A few years ago you could buy DVD players with DVI outputs, dumping up scaled 1080i without HDCP. Then a few years ago, when all the DVI ports disappeared so many of the players started refusing to dump 1080i over HDMI/DVI without HDCP. Instead they would only dump it at 720p or lower, that's when a lot of manufactures did the same thing to component. Its been really hard to find DVD players that would upscale to 1080i/p without HDCP for a couple years now.
The capacity and bitrate were the only advantage. On the other hand HD-DVD was a "finished" platform, with dozens of other advantages. It was doing dozens of things that simply wern't possible with the profile 1.0 (then later 1.1) BR disks. Its also pretty much given at this point, that putting java on the player has guaranteed that its been (and will be for the near future) a firmware upgrade/incompatibility nightmare. For a couple of years there, BR was just a scramble to throw in features (think picture in picture directors commentary, that required everyone except the PS3 owners to buy new players) when some hot HD-DVD title came out using a feature. I have a rule about my Blury player, if the disk I'm trying to play is newer than the firmware, then go to Sony's site and upgrade the firmware.
As someone familiar with the actual BR movie streams (chuckle) very few of them actually utilize more than single layer BR (25G) even when they are originally on dual layer. The extra capacity is almost always a second copy of the movie, or some extra crap encoded at 1080p originally filmed with a 480i camera. Even then, they generally come in under 30G (the default HD-DVD dual layer format). Frankly, even now, I can boot my HD-DVD player, drop a disk in and compare the "experience" with recent BR disks. HD-DVD continues to have more polish, and an unnoticeable quality difference. Part of that is the movie studios fault. For example, the default behavior for a HD-DVD is to start playing the movie (not previews) when the disk is inserted. If you want to select another audio stream (cause your system settings weren't correct) the popup menus over the movie allows you to do it dynamically while the movie is playing. The sequence for HD-DVD is "insert movie, watch movie", where is with BR, its "insert movie, fast forward through 3 commercials, navigate menus to start movie, watch movie". Then there are technology problems, for example, probably over 1/2 of the BR movies still can't be resumed from the middle, if you decide to finish watching at another time. This is apparently due to some issue with... wait for it.. the java (BD+?) running on the disks.
Finally, the hard coating was "required" because without it, the disks were to fragile as the data layer is right on the surface. I'm not sure that's an advantage. Someone could amended the CD, DVD or HD-DVD spec to require it too. It won't happen. It isn't necessary with those specifications as minor scratches don't ruin the disk. You can by DVD blanks with the same coating, but very few people do that either. If HD-DVD were still around, they probably would be using the scratch resistant coating to compensate for the error correction changes they were making right at the end to create 23G layers.
Which is why the parents solution is wrong. You should probably force crash dump the machine, pull the HD, swap a new one in, rebuilt the machine and then analyze the pulled hard drive.
That way you have a record of not only what was on the disk, but in memory as well. Of course the NMI or crashdump could be hooked, and set to wipe the memory, but that takes a level of care you have to hope the malware author didn't have.
If I can come up with a regression model that accurately predicts the price of corn next quarter 95% of the time, I can make a fortune on the markets with that knowledge. I don't really care if the variables in my equation are causative or correlative, I only care if they make accurate predictions.
And that is exactly the thinking that got us into the current mess. Its totally false for any real market. This has been known/ignored for a long time, but people continue to insist its true. While you may be able to make a lot of money when the model is correct, the type of deviations real markets have will eventually cause problems. Look up "Long Term Capital Management" for a case study. The only way to avoid the big risk is to make smaller bets, until your not making a fortune anymore...
The fastest previous Intel processor with cutting-edge libraries in the most favorable mode could probably encrypt or decrypt 500MB/s/core at 3-3.5GHz. This is fast enough for most purposes, but in real life with ordinary libraries you'd probably get a third of that
500MB/sec on AES, or something else? If AES, is your library available for use/purchase? Our application needs AES as fast as it can go, and that's pretty darn fast without acceleration hardware.
I've been calling it eXtraPoop since it was released. Given I was running w2k pro, I concluded it was called XP for all the unnecessary crap like windows activation, and the fisher-price look it had.
The polarization for passive glasses is circular, so alignment isn't an issue.
Your right, the polarization on real 3d is circular, but it still ghosts. Whether that is due to the projection screens or something else I don't know. The bottom line is that I expect most of the people complaining of "head aches" have the problem because the image always looks slightly out of focus due to the ghosting. My experience with the active glasses is that the images look significantly sharper.
I think the active shutter glasses work better because you don't have to worry about alignment as much. The fixed up/down left/right glasses need to be fairly well aligned to the source or you get ghosting from a percentage of the light leaking through the wrong lens.
