Very good post. I just recently purchased a new panel. I upgraded from my 19" LG Flatron Slim to a Dell 24" 2408WFP. I hadn't purchased a panel in some five years so I was a little out of the loop as far as terminology and features, so I spent a few evenings doing a whole lot of reading.
After many reviews I settled on the Dell. The single biggest complaint on the Net was a perceived "lag time". Prior to my LG panel I'd had a CRT and the LG had no discernible lag issue so I was a little worried. Still, reasoning out the timing, people generally can't tell a difference on the order of even 50ms in most situations. So I decided to buy the panel.
I couldn't be happier with it. The picture quality is simply amazing. It's advertised with a color gamut of 104% of the NTSC spec. By any measure, though, it is markedly better than the colors from the 6bit TN panel that my LG had.
And lag? The picture is as in-sync as it can get. I've tried to run it though its paces as best I could. Videos and games alike. I can't tell even a slight difference in fast paced FPS games.
Not too surprisingly, I suppose, is that nearly all of the comments I saw on the Net about this panel's lag came from hard core FPS games, all of them whining about what a crap screen it was and how huge and detrimental the lag was.
One review I read gave, I thought, a good explanation about this "perception" as being the result of increased screen resolution. You'll need to move the mouse more, depending on how the input is configured, which may seem like lag. Also, there's a lot more to draw so the GPU will naturally be at least a little bit slower. Combined, these can manifest themselves as what appears to be input lag.
Personally, I'm glad I based my decision far more on display/color quality than anything else. I'm going to be staring at it for a number of years after all.
I bought GTAIV from Steam when it was first released and I'm playing it on a very new PC (Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM) with a Radeon HD4850 video card running Vista 64.
Despite the constant bitching here and elsewhere, the game actually runs well on my machine and looks nice. I turned off the PC-specific shadow feature for a small bump in fps. I did encounter a few minor bugs here and there, but overall there was nothing major and nothing that prevented me from playing the entire game.
I'm not doubting there are problems people are having, just saying that it is, in fact, possible to play and enjoy the game. The only caveat I should mention is that I happen to have purchased an Xbox360 controller for use on my PC. I actually bought it before GTA4 was released and before I knew it was the only one supported. I would have been far less pleased if I had been unable to play with a controller. My understanding, though, is that this is *supposed* to be fixed by a current or forthcoming patch.
Hope is the tool of con men and tyrants - remember that.
Ouch. I think we're entering some cynicism overload territory here.
I am now aware this isn't an entirely normal school experience, but I wasn't at the time.
No, but having read/. for years, it's not too uncommon here. Personally, I'm in an extreme minority here, having actually enjoyed high school for the most part. I attended a "GATE"/magnet public high school and while there's always some amount of bullying and/or unhappiness, it was generally good with excellent teachers.
Most of the teachers enjoyed their jobs (although one of my English teachers was something of a flake) and did a decent job of teaching both the subject at hand as well as critical thinking.
Media reports, talking to other people, and posts like yours make me extremely grateful I attended such a school and at the same time sad that other schools were not more like mine. If there were more, there would be far fewer unhappy students on Slashdot...
This is probably really good advice, as cynical as it is. The truth of the matter is, freedom is one dead dog.
Yes, it is cynical, and a very defeatist attitude. Not to sound naive, but freedom is only as dead as you let it become.
Of course you're not going to single handedly stem the tide of wrong, but if you don't do anything at all, what good is that? As one of the other posts above said, you must be assertive in protecting your rights and freedoms, but not necessarily aggressive.
Stand up for yourself, see what happens, and take it from there. You can't win every battle, but if you don't even try you'll just keep losing.
No kidding. I really can't stand this mindset. I think it comes from the barrage of advertising. There is a constant stream of car commercials where they talk about how great the fuel economy is and then give the mileage as something horrid like 28 or 30mpg. Really?
And it's not just domestic cars either. This seems to come from all makers. I suppose that people see it enough on TV and listen to it on the radio that eventually they come to think that this is normal.
But there are many cars that do so much better that are neither hybrids nor concept cars. I'm not sure what it will take for people to start rejecting these mileage numbers.
True, but they're certainly not all Japanese. Mushroom Hunting, Call Me Call Me, and a few others are in English. Fastaisie Sign is in French. The Real Folk Blues is in Japanese. I'm not sure what language Green Bird is... also French?
Come to think of it, almost all of those songs (and most songs in the show with lyrics) are in English.
But, whatever... the characters in the show/movie don't do any singing. As long as Yoko Kanno is doing the soundtrack, I'll be happy. And if the movie is actually good, I'll be extremely happy.
Here, for some reason beyond my understanding, medical records have become almost the equivalent of classified documents in terms of how they are protected. This has probably cost us much more money than whether or not the records are digital.
I believe this is due in large part to the medical insurance mess. Insurers can reject covering you for a huge list of reasons and can deny coverage for pre-existing conditions outright or for certain periods of time.
If we had a single payer system here in the US, or even just firm laws that insurance companies cannot deny coverage to anybody (nor raise rates impossibly high, nor cherry-pick clients), then I think many of the privacy concerns over medical records would fade away in time.
They won't go away entirely, I'm sure, as there will always be social reasons to keep things private. The stigma associated with HIV/AIDS is a good example.
