I decided to build a new system some time in the fall of 2000, but prior to that I had been running the original Windows 95 install that I did some time in mid 1996. There were some hardware upgrades, sure, but I never resorted to reinstalling. My systems are highly customized, I like to set everything just the way I like it. So to me a reinstall is not something I do lightly. The system was not unstable at all, it was quite a workhorse. Sure, every now and then it would have a lockup of some sort, but we're talking once every few weeks. Now that I run win2k it's very rare indeed.
You can manage the cruft in windows. It's not impossible, even if you install/uninstall a lot of stuff. The important things are to know what's running (task list, services, run at startup, etc) and to get to know the registry. You must babysit for poor installation programs. Often they will add crap to startup, or icons on the desktop, or other weird things, which I would always delete. You also have to help some of them wipe their ass when you uninstall, as a lot of them leave junk behind. You have to be willing to go into the Windows system directory and examine questionable DLLs. There a lot of tools to help with this. I recommend everyone who is interested go to www.sysinternals.com. There you will find programs such as REGMON and FILEMON which show you every registry access or file access in realtime, with the ability to filter. Also very useful is LISTDLLS which shows you which DLLs are loaded by every process in memory. If there is a file that's locked you can often find out who is using in with this program. The 2k resource kit has a free utility called Dependancy Walker which will show you the library dependancies of any.EXE, sort of like ldd. You must also be familiar with certain areas of the registry, such as the part where stuff is loaded on boot, the "pending file rename" section, the section where apps install their preferences, etc.
I find a lot of times when I use someone else's windows machine I am appauled by the amount of crap they have loaded, and most of the time aren't aware of it. Programs that load stuff on startup without being very clear about it and asking you first really peeve me. I patrol the startup folder+registry entries very strictly, and keep the task list small.
You of course have to make sure your hardware is stable and you have to go through the process of finding a driver combination that is suitable. It can be very frustrating to mess with crap drivers and a ton of strange BIOS settings. But if you stick with it you can eventually find a combination that is bulletproof and will yield stability. If you don't put in the effort to do this, though, you will forever be messing with strange crashes.
It can be done, but it is not for the faint of heart.
It must have taken a lot of determination to build that, and I'm not talking about the months and months of actual construction -- which was a heaping load of blood, sweat, & tears in its own right. I'm talking about the crap that every homeowner has to deal with, such as convincing the wife to let him undertake this massive project, not pissing off the neighborhood with a giant eyesore (or making all the other neighborhood dads feel inadequate!), and dealing with the fact that you can basically never move out. Or, if you do, you have to find some way to remove the 700 lbs of wood 25 ft high in the air, resting on 500 lbs of steel frame, embedded three feet deep in the ground with 1300 pounds of concrete. I'd love to see the look on the face of the real estate agent called upon to sell the house... "and here we have the 25 foot tall mechwarrior playhouse."
I've often wondered why slower RPM drives don't do dual read-write heads for faster access times and transfer speeds.
The reason is that you can achieve the same speedup with RAID without having to create custom hardware. There are a number of problems with doing multiple heads, and the truth is that the HD industry is cutthroat. You must sell millions to recoop R&D costs, and the vast majority of users would not want to pay for the considerable extra expense of multiple heads. You would be duplicating a significant amount of hardware without gaining any extra storage--for the same price you could buy two of the "standard" model and have the speedup AND twice the capacity.
And yes, this has been tried before a long time ago (the Connor Peripherals Chinook model) and it was a failure.
I would like to understand the math better, specifically to see if it might have applications to software. I'd also like to plot the superhighway, or understand how they are doing it. But only have a year of college math. Where is a good and free place to learn about it online? Been to Mathematica.
I don't think this technology is meant to compete with high quality LCDs. It's meant to compete where cost is the biggest issue. They are not nearly as concerned with resolution, refresh rate, or lifetime as they are with cost. The goal is to produce a cheap process which can be integrated with current manufacturing methods used to create packaging. The holy grail of this field is to be able to produce an entire system (display complete with driver, logic, memory, power source) in this process, using high volume, nonprecision techniques. I wouldn't expect to see this in a laptop, it's a different market.
Think flashing Doritos bags, cereal boxes with animated cartoons, etc. There's a lot of money to be made by calling attention to your product amongst a number of similar looking products. Just look at the boxes of kids' cereals these days: fancy inks, vivid colors -- they've even started incluing free CDROMs on the cereal box.
I'm thinking about using png exclusively. If the content is good enough, I'm sure many IE users would make the effort to swtich.
Why would they need to switch? IE has supported png since version 4.
Okay, so some features aren't implemented right and there are still a few gotchas, most notably alpha channel support. Surprisingly, IE for the Mac has perfect alpha channel rendering, yet it remains broken on the Windows version.
Such as the fact that it's in the best interest of lawmakers to encourage numerous patent filings (regardless of legitimacy) because the Office of Management and Budget can shuffle funds from the patent filing fees (which are supposed to hire and support engineers, scientists, researchers, etc. to verify claims) into the general fund. Worse, there's little oversight since none of the fees are taxpayer dollars so they fall under the radar. When you need some extra cash for your pet project this sort of thing is great.
How much money are we talking about? The USPTO receives zero taxpayer dollars -- its entire budget is based on its fees. The fees amount to $710 to file an application, $1,240 due at issuance, followed by periodic maintenance fees of $850 due 3-1/2 years post-issue, $1,950 at seven years, and $2,990 at year 11. These fees are reduced by about half for independent inventors and small companies.
