I'd like to announce the new MnM/Amil operating system: Its "MNM's Not Multics" running on the "Amalgamation of Multics Impersonating Lemmings!" Its also licensed by the new MnM Candy Coated License (MnM CCL) which is will never leave your hands dirty! Yummy!
Once it's produced, how do you store it? I confess that I now (sort of) work for evil "big oil" but I do have some experience with the practicalities of storing and transporting hydrogen.
Thats a pretty good question there! I'd recommend using Metastable Metallic Hydrogen personally, except there's a small issue that nobody has exactly figured out how to make the stuff yet.
That being said, I always thought that good old Ammonia (NH4) had some nice potential for hydrogen storage. Its easily liquefied at room temperature. There are a couple issues with Ammonia though. First, it tends to be rather poisonous, such that breathing in a good lung full of the pure gas would probably be fatal. Secondly, its a bit difficult to get it to react in a controlled fashion. Thirdly, it tends to explode violently sometimes, kind of unpredictably I gather. There's no doubt that Ammonia is an energy dense substance; however, exploiting it for a consumer energy material is somewhat problematic.
A safer alternative would be to saturate a carbon backbone with hydrogens, resulting in some kind of diesel or wax type fuel. That more or less puts us back where we started though, except now we have to expend extra energy to synthesize the stuff rather than just pumping it out of a hole. I suppose when the holes start going dry it might be an option...
I was going to get a PS3 to make a nifty little webserver out of it by loading up Linux. I figured that even if I couldn't get Linux to use the graphics acceleration, it wouldn't matter. I could run a little webserver on it on my lan and stick it out in the DMZ. Perhaps I could learn how to program the nifty SPU's and rack up lots of points on something like Distributed.Net.
Heh, these things draw like 200W on idle. Thats more than a typical PC. $14 a month for electricity (estimated). I think I'll keep my little old 300MHz StrongArm Netwinder that draws 18W max. Thats about $1.30 a month!
Still, I'd like to get one to play with the cell processor in Linux, but it is kind of limited as a workstation not having 3D acceleration, burns too much electricity to be useful as a 24/7 server, and I'm lucky if I have time to play WoW a few hours a week, so its not like I want it for console gaming. For the price of a PS3, I could plug a AMD Phenom into my motherboard when they come out and see some serious performance boots.
Phooey. It really sucks when I want to buy a toy but can't find an excuse to do it.
This must also be one of the reasons why DN4 still isn't ready. IIRC they switched from the Quake2 engine to the Unreal engine sometime back in the late 90's. They could claim billions of dollars in delay costs after all these years!
Therein lies another problem, I've bought a PS3 already, and am having a really good time with Motorstorm, Resistance and Ninja Gaiden Sigma..but they have not provided the support for GPU acceleration in linux, and do not seem poised to do so in the near future.
This is a classic case of just having to stick it out, but thanks for the info that GLX isn't yet supported on YD for the PS3. There will be millions of PS3's around soon. Eventually someone will reverse-engineer the chipset, then buggy Linux drivers will appear. At that point one of two things will happen: (a) Sony will provide binary drivers, or (b) the reverse-engineered drivers will eventually be perfected.
Remember, this is a console, mass produced in the millions (Sony hopes). This graphics chipset will become available on a scale that blows away typical graphics cards distribution. It may take a while, but it *will* become fully known and supported eventually. If it runs in framebuffer mode right now, thats acceptable given the newness of the hardware.
Technology gets CHEAPER. Far out-pacing inflation. The PS3 pricing is a joke when compared to any other modern consumer electronics - then again, game consoles pretty much have been for a while now.
Agreed. I'm not really into the PS3 as a gaming console, but rather as a cell processor linux platform. 500 beans isn't a bad price for a computer brainbox. I'm pretty tempted to snag one up. I doubt that anybody that isn't a Linux expert would see the appeal, but I'm pretty confident that I could install a smashing system on a PS3 giving a bit of tinkering around. Oh, I can watch DVD movies on it and play console games too... bonus!
I think I see one of these in my future. I need a new linux toy:-)
The original xbox had a better GPU than the PS2, look where that got them.
From what I see, the PS3 GPU looks fine for most purposes. Check out yonder Inquirer article: Playstation 3 GPU "slightly less powerful than GeForce 7800". As far as running Linux is concerned, that should be plenty sufficient, with a little backup from the Mesa lib, to run almost any OpenGL or GLX app with great performance.