Seriously though why not just web forms keep java script in the browser so we only have to worry about the browser as a javascript threat vector. PDF forms seem like a complete duplication and a poor one at that since it's more efficient to send someone a URL to a website that can take the data and then pass it on to the back end system automatically. Only reason I see people doing the adobe forms is because they are too lazy, dumb, or ignorant to either build a simple forms based web app or hire a coder to do it for them.
But adobe can't sell that.. What they can sell is print accurate display. But that market is only so big, so they make up excuses like we need javascript to do form validation. Which everyone knows is BS, form validation can be done with simple rule or regex based engines. The truth is, they want to sell big expensive customized "work flow management" packages that lock their customers into a proprietary technology they can milk for decades. Which any idiot can see, and hence the reason you don't see lots of PDF forms. The fundamental problem is, PDF is the defacto standard for display independent layout and printing. Nothing else really comes close (except maybe ps, DVI needs font encapsulation), so everyone is jerked around by the needs of a company to make money.
I'm going to second the dozens of comments about everything being treated like ass. I'm a US citizen as well, and of the last half dozen entries maybe 2 where what I would call smooth. I've done everything from sit in the first mystery room (you know the one where people in line mysteriously get taken to, and then just as mysteriously released, or disappear into other rooms never to be seen again!), to being stuck in customs sweeps where they go over every passenger's belonging with a fine tooth comb. Or most common, having the joy of standing in the immigration line for more than a few hours.
I've missed enough flights due to simply trying to reenter, that I now try to leave 6 hours on my itineraries to get back in. I would rather sit around an airport for 5 hours, than get unexpectedly stuck in some city overnight.
BTW: If you haven't had the joy of the first mystery room, then you are really missing an experience. I couldn't actually believe how people are treated there. Lets just say, after my fairly mild experience I believe all the stories posted on the internet.
One question on it, however, did cause us some trouble since it was about how much money we brought into the country and what we estimated the value of our belongings to be and we had just bought a new, fancy camcorder. Since we tried to be honest, we probably overestimated everything a little and the customs agent actually asked why the total value of our belongings and cash was so high
IIRC, the line reads something like "List the value of all items being brought into the XXX". Which on first pass leads you to believe they want the value of the possessions your are carrying. In fact, most countries, the US included really mean, the value of items you plan on leaving in the country. A lot of travelers (especially business) if they computed the value of the laptop/software/suits/watches/etc they are carrying far exceeds the customs allowances. The only glitch entering the US, is cash. never carry any significant amount of cash in, and if you do, you better declare it. The stupid "war on drugs" will get you marked up instantly as a drug dealer/money launderer if you bring cash in. Get yourself a credit card and ATM card before you come.
I bet the OS group gets to keep their hardware. While windbg via named pipe is cute, the last thing you need during OS/driver bringup is more complexity. I tend to do just find with IPMI/ILO/IP-PDU/RS-232/etc for remote management during kernel work, but there are some weeks where I have to walk into the lab 100 times a day to move a card/cable, or press the reset button because the particular machine isn't on the IP-PDU and the buggy IPMI card got confused due to a PCIe bus hang or whatnot.
Every block on the disk has error correction as well. The undetected bit error rates for hard drives are exceedingly low. When put into a Reed Solomon raid6 scrubber the chance of undetected bit error rates goes even lower. That doesn't mean you will not have uncorrectable errors, what it means is that it becomes extremely unlikely that you won't detect them.
Compared with multiple layers of ecc the Fletcher checksums in ZFS are a joke.
Newer GE Security alarms support cellular networks, although this does increase your monthly monitoring bill by $30 or more.
Or, you can just find a monitoring company that doesn't try to screw their customers. Its possible to get multizone+smoke monitoring over cell for less than $30 from reputable companies. To do that you just have to avoid the companies that advertise on TV all day long.
I wondered this myself. How can a few hundred K of HTML/javascript and images turn into 10-15M of memory usage. The only explanation is the DOM structures are being constructed and left in memory, and Javascript garbage collection/leaking.
I don't find that surprising, it could be a problem even back in the win2k days. In general back then, running WHQL drivers, the machines generally worked. I had a number of machines with >4G of memory in the 2k time frame and they worked fine as long as you were careful about what hardware you plugged in.
As soon as MS released the 64-bit versions of windows, the PAE support became a 3rd class citizen, primary because the official line was use the 64-bit version of windows.
Running 64-bit isn't a bad idea, and not to sound a little old, but i'm not really sure what your average desktop user does with 6G of ram. Its way more than you need for general use, and things like HD video processing are still fairly constrained until you get over 10+G of RAM. About the only time I go over 4G of RAM is when I have a few virtual machines open. Heck, right (64-bit w2k3) now i've got a win7, suse and sles VM running along with a shed load of local applications and my current physical memory usage is 3G on a machine with 4G of ram. The peak commit on the machine is 5G over a few months. At home I edit HD home movies on a machine with 2G of RAM, and it works just fine except when it becomes disk constrained and then I need a lot more than 6G of ram to cache the whole movie. Frankly, I've thought about putting more RAM in that machine, and I would if every time I think about it I check my current ram usage to find 1G or more free.
