Politicians will stay what they currently are: a development path completely separate from your "regular" profession (smuggler, entertainer, medic, etc.).
Personally speaking, SOE has one by one destroyed every profession I've ever cared about in the game. First, Creature Handlers (CHs), which was nerfed to uselessness before I even joined in March of 2004, then continued to get worse for over a year as various critters were made untamable or less effective in combat, even those required for economic viability like the Motley Kaadu, one of the few non-CH mounts. Now they're out of the game completely. My CH is in mourning.
Entertainers used to be big. They had galaxy-spanning events that would attract nearly 100 players at a time to participate in "Cantina Crawls." Then, ents were made gradually inviable for serious play because you couldn't make money to do anything, like buy furniture for your house. Then came the removal of weapons, armor, large groups, and other things from an ent's repertoire. They took away buffs, then mind healing. Well, videos are worth a millions words:
In other words, I feel your pain. Noncoms have had increasingly insignificant roles in the game. Oh sure, I understand why: as a company, SOE feels they need to take care of the majority of players, and it just happens that they want to fight. It's just unfortunate that this comes at the cost of enjoyment and viability for other players and professions.
A note about the change to professions: SWG used to have the most interesting character development system in any MMO I've heard of. Not only are there dozens of professions, you can mix them. For a quick fighter, combine various skill trees of Fencer and Pistoleer. Love entertaining? Feel free to do both Musician and Dancer. Use your skill points in any way to mix and match skills and abilities. Now they're taking away this, the most unique aspect of the game. The old system wasn't perfect, but you don't use a nuke to swat a fly. While the new system may work, it will feel like any other MMO./sigh
While you're at it, have it last year-round. Not like it hasn't been done before:
The last time the United States and Canada observed different winter time systems was during the 1974-75 oil crisis. The U.S. did not turn its clocks back at all that fall in an attempt to conserve energy.
Better to have to change once and get it over with than replay the same drama every decade when someone wants to avoid problems like having hundreds of thousands of people driving huge vans and SUVs to work with no passengers. By the way, why is gas so much more expensive in other countries when we seem to waste it? From time to time I hear about equivalent prices of over $10/gallon.
Consider cryptographic secret-sharing schemes. You split up data into m parts, and require that at least n of them be brought together to recover the secret. It's kind of like cryptographic RAID. It might not be practical for most of the data that we store, but it's certainly an interesting idea. It would be difficult for a small group of people to get together and recover your secret, and difficult for a small group of people to hold out and prevent the secret from getting out when it should. The ratio of n and m is adjusted based on the risk analysis of the two attacks. I first read about this idea in Schneier's Applied Crypto book, but wikipedia comes through:
Keep in mind that whether or not you need encryption, whether or not you need offsite storage, whether or not you need physically-accessible data should the Internet become available... all these things depend on the data you're trying to protect, and the disasters you're trying to protect against. Flinging buzzwords at your data doesn't necessarily do anything useful to protect it.
I was really looking forward to running my home servers on Mini-ITX boards. Then the Mini came out and almost every enticing feature of the Mini-ITX platform (for home use) was instantly overshadowed.
Power Tie, at 10W-20W for the entire system.
The other power The C3 Nehemiah is decent at integer math for its clock speed and power usage, but sucks at floating point. Google some benchmarks for more information. For a server, that's generally not a terrible problem, but it makes the Mini more flexible in the ways it can be used.
Price I can get a new mini at under $500 shipped direct from Apple, with a hard drive, CD-burner, memory, case, latest commercial software. Good Mini-ITX cases cost well over $100 just because the market is small. A recent Mini-ITX board is $200-$300. No, don't use the price of an original Epia, which can't hold a candle to a Celeron 400, not to mention a 1.25GHz G4. Don't use the price of a full-size cheapo ATX case, cause that's not a fair comparison. Then add storage, RAM, etc. Even after spending all that (easily $500-$700 for a system that can even attempt to rival a low-end Mini in terms of performance), you don't get...
Support Apple has legendary customer support (look at, say, Consumer Reports and their customer support comparisons). Via might not be terrible, but they'll only help you with the mainboard, not the components, nor integration.
