Um, hello? If you want to use hydrogen, you'll need a NEW car. Where will these new cars come from? The Easter bunny? And what will happen to all the old cars? They'll get recycled? Sure.
Yes, they will, because it's actually economical to do so in many cases. See all that steel? Normally, you have to mine it as iron oxide and reduce it, which takes a huge amount of energy. With recycling, you just melt it. The resulting steel isn't going to be of high quality, but we have lots of uses for it nonetheless. A great deal of the steel rebar used in every construction project is recycled. There are scrap dealers that specialize in buying, sorting and selling used steel, and they'll actually pay you for it.
Aluminum is recycled for the same reason: melting it is much cheaper than refining it. With Al, this is FAR more significant than with steel - melting Al takes 95% less energy than smelting.
The whole point is that you are EXTRACTING ENERGY FROM AN ECOSYSTEM.
We already alter ecosystems on a huge scale. We dam rivers, our cities cause significant changes to wind patterns and to the termal profile of the entire continent, we alter wildlife habitats... we change everything. You're human, deal with it.
But specifically, you're thinking that by taking energy out of the wind, we must be slowing it down, and that by taking energy from the ground, we cool the ground. Yes, that's all true. With wind, you may even have a nontrivial effect on the surroundings, but who is to say that it will be damaging? With the ground... believe me, there is no way you could pump enough heat out of the ground to have an effect on anything... the earth is much bigger heat reservoir than you make it out to be.
Because 50 years from now, eco-freaks will be whining about some unforseen side-effect of using hydrogen and what will you say then?
The eco-freaks are not going to find issue with hydrogen. Fuel cells release water and heat. The heat is a byproduct of everything that does work, to complain about that causing global warming is like complaining about the heat that six billion human bodies generate.
OK, I take that back, eco-freaks will always find something to complain about. But it's best if we just ignore them. They won't be happy until we have zero environmental impact. That's impossible, so they'll always be around.
It's a fact of human civilization that it affects its environment, and energy use is the price of progress. To use less energy is to take a step back. We need to change where we get that energy from.
I don't think you understand the mentality of the pilots who were to fly these missions. They joked about the missions being hopeless, they laughed about the whole idea of nuclear war and the annihilation of a good chunk of the human population, they gave their maneuvers names like the "idiot loop" - but it was all humour, all to keep themselves sane. If you couldn't learn to laugh about it, you probably wouldn't have been able to handle the pressure.
In a firing squad, there is always one man who fires a blank. Every man knows that, statistically, it's very likely that he played a part in the killing of a man, but when his conscience begins to eat away at him, he finds an enormous amount of comfort in the fact that he may have fired a blank. So much so that the man might completely convince himself that he was the one who fired that blank. The human mind will do whatever it can to stay sane.
Likewise, the pilots never thought of their missions as being suicidal. They thought that with luck, or skill, or the grace of god, or whatever they believed in, they would make it home alive.
The military knew it could get twice the range out of an aircraft that wasn't destined to return home. They also knew that you could save yourself a great deal of training and effort if you just told the men to drop the bomb while flying level at 50 feet.
Instead they invented an elaborate maneuver to try to bring their men back alive, no matter what the odds. The military creates soldiers, not suicide bombers.
It is the hope of coming home alive that seperates a brave man willing to take an enormous risk from a deluded psychotic who is willing to detonate a bag of gunpowder and nails tied to his chest.
To compare the two is to misunderstand human nature.
It doesn't matter if this computer is a good deal or a bad one, if the components are well chosen or not, if the construction quality is amazing or if the whole thing just looks cheesy, the real question is this: how is this news?
Someone throws standard retail components into a custom-designed case, sells it for way more than it's worth, and somehow we care?
Computers are not cars, there is no art to tweaking them at the hardware level. Put prefabricated components together in the right way, and you have a computer. There are many hardware sites dedicated to this; let this kind of article be posted there.
This whole case-modding culture is a joke if you think about it. It's the computer equivalent of bored rich kids paying someone to put the world's largest spoiler on a civic.
Actually, most people can hear the whine of an NTSC television; the horizontal scanning circuitry operates at only 15.75kHz, which is well within the range of human hearing. Some television sets are louder than others, but they all make noise. Hearing sensitivity drops with age though; my parents can't understand why I always turn an unwatched television set off.
You don't hear this noise with computer displays because higher resolutions require higher scan frequencies. As a case in point, my display at 1280x1024x75Hz has a horizontal scan rate of 80.1kHz, which is well beyond the hearing range of any animal.
This, by the way, is the reason that most sets on the market today will do 1080i but not the lower resolution 720p: a higher horizontal scan frequency is required for progressive scan, and that means more expensive circuitry.
It also illustrates why NTSC was designed as interlaced rather than progressive: it requires much less bandwidth and simpler circuitry.
The parent poster's plasma display is probably operating in 480p. Dogs can hear the resulting 31.5kHz scan frequency, and while humans can't, I guess in some rare cases, the ultrasonic noise causes headaches.
Scroll to the bottom and you'll find that this is written by "CYBERYOGI Christian Oliver(=CO=) Windler, (teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion!)."
This looks like one of many crackpot "religions" based on a few scientific terms and some mystical psychobabble. These are people that believe microwave radiation or EMF from power lines slowly poisons your soul, the world is coming to an end becuase of evil american weather control machines, the aliens have visited us from dimension Z, the ancient Mayan calendar is the key to all knowledge, astrology is a real and important force in our lives, and so forth.
Mix varying amounts of scientific-sounding nonsense, mysticism with references to eastern religions, profound realizations about the nature of space and time, and maybe a few terms like "asymptotically" to really fill the minds of morons with awe and fear, and you have yourself a religion, or more appropriately, a cult.
