You keep making my point for me. Alcohol is legal yet does irrepairable damage to thousands every year. Other drugs, that are currently deemed illegal, do the same. So how would legalising or decriminalising them help?
My point all along hasn't been that drugs are bad so they should be illegal - indeed, I've said that I'm in favour of legalisation or decriminalisation of cannabis and other "casual" drugs - but that do cause some harm, and that this harm won't automatically disappear because of legalisation.
Put another way, I'm not saying that cocaine is bad so it should be illegal, I'm saying that it's negative aspects won't suddenly all fade away if it were a legal drug.
Remember, I'm contesting the original poster's statement that "drugs do not generally cause a great deal of harm in and of themselves", which to me is patently not true.
This story's a dupe but everything's all screwy - Taco posted the original story and not the dupe.
How can this be? Surely everyone knows that posting dupes is Taco's territory.
Either one of three things is happening here:
1. Timothy's looking to replace Taco with in a Macbeth style takeover; 2. Time is moving backwards and Slashdot's been flooded with tachyons (B definitely came before A in this case); or 3. Timothy's a dupe of Taco.
That's just semantics - like the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument it deflects the attention away from the issue without respecting why there's an issue in the first place.
People that find themselves spiralling further and further down don't start taking drugs because they want to become strung out, lifeless addicts, they start because the drugs make them feel good. After a while, the user stops taking the drug and the drug starts taking the user, but where does one end and the other begin?
It's all very well saying it's about abuse but where does experimentation end and abuse start?
After all, it's not like a crack addict is able to make rational choices is it?
I'm not looking to troll and perhaps the subject line of my post was a bit dramatic. Mea culpa.
I think it would probably interest you that I'm in favour of legalisation of many drugs, including cannabis and cocaine, together with better, more even education across all age groups.
However, this doesn't change the fact that drugs can cause serious damage, both to the individual and to a society as a whole. Yes, some of that damage would be lessened if legalisation or decriminalisation was to occur, but not all of it:
1. A high driver is still lethal regardless of whether or not he's high legally or illegally.
Using the argument (as some people have done here) that you can be reckless when drunk is stupid and just proves my point - intoxication can be very dangerous, both to the individual concerned and others around him.
2. Drugs won't suddenly become free if they're legalised, and you can expect legal drugs to be taxed similar to alcohol and tobacco.
Don't suddenly expect drug-related petty crime to fall drastically because that kid with a £50 a day smack habit still has to find his cash from somewhere.
3. The stigmata associated with being a coke user isn't only because coke is illegal.
In many professions, being able to make unhindered decisions is vital, because people's lives and livelyhoods may be at stake. Train drivers, doctors, firemen, even stockbrokers and countless other professionals can be disciplined if they try to work under the influence of alcohol or other intoxicants.
You don't think that a doctor being a smackhead would be frowned on even if it were a legal drug?
4. Drug addiction can ruin your life - just as being an alcoholic or being addicted to gambling can.
As before, some people have used the argument that alcohol can be just as damaging as if that makes illegal drugs any less destructive to those who loose everything they've ever had becuase of a serious addiction.
Again, I'll stress the fact that I think that treating drugs as a taboo subject and treating addicts as criminals is wrong (I'd rather see them treated too), but I stand by what I said when I challenged the original poster's statement that "drugs do not generally cause a great deal of harm in and of themselves".
Substance abuse - regardless of whether or not that substance is legal or illegal - can and does destroy tens of thousands of lives every year.
First of all, let me just say that I've never seen the fascination with HArry Potter. I've read more than my fair share of fantasy novels, some when I was a kid, some in my twenties, but I've never rated the Harry Potter novels to be even in the same league as, say, either the Chronicles of Narnia, the Middle Earth novels, the Dune series or even the Shannara books. Don't ask me why, I just can't seem to find the magic (pun intended) that others do in JK Rowling's creations.
Having said that, I'm not blind to how big a phenomenon Harry Potter has become. JK Rowling herself has said that she's surprised that the plot of this latest book wasn't leaked before its launch, even though the story was a closely guarded secret. Less than a dozen people had read the book before it went into production and the printing lines and distribution centres were closely guarded too to stop any copies of the book getting out before the official launch.
How many copies and how big an exercise are we talking about?
Well, the new book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix, sold 1.7 million copies in Britain alone in its first week. The next best-selling hardback novel that week sold 6,500 copies. That isn't a small margin, it's a gulf.
Multiply that several times to come up with the number that were actually printed - 6.8 million for the original print run and 1.7 million for the second according to several sources. That's a lot of books. In fact, it's the biggest print run in history.
Now, if you had simultaneous launches in several languages then you'd have to have translations sorted beforehand (and worry even more about plot leakages), and have an even bigger print run to cope with all those foreign language versions.
Note the increased L2 cache size on the Barton, which AMD cite as the reason for the 200-300 point rise in their performance rating for those chips (eg, Barton 2.167 GHz = Thoroughbred 2.167GHz + 300). Obviously, the latest FSB bump introduced with the Barton family helps too.
In some situations a Thoroughbred 2800+ will outpace a Barton 3000+ because of it's greater clock speed but, in most cases, the Barton with its greater L2 cache will win out.