Now, the servers I use eat RAM, but that is different...
The real problem with 64-bit windows isn't the drivers, nor is it the fact that there are so few 64-bit clean applications out there. The real problem is the installed base of 16-bit applications. Last month I purchased a couple of educational games for my 3 year old. Turns out they are 16-bit, and won't run on a 64-bit OS. The developer doesn't have any plans to update them. This is far from unusual, I've been running 64-bit windows on one of my machines since the beta releases (a couple months after the initial opterons became available, it just took another year and a half for Ms to release it). That was a long time ago, and while lots of things work that didn't initially (.net support for example) some things never will.
That is because all 16 bit operations were removed from long mode, so MS didn't integrate any kind of 16-bit compatibility layer in windows. The only choice is a virtual machine. So, while getting a 32-bit application with a 16 bit installer is getting rarer, there are whole classes of applications which work just fine on a 32-bit OS but not on the 64-bit version. I expect that this short sight is part of the reasoning for XP compatibility mode via a VM in win7. Usually, the OS just acts like an older version for particular apps. That is because every version of the OS since w2k (maybe earlier) has had compatibility modes going back to very old versions of windows (right click your application, properties, compatibility ). From the average user of this site, that doesn't mean anything because they only see the small minority of applications that are very popular and therefor are updated regularly. The total set of windows applications is much larger, many of which run in niche markets, or are company specific. For example, I have a very capable eeprom burner which is driven by a 16-bit application, and doesn't work for a shit in a VM.
Also, it is possible to support more than 4G of ram with 32-bit windows, you just have to have a version that supports PAE, something Ms has been silently trying to kill, and has been helped by willful ignorance by a lot of people.
There are a lot of simple passive circuits, but no one is impressed by the switch and lightbulb, or the 1000 variations using solar cells or LEDs.
So, It seems to me that as a physics teacher, your probably better off focusing on the analog side of things and sticking with simple R/C/L type circuits. That stuff is fairly basic and matches up with basic physics. It helps to have some calculus to understand capacitors and inductors, but I understood basically how capacitors and inductors worked, long before I took a formal calculus class. Any good teacher should be able to impart a basic knowledge, its like computing the distance/speed/acceleration without doing the calculus, you just give the students the final formulas and an explanation of how to work them. Making the parts may or may not save some money, but it imparts a hands on kind of knowledge that isn't often taught in school.
Some ideas,
Butterworth filters- Do them in the audio range, all you need are a handful of capacitors and inductors, a shared audio source (PC, Radio, etc), a couple speakers. Bonus points if you make the inductors and capacitors in class using wire/tinfoil/paper towels etc.
RLC resonators - Design them to be in the audio range, or slow enough to be optically interesting. These can be tricky, especially if your trying to actually drive a load (speaker instead of an inductor, lamp instead of resistor). It might be better to have a few pre-built amplifiers with bulbs or speakers that you use as the load. Also, ignore the majority of the math and just focus on the w=1/sqrt(LC). The mistakes are often times the most fun and the fact that the results can be changed by moving you hand over them adds to it.
AM Crystal radios - These require a sensitive earphone. This site sells them, and has instructions for building radios with nothing else but the earphone and stuff every student should be able to find at home. Be prepared, the earphone is fairly expensive ($3.85 in quantities of 100). Since they are small they will probably walk off. The alternative is to build an amplifier and let them plug their radios into it.
The real problem is that the excitement level is going to be fairly limited, unless you add a BJT or FET. If you add those, the sky is the limit. Again the math can get pretty ugly, but running a BJT as a switch between saturation and cutoff is easy to understand and opens up the possibility of building simple and/or gates. From that you can build a bunch of digital stuff. Radio shack sold 100 packs of 2N2222 BJTs for just a few $ back when they sold such things. I'm sure you can find similar deals if you hunt around.
That said, again your probably better off sticking with the analog, the results tend to be more impressive due to the limited parts count. I would stay away from IC's. I don't think they are appropriate for a basic physics class as they are just black boxes. Plus, they can be expensive in the quantities you will need.
Gates - Build simple and/or gates for voting machines, etc.
Small signal amplifiers - You can build an amplifier that can drive a speaker with a single BJT (it just needs to be fairly beefy) and you need high impedance speakers. Again, bonus points if you build the speakers! This goes well with the crystal radio.
Colpitts/Hartley Oscillators - Again you can build simple ones with just a single BJT, these can often drive small loads without an amplifier as well, and they won't die like the resonators.
Finally, if your making the components, its going to be very helpful to be able to measure their capacitance, resistance or inductance. An inexpensive meter can provide R/C measurements, and you can build circuits that a part can be dropped in, that counts frequency or measures inductance.
