but your third reads like the blind rantings of an faithless being. Religious symbolism has meaning, it's not always 'profound' the author may not ever realize on a conscious level the meaning. the religious symbolism was put in there because it was popular, yes, but it was not 'meaningless.' Gainax especially seeks to put all thier creative talent, thier hearts and souls, into producing anime, this means they are a conduit for deeper underlying meaning.
I realize my previous comment wasn't as good as i thought it was, however, the literal translation of the name was a good point into my attempt to see into the mind of the author writing the story in such a way that perhaps even the author didn't realize what was motivating them;)
I use windows XP personally, it's been my primary OS because keeping it clean is simple.
1. Don't use IE ever. 2. Don't download software unless you're 500% sure it's good clean code, with no malware and no tracking code. 3. Always sit behind a firewall. Preferablly a full statefull inspection one, which does not have any ip address that connects to any interface which is even remotely capable of being accessed via an unsecure (eg: internet enabled) device. But, even a bad firewall is better than no firewall.
4. DISABLE automatic updates. Automatic updates are a Security vulnerabily, Especially for a corporate environment. There is a very nice Proof of concept, whereby someone who has exploited a routing server ahead of your internet connection whereby they can force redirect all your attempts to update automatically to a 'false' update server that validates as being authentic, and forces malware code to be 'automatically' installed on your system. Updates should only be transmitted via a verified, trusted, non-internet routed carrier, such as Certified mail, fed-ex, or over a private optical network etc.
See now was that so hard? all you have to do is disable _everything_ micrsoft calls a 'super great feature' and you have a nice, easy to use easy to adminster OS. Now if you can't enforce those simple 4 rules in your coroperate environemnt, then yeah, Linux is probably easier for you.. However, that is only because Linux makes it harder than pulling teeth to break any of those 4 basic rules;) Windows makes it so easy for a luser to hose thier machine that you've got to install some sore of scripted restoration of the system drive, and put documents etc on a different drive. Norton ghost 9 is an easy to implement tool, however,linux too makes a great tool.. imagine a small install that simply executes "zcat cdrive.tgz | dd bs=n >/dev/hda2 ; grub --bootdrive=/dev/hda2"** as a bootup script... n= the native blocksize of the hard drive partition which you uses when dd'ing and gziping the original image.
**= Not that I've tested it, I have bad karma with grub. But in theory, it should basically wipe the entire content of hda2 and replace it with a Known image, that is only on a linux install noone but the sysadmin knows the root passwd to.. every time the system boots up, and then boots a 'clean' windows environment. 'troubleshooting' the box becomes as easy as rebooting it and getting a coffee.
I am firmly convinced that anybody who claims to know what this anime is really about is full of shit.
I sir, Accept your challenge. Keep in mind that Gainax added stuff to the anime that was not in the manga, which took it in a different direction.. I am isolating the deeper meaning in the animated series. The primary goal of the Anime is to entertain, and it does that by being different. In a market where there are three broadcast telelvision station, which broadcast animated programming for the majority of thier time blocks, well it takes a lot to stand out fromt he crowd. Gainax has thier own thing they do that makes them different, so this aside, on to the rest.
Eva is a story about kids who have been put in the situation of saving the world from humanity. Humanity has tried to replace God with science, and the science they have created has seriously gone beyond what humanity can deal with, except for when 'new types' power armored suits that are based on the same 'out of control' technology that threatened the existance of humanity in the first place.
Beware the God you create, for the God you create to live your life by is the God that determines your fate. That Sir, Is what Evangelion is about. It is not about 'divine' intervention or some such, It is about humanity trying to create God in our image, and the price of arrogance. Also the title translates into modern english as "Brilliantly Illuminated, The creation of God's word"*
*= there are a couple of other possible tranlsations, but the next best is "Brilliantly illuminated, The first book of God -- Good news!" which is kinda wierd;)
Considering there is a smoking gun, he'd need at least $15 million... And then, he'd need some luck, the other legal team of equal or greater price would have to screw up somehow, in thier hasty desire to pin his file swapping butt.
However, there is one thing we can take for granted. The supreme court will probably overturn any lower court ruling that tries to make the source code to bit torrent illegal. BT has substantial non-infringing use, so the technology is safe. The Supreme court ruling was pretty clear, Grokster was promoting it's use for piracy, and thus made itself a target.
If the game's AI is that bad, a n00b is going to get dominated ^^. The thing is noobs don't know any of the keyboard shortcuts. They can't mouse very good, thier mice get full of gunk, and they have a cheap $3 oem mouse, instead of a 5-button M$ Optical mouse.
Believe you me, all I do on b.net is patrol move*, it's funny to see the n00bs try to out micro the ai ^^; while I'm busy deciding on which units to make next...
*= I still play wc3:p, however, noobs don't know the skill points they dont know the tech trees they dont know the units etc etc... The AI's can at least cheat, and can play with botted micro skills.
