No, cost is a big issue, along with ergonomics. The active shutter glasses are pretty cheap and simple. They are basically a one-pixel display for each eye, where the pixel switches between clear and opaque.
Contrast this to your idea, which amounts to a miniaturized 1080p display per eye, per user. Your glasses would much larger, much more expensive, and would consume much more power. They also make it impossible see anything in the viewing room. You can still look around when wearing the active shutter glasses.
Keeping the TV also has the nontrivial benefit of using it to watch 2D content...
There is lots of mutual animosity between the Inquirer and NVIDIA. Let's just say that neither goes out of their way to say nice things about the other.
Chances are good that Wall Street has a less biased handle on the scope of the issue. The current stock price suggests that this problem, while plenty bad, is not even close to fatal.
I completely agree; Martial Arts are ideal. Here are some additional points to consider.
1. Chances are good that you will find lots of fellow geek introverts at a martial arts school. Becoming less introverted is one reason many people choose martial arts. Sometimes those introverts end up becoming the best instructors. 2. Don't worry about looking stupid in front of other people. Everyone looks stupid when they start. At most schools you will find lots of sympathetic people willing to help you look less stupid because they remember how terrible they were at the beginning. 3. It is a full-body workout. Arms, legs, trunk, cardio. Perfect. 4. It is not boring. Martial arts require focus and concentration. For me, other types of indoor exercise are just mind-numbing.
Here is some advice on finding a martial arts school: 1. As fitness is your primary goal, look for a "family martial arts school" to get started. 2. Visit several schools and talk to the instructors there. Watch a beginner class; that's where you will be starting. Watch an advanced class (students with 2-3 years experience). Make sure the advanced students actually look better than the beginners. 3. Most schools will let you try one or more classes for free, or do free private lesson. Walk away if they don't. 4. Martial arts schools are notorious for trying to lock you into long-term contracts. There is a whole consulting business that is based on encouraging this practice. Ask for a month-to-month option that you can start with. Even if it costs more, pay month-to-month until you decide this is an activity you want to pursue long term. You don't want to be stuck with a year of payments if you decide after 3 weeks you hate it. 5. Consumer protection laws vary wildly depending on what state you live in; I assume this is true outside the US as well. Know your rights and their obligations. 6. Ask about the cost for promotions (belt tests) and required equipment. Be suspicious if they require lots of expensive equipment that you did not see being used in the classes you observed. 7. Don't get too wrapped up in choosing a particular style of art. Pay more attention to the atmosphere and methods of instruction.
Tivo has offered transfer deals in the past, but there isn't an option to transfer your lifetime service to Tivo HD right now. They do offer a multi-service discount of $6.00/month off whichever monthly plan you choose. With the MSD, the monthly fee is only $6.95 for a 3 year commitment. That's a bit cheaper than the $299 prepaid 3-year plan.
It's not true that you have no way to deauthorize the computer you no longer have.
From Apple support article 93014: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=930 14
If you find you have reached 5 authorizations due to system upgrades, you can reset your authorization count by clicking Deauthorize All in the Account Information screen. Note: You may only use this feature once per year. The Deauthorize All button will not appear if you have fewer than 5 authorized computers or if you have used this option within the last 12 months. Keep hating Apple's DRM if you want, but don't do it because they screwed you out of one of your authorized computers.
They actually remove a small section, and cauterize the ends! The crackling noises and smoke rising from one's nether regions during this procedure are very disconcerting.
No, I'm not kidding. But the worst part is those few seconds between jamming the needle into your sack and the local anesthetic kicking in. It's like being kicked by a lumberjack with steel-toed boots.
That sucks when they do the first side, and sucks more when the realization that you have a second ball slowly materializes...
According to http://www.ionet.net/~luttrell/history.html, the first parking meters were installed in Oklahoma City on July 16, 1935. They were intended to solve the problem of people who worked downtown taking too many parking spots all day.
This may just be the single most insightful comment in this thread. Poor documentation is a fact of life at all hardware companies. It's been true everywhere I have worked over the last 20 years.
The commenters that say "just release your specs" fail to understand that in many cases, the specs simply don't exist. The hardware guys who designed the last chip are off working on the next one, not writing docs. And the software guys who are forced to work with lousy docs are cussing them out.