What you are describing is called an arms race. Worse yet, the whole thought pattern stems from the idea that you need big ground and air offensive capability. If you step back and consider simple defense its actually quite simple, either MAD with hydrogen MIRVs works, or it doesn't. Then the only real offensive capability you need is in the form of being able to project special forces teams anywhere in the globe on short order to deal with situations that don't warrant the big guns. Even worse, small automated missiles are basically unstoppable in large enough quantities to take out anything of real value (aircraft carriers, bombers, etc) so you looking at a a fairly small offensive capability being able to do pretty serious damage. Thankfully, the same actors that have that kind of technology also have nukes so we don't go to war with them. Still, even without big government support the military is massively lacking against this kind of attack. Look at the current crop of IEDs in Iraq. A fairly small number of "guerrillas" has done an inordinate amount of damage. The current military/political stance is just a huge error.
I would ask why this stupidity is allowed to continue but then I remember that people like this thought credit default swaps were a pretty neat idea.
Fundamentally, CDS's are a fairly good idea (aka protect the lender if the borrower defaults, see Private Mortgage Insurance). The problem is that its hard enough to price something like PMI. Its even harder to price a CDO, and given the abstractions, people started to play games, like buying CDS's for securities they didn't even own, from multiple companies. Or selling CDS's at effectively random prices..
I see a lot of people saying that win7 is going to be a viable OS for netbooks. I just installed it this weekend on a netbook, and frankly it was a miserable experience. When finished, it was totally unusable for two primary reasons. First the netbook has a 1024x600 10" screen, once windows was done drawing all its art in the form of huge taskbars and big ribbons, plus assorted other screen junk, about 1/3 of the extremely limited screen remained. Secondly, it was just a dog, the 1G memory and low end CPU just makes it crawl along.
First let me say, I've been stuck at sub 2kx1.5k since the early 90's when the first 21" 1900x1280 monitors became affordable. I write/test a lot of code and vertical real estate has a significant affect on my productivity. Now, I use three Samsung 204T's (PVA, 1600x1200, 20"). Two are rotated 90 degrees. My laptop is a lenovo T61p with IPS 1900x1200 15.4" monitor. The lenovo display is fantastic even if it is wide screen. What I wouldn't give to have that kind of PPI in a 24" 4:3..
How do rotated 20" LCDs compare with two large CRT's? I wouldn't go back. Its primarily two things. First, at those resolutions I would converge my monitors daily. I've never seen a monitor that could run at those resolutions that would stay converged for any length of time. Plus, depending on luck/quality a lot of larger (>19") monitors couldn't keep the edges converged when the center was. My last CRT's had controls which allowed me to converge different parts of the screen, even then, there were areas with issues. The LCD simply doesn't have that problem.
The second area is DVI, while DVI has its own issues, I've never seen it smear. This is especially important because when I rotate the monitors I really notice video card DAC, or cabling issues. I think its because I've been trained to ignore a certain amount of horizontal bleed, when it shows up vertically the picture looks terrible.
Finally, there a number of other pluses, for example, I'm sure I have less eye strain now, more desk space, etc.
In the end, I believe the current crop of LCD monitors are mass produced trash. As others have stated you can get a 24" and rotate it 90. The problem is that I haven't seen a non TN 24" panel, assuming you can even find a 24" with a rotating base, the monitors look terrible when you rotate them. I picked up another 204T a few months ago, via an authorized samsung refurbishing company, for a "used" monitor it was a ripoff, compared with a new non TN one, a fairly decent deal.
No, he just found that RAID controllers suck. Which they do, universally, all the time. The only ones that actually perform decently are the ones in external SAN boxes, and inside they are typically servers with software RAID...
Mostly, right, except that if by "software" you mean software which drives big honking DMA and parity/Galois field computation engines in hardware, or runs on microcontrollers designed for the task, then yes.. PPC 440SPE
Maybe, but the java engines on the bluray players are slow. If you read the boards, people are still comparing bootup and disk load times even today with 3rd and 4th generation bluray players. I have a second generation player and it regularly takes a few minutes from power on to being able to play the movie. Menu's chug along like they are running on a 15 year old computer. This is with literally dozens of firmware updates which have improved the performance of the machine many times over. It got particularly bad when BD+ arrived as its implemented in java, and adds probably 45 seconds of bootup time on my player to every disk. PS3 users don't see this because the machine has gobsnots of processing power. Java on bluray has definitely increased the basic CPU requirements of the player, that much is obvious if you look at the tech specs on the more recent players. Not only that but is causing a lot of problems implementing the firmware on the devices. I have one of the sony players, and I have a rule. If the disk being played is newer than the firmware check for a firmware upgrade. If I have problems with the disks its almost always when i'm navigating around in the menus or if I try to pop the menus up during the movie.
the storage difference between blu-ray and HD was barely anything.
Yes the storage difference was always pointed to as the BR advantage, but I have a bluray ripping setup, and rarely does a movie come in over 25G even when its on a 50G BR. Even less often do they come in over 30G (nearly all my HD-DVD are dual layer, single layer HD-DVD was pretty much non existent).