I *have* seen Divx at high bitrate. Actually, I have the file right here, and it's a trailer for a game. 4.6Mbit/s, 400x300x24, divx5. It's full of rapid high motion sequences; it's in-game video. It's been my personal observation that divx does not give you much improvement in quality past a certain point. The 4.6Mbit video here still isn't anywhere near as good as I'd expect at this bitrate - there are certain imperfections that are just inherent in the format, and I suspect that encoding at 3Mbit would give you almost exactly the same output.
Throwing extra bitrate at divx often yields very little improvement. MPEG4 in general is optimized for streaming applications and low-bandwidth use. There are certain design descisions in a codec that make it ideal for some applications and suboptimal for others. Try encoding MPEG2 at 500kbit for a dramatic example, the codec is *optimized* for high bitrate applications. Yes, quality is a function of bitrate, but different codecs have different optimum points - the best quality/size compromise. It's really not that difficult a concept.
Now, blizzard is probably settling for an inferior video codec with divx because they got a better licensing deal. Obviously they wouldn't have chosen divx if it truly looked like ass, it doesn't, but I think they made a quality/cost descision more than anything. Slightly less quality, slightly less developed SDK, for a large reduction in cost. It's a good business descision I suppose.
Now, the fact that you needed to rip on me rather than just set me straight, says something. Maybe my attack on divx offended you at a personal level. My, aren't we protective of our favorite piece of code... unless you wrote part of it yourself, you have no reason to be this argumentative. If you did, then you would consider how such petty bickering reflects on the product you wrote and the company you represent. Maybe you just can't stand to see ignorance in the world and feel it's your duty to arrogantly berate everyone as if you're the final authority on everything.
If my comment was so full of ignorant rambling, why did you feel the need to correct me in such a vicious manner? Why not simply dismiss my nonsensical rambling? Because I was modded up, because you think I have nothing better to do than validate my existence by trolling or karma-whoring?
Oops, I've just replied to flamebait.
Now really, we have to get that sand out of your vagina. It's making you cranky.
What free alternatives are there? Remember, MPEG isn't free when you're selling a commercial product.
But, looking at the technical side, MPEG1 is obsolete, MPEG2 is a high bitrate codec and doesn't work well for animation at anything but DVD bitrate, Divx is a joke as far as commercial products go... Quicktime/sorenson is the only thing that even approaches an acceptable compromise for video in a game, due to its high quality at reasonable bitrate. On the other hand, it's pretty CPU heavy and it doesn't give you very fine control over the encoding process. I don't imagine that Quicktime is particularly suited as an SDK for use in game development.
Bink is PC and mac compatible out of the box, it's optimized for animation, the encoding process is very tweakable, it gives great quality at a range of bitrates, and the SDK is very well developed with games as the primary application. So really, I can see why they would have chosen it - not to mention that it's basically been the standard for any game with cutscenes since PCs gained the ability to play video.
I simply can't understand the popularity of Buffy. After all the raving on slashdot, I decided to give it a shot. Pure cheese; it's what I'd call a teen drama. Corny dialogue, melodrama, relationship troubles, idealized college campus life (clearly sanitized for the target audience), and even the popular "college rock" band of the week performing as guests. I can't imagine why this would appeal to anyone over 16, or for that matter, anyone with a Y chromosome regardless of age. So what's the appeal of this show?
"You think that some unspoken law gives you the right to ignore the contract you made with the DVD distributor when you purchased it?"
Back up for a second. I just purchased a DVD. I opened the shrinkwrap, put the disc in my dvd drive, and watched the movie. At no point did I sign a contract. At no point did I even get a clickthrough license agreement of questionable legal validity.
I purchased a product. It is a shiny plastic disc in a box. This purchase was no different from purchasing a box of fruit.
There are laws that govern my use of that fruit. I can't distill alcohol from it. I can't throw it at some random passer-by.
My use of the dvd is governed by certain laws as well, but I signed no contracts that in any way supersede those. I can't make a copy of it and sell it for profit, and I can't distribute copies of it to other people, because there are laws that say so. If I lived in the USA, I couldn't legally defeat region coding, macrovision, or CSS. In some places, the laws that govern my use of that disc don't make those restrictions.
It's all about the laws in the country. There are absolutely no contracts, signed or implicitly agreed to, in the purchase of a dvd.
Presumably this is done to discourage the registration of new domains to a country that no longer exists. Perhaps most of the 28000 were registered before the fees were so unrealistically high.
Re:Sikorsky ignored a number of problems
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The Coming Air Age
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Don't underestimate economies of scale. Helicopters are more expensive to make than cars, but cars are sold at a very generous profit margin. I'm convinced that helicopters, priced at what a high end auto costs, could be profitable, albeit with smaller margins than luxury cars.
Helicopters are not that much more complex than cars. We just have decades of experience with enormous scale production of the latter.
Not that this makes any difference. We can't switch to hydrogen fuel cells for automotive use because we can't change the infrastructure to support it. That's a very minor update compared to the complete redesign of, well, everything to accommodate personal flight. Barring trek-style transporters, nothing will get us off the ground for our daily commutes.
Re:Sikorsky ignored a number of problems
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The Coming Air Age
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I think all the issues you mention could be solved. Just take the user out of the piloting completely; have it computer driven from start to finish. The user should enter no more than a destination. A computer doesn't care much about weather or visibility, with the possible exception of high winds.
I envision a system of "roads" wherein all traffic in a particular direction has its own plane in 3D space. Everyone heading east flies at 1200m, everyone north at 1300m, and so on. 8 planes, N, NW, W, etc, should provide enough flexibility. Plane changes would be easily handled by the computer that would make sure you're not colliding with anything below or above you.