My 64-bit dual core AMD Athlon-X2 3800+ system only has a GeForce 7600GT, and it is extremely fast at 3D rendering applications. I have run (on the Windows side) TurboCAD Pro 14 Mechanical and ALGOR 20.2 using the 7600GT and it is easily the equivalent of any 3D CAD workstation that I've ever seen or used.
If the PS3 has something about like a GeForce 7800, it's *plenty good enough*. If your game or application can't run fast on that hardware, then maybe you should do a bit of profiling on your executable and consider what linking libraries you are employing.
That's where I'm at. I could care less whether the PS3 has any games whatsoever available for it so long as there is a robust and *useful* linux system which can be installed on the platform. The Cell architecture would seem to imply that a PS3 might be useful for some sort of network based parallel processing engine. I would love to be able to somehow figure out how to compile something like Code Aster for the Cell on PS3, then send meshing jobs to it, or run such as CAE Linux.
However, it is really light on RAM for these applications. 2G would probably make it usable, but 512M just won't cut it. I'd still like to pick up a PS3 as a curiosity to fool around with a Cell Linux system, but even $500 is kind of steep for a novelty system. I won't rule it out, I spent around $300 for my Sharp Zaurus Linux PDA, which is more or less a glorified alarm clock and *gee whiz* notepad, so a Cell processor powered unit like a PS3 is basically like one of the old ARM based Netwinder's on steroids. A fairly capable server brain with reasonable power consumption and commodity pricing.
Actually, it would probably make a pretty sweet little home webserver. Now if we can just get Gentoo 64 running on it. Hmmm . . .
Obviously whoever came up with this scheme has no understanding of either biology or chemistry.
Hey! wouldn't it be great if we could make bacteria ferment diesel! Yeah man! Cool!
I like alternative energy schemes, but I just get the "ain't gonna work" feeling from this one. For one thing the products would have to be water soluble to be fermentation products, so you're looking at some kind of carboxylic acid or long chain alcohol probably. These would then have to be dehydrated in an industrial process by boiling them in acid. The net result is you'd be better off just processing the sugar (or actually just raw plant material) to begin with rather than fooling around fermenting it into something else, because in each step you lose carbon.
That is such crap. If I am expected to surrender my concealed weapons, then I think that I should expect an armed escort by military personnel.
The current airport *security* plan is a joke. I have never felt more threatened in my life except when I have been in airports. They should issue all citizens complimentary handguns, then I'd feel a bit safer, and if there was a shootout, we'd have the numbers on our side at least.
How would you ever tune this game? I have been playing it for nearly five years, including all of its mods and new developments. Tuning it is nearly impossible because the tactics employed by new players are so vastly different from veterans that I cannot fathom how it could be done mathematically.
Nevertheless, if you coders want to go at it, its open source. Go to the Bear's Pit.
There is also Gnash which is a clean-room implementation of Flash. I run Gentoo amd64 with no 32-bit compatibility libs, and I have the Gnash plugin working on my system.
The Linux console in framebuffer mode is pretty cool. A lot of Gentoo users typically have it loaded so as to use the spiffy bootsplash system, and the graphics consoles are wonderful.
If you are into text console stuff, there is Twin - Textmode window environment which is surprisingly neat. It can run bash boxes in a ncurses based environment. Gentoo had it in portage and it compiled easily for me. A bit rough around the edges, but cool.
Also, I just have to plug Turbo Vision for POSIX which is that classic Borland library used for the great DOS apps of yore. I've been tinkering with it on Gentoo amd64 and even submitted a patch for the terminal class upstream. (Yes, I managed to compile it with debugging symbols, and trace down a segfault using gdb). I'd love to see Turbo Vision get a little luvin' so that it can run Bash boxes like Twin can, for no real reason other that its just such a darned nifty (and fast) environment.
And back to the framebuffer graphics consoles themselves. I believe you can write SDL apps that use the framebuffer. There was a FBUI project going, but I think it's dead.
I've been messing around with the sourceforge turbovision and it works on my Gentoo amd64 system, although there are some breakages in some of the classes.
It would be nice to see that lib get some much needed attention and fixups. It runs well in a linux console, inside an xterm, probably over ssh, etc.
