Thing is, everyone keeps mentioning pulling the screen out, and replacing it. Except, as far as I understand it, there's not much else to an OLED except the inputs and bezel. Aren't the polymers in fact printed onto the circuitry that drives this stuff? That doesn't sound so detachable to me...
The human eye apparently can distinguish less than 16 million colours (24-bit colour). However, I believe the colours it can distinguish are not evenly spread out through the colour space, so 32-bit colour might be an idea...
Hmm... how about, the environment is kinda messed up already, and having everyone throwing out their OLED TVs annually would really not help? Okay, they're meant to be environmentally more sound to produce, and probably to dispose of, but it's not an idea I'm massively fond of. If someone can come back and tell me the parts are easily recylable that would help...
Or, skipping that argument, I don't really feel like having to move TVs around annually. Sure, OLEDs are much lighter and smaller than CRTs, and even than LCD displays, but it's still not an idea that appeals.
Put another way, I can build computers from scratch, sys-admin Windows, Linux, OS X, Free and Open BSDs, and program in C, Java, Perl, m68k assembly and a whole pile of other languages.
Anyone brave enough to let me near their car engine? *evil grin*
1. Why on earth fiber? The advantage of fiber is that it works over long distances (standard copper ethernet cables can only go for about 200m I believe). It's great for connecting seperate sites. It's lousy for connecting dorm rooms. They should have had fiber coming into the halls, into a router, with gigabit switches serving the rooms. Suddenly, as long as you have RJ-45 ethernet, you can connect.
2. How much actual bandwidth is there. In particular, if you divide their bandwidth to the Internet, by the number of students, I bet you get a lot less than gigabit. Even taking into account that only a fraction of them will be online at any one time, I'd be suprised if this is actually much faster than most universities with a network in the halls.
Having just written a paper on BitTorrent (which should be presented at PGNET 2004 if anyone cares), a couple of points:
1. About 20% of people upload at least as much as they download. Which isn't a staggering number (I expected a lot higher), but that's still a reasonable number of people. 2. eDonkey - don't know about you, but I get about 24kbit/s on eDonkey. On BitTorrent, average bandwidth available per user comes out at around 200kbit/s, although I've seen up to 8mbit/s on high-demand torrents.
Well, if I was running a pirated version of Windows, and found out I couldn't secure my system because it was a pirated version, it would encourage me to actually buy a copy. While it might not persuade many people, I don't see MS wanting to make life easier for people without legal copies of Windows.
I'd just like to second this. I'm doing large amounts of data crunching (30Gb of raw data, being processed in several passes to generate summary statistics) for a paper I'm writing. I started writing a parser in C, and it was difficult. Someone suggested, as the data was text, that Perl would be a good language, so I wrote a parser in Perl. And lo, for it was easy, and the code made sense, and the performance really, really sucked.
So while I waited for the Perl to finish processing, I went back and finished my C parser. The code was ugly (something about a hand-coded finite state automata for parsing), and performance still kinda sucked, but I managed to finish the code and do the parsing in less time than it took the Perl code to complete.
In particular, all these benchmarks comparing C, Java, and Perl, etc. compare them doing similar tasks. Except, it's the features that Java and Perl don't have that makes C so fast, by which I primarily mean pointers, although having fine-grain control over data structures seems to provide a large performance boost too.
Err, no. I first bought Nvidia, then ATI, then Nvidia twice, then ATI again, and am probably going to go with ATI this time because I don't want to spend a fortune on a new power supply, or the electricity bill...
Interesting. It does seem to work in the UK - having been moving house every 9-12 months for the last seven years (living in a student town, permanent accomodation is apparently impossible to find), and each time having to deal with the previous owner's post, sending it back "NOT AT THIS ADDRESS", seems to cut down on the junk...
Which reminds me. Occaisionally I buy region 1 DVDs - things I can't get in this country, like MST3k. Now, I have a multi-region DVD player, but really would prefer to have a region 0 version. Ideally without those annoying bits where you can't fast forward.
So, here's the question. Is anyone aware of software that will take a DVD, and convert it to region 0 and without button blocking, ready for writing back to disk?
Unfortunately, we have lost the ISS, however the crew did manage to return in what appears to an FTL capable spaceship, with advanced energy weapons, transporters, and some kind of forcefield...
(Voyager shuttles were in fact Runabouts, right? Otherwise I just spouted more nonsense than usual...)
Two seperate "critical" passwords, one for financial (bank, credit card, etc.), one for system access.
One password for anything I need to make reasonably sure no-one gets access to (typically anything that stores my credit card details, even if they aren't viewable).