I think it is _possible_ we could save money with digitization, but not the amount suggested by this post. On the other hand, based on previous experience with medical IT, I think it's possible it could actually lose money in the long run, especially if "being digital" becomes more important than actually solving the communication problem.
As somebody who too frequently experiences the medical record disaster as a patient, I would absolutely love digitized records. Not having to fill out the same stack of papers in every office I visit. Not having to recount my lengthy medical history again and again. Not having to constantly make sure specialist A gets the note from specialist B who faxed part of my record to specialist C, while simultaneously juggling referrals from my primary care. Such a mess.
And beyond the convenience factor, even if it doesn't save money (which I think is very unlikely) there are other benefits. An enormous reduction in record errors is a big one. It's a separate headache trying to keep my own records in line... I can't imagine how troubling it would be for medical professionals.
There is also great research potential to be had in digitized records. This ties in with the privacy concerns mentioned above, so the full benefit from this might not be realized for some time. But, if you look at aggregate studies sometime (the NY Times science section reports on these often), you will see that many of these studies come from countries where you have both digitized records and less social concern about super privacy on medical records. You can learn a great deal by studying large groups of people.
I don't think this is entirely true. In many cases, 2D actions can be thought of as special cases of more generic 3D algorithms. Because of this, the same hardware can be utilized to perform what seems to be "2D" acceleration.
You're probably correct that neither ATI nor Nvidia spends much time optimizing 2D routines, but I would argue that modern CPUs and GPUs are so fast that there is no need to spend much more time optimizing 2D code paths. Outside of a benchmark no user will ever notice a difference, even with something that really does a lot of 2D work.
Of course, there are plenty of other good reasons to use a 3D compositing window manager.
No kidding. Just because some people have "uber rigs" that are stupidly expensive for playing games doesn't mean that those people ARE the PC gaming market.
My gaming platform of choice is a PC. I've got a single ATI Radeon 4850HD card which cost $170 new and that alone delivers better performance and visuals than either the XBox360 or the PS3 (not substantially better, but better). Anything more than that gives rapidly diminishing returns.
The rest of the machine is moderately priced, especially since my goal was quiet over deafening speed. And yet, having met that goal, I can still drop in most any game new or old and enjoy it. In fact, just today I finished GTA4.
Perhaps HP could sell more "gaming" PCs if they understood what that actually meant. I'm sure he's entirely correct that the market for PCs which consume 1.21 gigawatts of power is small. But you don't need that. HP could sell a machine like mine for perhaps $800-$900, still make a profit, and it would easily satisfy 90% of the PC gamers in terms of ability.
It's also a pain because finding useful info online for this is very difficult. This is because so much work as been done and a lot of help you find on the Net is already outdated. There's also some confusion/problems regarding temporary versus permanent dual monitor config.
At work I've got a workstation with an ATI Radeon X300 video card and there are two panels plugged in (one on the DVI plug, the other on the VGA plug). The panels are also different resolutions. Trying to get this dual setup working was a huge pain.
Much info pointed to Xinerama, but that seems mostly obsolete. Fortunately, unlike Nvidia's drivers, the ATI ones (OSS or proprietary) seem to do configuration the "X way" as opposed to their own way. I tried again and again to configure this in the xorg.conf file. I wanted it to use both screens by default, at start, and for all users.
The alternative was to use the Xrandr extension, but that only works while X is running. On the bright side, it worked beautifully. The xrandr tools found both screens and configured them properly even with the different resolutions. But... it does not persist from session to session and each user must do it themselves.
My eventual solution was to figure out the proper set of xrandr command line calls and put them in a script. This script is then executed when gdm starts. So far this is working, but it's hardly elegant.
Oh, good God yes. When one out of twenty stories is of the Idle variety, a story which must either be clicked on to view or briefly skipped over on the index, then Slashdot is truly ruined. What person would want this monster now?
Really now, I just can't understand all the vitriol spewed over Idle. I honestly have found just a small amount of it musing, but its overall impact on Slashdot as a whole is minuscule. If you hate it so much, just ignore the damn thing! Or, stop being an AC and then you can filter it out of everything but the RSS feed.
As for the GP's point... silly as this is, I don't have a problem with it being outside of Idle. Before there was an Idle section, stories which were serious candidates for an Ignobel award would have been fair game on Slashdot. Why not now?
I am left wondering if there would be any lawsuits if Nintendo had decided not to include the strap in the first place. Imagine a Wiimote with no strap and clear instructions that you not let go when making motions. If somebody tried to sue, Nintendo could say that the customer was duly warned and either a) let go or b) waved too forcefully.
Instead, they included a strap just in case and see where that has got them...
I think a better analogy would be yo-yos. They've got strings and they attach to your hand and, depending on what tricks you do with them, you can be throwing them or swinging them. Common sense says that if the string breaks and the yo-yo hits a TV or a vase, the manufacturer probably isn't liable.
It's not the same, obviously, since a Wiimote is meant to be used near a TV, but the strap is for accidents. It's not meant to protect you from yourself. Throwing the Wiimote like a fastball is just asking for trouble.
