just be careful, that exploding motherboard/psu trick is only fun if it doesn't come out of your paycheck. rebooting puts a high strain on the capacitors, and if pressed rapidly enough they can burst into flames yay!
you mean c:/windows/user.dat and C:/windows/system.dat aren't as easy to backup as a textfile? you can even set windows to keep the last 12 sets of registies (or more) to ensure you have enough backups... (okay that's win98, but ntuser.dat is in a lot more places...)
That link leaves on question begging to be asked: If a hard rock cafe server has a critical stop, can anyone hear it? Oh and hey, Guess what, they only used linux for apache, but you could have read that at the link you posted, the reason they saved money is because they ditched a complex and unwieldy solaris/netware/etc system. Keep in mind too that an overpriced fast-food bar/grill with loud music and lines for seating doesn't exactly require a whole fleet of computers to operate. It takes a lot of min-wage grunts, serving tables etc. Downtime doesn't exactly cause hard rock to loose money, especially if they can get the system back up relatively quicky. because there is this funny thing called a 'pen and paper' and a 'calculator' and with those basic tools, they can take orders, and determine how much to charge, and even calculate tip and taxes. On the other hand a bank could loose it's shirt if transactions got lost or delayed due to a system crash -- and every minute of downtime costs their organization money. yeah, if you want a system that minumum wage grunts can admin, and a few crashes won't kill you windows is ideal. And that's what it looks like the hard rock cafe wanted.
Never say never. I ran a FreeBSD (a 3.x version, I believe) dial-out server for my lan that used both packet and header compression to achieve a fairly consistant 'reported' downstream of 7.0kB/second (from a prodigy dial-up account no less) on binary transfers, and anywhere from 14-22kB per second on usenet feeds. My dial-out box was a mere 486, with an external Zoom 56k modem, probably using the 56kFlex standard, or possibly firmware upgraded at some point. For what it's worth the copper line was run direct from the phone company box, had no splits on it, except a line seperator, near the end (to allow a phone to be hooked up to the primary line) and yes, the dialout connection dropped frequently (2-3 times a day), but was alway back up within 15-20 seconds, (gotta love PPPD). People who say you can't get 7.0kB (binary) on a dialup don't cut fresh copper for the dedicated run to the telco's incoming line box, and don't take the time to properly configure a ppp dameon to utilize any compresion schemes supported by their ISP to maximize performance. Remember, also, that older usenet encoding relied on converting the data to 7-bit ascii, which ensured a minimum of 2:1 compression when packet compression is enabled -- for only a 20% increase in filesize. I'm not sure how well the 'new smaller' binary postings work with packet compression, but I'd almost be willing to wager that it eliminates the ability to perform any compression whatsoever, as dial-up modems have crude (yet highly effective on 7-bit ascii) compression capabilities. If anyone with packet compression enabled can confirm or deny that in fact, the older usenet posting methods download faster for them, it would be a great help... as I haven't had two phone lines for a long time, and I'm not entirely sure that cablemodems even has a method to implement packet/header compression, and seriously doubt my isp is configured properly for it.
So far, recent problems with IE has caused my sister ona one of my friends to install mozilla to use as their primary browser. I also got my friend to download and install Xchat, because apparently she couldn't get the mirc download link to work (probably from a download site.) Mozilla is the open source pet project of netscape, but Xchat is just a standard open source gui irc client. Obviously some open source applications are made easy enough that normal people would consider using them, yet many fail to design the application with any cares about what other people might find useful, in terms of an interface. True you're going to get a lot of useless advice, and you probably have limited resources to implement features, but that's why you just add features that seem to be beneficial to a to-do list, and hope that if you don't have the time/skills, a contributor might decide to help add the feature for you. Xchat surpassed mirc in terms of functionality (perl and python scripting) a long time ago, and has been comperable on user-friendlyness to mirc for a long time. So yes, open source software can become as user-friendly, and retain more functionality than existing closed source alternatives. The alternative can also be said, GAIM (one of many open source IM clients) has been around a long time, and Trillian, an entirely closed source multiple IM client application outdoes GAIM in functionality, and arguably in userfriendlyness (since it's fully skinable, and skins can make apps looks and work in way that feels more natural to the end user, sometimes.) Trillian isn't as mature as GAIM, and has only ever had 2 programmers working on it, and yet because they wanted to draw as many people as possible, they implemented the features they knew people wanted, as fast as they could, because they wanted to be able to have a product people would eventually pay for. So, in markets where there is money to be made closed source will almost always have the advantage. On a side note, the current problems the hardware industry is faced with is that hardware comes with only a limited warrenty, and that software comes with none. Imagine a car being sold that routed the exhaust through the interior vents, and A/C/heat through the exhaust pipe! You'd never get away with that in a car, but a motherboard with a comperable problem (keylock and HD led connectors routed wrong) was released by Asus not so long ago (thier dual AMD processor motherboard shipped like this.) When hardware can and does sell with serious design flaws, that can never be repaired, not even with firmware upgrades then how can software ever be expected to be able to run stably on it? Until a sane level of anti-lemon laws are applied to the industry we'll all be booting into edsels...
Just to correct you, 80 cents on the dollar of the price of MS windows (at the average price MS sells it at) is profit. Given that a viable economic model requires only 50%-100% profit, the actual (average) price of windows should be 30-40 cents on the dollar of what microsoft currently sells it for. Given that windows is on average 250%-333% overpriced, or 60-70% of the price of windows is the 'monopoly tax' windows users pay. MS word suffers the same problem (only worse), about average pricing. Fortunately at the OEM price point the monopoly tax is least visible (as per the legal settlement, which has nothing to do with retail pricing, but only OEM pricing), which is why white-box vendors almost always bundle software to attract customers. I can as Office XP 2k2 for $35 in added cost to a PC, but can claim that it saves the customer $450 (because over full-retail it does.) I'm building systems out of my house, I don't have a contract with microsoft anywhere, and frankly the settlement was to make sure people like me could compete with the likes of dell, at least on the price of microsoft products.
I've known dialup users who downloaded way more ISOs than I ever have on cable modem (about 12 or so, mostly linux or freebsd distros I really wanted on CDs) One person I knew averaged nearly a gig a day off dialup (24/7 leaching, primarily from usenet feeds, which are A. local, and B. 2:1-4:1 compressable when connecting over a compressed dial-up connection C. can be scheduled as a continous batch run with software like Agent)
It's not that dial-up users can't download ISOs, but rather that most people don't have the time/patience to do it. for that matter, most cable/DSL connections don't come with enough bandwith for many people's patience. Last time FreeBSD had new ISOs it took me 15 minutes to find an unofficial mirror, and 2-3 hours to DL the iso, and I'm paying $50 a month for cable modem 800kbit/200kbit (100 KB/s / 25 KB/s) which is the highest consumer bandwith level offered by my ISP.
It is real, but it requires modification to the gamecube with a bios swapper + modchip And a mod to the drive, to enable it to read industry standard DVD-r. Not an easy feat. And at nearly $9 (retail) a blank for mini-DVD-r it's not nearly as cheap. If all three had chosen mini-DVD style media then the pricing and availability would drop, but not by much. DVD-r blanks are made using the same process as CD-r, and yet they're nowhere near as cheap. Although they've finally hit the $1 and below prices, depending on where you buy it (and the quality of the media). But you don't see nearly as much about GC mods, even though both were released at the same time. Either there is more demand for the X-box mod, or else the it really is that much harder to make a working mod for the GC.
have you ever tried to Encode a DivX file on a 1.0 Ghz? how about a 3.0 Ghz? which one is more tolerable? I get what you're saying about processors, but really the reason it gets as low as $50 is because esenetially, that is as low as the price can get before someone starts loosing a lot of money. If we at some point decided that the P-4 3.06 W/HT was the last CPU core we ever needed to design, eventually they'd be able to be sold for $50 profitablly, and with no R&D research it's just a matter of time and volume before the rest of the expenses can be paid. AMD can eventually make money, because at some point development into future technologies will be exhausted... and future techologies are the most expensive ones to research.