I've been trying to make a Bash box run in turbovision, but no luck so far. The TTerminal class is the most broken part of the lib it seems.
As an update, I got further along this time, but compilation died when gcc tried to compile libphobos with the oddest autotools bug I've ever seen. Here's what I did:
Download and unpack gcc-4.0.3 into your personal src dir
Compilation dies on libphobos with the following peculiar error:
checking for nan... yes checking for exp2... yes checking for log2... yes checking for fpclassify and signbit... yes configure: error: Missing fpclassify and signbit make: *** [configure-target-libphobos] Error 1
Well, I'm getting further along. It would be nice to get D working in gcc, no doubt its more usefull than Objective-C. lol.
See http://dsource.org/projects/gentoo/wiki/LaymanSetu p for a portage overlay that includes DMD-bin. You have to edit the layman configuration and disable warnings about missing fields, but it works fine after that.
I tried it, and it added the package, but it is masked by missing keyword. Besides, I don't want to install dmd, which is the 32bit compiler from digital mars, I'd rather have the gcc addon gdc built into my existing 64bit compiler system. I currently don't have the 32bit emulation libs installed, and I don't plan on installing them either. I have a pretty cool system going that is 64bit clean and runs like my own personal supercomputer. I'm into engineering, science, and mathematics programming, so I really like the free extra precision with 64bit and sse3 not to mention the extra cpu registers.
I might try and compile D (gdc) into/usr/local/gcc-4.0 again just to see if I can get it to work, but it is obvious that some patches need to get sent upstream for the amd64 platform. I'm not sure how best to implement the patches, but I would think that it should be done using autotools, and that config.h mechanism.
I've been messing around for a couple hours now trying to compile gdc against gcc-4.0.3 in Gentoo amd64 and it's just not happening. I ran into an issue where it had a int and size_t mismatch, an undefined cpu symbols macro, and after hacking these the build died complaining it thought that I was cross-compiling gcc.
I've given up for now. Maybe if D hits the 1.0 magic number somebody will fix it for 64-bit systems and add it to portage. Oh well, I would have liked to start playing with D but I guess I'll just have to wait.
* Under voltage memory - biggest problem I've seen complaints about DDR2. Lots of DDR2 memory is sold to auto configure voltage for an Intel system, but require 0.1 to 0.2 more volts for an AMD system. If your memory is less than 2.0 or 2.1 volts, go into the BIOS and set it to 2.0 volts. If that does not work, set it to 2.1 volts.
Thats exactly what I had to do to make mine stable. I bumped up the DDR2 voltage a bit and haven't had a problem since.
Oh yeah, the flash player. No you're right it doesn't work in 64bit. Can't say I miss it though. All it does is enable annoying ads on webpages. I usually regret installing it everytime I do. I think that the mplayer plugin is working though. Java is working but somewhat crashy.
Amd64 is an experimental system, so not everything is as fully supported as in regular x86. I can live with it. I have been considering rebuilding a small 32bit x86 system too to play older commercial Linux games, but its pretty low priority. I really haven't tried the 32bit emulation libs so I can't say one way or another but I'd assume some kind of performance hit would be involved.
I have 64bit Firefox and OpenOffice working now in Gentoo amd64, I don't have any compatibility libs installed, and I'm running stable versions of 98% of the apps. Its a really nice system.
On the windows side, I have XP-X64 running which is also very good. I haven't had any problems with anything I tried to run, even 32bit games. I'm definitely not planning on going to Vista64 though unless I absolutely have to.
Overall, I'm very satisfied with my Athlon64 X2 3800+, it is considerably faster than the old Athlon XP 2400+ overall, and sometimes very much faster. The dual cores just fly when compiling Gentoo which is really nice. Python seems to run really fast also, possibly due to the extra registers.
Just make the frame out of carbon nano-tubes, with um spectra fiber cloth for the baloon, then pump the air out of that baby and up you go!
Yeah! Thats the ticket! They probably tried this in Soviet Russia years ago, but failed because they didn't have carbon nano-tubes, so now all this profit are belong to me!
I'm just curious because I recently had another game that ran like a dog with the onboard AC97 sound. It was a choppy unplayable mess. I pulled an old SBLive card out of my junk drawer and installed it and the game suddenly worked like a charm.