The real issue for concern out of the childhood vaccines is the suspension solution they are delivered in. This contains preservatives to provide shelf-life and enhance the vaccine's effectiveness since we don't have Just-In-Time medical vaccination infrastructure. Some of the happy ingredients you'll find in common vaccines are formaldehyde (poison) and thimerosal (poison) which breaks down into ethylmercury (poison) and also raw mercury (poison).
Are you sure about this? My understanding is that mercury-based vaccine preservatives were done away with at least five years ago, if not longer. I believe it was done in large part to allay parents fears about giving their children vaccines.
Normally, yes. However, in this case, because Steam launches the GTA "Social Club" launcher which in turn runs a command window which in turn actually runs GTA4, the options get lost somewhere along the way...
Maybe it will get fixed with a GTA or Steam patch, but right now the only way to pass options in is to create your own shortcut to LaunchGTAIV.exe and add them to that and then run it *after* you have already started the Rockstar Social Club app. It has a big play button, but just minimize it and use your shortcut instead.
Oh, I forgot to try that, and I even have my remote home directory mounted as Z:. Just a moment...
Sigh... no, it does not work. I tried a shortcut to Z:\music\album as well as shortcuts to individual files within that remote directory and neither worked. Seems like they must be local files. That's pretty bad...
I still need to try that registry hack mentioned below to relocate the "My Music" folder. Maybe that will work?
Also, disregard what I said in another reply about running the game from Steam. That only worked once. I created the shortcut to run the game directly and use the right command line options. That works. Running the game later from Steam once the new graphics settings have been "saved" doesn't. I have to keep running from the new shortcut if I want to keep the settings. Not really an inconvenience, but important to know.
Correct. If you create a shortcut to the LaunchGTAIV.exe file in the game directory, you can add the command line options to it. This is what I have done. After you run the game, the settings should be saved and you can go back to running it from Steam, which is what I'm doing now.
There was some debate over whether or not the 's' was needed at the end of norestriction so I put both. This config seems to work well and it gets me the "high" texture size (putting me "over budget" in the in-game graphics settings.
Huh... I guess I've just been very lucky so far. I've been playing GTA4 for two days now with no stability issues. I've got Vista64 installed with 4GB RAM. That's the gaming side of my PC (I do everything else in Debian), so I try to tune it towards better game performance... things like turning off services that I'll never need for games.
Now, the port does have some issues. I've got a fairly decent machine and, especially when compared with games like Crysis or Farcry 2, this engine clearly needs some optimization. Strangely, it seems CPU limited rather than GPU limited. After I quit the game, I can see on my CPU graph that both cores have been running at ~100%. I spent some time tweaking the video settings and right now I've got it running with both decent quality and a decent framerate.
One "feature" that seems to be annoying a lot of people is the video memory "calculator" the game uses. For each setting you modify, it calculates how much video memory that will cost. Your total is your installed video memory (512MB on my card). Not everything affects it, but increasing resolution, texture size, and draw distance will. So depending on how you set these you can't necessarily have them all high. But, it doesn't seem to work very well. You can override it from the command line. I forced it to use my LCD resolution (1280x1024) with high textures and a decent draw distance. This puts me at about 730/512MB on my "budget" yet the game still runs just fine and it looks better too.
They added a "dynamic shadow" feature to the PC version which you can adjust in the graphics menu. The values range from 0 to 16, but the quality at any setting is mediocre. It's a nice idea, but poorly implemented, and the game will run a bit faster when I turn it off.
Another annoying bit already mentioned is the control scheme. Fortunately, I purchased an XBox360 controller for use on my PC because that is the only gamepad supported by GTA4 (though I didn't know that when I bought the controller). Also, you can't actually *change* any of the mappings. There is a "Controller Configuration" menu item, but when you select it you are shown a picture of the controller and a diagram of what each button does. You can press R-stick left and right but all that does is show you the mappings for on foot, in vehicle, etc.
Like previous GTA ports, the PC version will let you play your own music on one of the radio stations (Independence FM here). They've even improved it for GTA4 and one of the modes will automatically insert fake commercials and DJ banter between your music if you like. But... it doesn't support Ogg (my preferred format) or many others. I do have some MP3s, though, and could always transcode if I wanted. The game specifically says that you can put shortcuts to your music or music folders into the user music directory. But... it doesn't work with networked mounts. I keep all of my music on my server and access via Samba from Windows or NFS in Linux. But not for GTA4... it just ignores any shortcuts that access another machine. Lame!
Still, despite these issues, it's been working far better for me than it has for most people and I've certainly been enjoying it so far.
Virtual memory wasn't invented just because computer architects thought existing address schemes weren't clever enough. It was invented so you could use disk space to emulate extra RAM at the cost of a loss of performance. Perhaps you think the question should be phrased "why do we allocate disk to use with virtual memory" instead of "why do we use virtual memory". But the latter form of the question is a perfectly clear abbreviation, except to somebody who's more interested in picking semantic nits than actually answering the question.
No... I'm pretty sure you've got that wrong. Virtual memory was developed specifically to solve the problems of memory allocation. Without virtual memory, every executable must be loaded to a specific place in memory and great care must be taken so they don't walk over each other. With virtual memory, every executable is compiled and linked to begin at address 0 (or some other arbitrary point) and continue from there. As far as the executable binaries are concerned, they own the entire memory space. It's the MMU which provides the virtual memory space and sorts all of this out.