Actually, the price difference between an alienware Area-51M notebook and a Inspiron 8200 is under $1,000. Let's compare Alienware 51-m Configures as P-4 3.06 W/HT 15" UltraXGA display 1600x1200 Intel 845E + ICH3M chipset 512 MB PC 2100 2 So-dimm 40 GB 5400 RPM HD Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB (Specially selected Radeon 9000 pro cores used in this) Standard audio (extigy available, but for argument's sake I consiter the extigy an upgrade) Floppy drive 24x10x24x CD-rw/8x DVD-rom Integrated lan/modem Windows XP professional (home available at a $58 savings, but hyperthreading requires Pro) 1 year tech support (free) alienware t-shirt + 1 year subscription to CGM Total = $3044 ($61 more for most custom colors) Inspiron 8200 P-4-M 2.0 Intel chipset/unspecified 512 MB PC 2100 2 So-dimm 40 GB 5400 RPM HD 15" UltraXGA monitor, 1400x1050 res (1600x1200 capable display costs $130 more) Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB Standard audio Floppy drive 24x10x24x CD-rw/8x DVD-rom Integrated lan/modem Windows XP Home (pro availavle for ($79 more) 1 year tech support (free) 6 months of your choice: AOL/MSN/Earthlink dialup & Lexmark Z35 (no cable included) Total 2116
That's a whopping $928 savings, or, a $792 savings if same resolution capable displays are used. drop that another $79 if the same OS is used. so for a savings of $713 you're going with a processor that Lacks hyperthreading, is running at only 2/3 the clockspeed of the alienware (2.2 ghz is out of stock, and would cost you another $70 dropping the savings to $643).
Dell also has a $200 mail-in rebate, if you Remember to send it in, by the time they get the system mailed out to you. But even so, a 33% improvment in clockspeed alone makes the alienware much more attractive. Keep in mind that hyperthreading can make the 3.06 look and feel faster and more responsive than a 3.6 GHz p-4, even though benchmarks show that it has a negligable difference in most benchmarks.
The dell has a better battery life, and you can watch a (2 hour) DVD with it on just a fully charged battery. That life will drop rapidly, and to a comperable range (considering clock speed differencs) as the alienware when running games. The dell has it's advantages, sure, but the Nvidia Geforce4go is priced a full $120 below the ATI 9000 for a simple reason. the Geforce4go can't compete at all when it comes to framerate, or DVD battery life. mobility 9000 has hardware DVD decoding, which works with PowerDVD and better DVD playback software, it also shuts down unused portions of the core, such as the entire 3-d portion of the core, while performing DVD playback. I agree, ATI doesn't have as good driver support, but the radeon 9000 drivers are at a mature state by now, so that isn't a Real issue to gamers. the radeon 9000 will also be playable with doom3, while the geforce4go is just barely inside the minimum requirements for the doom3 engine. later games that push that engine to it's limits will likely run terribly, if at all, on the geforce4go. ATI also has provided some technical information (but not the stuff they're afraid of nvidia getting ahold of) to programmers in the open source community. Nividia offers closed source drivers, for linux, FreeBSD, and windows. While this means nvidia's driver shoould work the same under any OS, it also means that only nvidia can fix the bugs in the driver. if as some point they fork the unified driver scheme, or stop including backwards compatability for obsolete graphic card models that any bugs that remain in the closed source drivers are unfixable. BTW, ATI's cards don't suck, it's always been the drivers that suck, and they usually get better after a while. ATI is also the performance leader until the 50 pound (refering to the weight of the heatsink/exhaust pipe) behmoth NV30 "GeForceFX" is released.
For gamers, it seems pretty clear that the alienware is not only the better choice, but more reasonably priced for what you get with it. For anyone else, it's a measure of weighing the issues involved. price/performance/battery life/weight. because yes, the behemoth alienware comes in at a whopping 9.7 lbs (with battery) compared to 7.64 lbs for the Dell. a 2 lbs difference might make a difference to some people, although compared to lugging a mid-tower case to a lan party the convienence is obvious, even if you 'decide' that you need to play on a CRT. With a carrying case you can bring both in in a single trip, and without breaking your back (unless it's a big CRT).
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Mobile vs. Desktop Gaming
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This is a goatse.cx redirect, with a url long enough you have to copy/paste to notice it. second of all, it's not even right. ATI has focused on keeping power consumption low, to reduce the problem with heat dissipation. True, Nvidia is throwing out blast furnace cards that Require an air-intake... but ATI is managing to keep ahead of nvidia, while still sticking to low form factor heatsinkfans instead of 5 lbs monster copper heatsinks that could easily snap the AGP port right off the motherboard, if transported installed.
Alienware's 51m is located Here It comes with the Radeon 9000 pro standard now, and optionally you can get the new P-4 3.06 GHz With HyperThreading. Hyperthreading is worth it, and this laptop is ideal not just for gamers, but since adobe runs faster on a P-4 with H/T eanabled (see the Tom's video for proof -- 3.06 H/T enabled beats a 3.6 noticably and visually in how long it takes for software to get back to you so you can actually start editing that video/image etc) I'm really glad to see the Gamer's PC vendors getting into the notebook market seriously though. It's about time serious PC users could get a laptop with Today's cutting edge technology, instead of last years technology from places like dell.
Now dodging other stuff (like an extinction-level event such as a comet-head impact) should not wait until the incoming comet is sighted. that depends on what you mean by 'sighted' if you mean waiting until one can see it unaided with the human eye, then you're absolutely on the ball there. however, even gravity slingshot comets take months to travel through the solar system... even if we somehow, with all our fancy radio telelscopes and computer aided optical telescopes manage to not realise a rather large chung of mass is on a colision course with the earth until after it's passed pluto we've still got a matter of months to say, put rockets on it and move it into a collision course with jupiter, or blow it up whichever is easier. And remember, the weapons of mass destruction we have now make hiroshima look like a mosquito bite... we can easily pack a billon tons of TNT worth in explosive force into play against an incoming projectile, and thermonuclear bombs are a lot cleaner for the bang than a pure fission bomb.
Now on to the conclusion which ironically holds more truth than the rest of the post. Yes someone who bought a celeron 2 to 3 years ago wouldn't be getting a significant upgrade, but do you really think someone who bought a $600-700 dollar computer 3 years ago would be upgrading it with a $200 computer? I think not. This computer would make an excellent low end student computer or for a first time buyer. It really is a great deal for someone who wants to give their kid a computer do school work on, surf the inet, download mp3s, etc. As this was probably the only point my post was modded up for, I'd like to defend my argument a little further.
Bare Bones Assembled &Tested with CPU Athlon XP 2000+ 1.67GHz, RETAIL BOX(3yr.war)NEW SOYO KT400 DRAGON Ultra,RAID,3xDDR/400/333,ATA/ 133,8xAGP,4chan.Snd,LAN,2.0USB,400w Mid Twr/2USB Price: $ 269 + Ship: $15.00 - 29.00 INSURED
Very good board, in a stock case with a possibly dubious powersupply, but soyo boards aren't as picky as asus about a good powersupply. It probablly comes with an inadquate HSF, so I'll include a $30 copper one in the overall price.