Anyhow, given this story is about "overclockers looking to upgrade their age old Athlon mobo (KT133, KT266 etc.) with a spanking new AMD Barton CPU", I thought it prudent to point out your incorrect assumption about the XP 2600+ chip.
In all likelyhood, you probably wouldn't need any sort of adapter to fit a Thoroughbred chip to most older Athlon motherboards - I know that I could swap the 1.2GHz CPU in my machine for a 2800+ with no hassle but wouldn't be able to do the same with a 3200+, or even a 2500+.
But if you're really going to skip the 2800+ for the 3000+ or 3200+, then you're paying 50 percent or 110 percent more for your CPU in the first place. And if you're doing that, then you might as well be buying a new motherboard.
If you've got the money to go out and buy a new 2500+ or faster Athlon then you won't be breaking the bank if you spend a little bit extra and get a new, more suitable motherboard to go with it?
Sure, there are a very few number of people out there (and I mean maybe a handful) who have systems that for whatever reason can't handle a motherboard swapout but, apart for that tiny subset, this isn't worth the effort.
Why go to this much trouble and risk - possibly ruining a brand new CPU in the process - for a small bump in performance when you could swap both parts at once with less hassle and for greater gain?
That old CPU and motherboard doesn't have to go to waste either - find a cheap case for it, put in a minimal amount of memory (assuming you didn't buy some new RAM as part of your upgrade), a cheap NIC and an old hard drive (even a 250MB drive!) and you've got a nice little runner that'll act as a nice firewall/server/whatever. Let's face it, if you're the kind of guy that would upgrade a PC's CPU to squeeze out a few more clock cycles then you're the kind of guy who'll have those kinds of parts lying around doing nothing.
This may seem like a cheap upgrade option but if you fry that new CPU then it'll turn out to be a very expensive one.
First of all, the article itself is barely 2 pages in length. I did read it. I did realize what they did and why they did it.
Hmmm. Perhaps you're not familiar with the BBC News site. All the articles are of that length. They are news articles, not technical reviews. Perhaps you've got the site confused with ArsTechnica or something.
Second, what makes you think the guys wouldn't want to sell something like this as a kit? Is it too hard to believe that they would? Would it be so hard for the people writing the article to say: They just built it to build it.
Yep, you're definitely missing the purpose of BBC News online here. Let's go over this again: it's a site devoted to news, not to benchmarking, marketing or whatever else you'd like it to be.
I don't come to Slashdot looking for MLB scores or local cinema listings. Do you know why? Because Slashdot doesn't have MLB scores or local cinema listings! Similarly, the BBC doesn't article didn't have sales info or the exact physical dimensions of the device because it wasn't relevant to their story - if you want more info, follow the links that they provide. Doh!
Seriously though, it's pretty clear from reading the article that Hektor's a tool designed to create art and not, as you seem to suggest in your original post, a device that can be used to customise a paint job for your car, furniture or fittings.
Third, I'm glad you feel special that you can browse around/. just trying to find someone to rip on.
Well, gee, you set them up for me and I'll knock themed in.
I RTFA'ed before I read your post and, somehow, managed to spot the answers to all the questions you had in the story itself. I even cut and paste some of the relevant portions for you. I stand by what I said: if you really had RTFA properly then I wouldn't have had to do that cutting and pasting would I?
Sorry if you feel victimised here but, honestly, are you telling me that you thought the article was at all ambiguous about the artistic purpose of this device?
(This isn't meant to be flamebait BTW: he asked a question, I gave him an honest reply.)
6305 incoming emails and not one of them contained an order or anything else positive.
So, lessons to be learnt here if you're a spammer:
1. Give up - it's clearly not worth the effort; or 2. Keep at it - if at first you don't succeed, try again!
Now if only we could somehow get them all to learn lesson 1 instead of lesson 2 then we'd be home and dry.
When you RTFA, remember to R T F A...
on
Giant "Inkjet Printer"
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· Score: 4, Informative
The article is kind of light on details of sales and such though. Looks more like a hack job.
I doubt that commercial uses were the designers' primary motives, given that the machine was the winning entry in an art contest. The clue was in the "light on details" article:
"The machine has already won an award at the 2003 Machinista media art festival."
Also, the article gives a strong indication that the designers don't seem to be commercial developers:
"Researcher Jürg Lehni came up with the idea for Hektor when thinking about novel ways for an artist to turn computer-drawn images into something more concrete.
He wanted to combine the precision of computer-generated images with the woolier outlines produced by spray paint.
Working with friend and electronic engineering student Uli Franke, Mr Lehni created Hektor. The machine suspends a spray paint using two toothed belts that feed through a pair of motors."
Again, the focus seems to be on art, not on commercial applications.
Additionally, you seem to have missed the links to the Hektor, Machinista and the Zurich Kunsthaus gallery, where another Hektor-implemented piece of art can be found.
Cunningly - some would say as cunningly as a fox, what used to be professor of cunning at OxfordUniversity, who is now head of the United Nations department of cunning planning* - these were hidden on the very same page, under the deceptive title "Related Internet Links".
Is it me, or even when they RTFA do people forget to RTFA?