How many of you with bad framerates were using onboard AC97, and how many with good rates were using a dedicated sound card?
I'm a mechanical engineer with a degree from a very prestigious US ABET accredited university. I blew away my EIT (FE) exam and scored in the upper 80th percentile. My degree also included a minor in Mathematics in addition to mechanical engineering.
So why? Why have me and my family been on food stamps in the US for the last 3 years? I have applied for thousands of jobs during this period, and continue to do so. I spent a DECADE in engineering school to actually learn the content material rather than cheat my way past it.
Now in the "real business world" I find that no other engineers seem to have a freaking clue about any of that stuff that I labored to impress upon my brain, rather, they seem like a bunch of test cheating frat boys, and when they find I do know how to solve differential equations and understand and remember all of that diff-eq math and its applications, I'm suddenly on the short list for layoff.
Where is the payoff? I should have gone directly from high school into the trade industry. Now I'm a 40 year old US Army veteran mechanical engineer who is so hopelessly overqualified for anything that I am essentially unemployable. I'm going to die as a penniless forgotten wretch, a fool who went to school and actually learned something, instead of going to prison like everybody else who went to high school with me.
Yeah, Go USA, wooo hooo. Mother Fletcher forking representive republic democracy for the slavemasters. Fork you! I wish I could leave this stinking rat hole country of evil MBA arshole duckheads and jurk off farg management society. This country is a rotting zombie of a corpse. Fly high free birds and get away from the death lands if you can, this carrion pile of rotten liar bosses and corporate cuckolds is the death of everything you ever hoped and dreamed of. These are the words of infamy and the future was yesterday.
The reports of strange lights emanating from the lab were merely energy discharges from the material under the effects of the x-ray analysis, which is quite normal actually. Unfounded rumors of strange demonic figures running amok in the complex were likewise nothing more than a mischievous prank by a few of the overworked scientists who took a joke a bit too far. The security forces stationed around the building are merely there to keep pesky reporters from spoiling next-week's release. Any sounds which appear to be gunfire are simply sonic gas bubbles popping from out of the high tech equipment. So everything is completely under control, no need to worry.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to announce the new MnM/Amil operating system: Its "MNM's Not Multics" running on the "Amalgamation of Multics Impersonating Lemmings!" Its also licensed by the new MnM Candy Coated License (MnM CCL) which is will never leave your hands dirty! Yummy!
Once it's produced, how do you store it? I confess that I now (sort of) work for evil "big oil" but I do have some experience with the practicalities of storing and transporting hydrogen.
Thats a pretty good question there! I'd recommend using Metastable Metallic Hydrogen personally, except there's a small issue that nobody has exactly figured out how to make the stuff yet.
That being said, I always thought that good old Ammonia (NH4) had some nice potential for hydrogen storage. Its easily liquefied at room temperature. There are a couple issues with Ammonia though. First, it tends to be rather poisonous, such that breathing in a good lung full of the pure gas would probably be fatal. Secondly, its a bit difficult to get it to react in a controlled fashion. Thirdly, it tends to explode violently sometimes, kind of unpredictably I gather. There's no doubt that Ammonia is an energy dense substance; however, exploiting it for a consumer energy material is somewhat problematic.
A safer alternative would be to saturate a carbon backbone with hydrogens, resulting in some kind of diesel or wax type fuel. That more or less puts us back where we started though, except now we have to expend extra energy to synthesize the stuff rather than just pumping it out of a hole. I suppose when the holes start going dry it might be an option...
I was going to get a PS3 to make a nifty little webserver out of it by loading up Linux. I figured that even if I couldn't get Linux to use the graphics acceleration, it wouldn't matter. I could run a little webserver on it on my lan and stick it out in the DMZ. Perhaps I could learn how to program the nifty SPU's and rack up lots of points on something like Distributed.Net.
Heh, these things draw like 200W on idle. Thats more than a typical PC. $14 a month for electricity (estimated). I think I'll keep my little old 300MHz StrongArm Netwinder that draws 18W max. Thats about $1.30 a month!
Still, I'd like to get one to play with the cell processor in Linux, but it is kind of limited as a workstation not having 3D acceleration, burns too much electricity to be useful as a 24/7 server, and I'm lucky if I have time to play WoW a few hours a week, so its not like I want it for console gaming. For the price of a PS3, I could plug a AMD Phenom into my motherboard when they come out and see some serious performance boots.