So far $330, and still no HD of cd, or graphic card, nor a keyboard/mouse, nor a modem, But remember, a MODEM is Extra on the $200 linux box. We've also, got a RAID controller, and 5.1 sound onboard, even.
The onboard sound probably has bugs in it, if it's like most of the motherboard 5.1 sound I've tried using, so you're out a little bit more if you plan on doing anything like video capture, unless you're importing DV video, which would require a firewire card, or a USB 2.0 DV Studio product.
Those are all pretty optional, the onboard sound usually only have bugs with capturing sound, not with playback. So optionally a better soundcard would start at $100. An 80 GB HD can be had for around $80 if you shop around a little. and a combo DVD-rom/CD-RW drive starts at $60, although the one I personally recomend is $70 (LG Electronics, not a big name, but excellent drive for what you pay, in My experience). A graphic card is a very important part of a computer, so the least card I can reccommend for a frugal budget is a Geforce4 440MX 128MB, the 128MB will become important later on, so even though an (old) Geforce3 card might bench higher without enough video ram eventually some games won't run on the geforce3 that would on the Geforce4 budget card. By then you'd probably need a new card to play anyways, but at least you'd get to play the game that runs too choppy to be playable, that makes you upgrade to a faster computer. I almost forgot, RAM Personally I recomend spending a little more on this item too, OCZ Ultra 256MB DDR Memory PC-2700 333Hz Rev. 3.2 Model# OCZ333256R32. w/ copper heatspreader, 333Mhz CL 2.0, 252 is about $90 but is guarenteed to run at CL 2.0 252 timings at DDR333 mode. So what's the damage? $645-$800 depending on if you go with the bare minimum, or get get a better sound and graphic card. Compared to the $200 wal-mart machine, you get something that easilly outclasses it by a factor of 4 (or better) and not exactly at 4x the price. I will admit that i neglected to consider certain advantages the $200 wal-mart PC has. For one, it doesn't require A/C or huge fans/water cooling to avoid premature thermal death in the summers... So if you live in a house without AC a hot CPU like the athlon might be a bad Idea. But for the 'value' you can do better. programs and applications with respond faster, you can save weeks just on Encoding of mp3s if you have a substantial CD library to convert. It does have a valid market segment, but you should really make sure that you don't recomend this box to people who will end up trashing it in a few years so it can contaminate chinese rivers with lead and toxic chemicals. If you're not planning on giving the wal-mart box a good home for at least 5 years, you're Not the right person to be buying it. And yes, I realize it is 'fast' enough for many people, but many people don't realize how much a computer can do... One more advantge to the Soyo, it comes with a nice compactflash/smartmedia reader/usb hub (at least a $30 value) so for anyone planning on getting a digital camera, the Soyo board is the way to go. And I do realize that's a minor perk, and that the camera itself should work fine with these linux walmart PCs, especially since they're mainly USB Mass Storarge Class devices. But you can save batteries (although likely not power.) and not time (like you would with a PC Card adapter, since the soyo adapter is USB 1.1)
Granted, the graphic card has enough memory, But does the Processor have enough power? The Cyrix processor Lacks a FPU. Without FPU you're talking 1/3 the playback speed, on MMX Enhanced FPU requiring multi-media applications. That's right, this 800 MHz-1.0 GHz cyrix chip is going to run about as fast as a Celeron 333-450. Everything that doesn't need FPU integers is going to run as snappy as on a 1.0 ghz system, but video, audio, math intensive routines etc, are all goint to be hosed by the fact that they're not optimized for no-FPU cpus, and as such a FPU has to be Emulated to perform DivX playback. Now you're probably wondering "but my Pocket PC PDA can play DivX.." Which is true, up to a point, and that point is that at extremely low resolutions, an an extremely low resolution screen, DivX playback becomes possible. and the Windows Media PocketPC edition is designed to optimize for a no-fpu environment, so, even though a DivX codec might need to emulate FPU, nothing else on the system is, so you can get by. so forget 1024x768 resolution on the cyrix PCs for DivX playback, you'll have to full screen the movie, and decode at it's Native resolution, not at the current desktop resolution. avoiding the scaling should save enough cycles to allow clean playback. but, again, only because the DivX codec can turn off most features that enhance visual quality when playing back on a slower machine. Also, keep in mind that your calculations are only per-frame, and that can only hold true if the video memory can dump and rewrite the data at least 30 times per second. With shared memory, you might have problems, as you need to use 70MB/s of the memory thruput Just for the video card's usage... the decoder is also goine to use an identical amount of memory thruput, plus whatever memory thruput the OS and the codec need for themselves. True, even SDRAM should have enough thruput, but theory and practice aren't the same, playback is going to take more out of these systems, and stress it harder. Getting these cyrix $200 systems is almost like getting a 3 year old celeron box... for someone who has a three year old celeron, they might be looking at the current crop of computers with envy, but if they bought this bargain machine from wal-mart they'd be dissapointed. I really can only recommend this machine for people so financially strapped that it's the $200 linux box, or nothing. Or people willing to use it as a $200 all-in-one firewall/router/(possibly a personal ftp/webserver), and who don't have linux compatable hardware in thier old PC. (eg: a machine that would be a nightmare to try to get linux running on)
That reminds me of that movie... the one where they sent in these long range nuclear payload aircraft, and it's on mistake and (this is pre ICBM of course) this one cowboy like guy is so dedicated, that he makes it through antiairtcraft fire, which takes out his radio. So they keep on course, and then the bomb won't detatch, over the target site, and so this guy kicks at it until it (and him riding it) are loosed from the plane, and the movie ends with some stock footage of an above ground atomic test. He seemed, awful happy to ride that bomb into the target site. Now if only I could remember the name of the movie... The reason I said 10 Gs was certain death, is that if you black out, you're almost certain to die, if you were at all responsible for flying the craft. I seem to recall that those rocket sled guys drastically shortened their lifespans, by subjecting themselves to such high Gs. I'd also like to point out to you that the parts are only stress tested to survive hundreds of Gs, for a saftey factor, that they're not really expected to have to handle that much. I'm not certain how much of that is safety margin, but as the testing equipment only goes to 200 Gs, it's not 'hundreds' of Gs, at most it would be somewhere over 'a hundred' Gs, and not the plural. I'm even sceptical that they surpass 100Gs in operation.. but that's just because at 100 Gs there is an awful lot that can go wrong, even with parts tested to withstand upto 200 Gs. What if you hit a piece of orbital debris? if it weighs an ounce it's probablly packing more oomph than a stick of dynamite. Also, unless you're on an arc, 100 Gg of linear acceleration is over 1/3 the speed of light, of course the missles are on an arc, but that arc has a pretty big radius, so the increase in G forces is probablly less than double or triple. They're built to withstand more than 100 Gs so that the russians can't seed the space above them with ball bearings as a defensive shield. Remember, these things are being shot at, not just dealing with rentry forces, they want a glancing hit that lacks stoping power to just bounce off, not to rip the bomb to shreds like it's made of paper, or break the guidance system so it hits some field instead of moscow. Besides, I thought (originally) that you were on topic, thinking of having people shot into space and deal with with hundreds of Gs, and I had to correct that. And before ICBMS all out nuclear arsenal had cockpits (Aircraft bombers), and now that we've decommissioned almost all the ICBMs, in favor of sub delivered tridents, the subs have if not a cockpit, a crew in the sub at least. Just for fun, all our missles that were aimed at the former soviet union have been reprogrammed to targets in the middle of the ocean, where noone, not even shipping routes are close to, but it would take all of 10 seconds to restore all the old target coordinates.