When I first started on the internet I cared about my langauge usage, but as time went on I cared less and less. Eventually i didn't care at all, i had been spending almost 45 minutes per post on usenet on just editing them. course when i got to irc it was all about typing. like this cause you know we need to get the newlines in before you quit.
well, I could have said half or a quarter of what i've said online (some ~80 MB of text* since 1994) but then i'd have said so little, but it would have been capitialized and punctuated, and spelled, and even checked for grammar usage..
As far as mastering the english language goes -- I'm one of the few people who know how, and when to use the afore mentioned '--' punctuation. yeah, most of the time i type raw, there is no second throught about revising it. I can take a bit more time and think it out as I'm typing, without doing revision, but that nearly halves my KB/hour rate. Actuall single pass revision cuts my KB/h rate to 1/3 of it's original. And don't get me into how long duel pass revision takes man, I could type faster with a straw in my mouth to push the keys than do that;)
And hey If I look like an idiot, what's so bad about that? Aren't smart people suppsoed to be able to blend in, so that noone realizes quite how smart they were, until they've already quaffed the poison that is ending their life?;)
The dumber John Q Public thinks I am, the better, only my closest friends need to be able to see my intelligence.
*= estimated, I have the logs, please don't make be grep them and count the kb.
Sounds like youre a victim of an economy struggling to maintain the status quo. How many Americans do you know who actually HAVE tens of thousands of dollars to spend on anime a year? Why didn't you switch to anime rental, and selling manga? I can get a 15 manga book collection of TokyoPop for less than $150, that translates to roughly 15-25 DVDs, which are going to sell for $330-550, individually, of $150-$300 as boxed sets. Yeah I realize Reading the Manga requires more effort, and doesn't provide the same expeirience as watching the anime*, but at those prices, I'd be lucky If I could afford to RENT the anime.
I bet you'd have done a lot better, had you bothered to implement a dvd rental store, and left selling DVDs to the big boys who can get volume discounts, and focused your bottom line on selling things people can afford to buy, like manga, and books, collectables, and rental fees..
Don't feel so sad that you weren't able to make a niche retail store survive, clearly your passion is for anime not business.
I was tired, but I'm seeing the point you're trying to make, Intel was able to exert market control to inflate the price of it's products, while forcing the prices of it's competirotrs products lower. I'm still a little sketchy on that one, but if AMD can prove it, more power to them.
I am Not a financial anylist, but in past years, the flash sector WAS keeping AMD afloat. It's dead weight now, but in the past it was thier CPU unit that was the 'dead weight.' I believe I tried to point out that thier CPU business made a turnaround when the opterons started making inroads into the server market.
As far as #3 goes, not even Intel builds a fab every year;) I think it's every 5-10 years, As well as retooling the existing lines, etc. Point is you'd have to build a pretty big fab to be loosing billions a year. (AMD's largest are it's the Dresden plants the second of which is just slated to come online, and cost 2.5 bn euros. the existing dresden plant came online around the time the athlon MPs were released, so around 4 years ago, IIRC) that would be loosing about.5 bn a year, or.17 bn / quarter. they aren't loosing that much, so obviously they don't compeletely ignore the cost fo the fabs, but I think they have, historically, underestimated the cost.
I Know that intel entered into contracts, and made illegal exclusivity deals. That much is undisputable, and what has always sickened me about Intel. If you're number 1, why do you need to keep your 'competitors' crippled by using contracts etc, when they are licensing your technology! that would be like Ford (hypothetically) say selling Chevrolet it's windshields, and then making a contract with the city of detroit so that no Chevrolet cars could be sold there.
Have you ever READ an SEC filing for AMD? They generally loose money. Historically they've been loosing that money on CPUs. Because intel won't let them sell production capapcity? maybe? because they undercut intel for market share? yes.
What has kept them afloat is thier lucrative share of the flash memory market. Check the filings here, they're all PD. AMD has traditionally Lost Money on almost every desktop CPU they've released for a long time. This only recently started to change, with the foothold they've been making in the server and gaming market, and it looks like they're STILL undercutting, because they lost $17,000 last quarter (dunno how they got -$65 grand to -$17 grand, but I digress) (down from a profit of $45,000 a year ago)
I know what laws intel has broken;) and I know that AMD is being silly claiming prices of chips are 'artificially' inflated, when they are loosing money selling them at the price they're selling them at. My points are valid, AMD is making some valid claims, and some completely off the wall looney ones.
"Computer buyers pay higher prices inflated by Intel's monopoly profits." I thought consumers paid lower prices since Intel charged less to vendors with exclusive contracts?
The first is just marketdroid FUD. Intel has Always had the pricing of building new fabs priced into their product lines, that's part of why they have way more capacity than AMD -- because they price the cost of the fabs into the chips they have money to build the fabs, to build the chips, and make the profit.
Consumers are paying pretty close to fair prices, AMD tried to erode the market out from under intel, by pricing the chips at a lower profit margin, which forced intel to lower prices on it's low end. Since AMD couldn't ever erode the price below the cost of the chip, and intel's fabs were already paid for, there was no way for intel to loose on the price margin alone, so amd went after 'price/performance' make chips that are better, by actually designing them to be better. And then Intel started somwhere along there to actually Break the law, to prevent AMD from ever growing beyond it's current Fabs production capacity. Because while AMD could never beat intel in price alone, price/performance is battle that the underdog can win, especially when engineers start leaving your company because of your dirty sick marketing department... But they're playing unfair, so AMD needs governments and the people to realize that Intel is breaking the law to stifle compition, and since people are stupid, and AMD is upset, they say stupid, and untrue things. Like 'Intel is artificially inflating the price of computer parts.'