The real reason Blu-Ray won is it's packaging.
I don't know about that, seems to me the backroom dealings with the movie studios had more to do with it than anything. Had HD-DVD lasted another year, the combo players would have been standard. After that, the consumer wouldn't have really cared, and it would have come down to disk production and licensing costs. Its likely that HD DVD would have then won in the long run, because it was cheaper to produce. Frankly, whether BR "won" is really still in the air, I suspect that BR is going to be like laserdisk. Popular with small segment of the market, and promptly killed after years of little growth when the next mass appeal format arrives.
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A few years ago you could buy DVD players with DVI outputs, dumping up scaled 1080i without HDCP. Then a few years ago, when all the DVI ports disappeared so many of the players started refusing to dump 1080i over HDMI/DVI without HDCP. Instead they would only dump it at 720p or lower, that's when a lot of manufactures did the same thing to component. Its been really hard to find DVD players that would upscale to 1080i/p without HDCP for a couple years now.
The capacity and bitrate were the only advantage. On the other hand HD-DVD was a "finished" platform, with dozens of other advantages. It was doing dozens of things that simply wern't possible with the profile 1.0 (then later 1.1) BR disks. Its also pretty much given at this point, that putting java on the player has guaranteed that its been (and will be for the near future) a firmware upgrade/incompatibility nightmare. For a couple of years there, BR was just a scramble to throw in features (think picture in picture directors commentary, that required everyone except the PS3 owners to buy new players) when some hot HD-DVD title came out using a feature. I have a rule about my Blury player, if the disk I'm trying to play is newer than the firmware, then go to Sony's site and upgrade the firmware.
As someone familiar with the actual BR movie streams (chuckle) very few of them actually utilize more than single layer BR (25G) even when they are originally on dual layer. The extra capacity is almost always a second copy of the movie, or some extra crap encoded at 1080p originally filmed with a 480i camera. Even then, they generally come in under 30G (the default HD-DVD dual layer format). Frankly, even now, I can boot my HD-DVD player, drop a disk in and compare the "experience" with recent BR disks. HD-DVD continues to have more polish, and an unnoticeable quality difference. Part of that is the movie studios fault. For example, the default behavior for a HD-DVD is to start playing the movie (not previews) when the disk is inserted. If you want to select another audio stream (cause your system settings weren't correct) the popup menus over the movie allows you to do it dynamically while the movie is playing. The sequence for HD-DVD is "insert movie, watch movie", where is with BR, its "insert movie, fast forward through 3 commercials, navigate menus to start movie, watch movie". Then there are technology problems, for example, probably over 1/2 of the BR movies still can't be resumed from the middle, if you decide to finish watching at another time. This is apparently due to some issue with... wait for it.. the java (BD+?) running on the disks.
Finally, the hard coating was "required" because without it, the disks were to fragile as the data layer is right on the surface. I'm not sure that's an advantage. Someone could amended the CD, DVD or HD-DVD spec to require it too. It won't happen. It isn't necessary with those specifications as minor scratches don't ruin the disk. You can by DVD blanks with the same coating, but very few people do that either. If HD-DVD were still around, they probably would be using the scratch resistant coating to compensate for the error correction changes they were making right at the end to create 23G layers.
Which is why the parents solution is wrong. You should probably force crash dump the machine, pull the HD, swap a new one in, rebuilt the machine and then analyze the pulled hard drive.
That way you have a record of not only what was on the disk, but in memory as well. Of course the NMI or crashdump could be hooked, and set to wipe the memory, but that takes a level of care you have to hope the malware author didn't have.
If I can come up with a regression model that accurately predicts the price of corn next quarter 95% of the time, I can make a fortune on the markets with that knowledge. I don't really care if the variables in my equation are causative or correlative, I only care if they make accurate predictions.
And that is exactly the thinking that got us into the current mess. Its totally false for any real market. This has been known/ignored for a long time, but people continue to insist its true. While you may be able to make a lot of money when the model is correct, the type of deviations real markets have will eventually cause problems. Look up "Long Term Capital Management" for a case study. The only way to avoid the big risk is to make smaller bets, until your not making a fortune anymore...
The fastest previous Intel processor with cutting-edge libraries in the most favorable mode could probably encrypt or decrypt 500MB/s/core at 3-3.5GHz. This is fast enough for most purposes, but in real life with ordinary libraries you'd probably get a third of that
500MB/sec on AES, or something else? If AES, is your library available for use/purchase? Our application needs AES as fast as it can go, and that's pretty darn fast without acceleration hardware.
I've been calling it eXtraPoop since it was released. Given I was running w2k pro, I concluded it was called XP for all the unnecessary crap like windows activation, and the fisher-price look it had.
The polarization for passive glasses is circular, so alignment isn't an issue.
