iPhone cool? Absolutely. But so is the T-Mobile Sidekick. It's still an overpriced, closed device that will only appeal to a niche market.
On the other hand, Apple sold 21 million iPods in the last quarter alone, and over 8 million in each of the previous 3 quarters.
Yes, but how many of those are iPod Shuffles? How many are iPod Nanos? While I'm sure that the (full-size) iPod has outsold the Zune by a considerable margin, it's only fair to compare the Zune to its direct competition.
I'm sure the Honda Fit has outsold the Lexus GS600 by a big margin too, but it's not a perticularly important comparison.
Regardless, the fact is that the current generation Zune isn't that great. But, then again, neither is the current iPod.
I'm not referring to features, I'm referring to design. For one, the iPod needs a proprietary cable - forget about syncing/charging with a standard mini-USB cable (some Creative players do this). It has a screen that is too small for watching anything of consequence. The touch wheel is - well - touchy. It scratches easily. It shows fingerprints.
Oh, and then there's iTunes. It takes at least ~5 seconds to start on either a Mac or a PC (Windows Media Player starts in 2 on my box), it uses neither the Mac nor the Windows interface, it can't monitor folders for new music, the store is slow, and the app becomes unusably while transferring tracks to an iPod. Oh, and don't ever try connecting your iPod Shuffle to a second computer - you don't want to press the wrong button and erase all of your tracks.
Look, it's not that the iPod is such a great PMP - it's just that everything else on the market sucks! If I could get a stable music player that:
- Plays music directly off its filesystem (which can be accessed as a USB mass storage device), so I don't need software! - Has a mini-USB connector for sync and charge - Plays MPEG-1, MPEG-2, XVID, and H.264 (with a decent range of resolution and bitrate options, bonus points for FLV support) - Has a decent UI - Is as small as an iPod Nano
Why can't someone do this? All of the no-name players have the feature list down, but they invariably have crappy UIs and/or crappy form factors.
That, and the live partitioning without destroying data that's currently on the drive, which I've never seen before (though I haven't dabbled in the Linuxes in a while).
Ubuntu's installer can resize NTFS and FAT partitions nondestructively, though don't try it on a Vista system as the version of NTFSResize that Ubuntu ships with renders Windows unbootable (though it can be fixed using a newer version of NTFSResize, and 7.04 will almost certainly work fine).
Vista's disk management can resize NTFS partitions as well, including the boot partition - without restarting the computer.
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The fact is, THERE AREN'T MANY TERRORISTS. Terrorist attacks ARE NOT AND HAVE NEVER BEEN COMMON IN THE US. 9/11 happened because you cannot stop 9/11. Determined and resourceful people are trying to attack us, and, sooner or later, they will succeed. Terrorists could swallow explosives to get past security. They could use heat-seaking missles to hit jets. They could short a notebook battery and start a fire in the lavatory after stealing the fire extinguishers. They could open a cabin hatch in midflight.
We cannot stop terrorism. That's not to say that we shouldn't try to make it is difficult as possible for the terrorists. But we shouldn't become paranoid or live in fear trying to cover every last possibility. That's impossible. It would look like any other IED - some kind of timing or remote detonation device along with explosives. It doesn't really matter what it looks like, though, because it would be HIDDEN. You don't put explosives in plain sight - there's too much of a chance of them being discovered. You hide them in a vehicle, a mailbox, a trash can, or any of the millions of other out-of-sight places in a city. The point is that you don't put it in a public place at all. IT MAKES NO SENSE for terrorists to call attention to their devices with bright flashing lights. Whether or not individuals belieive that they are bombs, having your devices so plainly visible makes them infinitely easier to find and diffuse than if they were hidden.
Think of this from the police perspective: if you knew that bombs had been planted in your city, would you want them to be:
A - Brightly lit and placed in conspicuous locations
B - Nondescript devices (e.g. a cardboard box) hidden in trashcans or mailboxes
Which is easier to detect? Which is easier to find?
Non-violent games generally fall into a few categories: sports (Madden is one of the top selling games, year after year), racing (GT3 is the best selling PS2 game), card/casino (Hold 'Em is insanely popular online, and Solitare is the most distributed and played video game ever), builder/tycoon, and puzzle.