If you're headed from NY to DC, there could be a dedicated corridor at a seperate altitude so you're not constrained to the 8 directions on a compass when a more direct route is available.
The real challenge is writing the software to do all of this, and making sure it scales.
As for parking... there's no reason why helicopters couldn't have wheels and a small electric motor to drive them at walking speed to their parking spaces.
And finally, cost goes down with economies of scale.
Helicopters will never be practical for private transport on a large scale, we're in agreement on that, but for different reasons. The regulatory hurdles, the complete redesign of infrastructre, and the fundamental change in the way we think about personal transportation are issues that are probably too large to ever overcome. Not to mention the deafening roar that's typical of a helicopter.
Re:G4 800 faster than Athlon 2Ghz?!
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RC5-64 Success
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From the distributed.net faq:
Integral to the mathematics of the RC5 algorithm are 32-bit rotate operations.
For whatever reason, the designers of the IA32 (32bit Intel x86) and the PowerPC architectures decided to implement the rotate function as a hardware instruction.
Many other CPUs do not have built-in hardware rotate instructions and must emulate the operation by (at the very least) two shifts and a logical OR. This handicap is why many non-32bit-Intel and non-PowerPC computers run RC5 slower than one might expect based on real-world benchmarks. It is also the main reason why the RC5 client is a poor benchmark to use in determining the speed or performance of a particular CPU.
The P4 lacks a hardware rotate unit, otherwise known as a barrel shifter. It's the first x86 CPU since the 486 to lack one, hence my comment about it being a huge step back. It still understands the commands, it just carries them out in a less direct manner than previous Intel processors.
Re:G4 800 faster than Athlon 2Ghz?!
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RC5-64 Success
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· Score: 1
The P4 has no unit dedicated to integer rotate, which is a huge step backward from the P3. RC5 relies heavily on rotate.
But, comparing the P3 or K7 to the G4, the G4 still wipes the floor with both. The small number of registers in x86 really hurts here.
Re:Distributed.net no longer in the public eye
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RC5-64 Success
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· Score: 1
There are two reasons why dnet has largely faded into obscurity relative to other distributed computing projects. The first is that encryption is just not as sexy as a hopeless search for alien life.*
*[Yes, it's hopeless. Alien life is out there, but what are the chances that they're actively transmitting a coherent signal with the specific intent of communication, on a frequency that SETI is monitoring, and this signal is strong enough to be detectable, and is modulated in such a way that we can make sense of it, and is hitting the earth RIGHT NOW? The latter point is the most important: there is probably a narrow range of time between when a civilization learns to transmit radio waves and when it destroys itself. On the unfathomable time scales that the universe deals with, what are the odds that their transmission and our reception coincide? SETI is a waste of manpower, processor cycles, and scarce radiotelescope time.]
Back on topic, the second reason is a horrible mismanagement of dnet. Look at the frequency of.plan updates. Look at the features in the stats engine that have been "in progress" for years, and were ultimately not completed before RC5-64. Look at the complete lack of an OGR-24 result, despite the fact that the first run was completed years ago, with ample time for a second run since then. Whatever they needed to do to process those results, two years should have been enough time. Emails to people who claim to be working on the OGR project have simply been unanswered.
Dnet comes across as an organization that really lacks any leadership. It seems its founders have long since lost interest in doing anything but routine maintainance. I've been with RC5-64 for a long time, but now that it's over, I see no reason to continue running the dnet client with OGR.
Hell, they had the winning key in July, and it took them over two months to find out. The fact that a project this long in development and active use failed to immediately return a result, as it was designed to do, is pathetic.
And once the spin machine is done with this statistic, the decreased number of hijackings will be attributed to the success of airport security armed with CAPS.
Except Intel and AMD are rivals. Such an agreement would never be honored, because the first one to sneak in TCPA support would win instant favour with MS.
Besides, it's in both companies' best interests to implement Palladium. Media is the only processor intensive thing left to do on a computer.
In order for the companies that own media to cooperate, both Intel and AMD need to restrict the general purpose CPU to nothing more than a needlessly complex media decoding chip.
And they *do* indeed need the cooperation of media companies, otherwise said media will just use closed standards that the PC can't interface with. You may even find that your PC doesn't have a slot for the next generation of shiny video disc. If that happens, Intel and AMD might find themselves marginalized in the consumer market; the PC could become a business tool again, rather than a consumer product.
CPU makers need TCPA because they need media. Microsoft is just an intermediary.
The holy grail of copy protection is to keep everything off the internet, and thus, off the personal computer. General purpose computing devices are the biggest threat, and everything possible is being done to cripple them.
For now, we can get HD signals over component analog outputs, which when done right, are of excellent quality. And capture cards with component inputs will come around soon enough. Macrovision in these cards is often implemented or enabled through the drivers, which can and will be hacked. So if we're using an external tuner and a capture card, the video can end up on a computer, just as long as macrovision over component is defeated.
The enemy of this approach is the external tuner that refuses to output anything greater than 480p over component. We'll see about this - all TVs currently on the market will only accept HD signals over component, so this would be breaking compatibility with the entire installed base today. Mod chipping is a possibility here, or APEX-style hidden menus.
Some day, we'll have HD transferred digitally over 1394. It's a certainty that your 1394 tv will accept a signal only from an approved 1394 tuner and will output only to an approved 1394 recording device that implements DRM. But interestingly enough, I have a 1394 port on my computer right now.