(* You can't use the word cunning without quoting Blackadder.)
Re:Technology in sport...
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Sports Technology?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You forgot a "watching" in there. I'd much rather be out there doing something myself than sitting on the couch. Spectator sports are pointless as hell if you're a straight man.
As someone who's played football at (amateur) club level, field hockey and cricket for my school, and lacrosse for my university, as well as other non-contact sports, I am in no way ashamed to admit that I get more pleasure out of watching the world's finest sportsmen and -women perform.
Why shouldn't I enjoy watching a Michael Owen hattrick, a Steve McNair scramble for a touchdown, a Barry Bonds home run or a Sachin Tendulkar century? Aren't I allowed to marvel at the feats of others that I can only dream of acheiving?
Pointless as hell if you're a straight man? I don't think so. Are you really suggesting that everyone who's ever watched a sporting event - whether live or on TV - is gay? All those dads who take their kids to baseball games are gay? Every single one of them? Wow.
If you're right, virtually every single man on this planet is a closet homosexual. And John Rocker was only worried about the ones in New York! How little did he know!
Wait a minute though. I've just had a thought. Perhaps you're wrong. Perhaps it's you who's unsure about your sexuality. Perhaps you feel uncomfortable about just watching other men compete because you feel left out of the action. Perhaps you're secretly beating yourself up about watching the NFL on Sundays because you wish it was you that was being wrestled by that offensive tackle.
Why don't you take your "only real men play sports" attitude and shove it. Frankly, the rest of us - straight and gay - can do without your macho bullshit.
MLB: K-Zone - see the balls and strikes clearly. MLB: dead-straight camera - judge the strike zone with the naked eye more clearly. NFL: overlayed first down marker - see where the ball needs to go clearly. Football (soccer if you must): more cameras - a multitude of viewing angles including in goal cameras. Cricket: stumpcam - see the ball coming from inside the middle stump. Cricket: overlayed stump lines - judge LBW decisions more clearly. Cricket: super magnified replays - see and hear close nicks more clearly. Formula One: in car cameras - see what the driver sees in real-time.
But the best sporting technical innovation: scores displayed permanently in the top left corner of your TV picture. We take it for granted nowadays but there was a time that you had to wait for the commentator to tell you what the scoreline was - how annoying was that?
There are others but these are the ones that most improve my enjoyment of sports.
Nobody is speaking latin here, the correct ENGLISH plural of virus is viruses.
English is partially derived from Latin (and several other languages) and the plural of "virus" is indeed "virii", just as the singular form of "data" is "datum".
However, we live in a lazy, ignorant age - how many people even know that the singular form of "dice" is "die"? - and people often just add an "s" or "es" on the end of a word to pluralise it.
Just because you've seen the plural of "virus" spelt as "viruses" frequently it doesn't automatically become grammatically correct. Similarly, if I started writing the plural of "man" as "mans" it wouldn't suddenly become right.
You might not like or be comfortable with it but "virii" is correct. "Viruses", by vitue of its common misuse, is now found in dictionaries too but that doesn't make "virii" any less valid.
The KLF and Sonic Weaponry...
on
dB Drag Racing
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Jimmy Cauty aka Rockman Rock of the techno act The KLF allegedly had an interesting mobile sound system, courtesy of the British Army. From the KLF FAQ:
Q: What's Jimmy's sonic weapon?
A: Jimmy purchased two Saracen armoured vehicles at a scrap yard for ukp 4,000 and found equipment in them which he thought could have been used for sonic warfare. He has tried to assemble the acoustic gun from information he found on the Internet. Installing huge amplifiers and special speakers to cope with the very low frequencies cost him tens of thousands of pounds.
The 25,000-watt sonic gun can project sound for around 7 miles, and Jimmy annoyed his Devon neighbours by testing it on Midsummer's Day, 1996. Jimmy said: "I moved to Devon six months ago for a bit of a rest and this is a project I am taking an interest in. I do not see it as music or art." He said that he aimed the gun away from homes and it seemed to have no effect on sheep.
The Melody Maker said: "He was testing his two Audio Weapon Systems in a field near his new home. 'He alerted people to the fact that he was doing this by setting off some military flares. Then he
tested his Audio Weapons System for an hour for a very select group of scientists and friends. The Audio Weapons System is not designed to kill people."... [Cauty] first tested it at a Wire gig on Hungerford Bridge in May.... In January, Panasonic [ the "Finnish conceptual techno nutters"-NME] borrowed one of the Audio Weapons Systems for tests on how sonic waves affect the human body at Brick Lane in London.... A fax from Mr. Smith, the Head Of Commercial Exploitation at Advanced Acoustic Armaments, was sent to The Maker. It read : "The test took place to establish the parameters of the new vehicle solo and in tandem with its sister model, SS 9000K+L. The test featured new software generated for our latest commercial client, EXP LTD, and is described by Mr. Cauty as featuring 'the ultimate battle between sound and commerce ending in the death of all musicians and their ascension to rock-n-roll heaven or hell as befits them.' Yesterday we received communication with ex-Government employees who, in the Sixties, worked on audio weapon development with an offer of help and some ex-classified equipment. We regret any such death or damage that has resulted from our tests, but there are casualties in every war. The Triple A Formation Attack Ensemble will perform 'Foghorns Of The Northern Hemisphere' as part of an educational programmed supporting our research shortly."