Inside every hardware company in a fast-paced industry (which includes basically all semiconductor companies) there are two camps. One camp believes there isn't time to write documentation, the other believes that better documentation will fix no end of woes. Usually the first camp wins.
A company's life-blood is the collective wisdom of it's employees, not its specs. It's true in the open source world too. Think of how many projects have poor, outdated, or nonexistent documentation.
It's not his statement that is plain wrong, it's your understanding of NVIDIA's business.
When he talks about customers, he means companies that NVIDIA sells to, like Dell, HP, eVGA, MSI, etc. These companies (apparently) have not been asking for open source linux drivers. This shouldn't be a surprise; the linux market is a tiny fraction of all of these company's total business.
You're thinking of end-users. Sure, thousands of linux end-users have called for open source drivers, but these people are technically not NVIDIA customers. This is not ususual; buying a PC from Dell doesn't make me an Intel customer.
The same is not true for ATI. They do sell graphics cards to end-users.
Individual circumstances vary, but going straight to grad school often isn't cheaper in the long run. You're giving up 2 years of earnings (plus raises) and you have to pay for school yourself.
If you're only going as far as a Master's, consider working and having your employer pay for grad school. It's not easy, and it will take longer to finish your degree. But the real-life work experience will give you a new perspective towards your studies that full-time students will miss out on.
Don't procrastinate starting grad school after starting work though. Most people who "take a semester off" never get started. And voice of experience here, try especially hard to finish your degree before having kids.
The parent was dead on about quitting work and paying for grad school with retirement savings. This almost never pays off in the long run.
I also use iTunes. It does the job just fine, but requires Windows-XP or a Mac. I occasionally use my Tivo for one-shot podcast listening as well.
Finding good podcasts is a challenge. Everyone has different tastes, and there's a lot of just plain crap out there. But here are a some that I like:
National Public Radio has lots of good news-related podcasts. The NPR Story of the Day cast is worth a listen, and Wait... Wait Don't Tell Me is hilarious.
Coverville is a popular music podcast. The show's host is very entertaining and well informed.
If you're into a cappella music, AcappellaU and the Acapodcast are two of my favorites.
He shouldn't be connecting to his neighbor's open network at all. Would you stroll into your neighbor's house if you found a door left ajar?
Printing your name and phone number is just as wrong as printing instructions for securing the network, and is way dumber. There are lots of people in the world who are going to consider this an intrusion, and report it to law enforcement. Do you really want a visit from the police as thanks for your "helpful" offer?
If you find an open network, leave it alone. If you feel you must help, use the signal strength to determine which neighbor has the open access point, and make a personal visit. But don't be surprised if you get told to mind your own business.
It may vary by location, but yes, in at least some places Giganews access uses the Comcast account name and password.
It used to be true that one had to request newsgroup access and receive a special account name and password, but that changed a few months ago when they upped the monthly download quota from 1GB to 2GB.
Don't misquote. Nobody said "we don't care if it just falls apart".
Here's the real quote: "As long as we put the crew and the valuable cargo up above wherever the tanks are, we don't care what they shed," he said. "They can have dandruff all day long."
Seems sensible enough to me. Instead of trying to protect critical systems by preventing falling ice, simply move them above and let the ice fall harmlessly. The Saturn V used to drop huge pieces of ice during launch. I don't remember anyone ever calling it a safety hazard.
I'm pretty sure the folks at NASA are aware that exploding fuel tanks are something to be avoided.
It should be clear to everyone by now that the shuttle has failed to meet its goal of being a lower cost launch system. That doesn't necessary mean it never should have been built. Sometimes we learn more from our failures than our successes.
The shuttle is an amazing piece of engineering that needs to be retired. NASA needs to get over the emotional attachment to the shuttle and move on to better solutions before irreparable harm is done to the U.S. space program.
You might want to contact the U. S. Marconi Museum in Bedford, NH. http://www.marconiusa.org/index.html In addition to the exhibits, they restore vintage radios.
I work for a medium sized (~900 employees) semiconductor company. We have been migrating from Solaris to Linux for about 18 months now. I'm an IC designer who uses a Linux desktop every day. I pretty much spearheaded the move to Linux here, so I know what I'm talking about. We're doing mostly digital design and IC layout, but I think our experiences will apply for analog design as well.