I can transfer DV over 1394 from my camara to my computer. What's to stop me from transferring MPEG2 over it from my future tv? Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only thing stopping me is a lack of driver support, and the DRM layer in firewire. The latter is the challenge: cracking DRM at the hardware level. All the EE geeks of the world have their jobs cut out for them.
So the question is this: how hard is it to build a black box that takes an mpeg2 video stream over 1394 and strips it of its copy protection? We usually can't fab our own ASICs, but what about FPGA? Can/will it reach high enough speeds to process firewire signals in realtime?
Ah well, I'm skeptical. It seems to be taking an increasing amount of sophistication to defeat DRM, and the one thing the underground community doesn't do too well is coordinate its efforts. It would need the cooperation of the EE geeks for the hardware level DRM, the CS geeks for making mpeg2 over firewire work on the PC, etc.
In the king james version of the bible, the word "and" is used 58240 times. Thus it makes up 7.075% of the wordcount in that particular bible, as transcribed by Project Gutenberg.
...customers then decide that they really don't care, because if the rule is made by a large enough company, it must be right.
Scene: You're at a rental counter, and you read the agreement. While you're reading, ignoring dirty looks from Bertha standing behind the counter, you find the clauses you object to. In principle, contracts are negotiable: you could strike out the offending clauses, getting the signature of the aforementioned lady to validate that. In practice, the shrew would tell you to accept the contract as shown or leave, with the charming atttitude that women like Bertha tend to have. Your business is not valuable enough to the company, not when there are dozens of other customers quite willing to accept whatever arbitrary terms the contract imposes upon them.
Now, are you going to go to another rental company, wasting your time and effort, only to find that it has the same terms, or are you just going to accept the bloody contract because its the path of least resistance?
There's principle, then there's the real world.
Even a company that advertises their respect for privacy doesn't have a competitive edge, because most people will just accept any contract, without reading it. The company is better off including the offending parts of the contract, then billing you hundreds of dollars for driving at a reasonable speed.
After two long and useless pages that guide us through the setup screens on the router, we get a test of half-life pings, and downloading from two websites. To add insult to injury, the reviewer uses IE, which is known to report little more than crude approximations of transfer rates.
The half-life pings aren't telling us anything, as it's a well-known fact that pings jump when your connection is saturated. It doesn't matter if you're multiplexing two of them.
Win2k/XP can both report raw ethernet throughput using perfmon. This would have been a much more useful and reliable benchmark.
Too many issues are left unaddressed: does this solution double your upload or download rate to a single host? Are you accessible through a single IP, and if so, which one of your broadband connections is used for this?
Can anyone who's actually used this provide some insight?
I would take the worst commercial monopoly over government control any day. A government organization would make the telco's look like friendly and efficient organizations. The enormous overhead would result in higher prices: if not directly, then through taxes.
If govt were to own the wiring, the quality of service would vary from year to year depending on how much tax money is diverted to the War on Something. There are a lot of roads in fair or poor condition around the country, but at least a road is still a road, even if it's a bit rough. DSL or cable, on the other hand, just doesn't work if the lines aren't in near-perfect condition.
Finally, I can think of no justification for siezing control of billions of dollars in wiring from the company that laid it. Regulating a business is one thing, taking all of its assets is another entirely.
Phone lines are a natural monopoly, we just have to accept that. Any attempt at forcing competition is artificial and thus doomed to failure. The same can be said of power and gas distribution. One need look no further than Caliornia to see the spectacular failure of unnatural competition, and if you consider the slow growth and unreliable nature of DSL under this system, it too is an example of a large-scale failure.
To reiterate: phone lines are a *natural* monopoly, and if you think about it, the idea of competition is completely absurd. The only solution is regulation of the kind that is currently done for standard voice lines.
Alright, one canister leaks - it contains a few hundred kilograms of waste. Let's say it's dropped a few thousand kilometers offshore and a few kilometers deep. Before reaching any humans, it will have to diffuse through a few million cubic kilometers of water.
We're dealing with concentrations so small that they will be undetectable.
Of course, diffusion is not immediate, and its possible that whatever lives on the bottom of the ocean will be somewhat irradiated and poisoned. Excuse me while I cry a tear for some bottom-dwelling fish. By the time the waste reaches the whales we all love to rally around, it will already be insignificant.
And, if the canisters are made sufficiently dense, they will be travelling fast enough upon impact into the ocean floor that they will bury themselves deep within the soft mud. The potential for environmental contamination is now as close to negligable as we can get.
Do you actually take public transit? I do, every day, 70km to school. On the few occasions that I've driven, I get there in half the time.
And yes, I *do* want to avoid the unwashed street-urchin masses. This isn't elitism: I could really do without being disgusted or annoyed in some way every single day. I'm tired of being subjected to cretin that don't understand the following simple concepts:
-That funny thing that sprays water into a tub is to clean the layer of filth off your skin; the fact that you're acclimated to your stench doesn't make it any less painful for the rest of us.
-We don't want to hear you talking about what clothes you want to buy for 30 minutes.
-Your personal music listening device should be just that: personal.
-No one else around you cares about your insipid conversation, and you don't need to shout.
-You can chew with your mouth closed; though eating a full meal on a moving vehicle may not be the best idea anyway.
The list can go on. If I had the know-how, I would build a portable cell phone jammer just to deal with that particular class of degenerates. In North American society, there are indeed people too ignorant to manage their physical affairs. And these cretin are all concentrated on public transit, seeing as how society neither places enough trust in them to allow the operation of a motor vehicle, nor considers their labours (or lack thereof) worth enough to allow such a luxury.