Your right, the polarization on real 3d is circular, but it still ghosts. Whether that is due to the projection screens or something else I don't know. The bottom line is that I expect most of the people complaining of "head aches" have the problem because the image always looks slightly out of focus due to the ghosting. My experience with the active glasses is that the images look significantly sharper.
I think the active shutter glasses work better because you don't have to worry about alignment as much. The fixed up/down left/right glasses need to be fairly well aligned to the source or you get ghosting from a percentage of the light leaking through the wrong lens.
Seriously though why not just web forms keep java script in the browser so we only have to worry about the browser as a javascript threat vector. PDF forms seem like a complete duplication and a poor one at that since it's more efficient to send someone a URL to a website that can take the data and then pass it on to the back end system automatically. Only reason I see people doing the adobe forms is because they are too lazy, dumb, or ignorant to either build a simple forms based web app or hire a coder to do it for them.
But adobe can't sell that.. What they can sell is print accurate display. But that market is only so big, so they make up excuses like we need javascript to do form validation. Which everyone knows is BS, form validation can be done with simple rule or regex based engines. The truth is, they want to sell big expensive customized "work flow management" packages that lock their customers into a proprietary technology they can milk for decades. Which any idiot can see, and hence the reason you don't see lots of PDF forms. The fundamental problem is, PDF is the defacto standard for display independent layout and printing. Nothing else really comes close (except maybe ps, DVI needs font encapsulation), so everyone is jerked around by the needs of a company to make money.
I'm going to second the dozens of comments about everything being treated like ass. I'm a US citizen as well, and of the last half dozen entries maybe 2 where what I would call smooth. I've done everything from sit in the first mystery room (you know the one where people in line mysteriously get taken to, and then just as mysteriously released, or disappear into other rooms never to be seen again!), to being stuck in customs sweeps where they go over every passenger's belonging with a fine tooth comb. Or most common, having the joy of standing in the immigration line for more than a few hours.
I've missed enough flights due to simply trying to reenter, that I now try to leave 6 hours on my itineraries to get back in. I would rather sit around an airport for 5 hours, than get unexpectedly stuck in some city overnight.
BTW: If you haven't had the joy of the first mystery room, then you are really missing an experience. I couldn't actually believe how people are treated there. Lets just say, after my fairly mild experience I believe all the stories posted on the internet.
One question on it, however, did cause us some trouble since it was about how much money we brought into the country and what we estimated the value of our belongings to be and we had just bought a new, fancy camcorder. Since we tried to be honest, we probably overestimated everything a little and the customs agent actually asked why the total value of our belongings and cash was so high
IIRC, the line reads something like "List the value of all items being brought into the XXX". Which on first pass leads you to believe they want the value of the possessions your are carrying. In fact, most countries, the US included really mean, the value of items you plan on leaving in the country. A lot of travelers (especially business) if they computed the value of the laptop/software/suits/watches/etc they are carrying far exceeds the customs allowances. The only glitch entering the US, is cash. never carry any significant amount of cash in, and if you do, you better declare it. The stupid "war on drugs" will get you marked up instantly as a drug dealer/money launderer if you bring cash in. Get yourself a credit card and ATM card before you come.
I bet the OS group gets to keep their hardware. While windbg via named pipe is cute, the last thing you need during OS/driver bringup is more complexity. I tend to do just find with IPMI/ILO/IP-PDU/RS-232/etc for remote management during kernel work, but there are some weeks where I have to walk into the lab 100 times a day to move a card/cable, or press the reset button because the particular machine isn't on the IP-PDU and the buggy IPMI card got confused due to a PCIe bus hang or whatnot.
Every block on the disk has error correction as well. The undetected bit error rates for hard drives are exceedingly low. When put into a Reed Solomon raid6 scrubber the chance of undetected bit error rates goes even lower. That doesn't mean you will not have uncorrectable errors, what it means is that it becomes extremely unlikely that you won't detect them.
Compared with multiple layers of ecc the Fletcher checksums in ZFS are a joke.
You are forgetting about AWE, random google hit about it. (http://blogs.technet.com/rob/archive/2008/05/15/windows-memory-and-sql-server.aspx)
Newer GE Security alarms support cellular networks, although this does increase your monthly monitoring bill by $30 or more.
Or, you can just find a monitoring company that doesn't try to screw their customers. Its possible to get multizone+smoke monitoring over cell for less than $30 from reputable companies. To do that you just have to avoid the companies that advertise on TV all day long.
I wondered this myself. How can a few hundred K of HTML/javascript and images turn into 10-15M of memory usage. The only explanation is the DOM structures are being constructed and left in memory, and Javascript garbage collection/leaking.
I don't find that surprising, it could be a problem even back in the win2k days. In general back then, running WHQL drivers, the machines generally worked. I had a number of machines with >4G of memory in the 2k time frame and they worked fine as long as you were careful about what hardware you plugged in.
As soon as MS released the 64-bit versions of windows, the PAE support became a 3rd class citizen, primary because the official line was use the 64-bit version of windows.