They are just smart enough to include all R&D and fab plant construction costs to be in the profit margin of the CPUs they sell. However that doesn't change the illegal practices intel is using to prevent competitors from gaining market share. AMD is being wronged, they're just wrong about how much they're being wronged;)
It's news because who read TFA anyways;) It wasn't in the Summary of TFA yesterday so thus it wasn't _covered_ yesterday. I also notice them echoing my concerns for how this could backfire on AMD from the comments yesterday, if somewhat more vaugly;)
As a former lab rat... Veins roll and move a lot.. That's why they give/take blood in locations where the vein tends to be a bit more anchored, like the elbow.. a joint with only 2 axis, veins close to the surface, and by holding your arm a certain way you can shift where the veins are so they're in the same spot every time.
Biometrics that read veins are worthless, unless you're going to 'etch' a microscopic pattern into the vein with a laser. And then it's not really biometrics, is it? You've just written your password inside your body, and can protect it from being read by wearing clothes.
As to unbreakable security the closest thing there is, is to burn all the valuable data, destroy anything with any value, and kill anyone in the way. Destruction is the only Flawless security measure, what has been completely destroyed can never be recovered. That being said, it's stupid too.
And your 'perfect' model is flawed. RFID's give off radiation, exposing the data that is needed to counter them. Biometrics can all be forged/used from an unconcious person. Passwords are always stored somewhere... it's just a matter of having the technology to read them. Right now the safest place for storage is in the human brain, at least until we crack the RF noise being emitted by them to read thoughts. However the caveat of storing passwords in the human brain is that most people use dictionary methods to create memorable passwords. No matter how complex your 'Dictionary method' is it's as vulnerable to brute force decryption as if the number of words/punctuation was equal to number of characters/2 in a truly random password. so a truly random password like 04g09an167sjal is as secure as FerarriYuppieAmyzse4Fargo;Iraq
Notice the pattern, I have a brand name, an adjective, a proper name, a qwerty pattern, a City name, a random puntuation, and a country. Which one is easier to remember? Which one is more vulnerable to brute force decryption? Actually the latter is, because it's in such an easy to remember formula. I weakened the password by capitalizing the first letter of each word, a dictionary method knowing that would have an easy time brute forcing. But I can't actually be inconsistant with my capitilization, or I can't remember what case I used ^^; there has to be a pattern, the trick to brute forcing a dictionary method is knowing what pattern they used when making the dictionary password. However the number of possible patterns is endless, and passwords that change hourly, with weekly pattern shifts, ensure that not even the fastest super computer could _ever_ brute force you, without a cosmic scale of luck that would make winning 10 consecutive powerball drawings look easy.
I think a suitable anime reference would be Beck. It's a short music anime about an indy rock band in Japan. There is a lot in the Anime that actually reflects on what Mr. wheaton said. Even though Beck is (from the perspective of the anime) an incredibly talented band of rock musicians, they have to do all the promotion themselves, and all this while they're becoming better musicians, and to the recording people it means jack squat, all they want is a pretty face to attract the girls.. they don't give a damn about the quality of the music.
It's a kick ass Anime and well, just to make sure you don't confuse Beck/Mongolian chop squad with the alternative band Beck they're totally unrelated ^^;
I seem to have my own method of writing, and that is to first write as much as I can, for as long as I can, and pretty much ignore as much of the polishing work as I can and still write... then when I get stuck, I go back and fix everything that's horrible and ugly about it, and frankly I'm not letting anyone read anything I've written until it's had a complete re-write by myself anymore ^^; It's a completely different approach from what I've heard of other people using, using this method, I can average about 7KB/hour of rough rough draft, and the primary revision of fixing everything that's horrible and ugly takes about an equal amount of time as the original writing. the copy is still pretty ugly, at that point, but hey I'm just starting the whole writing thing... My favorite part of this style is that instead of getting upset over typos etc, I write the story the way I wanted to, and then I seperate out the whole fixing it bit. Easier than trying to switch from left brain to right brain every 3 words --;
$41 for a piece of plastic which reads DVDs and doesn't burn them
Your bad read my post, they should all be 16x Dual layer, dual format DVD burners. I researched the specific model about 6 months ago, and I own one, But at the time I ordered I payed $60. I burn between 6-10 DVDs a month and have had 0 coasters, even though I buy imation spindle media at super 30 cents a disc 'close out prices' at office max.
They weaknesses they have are only 8X -r burning speed, and only 2.4x dual layer burn speed. The strengths include a very low media costering rate, even with media higher priced drives have a 20% failure rate on.
Don't buy by brand, I had a total POS Nec 20x cd-burner, but I'm 100% satisfied with the quality of this model DVD burner. The best thing to do is research products, and when a company has a total winner of a product you buy that one.. Sometimes I try to stick with a particular company because I know they have better business practices than thier competitors, but even then I reasearch which model to buy.