Sports games don't do well on PCs. They play better with controllers and on a big screen with friends. Racing games - ditto - few have a wheel, and no one wants to play a racing game with a keyboard. Card/casino and puzzle games are unlikely to make a Top 20 list (not that they are bad, they just aren't typically deep big-budget titles). As for builder/tycoon games, there have been some standout titles (Sim City, for one), but there hasn't been anything spectacular in the last 5 years - mostly just sequels and rehashes.
So, what does that leave? RTS, FPS, RPG, and MMO games. Guess what? They almost always involve at least a minimal amount of violence.
We did leave one insanely popular PC game out, though. The Sims is the best-selling PC title of all time, and it isn't really violent at all.
Well, that may be true, but it's not the case with Vista. Vista builds have been more or less publically available since Beta 2 through the CPP. It's hard to distribute different builds to different people when 5 million people are running your beta OS.
Nice try, but Vista can already do that. It's called "previous versions".
I'm sure in 6 months, someone will claim that Microsoft ripped off time machine. Just like they "ripped off" Dashboard (HINT: Konfabulator did pretty much the EXACT SAME THING before Dashboard did, and Stardock DesktopX did it before Konfabulator).
Well, to be fair, "John Jackson" and "Jack Johnson" are clones, so it really doesn't matter who you vote for. Unless you care about the titanium tax.
Try downloading a 1080p trailer from Apple sometime. Notice how, even with the fastest software decoder (CoreAVC, although libavcodec comes close), your formerly fast CPU can barely manage to keep up. Now consider that Blu-Ray/HD-DVD have considerably higher bitrates. IF said content uses the image constraint token, then yes, you will need HDCP, or your content will be downscaled to 960x540 (the same resolution as many "HD" XVID HDTV rips, mind you). It works the same way on a standalone HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player. Apple's implementation will doubtless work the same way as well, because it's mandated by the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray licensing groups.
I know that apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade (on Debian Stable) is unlikely to break anything. Testing is still prudent, but you know that nothing so insanely stupid as an incompatible database upgrade is going to occur. PHP4 and PHP5, for example, are separate packages in Debian. So are MySQL 4 and MySQL 5, Apache and Apache2, and any other package with significantly different versions. Running updates doesn't drastically change your environment. That's a good thing.
The vast majority of the market wants something that's not a moving target. I can install Debian or CentOS, keep it up to date with yum or apt-get, and never worry about something breaking because a new version of some package was installed.
I'm sure you can do this with Gentoo. But that's not the point. I don't want a distro that makes more work for me. I don't want to "keep track of their libraries with revdep-rebuild". I don't want to screw around with make.conf or
ISVs don't want everyone to be running different binaries. It's hard enough to debug without having to worry that one of your customers has changed their compile flags for glibc.
I have pulled the heatsink from an old Northwood, and, let me say this - the results are not pretty. The system crashed almost immediately.
The Tom's Hardware tests you are probably referring to were pretty clearly faked.
And, more to the point, when was the last time that you saw heatsink fell of of a system while it was operating? Fan failures, yes. Heatsinks falling off - not unless the box is dropkicked. Was it? Tell that to the people who have been running Opterons successfully for years in server environments. Tell that to Dell, to HP, to Sun, to IBM, or to the millions of people who use AMD CPUs every day. AMD CPUs have had on-die thermal management since Athlon 64, and chipset-implemented thermal management since the Athlon XP.
Intel's thermal montior (TM1) feature has been the source of hell for lots of users. It's a good idea, poorly implemented - instead of halting the system or producing an error, the system continues to run - poorly. It makes it difficult to diagnose whether or not the heatsink is working properly, unless you use tools which detect throttling, which, unfortunately, aren't bult in to Windows.
It really depends on what you're doing. Wikipedia, for example, serves a tremendous number of hits with PHP and a very minimal (for Wikipedia's size) server setup.
Even a modest server should be able to hit ~ 100 pageviews/sec, depending on the database load and code complexity of your application.
If you're doing something that requires code execution speed, you're probably better off looking at Java or possibly even ASP.NET.
Also note that you are probably below the minimum system requirements from Apple, which require 256MiB of memory - unless, of course, you have upgraded the memory on your iMac. That's ironic coming from someone who doesn't understand the age of his hardware. No, they don't. Unless you consider all PowerPC Macs "legacy", there has been surprisingly little variation in Apple hardware since the iMac. XP has support for things like ISA (PCI is 13 years old!) and APM (ACPI is 10 years old!). Vista still supports Win16 applications (Win32 is 12+ years old!).