1. OS selection: RedHat 7.3 or 8.0. Don't bother considering anything else.
2. Skip the file servers. You already have a large network of Suns, so I'm assuming you already have Sun, Netapp, or some other enterprise file servers. Don't mess with this. Your cheap Linux boxes are best used as fast compute servers. If one dies, chuck it into the dumpster and swap in a new one.
3. Skip the expensive graphics card. Any sub-$100 2D card is fine for the EDA apps used for IC design.
4. Skip the multiprocessor servers. I don't think the memory systems of most PC's are up to the task. Buy single processor systems, and run one job at-a-time on them. Use Gridware from Sun for free batch processing. Or pay for LSF if you're already using it in your existing network. Set up correctly, either can dispatch jobs to a Sun or a Linux box transparently to the user.
5. Skip the CD drive in the compute servers; you can install the OS from the network. Make your desktop users happy by including a CD drive so they can listen to tunes...
6. Put small IDE hard drives (30-40 Gig) in all of your Linux boxes. Discourage using the local drives for anything but transient data. Keep some spares on hand; some of these drives are going to croak.
7. Pay for fast processors and lots of RAM. We bought Athlons, but P4's are probably faster today. There's a 3Gig per process limit, so more than 3 gig is not useful.
8. Forget the Itanium except as a science project. Run any jobs that are too big (>3gig) for the Linux boxes on a 64-bit Sun. You won't find (m)any commercial EDA apps for Itanium. If you have some in-house applications that you really want to port to Itanium, go for it. I wouldn't bother...
9. Install Win4Lin to run those pesky windows apps. It's cheap, and gets the job done.
10. Prepare for people to start fighting over who gets the new Linux boxes. We don't have a single person here who would go back to their Sun.
Good luck. EDA on Linux works. It's as simple as that.
Slashdot Mirror
No, cost is a big issue, along with ergonomics.
The active shutter glasses are pretty cheap and simple. They are basically a one-pixel display for each eye, where the pixel switches between clear and opaque.
Contrast this to your idea, which amounts to a miniaturized 1080p display per eye, per user. Your glasses would much larger, much more expensive, and would consume much more power. They also make it impossible see anything in the viewing room. You can still look around when wearing the active shutter glasses.
Keeping the TV also has the nontrivial benefit of using it to watch 2D content...
There is a PERL-TK New Hampshire plate cruising about as well. That one registers especially high on the geek scale.
There is lots of mutual animosity between the Inquirer and NVIDIA. Let's just say that neither goes out of their way to say nice things about the other.
Chances are good that Wall Street has a less biased handle on the scope of the issue. The current stock price suggests that this problem, while plenty bad, is not even close to fatal.
Does this have anything to do with the Xbox 360's Red Ring of Death? [...]
Nvidia has been said to have had a hand in the design of some parts of the 360, and the problem sounds like it is identical.
Xbox 360 has ATI graphics. You must be thinking of the original Xbox, which did use NVIDIA graphics.
I completely agree; Martial Arts are ideal. Here are some additional points to consider.
1. Chances are good that you will find lots of fellow geek introverts at a martial arts school. Becoming less introverted is one reason many people choose martial arts. Sometimes those introverts end up becoming the best instructors.
2. Don't worry about looking stupid in front of other people. Everyone looks stupid when they start. At most schools you will find lots of sympathetic people willing to help you look less stupid because they remember how terrible they were at the beginning.
3. It is a full-body workout. Arms, legs, trunk, cardio. Perfect.
4. It is not boring. Martial arts require focus and concentration. For me, other types of indoor exercise are just mind-numbing.
Here is some advice on finding a martial arts school:
1. As fitness is your primary goal, look for a "family martial arts school" to get started.
2. Visit several schools and talk to the instructors there. Watch a beginner class; that's where you will be starting. Watch an advanced class (students with 2-3 years experience). Make sure the advanced students actually look better than the beginners.
3. Most schools will let you try one or more classes for free, or do free private lesson. Walk away if they don't.
4. Martial arts schools are notorious for trying to lock you into long-term contracts. There is a whole consulting business that is based on encouraging this practice. Ask for a month-to-month option that you can start with. Even if it costs more, pay month-to-month until you decide this is an activity you want to pursue long term. You don't want to be stuck with a year of payments if you decide after 3 weeks you hate it.
5. Consumer protection laws vary wildly depending on what state you live in; I assume this is true outside the US as well. Know your rights and their obligations.