Most of this is probably scam, but Cauty has recorded an album of sonic waves for Paul Smith's Blast First label under the name AAA. The album is in the hands of lawyers who are trying to clear some of the samples used on it, and has yet to be released (07/96). It appears to be a Cauty solo project.
More recently, Jimmy teamed up with new Asian-techno group, Black Star Liner for a _happening_ in a field on Dartmoor. Jimmy chartered a 'chopper to take BSL and assorted journos out to Dartmoor, where he intended to remix the Halaal Rock track in his tank. Apparently, BSL bumped into Cauty on London's South Bank, while he was driving about in his tank, he got hold of their album, and said that he wanted to work with them. Anyway, the chopper was grounded by severe fog, so everyone was put on a convey of buses. All the journos were given _orange_ jackets to wear. They eventually arrived at a field full of military vehicles, and people in _yellow_ jackets, wearing goggles and ears protectors, doing some form of formation dancing. The journos were lead to the ir seats, and had large floodlights shone into their eyes, while the yellow jackets let of flares all around them.
There were a load of goats skulls on sticks around the field, and a whole pile of fireworks let of towards the end of the mix, when Cauty was mixing in some Jimi Hendrix. However, this d
It looks as if someone got in on the act early and targetted our beloved Slashdot.
Huh? Whassat? This is a redesign?
Years waiting for a more user-friendly layout and this is the best that they could come up with?
You'd think that they could have come up with something better. After all, it's not like they spend their time checking for dupes, hoaxes or even simple spelling errors.
It most certainly IS flamebait. "Fact", my ass. That's an absurd distortion of the truth and you know it. Has Israel ever butchered Palestinians and buried them, by the thousands, in mass graves? Of course not.
Are they culpable in a great deal of violence and destruction resulting from their invasion, settlement and crackdowns in Palestinian land? Certainly so. But to equate them with Saddam's brutal regime is a perversion of truth, to say the least.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the spurious case the US mounted in order to trump up an excuse to remove Saddam... but Israel has not, and will never, gas Palestinian dissenters en masse. Really, open your eyes...
A Kurdish child gassed dead by Hussein's troops is no more dead, no more tragic or no more sickening than a Palestinian child bombed dead by Israeli forces. One life isn't more valuable than another.
The dead are dead. Arguing over how they were murdered is just petty semantics.
I'm sorry that the BBC being a truly independent news organisation ruins your enjoyment of the suffering of the Iraqi people.
Perhaps you prefer getting all your news from "patriotic" broadcasters, like FOX News, who won't bring you anything that doesn't paint the US/UK/other invasion in anything apart from a positive light. Good for you - if you want your news censored by a broadcaster who's more interested in keeping you watching at any cost that it is in the truth then that's your perogative. But some of us prefer getting the raw facts and making our minds up for ourselves.
Yes, the BBC's coverage of the war hasn't been a flag-waving exercise. But why should it be? Because you say so? Because a government official says so? Sometimes the truth isn't as pretty as we would like but that doesn't make that truth any less valid or worthy of our attention.
Perhaps you like watching the news brought to you by people who would probably have their war coverage sponsored by a handgun manufacturer if they thought that they could get away with it. But I and many others don't.
Yeah, it's a real bummer when you get caught bulldozing down the homes of women and children without any prior notice whilst the occupants are in there sleeping.
Israel's guilty of just as many human rights violations as Saddam Hussein's regime was in Iraq. But whereas Hussein used chemical weapons supplied by the US and others to kill Kurds, Israel uses to tanks, planes and gunships supplied by the US to kill Palistineans. Big difference.
This isn't flamebait, this is fact. But, as ever, some people with mod points will mod this down as it doesn't fit in with their personal cosy, rose-tinted view of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
You keep making my point for me. Alcohol is legal yet does irrepairable damage to thousands every year. Other drugs, that are currently deemed illegal, do the same. So how would legalising or decriminalising them help?
My point all along hasn't been that drugs are bad so they should be illegal - indeed, I've said that I'm in favour of legalisation or decriminalisation of cannabis and other "casual" drugs - but that do cause some harm, and that this harm won't automatically disappear because of legalisation.
Put another way, I'm not saying that cocaine is bad so it should be illegal, I'm saying that it's negative aspects won't suddenly all fade away if it were a legal drug.
Remember, I'm contesting the original poster's statement that "drugs do not generally cause a great deal of harm in and of themselves", which to me is patently not true.
This story's a dupe but everything's all screwy - Taco posted the original story and not the dupe.
How can this be? Surely everyone knows that posting dupes is Taco's territory.
Either one of three things is happening here:
1. Timothy's looking to replace Taco with in a Macbeth style takeover;
2. Time is moving backwards and Slashdot's been flooded with tachyons (B definitely came before A in this case); or
3. Timothy's a dupe of Taco.
Oh look, here's a timely link, courtesy of the BBC about the plans to introduce drug driving tests.