You probably though I meant a DVD-rom drive because you see DVD-burners selling for $80-$100 at retail.. Well, I knew from experience DVD burners were abotu ready to 'hit the floor' in terms of pricing 6 months ago so I started reaserching hard for good models.. This NEC isn't the only good model I found, it just happens to be the cheapest of the good models I found then
Well, okay I wasn't looking at it that way ^^ you've eased my mind a lot. The reason why this delay took so long is because AMD needed to have leverage to be able to safely take intel to court over thier unlawful buisness practices.
I don't really care how much slashdot fanboys rant about NVidia
My problem is with the lack of decent vendors, who have quality engineers and churn out consistantly top notch cards who provide decent warranties vs manfacturer defect, and don't require you to return said card to 'mega retailer outlet chain' to recieve warranty service.
Nvidia is just a chip fab/driver company. they don't actually sell boards, because that takes too much engineering resource... if you take away the most complicated part of design implementation of course you can have the 'best' product with the best drivers, but you never know if the realesed product is going to be rice boy garbage where the heatsink is a full mm above the surface of the production chip, because early pre-production chips were 1 mm taller due to a larger die size that was available for pre-production 'testing' chips.
Yeah I was burned, on a $400 geforce that had no warrenty, because you had to return it to the reseller, and I forgot who I ordered it from online. Because of that bullshit I don't buy nvidia -- At least with ATI I know where I stand on warrenties, and frankly, I've never had a card from them have such an obvious flaw in workmanship...
My problem with Nvidia is they skip a step in the design and implementation of their products, so of course they have an 'advantage' they let someone else do that work for them.. I'll buy an Nvidia the day ATI starts selling them, because I know ATI's got the talent and skills to engineer a reliable finished product. Maybe things have changed since I looked into nvidia resellers, but last I checked it was all no-name tiwaneese companies, and crappy tiwanese mobo makers* with 'crappy or inconsistant QA track records.'
I've been buying ATI products for years, so I know they're not perfect, but every board I've bought from them has worked Stabily, as a graphic card, even if not every feature of the card worked correctly. As an example of how solidly they are designed, I was running a board outside a case, with an ati card inserted, powered on for testing. I accidently unseated the card, but the board and card both survived a potentially fatal short out (this was an AGP card too btw, the AGP pin out can be shorted out simply by removing a card from a powered on motherboard.) There may have been a bit of luck involved, or the fact that I flipped the power off on the surge strip with my foot when the card unseated... or perhaps it was because I had all top quality parts, a high end power supply, a top rated motherboard, and a quality graphic card.
*= by this I mean when they release a crap product they cease production flood the market with remnants, and stay in buisness by having a no RMA from end users policy, so they drive the small part retailers to 'eat' the cost of replacing said discontinued parts. This includes virtually every maker you've heard praised anywhere on the web, Asus, Abit, EpoX etc etc.. they've all done it, they're all guilty..
I know that Intel has engaged in unfair practices, but it still concerns me... Is AMD doing this because of the recently announced deal with Apple/intel? Are they just being IBMs lapdog, fighting a battle that may not be possible to win?
Remember Every AMD chip contains technology they Licensed from Intel, if they loose they are out of the buisness for good, because there is no way in hell Intel will license out technology to allow AMD to continue to make microprocessors.
Even if they win, they're going to need court orders requiring intel to fairly sublicense out it's technology, to continue to ship units. You may be right about this being long overdue, but I seriously hope the delay in the coming of this trial was strategic.
AMD needs an air tight case, they can't afford to loose, if this lawsuit wasn't well thought out then they are screwed and Intel becomes pretty much the only game in town. Especially with Apple switching to x86 hardware.
To be honest most of my friends are journal people they read journals, a few do the main page, but most of them are here for the journal community... So I already excempted people here primarily for journal usage ^^;
but nonetheless my point was slashdot has very few people using slow connection, and very many with very fast connections. whereas the readership of the nytimes is probablly more reflective of actual internet demographics, with over 50% of it's user base still using dial-up modems.
I am starting to think 2 releases a year is a rush.
I think you're ready for Debian linux. The current stable release spent 4 years getting ready to be released. Then they delayed the release by 6 months because 'it wasn't ready.'
Appologies if the capabilities of said drives vary --; and a few are 'one day sale' links... they go up in price by $4 if you missed out on the 'one day sale' price.
Mind you this is for an NEC brand dvd burner, from a large and well rated online store. So what if your computer doesn't have a DVD-rom? buy one. $50 costs less than a single copy of most software/games, and since you can use this drive to burn and then install linux, you're good to go.
Slashdot Mirror
Well then don't mod me up if i'm so wrong ;)
;)
your second point is good,
but your third reads like the blind rantings of an faithless being. Religious symbolism has meaning, it's not always 'profound' the author may not ever realize on a conscious level the meaning. the religious symbolism was put in there because it was popular, yes, but it was not 'meaningless.'
Gainax especially seeks to put all thier creative talent, thier hearts and souls, into producing anime, this means they are a conduit for deeper underlying meaning.
