It seems to me that astronauts are alot more likely to be killed as a result of someone else's incompetence than their own
Ghee, it had never occured to me that an astronaut sitting in a contraption designed by thousands of people, controlled mainly by computers, was at the mercy of other peoples compentence.;-)
Just kidding, I know what you are saying, that one sounded just a little too obvious.:)
I especially found the following passage painfully funny:
I'm writing this column using the Vim editor. The language it's written is C.
Not that I want to start a vi(m) flamewar, but if it is used as an argument that C is here to stay, that's just silly.
Again, without going into the long list of 'cons' of vi(m), I think everyone would agree that vim is not exactly leading-edge technology.
That's interesting. Not too long ago I compiled a huge project (Spyglass Device Mosaic Web browser) with the Intel compiler, vs. the Microsoft compiler that was used before.
I could not detect any improvements whatsoever. One of the tests I had was an HTML page that took DM 30(!) seconds to render. (CPU load was 100% on P4-1.7Ghz). I figured that the P4 optimization should give it quite a boost, but nothing. (and as the CPU load shows, this was not an IO issue).
In my opinion the DM code is horribly written, so I wonder if 'better' code optimizes better. But if so, what is better code? (Supposedly VTune should help to determine this, but I've never been able to succesfully use it)
I still think there's quite a difference between someone not being able to type their own last name and someone making a mistake in a foreign language.
... countries which somehow forbid the consumption of alcohol or just its advertising.
For example, in France...
Wow, talk about a _bad_ example.;o)
I know this quote takes it somehow out of context, but France will probably be the _last_ country to forbid alcohol. Or wait,- wine isn't really alcohol, is it?
The significance of the TV domains is
on
VeriSign Buys .tv
·
· Score: 2
Although this goes well beyond what should be discussed on/. and has practically no significance at all, I have to say that 'Heavily Modified' bothers me when it comes to cars like this.
I always find it a bit sad. Like the original creators didn't do a good job. If you spend that much money, why buy a car that you don't agree with?
And if you (apparently) plan to sell it, it's pretty silly. Almost no-one will agree your mods are so kewl. By now they are out-dated, start to fail (believe me, I had a 911 Turbo and the one mod caused me a major headache) and it's practically impossible to bring the car back to it's original condition.
When a car like this is modified it usually means that it was just a rich kids toy. Not someone that bought it because they loved the car. For the true lover, there's nothing but the original.
In any case, the $100K Buy It Now is horribly over-priced. You get an original Testarossa from the same year for a little more than half of that. And it will still be worth something 10 years from now. (for example, not that I anything about this car, so this is not a recommendation);o)
For me the main reason to buy UltimateTV was that it recorded the DirecTV signal digitally (and two channels at a time). I had seen Tivo and Replay and I never liked the quality.
However, the product as a whole sucks monkey-ass. Interestingly enough, a friend of mine who happens to work for WebTV (his bad), tells me that a lot of senior developers from M$ where on the project. I must come to the conclusion that with senior he must mean age, not superiour technical skills.
Microsoft, a company that has spent gazillions on User Interface research, managed to get a product out that fails even the most basic requirements of a good UI.
For example,- it's not uncommon for the unit to take > 2 seconds to respond to a key press on the remote. It was M$ themselves that concluded that a response has to be within a second.
There's the case where the unit shows a screen with NO information, just ONE button (and it's not a delete confirmation or so). Like, what else do they expect us to do than hit that button? E.g. redundancy gallore.
Never mind the horrible navigation and the terrible interface to select/unselect your channels from the 2400 that are available (of which many are unavailable for reasons such as you didn't subscribe to them, oddly enough there's evidence that the software DOES know that these channels are not subscribed to).
I could write a book about this product. It pisses me off though,- we kept the unit under the assumption that it was still very new and further development would improve the software. Like that was ever gonna happen...
Yeah man, I just installed Win2K on my machine and I popped in a cd: all tracks showed up as.cda. They have done some fenominal work on compression: all tracks where 44 bytes!
I tell you I couldn't even hear the difference with the original!
Why bother with compression?
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 1
That's 618MB/1$. In other words you can pretty much store an entire CD for 1$.
The advantage being that you don't have to dick around with proprietary formats or players that seem to have been designed to support the wackiest skinz but have a horrible user interface. Needles to say you have no degradation of audio quality.
Although I totally agree with you, the true definition of censorship does seem to require the actual banning or deletion of information.
Now, you could argue that OZ is certainly not deleting anything. They ban stuff, but that's a relative word,- I bet if someone got a dial-up account in the US and dialed it directly, they could still have access to the information. This is where things get fuzzy,- the information is still out there, it's just harder to get to. Therefore you would have to conclude that the use of the word censorship applies similarly to both discussed cases here.
In both cases the information is still accessible, however in both cases entities with the power try to keep people from seeing it.