Linux I haven't checked in the last few months, but I'd wager that the Mini has better Linux support for its embedded hardware overall. EPIA drivers have a history of being shakey. See also the stability problems below, if you're thinking of going with an older, cheaper board. I loaded Debian-PPC on my Mini and everything just worked. Granted I don't use Airport Express (which as far as I know still doesn't work) and the Mac's onboard hardware monitoring chip isn't easy to configure with lm-sensors, but nothing that I really needed required special drivers.
Tinkering If you insist on building things yourself, then the Epia wins here. Keep in mind, however, that you can open a Mini and make minor changes (like adding RAM) without voiding your warranty.
Expansion Be careful if you think the Epia wins here. Some boards claim to support up to 2 PCI cards, but they are plagued with DMA problems. Notice that the newest Epia SP has dropped claims of such support. The problem crops up while sending large amounts of traffic to a hard drive and PCI card at the same time, or Ethernet port and hard drive, etc. and it will tank the machine. This is a known problem apparently resulting from a slow interconnect between the North and South bridges. Via's official forums (www.viaarena.com) has threads about this issue. To be fair, the CN400 chipset has a much faster interconnect, so problems might be alleviated. As for the Mini, most peripherals and add-ons will support one or more of USB and Firewire, so there's not a big problem. Video capture may or may not be a problem (are there Linux-friendly Firewire video capture devices?), since I haven't looked into that at all.
Apple stickers Bundled with the Mini! =P
The Epia is often used to build car-puters, whereas I haven't yet heard of something using a Mini for that purpose. If you have a particular PCI card you must use, that might be a reason to go Epia. Aside from those reasons, the Mini is a better deal and probably more capable.
The mice are the physical manifestations of superintelligent beings, sent here to weed off certain portions of the population deemed unworthy to perform the necessary calculations of the computer Earth.
Even Seagate's announcement of *their* 500Gig drive, to ship this fall, is weeks if not months old. From what I remember about the spec sheets, the Seagate drive will be cooler, quieter, use less power, and have two more years warranty. If you can hold out, at least wait until reviews of the Seagate drive appear and make your decision then.
It's not cost effective for them to go to trial even when they can win!
This is true for both sides of many disputes. How many high school/college students do you think have the resources to fight the RIAA/MPAA? Would you take out a second mortgage to make this particular point? If so, make your IP show up in those logs and wait for your chance to shine.
If you go to trial and lose, you're probably even worse off than having paid whatever arbitrary amount they want. I haven't seen what the EFF is up to lately but are they willing to defend these cases for free?
I appreciate the sentiment of "Don't give in" but I doubt how feasible it is.
As others have mentioned here, assuming that the Internet is confidential is dangerous and naive. With the rise of cable modem networks and Wifi networks, the zone of trust is even smaller.
I don't have a problem with the general idea of governments being able to tap the Internet in the same way as they tap phones, if and only if the system is secure and regulated at least as rigorously as phone taps. In fact, given the choice I'd rather they tap the Internet than phones (where things like encryption are expensive/difficult to employ).
While the general idea of a net tap isn't so bad, the implications are more distressing. Once they get their mitts on the first few layers of the network stack, they'll naturally work their way up. The next logical step is key escrow for encryption. For an old yet relevant paper on this, see:
Among the risks and problems cited in that paper are things that will also be relevant in any sort of network tap, including higher costs pushed onto end users, inherent insecurity in having extra access vectors, and difficulty in preventing abuse of the system.
In the end the idea of a network tap isn't so bad. What bothers me is the difficulty (impossibility?) of doing it right, and the other things that this will set a precedent for.
People have been making mini itx boxes with the idea of compactness etc. before the Mac Mini came out.
Sure, but let's consider the target market of the Mini: those wanting to try out OS X and (grand)parents because it does what they need. There are no complete EPIA-based hardware+software+support solutions with anywhere near the price point or functionality of the Mini.
Integration could be done by a reseller, but you'd be going to them for support as well. The point is not whoever made a small computer first. Apple gives you reasonable hardware, the latest software, and support for $500.
Via had long before Mac Mini came out announced nano-ITX
Duke Nukem Forever has been announced for years, but it's not out either. Having a retail product that has already been shipping for months is something else entirely. As far as EPIAs go, no one has made a complete system and sold it with software and support anyway.
Apple cult followers will now always say it was Apple's idea to make PC's small.