As an added benefit you also get the ability to page to disk and I'm sure this was realized and implemented post-haste, but the driving force was to solve allocation and linking problems on multi-tasking systems.
Honestly, I'm far more concerned with the fate of The Longest Journey, one of their other franchises.
The original was one of the greatest point-and-click adventure games of all time. The sequel was okay, but left too many unanswered questions. The original left the door open, of course, but it also told a complete story with a real ending.
I generally don't track most gaming news like a hawk, but I do recall reading at one point that the plan was to continue the series with something like Dreamfall: Chapters, or some such. A sort of episodic continuation. I hope these layoffs don't affect other projects at Funcom.
Still, given the time between when I first heard that bit of news and now, Funcom seems to be following the Valve method of episodic delivery rather than the much better Telltale method. Valve has been able to get away with it because they have a long and successful track record and a huge player base. The Longest Journey, as great as it was, does not have quite as big a following...
And it's not just the GPU companies. Creative took their sweet time releasing Vista drivers for their previous generation of audio cards. I believe they were actually released after Vista was, and they're still just dreadful.
My Audigy 2 is not that old, but after much fighting I still couldn't get 4.1 sound and EAX to work in any capacity. Part of it was Creative insisting on their own competing implementation of how to configure speakers which does not play nicely with the one included with Vista. Other issues are due to the general crummy nature of the drivers. Still other issues apparently only occur on Vista64 with 4 or more GB of RAM. Just awful. Eventually, I had to stop using the Audigy and use the onboard RealTek branded Intel HDA chip which seems to work fine, though the sound is less clean than what I got with my Audigy.
Another piece of hardware, a Playstation/Gamecube/Dreamcast to USB controller adapter, from EMS Production (http://www.hkems.com) won't work with Vista64 either. Two years in and the company, still alive, has yet to release any Vista64 drivers and the Vista32 drivers are still listed as "beta".
The annoying thing here is that the damn thing shouldn't even *need* an adapter. In Linux it is simply recognized as a HID gaming device and works fine. Vista actually recognizes it as such and DirectX controller diagnostic program can properly read values from the controller, but Vista steadfastly refuses to list the device in the "Game Controllers" control panel dialog, making it pretty useless for anything.
Sigh... at least both these pieces of hardware work perfectly well in Linux...
I took it and got all 33 answers right. This is not to brag, but to establish some limited credentials for when I say: this test sucks. Hard.
Q: If taxes equal government spending, then:
A: tax per person equals government spending per person
This question tests your grasp of logic or algebra, not civics. For the record, another option is "government debt is zero." This is incorrect because it's the deficit that's zero, not the debt. It's designed to confuse. A knowledgeable person could get this question wrong merely by being careless.
I don't think this is a bad question at all. You're correct that it is specifically testing whether you know the difference between a government deficit and government debt. This seems entirely appropriate for a civics test question. Such terms come up all the time and it is important to know the difference between them.
The other two questions, though... yeah, they weren't that great.
Anyway, of course people should be doing better on this than they are. But it's still a crappy test. And for the record, the "officials" cited aren't exactly Barack Obama and John McCain; they're poll respondents who indicated that they have held elected office at one point. That could include your local dogcatcher, the chairman of your condo association, the head of your PTA, etc.
So don't be too alarmed.
Hmmmm... there's still something interesting here. You're probably right that most of the self-identified politicians who took this test are low-to-mid level elected officials. But, if this is the case, these people should not be that different from the rest of the random sample. Shouldn't they have had a nearly identical average score to the rest of the people?
Honestly, I would have expected that these people, citizens who have shown at least a small iota of enthusiasm to work for the community, would have scored slightly better than the rest of the sample.
Lightsabers are even more far-fetched - they would need a heated arcing plasma (or something like that) as well as a strong repulsive energy and one hell of a power source.
True, but something a little less magical might be available in the not to distant future. Larry Niven wrote about a weapon in the Ringworld books which was a molecule wide strand. I can't remember the name of it, though.
Now, in his fiction, this invisible strand was made lethal by virtue of being contained within a Slaver stasis field. Little did he know that a few years down the road we would have strings of carbon nano-tubes. Braid a few of those together and you've got yourself an invisible cutting surface. I don't know how many strings you'd need to prevent it from breaking when you try to cut something, but it's probably not a huge number. The major difference between Niven's weapon and this is that his was rigid due to the field.
I, too, mourn the loss of Senator McCain. My political views lean heavily towards the liberal side on nearly all issues, but I also have the capacity to recognize a good statesman when I see one.
As an Arizona voter, I've had the opportunity to vote to re-elect McCain to his Senate seat twice now. There were Democratic challengers both times, of course, but there's something to be said for having a senior senator represent your state. He may go ballistic over pork, but he's still been good for Arizona.
That said, his metamorphoses during his presidential campaign has been quite disappointing. I never planned to vote for McCain in a presidential race, but, sadly, I will very much have to think twice about my choice next time his senate seat is up for re-election.
Slashdot Mirror
Very good post. I just recently purchased a new panel. I upgraded from my 19" LG Flatron Slim to a Dell 24" 2408WFP. I hadn't purchased a panel in some five years so I was a little out of the loop as far as terminology and features, so I spent a few evenings doing a whole lot of reading.