Phooey. It really sucks when I want to buy a toy but can't find an excuse to do it.
Here's how it goes . . .
Number of voice mails recieved / number replied
Number of emails received / number replied
Number of help tickets received / number answered
---
Add em up somehow and make a score
This must also be one of the reasons why DN4 still isn't ready. IIRC they switched from the Quake2 engine to the Unreal engine sometime back in the late 90's. They could claim billions of dollars in delay costs after all these years!
This is a classic case of just having to stick it out, but thanks for the info that GLX isn't yet supported on YD for the PS3. There will be millions of PS3's around soon. Eventually someone will reverse-engineer the chipset, then buggy Linux drivers will appear. At that point one of two things will happen: (a) Sony will provide binary drivers, or (b) the reverse-engineered drivers will eventually be perfected.
Remember, this is a console, mass produced in the millions (Sony hopes). This graphics chipset will become available on a scale that blows away typical graphics cards distribution. It may take a while, but it *will* become fully known and supported eventually. If it runs in framebuffer mode right now, thats acceptable given the newness of the hardware.
Agreed. I'm not really into the PS3 as a gaming console, but rather as a cell processor linux platform. 500 beans isn't a bad price for a computer brainbox. I'm pretty tempted to snag one up. I doubt that anybody that isn't a Linux expert would see the appeal, but I'm pretty confident that I could install a smashing system on a PS3 giving a bit of tinkering around. Oh, I can watch DVD movies on it and play console games too... bonus!
I think I see one of these in my future. I need a new linux toy :-)
From what I see, the PS3 GPU looks fine for most purposes. Check out yonder Inquirer article: Playstation 3 GPU "slightly less powerful than GeForce 7800". As far as running Linux is concerned, that should be plenty sufficient, with a little backup from the Mesa lib, to run almost any OpenGL or GLX app with great performance.
My 64-bit dual core AMD Athlon-X2 3800+ system only has a GeForce 7600GT, and it is extremely fast at 3D rendering applications. I have run (on the Windows side) TurboCAD Pro 14 Mechanical and ALGOR 20.2 using the 7600GT and it is easily the equivalent of any 3D CAD workstation that I've ever seen or used.
If the PS3 has something about like a GeForce 7800, it's *plenty good enough*. If your game or application can't run fast on that hardware, then maybe you should do a bit of profiling on your executable and consider what linking libraries you are employing.
That's where I'm at. I could care less whether the PS3 has any games whatsoever available for it so long as there is a robust and *useful* linux system which can be installed on the platform. The Cell architecture would seem to imply that a PS3 might be useful for some sort of network based parallel processing engine. I would love to be able to somehow figure out how to compile something like Code Aster for the Cell on PS3, then send meshing jobs to it, or run such as CAE Linux.
However, it is really light on RAM for these applications. 2G would probably make it usable, but 512M just won't cut it. I'd still like to pick up a PS3 as a curiosity to fool around with a Cell Linux system, but even $500 is kind of steep for a novelty system. I won't rule it out, I spent around $300 for my Sharp Zaurus Linux PDA, which is more or less a glorified alarm clock and *gee whiz* notepad, so a Cell processor powered unit like a PS3 is basically like one of the old ARM based Netwinder's on steroids. A fairly capable server brain with reasonable power consumption and commodity pricing.
Actually, it would probably make a pretty sweet little home webserver. Now if we can just get Gentoo 64 running on it. Hmmm . . .
Obviously whoever came up with this scheme has no understanding of either biology or chemistry.
Hey! wouldn't it be great if we could make bacteria ferment diesel! Yeah man! Cool!
I like alternative energy schemes, but I just get the "ain't gonna work" feeling from this one. For one thing the products would have to be water soluble to be fermentation products, so you're looking at some kind of carboxylic acid or long chain alcohol probably. These would then have to be dehydrated in an industrial process by boiling them in acid. The net result is you'd be better off just processing the sugar (or actually just raw plant material) to begin with rather than fooling around fermenting it into something else, because in each step you lose carbon.
That is such crap. If I am expected to surrender my concealed weapons, then I think that I should expect an armed escort by military personnel.