And face it, North American society is built around the automobile. Our cities are not like those of Europe; we live in suburbs, we commute more in a day than many Europeans do in a week. As a matter of practicality, we need a car to get around. You're completely crippled without one. Evening social functions, a trip to the bank or store, effectively commuting to work or school... all a serious challenge with public transit. I'm sick and tired of my mobility being restricted and subjected to the arbitrary conditions of the bus schedule.
As soon as I can scrape up enough cash, I'm buying a car.
And when I make enough money to afford one, I will get a vehicle with enough engine capacity to carry me comfortably, and enough space in the passenger cabin to sit comfortably. Provided that your kind doesn't succeed in making that illegal.
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Yes, they will, because it's actually economical to do so in many cases. See all that steel? Normally, you have to mine it as iron oxide and reduce it, which takes a huge amount of energy. With recycling, you just melt it. The resulting steel isn't going to be of high quality, but we have lots of uses for it nonetheless. A great deal of the steel rebar used in every construction project is recycled. There are scrap dealers that specialize in buying, sorting and selling used steel, and they'll actually pay you for it.
Aluminum is recycled for the same reason: melting it is much cheaper than refining it. With Al, this is FAR more significant than with steel - melting Al takes 95% less energy than smelting.
We already alter ecosystems on a huge scale. We dam rivers, our cities cause significant changes to wind patterns and to the termal profile of the entire continent, we alter wildlife habitats... we change everything. You're human, deal with it.
But specifically, you're thinking that by taking energy out of the wind, we must be slowing it down, and that by taking energy from the ground, we cool the ground. Yes, that's all true. With wind, you may even have a nontrivial effect on the surroundings, but who is to say that it will be damaging? With the ground... believe me, there is no way you could pump enough heat out of the ground to have an effect on anything... the earth is much bigger heat reservoir than you make it out to be.
The eco-freaks are not going to find issue with hydrogen. Fuel cells release water and heat. The heat is a byproduct of everything that does work, to complain about that causing global warming is like complaining about the heat that six billion human bodies generate.
OK, I take that back, eco-freaks will always find something to complain about. But it's best if we just ignore them. They won't be happy until we have zero environmental impact. That's impossible, so they'll always be around.
It's a fact of human civilization that it affects its environment, and energy use is the price of progress. To use less energy is to take a step back. We need to change where we get that energy from.
I don't think you understand the mentality of the pilots who were to fly these missions. They joked about the missions being hopeless, they laughed about the whole idea of nuclear war and the annihilation of a good chunk of the human population, they gave their maneuvers names like the "idiot loop" - but it was all humour, all to keep themselves sane. If you couldn't learn to laugh about it, you probably wouldn't have been able to handle the pressure.
In a firing squad, there is always one man who fires a blank. Every man knows that, statistically, it's very likely that he played a part in the killing of a man, but when his conscience begins to eat away at him, he finds an enormous amount of comfort in the fact that he may have fired a blank. So much so that the man might completely convince himself that he was the one who fired that blank. The human mind will do whatever it can to stay sane.
Likewise, the pilots never thought of their missions as being suicidal. They thought that with luck, or skill, or the grace of god, or whatever they believed in, they would make it home alive.
The military knew it could get twice the range out of an aircraft that wasn't destined to return home. They also knew that you could save yourself a great deal of training and effort if you just told the men to drop the bomb while flying level at 50 feet.
Instead they invented an elaborate maneuver to try to bring their men back alive, no matter what the odds. The military creates soldiers, not suicide bombers.
It is the hope of coming home alive that seperates a brave man willing to take an enormous risk from a deluded psychotic who is willing to detonate a bag of gunpowder and nails tied to his chest.
To compare the two is to misunderstand human nature.
It doesn't matter if this computer is a good deal or a bad one, if the components are well chosen or not, if the construction quality is amazing or if the whole thing just looks cheesy, the real question is this: how is this news?
Someone throws standard retail components into a custom-designed case, sells it for way more than it's worth, and somehow we care?
Computers are not cars, there is no art to tweaking them at the hardware level. Put prefabricated components together in the right way, and you have a computer. There are many hardware sites dedicated to this; let this kind of article be posted there.
This whole case-modding culture is a joke if you think about it. It's the computer equivalent of bored rich kids paying someone to put the world's largest spoiler on a civic.
Actually, most people can hear the whine of an NTSC television; the horizontal scanning circuitry operates at only 15.75kHz, which is well within the range of human hearing. Some television sets are louder than others, but they all make noise. Hearing sensitivity drops with age though; my parents can't understand why I always turn an unwatched television set off.
You don't hear this noise with computer displays because higher resolutions require higher scan frequencies. As a case in point, my display at 1280x1024x75Hz has a horizontal scan rate of 80.1kHz, which is well beyond the hearing range of any animal.
HDTV scan frequencies:
480i (NTSC) : 15.75kHz
480p : 31.5kHz
720p : 45kHz
1080i : 33.75kHz
This, by the way, is the reason that most sets on the market today will do 1080i but not the lower resolution 720p: a higher horizontal scan frequency is required for progressive scan, and that means more expensive circuitry.
It also illustrates why NTSC was designed as interlaced rather than progressive: it requires much less bandwidth and simpler circuitry.
The parent poster's plasma display is probably operating in 480p. Dogs can hear the resulting 31.5kHz scan frequency, and while humans can't, I guess in some rare cases, the ultrasonic noise causes headaches.
Scroll to the bottom and you'll find that this is written by "CYBERYOGI Christian Oliver(=CO=) Windler, (teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion!)."
This looks like one of many crackpot "religions" based on a few scientific terms and some mystical psychobabble. These are people that believe microwave radiation or EMF from power lines slowly poisons your soul, the world is coming to an end becuase of evil american weather control machines, the aliens have visited us from dimension Z, the ancient Mayan calendar is the key to all knowledge, astrology is a real and important force in our lives, and so forth.