It was Apple's idea to make small computers viable, and the success of the Mini proves it. The cappuccino has been around for years: http://www.cappuccinopc.com/cappuccino.asp... but no one *I* know uses them.
The EPIAs are fun for experimentation (check out the custom cases on http://www.mini-itx.com/ but they're far from the complete solution that non-enthusiasts want.
Offtopic: Speaking of experimentation, I've been watching the Epia platform rather closely for the past half-year or so. I want to build a low power, quiet, SFF Linux file server and have been waiting for an Epia that would overcome some of the technical problems that older boards like the M/MII Epias had (lockups on DMA I/O, etc.). The newest Epia SP solves that, but is hard to find in stock, has crap Linux drivers, and costs around $250 without case, drives, PSU, or memory. With distros like Yellow Dog, Ubuntu, and Debian supporting almost everything in the Mini with the default install (http://www.sowerbutts.com/linux-mac-mini/#support), it's hard for me to justify going with the Epia platform.
A PSU comparison by tomshardware shows that manufacturer-claimed wattages are only rough estimates at best and naively/dangerously optimistic at worst. Some good PSUs can power much more than they claim, and some bad ones cannot even approach their claimed max loads.
As an aside, my 300W PSU powered a 3GHz P4, GeForce 4, 2x 10k RPM Raptors, 7.2k RPM storage drive, etc. with no stability issues for 18 months. (I replaced the PSU because of hardware upgrades, not PSU failure.) That shouldn't be surprising but you might want to re-evaluate your power needs if it is.
I have absolutely hated the gameplay in most Final Fantasy games because the huge playtimes are due to grinding and NOT content.
I would much rather have twenty hours of solid, continually fresh content rather than thirty hours of content couched in seventy hours of grinding. Walking around the same area for hours fighting random battles just to level is not content. Moving to a new area and advancing the plot (among other things) is content.
In short: I seem to like RPGs where enemies don't respawn and don't spawn randomly. When all the enemies are dead, you're forced to move on to new areas and new content. If I want to grind, or keep repeating the same events and battles, I'll just play the game again. And again...
First, to answer your question: yes, Tomshardware recently updated their CPU benchmark test to now include over 100 CPUs from the last ten years. Starts here (graphs come later):
Now to explain why you're asking the wrong question: Moore's observation says nothing directly about performance. He merely suggested that the complexity of ICs double every 18 months or so. In general, this has nothing to do with a comparable trend in clock speeds on CPUs, nor performance of CPUs.
On tom's charts, the most recent CPUs are about 50% faster in raw dhry-/whet-stone tests than my CPU which I bought two years ago. Other tests, which rely less on raw CPU performance, show an even smaller difference.
At some point in the past, performance of commodity hardware might have indeed doubled every year and a half. For the past 2-3 years, that's certainly untrue.
maybe they were adopting a Netflix-type model, where a customer could keep a movie as long as he likes, but couldn't rent any more until the late one was returned.
It wouldn't be a similar model unless blockbuster starts charging a monthly fee like Netflix does, as opposed to a per-rental fee.
People usually have no interest in keeping a Netflix "rental" any longer than absolutely necessary, because for every day you keep a movie, you are seeing less return on your monthly investment.
Since Blockbuster doesn't charge monthly, they MUST charge some sort of late fee, regardless of what it's called or how it's spinned, or go out of business.
I am online upward of 10-12 hours a day. I run multiple Net-connected programs at all times... I'm a power user. And I have yet to suffer a single debilitating virus or worm or spyware or malware whatsoever.
What is his definition of power user? Simply someone that uses computers a lot? Plenty of people put unusual stresses on their machines simply because they don't know better. To me, a power user is someone who is knowledgable about his equipment, takes advantage of its strengths, and works around its weaknesses.
Sure, Windows has a lot of flaws. A lot of them are due to its basic philosophy and operation: it is insecure by default. Nonetheless, it has gotten improvement. My uptime in Windows 98 was measured in days. My uptime in WinXP is now measured in weeks (or months, if not for reboot-requiring updates).
The useful lifetime of a Win98 installation was measured in months. It would get unbearably slow or unstable at that point. I have been using a single installation of WinXP for a year and a half now with no perceived loss of performance.