What I can't believe is that this issue is taking on a rediculous magnitude. I don't understand why anyone of the staff doesn't say something like 'sorry guys, that was maybe not too kewl, we'll create a permanent thread where you can bitch about/. all you want', or something like that.
I mean, this thread is getting to the point where we all are probably going to lose a bit of Karma again...
An other quick note about how stupid this really is (I can already see the bidding war going on to place a message on your front porch):
For many businesses, it will be a marketing dream come true. Retailers will be falling over themselves to bombard people passing their doors with targeted come-ons
Fortunately, they write:
There are some very simple mechanisms that can restrict who gets to post you a message, and who gets to read the ones you write, they say. You could, for instance, join a paid service that would scrutinise messages and guarantee their authenticity and usefulness.
I particularly like the 'very simple' part. If it where so simple, then why don't people use this exact same method for email? I mean there's a direct analogy with spam here and we know how simple it is to get rid of that.
Not to mention that this method is far more desireable to marketing people than people because of the additional information that's available. (whenever I'm seen in Hawaii you can be damn sure that I'm on vacation)
Yeah, well for this to work, your cell-phone/GPS would have to report your location to a central point. I know of quite some people who would love THAT!
Not for me, thank you, I'd rather keep my privacy.
Yeah, fun discussion, nonetheless. I have to admit that I'm a little rusty on the Linux side. I wrote a couple of device drivers (for MPEG hardware decoders and a block dev for RIO MP3 player. Non of em actually where released for a variety of reasons...) but that's quite a while ago.
I probably should have stayed out of it, because the topic really was the Robert Love's Linux patches...
I've read up on some of the documentation on your website and it certainly cleared things up a lot. I guess I understand where you are coming from as well.:o))))
Anyways, I really go to get back to work and stop posting on/. all the time.
Seems pretty bloody limiting to me, given the large number of readily available >1Ghz CPUs nowadays
Well, obviously the cooling capacity is really an x amount of Watts. There's CPUs out there that are faster and use less power than a PIII 1GHz, I'm sure you could use those.
It's just that the manufacturer hasn't tested these yet. I spoke with them and they are testing faster CPUs.
The purpose of this box is to create an ultimately quiet PC, it's NOT intended for overclockers (a water-cooled case is great for that purpose, but they are not designed to be quiet,- the pump for example still produces noise). The CPU you recommended doesn't solve the power-supply fan and graphics card fan either. And in some environments you just don't want a fan at all.
Fans not only produce noise but they also produce a lot of EMI, in very anoying frequencies. So for example in an enviroment where you are dealing with analog audio it's better to not have fans at all.
Yeah, I will certainly try it out. However, I suspect that the elements have to be mounted vertically for the circulation to work properly. Since there's four of those, rather large elements, you'd need quite a bit of surface, vertically. In other words, it's not easy to use this in a low profile horizontal enclosure.
I just removed one of the elements,- it looked like they where glued on, but the good news is that that is just heat-conducting paste. They are just screwed on, and easy to remove.:-)
I also wanted to mention that most of todays hi-end graphics card (such as the ATI 8500DV which I have) come with a fan installed on the graphics chip. Unfortunately these are not attached using the semi-standard holes but rather glued straight onto the chip. This means, you have to break off the fan and then glue on the CalmPC heatsink. The material that comes with the CalmPC to attach to the graphics card doesn't work.:-(
I didn't have a problem with the max. of a 1Ghz PIII processor,- this puppy is going in my AV rack, so all I care about is noise. (or lack of)
However, it is but-ugly, and since I saw the same enclosure for sale in the non-Calm-PC version, I had hoped that I could rip out the cooling system and place it in an other enclosure.
Well, it seems to be possible,- the PS has normal dimensions. The rest of the cooling system isn't all that crazy either. BUT, the cooling elements are mounted on the side panel of the enclosure. The thing is that this is a customized side panel. It's about twice as thick as the original one.
This got me a little worried about heat distribution if I mounted the elements on a surface that does not have the same 'body' as this panel. So now I'm thinking, maybe I'll keep the original construction, cut off some of it, and fit the entire thing in an other enclosure.
I had hoped to creat a horizontal enclosure, but I'm worried that cooling system might not work if the elements aren't mounted in the right orientation.
Anyways, waiting for my solid-state disk and CPU to arrive so I can start playing around with it. I'll post my findings.:o)
Slashdot Mirror
The first says "I don't care if windows users can't read my mail"
So why exactly are you sending it to them in the first place?
It seems to me that astronauts are alot more likely to be killed as a result of someone else's incompetence than their own
;-)
:)
Ghee, it had never occured to me that an astronaut sitting in a contraption designed by thousands of people, controlled mainly by computers, was at the mercy of other peoples compentence.