Here, just in case you can't be bothered to RTFA is the first paragraph of the article:
Police look to 'drug driving' tests
Plans to stop and test drivers for crack cocaine and heroin are well under way, the BBC has learned.
The proposals for roadside checks were revealed as chief police officers meet in Blackpool to discuss the fight against crack.
About 200 people a year die because of drug driving.
Most of the casualties are caused by those using class A drugs like heroin and crack cocaine.
The Railway and Transport Safety Bill, which is due to pass through Parliament this week, will give police powers to use roadside screening tests.
These will scan saliva samples, with those testing positive then being tested again at a police station in the same way as for alcohol tests.
The problem isn't the drugs, it's the abusers.
That's just semantics - like the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument it deflects the attention away from the issue without respecting why there's an issue in the first place.
People that find themselves spiralling further and further down don't start taking drugs because they want to become strung out, lifeless addicts, they start because the drugs make them feel good. After a while, the user stops taking the drug and the drug starts taking the user, but where does one end and the other begin?
It's all very well saying it's about abuse but where does experimentation end and abuse start?
After all, it's not like a crack addict is able to make rational choices is it?
I'm not looking to troll and perhaps the subject line of my post was a bit dramatic. Mea culpa.
I think it would probably interest you that I'm in favour of legalisation of many drugs, including cannabis and cocaine, together with better, more even education across all age groups.
However, this doesn't change the fact that drugs can cause serious damage, both to the individual and to a society as a whole. Yes, some of that damage would be lessened if legalisation or decriminalisation was to occur, but not all of it:
1. A high driver is still lethal regardless of whether or not he's high legally or illegally.
Using the argument (as some people have done here) that you can be reckless when drunk is stupid and just proves my point - intoxication can be very dangerous, both to the individual concerned and others around him.
2. Drugs won't suddenly become free if they're legalised, and you can expect legal drugs to be taxed similar to alcohol and tobacco.
Don't suddenly expect drug-related petty crime to fall drastically because that kid with a £50 a day smack habit still has to find his cash from somewhere.
3. The stigmata associated with being a coke user isn't only because coke is illegal.
In many professions, being able to make unhindered decisions is vital, because people's lives and livelyhoods may be at stake. Train drivers, doctors, firemen, even stockbrokers and countless other professionals can be disciplined if they try to work under the influence of alcohol or other intoxicants.
You don't think that a doctor being a smackhead would be frowned on even if it were a legal drug?
4. Drug addiction can ruin your life - just as being an alcoholic or being addicted to gambling can.
As before, some people have used the argument that alcohol can be just as damaging as if that makes illegal drugs any less destructive to those who loose everything they've ever had becuase of a serious addiction.
Again, I'll stress the fact that I think that treating drugs as a taboo subject and treating addicts as criminals is wrong (I'd rather see them treated too), but I stand by what I said when I challenged the original poster's statement that "drugs do not generally cause a great deal of harm in and of themselves".
Substance abuse - regardless of whether or not that substance is legal or illegal - can and does destroy tens of thousands of lives every year.
Doh! I mean here.
Get it here.
Drugs do not generally cause a great deal of harm in and of themselves.
Unless you overdose.
Or are negligent becuase you're high or strung out (whilst driving, etc.)
Or have to steal to feed your habit.
Or are blackmailed by someone who threatens to tell your boss about your coke addiction.
Or get poisoned by a bad fix.
Or catch HIV or another nasty illness from sharing a dirty needle with another addict.
Or are ripped off by your dealer.
Or are hurt because you found yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time when you needed to get a fix badly.
Or lose your life, family, friends and material possessions because of your addiction.
Yep, having a hard drug habit never hurt anyone.
Changle? What the hell does that mean? Man, I swear people on Slashdot make words up just for the hell of it.
Man, I thought the last story was bad, with its "muggles", "Gryffondors", etc.
First of all, let me just say that I've never seen the fascination with HArry Potter. I've read more than my fair share of fantasy novels, some when I was a kid, some in my twenties, but I've never rated the Harry Potter novels to be even in the same league as, say, either the Chronicles of Narnia, the Middle Earth novels, the Dune series or even the Shannara books. Don't ask me why, I just can't seem to find the magic (pun intended) that others do in JK Rowling's creations.
Having said that, I'm not blind to how big a phenomenon Harry Potter has become. JK Rowling herself has said that she's surprised that the plot of this latest book wasn't leaked before its launch, even though the story was a closely guarded secret. Less than a dozen people had read the book before it went into production and the printing lines and distribution centres were closely guarded too to stop any copies of the book getting out before the official launch.
How many copies and how big an exercise are we talking about?
Well, the new book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix, sold 1.7 million copies in Britain alone in its first week. The next best-selling hardback novel that week sold 6,500 copies. That isn't a small margin, it's a gulf.
Multiply that several times to come up with the number that were actually printed - 6.8 million for the original print run and 1.7 million for the second according to several sources. That's a lot of books. In fact, it's the biggest print run in history.
Now, if you had simultaneous launches in several languages then you'd have to have translations sorted beforehand (and worry even more about plot leakages), and have an even bigger print run to cope with all those foreign language versions.
Three words for you: never gonna happen.
An Athlon XP 2600+ isn't a Barton core chip, it's a Thoroughbred "B" chip.