Mix varying amounts of scientific-sounding nonsense, mysticism with references to eastern religions, profound realizations about the nature of space and time, and maybe a few terms like "asymptotically" to really fill the minds of morons with awe and fear, and you have yourself a religion, or more appropriately, a cult.
I *have* seen Divx at high bitrate. Actually, I have the file right here, and it's a trailer for a game. 4.6Mbit/s, 400x300x24, divx5. It's full of rapid high motion sequences; it's in-game video. It's been my personal observation that divx does not give you much improvement in quality past a certain point. The 4.6Mbit video here still isn't anywhere near as good as I'd expect at this bitrate - there are certain imperfections that are just inherent in the format, and I suspect that encoding at 3Mbit would give you almost exactly the same output.
Throwing extra bitrate at divx often yields very little improvement. MPEG4 in general is optimized for streaming applications and low-bandwidth use. There are certain design descisions in a codec that make it ideal for some applications and suboptimal for others. Try encoding MPEG2 at 500kbit for a dramatic example, the codec is *optimized* for high bitrate applications. Yes, quality is a function of bitrate, but different codecs have different optimum points - the best quality/size compromise. It's really not that difficult a concept.
Now, blizzard is probably settling for an inferior video codec with divx because they got a better licensing deal. Obviously they wouldn't have chosen divx if it truly looked like ass, it doesn't, but I think they made a quality/cost descision more than anything. Slightly less quality, slightly less developed SDK, for a large reduction in cost. It's a good business descision I suppose.
Now, the fact that you needed to rip on me rather than just set me straight, says something. Maybe my attack on divx offended you at a personal level. My, aren't we protective of our favorite piece of code... unless you wrote part of it yourself, you have no reason to be this argumentative. If you did, then you would consider how such petty bickering reflects on the product you wrote and the company you represent. Maybe you just can't stand to see ignorance in the world and feel it's your duty to arrogantly berate everyone as if you're the final authority on everything.
If my comment was so full of ignorant rambling, why did you feel the need to correct me in such a vicious manner? Why not simply dismiss my nonsensical rambling? Because I was modded up, because you think I have nothing better to do than validate my existence by trolling or karma-whoring?
Oops, I've just replied to flamebait.
Now really, we have to get that sand out of your vagina. It's making you cranky.
What free alternatives are there? Remember, MPEG isn't free when you're selling a commercial product.
But, looking at the technical side, MPEG1 is obsolete, MPEG2 is a high bitrate codec and doesn't work well for animation at anything but DVD bitrate, Divx is a joke as far as commercial products go... Quicktime/sorenson is the only thing that even approaches an acceptable compromise for video in a game, due to its high quality at reasonable bitrate. On the other hand, it's pretty CPU heavy and it doesn't give you very fine control over the encoding process. I don't imagine that Quicktime is particularly suited as an SDK for use in game development.
Bink is PC and mac compatible out of the box, it's optimized for animation, the encoding process is very tweakable, it gives great quality at a range of bitrates, and the SDK is very well developed with games as the primary application. So really, I can see why they would have chosen it - not to mention that it's basically been the standard for any game with cutscenes since PCs gained the ability to play video.
I simply can't understand the popularity of Buffy. After all the raving on slashdot, I decided to give it a shot. Pure cheese; it's what I'd call a teen drama. Corny dialogue, melodrama, relationship troubles, idealized college campus life (clearly sanitized for the target audience), and even the popular "college rock" band of the week performing as guests. I can't imagine why this would appeal to anyone over 16, or for that matter, anyone with a Y chromosome regardless of age. So what's the appeal of this show?
Yeah, except it should actually do what you want it to do, rather than what Microsoft decides to let you do.
"You think that some unspoken law gives you the right to ignore the contract you made with the DVD distributor when you purchased it?"
Back up for a second. I just purchased a DVD. I opened the shrinkwrap, put the disc in my dvd drive, and watched the movie. At no point did I sign a contract. At no point did I even get a clickthrough license agreement of questionable legal validity.
I purchased a product. It is a shiny plastic disc in a box. This purchase was no different from purchasing a box of fruit.
There are laws that govern my use of that fruit. I can't distill alcohol from it. I can't throw it at some random passer-by.
My use of the dvd is governed by certain laws as well, but I signed no contracts that in any way supersede those. I can't make a copy of it and sell it for profit, and I can't distribute copies of it to other people, because there are laws that say so. If I lived in the USA, I couldn't legally defeat region coding, macrovision, or CSS. In some places, the laws that govern my use of that disc don't make those restrictions.
It's all about the laws in the country. There are absolutely no contracts, signed or implicitly agreed to, in the purchase of a dvd.
Presumably this is done to discourage the registration of new domains to a country that no longer exists. Perhaps most of the 28000 were registered before the fees were so unrealistically high.
Don't underestimate economies of scale. Helicopters are more expensive to make than cars, but cars are sold at a very generous profit margin. I'm convinced that helicopters, priced at what a high end auto costs, could be profitable, albeit with smaller margins than luxury cars.
Helicopters are not that much more complex than cars. We just have decades of experience with enormous scale production of the latter.
Not that this makes any difference. We can't switch to hydrogen fuel cells for automotive use because we can't change the infrastructure to support it. That's a very minor update compared to the complete redesign of, well, everything to accommodate personal flight. Barring trek-style transporters, nothing will get us off the ground for our daily commutes.
I think all the issues you mention could be solved. Just take the user out of the piloting completely; have it computer driven from start to finish. The user should enter no more than a destination. A computer doesn't care much about weather or visibility, with the possible exception of high winds.