One password for anything it would be annoying if people access (LiveJournal, online retailers who don't store my credit card, etc.)
One password for sites I don't really care if anyone gets into.
One password for sites I only plan on using once (which you can have for a bar of chocolate)
Additionally, every 6 months or so I create (using a random password generator) a new password, which becomes my systems password. My systems password becomes my financial password, my financial password becomes my need-to-keep secure, and so on down...
C has its uses, especially where you need extremely high-speed code. Particularly the wierder stuff, like using function pointer arithmetic to improve performance, or highly-specific optimised binary search tree implementations. Now, neither of these cases is exactly every day stuff (or in fact a good idea unless you know exactly what you're doing), and I'm quite happy writing most of my code in Java, but when we're trying to do complex statistics across gigabytes of data, C really is the best language for the job.
Not that I'm diagreeing with you, but could someone tell the tech people here that, AFAIK I'm the only computer support person in the entire university who is available out of hours (and thank goodness I only handle a small service for one department!)
That's great, sorry, had expected the "It damages HDs when you power them up/down" argument, it's what I got back the last few times. If you're doing stuff with it, great, that's kinda what I meant by "If you're doing processing, fine, good point".
Why do people leave computers on at night? Really? If you're doing processing, fine, good point, otherwise... huh? Is the 30 second boot time in the morning so terrible? We have limited fossil fuels, could people perhaps try saving them instead of finding ways to work around the problem?
> Everynight, I get to play with the best players in the game
Y'see, that's the problem. People who play online tend to be a lot more skilled than me. There are a few reasons for this, but it boils down to the fact that my game playing time is extremely limited (I consider 5-6 hours over a week to be a lot), because I'm too busy doing other stuff. The people that play online tend to both put more time in, and just care more about how good they are.
So, while I think on-line gaming will continue to be really popular, it's also important for people to realise it's not going to appeal to everyone. I tend to play games vs my flatmates, when I do play multiplayer, and that works well for me...
Slashdot Mirror
Thing is, everyone keeps mentioning pulling the screen out, and replacing it. Except, as far as I understand it, there's not much else to an OLED except the inputs and bezel. Aren't the polymers in fact printed onto the circuitry that drives this stuff? That doesn't sound so detachable to me...
Or am I missing something...
The human eye apparently can distinguish less than 16 million colours (24-bit colour). However, I believe the colours it can distinguish are not evenly spread out through the colour space, so 32-bit colour might be an idea...
Hmm... how about, the environment is kinda messed up already, and having everyone throwing out their OLED TVs annually would really not help? Okay, they're meant to be environmentally more sound to produce, and probably to dispose of, but it's not an idea I'm massively fond of. If someone can come back and tell me the parts are easily recylable that would help...
Or, skipping that argument, I don't really feel like having to move TVs around annually. Sure, OLEDs are much lighter and smaller than CRTs, and even than LCD displays, but it's still not an idea that appeals.
Put another way, I can build computers from scratch, sys-admin Windows, Linux, OS X, Free and Open BSDs, and program in C, Java, Perl, m68k assembly and a whole pile of other languages.
Anyone brave enough to let me near their car engine? *evil grin*
1. Why on earth fiber? The advantage of fiber is that it works over long distances (standard copper ethernet cables can only go for about 200m I believe). It's great for connecting seperate sites. It's lousy for connecting dorm rooms. They should have had fiber coming into the halls, into a router, with gigabit switches serving the rooms. Suddenly, as long as you have RJ-45 ethernet, you can connect.
2. How much actual bandwidth is there. In particular, if you divide their bandwidth to the Internet, by the number of students, I bet you get a lot less than gigabit. Even taking into account that only a fraction of them will be online at any one time, I'd be suprised if this is actually much faster than most universities with a network in the halls.
What scares me is that I can't tell if you've just streamed the acronyms out of the article, or, like me, you actually have to work with this stuff...
Having just written a paper on BitTorrent (which should be presented at PGNET 2004 if anyone cares), a couple of points:
4 /papers/148.pdf that covers things like user-count dropoff.
1. About 20% of people upload at least as much as they download. Which isn't a staggering number (I expected a lot higher), but that's still a reasonable number of people.
2. eDonkey - don't know about you, but I get about 24kbit/s on eDonkey. On BitTorrent, average bandwidth available per user comes out at around 200kbit/s, although I've seen up to 8mbit/s on high-demand torrents.
Oh, and there's another interesting paper at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/pam200
Well, if I was running a pirated version of Windows, and found out I couldn't secure my system because it was a pirated version, it would encourage me to actually buy a copy. While it might not persuade many people, I don't see MS wanting to make life easier for people without legal copies of Windows.