I realize my previous comment wasn't as good as i thought it was, however, the literal translation of the name was a good point into my attempt to see into the mind of the author writing the story in such a way that perhaps even the author didn't realize what was motivating them
I wrote the command wrong...
it should have been --bootdrive=0,1 for hda2
I was looking at the man page while writing the comment too.
I use windows XP personally, it's been my primary OS because keeping it clean is simple.
;) Windows makes it so easy for a luser to hose thier machine that you've got to install some sore of scripted restoration of the system drive, and put documents etc on a different drive. Norton ghost 9 is an easy to implement tool, however,linux too makes a great tool.. imagine a small install that simply executes "zcat cdrive.tgz | dd bs=n > /dev/hda2 ; grub --bootdrive=/dev/hda2"**
1. Don't use IE ever. 2. Don't download software unless you're 500% sure it's good clean code, with no malware and no tracking code. 3. Always sit behind a firewall. Preferablly a full statefull inspection one, which does not have any ip address that connects to any interface which is even remotely capable of being accessed via an unsecure (eg: internet enabled) device. But, even a bad firewall is better than no firewall.
4. DISABLE automatic updates. Automatic updates are a Security vulnerabily, Especially for a corporate environment. There is a very nice Proof of concept, whereby someone who has exploited a routing server ahead of your internet connection whereby they can force redirect all your attempts to update automatically to a 'false' update server that validates as being authentic, and forces malware code to be 'automatically' installed on your system. Updates should only be transmitted via a verified, trusted, non-internet routed carrier, such as Certified mail, fed-ex, or over a private optical network etc.
See now was that so hard? all you have to do is disable _everything_ micrsoft calls a 'super great feature' and you have a nice, easy to use easy to adminster OS. Now if you can't enforce those simple 4 rules in your coroperate environemnt, then yeah, Linux is probably easier for you.. However, that is only because Linux makes it harder than pulling teeth to break any of those 4 basic rules
as a bootup script... n= the native blocksize of the hard drive partition which you uses when dd'ing and gziping the original image.
**= Not that I've tested it, I have bad karma with grub. But in theory, it should basically wipe the entire content of hda2 and replace it with a Known image, that is only on a linux install noone but the sysadmin knows the root passwd to.. every time the system boots up, and then boots a 'clean' windows environment. 'troubleshooting' the box becomes as easy as rebooting it and getting a coffee.
Imagine a cube cluster of Bills... sorry, could not resist...
You play xbill too?
I am firmly convinced that anybody who claims to know what this anime is really about is full of shit.
;)
I sir, Accept your challenge. Keep in mind that Gainax added stuff to the anime that was not in the manga, which took it in a different direction.. I am isolating the deeper meaning in the animated series. The primary goal of the Anime is to entertain, and it does that by being different. In a market where there are three broadcast telelvision station, which broadcast animated programming for the majority of thier time blocks, well it takes a lot to stand out fromt he crowd. Gainax has thier own thing they do that makes them different, so this aside, on to the rest.
Eva is a story about kids who have been put in the situation of saving the world from humanity. Humanity has tried to replace God with science, and the science they have created has seriously gone beyond what humanity can deal with, except for when 'new types' power armored suits that are based on the same 'out of control' technology that threatened the existance of humanity in the first place.
Beware the God you create, for the God you create to live your life by is the God that determines your fate. That Sir, Is what Evangelion is about. It is not about 'divine' intervention or some such, It is about humanity trying to create God in our image, and the price of arrogance. Also the title translates into modern english as "Brilliantly Illuminated, The creation of God's word"*
*= there are a couple of other possible tranlsations, but the next best is "Brilliantly illuminated, The first book of God -- Good news!" which is kinda wierd
I wonder how much he'd need
Considering there is a smoking gun, he'd need at least $15 million... And then, he'd need some luck, the other legal team of equal or greater price would have to screw up somehow, in thier hasty desire to pin his file swapping butt.
However, there is one thing we can take for granted. The supreme court will probably overturn any lower court ruling that tries to make the source code to bit torrent illegal. BT has substantial non-infringing use, so the technology is safe. The Supreme court ruling was pretty clear, Grokster was promoting it's use for piracy, and thus made itself a target.
even a noob would be better than the AI
:p, however, noobs don't know the skill points they dont know the tech trees they dont know the units etc etc... The AI's can at least cheat, and can play with botted micro skills.
If the game's AI is that bad, a n00b is going to get dominated ^^. The thing is noobs don't know any of the keyboard shortcuts. They can't mouse very good, thier mice get full of gunk, and they have a cheap $3 oem mouse, instead of a 5-button M$ Optical mouse.
Believe you me, all I do on b.net is patrol move*, it's funny to see the n00bs try to out micro the ai ^^; while I'm busy deciding on which units to make next...
*= I still play wc3
Clark said he would like to see two things addressed in any replacement for the current internet...
A television in every home and two cars in every garage. Opps wait wrong guy..
When I first started on the internet I cared about my langauge usage, but as time went on I cared less and less. Eventually i didn't care at all, i had been spending almost 45 minutes per post on usenet on just editing them. course when i got to irc it was all about typing.