You can't even run Classic on x86 Macs.
I don't - the tax is not something that you are paying to the retailer, it is something that you are paying to the state. If the government is going to force businesses to take my money on its behalf, it should at least be clear that the government's take is not part of the price from the retailer's perspective.
Nice try, but Microsoft's activation hotline is 24/7.
IE7 strips GET data (anything after the ?) from the pages you check, so this kind of thing doesn't happen.
The funny thing is that there was an article about this on IEBlog months ago - I'm amazed that Google didn't do this.
Living in Boulder without a car, I can corroborate this. I should add that Boulder's us transit system (operated jointly by the city and the regional transportation district) is one of the best systems for any city its size.
There's a regular(10-15 minutes) circulator bus operating in both directions (counterclockwise and clockwise), which connects the malls (29th Street and Pearl), the university (CU), and "The Hill" (a region just west of the university).
There is a bus which runs along Broadway, linking NIST with the university and the Pearl St. Mall. There are busses going to Superior/Louisville/Broomfield/Westminster/Denver (from 5am-midnight every 15-30 mins), the airport (3:30am to 10p, every 30 mins), Longmont, Golden (M-F only), and just about anywhere else in the region (if you're willing to connect in Denver).
There's a free Park & Ride with 800 spaces, commuter rail and BRT coming in 2012, and quite a bit more.
Don't assume that public transit is purely a European fixture. It's alive and well in the US - we have just spent the last 50 years ignoring it.
I'm a fan of nuclear power too, but this is just wrong. Typical PV systems will operate for over 30 years, and produce more than 10 times their production energy cost in usable energy during that lifetime.
You might try reading the DOE's site or Wikipedia article.
You don't know very many people, then. There are a lot of people who have been sold pirated Windows by disreputable system builders. That's the entire point of WGA and "How to Tell" - a dedicated enough pirate will always bypass it, but someone who doesn't know that their copy of Windows is illegal will probably be asking their OEM a few pointed questions.
Is WGA a pain in the ass? Absolutely. But so are product keys, activation, and all of the other antipiracy methods used in the past. If they bother you, you are welcome to use a version of Windows without activation (Windows 2000), or, perhaps better yet, another OS altogether. But, clearly, most people aren't bugged enough to care.
I can say, however, that WGA is a huge pain in the ass to pirates in Vista. There's always a good chance that a new patch will update WGA and deauthorize your computer, at which time you have 30 days to either crack WGA again or buy a legal copy.
I can also say that I have never seen WGA trigger on a legal copy of Windows. That's not to say that it doesn't happen, but it seems to be quite rare. A lot of the people I see complaining are using "borrowed" corporate keys.
That's why you buy the OEM version - Vista Home Premium OEM, for example, is $129 from Amazon.
Microsoft has just such a program - buy an upgrade or full retail copy of Vista Ultimate and you can buy additional licenses (up to 4) of Vista Home Premium for $49 each.
Actually, the C2D has considerably better (~20%) IPC than the Athlon 64. K8L is supposed to close this gap, but it's not coming until (at least) the second half of 2007.
FYI, AMD is already shipping 65nm parts for revenue, and is already working on its 45nm process.
Wow, someone feels pissy today. Strangely, I don't feel any worse for having made the 'CD tray for a cup-holder' joke.
See, the difference is that nearly every person in the business world in this country uses a computer every day. Oh, and tray-load CD drives have been around for over 20 years - and they are fund on something as regular as a DVD player. It's reasonable to expect that someone would know how to use the tool that they are required to use every day.
I don't expect a typical computer user to know how to program. That's what understanding why you cant short pink sheet stocks is like. I do, however, expect them to understand that the optical drives that have been common in nearly every PC, not to mention most CD and DVD players, are not designed to be used as a cupholder. It's like understanding that you drive on the right.
Slashdot is frequently misinformed about a broad range of topics. Most of us don't know jackshit about medicine or law either. But that's OK - the few of us who ARE doctors or lawyers can correct the rest, as several other posters in this article (including you!) have already done. I guess it's bothersome to you that misinformed users are learning from well-informed users, which, considering how you seem to like to lord your superior knowledge over everyone else, would make perfect sense.