Empty space IE a hard vacume has no temperature, but There is no Hard vacume in this solar system, and if light readings are any indication the rest of the universe is gradually becoming a soft vacume as well. As a matter of fact, the actual temperature at Low earth orbit is quite literally far beyond the melting point of any metal we have, Fortunately there is SO little matter that they can't actually melt anything. And in fact, the temperature is superheated by the fact that there is so much radiation, and so little place for that energy to go once it's in the few particles of gas that make up a soft vacume. Cooling is indeed a problem, however, as the only method of cooling is to vent waste air or fluid, which becomes a potential threat to future low earth orbit satelites, as it retains all the potential energy, and the mass that doesn't boil into gas will freeze, because of the potential energy being ripped away by the effect of a near freezing temeperature boiling point (for water) in a near vacume. of course, venting also contributes a lot of kinetic energy into the droplets of ice, so they aren't easy to recapture... This is why the moon is ideal for a permanent space presence, because there may be a LOT of ice at the poles, from comet and metoerite impacts, and the ice would serve both as a source of fresh water, and as cooling. habitats could be burried under the natural radiation shield of the moon's surface, although some research wouldn't be applicable, since it needs the microgravity of a low earth orbit to develop.
The on rentry bubble, even an ICBM suffers the greatest Gs while accelerating, during the 5-10 minutes it takes the missle to reach the zeinith of it's orbit, compared to the hour and a half the shuttle takes to acheive LEO.. And the ICBM still only pulls around 20-40 Gs (not sure the exact), afterall you don't want to release enough energy to cause the warhead to go off. Yes, it's true, ICBM parts are Stress tested for up to 200 Gs, but not because in actual use the missle will reach that speed, but rather, to ensure the lowest possible failure rate at the actual G forces the missle will reach while accelerating. The LAST thing you want is a loaded ICBM falling back onto washington DC because a compontent couldn't take the G forces of liftoff. And if you Read the article, this is about Manned, commercial space flight. Not obsolete cold-war mutually assured destruction warhead vehicles.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but There aren't 'hundreds of Gs on rentry.' Anything over 5 Gs is pretty dangerous, with anything over 10 Gs meaning Certain Death. G-forces are Usually highest at Launch, and in fact the Space Shuttle only generates 3-Gs as this article points out In fact, to achieve 100 Gs you would have to drive around the texas motor speedway corners at 1,056 miles per hour. Those are some mean turns, there. And remember just because the space shuttle can achieve a speed of 17,500 mph, doesn't mean it can make a 750 foot radius turn at that speed (which at 27,450 Gs would tear the shuttle to itty bits, and make puree out of the crew inside). Just for comparison sake, the G forces of accelerating, in a Straight line, at the speed of light is a mere 267 Gs. However, traveling around the curve at the Texas motor speedway at the speed of light would generate 3,110,837.4 Gs. Obviously, the tighter the curve you're making the higher the G forces. Hope this helped, and BTW, I used the speed that light travels in this solar system, not the theoretical speed in a pure vacume.
Of course, if china makes spamming illegal, you end up in a slave labor camp, err JAIL making radios 14 hours a day. yeah, Let the spammers move over to countries that might decide they make good slave labor someday. Spam that seems to come from china, usually isn't from china, it's from open relays. The spammers are pulling the same stunts that any con-artist would, by trying to stay two setps ahead of law enforcments attempts to track them down. Do you see con-artists moving over to china to practice thier trade? no, you don't. China is sure to have some spammers in their midsts once technology has pervaded thier society, but at this point in time, america is the heartland of spam, no matter what country it seems to be coming from. Because it's easier to stay a step ahead of the law here, due to the constitutional rights that are oh so slowly slipping away. then of course there are the spam kings who don't send scams, but rather work on the principal of sheer volume to make money spamming. someone, somewhere is going to accidently click that refferal link when thier kids are pulling on thier arm as they try to drag it to the trash, if you can send a few million of them every day, you're gonna make good money, without needing to run a scam.
You only had 2.5 years to build that nitrogen gas filled, oxygen free CD/DVD jukebox enclosure, with airlock, and little rubber glove things to open the CDs inside it. no oxygen, no degredation... that simple.
excuse me, but I happen to live in north dakota, and I don't see as how even if a melting of the polar caps causes a mini ice age how that would make all of north america and europe uninhabitable... didn't the native american's ancestors cross from siberia over to alaska durring the last ice age??? and they didn't even have central heating systems installed from sears... get a clue... just because you think 70 degrees is cold doesn't mean other people are perfectly happy with sub zero temperatures...
Keep in mind that since 1979 10% of the polar ice cap has melted, and yet there hasn't been a single costal city flooded. Remember, Ice is lower density than water, and the polar caps are a FRACTION of the size of the surface are of the worlds oceans. IF all the ice at both poles melted the world's oceans risings could be measured in inches. not in feet. And remember, the ice caps melting does not mean 'global warming' because in fact, the globe isn't warming... only the polar caps seem to be melting... and that could well be due to the dramatic weakening of the earth's magnetosphere over the past 200 years. Imagining cities around the globe flooding because of the ice caps melting is fantasy, because there isn't enough ice up there to actually raise the world's oceans. remember we already have tides, so a few inches won't cause any costal cities to flood, although the netherlands might want to evaluate their dikes, since sea level rising by an inch could increase the strain dramatically.
The beauty of hydrogen fuelcell power is that you can have a home solar cell rig to 'continously' replenish a home storage tank. mount a few ~$300 solar panels, and have an option to draw off the grid if the user needs extra for a trip or something. you essentially eliminate the need for gas stations, and for your average commuter you've got plenty of cheap driving power. Despite the expense fuel cell vehicles might be optimal for remote locations, where the infrastructure for internal combustion doesn't exist. not that there are many remote places left, but there are a few. The auto industry is very resistant to change, they don't like it. Also, keep in mind, hybrid cars are practically begging to be modded into fuelcell cars, since they already have regenerative breaking and electric motors. throw in fuel cells, a higher power electric motor to 'replace' the drive the car is expecting from it's combustion engine and you've got a fuelcell car, that's practically mass produced. This is a step in the right direction, because a drop in engine replacement and retrofited hydrogen tank can be added to hybrid vehicle at a fraction of the conversion cost of a car that lacks regenerative breaking etc.
Re:Clarification of "try this"
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LCD Round-up
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· Score: 2
You're missing the point, the LCD works Excelent at FAST motion updates, as good or better than a CRT, it's a slow pan and scan that appears to visually blur. Not fast motion, because in fact a LCD can refresh a pixel FASTER than a CRT, which can only change a single pixel at a time. the LCD can chage every pixel at the same time. to human eyes this makes a slow pan look blurry because we see the old pixel and the new pixel at the same time, thus making it appear to blur, because of the proximity of the color and intensity in the before and after. But high speed (eg: Twitch game graphics) are actually updating too fast to 'fool' the eye into thinking there is blurring. there is no bluring, and in fact LCDs can refresh better than a CRT, especially for sudden changes. In fact the program you mentioned if you drag the box in the middle through the wav it looks better and cleaner than it does when you hold down the arrow at the side, and has the same blanking effect on both crt and LCD. A possible work around to your slow scroll problem would be to draw a solid black (to emulate a CRT) between visual frames while slowly scrolling. It should be possible on a fast enough notebook to make the slower scrolling look more palateable to the human eye, because the problem is not in the display, but rather in the fact that the human eye can't even percieve 30 frames as being individual within a second.... and so they blur together, and thus the imperfact images appear to look better.