The Barton core chips are:
Barton 3200+ (2.250GHz, 512KB cache);
Barton 3000+ (2.167GHz, 512KB L2 cache);
Barton 2800+ (2.083GHz, 512KB L2 cache);
Barton 2500+ (1.833GHz, 512KB L2 cache).
The top Thorougbred core chips are:
Thoroughbred 2800+ (2.250GHz, 256KB L2 cache);
Thoroughbred 2700+ (2.167GHz, 256KB L2 cache);
Thoroughbred 2600+ (2.083GHz, 256KB L2 cache);
Thoroughbred 2400+ (2.000GHz, 256KB L2 cache).
Note the increased L2 cache size on the Barton, which AMD cite as the reason for the 200-300 point rise in their performance rating for those chips (eg, Barton 2.167 GHz = Thoroughbred 2.167GHz + 300). Obviously, the latest FSB bump introduced with the Barton family helps too.
In some situations a Thoroughbred 2800+ will outpace a Barton 3000+ because of it's greater clock speed but, in most cases, the Barton with its greater L2 cache will win out.
Anyhow, given this story is about "overclockers looking to upgrade their age old Athlon mobo (KT133, KT266 etc.) with a spanking new AMD Barton CPU", I thought it prudent to point out your incorrect assumption about the XP 2600+ chip.
In all likelyhood, you probably wouldn't need any sort of adapter to fit a Thoroughbred chip to most older Athlon motherboards - I know that I could swap the 1.2GHz CPU in my machine for a 2800+ with no hassle but wouldn't be able to do the same with a 3200+, or even a 2500+.
But if you're really going to skip the 2800+ for the 3000+ or 3200+, then you're paying 50 percent or 110 percent more for your CPU in the first place. And if you're doing that, then you might as well be buying a new motherboard.
If you've got the money to go out and buy a new 2500+ or faster Athlon then you won't be breaking the bank if you spend a little bit extra and get a new, more suitable motherboard to go with it?
Sure, there are a very few number of people out there (and I mean maybe a handful) who have systems that for whatever reason can't handle a motherboard swapout but, apart for that tiny subset, this isn't worth the effort.
Why go to this much trouble and risk - possibly ruining a brand new CPU in the process - for a small bump in performance when you could swap both parts at once with less hassle and for greater gain?
That old CPU and motherboard doesn't have to go to waste either - find a cheap case for it, put in a minimal amount of memory (assuming you didn't buy some new RAM as part of your upgrade), a cheap NIC and an old hard drive (even a 250MB drive!) and you've got a nice little runner that'll act as a nice firewall/server/whatever. Let's face it, if you're the kind of guy that would upgrade a PC's CPU to squeeze out a few more clock cycles then you're the kind of guy who'll have those kinds of parts lying around doing nothing.
This may seem like a cheap upgrade option but if you fry that new CPU then it'll turn out to be a very expensive one.
First of all, the article itself is barely 2 pages in length. I did read it. I did realize what they did and why they did it.
/. just trying to find someone to rip on.
Hmmm. Perhaps you're not familiar with the BBC News site. All the articles are of that length. They are news articles, not technical reviews. Perhaps you've got the site confused with ArsTechnica or something.
Second, what makes you think the guys wouldn't want to sell something like this as a kit? Is it too hard to believe that they would? Would it be so hard for the people writing the article to say: They just built it to build it.
Yep, you're definitely missing the purpose of BBC News online here. Let's go over this again: it's a site devoted to news, not to benchmarking, marketing or whatever else you'd like it to be.
I don't come to Slashdot looking for MLB scores or local cinema listings. Do you know why? Because Slashdot doesn't have MLB scores or local cinema listings! Similarly, the BBC doesn't article didn't have sales info or the exact physical dimensions of the device because it wasn't relevant to their story - if you want more info, follow the links that they provide. Doh!
Seriously though, it's pretty clear from reading the article that Hektor's a tool designed to create art and not, as you seem to suggest in your original post, a device that can be used to customise a paint job for your car, furniture or fittings.
Third, I'm glad you feel special that you can browse around
Well, gee, you set them up for me and I'll knock themed in.
I RTFA'ed before I read your post and, somehow, managed to spot the answers to all the questions you had in the story itself. I even cut and paste some of the relevant portions for you. I stand by what I said: if you really had RTFA properly then I wouldn't have had to do that cutting and pasting would I?
Sorry if you feel victimised here but, honestly, are you telling me that you thought the article was at all ambiguous about the artistic purpose of this device?
(This isn't meant to be flamebait BTW: he asked a question, I gave him an honest reply.)
6305 incoming emails and not one of them contained an order or anything else positive.
So, lessons to be learnt here if you're a spammer:
1. Give up - it's clearly not worth the effort; or
2. Keep at it - if at first you don't succeed, try again!
Now if only we could somehow get them all to learn lesson 1 instead of lesson 2 then we'd be home and dry.
The article is kind of light on details of sales and such though. Looks more like a hack job.
I doubt that commercial uses were the designers' primary motives, given that the machine was the winning entry in an art contest. The clue was in the "light on details" article:
"The machine has already won an award at the 2003 Machinista media art festival."