Running 64-bit isn't a bad idea, and not to sound a little old, but i'm not really sure what your average desktop user does with 6G of ram. Its way more than you need for general use, and things like HD video processing are still fairly constrained until you get over 10+G of RAM. About the only time I go over 4G of RAM is when I have a few virtual machines open. Heck, right (64-bit w2k3) now i've got a win7, suse and sles VM running along with a shed load of local applications and my current physical memory usage is 3G on a machine with 4G of ram. The peak commit on the machine is 5G over a few months. At home I edit HD home movies on a machine with 2G of RAM, and it works just fine except when it becomes disk constrained and then I need a lot more than 6G of ram to cache the whole movie. Frankly, I've thought about putting more RAM in that machine, and I would if every time I think about it I check my current ram usage to find 1G or more free.
Now, the servers I use eat RAM, but that is different...
The real problem with 64-bit windows isn't the drivers, nor is it the fact that there are so few 64-bit clean applications out there. The real problem is the installed base of 16-bit applications. Last month I purchased a couple of educational games for my 3 year old. Turns out they are 16-bit, and won't run on a 64-bit OS. The developer doesn't have any plans to update them. This is far from unusual, I've been running 64-bit windows on one of my machines since the beta releases (a couple months after the initial opterons became available, it just took another year and a half for Ms to release it). That was a long time ago, and while lots of things work that didn't initially (.net support for example) some things never will.
That is because all 16 bit operations were removed from long mode, so MS didn't integrate any kind of 16-bit compatibility layer in windows. The only choice is a virtual machine. So, while getting a 32-bit application with a 16 bit installer is getting rarer, there are whole classes of applications which work just fine on a 32-bit OS but not on the 64-bit version. I expect that this short sight is part of the reasoning for XP compatibility mode via a VM in win7. Usually, the OS just acts like an older version for particular apps. That is because every version of the OS since w2k (maybe earlier) has had compatibility modes going back to very old versions of windows (right click your application, properties, compatibility ). From the average user of this site, that doesn't mean anything because they only see the small minority of applications that are very popular and therefor are updated regularly. The total set of windows applications is much larger, many of which run in niche markets, or are company specific. For example, I have a very capable eeprom burner which is driven by a 16-bit application, and doesn't work for a shit in a VM.
Also, it is possible to support more than 4G of ram with 32-bit windows, you just have to have a version that supports PAE, something Ms has been silently trying to kill, and has been helped by willful ignorance by a lot of people.
There are a lot of simple passive circuits, but no one is impressed by the switch and lightbulb, or the 1000 variations using solar cells or LEDs.
So, It seems to me that as a physics teacher, your probably better off focusing on the analog side of things and sticking with simple R/C/L type circuits. That stuff is fairly basic and matches up with basic physics. It helps to have some calculus to understand capacitors and inductors, but I understood basically how capacitors and inductors worked, long before I took a formal calculus class. Any good teacher should be able to impart a basic knowledge, its like computing the distance/speed/acceleration without doing the calculus, you just give the students the final formulas and an explanation of how to work them. Making the parts may or may not save some money, but it imparts a hands on kind of knowledge that isn't often taught in school.
Some ideas,
The real problem is that the excitement level is going to be fairly limited, unless you add a BJT or FET. If you add those, the sky is the limit. Again the math can get pretty ugly, but running a BJT as a switch between saturation and cutoff is easy to understand and opens up the possibility of building simple and/or gates. From that you can build a bunch of digital stuff. Radio shack sold 100 packs of 2N2222 BJTs for just a few $ back when they sold such things. I'm sure you can find similar deals if you hunt around.
That said, again your probably better off sticking with the analog, the results tend to be more impressive due to the limited parts count. I would stay away from IC's. I don't think they are appropriate for a basic physics class as they are just black boxes. Plus, they can be expensive in the quantities you will need.
Finally, if your making the components, its going to be very helpful to be able to measure their capacitance, resistance or inductance. An inexpensive meter can provide R/C measurements, and you can build circuits that a part can be dropped in, that counts frequency or measures inductance.
What you are describing is called an arms race. Worse yet, the whole thought pattern stems from the idea that you need big ground and air offensive capability. If you step back and consider simple defense its actually quite simple, either MAD with hydrogen MIRVs works, or it doesn't. Then the only real offensive capability you need is in the form of being able to project special forces teams anywhere in the globe on short order to deal with situations that don't warrant the big guns. Even worse, small automated missiles are basically unstoppable in large enough quantities to take out anything of real value (aircraft carriers, bombers, etc) so you looking at a a fairly small offensive capability being able to do pretty serious damage. Thankfully, the same actors that have that kind of technology also have nukes so we don't go to war with them. Still, even without big government support the military is massively lacking against this kind of attack. Look at the current crop of IEDs in Iraq. A fairly small number of "guerrillas" has done an inordinate amount of damage. The current military/political stance is just a huge error.