;)
;)
like this
cause
you know
we need
to get the newlines
in before you quit.
well, I could have said half or a quarter of what i've said online (some ~80 MB of text* since 1994) but then i'd have said so little, but it would have been capitialized and punctuated, and spelled, and even checked for grammar usage..
As far as mastering the english language goes -- I'm one of the few people who know how, and when to use the afore mentioned '--' punctuation. yeah, most of the time i type raw, there is no second throught about revising it. I can take a bit more time and think it out as I'm typing, without doing revision, but that nearly halves my KB/hour rate. Actuall single pass revision cuts my KB/h rate to 1/3 of it's original. And don't get me into how long duel pass revision takes man, I could type faster with a straw in my mouth to push the keys than do that
And hey If I look like an idiot, what's so bad about that? Aren't smart people suppsoed to be able to blend in, so that noone realizes quite how smart they were, until they've already quaffed the poison that is ending their life?
The dumber John Q Public thinks I am, the better, only my closest friends need to be able to see my intelligence.
*= estimated, I have the logs, please don't make be grep them and count the kb.
Sounds like youre a victim of an economy struggling to maintain the status quo. How many Americans do you know who actually HAVE tens of thousands of dollars to spend on anime a year? Why didn't you switch to anime rental, and selling manga? I can get a 15 manga book collection of TokyoPop for less than $150, that translates to roughly 15-25 DVDs, which are going to sell for $330-550, individually, of $150-$300 as boxed sets. Yeah I realize Reading the Manga requires more effort, and doesn't provide the same expeirience as watching the anime*, but at those prices, I'd be lucky If I could afford to RENT the anime.
I bet you'd have done a lot better, had you bothered to implement a dvd rental store, and left selling DVDs to the big boys who can get volume discounts, and focused your bottom line on selling things people can afford to buy, like manga, and books, collectables, and rental fees..
Don't feel so sad that you weren't able to make a niche retail store survive, clearly your passion is for anime not business.
*= sometimes the experience is better
I was tired, but I'm seeing the point you're trying to make, Intel was able to exert market control to inflate the price of it's products, while forcing the prices of it's competirotrs products lower. I'm still a little sketchy on that one, but if AMD can prove it, more power to them.
;) I think it's every 5-10 years, As well as retooling the existing lines, etc. Point is you'd have to build a pretty big fab to be loosing billions a year. (AMD's largest are it's the Dresden plants the second of which is just slated to come online, and cost 2.5 bn euros. the existing dresden plant came online around the time the athlon MPs were released, so around 4 years ago, IIRC) that would be loosing about .5 bn a year, or .17 bn / quarter. they aren't loosing that much, so obviously they don't compeletely ignore the cost fo the fabs, but I think they have, historically, underestimated the cost.
I am Not a financial anylist, but in past years, the flash sector WAS keeping AMD afloat. It's dead weight now, but in the past it was thier CPU unit that was the 'dead weight.' I believe I tried to point out that thier CPU business made a turnaround when the opterons started making inroads into the server market.
As far as #3 goes, not even Intel builds a fab every year
I Know that intel entered into contracts, and made illegal exclusivity deals. That much is undisputable, and what has always sickened me about Intel. If you're number 1, why do you need to keep your 'competitors' crippled by using contracts etc, when they are licensing your technology! that would be like Ford (hypothetically) say selling Chevrolet it's windshields, and then making a contract with the city of detroit so that no Chevrolet cars could be sold there.
of course every chip manufacturer does that
;) and I know that AMD is being silly claiming prices of chips are 'artificially' inflated, when they are loosing money selling them at the price they're selling them at. My points are valid, AMD is making some valid claims, and some completely off the wall looney ones.
Have you ever READ an SEC filing for AMD? They generally loose money. Historically they've been loosing that money on CPUs. Because intel won't let them sell production capapcity? maybe? because they undercut intel for market share? yes.
What has kept them afloat is thier lucrative share of the flash memory market. Check the filings here, they're all PD. AMD has traditionally Lost Money on almost every desktop CPU they've released for a long time. This only recently started to change, with the foothold they've been making in the server and gaming market, and it looks like they're STILL undercutting, because they lost $17,000 last quarter (dunno how they got -$65 grand to -$17 grand, but I digress) (down from a profit of $45,000 a year ago)
I know what laws intel has broken
"Computer buyers pay higher prices inflated by Intel's monopoly profits."
;)
I thought consumers paid lower prices since Intel charged less to vendors with exclusive contracts?
The first is just marketdroid FUD. Intel has Always had the pricing of building new fabs priced into their product lines, that's part of why they have way more capacity than AMD -- because they price the cost of the fabs into the chips they have money to build the fabs, to build the chips, and make the profit.
