i've played a little bit with cryogenics in Phys Chem lab, and while LN2 rocks, liquid helium is an order of magnitude colder (4K vs. 77K, also $14.99 a liter, $0.89/L for LN2)...begging the question, what would happen if you used liquid helium to cool your system? iirc, silicon is a superconductor at 4K. would the superconductivity short out the chip (by making the substrate conductive), or would you be able to crank it up to any speed you want, say a few THz? (/no/ resistance =/no/ heat) it'd be a real bitch to manage, and you'd have to sink your whole motherboard in the very-well-insulated LH (but then eveything would be @ 4K and superconducting...hmm...1GHz FSB?), but could it work?
NY channel 7 is reporting that most of the workers below the 80th floors got out...but a survivor they had on set reported that hundreds of firemen were climbing the stairs as he was leaving....which was less than two minutes before the collapse of the south tower. prayers to those who lost their lives doing their duty today.
"It's a sad state of things when you've got to prove that something is good in order that it not be presumed harmful. 'This hammer could be used for dangerous purposes -- can you prove there are good uses for it?'"
they do it with guns every day. and i know a gun's primary purpose is to kill, but it's a friggin inanimate object...it takes a finger on the trigger to make it function. you could kill just as many kids in a high school with a good katana (and it'd be a lot messier), but i don't hear people screaming for bans on sharp objects. sorry for going OT, just had some interesting (read aggrivating) conversation with the housemates.
i'm surprised nobody's mentioned hotline -- it's been around for a while now, longer than napster, and it's still very much the seedy underbelly of the net...probably 90% of the servers are warez/pr0n/mp3. the official software is mac/win, but there's some excellent unix clients available. it's not distributed like gnutella, you have to run server software, but it's rock-stable and very fast. official site the hx site
i dunno about coffee specifically, but caffeine's a damn good stimulant. just ask a certain trio of ne'er-do-well college chem students who happened to get a kilo or so of 99.99+% caffeine out of the stock room and decide it might be a good idea to put ~500mg into a can of mtn dew and chug it...wooooo. and you think a quadruple espresso hurts.
i've at least tried out, and bought most of, every ambrosia game that i know of. now, i can't say anything about the utilities, but i have come across one bug that actually hung the system (Escape Velocity), and it was fixed in the next release. none of the few other problems i've had with ambrosia software requires a patch or a workaroud; they're mostly little graphics hiccups that don't affect gameplay in the least. bottom line is, when your product is as quality as ambrosia's stuff is, with whatever bugs present being honestly mistakes that somehow made it past the testers, you're allowed to come up with oddball marketing schemes like this.
(for those of you who don't know who ambrosia is, they're a small group of mac developers who have been churning out amazing games and pretty cool utilites for years now. they actually care about putting out a good product and less about hype and marketing...just a bunch of Good Guys doing Good Things.)
at last, a comment on the whole piracy issue that makes SENSE. spiffy liner notes/lyrics/etc. are exactly why i buy a cd instead of just pulling the mp3s from gnutella (well...cd's DO sound much better [and vinyl even more so], but i don't have the cash to buy any music that suits my fancy). mail a copy of this to jack valenti!
bleh. i thought m:i-2 and gladiator were both semi-limp flicks. they've both got some good blood-and-guts action, but neither one really has much of a plot IMHO. my advice, if you like bloody hand-to-hand gore, go for gladiator; if you like high-tech specials and explosions, go see m:i-2. neither one's really worth the $8.25 anyway, movies are going so downhill...
It seems they're not just targeting this at home users -- they're billing to to corporations as dumb terminals for web-based apps and and as web kiosks and hotel room access. could be interesting, this looks cheap enough to make widespread use actually feasible...
MC^2 != IR. E=MC^2 is the equation stating the total amount of energy "frozen" into a given amount of matter. 1 gram of matter is "worth" 0.001kg[(300,000,000m/s)^2], or 9x10^13 joules of energy - any processor that dissipated that much heat energy would probably resemble a large thermonuclear device more than a computer. The E in E=MC^2 just isn't equivalent to the E in E=IR.
deCSS does make low-tech piracy possible. Once the encryption is removed and the data on the DVD is available, it's possible to pull out just the basic video track and put it on a Video CD. There wouldn't be all the bells and whistles of a DVD, but it would be transferrable across the net (look at Hotline, every other site has VCDs) and doesn't need a $10K burner to produce; and I know quite a few people who would take a $5 VCD over a $25 DVD. Just my $0.02...
hmm...weren't the originals like $3,000 or something? jeez...you can get a really nice box (or used car...) for that much money...man, i wish *i* was a rich geek.
hmm. It seems this whole fiasco is largely the result of problems with Motorola's ability to supply G4s. Granted, Apple should have either a. waited until they had a reliable supply of chips or b. issued one press release cancelling the orders "due to parts supply problems" or something. But, since this isn't entirely their fault, and a lot of people are going to come down hard on Apple alone, perhaps it would be a wise move to pass the buck, or at least some change, on to Motorola. I mean, Motorola is at the root of this problem; it seems sort of unfair for Apple to have to take all the heat because Motorola can't deliver what thet promised.