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just be careful, that exploding motherboard/psu trick is only fun if it doesn't come out of your paycheck. rebooting puts a high strain on the capacitors, and if pressed rapidly enough they can burst into flames yay!
you mean c:/windows/user.dat and C:/windows/system.dat aren't as easy to backup as a textfile? you can even set windows to keep the last 12 sets of registies (or more) to ensure you have enough backups...
(okay that's win98, but ntuser.dat is in a lot more places...)
That link leaves on question begging to be asked:
If a hard rock cafe server has a critical stop, can anyone hear it?
Oh and hey, Guess what, they only used linux for apache, but you could have read that at the link you posted, the reason they saved money is because they ditched a complex and unwieldy solaris/netware/etc system.
Keep in mind too that an overpriced fast-food bar/grill with loud music and lines for seating doesn't exactly require a whole fleet of computers to operate. It takes a lot of min-wage grunts, serving tables etc.
Downtime doesn't exactly cause hard rock to loose money, especially if they can get the system back up relatively quicky. because there is this funny thing called a 'pen and paper' and a 'calculator' and with those basic tools, they can take orders, and determine how much to charge, and even calculate tip and taxes.
On the other hand a bank could loose it's shirt if transactions got lost or delayed due to a system crash -- and every minute of downtime costs their organization money.
yeah, if you want a system that minumum wage grunts can admin, and a few crashes won't kill you windows is ideal. And that's what it looks like the hard rock cafe wanted.
Never say never. I ran a FreeBSD (a 3.x version, I believe) dial-out server for my lan that used both packet and header compression to achieve a fairly consistant 'reported' downstream of 7.0kB/second (from a prodigy dial-up account no less) on binary transfers, and anywhere from 14-22kB per second on usenet feeds. My dial-out box was a mere 486, with an external Zoom 56k modem, probably using the 56kFlex standard, or possibly firmware upgraded at some point. For what it's worth the copper line was run direct from the phone company box, had no splits on it, except a line seperator, near the end (to allow a phone to be hooked up to the primary line) and yes, the dialout connection dropped frequently (2-3 times a day), but was alway back up within 15-20 seconds, (gotta love PPPD).
People who say you can't get 7.0kB (binary) on a dialup don't cut fresh copper for the dedicated run to the telco's incoming line box, and don't take the time to properly configure a ppp dameon to utilize any compresion schemes supported by their ISP to maximize performance.
Remember, also, that older usenet encoding relied on converting the data to 7-bit ascii, which ensured a minimum of 2:1 compression when packet compression is enabled -- for only a 20% increase in filesize. I'm not sure how well the 'new smaller' binary postings work with packet compression, but I'd almost be willing to wager that it eliminates the ability to perform any compression whatsoever, as dial-up modems have crude (yet highly effective on 7-bit ascii) compression capabilities.
If anyone with packet compression enabled can confirm or deny that in fact, the older usenet posting methods download faster for them, it would be a great help... as I haven't had two phone lines for a long time, and I'm not entirely sure that cablemodems even has a method to implement packet/header compression, and seriously doubt my isp is configured properly for it.
So far, recent problems with IE has caused my sister ona one of my friends to install mozilla to use as their primary browser. I also got my friend to download and install Xchat, because apparently she couldn't get the mirc download link to work (probably from a download site.)
Mozilla is the open source pet project of netscape, but Xchat is just a standard open source gui irc client. Obviously some open source applications are made easy enough that normal people would consider using them, yet many fail to design the application with any cares about what other people might find useful, in terms of an interface.
True you're going to get a lot of useless advice, and you probably have limited resources to implement features, but that's why you just add features that seem to be beneficial to a to-do list, and hope that if you don't have the time/skills, a contributor might decide to help add the feature for you.
Xchat surpassed mirc in terms of functionality (perl and python scripting) a long time ago, and has been comperable on user-friendlyness to mirc for a long time.
So yes, open source software can become as user-friendly, and retain more functionality than existing closed source alternatives. The alternative can also be said, GAIM (one of many open source IM clients) has been around a long time, and Trillian, an entirely closed source multiple IM client application outdoes GAIM in functionality, and arguably in userfriendlyness (since it's fully skinable, and skins can make apps looks and work in way that feels more natural to the end user, sometimes.)
Trillian isn't as mature as GAIM, and has only ever had 2 programmers working on it, and yet because they wanted to draw as many people as possible, they implemented the features they knew people wanted, as fast as they could, because they wanted to be able to have a product people would eventually pay for.
So, in markets where there is money to be made closed source will almost always have the advantage.
On a side note, the current problems the hardware industry is faced with is that hardware comes with only a limited warrenty, and that software comes with none. Imagine a car being sold that routed the exhaust through the interior vents, and A/C/heat through the exhaust pipe! You'd never get away with that in a car, but a motherboard with a comperable problem (keylock and HD led connectors routed wrong) was released by Asus not so long ago (thier dual AMD processor motherboard shipped like this.)
When hardware can and does sell with serious design flaws, that can never be repaired, not even with firmware upgrades then how can software ever be expected to be able to run stably on it?
Until a sane level of anti-lemon laws are applied to the industry we'll all be booting into edsels...
Just to correct you, 80 cents on the dollar of the price of MS windows (at the average price MS sells it at) is profit. Given that a viable economic model requires only 50%-100% profit, the actual (average) price of windows should be 30-40 cents on the dollar of what microsoft currently sells it for. Given that windows is on average 250%-333% overpriced, or 60-70% of the price of windows is the 'monopoly tax' windows users pay. MS word suffers the same problem (only worse), about average pricing. Fortunately at the OEM price point the monopoly tax is least visible (as per the legal settlement, which has nothing to do with retail pricing, but only OEM pricing), which is why white-box vendors almost always bundle software to attract customers. I can as Office XP 2k2 for $35 in added cost to a PC, but can claim that it saves the customer $450 (because over full-retail it does.) I'm building systems out of my house, I don't have a contract with microsoft anywhere, and frankly the settlement was to make sure people like me could compete with the likes of dell, at least on the price of microsoft products.
I've known dialup users who downloaded way more ISOs than I ever have on cable modem (about 12 or so, mostly linux or freebsd distros I really wanted on CDs)
One person I knew averaged nearly a gig a day off dialup (24/7 leaching, primarily from usenet feeds, which are A. local, and B. 2:1-4:1 compressable when connecting over a compressed dial-up connection C. can be scheduled as a continous batch run with software like Agent)
It's not that dial-up users can't download ISOs, but rather that most people don't have the time/patience to do it. for that matter, most cable/DSL connections don't come with enough bandwith for many people's patience.
Last time FreeBSD had new ISOs it took me 15 minutes to find an unofficial mirror, and 2-3 hours to DL the iso, and I'm paying $50 a month for cable modem 800kbit/200kbit (100 KB/s / 25 KB/s) which is the highest consumer bandwith level offered by my ISP.
It is real, but it requires modification to the gamecube with a bios swapper + modchip And a mod to the drive, to enable it to read industry standard DVD-r.
Not an easy feat. And at nearly $9 (retail) a blank for mini-DVD-r it's not nearly as cheap.
If all three had chosen mini-DVD style media then the pricing and availability would drop, but not by much. DVD-r blanks are made using the same process as CD-r, and yet they're nowhere near as cheap. Although they've finally hit the $1 and below prices, depending on where you buy it (and the quality of the media).
But you don't see nearly as much about GC mods, even though both were released at the same time.
Either there is more demand for the X-box mod, or else the it really is that much harder to make a working mod for the GC.
have you ever tried to Encode a DivX file on a 1.0 Ghz? how about a 3.0 Ghz? which one is more tolerable?