Consumers are paying pretty close to fair prices, AMD tried to erode the market out from under intel, by pricing the chips at a lower profit margin, which forced intel to lower prices on it's low end. Since AMD couldn't ever erode the price below the cost of the chip, and intel's fabs were already paid for, there was no way for intel to loose on the price margin alone, so amd went after 'price/performance' make chips that are better, by actually designing them to be better. And then Intel started somwhere along there to actually Break the law, to prevent AMD from ever growing beyond it's current Fabs production capacity. Because while AMD could never beat intel in price alone, price/performance is battle that the underdog can win, especially when engineers start leaving your company because of your dirty sick marketing department... But they're playing unfair, so AMD needs governments and the people to realize that Intel is breaking the law to stifle compition, and since people are stupid, and AMD is upset, they say stupid, and untrue things. Like 'Intel is artificially inflating the price of computer parts.'
They are just smart enough to include all R&D and fab plant construction costs to be in the profit margin of the CPUs they sell. However that doesn't change the illegal practices intel is using to prevent competitors from gaining market share. AMD is being wronged, they're just wrong about how much they're being wronged
It's news because who read TFA anyways ;) It wasn't in the Summary of TFA yesterday so thus it wasn't _covered_ yesterday. I also notice them echoing my concerns for how this could backfire on AMD from the comments yesterday, if somewhat more vaugly ;)
As a former lab rat...
Veins roll and move a lot.. That's why they give/take blood in locations where the vein tends to be a bit more anchored, like the elbow.. a joint with only 2 axis, veins close to the surface, and by holding your arm a certain way you can shift where the veins are so they're in the same spot every time.
Biometrics that read veins are worthless, unless you're going to 'etch' a microscopic pattern into the vein with a laser. And then it's not really biometrics, is it? You've just written your password inside your body, and can protect it from being read by wearing clothes.
As to unbreakable security the closest thing there is, is to burn all the valuable data, destroy anything with any value, and kill anyone in the way. Destruction is the only Flawless security measure, what has been completely destroyed can never be recovered. That being said, it's stupid too.
And your 'perfect' model is flawed. RFID's give off radiation, exposing the data that is needed to counter them. Biometrics can all be forged/used from an unconcious person. Passwords are always stored somewhere... it's just a matter of having the technology to read them. Right now the safest place for storage is in the human brain, at least until we crack the RF noise being emitted by them to read thoughts. However the caveat of storing passwords in the human brain is that most people use dictionary methods to create memorable passwords. No matter how complex your 'Dictionary method' is it's as vulnerable to brute force decryption as if the number of words/punctuation was equal to number of characters/2 in a truly random password. so a truly random password like
04g09an167sjal is as secure as FerarriYuppieAmyzse4Fargo;Iraq
Notice the pattern, I have a brand name, an adjective, a proper name, a qwerty pattern, a City name, a random puntuation, and a country. Which one is easier to remember? Which one is more vulnerable to brute force decryption? Actually the latter is, because it's in such an easy to remember formula. I weakened the password by capitalizing the first letter of each word, a dictionary method knowing that would have an easy time brute forcing. But I can't actually be inconsistant with my capitilization, or I can't remember what case I used ^^; there has to be a pattern, the trick to brute forcing a dictionary method is knowing what pattern they used when making the dictionary password. However the number of possible patterns is endless, and passwords that change hourly, with weekly pattern shifts, ensure that not even the fastest super computer could _ever_ brute force you, without a cosmic scale of luck that would make winning 10 consecutive powerball drawings look easy.
I think a suitable anime reference would be Beck.
It's a short music anime about an indy rock band in Japan. There is a lot in the Anime that actually reflects on what Mr. wheaton said. Even though Beck is (from the perspective of the anime) an incredibly talented band of rock musicians, they have to do all the promotion themselves, and all this while they're becoming better musicians, and to the recording people it means jack squat, all they want is a pretty face to attract the girls.. they don't give a damn about the quality of the music.
It's a kick ass Anime and well, just to make sure you don't confuse Beck/Mongolian chop squad with the alternative band Beck they're totally unrelated ^^;
I seem to have my own method of writing, and that is to first write as much as I can, for as long as I can, and pretty much ignore as much of the polishing work as I can and still write... then when I get stuck, I go back and fix everything that's horrible and ugly about it, and frankly I'm not letting anyone read anything I've written until it's had a complete re-write by myself anymore ^^; It's a completely different approach from what I've heard of other people using, using this method, I can average about 7KB/hour of rough rough draft, and the primary revision of fixing everything that's horrible and ugly takes about an equal amount of time as the original writing. the copy is still pretty ugly, at that point, but hey I'm just starting the whole writing thing... My favorite part of this style is that instead of getting upset over typos etc, I write the story the way I wanted to, and then I seperate out the whole fixing it bit. Easier than trying to switch from left brain to right brain every 3 words --;
Why bypass the trailers when you can use your blu-ray player to download movies off the net?
$41 for a piece of plastic which reads DVDs and doesn't burn them
Your bad read my post, they should all be 16x Dual layer, dual format DVD burners. I researched the specific model about 6 months ago, and I own one, But at the time I ordered I payed $60. I burn between 6-10 DVDs a month and have had 0 coasters, even though I buy imation spindle media at super 30 cents a disc 'close out prices' at office max.
They weaknesses they have are only 8X -r burning speed, and only 2.4x dual layer burn speed. The strengths include a very low media costering rate, even with media higher priced drives have a 20% failure rate on.