I would ask why this stupidity is allowed to continue but then I remember that people like this thought credit default swaps were a pretty neat idea.
Fundamentally, CDS's are a fairly good idea (aka protect the lender if the borrower defaults, see Private Mortgage Insurance). The problem is that its hard enough to price something like PMI. Its even harder to price a CDO, and given the abstractions, people started to play games, like buying CDS's for securities they didn't even own, from multiple companies. Or selling CDS's at effectively random prices..
I see a lot of people saying that win7 is going to be a viable OS for netbooks. I just installed it this weekend on a netbook, and frankly it was a miserable experience. When finished, it was totally unusable for two primary reasons. First the netbook has a 1024x600 10" screen, once windows was done drawing all its art in the form of huge taskbars and big ribbons, plus assorted other screen junk, about 1/3 of the extremely limited screen remained. Secondly, it was just a dog, the 1G memory and low end CPU just makes it crawl along.
First let me say, I've been stuck at sub 2kx1.5k since the early 90's when the first 21" 1900x1280 monitors became affordable. I write/test a lot of code and vertical real estate has a significant affect on my productivity. Now, I use three Samsung 204T's (PVA, 1600x1200, 20"). Two are rotated 90 degrees. My laptop is a lenovo T61p with IPS 1900x1200 15.4" monitor. The lenovo display is fantastic even if it is wide screen. What I wouldn't give to have that kind of PPI in a 24" 4:3..
How do rotated 20" LCDs compare with two large CRT's? I wouldn't go back. Its primarily two things. First, at those resolutions I would converge my monitors daily. I've never seen a monitor that could run at those resolutions that would stay converged for any length of time. Plus, depending on luck/quality a lot of larger (>19") monitors couldn't keep the edges converged when the center was. My last CRT's had controls which allowed me to converge different parts of the screen, even then, there were areas with issues. The LCD simply doesn't have that problem.
The second area is DVI, while DVI has its own issues, I've never seen it smear. This is especially important because when I rotate the monitors I really notice video card DAC, or cabling issues. I think its because I've been trained to ignore a certain amount of horizontal bleed, when it shows up vertically the picture looks terrible.
Finally, there a number of other pluses, for example, I'm sure I have less eye strain now, more desk space, etc.
In the end, I believe the current crop of LCD monitors are mass produced trash. As others have stated you can get a 24" and rotate it 90. The problem is that I haven't seen a non TN 24" panel, assuming you can even find a 24" with a rotating base, the monitors look terrible when you rotate them. I picked up another 204T a few months ago, via an authorized samsung refurbishing company, for a "used" monitor it was a ripoff, compared with a new non TN one, a fairly decent deal.
No, he just found that RAID controllers suck. Which they do, universally, all the time. The only ones that actually perform decently are the ones in external SAN boxes, and inside they are typically servers with software RAID...
Mostly, right, except that if by "software" you mean software which drives big honking DMA and parity/Galois field computation engines in hardware, or runs on microcontrollers designed for the task, then yes.. PPC 440SPE
Jave on devices is not slow.
Maybe, but the java engines on the bluray players are slow. If you read the boards, people are still comparing bootup and disk load times even today with 3rd and 4th generation bluray players. I have a second generation player and it regularly takes a few minutes from power on to being able to play the movie. Menu's chug along like they are running on a 15 year old computer. This is with literally dozens of firmware updates which have improved the performance of the machine many times over. It got particularly bad when BD+ arrived as its implemented in java, and adds probably 45 seconds of bootup time on my player to every disk. PS3 users don't see this because the machine has gobsnots of processing power. Java on bluray has definitely increased the basic CPU requirements of the player, that much is obvious if you look at the tech specs on the more recent players. Not only that but is causing a lot of problems implementing the firmware on the devices. I have one of the sony players, and I have a rule. If the disk being played is newer than the firmware check for a firmware upgrade. If I have problems with the disks its almost always when i'm navigating around in the menus or if I try to pop the menus up during the movie.
the storage difference between blu-ray and HD was barely anything.
Yes the storage difference was always pointed to as the BR advantage, but I have a bluray ripping setup, and rarely does a movie come in over 25G even when its on a 50G BR. Even less often do they come in over 30G (nearly all my HD-DVD are dual layer, single layer HD-DVD was pretty much non existent).
The real reason Blu-Ray won is it's packaging.
I don't know about that, seems to me the backroom dealings with the movie studios had more to do with it than anything. Had HD-DVD lasted another year, the combo players would have been standard. After that, the consumer wouldn't have really cared, and it would have come down to disk production and licensing costs. Its likely that HD DVD would have then won in the long run, because it was cheaper to produce. Frankly, whether BR "won" is really still in the air, I suspect that BR is going to be like laserdisk. Popular with small segment of the market, and promptly killed after years of little growth when the next mass appeal format arrives.