Also, the article gives a strong indication that the designers don't seem to be commercial developers:
"Researcher Jürg Lehni came up with the idea for Hektor when thinking about novel ways for an artist to turn computer-drawn images into something more concrete.
He wanted to combine the precision of computer-generated images with the woolier outlines produced by spray paint.
Working with friend and electronic engineering student Uli Franke, Mr Lehni created Hektor. The machine suspends a spray paint using two toothed belts that feed through a pair of motors."
Again, the focus seems to be on art, not on commercial applications.
Additionally, you seem to have missed the links to the Hektor, Machinista and the Zurich Kunsthaus gallery, where another Hektor-implemented piece of art can be found.
Cunningly - some would say as cunningly as a fox, what used to be professor of cunning at OxfordUniversity, who is now head of the United Nations department of cunning planning* - these were hidden on the very same page, under the deceptive title "Related Internet Links".
Is it me, or even when they RTFA do people forget to RTFA?
(* You can't use the word cunning without quoting Blackadder.)
You forgot a "watching" in there. I'd much rather be out there doing something myself than sitting on the couch. Spectator sports are pointless as hell if you're a straight man.
As someone who's played football at (amateur) club level, field hockey and cricket for my school, and lacrosse for my university, as well as other non-contact sports, I am in no way ashamed to admit that I get more pleasure out of watching the world's finest sportsmen and -women perform.
Why shouldn't I enjoy watching a Michael Owen hattrick, a Steve McNair scramble for a touchdown, a Barry Bonds home run or a Sachin Tendulkar century? Aren't I allowed to marvel at the feats of others that I can only dream of acheiving?
Pointless as hell if you're a straight man? I don't think so. Are you really suggesting that everyone who's ever watched a sporting event - whether live or on TV - is gay? All those dads who take their kids to baseball games are gay? Every single one of them? Wow.
If you're right, virtually every single man on this planet is a closet homosexual. And John Rocker was only worried about the ones in New York! How little did he know!
Wait a minute though. I've just had a thought. Perhaps you're wrong. Perhaps it's you who's unsure about your sexuality. Perhaps you feel uncomfortable about just watching other men compete because you feel left out of the action. Perhaps you're secretly beating yourself up about watching the NFL on Sundays because you wish it was you that was being wrestled by that offensive tackle.
Why don't you take your "only real men play sports" attitude and shove it. Frankly, the rest of us - straight and gay - can do without your macho bullshit.
From a fan's perspective:
MLB: K-Zone - see the balls and strikes clearly.
MLB: dead-straight camera - judge the strike zone with the naked eye more clearly.
NFL: overlayed first down marker - see where the ball needs to go clearly.
Football (soccer if you must): more cameras - a multitude of viewing angles including in goal cameras.
Cricket: stumpcam - see the ball coming from inside the middle stump.
Cricket: overlayed stump lines - judge LBW decisions more clearly.
Cricket: super magnified replays - see and hear close nicks more clearly.
Formula One: in car cameras - see what the driver sees in real-time.
But the best sporting technical innovation: scores displayed permanently in the top left corner of your TV picture. We take it for granted nowadays but there was a time that you had to wait for the commentator to tell you what the scoreline was - how annoying was that?
There are others but these are the ones that most improve my enjoyment of sports.
Nobody is speaking latin here, the correct ENGLISH plural of virus is viruses.
English is partially derived from Latin (and several other languages) and the plural of "virus" is indeed "virii", just as the singular form of "data" is "datum".
However, we live in a lazy, ignorant age - how many people even know that the singular form of "dice" is "die"? - and people often just add an "s" or "es" on the end of a word to pluralise it.
Just because you've seen the plural of "virus" spelt as "viruses" frequently it doesn't automatically become grammatically correct. Similarly, if I started writing the plural of "man" as "mans" it wouldn't suddenly become right.
You might not like or be comfortable with it but "virii" is correct. "Viruses", by vitue of its common misuse, is now found in dictionaries too but that doesn't make "virii" any less valid.
Jimmy Cauty aka Rockman Rock of the techno act The KLF allegedly had an interesting mobile sound system, courtesy of the British Army. From the KLF FAQ:
... [Cauty] first tested it at a Wire gig on Hungerford Bridge in May. ... ... A fax from Mr. Smith, the Head Of Commercial Exploitation at Advanced Acoustic Armaments, was sent to The Maker. It read : "The test took place to establish the parameters of the new vehicle solo and in tandem with its sister model, SS 9000K+L. The test featured new software generated for our latest commercial client, EXP LTD, and is described by Mr. Cauty as featuring 'the ultimate battle between sound and commerce ending in the death of all musicians and their ascension to rock-n-roll heaven or hell as befits them.' Yesterday we received communication with ex-Government employees who, in the Sixties, worked on audio weapon development with an offer of help and some ex-classified equipment. We regret any such death or damage that has resulted from our tests, but there are casualties in every war. The Triple A Formation Attack Ensemble will perform 'Foghorns Of The Northern Hemisphere' as part of an educational programmed supporting our research shortly."
Q: What's Jimmy's sonic weapon?