6. Ask about the cost for promotions (belt tests) and required equipment. Be suspicious if they require lots of expensive equipment that you did not see being used in the classes you observed.
7. Don't get too wrapped up in choosing a particular style of art. Pay more attention to the atmosphere and methods of instruction.
Tivo has offered transfer deals in the past, but there isn't an option to transfer your lifetime service to Tivo HD right now.
They do offer a multi-service discount of $6.00/month off whichever monthly plan you choose. With the MSD, the monthly fee is only $6.95 for a 3 year commitment. That's a bit cheaper than the $299 prepaid 3-year plan.
I already placed my order...
From Apple support article 93014: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93
I would assume they built a mold in the block's final position, and carried the wet concrete up in small batches.
Still off-topic...
They actually remove a small section, and cauterize the ends! The crackling noises and smoke rising from one's nether regions during this procedure are very disconcerting.
No, I'm not kidding. But the worst part is those few seconds between jamming the needle into your sack and the local anesthetic kicking in. It's like being kicked by a lumberjack with steel-toed boots.
That sucks when they do the first side, and sucks more when the realization that you have a second ball slowly materializes...
You're fortunate that you don't live in a rural area where Verizon is busy trying to sell off their landlines. From today's New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/technology/28ver mont.html
According to http://www.ionet.net/~luttrell/history.html, the first parking meters were installed in Oklahoma City on July 16, 1935. They were intended to solve the problem of people who worked downtown taking too many parking spots all day.
This may just be the single most insightful comment in this thread. Poor documentation is a fact of life at all hardware companies. It's been true everywhere I have worked over the last 20 years.
The commenters that say "just release your specs" fail to understand that in many cases, the specs simply don't exist. The hardware guys who designed the last chip are off working on the next one, not writing docs. And the software guys who are forced to work with lousy docs are cussing them out.
Inside every hardware company in a fast-paced industry (which includes basically all semiconductor companies) there are two camps. One camp believes there isn't time to write documentation, the other believes that better documentation will fix no end of woes. Usually the first camp wins.
A company's life-blood is the collective wisdom of it's employees, not its specs. It's true in the open source world too. Think of how many projects have poor, outdated, or nonexistent documentation.
It's not his statement that is plain wrong, it's your understanding of NVIDIA's business.
When he talks about customers, he means companies that NVIDIA sells to, like Dell, HP, eVGA, MSI, etc. These companies (apparently) have not been asking for open source linux drivers. This shouldn't be a surprise; the linux market is a tiny fraction of all of these company's total business.
You're thinking of end-users. Sure, thousands of linux end-users have called for open source drivers, but these people are technically not NVIDIA customers. This is not ususual; buying a PC from Dell doesn't make me an Intel customer.
The same is not true for ATI. They do sell graphics cards to end-users.
Individual circumstances vary, but going straight to grad school often isn't cheaper in the long run. You're giving up 2 years of earnings (plus raises) and you have to pay for school yourself.
If you're only going as far as a Master's, consider working and having your employer pay for grad school. It's not easy, and it will take longer to finish your degree. But the real-life work experience will give you a new perspective towards your studies that full-time students will miss out on.
Don't procrastinate starting grad school after starting work though. Most people who "take a semester off" never get started. And voice of experience here, try especially hard to finish your degree before having kids.
The parent was dead on about quitting work and paying for grad school with retirement savings. This almost never pays off in the long run.
I also use iTunes. It does the job just fine, but requires Windows-XP or a Mac. I occasionally use my Tivo for one-shot podcast listening as well.
Finding good podcasts is a challenge. Everyone has different tastes, and there's a lot of just plain crap out there. But here are a some that I like:
National Public Radio has lots of good news-related podcasts. The NPR Story of the Day cast is worth a listen, and Wait... Wait Don't Tell Me is hilarious.
Coverville is a popular music podcast. The show's host is very entertaining and well informed.
If you're into a cappella music, AcappellaU and the Acapodcast are two of my favorites.
They're manufactured in China. If you order directly from Apple, you can follow the FedEx tracking from the factory to your door.
I imagine the presonalized laser engraving is one motivation for this. Build it, engrave it, package it, and ship it, all from one place. Slick.
He shouldn't be connecting to his neighbor's open network at all. Would you stroll into your neighbor's house if you found a door left ajar?