After many reviews I settled on the Dell. The single biggest complaint on the Net was a perceived "lag time". Prior to my LG panel I'd had a CRT and the LG had no discernible lag issue so I was a little worried. Still, reasoning out the timing, people generally can't tell a difference on the order of even 50ms in most situations. So I decided to buy the panel.
I couldn't be happier with it. The picture quality is simply amazing. It's advertised with a color gamut of 104% of the NTSC spec. By any measure, though, it is markedly better than the colors from the 6bit TN panel that my LG had.
And lag? The picture is as in-sync as it can get. I've tried to run it though its paces as best I could. Videos and games alike. I can't tell even a slight difference in fast paced FPS games.
Not too surprisingly, I suppose, is that nearly all of the comments I saw on the Net about this panel's lag came from hard core FPS games, all of them whining about what a crap screen it was and how huge and detrimental the lag was.
One review I read gave, I thought, a good explanation about this "perception" as being the result of increased screen resolution. You'll need to move the mouse more, depending on how the input is configured, which may seem like lag. Also, there's a lot more to draw so the GPU will naturally be at least a little bit slower. Combined, these can manifest themselves as what appears to be input lag.
Personally, I'm glad I based my decision far more on display/color quality than anything else. I'm going to be staring at it for a number of years after all.
I bought GTAIV from Steam when it was first released and I'm playing it on a very new PC (Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM) with a Radeon HD4850 video card running Vista 64.
Despite the constant bitching here and elsewhere, the game actually runs well on my machine and looks nice. I turned off the PC-specific shadow feature for a small bump in fps. I did encounter a few minor bugs here and there, but overall there was nothing major and nothing that prevented me from playing the entire game.
I'm not doubting there are problems people are having, just saying that it is, in fact, possible to play and enjoy the game. The only caveat I should mention is that I happen to have purchased an Xbox360 controller for use on my PC. I actually bought it before GTA4 was released and before I knew it was the only one supported. I would have been far less pleased if I had been unable to play with a controller. My understanding, though, is that this is *supposed* to be fixed by a current or forthcoming patch.
Hope is the tool of con men and tyrants - remember that.
Ouch. I think we're entering some cynicism overload territory here.
I am now aware this isn't an entirely normal school experience, but I wasn't at the time.
No, but having read /. for years, it's not too uncommon here. Personally, I'm in an extreme minority here, having actually enjoyed high school for the most part. I attended a "GATE"/magnet public high school and while there's always some amount of bullying and/or unhappiness, it was generally good with excellent teachers.
Most of the teachers enjoyed their jobs (although one of my English teachers was something of a flake) and did a decent job of teaching both the subject at hand as well as critical thinking.
Media reports, talking to other people, and posts like yours make me extremely grateful I attended such a school and at the same time sad that other schools were not more like mine. If there were more, there would be far fewer unhappy students on Slashdot...
This is probably really good advice, as cynical as it is. The truth of the matter is, freedom is one dead dog.
Yes, it is cynical, and a very defeatist attitude. Not to sound naive, but freedom is only as dead as you let it become.
Of course you're not going to single handedly stem the tide of wrong, but if you don't do anything at all, what good is that? As one of the other posts above said, you must be assertive in protecting your rights and freedoms, but not necessarily aggressive.
Stand up for yourself, see what happens, and take it from there. You can't win every battle, but if you don't even try you'll just keep losing.
No kidding. I really can't stand this mindset. I think it comes from the barrage of advertising. There is a constant stream of car commercials where they talk about how great the fuel economy is and then give the mileage as something horrid like 28 or 30mpg. Really?
And it's not just domestic cars either. This seems to come from all makers. I suppose that people see it enough on TV and listen to it on the radio that eventually they come to think that this is normal.
But there are many cars that do so much better that are neither hybrids nor concept cars. I'm not sure what it will take for people to start rejecting these mileage numbers.
True, but they're certainly not all Japanese. Mushroom Hunting, Call Me Call Me, and a few others are in English. Fastaisie Sign is in French. The Real Folk Blues is in Japanese. I'm not sure what language Green Bird is... also French?
Come to think of it, almost all of those songs (and most songs in the show with lyrics) are in English.
But, whatever... the characters in the show/movie don't do any singing. As long as Yoko Kanno is doing the soundtrack, I'll be happy. And if the movie is actually good, I'll be extremely happy.
I agree. I've just never heard of Government as a solution for inefficiency and waste.......
That should give you some indication of just how inefficient and wasteful the medical industry is...
:(
Here, for some reason beyond my understanding, medical records have become almost the equivalent of classified documents in terms of how they are protected. This has probably cost us much more money than whether or not the records are digital.
I believe this is due in large part to the medical insurance mess. Insurers can reject covering you for a huge list of reasons and can deny coverage for pre-existing conditions outright or for certain periods of time.
If we had a single payer system here in the US, or even just firm laws that insurance companies cannot deny coverage to anybody (nor raise rates impossibly high, nor cherry-pick clients), then I think many of the privacy concerns over medical records would fade away in time.
They won't go away entirely, I'm sure, as there will always be social reasons to keep things private. The stigma associated with HIV/AIDS is a good example.