I get what you're saying about processors, but really the reason it gets as low as $50 is because esenetially, that is as low as the price can get before someone starts loosing a lot of money.
If we at some point decided that the P-4 3.06 W/HT was the last CPU core we ever needed to design, eventually they'd be able to be sold for $50 profitablly, and with no R&D research it's just a matter of time and volume before the rest of the expenses can be paid.
AMD can eventually make money, because at some point development into future technologies will be exhausted... and future techologies are the most expensive ones to research.
Actually, the price difference between an alienware Area-51M notebook and a Inspiron 8200 is under $1,000. Let's compare Alienware 51-m Configures as
.
P-4 3.06 W/HT
15" UltraXGA display 1600x1200
Intel 845E + ICH3M chipset
512 MB PC 2100 2 So-dimm
40 GB 5400 RPM HD
Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB (Specially selected Radeon 9000 pro cores used in this)
Standard audio (extigy available, but for argument's sake I consiter the extigy an upgrade)
Floppy drive
24x10x24x CD-rw/8x DVD-rom
Integrated lan/modem
Windows XP professional (home available at a $58 savings, but hyperthreading requires Pro)
1 year tech support
(free) alienware t-shirt + 1 year subscription to CGM
Total = $3044 ($61 more for most custom colors)
Inspiron 8200
P-4-M 2.0
Intel chipset/unspecified
512 MB PC 2100 2 So-dimm
40 GB 5400 RPM HD
15" UltraXGA monitor, 1400x1050 res (1600x1200 capable display costs $130 more)
Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB
Standard audio
Floppy drive
24x10x24x CD-rw/8x DVD-rom
Integrated lan/modem
Windows XP Home (pro availavle for ($79 more)
1 year tech support
(free) 6 months of your choice: AOL/MSN/Earthlink dialup & Lexmark Z35 (no cable included)
Total 2116
That's a whopping $928 savings, or, a $792 savings if same resolution capable displays are used. drop that another $79 if the same OS is used. so for a savings of $713 you're going with a processor that Lacks hyperthreading, is running at only 2/3 the clockspeed of the alienware (2.2 ghz is out of stock, and would cost you another $70 dropping the savings to $643).
Dell also has a $200 mail-in rebate, if you Remember to send it in, by the time they get the system mailed out to you. But even so, a 33% improvment in clockspeed alone makes the alienware much more attractive. Keep in mind that hyperthreading can make the 3.06 look and feel faster and more responsive than a 3.6 GHz p-4, even though benchmarks show that it has a negligable difference in most benchmarks.
The dell has a better battery life, and you can watch a (2 hour) DVD with it on just a fully charged battery. That life will drop rapidly, and to a comperable range (considering clock speed differencs) as the alienware when running games. The dell has it's advantages, sure, but the Nvidia Geforce4go is priced a full $120 below the ATI 9000 for a simple reason. the Geforce4go can't compete at all when it comes to framerate, or DVD battery life. mobility 9000 has hardware DVD decoding, which works with PowerDVD and better DVD playback software, it also shuts down unused portions of the core, such as the entire 3-d portion of the core, while performing DVD playback.
I agree, ATI doesn't have as good driver support, but the radeon 9000 drivers are at a mature state by now, so that isn't a Real issue to gamers. the radeon 9000 will also be playable with doom3, while the geforce4go is just barely inside the minimum requirements for the doom3 engine. later games that push that engine to it's limits will likely run terribly, if at all, on the geforce4go
ATI also has provided some technical information (but not the stuff they're afraid of nvidia getting ahold of) to programmers in the open source community. Nividia offers closed source drivers, for linux, FreeBSD, and windows.
While this means nvidia's driver shoould work the same under any OS, it also means that only nvidia can fix the bugs in the driver. if as some point they fork the unified driver scheme, or stop including backwards compatability for obsolete graphic card models that any bugs that remain in the closed source drivers are unfixable.
BTW, ATI's cards don't suck, it's always been the drivers that suck, and they usually get better after a while. ATI is also the performance leader until the 50 pound (refering to the weight of the heatsink/exhaust pipe) behmoth NV30 "GeForceFX" is released.
For gamers, it seems pretty clear that the alienware is not only the better choice, but more reasonably priced for what you get with it.
For anyone else, it's a measure of weighing the issues involved. price/performance/battery life/weight. because yes, the behemoth alienware comes in at a whopping 9.7 lbs (with battery) compared to 7.64 lbs for the Dell. a 2 lbs difference might make a difference to some people, although compared to lugging a mid-tower case to a lan party the convienence is obvious, even if you 'decide' that you need to play on a CRT. With a carrying case you can bring both in in a single trip, and without breaking your back (unless it's a big CRT).
This is a goatse.cx redirect, with a url long enough you have to copy/paste to notice it.
second of all, it's not even right.
ATI has focused on keeping power consumption low, to reduce the problem with heat dissipation. True, Nvidia is throwing out blast furnace cards that Require an air-intake... but ATI is managing to keep ahead of nvidia, while still sticking to low form factor heatsinkfans instead of 5 lbs monster copper heatsinks that could easily snap the AGP port right off the motherboard, if transported installed.
Alienware's 51m is located Here
It comes with the Radeon 9000 pro standard now, and optionally you can get the new P-4 3.06 GHz With HyperThreading.
Hyperthreading is worth it, and this laptop is ideal not just for gamers, but since adobe runs faster on a P-4 with H/T eanabled (see the Tom's video for proof -- 3.06 H/T enabled beats a 3.6 noticably and visually in how long it takes for software to get back to you so you can actually start editing that video/image etc)
I'm really glad to see the Gamer's PC vendors getting into the notebook market seriously though. It's about time serious PC users could get a laptop with Today's cutting edge technology, instead of last years technology from places like dell.
Now dodging other stuff (like an extinction-level event such as a comet-head impact) should not wait until the incoming comet is sighted.
that depends on what you mean by 'sighted'
if you mean waiting until one can see it unaided with the human eye, then you're absolutely on the ball there.
however, even gravity slingshot comets take months to travel through the solar system... even if we somehow, with all our fancy radio telelscopes and computer aided optical telescopes manage to not realise a rather large chung of mass is on a colision course with the earth until after it's passed pluto we've still got a matter of months to say, put rockets on it and move it into a collision course with jupiter, or blow it up whichever is easier. And remember, the weapons of mass destruction we have now make hiroshima look like a mosquito bite... we can easily pack a billon tons of TNT worth in explosive force into play against an incoming projectile, and thermonuclear bombs are a lot cleaner for the bang than a pure fission bomb.
Now on to the conclusion which ironically holds more truth than the rest of the post. Yes someone who bought a celeron 2 to 3 years ago wouldn't be getting a significant upgrade, but do you really think someone who bought a $600-700 dollar computer 3 years ago would be upgrading it with a $200 computer? I think not. This computer would make an excellent low end student computer or for a first time buyer. It really is a great deal for someone who wants to give their kid a computer do school work on, surf the inet, download mp3s, etc.
As this was probably the only point my post was modded up for, I'd like to defend my argument a little further.
Bare Bones Assembled &Tested with CPU Athlon XP 2000+ 1.67GHz, RETAIL BOX(3yr.war)NEW SOYO KT400 DRAGON Ultra,RAID,3xDDR/400/333,ATA/ 133,8xAGP,4chan.Snd,LAN,2.0USB,400w Mid Twr/2USB
Price: $ 269 + Ship: $15.00 - 29.00 INSURED
Very good board, in a stock case with a possibly dubious powersupply, but soyo boards aren't as picky as asus about a good powersupply. It probablly comes with an inadquate HSF, so I'll include a $30 copper one in the overall price.