A: Jimmy purchased two Saracen armoured vehicles at a scrap yard for ukp 4,000 and found equipment in them which he thought could have been used for sonic warfare. He has tried to assemble the acoustic gun from information he found on the Internet. Installing huge amplifiers and special speakers to cope with the very low frequencies cost him tens of thousands of pounds.
The 25,000-watt sonic gun can project sound for around 7 miles, and Jimmy annoyed his Devon neighbours by testing it on Midsummer's Day, 1996. Jimmy said: "I moved to Devon six months ago for a bit of a rest and this is a project I am taking an interest in. I do not see it as music or art." He said that he aimed the gun away from homes and it seemed to have no effect on sheep.
The Melody Maker said: "He was testing his two Audio Weapon Systems in a field near his new home. 'He alerted people to the fact that he was doing this by setting off some military flares. Then he
tested his Audio Weapons System for an hour for a very select group of scientists and friends. The Audio Weapons System is not designed to kill people."
In January, Panasonic [ the "Finnish conceptual techno nutters"-NME] borrowed one of the Audio Weapons Systems for tests on how sonic waves affect the human body at Brick Lane in London.
Most of this is probably scam, but Cauty has recorded an album of sonic waves for Paul Smith's Blast First label under the name AAA. The album is in the hands of lawyers who are trying to clear some of the samples used on it, and has yet to be released (07/96). It appears to be a Cauty solo project.
More recently, Jimmy teamed up with new Asian-techno group, Black Star Liner for a _happening_ in a field on Dartmoor. Jimmy chartered a 'chopper to take BSL and assorted journos out to Dartmoor, where he intended to remix the Halaal Rock track in his tank. Apparently, BSL bumped into Cauty on London's South Bank, while he was driving about in his tank, he got hold of their album, and said that he wanted to work with them. Anyway, the chopper was grounded by severe fog, so everyone was put on a convey of buses. All the journos were given _orange_ jackets to wear. They eventually arrived at a field full of military vehicles, and people in _yellow_ jackets, wearing goggles and ears protectors, doing some form of formation dancing. The journos were lead to the ir seats, and had large floodlights shone into their eyes, while the yellow jackets let of flares all around them.
There were a load of goats skulls on sticks around the field, and a whole pile of fireworks let of towards the end of the mix, when Cauty was mixing in some Jimi Hendrix. However, this d
When I say "who" I mean organizationally, as I realize 99% of us geeks already use it.
What a joke.
I guess you've never heard of Opera or Safari, both of which are arguably better browsers than Mozilla?
(And yes, I realise that not everyone will agree with me on that - that's why I used the word "arguably" in my statement.)
It looks as if someone got in on the act early and targetted our beloved Slashdot.
Huh? Whassat? This is a redesign?
Years waiting for a more user-friendly layout and this is the best that they could come up with?
You'd think that they could have come up with something better. After all, it's not like they spend their time checking for dupes, hoaxes or even simple spelling errors.
Not a lot of new information, but some good visuals.
When the eye candy is twice as nice the slashdotting is twice as fast.
It most certainly IS flamebait. "Fact", my ass. That's an absurd distortion of the truth and you know it. Has Israel ever butchered Palestinians and buried them, by the thousands, in mass graves? Of course not.
Are they culpable in a great deal of violence and destruction resulting from their invasion, settlement and crackdowns in Palestinian land? Certainly so. But to equate them with Saddam's brutal regime is a perversion of truth, to say the least.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the spurious case the US mounted in order to trump up an excuse to remove Saddam... but Israel has not, and will never, gas Palestinian dissenters en masse. Really, open your eyes...
A Kurdish child gassed dead by Hussein's troops is no more dead, no more tragic or no more sickening than a Palestinian child bombed dead by Israeli forces. One life isn't more valuable than another.
The dead are dead. Arguing over how they were murdered is just petty semantics.
I'm sorry that the BBC being a truly independent news organisation ruins your enjoyment of the suffering of the Iraqi people.
Perhaps you prefer getting all your news from "patriotic" broadcasters, like FOX News, who won't bring you anything that doesn't paint the US/UK/other invasion in anything apart from a positive light. Good for you - if you want your news censored by a broadcaster who's more interested in keeping you watching at any cost that it is in the truth then that's your perogative. But some of us prefer getting the raw facts and making our minds up for ourselves.
Yes, the BBC's coverage of the war hasn't been a flag-waving exercise. But why should it be? Because you say so? Because a government official says so? Sometimes the truth isn't as pretty as we would like but that doesn't make that truth any less valid or worthy of our attention.
Perhaps you like watching the news brought to you by people who would probably have their war coverage sponsored by a handgun manufacturer if they thought that they could get away with it. But I and many others don't.
Yeah, it's a real bummer when you get caught bulldozing down the homes of women and children without any prior notice whilst the occupants are in there sleeping.
Israel's guilty of just as many human rights violations as Saddam Hussein's regime was in Iraq. But whereas Hussein used chemical weapons supplied by the US and others to kill Kurds, Israel uses to tanks, planes and gunships supplied by the US to kill Palistineans. Big difference.
This isn't flamebait, this is fact. But, as ever, some people with mod points will mod this down as it doesn't fit in with their personal cosy, rose-tinted view of the world.