Just kidding, I know what you are saying, that one sounded just a little too obvious.
I especially found the following passage painfully funny:
I'm writing this column using the Vim editor. The language it's written is C.
Not that I want to start a vi(m) flamewar, but if it is used as an argument that C is here to stay, that's just silly.
Again, without going into the long list of 'cons' of vi(m), I think everyone would agree that vim is not exactly leading-edge technology.
That's interesting. Not too long ago I compiled a huge project (Spyglass Device Mosaic Web browser) with the Intel compiler, vs. the Microsoft compiler that was used before.
I could not detect any improvements whatsoever. One of the tests I had was an HTML page that took DM 30(!) seconds to render. (CPU load was 100% on P4-1.7Ghz). I figured that the P4 optimization should give it quite a boost, but nothing. (and as the CPU load shows, this was not an IO issue).
In my opinion the DM code is horribly written, so I wonder if 'better' code optimizes better. But if so, what is better code? (Supposedly VTune should help to determine this, but I've never been able to succesfully use it)
Yeah I noticed that too after I hit submit.
I still think there's quite a difference between someone not being able to type their own last name and someone making a mistake in a foreign language.
Well, if THAT is your real name, you may want to consider registering "http://www.ericharshberger.org/".
Than, next time you don't have to post a link to "http://www.ericharshbarger.org/" which is owned by Eric Harshbarger.
Apart from Lego, an other hobby of yours must be S&M. How else would you explain calling a /. effect on yourself. ;o)
... countries which somehow forbid the consumption of alcohol or just its advertising. ...
;o)
For example, in France
Wow, talk about a _bad_ example.
I know this quote takes it somehow out of context, but France will probably be the _last_ country to forbid alcohol. Or wait,- wine isn't really alcohol, is it?
carefully displayed by M.TV
I just keep think of the Dire Straits song: "I want my M.TV..."
:-) Bad choice of words, I suppose.
I'm waiting for him to get rid of his girlfriend
Although this goes well beyond what should be discussed on /. and has practically no significance at all, I have to say that 'Heavily Modified' bothers me when it comes to cars like this.
;o)
I always find it a bit sad. Like the original creators didn't do a good job. If you spend that much money, why buy a car that you don't agree with?
And if you (apparently) plan to sell it, it's pretty silly. Almost no-one will agree your mods are so kewl. By now they are out-dated, start to fail (believe me, I had a 911 Turbo and the one mod caused me a major headache) and it's practically impossible to bring the car back to it's original condition.
When a car like this is modified it usually means that it was just a rich kids toy. Not someone that bought it because they loved the car. For the true lover, there's nothing but the original.
In any case, the $100K Buy It Now is horribly over-priced. You get an original Testarossa from the same year for a little more than half of that. And it will still be worth something 10 years from now. (for example, not that I anything about this car, so this is not a recommendation)
For me the main reason to buy UltimateTV was that it recorded the DirecTV signal digitally (and two channels at a time). I had seen Tivo and Replay and I never liked the quality.
However, the product as a whole sucks monkey-ass. Interestingly enough, a friend of mine who happens to work for WebTV (his bad), tells me that a lot of senior developers from M$ where on the project. I must come to the conclusion that with senior he must mean age, not superiour technical skills.
Microsoft, a company that has spent gazillions on User Interface research, managed to get a product out that fails even the most basic requirements of a good UI.
For example,- it's not uncommon for the unit to take > 2 seconds to respond to a key press on the remote. It was M$ themselves that concluded that a response has to be within a second.
There's the case where the unit shows a screen with NO information, just ONE button (and it's not a delete confirmation or so). Like, what else do they expect us to do than hit that button? E.g. redundancy gallore.
Never mind the horrible navigation and the terrible interface to select/unselect your channels from the 2400 that are available (of which many are unavailable for reasons such as you didn't subscribe to them, oddly enough there's evidence that the software DOES know that these channels are not subscribed to).
I could write a book about this product. It pisses me off though,- we kept the unit under the assumption that it was still very new and further development would improve the software. Like that was ever gonna happen...
Now if only you had read my entire comment...
To start calling people nazis is not very cool.
Yeah man, I just installed Win2K on my machine and I popped in a cd: all tracks showed up as .cda. They have done some fenominal work on compression: all tracks where 44 bytes!
I tell you I couldn't even hear the difference with the original!
I mean seriously, a 160GB drive costs $259,-.
That's 618MB/1$. In other words you can pretty much store an entire CD for 1$.
The advantage being that you don't have to dick around with proprietary formats or players that seem to have been designed to support the wackiest skinz but have a horrible user interface. Needles to say you have no degradation of audio quality.
Although I totally agree with you, the true definition of censorship does seem to require the actual banning or deletion of information.
/. all you want', or something like that.