Printing your name and phone number is just as wrong as printing instructions for securing the network, and is way dumber. There are lots of people in the world who are going to consider this an intrusion, and report it to law enforcement. Do you really want a visit from the police as thanks for your "helpful" offer?
If you find an open network, leave it alone. If you feel you must help, use the signal strength to determine which neighbor has the open access point, and make a personal visit. But don't be surprised if you get told to mind your own business.
It may vary by location, but yes, in at least some places Giganews access uses the Comcast account name and password.
It used to be true that one had to request newsgroup access and receive a special account name and password, but that changed a few months ago when they upped the monthly download quota from 1GB to 2GB.
Don't misquote. Nobody said "we don't care if it just falls apart".
Here's the real quote: "As long as we put the crew and the valuable cargo up above wherever the tanks are, we don't care what they shed," he said. "They can have dandruff all day long."
Seems sensible enough to me. Instead of trying to protect critical systems by preventing falling ice, simply move them above and let the ice fall harmlessly. The Saturn V used to drop huge pieces of ice during launch. I don't remember anyone ever calling it a safety hazard.
I'm pretty sure the folks at NASA are aware that exploding fuel tanks are something to be avoided.
It should be clear to everyone by now that the shuttle has failed to meet its goal of being a lower cost launch system. That doesn't necessary mean it never should have been built. Sometimes we learn more from our failures than our successes.
The shuttle is an amazing piece of engineering that needs to be retired. NASA needs to get over the emotional attachment to the shuttle and move on to better solutions before irreparable harm is done to the U.S. space program.
Low-end Dell Dimension desktops (2400 and 3000) don't have AGP slots.
You might want to contact the U. S. Marconi Museum in Bedford, NH. http://www.marconiusa.org/index.html
In addition to the exhibits, they restore vintage radios.
I work for a medium sized (~900 employees) semiconductor company. We have been migrating from Solaris to Linux for about 18 months now. I'm an IC designer who uses a Linux desktop every day. I pretty much spearheaded the move to Linux here, so I know what I'm talking about. We're doing mostly digital design and IC layout, but I think our experiences will apply for analog design as well.
1. OS selection: RedHat 7.3 or 8.0. Don't bother considering anything else.
2. Skip the file servers. You already have a large network of Suns, so I'm assuming you already have Sun, Netapp, or some other enterprise file servers. Don't mess with this. Your cheap Linux boxes are best used as fast compute servers. If one dies, chuck it into the dumpster and swap in a new one.
3. Skip the expensive graphics card. Any sub-$100 2D card is fine for the EDA apps used for IC design.
4. Skip the multiprocessor servers. I don't think the memory systems of most PC's are up to the task. Buy single processor systems, and run one job at-a-time on them. Use Gridware from Sun for free batch processing. Or pay for LSF if you're already using it in your existing network. Set up correctly, either can dispatch jobs to a Sun or a Linux box transparently to the user.
5. Skip the CD drive in the compute servers; you can install the OS from the network. Make your desktop users happy by including a CD drive so they can listen to tunes...
6. Put small IDE hard drives (30-40 Gig) in all of your Linux boxes. Discourage using the local drives for anything but transient data. Keep some spares on hand; some of these drives are going to croak.
7. Pay for fast processors and lots of RAM. We bought Athlons, but P4's are probably faster today. There's a 3Gig per process limit, so more than 3 gig is not useful.
8. Forget the Itanium except as a science project. Run any jobs that are too big (>3gig) for the Linux boxes on a 64-bit Sun. You won't find (m)any commercial EDA apps for Itanium. If you have some in-house applications that you really want to port to Itanium, go for it. I wouldn't bother...
9. Install Win4Lin to run those pesky windows apps. It's cheap, and gets the job done.
10. Prepare for people to start fighting over who gets the new Linux boxes. We don't have a single person here who would go back to their Sun.
Good luck. EDA on Linux works. It's as simple as that.
Lawn darts were fun, but the stories of their danger are not greatly exaggerated.
Mom took one in the knee once. She was not a happy camper...
My kids call Trading Spaces "Mess up your Neighbor's House". Pretty appropriate IMO.
Why is it that all Slashdotter's wives watch the same stuff?
Please, keep those scientists away from my in-laws house. That's grief I don't need...