I think it is _possible_ we could save money with digitization, but not the amount suggested by this post. On the other hand, based on previous experience with medical IT, I think it's possible it could actually lose money in the long run, especially if "being digital" becomes more important than actually solving the communication problem.
As somebody who too frequently experiences the medical record disaster as a patient, I would absolutely love digitized records. Not having to fill out the same stack of papers in every office I visit. Not having to recount my lengthy medical history again and again. Not having to constantly make sure specialist A gets the note from specialist B who faxed part of my record to specialist C, while simultaneously juggling referrals from my primary care. Such a mess.
And beyond the convenience factor, even if it doesn't save money (which I think is very unlikely) there are other benefits. An enormous reduction in record errors is a big one. It's a separate headache trying to keep my own records in line... I can't imagine how troubling it would be for medical professionals.
There is also great research potential to be had in digitized records. This ties in with the privacy concerns mentioned above, so the full benefit from this might not be realized for some time. But, if you look at aggregate studies sometime (the NY Times science section reports on these often), you will see that many of these studies come from countries where you have both digitized records and less social concern about super privacy on medical records. You can learn a great deal by studying large groups of people.
I don't think this is entirely true. In many cases, 2D actions can be thought of as special cases of more generic 3D algorithms. Because of this, the same hardware can be utilized to perform what seems to be "2D" acceleration.
You're probably correct that neither ATI nor Nvidia spends much time optimizing 2D routines, but I would argue that modern CPUs and GPUs are so fast that there is no need to spend much more time optimizing 2D code paths. Outside of a benchmark no user will ever notice a difference, even with something that really does a lot of 2D work.
Of course, there are plenty of other good reasons to use a 3D compositing window manager.
No kidding. Just because some people have "uber rigs" that are stupidly expensive for playing games doesn't mean that those people ARE the PC gaming market.
My gaming platform of choice is a PC. I've got a single ATI Radeon 4850HD card which cost $170 new and that alone delivers better performance and visuals than either the XBox360 or the PS3 (not substantially better, but better). Anything more than that gives rapidly diminishing returns.
The rest of the machine is moderately priced, especially since my goal was quiet over deafening speed. And yet, having met that goal, I can still drop in most any game new or old and enjoy it. In fact, just today I finished GTA4.
Perhaps HP could sell more "gaming" PCs if they understood what that actually meant. I'm sure he's entirely correct that the market for PCs which consume 1.21 gigawatts of power is small. But you don't need that. HP could sell a machine like mine for perhaps $800-$900, still make a profit, and it would easily satisfy 90% of the PC gamers in terms of ability.
It's also a pain because finding useful info online for this is very difficult. This is because so much work as been done and a lot of help you find on the Net is already outdated. There's also some confusion/problems regarding temporary versus permanent dual monitor config.
At work I've got a workstation with an ATI Radeon X300 video card and there are two panels plugged in (one on the DVI plug, the other on the VGA plug). The panels are also different resolutions. Trying to get this dual setup working was a huge pain.
Much info pointed to Xinerama, but that seems mostly obsolete. Fortunately, unlike Nvidia's drivers, the ATI ones (OSS or proprietary) seem to do configuration the "X way" as opposed to their own way. I tried again and again to configure this in the xorg.conf file. I wanted it to use both screens by default, at start, and for all users.
The alternative was to use the Xrandr extension, but that only works while X is running. On the bright side, it worked beautifully. The xrandr tools found both screens and configured them properly even with the different resolutions. But... it does not persist from session to session and each user must do it themselves.
My eventual solution was to figure out the proper set of xrandr command line calls and put them in a script. This script is then executed when gdm starts. So far this is working, but it's hardly elegant.
Oh, good God yes. When one out of twenty stories is of the Idle variety, a story which must either be clicked on to view or briefly skipped over on the index, then Slashdot is truly ruined. What person would want this monster now?
Really now, I just can't understand all the vitriol spewed over Idle. I honestly have found just a small amount of it musing, but its overall impact on Slashdot as a whole is minuscule. If you hate it so much, just ignore the damn thing! Or, stop being an AC and then you can filter it out of everything but the RSS feed.
As for the GP's point... silly as this is, I don't have a problem with it being outside of Idle. Before there was an Idle section, stories which were serious candidates for an Ignobel award would have been fair game on Slashdot. Why not now?
I am left wondering if there would be any lawsuits if Nintendo had decided not to include the strap in the first place. Imagine a Wiimote with no strap and clear instructions that you not let go when making motions. If somebody tried to sue, Nintendo could say that the customer was duly warned and either a) let go or b) waved too forcefully.
Instead, they included a strap just in case and see where that has got them...
I think a better analogy would be yo-yos. They've got strings and they attach to your hand and, depending on what tricks you do with them, you can be throwing them or swinging them. Common sense says that if the string breaks and the yo-yo hits a TV or a vase, the manufacturer probably isn't liable.
It's not the same, obviously, since a Wiimote is meant to be used near a TV, but the strap is for accidents. It's not meant to protect you from yourself. Throwing the Wiimote like a fastball is just asking for trouble.