So far $330, and still no HD of cd, or graphic card, nor a keyboard/mouse, nor a modem, But remember, a MODEM is Extra on the $200 linux box.
We've also, got a RAID controller, and 5.1 sound onboard, even.
The onboard sound probably has bugs in it, if it's like most of the motherboard 5.1 sound I've tried using, so you're out a little bit more if you plan on doing anything like video capture, unless you're importing DV video, which would require a firewire card, or a USB 2.0 DV Studio product.
Those are all pretty optional, the onboard sound usually only have bugs with capturing sound, not with playback. So optionally a better soundcard would start at $100. An 80 GB HD can be had for around $80 if you shop around a little. and a combo DVD-rom/CD-RW drive starts at $60, although the one I personally recomend is $70 (LG Electronics, not a big name, but excellent drive for what you pay, in My experience).
A graphic card is a very important part of a computer, so the least card I can reccommend for a frugal budget is a Geforce4 440MX 128MB, the 128MB will become important later on, so even though an (old) Geforce3 card might bench higher without enough video ram eventually some games won't run on the geforce3 that would on the Geforce4 budget card. By then you'd probably need a new card to play anyways, but at least you'd get to play the game that runs too choppy to be playable, that makes you upgrade to a faster computer.
I almost forgot, RAM Personally I recomend spending a little more on this item too, OCZ Ultra 256MB DDR Memory PC-2700 333Hz Rev. 3.2
Model# OCZ333256R32. w/ copper heatspreader, 333Mhz CL 2.0, 252 is about $90 but is guarenteed to run at CL 2.0 252 timings at DDR333 mode.
So what's the damage? $645-$800 depending on if you go with the bare minimum, or get get a better sound and graphic card.
Compared to the $200 wal-mart machine, you get something that easilly outclasses it by a factor of 4 (or better) and not exactly at 4x the price.
I will admit that i neglected to consider certain advantages the $200 wal-mart PC has. For one, it doesn't require A/C or huge fans/water cooling to avoid premature thermal death in the summers...
So if you live in a house without AC a hot CPU like the athlon might be a bad Idea.
But for the 'value' you can do better. programs and applications with respond faster, you can save weeks just on Encoding of mp3s if you have a substantial CD library to convert.
It does have a valid market segment, but you should really make sure that you don't recomend this box to people who will end up trashing it in a few years so it can contaminate chinese rivers with lead and toxic chemicals.
If you're not planning on giving the wal-mart box a good home for at least 5 years, you're Not the right person to be buying it.
And yes, I realize it is 'fast' enough for many people, but many people don't realize how much a computer can do...
One more advantge to the Soyo, it comes with a nice compactflash/smartmedia reader/usb hub (at least a $30 value) so for anyone planning on getting a digital camera, the Soyo board is the way to go. And I do realize that's a minor perk, and that the camera itself should work fine with these linux walmart PCs, especially since they're mainly USB Mass Storarge Class devices. But you can save batteries (although likely not power.) and not time (like you would with a PC Card adapter, since the soyo adapter is USB 1.1)
Granted, the graphic card has enough memory, But does the Processor have enough power? The Cyrix processor Lacks a FPU. Without FPU you're talking 1/3 the playback speed, on MMX Enhanced FPU requiring multi-media applications. That's right, this 800 MHz-1.0 GHz cyrix chip is going to run about as fast as a Celeron 333-450. Everything that doesn't need FPU integers is going to run as snappy as on a 1.0 ghz system, but video, audio, math intensive routines etc, are all goint to be hosed by the fact that they're not optimized for no-FPU cpus, and as such a FPU has to be Emulated to perform DivX playback.
Now you're probably wondering "but my Pocket PC PDA can play DivX.." Which is true, up to a point, and that point is that at extremely low resolutions, an an extremely low resolution screen, DivX playback becomes possible. and the Windows Media PocketPC edition is designed to optimize for a no-fpu environment, so, even though a DivX codec might need to emulate FPU, nothing else on the system is, so you can get by.
so forget 1024x768 resolution on the cyrix PCs for DivX playback, you'll have to full screen the movie, and decode at it's Native resolution, not at the current desktop resolution. avoiding the scaling should save enough cycles to allow clean playback. but, again, only because the DivX codec can turn off most features that enhance visual quality when playing back on a slower machine.
Also, keep in mind that your calculations are only per-frame, and that can only hold true if the video memory can dump and rewrite the data at least 30 times per second. With shared memory, you might have problems, as you need to use 70MB/s of the memory thruput Just for the video card's usage... the decoder is also goine to use an identical amount of memory thruput, plus whatever memory thruput the OS and the codec need for themselves. True, even SDRAM should have enough thruput, but theory and practice aren't the same, playback is going to take more out of these systems, and stress it harder.
Getting these cyrix $200 systems is almost like getting a 3 year old celeron box... for someone who has a three year old celeron, they might be looking at the current crop of computers with envy, but if they bought this bargain machine from wal-mart they'd be dissapointed.
I really can only recommend this machine for people so financially strapped that it's the $200 linux box, or nothing. Or people willing to use it as a $200 all-in-one firewall/router/(possibly a personal ftp/webserver), and who don't have linux compatable hardware in thier old PC. (eg: a machine that would be a nightmare to try to get linux running on)
That reminds me of that movie... the one where they sent in these long range nuclear payload aircraft, and it's on mistake and (this is pre ICBM of course) this one cowboy like guy is so dedicated, that he makes it through antiairtcraft fire, which takes out his radio. So they keep on course, and then the bomb won't detatch, over the target site, and so this guy kicks at it until it (and him riding it) are loosed from the plane, and the movie ends with some stock footage of an above ground atomic test.
He seemed, awful happy to ride that bomb into the target site.
Now if only I could remember the name of the movie...
The reason I said 10 Gs was certain death, is that if you black out, you're almost certain to die, if you were at all responsible for flying the craft. I seem to recall that those rocket sled guys drastically shortened their lifespans, by subjecting themselves to such high Gs.
I'd also like to point out to you that the parts are only stress tested to survive hundreds of Gs, for a saftey factor, that they're not really expected to have to handle that much. I'm not certain how much of that is safety margin, but as the testing equipment only goes to 200 Gs, it's not 'hundreds' of Gs, at most it would be somewhere over 'a hundred' Gs, and not the plural. I'm even sceptical that they surpass 100Gs in operation.. but that's just because at 100 Gs there is an awful lot that can go wrong, even with parts tested to withstand upto 200 Gs.
What if you hit a piece of orbital debris? if it weighs an ounce it's probablly packing more oomph than a stick of dynamite. Also, unless you're on an arc, 100 Gg of linear acceleration is over 1/3 the speed of light, of course the missles are on an arc, but that arc has a pretty big radius, so the increase in G forces is probablly less than double or triple.
They're built to withstand more than 100 Gs so that the russians can't seed the space above them with ball bearings as a defensive shield. Remember, these things are being shot at, not just dealing with rentry forces, they want a glancing hit that lacks stoping power to just bounce off, not to rip the bomb to shreds like it's made of paper, or break the guidance system so it hits some field instead of moscow.
Besides, I thought (originally) that you were on topic, thinking of having people shot into space and deal with with hundreds of Gs, and I had to correct that.
And before ICBMS all out nuclear arsenal had cockpits (Aircraft bombers), and now that we've decommissioned almost all the ICBMs, in favor of sub delivered tridents, the subs have if not a cockpit, a crew in the sub at least.
Just for fun, all our missles that were aimed at the former soviet union have been reprogrammed to targets in the middle of the ocean, where noone, not even shipping routes are close to, but it would take all of 10 seconds to restore all the old target coordinates.