Slashdot Mirror
i've played a little bit with cryogenics in Phys Chem lab, and while LN2 rocks, liquid helium is an order of magnitude colder (4K vs. 77K, also $14.99 a liter, $0.89/L for LN2)...begging the question, what would happen if you used liquid helium to cool your system? iirc, silicon is a superconductor at 4K. would the superconductivity short out the chip (by making the substrate conductive), or would you be able to crank it up to any speed you want, say a few THz? (/no/ resistance = /no/ heat) it'd be a real bitch to manage, and you'd have to sink your whole motherboard in the very-well-insulated LH (but then eveything would be @ 4K and superconducting...hmm...1GHz FSB?), but could it work?
just a little food for thought.
The APR is a library of blocks for portability issues that will help smooth the transition between platforms whether Windows, Unix or Mac.
Isn't mac now unix, and doesn't it come with Apache? I somehow don't see any transition problems with OSX in the near future....
NY channel 7 is reporting that most of the workers below the 80th floors got out...but a survivor they had on set reported that hundreds of firemen were climbing the stairs as he was leaving....which was less than two minutes before the collapse of the south tower. prayers to those who lost their lives doing their duty today.
"It's a sad state of things when you've got to prove that something is good in order that it not be presumed harmful. 'This hammer could be used for dangerous purposes -- can you prove there are good uses for it?'"
they do it with guns every day. and i know a gun's primary purpose is to kill, but it's a friggin inanimate object...it takes a finger on the trigger to make it function. you could kill just as many kids in a high school with a good katana (and it'd be a lot messier), but i don't hear people screaming for bans on sharp objects. sorry for going OT, just had some interesting (read aggrivating) conversation with the housemates.
...but hey, never hurts, specially an .edu...
SDMI Attack
i'm surprised nobody's mentioned hotline -- it's been around for a while now, longer than napster, and it's still very much the seedy underbelly of the net...probably 90% of the servers are warez/pr0n/mp3. the official software is mac/win, but there's some excellent unix clients available. it's not distributed like gnutella, you have to run server software, but it's rock-stable and very fast.
official site
the hx site
i dunno about coffee specifically, but caffeine's a damn good stimulant. just ask a certain trio of ne'er-do-well college chem students who happened to get a kilo or so of 99.99+% caffeine out of the stock room and decide it might be a good idea to put ~500mg into a can of mtn dew and chug it...wooooo. and you think a quadruple espresso hurts.
i've at least tried out, and bought most of, every ambrosia game that i know of. now, i can't say anything about the utilities, but i have come across one bug that actually hung the system (Escape Velocity), and it was fixed in the next release. none of the few other problems i've had with ambrosia software requires a patch or a workaroud; they're mostly little graphics hiccups that don't affect gameplay in the least. bottom line is, when your product is as quality as ambrosia's stuff is, with whatever bugs present being honestly mistakes that somehow made it past the testers, you're allowed to come up with oddball marketing schemes like this.
(for those of you who don't know who ambrosia is, they're a small group of mac developers who have been churning out amazing games and pretty cool utilites for years now. they actually care about putting out a good product and less about hype and marketing...just a bunch of Good Guys doing Good Things.)
at last, a comment on the whole piracy issue that makes SENSE. spiffy liner notes/lyrics/etc. are exactly why i buy a cd instead of just pulling the mp3s from gnutella (well...cd's DO sound much better [and vinyl even more so], but i don't have the cash to buy any music that suits my fancy). mail a copy of this to jack valenti!
bleh. i thought m:i-2 and gladiator were both semi-limp flicks. they've both got some good blood-and-guts action, but neither one really has much of a plot IMHO. my advice, if you like bloody hand-to-hand gore, go for gladiator; if you like high-tech specials and explosions, go see m:i-2. neither one's really worth the $8.25 anyway, movies are going so downhill...
http:/ /www.indrema.com/servlet/site?page=whats_a_web_con sole_enterprise.html
It seems they're not just targeting this at home users -- they're billing to to corporations as dumb terminals for web-based apps and and as web kiosks and hotel room access. could be interesting, this looks cheap enough to make widespread use actually feasible...
MC^2 != IR.
E=MC^2 is the equation stating the total amount of energy "frozen" into a given amount of matter.
1 gram of matter is "worth" 0.001kg[(300,000,000m/s)^2], or 9x10^13 joules of energy - any processor that dissipated that much heat energy would probably resemble a large thermonuclear device more than a computer. The E in E=MC^2 just isn't equivalent to the E in E=IR.
deCSS does make low-tech piracy possible. Once the encryption is removed and the data on the DVD is available, it's possible to pull out just the basic video track and put it on a Video CD. There wouldn't be all the bells and whistles of a DVD, but it would be transferrable across the net (look at Hotline, every other site has VCDs) and doesn't need a $10K burner to produce; and I know quite a few people who would take a $5 VCD over a $25 DVD. Just my $0.02...
hmm...weren't the originals like $3,000 or something? jeez...you can get a really nice box (or used car...) for that much money...man, i wish *i* was a rich geek.
hmm. It seems this whole fiasco is largely the result of problems with Motorola's ability to supply G4s. Granted, Apple should have either a. waited until they had a reliable supply of chips or b. issued one press release cancelling the orders "due to parts supply problems" or something. But, since this isn't entirely their fault, and a lot of people are going to come down hard on Apple alone, perhaps it would be a wise move to pass the buck, or at least some change, on to Motorola. I mean, Motorola is at the root of this problem; it seems sort of unfair for Apple to have to take all the heat because Motorola can't deliver what thet promised.