I envision a system of "roads" wherein all traffic in a particular direction has its own plane in 3D space. Everyone heading east flies at 1200m, everyone north at 1300m, and so on. 8 planes, N, NW, W, etc, should provide enough flexibility. Plane changes would be easily handled by the computer that would make sure you're not colliding with anything below or above you.
If you're headed from NY to DC, there could be a dedicated corridor at a seperate altitude so you're not constrained to the 8 directions on a compass when a more direct route is available.
The real challenge is writing the software to do all of this, and making sure it scales.
As for parking... there's no reason why helicopters couldn't have wheels and a small electric motor to drive them at walking speed to their parking spaces.
And finally, cost goes down with economies of scale.
Helicopters will never be practical for private transport on a large scale, we're in agreement on that, but for different reasons. The regulatory hurdles, the complete redesign of infrastructre, and the fundamental change in the way we think about personal transportation are issues that are probably too large to ever overcome. Not to mention the deafening roar that's typical of a helicopter.
From the distributed.net faq:
The P4 lacks a hardware rotate unit, otherwise known as a barrel shifter. It's the first x86 CPU since the 486 to lack one, hence my comment about it being a huge step back. It still understands the commands, it just carries them out in a less direct manner than previous Intel processors.
The P4 has no unit dedicated to integer rotate, which is a huge step backward from the P3. RC5 relies heavily on rotate.
But, comparing the P3 or K7 to the G4, the G4 still wipes the floor with both. The small number of registers in x86 really hurts here.
Here is a client speeds database.
There are two reasons why dnet has largely faded into obscurity relative to other distributed computing projects. The first is that encryption is just not as sexy as a hopeless search for alien life.*
.plan updates. Look at the features in the stats engine that have been "in progress" for years, and were ultimately not completed before RC5-64. Look at the complete lack of an OGR-24 result, despite the fact that the first run was completed years ago, with ample time for a second run since then. Whatever they needed to do to process those results, two years should have been enough time. Emails to people who claim to be working on the OGR project have simply been unanswered.
*[Yes, it's hopeless. Alien life is out there, but what are the chances that they're actively transmitting a coherent signal with the specific intent of communication, on a frequency that SETI is monitoring, and this signal is strong enough to be detectable, and is modulated in such a way that we can make sense of it, and is hitting the earth RIGHT NOW? The latter point is the most important: there is probably a narrow range of time between when a civilization learns to transmit radio waves and when it destroys itself. On the unfathomable time scales that the universe deals with, what are the odds that their transmission and our reception coincide? SETI is a waste of manpower, processor cycles, and scarce radiotelescope time.]
Back on topic, the second reason is a horrible mismanagement of dnet. Look at the frequency of
Dnet comes across as an organization that really lacks any leadership. It seems its founders have long since lost interest in doing anything but routine maintainance. I've been with RC5-64 for a long time, but now that it's over, I see no reason to continue running the dnet client with OGR.
Hell, they had the winning key in July, and it took them over two months to find out. The fact that a project this long in development and active use failed to immediately return a result, as it was designed to do, is pathetic.
It's getting very hard to take dnet seriously.
And once the spin machine is done with this statistic, the decreased number of hijackings will be attributed to the success of airport security armed with CAPS.
Except Intel and AMD are rivals. Such an agreement would never be honored, because the first one to sneak in TCPA support would win instant favour with MS.
Besides, it's in both companies' best interests to implement Palladium. Media is the only processor intensive thing left to do on a computer.
In order for the companies that own media to cooperate, both Intel and AMD need to restrict the general purpose CPU to nothing more than a needlessly complex media decoding chip.
And they *do* indeed need the cooperation of media companies, otherwise said media will just use closed standards that the PC can't interface with. You may even find that your PC doesn't have a slot for the next generation of shiny video disc. If that happens, Intel and AMD might find themselves marginalized in the consumer market; the PC could become a business tool again, rather than a consumer product.
CPU makers need TCPA because they need media. Microsoft is just an intermediary.
The holy grail of copy protection is to keep everything off the internet, and thus, off the personal computer. General purpose computing devices are the biggest threat, and everything possible is being done to cripple them.
For now, we can get HD signals over component analog outputs, which when done right, are of excellent quality. And capture cards with component inputs will come around soon enough. Macrovision in these cards is often implemented or enabled through the drivers, which can and will be hacked. So if we're using an external tuner and a capture card, the video can end up on a computer, just as long as macrovision over component is defeated.
The enemy of this approach is the external tuner that refuses to output anything greater than 480p over component. We'll see about this - all TVs currently on the market will only accept HD signals over component, so this would be breaking compatibility with the entire installed base today. Mod chipping is a possibility here, or APEX-style hidden menus.
Some day, we'll have HD transferred digitally over 1394. It's a certainty that your 1394 tv will accept a signal only from an approved 1394 tuner and will output only to an approved 1394 recording device that implements DRM. But interestingly enough, I have a 1394 port on my computer right now.
I can transfer DV over 1394 from my camara to my computer. What's to stop me from transferring MPEG2 over it from my future tv? Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only thing stopping me is a lack of driver support, and the DRM layer in firewire. The latter is the challenge: cracking DRM at the hardware level. All the EE geeks of the world have their jobs cut out for them.
So the question is this: how hard is it to build a black box that takes an mpeg2 video stream over 1394 and strips it of its copy protection? We usually can't fab our own ASICs, but what about FPGA? Can/will it reach high enough speeds to process firewire signals in realtime?