The real issue for concern out of the childhood vaccines is the suspension solution they are delivered in. This contains preservatives to provide shelf-life and enhance the vaccine's effectiveness since we don't have Just-In-Time medical vaccination infrastructure. Some of the happy ingredients you'll find in common vaccines are formaldehyde (poison) and thimerosal (poison) which breaks down into ethylmercury (poison) and also raw mercury (poison).
Are you sure about this? My understanding is that mercury-based vaccine preservatives were done away with at least five years ago, if not longer. I believe it was done in large part to allay parents fears about giving their children vaccines.
Normally, yes. However, in this case, because Steam launches the GTA "Social Club" launcher which in turn runs a command window which in turn actually runs GTA4, the options get lost somewhere along the way...
Maybe it will get fixed with a GTA or Steam patch, but right now the only way to pass options in is to create your own shortcut to LaunchGTAIV.exe and add them to that and then run it *after* you have already started the Rockstar Social Club app. It has a big play button, but just minimize it and use your shortcut instead.
Oh, I forgot to try that, and I even have my remote home directory mounted as Z:. Just a moment...
Sigh... no, it does not work. I tried a shortcut to Z:\music\album as well as shortcuts to individual files within that remote directory and neither worked. Seems like they must be local files. That's pretty bad...
I still need to try that registry hack mentioned below to relocate the "My Music" folder. Maybe that will work?
Also, disregard what I said in another reply about running the game from Steam. That only worked once. I created the shortcut to run the game directly and use the right command line options. That works. Running the game later from Steam once the new graphics settings have been "saved" doesn't. I have to keep running from the new shortcut if I want to keep the settings. Not really an inconvenience, but important to know.
Correct. If you create a shortcut to the LaunchGTAIV.exe file in the game directory, you can add the command line options to it. This is what I have done. After you run the game, the settings should be saved and you can go back to running it from Steam, which is what I'm doing now.
The command line options I'm using are:
-nomemrestrict -norestrictions -norestriction -texturequality 2 -renderquality 4 -shadowdensity 0 -viewdistance 30 -detailquality 30 /high
There was some debate over whether or not the 's' was needed at the end of norestriction so I put both. This config seems to work well and it gets me the "high" texture size (putting me "over budget" in the in-game graphics settings.
Huh... I guess I've just been very lucky so far. I've been playing GTA4 for two days now with no stability issues. I've got Vista64 installed with 4GB RAM. That's the gaming side of my PC (I do everything else in Debian), so I try to tune it towards better game performance... things like turning off services that I'll never need for games.
Now, the port does have some issues. I've got a fairly decent machine and, especially when compared with games like Crysis or Farcry 2, this engine clearly needs some optimization. Strangely, it seems CPU limited rather than GPU limited. After I quit the game, I can see on my CPU graph that both cores have been running at ~100%. I spent some time tweaking the video settings and right now I've got it running with both decent quality and a decent framerate.
One "feature" that seems to be annoying a lot of people is the video memory "calculator" the game uses. For each setting you modify, it calculates how much video memory that will cost. Your total is your installed video memory (512MB on my card). Not everything affects it, but increasing resolution, texture size, and draw distance will. So depending on how you set these you can't necessarily have them all high. But, it doesn't seem to work very well. You can override it from the command line. I forced it to use my LCD resolution (1280x1024) with high textures and a decent draw distance. This puts me at about 730/512MB on my "budget" yet the game still runs just fine and it looks better too.
They added a "dynamic shadow" feature to the PC version which you can adjust in the graphics menu. The values range from 0 to 16, but the quality at any setting is mediocre. It's a nice idea, but poorly implemented, and the game will run a bit faster when I turn it off.
Another annoying bit already mentioned is the control scheme. Fortunately, I purchased an XBox360 controller for use on my PC because that is the only gamepad supported by GTA4 (though I didn't know that when I bought the controller). Also, you can't actually *change* any of the mappings. There is a "Controller Configuration" menu item, but when you select it you are shown a picture of the controller and a diagram of what each button does. You can press R-stick left and right but all that does is show you the mappings for on foot, in vehicle, etc.
Like previous GTA ports, the PC version will let you play your own music on one of the radio stations (Independence FM here). They've even improved it for GTA4 and one of the modes will automatically insert fake commercials and DJ banter between your music if you like. But... it doesn't support Ogg (my preferred format) or many others. I do have some MP3s, though, and could always transcode if I wanted. The game specifically says that you can put shortcuts to your music or music folders into the user music directory. But... it doesn't work with networked mounts. I keep all of my music on my server and access via Samba from Windows or NFS in Linux. But not for GTA4... it just ignores any shortcuts that access another machine. Lame!
Still, despite these issues, it's been working far better for me than it has for most people and I've certainly been enjoying it so far.
Virtual memory wasn't invented just because computer architects thought existing address schemes weren't clever enough. It was invented so you could use disk space to emulate extra RAM at the cost of a loss of performance. Perhaps you think the question should be phrased "why do we allocate disk to use with virtual memory" instead of "why do we use virtual memory". But the latter form of the question is a perfectly clear abbreviation, except to somebody who's more interested in picking semantic nits than actually answering the question.
No... I'm pretty sure you've got that wrong. Virtual memory was developed specifically to solve the problems of memory allocation. Without virtual memory, every executable must be loaded to a specific place in memory and great care must be taken so they don't walk over each other. With virtual memory, every executable is compiled and linked to begin at address 0 (or some other arbitrary point) and continue from there. As far as the executable binaries are concerned, they own the entire memory space. It's the MMU which provides the virtual memory space and sorts all of this out.