Now, you could argue that OZ is certainly not deleting anything. They ban stuff, but that's a relative word,- I bet if someone got a dial-up account in the US and dialed it directly, they could still have access to the information. This is where things get fuzzy,- the information is still out there, it's just harder to get to. Therefore you would have to conclude that the use of the word censorship applies similarly to both discussed cases here.
In both cases the information is still accessible, however in both cases entities with the power try to keep people from seeing it.
What I can't believe is that this issue is taking on a rediculous magnitude. I don't understand why anyone of the staff doesn't say something like 'sorry guys, that was maybe not too kewl, we'll create a permanent thread where you can bitch about
I mean, this thread is getting to the point where we all are probably going to lose a bit of Karma again...
there's always places where things are worse. :-O
An other quick note about how stupid this really is (I can already see the bidding war going on to place a message on your front porch):
For many businesses, it will be a marketing dream come true. Retailers will be falling over themselves to bombard people passing their doors with targeted come-ons
Fortunately, they write:
There are some very simple mechanisms that can restrict who gets to post you a message, and who gets to read the ones you write, they say. You could, for instance, join a paid service that would scrutinise messages and guarantee their authenticity and usefulness.
I particularly like the 'very simple' part. If it where so simple, then why don't people use this exact same method for email? I mean there's a direct analogy with spam here and we know how simple it is to get rid of that.
Not to mention that this method is far more desireable to marketing people than people because of the additional information that's available. (whenever I'm seen in Hawaii you can be damn sure that I'm on vacation)
Ugh...
Yeah, well for this to work, your cell-phone/GPS would have to report your location to a central point. I know of quite some people who would love THAT!
Not for me, thank you, I'd rather keep my privacy.
Yeah, fun discussion, nonetheless. I have to admit that I'm a little rusty on the Linux side. I wrote a couple of device drivers (for MPEG hardware decoders and a block dev for RIO MP3 player. Non of em actually where released for a variety of reasons...) but that's quite a while ago.
:o))))
/. all the time.
I probably should have stayed out of it, because the topic really was the Robert Love's Linux patches...
I've read up on some of the documentation on your website and it certainly cleared things up a lot. I guess I understand where you are coming from as well.
Anyways, I really go to get back to work and stop posting on
Cheers.
Seems pretty bloody limiting to me, given the large number of readily available >1Ghz CPUs nowadays
Well, obviously the cooling capacity is really an x amount of Watts. There's CPUs out there that are faster and use less power than a PIII 1GHz, I'm sure you could use those.
It's just that the manufacturer hasn't tested these yet. I spoke with them and they are testing faster CPUs.
The purpose of this box is to create an ultimately quiet PC, it's NOT intended for overclockers (a water-cooled case is great for that purpose, but they are not designed to be quiet,- the pump for example still produces noise). The CPU you recommended doesn't solve the power-supply fan and graphics card fan either. And in some environments you just don't want a fan at all.
Fans not only produce noise but they also produce a lot of EMI, in very anoying frequencies. So for example in an enviroment where you are dealing with analog audio it's better to not have fans at all.
Yeah, I will certainly try it out. However, I suspect that the elements have to be mounted vertically for the circulation to work properly. Since there's four of those, rather large elements, you'd need quite a bit of surface, vertically. In other words, it's not easy to use this in a low profile horizontal enclosure.
Couple of more notes.
:-)
:-(
I just removed one of the elements,- it looked like they where glued on, but the good news is that that is just heat-conducting paste. They are just screwed on, and easy to remove.
I also wanted to mention that most of todays hi-end graphics card (such as the ATI 8500DV which I have) come with a fan installed on the graphics chip. Unfortunately these are not attached using the semi-standard holes but rather glued straight onto the chip. This means, you have to break off the fan and then glue on the CalmPC heatsink. The material that comes with the CalmPC to attach to the graphics card doesn't work.
a couple of days ago.
:o)
I didn't have a problem with the max. of a 1Ghz PIII processor,- this puppy is going in my AV rack, so all I care about is noise. (or lack of)
However, it is but-ugly, and since I saw the same enclosure for sale in the non-Calm-PC version, I had hoped that I could rip out the cooling system and place it in an other enclosure.
Well, it seems to be possible,- the PS has normal dimensions. The rest of the cooling system isn't all that crazy either. BUT, the cooling elements are mounted on the side panel of the enclosure. The thing is that this is a customized side panel. It's about twice as thick as the original one.
This got me a little worried about heat distribution if I mounted the elements on a surface that does not have the same 'body' as this panel. So now I'm thinking, maybe I'll keep the original construction, cut off some of it, and fit the entire thing in an other enclosure.
I had hoped to creat a horizontal enclosure, but I'm worried that cooling system might not work if the elements aren't mounted in the right orientation.
Anyways, waiting for my solid-state disk and CPU to arrive so I can start playing around with it. I'll post my findings.