Ah well, I'm skeptical. It seems to be taking an increasing amount of sophistication to defeat DRM, and the one thing the underground community doesn't do too well is coordinate its efforts. It would need the cooperation of the EE geeks for the hardware level DRM, the CS geeks for making mpeg2 over firewire work on the PC, etc.
Fun fact:
In the king james version of the bible, the word "and" is used 58240 times. Thus it makes up 7.075% of the wordcount in that particular bible, as transcribed by Project Gutenberg.
...customers then decide that they really don't care, because if the rule is made by a large enough company, it must be right.
Scene: You're at a rental counter, and you read the agreement. While you're reading, ignoring dirty looks from Bertha standing behind the counter, you find the clauses you object to. In principle, contracts are negotiable: you could strike out the offending clauses, getting the signature of the aforementioned lady to validate that. In practice, the shrew would tell you to accept the contract as shown or leave, with the charming atttitude that women like Bertha tend to have. Your business is not valuable enough to the company, not when there are dozens of other customers quite willing to accept whatever arbitrary terms the contract imposes upon them.
Now, are you going to go to another rental company, wasting your time and effort, only to find that it has the same terms, or are you just going to accept the bloody contract because its the path of least resistance?
There's principle, then there's the real world.
Even a company that advertises their respect for privacy doesn't have a competitive edge, because most people will just accept any contract, without reading it. The company is better off including the offending parts of the contract, then billing you hundreds of dollars for driving at a reasonable speed.
After two long and useless pages that guide us through the setup screens on the router, we get a test of half-life pings, and downloading from two websites. To add insult to injury, the reviewer uses IE, which is known to report little more than crude approximations of transfer rates.
The half-life pings aren't telling us anything, as it's a well-known fact that pings jump when your connection is saturated. It doesn't matter if you're multiplexing two of them.
Win2k/XP can both report raw ethernet throughput using perfmon. This would have been a much more useful and reliable benchmark.
Too many issues are left unaddressed: does this solution double your upload or download rate to a single host? Are you accessible through a single IP, and if so, which one of your broadband connections is used for this?
Can anyone who's actually used this provide some insight?
I would take the worst commercial monopoly over government control any day. A government organization would make the telco's look like friendly and efficient organizations. The enormous overhead would result in higher prices: if not directly, then through taxes.
If govt were to own the wiring, the quality of service would vary from year to year depending on how much tax money is diverted to the War on Something. There are a lot of roads in fair or poor condition around the country, but at least a road is still a road, even if it's a bit rough. DSL or cable, on the other hand, just doesn't work if the lines aren't in near-perfect condition.
Finally, I can think of no justification for siezing control of billions of dollars in wiring from the company that laid it. Regulating a business is one thing, taking all of its assets is another entirely.
Phone lines are a natural monopoly, we just have to accept that. Any attempt at forcing competition is artificial and thus doomed to failure. The same can be said of power and gas distribution. One need look no further than Caliornia to see the spectacular failure of unnatural competition, and if you consider the slow growth and unreliable nature of DSL under this system, it too is an example of a large-scale failure.
To reiterate: phone lines are a *natural* monopoly, and if you think about it, the idea of competition is completely absurd. The only solution is regulation of the kind that is currently done for standard voice lines.
Actually, underwater burial is the best option.
Alright, one canister leaks - it contains a few hundred kilograms of waste. Let's say it's dropped a few thousand kilometers offshore and a few kilometers deep. Before reaching any humans, it will have to diffuse through a few million cubic kilometers of water.
We're dealing with concentrations so small that they will be undetectable.
Of course, diffusion is not immediate, and its possible that whatever lives on the bottom of the ocean will be somewhat irradiated and poisoned. Excuse me while I cry a tear for some bottom-dwelling fish. By the time the waste reaches the whales we all love to rally around, it will already be insignificant.
And, if the canisters are made sufficiently dense, they will be travelling fast enough upon impact into the ocean floor that they will bury themselves deep within the soft mud. The potential for environmental contamination is now as close to negligable as we can get.
Do you actually take public transit? I do, every day, 70km to school. On the few occasions that I've driven, I get there in half the time.
And yes, I *do* want to avoid the unwashed street-urchin masses. This isn't elitism: I could really do without being disgusted or annoyed in some way every single day. I'm tired of being subjected to cretin that don't understand the following simple concepts:
-That funny thing that sprays water into a tub is to clean the layer of filth off your skin; the fact that you're acclimated to your stench doesn't make it any less painful for the rest of us.
-We don't want to hear you talking about what clothes you want to buy for 30 minutes.
-Your personal music listening device should be just that: personal.
-No one else around you cares about your insipid conversation, and you don't need to shout.
-You can chew with your mouth closed; though eating a full meal on a moving vehicle may not be the best idea anyway.
The list can go on. If I had the know-how, I would build a portable cell phone jammer just to deal with that particular class of degenerates. In North American society, there are indeed people too ignorant to manage their physical affairs. And these cretin are all concentrated on public transit, seeing as how society neither places enough trust in them to allow the operation of a motor vehicle, nor considers their labours (or lack thereof) worth enough to allow such a luxury.
And face it, North American society is built around the automobile. Our cities are not like those of Europe; we live in suburbs, we commute more in a day than many Europeans do in a week. As a matter of practicality, we need a car to get around. You're completely crippled without one. Evening social functions, a trip to the bank or store, effectively commuting to work or school... all a serious challenge with public transit. I'm sick and tired of my mobility being restricted and subjected to the arbitrary conditions of the bus schedule.
As soon as I can scrape up enough cash, I'm buying a car.
And when I make enough money to afford one, I will get a vehicle with enough engine capacity to carry me comfortably, and enough space in the passenger cabin to sit comfortably. Provided that your kind doesn't succeed in making that illegal.