In the end, I use Windows on one of my machines for the software that only runs on Windows. However, I prefer OS X on laptops and Linux on servers. I have found a niche for each of these platforms, and see no reason to force any platform into another role. Is Windows insecure by default? Yes. Is it insecurable in the context of an inexpensive home network, especially by a "power user"? No.
I don't think you should set maxrequests to 30. If everyone did this, 10 simultaneous users would mean 300 connections.
I'm probably missing something here, but my limited understanding of http pipelining says a client's maxrequests is the max number of requests to pipeline through a single TCP connection.
So 10 simultaneous users using pipelining browsers on a page with 30 GETs would hopefully result in 300 transfers over 10 TCP connections, whereas those 10 users getting those same files with a "traditional" browser would result in 300 TCP connections, contrary to what I think you said.
I'll beat your ass with a baseball bat, all the while laughing like a pirate at your incredible lack of hubris and blatant stupdity.
In one sentence you threaten violence, call someone stupid, misspell stupidity, and misuse the term hubris. Your versatility is commendable. By the way, one who lacks hubris is characterized by humility and modesty.
Doesn't it suck when you're insulting someone for stupidity and you make a mistke? =P
Slashdot Mirror
... or funny?
g .gif
E.g. http://www.speakeasy.org/~curby/swg/text/jellypon
I vote for funny.
Politicians will stay what they currently are: a development path completely separate from your "regular" profession (smuggler, entertainer, medic, etc.).
2 2
/sigh
Personally speaking, SOE has one by one destroyed every profession I've ever cared about in the game. First, Creature Handlers (CHs), which was nerfed to uselessness before I even joined in March of 2004, then continued to get worse for over a year as various critters were made untamable or less effective in combat, even those required for economic viability like the Motley Kaadu, one of the few non-CH mounts. Now they're out of the game completely. My CH is in mourning.
Entertainers used to be big. They had galaxy-spanning events that would attract nearly 100 players at a time to participate in "Cantina Crawls." Then, ents were made gradually inviable for serious play because you couldn't make money to do anything, like buy furniture for your house. Then came the removal of weapons, armor, large groups, and other things from an ent's repertoire. They took away buffs, then mind healing. Well, videos are worth a millions words:
http://furplay.com/swg/download.php?view.17
http://furplay.com/swg/download.php?view.28
The result? Read on:
http://furplay.com/swg/comment.php?comment.news.1
In other words, I feel your pain. Noncoms have had increasingly insignificant roles in the game. Oh sure, I understand why: as a company, SOE feels they need to take care of the majority of players, and it just happens that they want to fight. It's just unfortunate that this comes at the cost of enjoyment and viability for other players and professions.
A note about the change to professions: SWG used to have the most interesting character development system in any MMO I've heard of. Not only are there dozens of professions, you can mix them. For a quick fighter, combine various skill trees of Fencer and Pistoleer. Love entertaining? Feel free to do both Musician and Dancer. Use your skill points in any way to mix and match skills and abilities. Now they're taking away this, the most unique aspect of the game. The old system wasn't perfect, but you don't use a nuke to swat a fly. While the new system may work, it will feel like any other MMO.
While you're at it, have it last year-round. Not like it hasn't been done before:
/ daylight050728.html?print
The last time the United States and Canada observed different winter time systems was during the 1974-75 oil crisis. The U.S. did not turn its clocks back at all that fall in an attempt to conserve energy.
From http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2005/07/28
Better to have to change once and get it over with than replay the same drama every decade when someone wants to avoid problems like having hundreds of thousands of people driving huge vans and SUVs to work with no passengers. By the way, why is gas so much more expensive in other countries when we seem to waste it? From time to time I hear about equivalent prices of over $10/gallon.
Not strictly math, but some mathematical aspects, some logic, and a lot of sleuthing.
http://www.notpron.com/
mostly SFW, though I have heard that some later levels link to (but don't show) porn.
Ebola Zaire averaged an 83% fatality rate.