Don't buy by brand, I had a total POS Nec 20x cd-burner, but I'm 100% satisfied with the quality of this model DVD burner. The best thing to do is research products, and when a company has a total winner of a product you buy that one.. Sometimes I try to stick with a particular company because I know they have better business practices than thier competitors, but even then I reasearch which model to buy.
You probably though I meant a DVD-rom drive because you see DVD-burners selling for $80-$100 at retail.. Well, I knew from experience DVD burners were abotu ready to 'hit the floor' in terms of pricing 6 months ago so I started reaserching hard for good models.. This NEC isn't the only good model I found, it just happens to be the cheapest of the good models I found then
Well, okay I wasn't looking at it that way ^^ you've eased my mind a lot. The reason why this delay took so long is because AMD needed to have leverage to be able to safely take intel to court over thier unlawful buisness practices.
I don't really care how much slashdot fanboys rant about NVidia
My problem is with the lack of decent vendors, who have quality engineers and churn out consistantly top notch cards who provide decent warranties vs manfacturer defect, and don't require you to return said card to 'mega retailer outlet chain' to recieve warranty service.
Nvidia is just a chip fab/driver company. they don't actually sell boards, because that takes too much engineering resource... if you take away the most complicated part of design implementation of course you can have the 'best' product with the best drivers, but you never know if the realesed product is going to be rice boy garbage where the heatsink is a full mm above the surface of the production chip, because early pre-production chips were 1 mm taller due to a larger die size that was available for pre-production 'testing' chips.
Yeah I was burned, on a $400 geforce that had no warrenty, because you had to return it to the reseller, and I forgot who I ordered it from online. Because of that bullshit I don't buy nvidia -- At least with ATI I know where I stand on warrenties, and frankly, I've never had a card from them have such an obvious flaw in workmanship...
My problem with Nvidia is they skip a step in the design and implementation of their products, so of course they have an 'advantage' they let someone else do that work for them.. I'll buy an Nvidia the day ATI starts selling them, because I know ATI's got the talent and skills to engineer a reliable finished product. Maybe things have changed since I looked into nvidia resellers, but last I checked it was all no-name tiwaneese companies, and crappy tiwanese mobo makers* with 'crappy or inconsistant QA track records.'
I've been buying ATI products for years, so I know they're not perfect, but every board I've bought from them has worked Stabily, as a graphic card, even if not every feature of the card worked correctly. As an example of how solidly they are designed, I was running a board outside a case, with an ati card inserted, powered on for testing. I accidently unseated the card, but the board and card both survived a potentially fatal short out (this was an AGP card too btw, the AGP pin out can be shorted out simply by removing a card from a powered on motherboard.) There may have been a bit of luck involved, or the fact that I flipped the power off on the surge strip with my foot when the card unseated... or perhaps it was because I had all top quality parts, a high end power supply, a top rated motherboard, and a quality graphic card.
*= by this I mean when they release a crap product they cease production flood the market with remnants, and stay in buisness by having a no RMA from end users policy, so they drive the small part retailers to 'eat' the cost of replacing said discontinued parts. This includes virtually every maker you've heard praised anywhere on the web, Asus, Abit, EpoX etc etc.. they've all done it, they're all guilty..
I know that Intel has engaged in unfair practices, but it still concerns me... Is AMD doing this because of the recently announced deal with Apple/intel? Are they just being IBMs lapdog, fighting a battle that may not be possible to win?
Remember Every AMD chip contains technology they Licensed from Intel, if they loose they are out of the buisness for good, because there is no way in hell Intel will license out technology to allow AMD to continue to make microprocessors.
Even if they win, they're going to need court orders requiring intel to fairly sublicense out it's technology, to continue to ship units. You may be right about this being long overdue, but I seriously hope the delay in the coming of this trial was strategic.
AMD needs an air tight case, they can't afford to loose, if this lawsuit wasn't well thought out then they are screwed and Intel becomes pretty much the only game in town. Especially with Apple switching to x86 hardware.
To be honest most of my friends are journal people they read journals, a few do the main page, but most of them are here for the journal community... So I already excempted people here primarily for journal usage ^^;
but nonetheless my point was slashdot has very few people using slow connection, and very many with very fast connections. whereas the readership of the nytimes is probablly more reflective of actual internet demographics, with over 50% of it's user base still using dial-up modems.
I am starting to think 2 releases a year is a rush.
I think you're ready for Debian linux. The current stable release spent 4 years getting ready to be released. Then they delayed the release by 6 months because 'it wasn't ready.'
what about machines that lack dvd-roms?
Go buy a DVD-burner for $41 not only can you burn the iso in the torrent, but you can then boot off it.. maybe you prefer a black front panel $45 or silver $49
perhaps you'd like a full retail box for a few dollars more.
Appologies if the capabilities of said drives vary --; and a few are 'one day sale' links... they go up in price by $4 if you missed out on the 'one day sale' price.
Mind you this is for an NEC brand dvd burner, from a large and well rated online store. So what if your computer doesn't have a DVD-rom? buy one. $50 costs less than a single copy of most software/games, and since you can use this drive to burn and then install linux, you're good to go.