The current airport *security* plan is a joke. I have never felt more threatened in my life except when I have been in airports. They should issue all citizens complimentary handguns, then I'd feel a bit safer, and if there was a shootout, we'd have the numbers on our side at least.
How would you ever tune this game? I have been playing it for nearly five years, including all of its mods and new developments. Tuning it is nearly impossible because the tactics employed by new players are so vastly different from veterans that I cannot fathom how it could be done mathematically.
Nevertheless, if you coders want to go at it, its open source. Go to the Bear's Pit.
There is also Gnash which is a clean-room implementation of Flash. I run Gentoo amd64 with no 32-bit compatibility libs, and I have the Gnash plugin working on my system.
The Linux console in framebuffer mode is pretty cool. A lot of Gentoo users typically have it loaded so as to use the spiffy bootsplash system, and the graphics consoles are wonderful.
If you are into text console stuff, there is Twin - Textmode window environment which is surprisingly neat. It can run bash boxes in a ncurses based environment. Gentoo had it in portage and it compiled easily for me. A bit rough around the edges, but cool.
Also, I just have to plug Turbo Vision for POSIX which is that classic Borland library used for the great DOS apps of yore. I've been tinkering with it on Gentoo amd64 and even submitted a patch for the terminal class upstream. (Yes, I managed to compile it with debugging symbols, and trace down a segfault using gdb). I'd love to see Turbo Vision get a little luvin' so that it can run Bash boxes like Twin can, for no real reason other that its just such a darned nifty (and fast) environment.
And back to the framebuffer graphics consoles themselves. I believe you can write SDL apps that use the framebuffer. There was a FBUI project going, but I think it's dead.
I've been messing around with the sourceforge turbovision and it works on my Gentoo amd64 system, although there are some breakages in some of the classes.
It would be nice to see that lib get some much needed attention and fixups. It runs well in a linux console, inside an xterm, probably over ssh, etc.
I've been trying to make a Bash box run in turbovision, but no luck so far. The TTerminal class is the most broken part of the lib it seems.
As an update, I got further along this time, but compilation died when gcc tried to compile libphobos with the oddest autotools bug I've ever seen. Here's what I did:
Download and unpack gcc-4.0.3 into your personal src dir
Download the svn trunk of gdc from http://sourceforge.net/projects/dgcc
Go into gcc-4.0.3/gcc
$ cp -a ../../dgcc/trunk/d .
$ cd ..
$ gcc/d/setup-gcc.sh
$ mkdir work
$ cd work
$ ../configure --prefix=/usr/local/gcc-4.0.3 --enable-languages=c,d,c++ --host=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu --build=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu --target=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu --disable-multilib
edit ../gcc/d/d-lang.cc and change the following on line 268
Run "make"
Compilation dies on libphobos with the following peculiar error:
Well, I'm getting further along. It would be nice to get D working in gcc, no doubt its more usefull than Objective-C. lol.
See http://dsource.org/projects/gentoo/wiki/LaymanSetu p for a portage overlay that includes DMD-bin. You have to edit the layman configuration and disable warnings about missing fields, but it works fine after that.
I tried it, and it added the package, but it is masked by missing keyword. Besides, I don't want to install dmd, which is the 32bit compiler from digital mars, I'd rather have the gcc addon gdc built into my existing 64bit compiler system. I currently don't have the 32bit emulation libs installed, and I don't plan on installing them either. I have a pretty cool system going that is 64bit clean and runs like my own personal supercomputer. I'm into engineering, science, and mathematics programming, so I really like the free extra precision with 64bit and sse3 not to mention the extra cpu registers.
I might try and compile D (gdc) into /usr/local/gcc-4.0 again just to see if I can get it to work, but it is obvious that some patches need to get sent upstream for the amd64 platform. I'm not sure how best to implement the patches, but I would think that it should be done using autotools, and that config.h mechanism.
I've been messing around for a couple hours now trying to compile gdc against gcc-4.0.3 in Gentoo amd64 and it's just not happening. I ran into an issue where it had a int and size_t mismatch, an undefined cpu symbols macro, and after hacking these the build died complaining it thought that I was cross-compiling gcc.
I've given up for now. Maybe if D hits the 1.0 magic number somebody will fix it for 64-bit systems and add it to portage. Oh well, I would have liked to start playing with D but I guess I'll just have to wait.