As an added benefit you also get the ability to page to disk and I'm sure this was realized and implemented post-haste, but the driving force was to solve allocation and linking problems on multi-tasking systems.
Honestly, I'm far more concerned with the fate of The Longest Journey, one of their other franchises.
The original was one of the greatest point-and-click adventure games of all time. The sequel was okay, but left too many unanswered questions. The original left the door open, of course, but it also told a complete story with a real ending.
I generally don't track most gaming news like a hawk, but I do recall reading at one point that the plan was to continue the series with something like Dreamfall: Chapters, or some such. A sort of episodic continuation. I hope these layoffs don't affect other projects at Funcom.
Still, given the time between when I first heard that bit of news and now, Funcom seems to be following the Valve method of episodic delivery rather than the much better Telltale method. Valve has been able to get away with it because they have a long and successful track record and a huge player base. The Longest Journey, as great as it was, does not have quite as big a following...
Don't blow it, Funcom!
And it's not just the GPU companies. Creative took their sweet time releasing Vista drivers for their previous generation of audio cards. I believe they were actually released after Vista was, and they're still just dreadful.
My Audigy 2 is not that old, but after much fighting I still couldn't get 4.1 sound and EAX to work in any capacity. Part of it was Creative insisting on their own competing implementation of how to configure speakers which does not play nicely with the one included with Vista. Other issues are due to the general crummy nature of the drivers. Still other issues apparently only occur on Vista64 with 4 or more GB of RAM. Just awful. Eventually, I had to stop using the Audigy and use the onboard RealTek branded Intel HDA chip which seems to work fine, though the sound is less clean than what I got with my Audigy.
Another piece of hardware, a Playstation/Gamecube/Dreamcast to USB controller adapter, from EMS Production (http://www.hkems.com) won't work with Vista64 either. Two years in and the company, still alive, has yet to release any Vista64 drivers and the Vista32 drivers are still listed as "beta".
The annoying thing here is that the damn thing shouldn't even *need* an adapter. In Linux it is simply recognized as a HID gaming device and works fine. Vista actually recognizes it as such and DirectX controller diagnostic program can properly read values from the controller, but Vista steadfastly refuses to list the device in the "Game Controllers" control panel dialog, making it pretty useless for anything.
Sigh... at least both these pieces of hardware work perfectly well in Linux...
I took it and got all 33 answers right. This is not to brag, but to establish some limited credentials for when I say: this test sucks. Hard.
Q: If taxes equal government spending, then:
A: tax per person equals government spending per person
This question tests your grasp of logic or algebra, not civics. For the record, another option is "government debt is zero." This is incorrect because it's the deficit that's zero, not the debt. It's designed to confuse. A knowledgeable person could get this question wrong merely by being careless.
I don't think this is a bad question at all. You're correct that it is specifically testing whether you know the difference between a government deficit and government debt. This seems entirely appropriate for a civics test question. Such terms come up all the time and it is important to know the difference between them.
The other two questions, though... yeah, they weren't that great.
Anyway, of course people should be doing better on this than they are. But it's still a crappy test. And for the record, the "officials" cited aren't exactly Barack Obama and John McCain; they're poll respondents who indicated that they have held elected office at one point. That could include your local dogcatcher, the chairman of your condo association, the head of your PTA, etc.
So don't be too alarmed.
Hmmmm... there's still something interesting here. You're probably right that most of the self-identified politicians who took this test are low-to-mid level elected officials. But, if this is the case, these people should not be that different from the rest of the random sample. Shouldn't they have had a nearly identical average score to the rest of the people?
Honestly, I would have expected that these people, citizens who have shown at least a small iota of enthusiasm to work for the community, would have scored slightly better than the rest of the sample.
Lightsabers are even more far-fetched - they would need a heated arcing plasma (or something like that) as well as a strong repulsive energy and one hell of a power source.
True, but something a little less magical might be available in the not to distant future. Larry Niven wrote about a weapon in the Ringworld books which was a molecule wide strand. I can't remember the name of it, though.
Now, in his fiction, this invisible strand was made lethal by virtue of being contained within a Slaver stasis field. Little did he know that a few years down the road we would have strings of carbon nano-tubes. Braid a few of those together and you've got yourself an invisible cutting surface. I don't know how many strings you'd need to prevent it from breaking when you try to cut something, but it's probably not a huge number. The major difference between Niven's weapon and this is that his was rigid due to the field.
Science: Invisible sword, please!
I, too, mourn the loss of Senator McCain. My political views lean heavily towards the liberal side on nearly all issues, but I also have the capacity to recognize a good statesman when I see one.
As an Arizona voter, I've had the opportunity to vote to re-elect McCain to his Senate seat twice now. There were Democratic challengers both times, of course, but there's something to be said for having a senior senator represent your state. He may go ballistic over pork, but he's still been good for Arizona.
That said, his metamorphoses during his presidential campaign has been quite disappointing. I never planned to vote for McCain in a presidential race, but, sadly, I will very much have to think twice about my choice next time his senate seat is up for re-election.