Empty space IE a hard vacume has no temperature, but There is no Hard vacume in this solar system, and if light readings are any indication the rest of the universe is gradually becoming a soft vacume as well.
As a matter of fact, the actual temperature at Low earth orbit is quite literally far beyond the melting point of any metal we have, Fortunately there is SO little matter that they can't actually melt anything. And in fact, the temperature is superheated by the fact that there is so much radiation, and so little place for that energy to go once it's in the few particles of gas that make up a soft vacume.
Cooling is indeed a problem, however, as the only method of cooling is to vent waste air or fluid, which becomes a potential threat to future low earth orbit satelites, as it retains all the potential energy, and the mass that doesn't boil into gas will freeze, because of the potential energy being ripped away by the effect of a near freezing temeperature boiling point (for water) in a near vacume. of course, venting also contributes a lot of kinetic energy into the droplets of ice, so they aren't easy to recapture...
This is why the moon is ideal for a permanent space presence, because there may be a LOT of ice at the poles, from comet and metoerite impacts, and the ice would serve both as a source of fresh water, and as cooling. habitats could be burried under the natural radiation shield of the moon's surface, although some research wouldn't be applicable, since it needs the microgravity of a low earth orbit to develop.
The on rentry bubble, even an ICBM suffers the greatest Gs while accelerating, during the 5-10 minutes it takes the missle to reach the zeinith of it's orbit, compared to the hour and a half the shuttle takes to acheive LEO..
And the ICBM still only pulls around 20-40 Gs (not sure the exact), afterall you don't want to release enough energy to cause the warhead to go off. Yes, it's true, ICBM parts are Stress tested for up to 200 Gs, but not because in actual use the missle will reach that speed, but rather, to ensure the lowest possible failure rate at the actual G forces the missle will reach while accelerating.
The LAST thing you want is a loaded ICBM falling back onto washington DC because a compontent couldn't take the G forces of liftoff.
And if you Read the article, this is about Manned, commercial space flight. Not obsolete cold-war mutually assured destruction warhead vehicles.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but There aren't 'hundreds of Gs on rentry.' Anything over 5 Gs is pretty dangerous, with anything over 10 Gs meaning Certain Death. G-forces are Usually highest at Launch, and in fact the Space Shuttle only generates 3-Gs as this article points out
In fact, to achieve 100 Gs you would have to drive around the texas motor speedway corners at 1,056 miles per hour. Those are some mean turns, there. And remember just because the space shuttle can achieve a speed of 17,500 mph, doesn't mean it can make a 750 foot radius turn at that speed (which at 27,450 Gs would tear the shuttle to itty bits, and make puree out of the crew inside).
Just for comparison sake, the G forces of accelerating, in a Straight line, at the speed of light is a mere 267 Gs. However, traveling around the curve at the Texas motor speedway at the speed of light would generate 3,110,837.4 Gs.
Obviously, the tighter the curve you're making the higher the G forces.
Hope this helped, and BTW, I used the speed that light travels in this solar system, not the theoretical speed in a pure vacume.
Of course, if china makes spamming illegal, you end up in a slave labor camp, err JAIL making radios 14 hours a day. yeah, Let the spammers move over to countries that might decide they make good slave labor someday. Spam that seems to come from china, usually isn't from china, it's from open relays. The spammers are pulling the same stunts that any con-artist would, by trying to stay two setps ahead of law enforcments attempts to track them down. Do you see con-artists moving over to china to practice thier trade? no, you don't. China is sure to have some spammers in their midsts once technology has pervaded thier society, but at this point in time, america is the heartland of spam, no matter what country it seems to be coming from. Because it's easier to stay a step ahead of the law here, due to the constitutional rights that are oh so slowly slipping away. then of course there are the spam kings who don't send scams, but rather work on the principal of sheer volume to make money spamming. someone, somewhere is going to accidently click that refferal link when thier kids are pulling on thier arm as they try to drag it to the trash, if you can send a few million of them every day, you're gonna make good money, without needing to run a scam.
You only had 2.5 years to build that nitrogen gas filled, oxygen free CD/DVD jukebox enclosure, with airlock, and little rubber glove things to open the CDs inside it. no oxygen, no degredation... that simple.
excuse me, but I happen to live in north dakota, and I don't see as how even if a melting of the polar caps causes a mini ice age how that would make all of north america and europe uninhabitable...
didn't the native american's ancestors cross from siberia over to alaska durring the last ice age??? and they didn't even have central heating systems installed from sears... get a clue... just because you think 70 degrees is cold doesn't mean other people are perfectly happy with sub zero temperatures...
Keep in mind that since 1979 10% of the polar ice cap has melted, and yet there hasn't been a single costal city flooded.
Remember, Ice is lower density than water, and the polar caps are a FRACTION of the size of the surface are of the worlds oceans. IF all the ice at both poles melted the world's oceans risings could be measured in inches. not in feet.
And remember, the ice caps melting does not mean 'global warming' because in fact, the globe isn't warming... only the polar caps seem to be melting... and that could well be due to the dramatic weakening of the earth's magnetosphere over the past 200 years.
Imagining cities around the globe flooding because of the ice caps melting is fantasy, because there isn't enough ice up there to actually raise the world's oceans. remember we already have tides, so a few inches won't cause any costal cities to flood, although the netherlands might want to evaluate their dikes, since sea level rising by an inch could increase the strain dramatically.
The beauty of hydrogen fuelcell power is that you can have a home solar cell rig to 'continously' replenish a home storage tank. mount a few ~$300 solar panels, and have an option to draw off the grid if the user needs extra for a trip or something. you essentially eliminate the need for gas stations, and for your average commuter you've got plenty of cheap driving power.
Despite the expense fuel cell vehicles might be optimal for remote locations, where the infrastructure for internal combustion doesn't exist. not that there are many remote places left, but there are a few.
The auto industry is very resistant to change, they don't like it. Also, keep in mind, hybrid cars are practically begging to be modded into fuelcell cars, since they already have regenerative breaking and electric motors.
throw in fuel cells, a higher power electric motor to 'replace' the drive the car is expecting from it's combustion engine and you've got a fuelcell car, that's practically mass produced.
This is a step in the right direction, because a drop in engine replacement and retrofited hydrogen tank can be added to hybrid vehicle at a fraction of the conversion cost of a car that lacks regenerative breaking etc.
You're missing the point, the LCD works Excelent at FAST motion updates, as good or better than a CRT, it's a slow pan and scan that appears to visually blur. Not fast motion, because in fact a LCD can refresh a pixel FASTER than a CRT, which can only change a single pixel at a time. the LCD can chage every pixel at the same time. to human eyes this makes a slow pan look blurry because we see the old pixel and the new pixel at the same time, thus making it appear to blur, because of the proximity of the color and intensity in the before and after. But high speed (eg: Twitch game graphics) are actually updating too fast to 'fool' the eye into thinking there is blurring. there is no bluring, and in fact LCDs can refresh better than a CRT, especially for sudden changes.
In fact the program you mentioned if you drag the box in the middle through the wav it looks better and cleaner than it does when you hold down the arrow at the side, and has the same blanking effect on both crt and LCD. A possible work around to your slow scroll problem would be to draw a solid black (to emulate a CRT) between visual frames while slowly scrolling. It should be possible on a fast enough notebook to make the slower scrolling look more palateable to the human eye, because the problem is not in the display, but rather in the fact that the human eye can't even percieve 30 frames as being individual within a second.... and so they blur together, and thus the imperfact images appear to look better.