Ebula Sudan averaged a 54% fatality rate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola
Consider cryptographic secret-sharing schemes. You split up data into m parts, and require that at least n of them be brought together to recover the secret. It's kind of like cryptographic RAID. It might not be practical for most of the data that we store, but it's certainly an interesting idea. It would be difficult for a small group of people to get together and recover your secret, and difficult for a small group of people to hold out and prevent the secret from getting out when it should. The ratio of n and m is adjusted based on the risk analysis of the two attacks. I first read about this idea in Schneier's Applied Crypto book, but wikipedia comes through:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing
Keep in mind that whether or not you need encryption, whether or not you need offsite storage, whether or not you need physically-accessible data should the Internet become available... all these things depend on the data you're trying to protect, and the disasters you're trying to protect against. Flinging buzzwords at your data doesn't necessarily do anything useful to protect it.
Looks very interesting - I'd love to get one for review.
The point is to get TWO for review. =)
Mod parent up to 6, at least.
I was really looking forward to running my home servers on Mini-ITX boards. Then the Mini came out and almost every enticing feature of the Mini-ITX platform (for home use) was instantly overshadowed.
Power Tie, at 10W-20W for the entire system.
The other power The C3 Nehemiah is decent at integer math for its clock speed and power usage, but sucks at floating point. Google some benchmarks for more information. For a server, that's generally not a terrible problem, but it makes the Mini more flexible in the ways it can be used.
Price I can get a new mini at under $500 shipped direct from Apple, with a hard drive, CD-burner, memory, case, latest commercial software. Good Mini-ITX cases cost well over $100 just because the market is small. A recent Mini-ITX board is $200-$300. No, don't use the price of an original Epia, which can't hold a candle to a Celeron 400, not to mention a 1.25GHz G4. Don't use the price of a full-size cheapo ATX case, cause that's not a fair comparison. Then add storage, RAM, etc. Even after spending all that (easily $500-$700 for a system that can even attempt to rival a low-end Mini in terms of performance), you don't get...
Support Apple has legendary customer support (look at, say, Consumer Reports and their customer support comparisons). Via might not be terrible, but they'll only help you with the mainboard, not the components, nor integration.
Linux I haven't checked in the last few months, but I'd wager that the Mini has better Linux support for its embedded hardware overall. EPIA drivers have a history of being shakey. See also the stability problems below, if you're thinking of going with an older, cheaper board. I loaded Debian-PPC on my Mini and everything just worked. Granted I don't use Airport Express (which as far as I know still doesn't work) and the Mac's onboard hardware monitoring chip isn't easy to configure with lm-sensors, but nothing that I really needed required special drivers.
Tinkering If you insist on building things yourself, then the Epia wins here. Keep in mind, however, that you can open a Mini and make minor changes (like adding RAM) without voiding your warranty.
Expansion Be careful if you think the Epia wins here. Some boards claim to support up to 2 PCI cards, but they are plagued with DMA problems. Notice that the newest Epia SP has dropped claims of such support. The problem crops up while sending large amounts of traffic to a hard drive and PCI card at the same time, or Ethernet port and hard drive, etc. and it will tank the machine. This is a known problem apparently resulting from a slow interconnect between the North and South bridges. Via's official forums (www.viaarena.com) has threads about this issue. To be fair, the CN400 chipset has a much faster interconnect, so problems might be alleviated. As for the Mini, most peripherals and add-ons will support one or more of USB and Firewire, so there's not a big problem. Video capture may or may not be a problem (are there Linux-friendly Firewire video capture devices?), since I haven't looked into that at all.
Apple stickers Bundled with the Mini! =P
The Epia is often used to build car-puters, whereas I haven't yet heard of something using a Mini for that purpose. If you have a particular PCI card you must use, that might be a reason to go Epia. Aside from those reasons, the Mini is a better deal and probably more capable.
The mice are the physical manifestations of superintelligent beings, sent here to weed off certain portions of the population deemed unworthy to perform the necessary calculations of the computer Earth.
This is not news. Maximumpc did a review three months ago, but Slashdot's lag makes this post appropriately timely. =P
h tml
http://www.maximumpc.com/2005/06/hitachi_7k500_d.
Even Seagate's announcement of *their* 500Gig drive, to ship this fall, is weeks if not months old. From what I remember about the spec sheets, the Seagate drive will be cooler, quieter, use less power, and have two more years warranty. If you can hold out, at least wait until reviews of the Seagate drive appear and make your decision then.
It's not cost effective for them to go to trial even when they can win!