* Under voltage memory - biggest problem I've seen complaints about DDR2. Lots of DDR2 memory is sold to auto configure voltage for an Intel system, but require 0.1 to 0.2 more volts for an AMD system. If your memory is less than 2.0 or 2.1 volts, go into the BIOS and set it to 2.0 volts. If that does not work, set it to 2.1 volts.
Thats exactly what I had to do to make mine stable. I bumped up the DDR2 voltage a bit and haven't had a problem since.
Oh yeah, the flash player. No you're right it doesn't work in 64bit. Can't say I miss it though. All it does is enable annoying ads on webpages. I usually regret installing it everytime I do. I think that the mplayer plugin is working though. Java is working but somewhat crashy.
Amd64 is an experimental system, so not everything is as fully supported as in regular x86. I can live with it. I have been considering rebuilding a small 32bit x86 system too to play older commercial Linux games, but its pretty low priority. I really haven't tried the 32bit emulation libs so I can't say one way or another but I'd assume some kind of performance hit would be involved.
I have 64bit Firefox and OpenOffice working now in Gentoo amd64, I don't have any compatibility libs installed, and I'm running stable versions of 98% of the apps. Its a really nice system.
On the windows side, I have XP-X64 running which is also very good. I haven't had any problems with anything I tried to run, even 32bit games. I'm definitely not planning on going to Vista64 though unless I absolutely have to.
Overall, I'm very satisfied with my Athlon64 X2 3800+, it is considerably faster than the old Athlon XP 2400+ overall, and sometimes very much faster. The dual cores just fly when compiling Gentoo which is really nice. Python seems to run really fast also, possibly due to the extra registers.
Instead of filling the blimp with hot air . . .
Just make the frame out of carbon nano-tubes, with um spectra fiber cloth for the baloon, then pump the air out of that baby and up you go!
Yeah! Thats the ticket! They probably tried this in Soviet Russia years ago, but failed because they didn't have carbon nano-tubes, so now all this profit are belong to me!
I'm just curious because I recently had another game that ran like a dog with the onboard AC97 sound. It was a choppy unplayable mess. I pulled an old SBLive card out of my junk drawer and installed it and the game suddenly worked like a charm.
How many of you with bad framerates were using onboard AC97, and how many with good rates were using a dedicated sound card?
I'm a mechanical engineer with a degree from a very prestigious US ABET accredited university. I blew away my EIT (FE) exam and scored in the upper 80th percentile. My degree also included a minor in Mathematics in addition to mechanical engineering.
So why? Why have me and my family been on food stamps in the US for the last 3 years? I have applied for thousands of jobs during this period, and continue to do so. I spent a DECADE in engineering school to actually learn the content material rather than cheat my way past it.
Now in the "real business world" I find that no other engineers seem to have a freaking clue about any of that stuff that I labored to impress upon my brain, rather, they seem like a bunch of test cheating frat boys, and when they find I do know how to solve differential equations and understand and remember all of that diff-eq math and its applications, I'm suddenly on the short list for layoff.
Where is the payoff? I should have gone directly from high school into the trade industry. Now I'm a 40 year old US Army veteran mechanical engineer who is so hopelessly overqualified for anything that I am essentially unemployable. I'm going to die as a penniless forgotten wretch, a fool who went to school and actually learned something, instead of going to prison like everybody else who went to high school with me.
Yeah, Go USA, wooo hooo. Mother Fletcher forking representive republic democracy for the slavemasters. Fork you! I wish I could leave this stinking rat hole country of evil MBA arshole duckheads and jurk off farg management society. This country is a rotting zombie of a corpse. Fly high free birds and get away from the death lands if you can, this carrion pile of rotten liar bosses and corporate cuckolds is the death of everything you ever hoped and dreamed of. These are the words of infamy and the future was yesterday.
The reports of strange lights emanating from the lab were merely energy discharges from the material under the effects of the x-ray analysis, which is quite normal actually. Unfounded rumors of strange demonic figures running amok in the complex were likewise nothing more than a mischievous prank by a few of the overworked scientists who took a joke a bit too far. The security forces stationed around the building are merely there to keep pesky reporters from spoiling next-week's release. Any sounds which appear to be gunfire are simply sonic gas bubbles popping from out of the high tech equipment. So everything is completely under control, no need to worry.