While Mac OS does indeed have an impressive font renderer, at small font sizes - like those used in a smartphone - Microsoft's renderer, combined with their boring-but-readable fonts, make for an impressively readable display.
So does Opera 8 for mobile phones (Windows Mobile and Symbian). Seriously - has anyone talking about how "revolutionary" this is actually owned a PDA phone in the last 2 years?
Which is why J2ME devices and the Treo already have native support. No, you can't do the fancy "zoom by pinching" thing, but you can scroll around with your stylus just fine.
Oh, and WM5 devices have Live Search, which is better executed than Google's mobile client anyway.
I can use over 3000+ accessories with my phone without plugging them in. It's called Bluetooth.
For sync & charge, I have a standard mini-USB connector - the same one used on every new Motorola phone, the same one used by my digital camera, by a number of (non-iPod) MP3 players, and by the TI-89. One cable that connects everything - isn't that a better idea than all of these stupid proprietary connectors?
Wrong. It's a Sidekick-like device. Name one PDA that you can't load 3rd-party software on. Hell, most phones can run J2ME applications!
The iPhone is like the Sidekick - a stylish, closed device that only runs the applications that Apple (and presumably Cingular) approve.
It's not a follow up to the Palm Pilot with phone capabilities. Apparently, you've never used a Treo 180g - it is a Palm OS 3.5 device with a GSM phone, GPRS, and Graffiti. It failed miserably because most people hate Graffiti.
Apparently, you haven't used a smartphone for the last 5 years. There are WM smartphones without keyboards (and, yes, they have Graffiti - it's just called "Block Recognizer"). There are Palm OS devices (e.g. the LifeDrive) without keyboards. There are even Symbian devices without keyboards (Sony Erricson P900) and with Graffiti.
Guess what? The iPhone doesn't have Graffiti! It doesn't run Palm OS, it doesn't run third-party apps, and it doesn't even have a stylus! It is in no way a "followup" to the Palm OS devices you knew and loved. The industry has been doing "followup" devices for 8 years - from the Qualcomm PDQ to the latest Treo 680.
Is the iPhone cool? Absolutely. But so is the T-Mobile Sidekick. It's still an overpriced, closed device that will only appeal to a niche market.
Yes, but how many of those are iPod Shuffles? How many are iPod Nanos? While I'm sure that the (full-size) iPod has outsold the Zune by a considerable margin, it's only fair to compare the Zune to its direct competition.
I'm sure the Honda Fit has outsold the Lexus GS600 by a big margin too, but it's not a perticularly important comparison.
Regardless, the fact is that the current generation Zune isn't that great. But, then again, neither is the current iPod.
I'm not referring to features, I'm referring to design. For one, the iPod needs a proprietary cable - forget about syncing/charging with a standard mini-USB cable (some Creative players do this). It has a screen that is too small for watching anything of consequence. The touch wheel is - well - touchy. It scratches easily. It shows fingerprints.
Oh, and then there's iTunes. It takes at least ~5 seconds to start on either a Mac or a PC (Windows Media Player starts in 2 on my box), it uses neither the Mac nor the Windows interface, it can't monitor folders for new music, the store is slow, and the app becomes unusably while transferring tracks to an iPod. Oh, and don't ever try connecting your iPod Shuffle to a second computer - you don't want to press the wrong button and erase all of your tracks.
Look, it's not that the iPod is such a great PMP - it's just that everything else on the market sucks! If I could get a stable music player that:
- Plays music directly off its filesystem (which can be accessed as a USB mass storage device), so I don't need software!
- Has a mini-USB connector for sync and charge
- Plays MPEG-1, MPEG-2, XVID, and H.264 (with a decent range of resolution and bitrate options, bonus points for FLV support)
- Has a decent UI
- Is as small as an iPod Nano
Why can't someone do this? All of the no-name players have the feature list down, but they invariably have crappy UIs and/or crappy form factors.
Ubuntu's installer can resize NTFS and FAT partitions nondestructively, though don't try it on a Vista system as the version of NTFSResize that Ubuntu ships with renders Windows unbootable (though it can be fixed using a newer version of NTFSResize, and 7.04 will almost certainly work fine).
Vista's disk management can resize NTFS partitions as well, including the boot partition - without restarting the computer.