This is true for both sides of many disputes. How many high school/college students do you think have the resources to fight the RIAA/MPAA? Would you take out a second mortgage to make this particular point? If so, make your IP show up in those logs and wait for your chance to shine.
If you go to trial and lose, you're probably even worse off than having paid whatever arbitrary amount they want. I haven't seen what the EFF is up to lately but are they willing to defend these cases for free?
I appreciate the sentiment of "Don't give in" but I doubt how feasible it is.
As others have mentioned here, assuming that the Internet is confidential is dangerous and naive. With the rise of cable modem networks and Wifi networks, the zone of trust is even smaller.
I don't have a problem with the general idea of governments being able to tap the Internet in the same way as they tap phones, if and only if the system is secure and regulated at least as rigorously as phone taps. In fact, given the choice I'd rather they tap the Internet than phones (where things like encryption are expensive/difficult to employ).
While the general idea of a net tap isn't so bad, the implications are more distressing. Once they get their mitts on the first few layers of the network stack, they'll naturally work their way up. The next logical step is key escrow for encryption. For an old yet relevant paper on this, see:
http://www.cdt.org/crypto/risks98/ [html]
Among the risks and problems cited in that paper are things that will also be relevant in any sort of network tap, including higher costs pushed onto end users, inherent insecurity in having extra access vectors, and difficulty in preventing abuse of the system.
In the end the idea of a network tap isn't so bad. What bothers me is the difficulty (impossibility?) of doing it right, and the other things that this will set a precedent for.
People have been making mini itx boxes with the idea of compactness etc. before the Mac Mini came out.
... but no one *I* know uses them.
t ), it's hard for me to justify going with the Epia platform.
Sure, but let's consider the target market of the Mini: those wanting to try out OS X and (grand)parents because it does what they need. There are no complete EPIA-based hardware+software+support solutions with anywhere near the price point or functionality of the Mini.
Integration could be done by a reseller, but you'd be going to them for support as well. The point is not whoever made a small computer first. Apple gives you reasonable hardware, the latest software, and support for $500.
Via had long before Mac Mini came out announced nano-ITX
Duke Nukem Forever has been announced for years, but it's not out either. Having a retail product that has already been shipping for months is something else entirely. As far as EPIAs go, no one has made a complete system and sold it with software and support anyway.
Apple cult followers will now always say it was Apple's idea to make PC's small.
It was Apple's idea to make small computers viable, and the success of the Mini proves it. The cappuccino has been around for years: http://www.cappuccinopc.com/cappuccino.asp
The EPIAs are fun for experimentation (check out the custom cases on http://www.mini-itx.com/ but they're far from the complete solution that non-enthusiasts want.
Offtopic: Speaking of experimentation, I've been watching the Epia platform rather closely for the past half-year or so. I want to build a low power, quiet, SFF Linux file server and have been waiting for an Epia that would overcome some of the technical problems that older boards like the M/MII Epias had (lockups on DMA I/O, etc.). The newest Epia SP solves that, but is hard to find in stock, has crap Linux drivers, and costs around $250 without case, drives, PSU, or memory. With distros like Yellow Dog, Ubuntu, and Debian supporting almost everything in the Mini with the default install (http://www.sowerbutts.com/linux-mac-mini/#suppor
A PSU comparison by tomshardware shows that manufacturer-claimed wattages are only rough estimates at best and naively/dangerously optimistic at worst. Some good PSUs can power much more than they claim, and some bad ones cannot even approach their claimed max loads.
As an aside, my 300W PSU powered a 3GHz P4, GeForce 4, 2x 10k RPM Raptors, 7.2k RPM storage drive, etc. with no stability issues for 18 months. (I replaced the PSU because of hardware upgrades, not PSU failure.) That shouldn't be surprising but you might want to re-evaluate your power needs if it is.
There are 2 things involved in 4-dimensional translocation:
-- Reaching the exact coordinates at the right instant, considering rotation and revolution of the planet, solar system, and galaxy.
-- Matching the velocity of that location (and timeframe) exactly.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Heisenberg say achieving both is impossible? Perhaps we can get around that with small nonzero error margins.
I have absolutely hated the gameplay in most Final Fantasy games because the huge playtimes are due to grinding and NOT content.