So, nothing in the first 215 items seemed a little confusing? Wow...
I'd just like to second this. I'm doing large amounts of data crunching (30Gb of raw data, being processed in several passes to generate summary statistics) for a paper I'm writing. I started writing a parser in C, and it was difficult. Someone suggested, as the data was text, that Perl would be a good language, so I wrote a parser in Perl. And lo, for it was easy, and the code made sense, and the performance really, really sucked.
So while I waited for the Perl to finish processing, I went back and finished my C parser. The code was ugly (something about a hand-coded finite state automata for parsing), and performance still kinda sucked, but I managed to finish the code and do the parsing in less time than it took the Perl code to complete.
In particular, all these benchmarks comparing C, Java, and Perl, etc. compare them doing similar tasks. Except, it's the features that Java and Perl don't have that makes C so fast, by which I primarily mean pointers, although having fine-grain control over data structures seems to provide a large performance boost too.
P800 Ogg Vorbis Player
Agile Messenger IM client
Okay, so it's not many, but they are out there, and if you really want free apps, download the SDK:
http://www.symbian.com/developer/
Err, no. I first bought Nvidia, then ATI, then Nvidia twice, then ATI again, and am probably going to go with ATI this time because I don't want to spend a fortune on a new power supply, or the electricity bill...
Interesting. It does seem to work in the UK - having been moving house every 9-12 months for the last seven years (living in a student town, permanent accomodation is apparently impossible to find), and each time having to deal with the previous owner's post, sending it back "NOT AT THIS ADDRESS", seems to cut down on the junk...
Which reminds me. Occaisionally I buy region 1 DVDs - things I can't get in this country, like MST3k. Now, I have a multi-region DVD player, but really would prefer to have a region 0 version. Ideally without those annoying bits where you can't fast forward.
So, here's the question. Is anyone aware of software that will take a DVD, and convert it to region 0 and without button blocking, ready for writing back to disk?
I can see the NASA press release now:
Unfortunately, we have lost the ISS, however the crew did manage to return in what appears to an FTL capable spaceship, with advanced energy weapons, transporters, and some kind of forcefield...
(Voyager shuttles were in fact Runabouts, right? Otherwise I just spouted more nonsense than usual...)
I remember having to try telling someone one my passwords... who'd have thought having varied case characters could cause so many problems...
I go a little further than this:
Additionally, every 6 months or so I create (using a random password generator) a new password, which becomes my systems password. My systems password becomes my financial password, my financial password becomes my need-to-keep secure, and so on down...
Works for me...
C has its uses, especially where you need extremely high-speed code. Particularly the wierder stuff, like using function pointer arithmetic to improve performance, or highly-specific optimised binary search tree implementations. Now, neither of these cases is exactly every day stuff (or in fact a good idea unless you know exactly what you're doing), and I'm quite happy writing most of my code in Java, but when we're trying to do complex statistics across gigabytes of data, C really is the best language for the job.
Not that I'm diagreeing with you, but could someone tell the tech people here that, AFAIK I'm the only computer support person in the entire university who is available out of hours (and thank goodness I only handle a small service for one department!)
Yes, but you can always play Ogg Vorbis on it:
http://symbianoggplay.sourceforge.net/
and isn't that what's really important in life?
That's great, sorry, had expected the "It damages HDs when you power them up/down" argument, it's what I got back the last few times. If you're doing stuff with it, great, that's kinda what I meant by "If you're doing processing, fine, good point".
Why do people leave computers on at night? Really? If you're doing processing, fine, good point, otherwise... huh? Is the 30 second boot time in the morning so terrible? We have limited fossil fuels, could people perhaps try saving them instead of finding ways to work around the problem?
In particular, if he bought cheaper gadgets, maybe they'd have green or red LEDs...
I want you to consider, for example, what any of the Robocop or Terminator movies would be like, after this DVD player got to them.
Which, admittadely, is not the sort of content likely to be played on this, I just thought it was a funny idea...
> Everynight, I get to play with the best players in the game
Y'see, that's the problem. People who play online tend to be a lot more skilled than me. There are a few reasons for this, but it boils down to the fact that my game playing time is extremely limited (I consider 5-6 hours over a week to be a lot), because I'm too busy doing other stuff. The people that play online tend to both put more time in, and just care more about how good they are.
So, while I think on-line gaming will continue to be really popular, it's also important for people to realise it's not going to appeal to everyone. I tend to play games vs my flatmates, when I do play multiplayer, and that works well for me...