I would much rather have twenty hours of solid, continually fresh content rather than thirty hours of content couched in seventy hours of grinding. Walking around the same area for hours fighting random battles just to level is not content. Moving to a new area and advancing the plot (among other things) is content.
In short: I seem to like RPGs where enemies don't respawn and don't spawn randomly. When all the enemies are dead, you're forced to move on to new areas and new content. If I want to grind, or keep repeating the same events and battles, I'll just play the game again. And again...
I'm not affiliated with speakeasy. But:
c y
the DSL provider insists on bundling local POTS and long distance phone service with the DSL connection
Speakeasy's OneLink service gets you DSL service without needing POTS. You need the physical link, but don't need active phone service over it.
The trouble with that scheme is that typically consumer broadband services won't allow you to share your connection,
Speakeasy let's you: http://www.speakeasy.net/netshare/terms/#wifipoli
In fact, they'll help you: http://www.speakeasy.net/netshare/
here
Seriously, you get your Unix kernel, CLI shell, X server, terrific hardware-software integration (check out the sleep feature), etc.
Admittedly, Apple needs to bundle more popular productivity applications.
First, to answer your question: yes, Tomshardware recently updated their CPU benchmark test to now include over 100 CPUs from the last ten years. Starts here (graphs come later):
h tml
http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041220/index.
Now to explain why you're asking the wrong question: Moore's observation says nothing directly about performance. He merely suggested that the complexity of ICs double every 18 months or so. In general, this has nothing to do with a comparable trend in clock speeds on CPUs, nor performance of CPUs.
On tom's charts, the most recent CPUs are about 50% faster in raw dhry-/whet-stone tests than my CPU which I bought two years ago. Other tests, which rely less on raw CPU performance, show an even smaller difference.
At some point in the past, performance of commodity hardware might have indeed doubled every year and a half. For the past 2-3 years, that's certainly untrue.
murder mystery solved
People usually have no interest in keeping a Netflix "rental" any longer than absolutely necessary, because for every day you keep a movie, you are seeing less return on your monthly investment.
Since Blockbuster doesn't charge monthly, they MUST charge some sort of late fee, regardless of what it's called or how it's spinned, or go out of business.
I am online upward of 10-12 hours a day. I run multiple Net-connected programs at all times. .. I'm a power user. And I have yet to suffer a single debilitating virus or worm or spyware or malware whatsoever.
What is his definition of power user? Simply someone that uses computers a lot? Plenty of people put unusual stresses on their machines simply because they don't know better. To me, a power user is someone who is knowledgable about his equipment, takes advantage of its strengths, and works around its weaknesses.
Sure, Windows has a lot of flaws. A lot of them are due to its basic philosophy and operation: it is insecure by default. Nonetheless, it has gotten improvement. My uptime in Windows 98 was measured in days. My uptime in WinXP is now measured in weeks (or months, if not for reboot-requiring updates).
The useful lifetime of a Win98 installation was measured in months. It would get unbearably slow or unstable at that point. I have been using a single installation of WinXP for a year and a half now with no perceived loss of performance.
In the end, I use Windows on one of my machines for the software that only runs on Windows. However, I prefer OS X on laptops and Linux on servers. I have found a niche for each of these platforms, and see no reason to force any platform into another role. Is Windows insecure by default? Yes. Is it insecurable in the context of an inexpensive home network, especially by a "power user"? No.
I don't think you should set maxrequests to 30. If everyone did this, 10 simultaneous users would mean 300 connections.
I'm probably missing something here, but my limited understanding of http pipelining says a client's maxrequests is the max number of requests to pipeline through a single TCP connection.
So 10 simultaneous users using pipelining browsers on a page with 30 GETs would hopefully result in 300 transfers over 10 TCP connections, whereas those 10 users getting those same files with a "traditional" browser would result in 300 TCP connections, contrary to what I think you said.
Yes, you missed his last sentance.
Atleast it's my choise now and if I want to slow down I can.
I'll beat your ass with a baseball bat, all the while laughing like a pirate at your incredible lack of hubris and blatant stupdity.
In one sentence you threaten violence, call someone stupid, misspell stupidity, and misuse the term hubris. Your versatility is commendable. By the way, one who lacks hubris is characterized by humility and modesty.
Doesn't it suck when you're insulting someone for stupidity and you make a mistke? =P