The fees are supposed to nearly exactly track the actual costs of maintaining patents and paying researchers. However, when Congress can freely dip into the pool for cash it's not hard to see why they resort to retarded monkeys that wouldn't know prior art if it crawled up their ass and died.
A web application is software and should be treated as such.
I see your point, but there's a difference between a quick 20 line script to check for dead links and a million-line code base that has revision control and regression testing. In other words, the target audience does not want to write serious code -- they just want a few extra tools in the toolbox to help with some of the more mundane tasks. Sure, some might read this and try to write a sprawling custom order tracking backend and probably fail or introduce serious security issues, but I think it's a minority. The "I'm an editor not a programmer" types would probably agree that they want to write the minimum amount of code necessary to get the job done.
Or, put another way, most of the people who would need this book have only a few options: browse through code snippets and blindly cut+paste until something finally works, pay/beg someone else to do it, or read this book and get off on a running start to actually understanding the strange and bizarre world of perl.
A far better solution would be to build a powerful enough ground based laser system to convert the garbage into vapor.
How can you possibly believe that?
First, a laser on the ground would have to have a crapload of power since the vast majority of it would be dissipated by the atmosphere.
Next you have to refine the optics to an extremely high degree so that the beam is still focused at the target. Even the slightest bit of divergence really adds up over hundreds of kilometers. To vaporize high tensile strength steel requires a lot of energy, and most of these objects are very small -- both are reasons for needing a focused beam.
Also consider that they are traveling at tens of thousands of MPH. It would be almost impossible to servo track the object, so your laser would have to work with a single high-energy pulse. You'll need a very high peak pulse power to deliver enough energy to do any serious damage. And this ignores the fact that we can't actually track the majority of the debris. The ground based laser thing would need extremely precise tracking information which is just not available for anything but the large stuff -- which we can already do a fine job of working around. Also consider the aiming accuracy necessary to precisely hit a small target a few centimeters or smaller from hundreds or thousands of kilometers away. Then there's the issue of all the crap in the way between your laser and the target which could cause diffraction, scattering, dissipation, etc.
In the 80s the Star Wars thing was going to cost how many billions (75?) to disable (not totally vaporize as you propose) much larger objects traveling at more certain orbits, and was called a technical impossibility by many engineers who read the proposal. And even this plan would have used space-based lasers so the distances and dissipation factors was not as bad.
What you are proposing would never work. Get real.
For those that wish not to fill in a number of required (!!) fields such as postal address, birth year, last name, etc., here is the text of the article -- all 15 or so lines of it.
Firm to Pay Up to $6.5M for Junk Fax By Associated Press
July 10, 2002, 8:57 AM CDT
ST. LOUIS -- A car dealership agreed to pay up to $6.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its unsolicited "junk fax" advertisements, which are barred by federal law, a lawyer said.
Promotions for Newbold Toyota-BMW of O'Fallon, Ill., were faxed to more than 33,000 businesses and homes in the 314 and 636 area codes around St. Louis in early 2001.
The dealership's owners did not know the practice was illegal when they hired a company to do the advertising, said lawyer Steven Katz, who filed the case last year.
If a judge approves the settlement after a September hearing, anyone who received a fax can claim as much as $500 for each advertisement received, the standard penalty under the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Katz said he did not expect everyone to file a claim.
A notice of the settlement was sent -- by fax -- to the 33,000 numbers turned over by the company that did the faxing for the dealership. That company, American Blast Fax of Dallas, is out of business, he said.
I don't know how their retention / completeness rates with the others, but meganetnews seems competitive as far as pricing and has a good selection of plans. They offer uncensored newsgroups and ssl connections.
100M per Day == $5.95/mo or $59.50/year 250M per Day == $7.95/mo or $79.50/year 500M per Day == $9.95/mo or $99.50/year 750M per Day == $11.95/mo or $119.50/year 1500M per Day == $21.95/mo or $219.50/year 2500M per Day == $34.95/mo 5000M per Day == $64.95/mo
You've got to be really into porn and/or warez to go for the 5G/day plan. When you decide to take it to that level you should factor in the extra monthly recurring costs of Astro Glide and/or blank CDRs.
Circa 1995 I bought a PC game, I think it was Alone in the Dark. It came with a stack of these special cards. They were about the same size and material as playing cards, but they had rows and columns of abstract symbols in various colors. Each card also had a few holes punched out in random locations, and each card was numbered. The game would ask you to put card X on top of card Y and then enter the symbol that was visible at a certain row and column location. I can't remember how elaborate the procedure was but I do remember that it was not too cumbersome.
This certainly falls in the category of "certainly not impossible to duplicate but would be a real pain in the ass."
I also remember buying the game Serf City (around 95-96) and it came with a page full of symbols, and when you ran the game it displayed a palette of these glyphs and you had to enter the proper sequence from the specified location on the sheet of paper. The funny thing was that the game came with this sheet of codes as a PDF file on the CD! The game had been out for a while when I bought it, and it had apparently just been re-released on CD. (This was around the time when getting games on CD was still new.) I'm assuming the original packaging came with a manual that had these codes in a photocopier-unfriendly manner, but the game had been repackaged for the bargain bins as just a jewel case/CD, no manual. They didn't want to rewrite the game to remove the protection so they just included it as a PDF file on the CD.
Yeah, seriously, it looks to my eye like all of the pictures showing a real application (as opposed to someone holding it) are doctored. I can understand that, but it really doesn't help their credibility to pass off "simulated" pictures as real. Especially this one, but also this and this.
Also, they mention that it costs less than similar fiber-composite structures, but that isn't really saying much since most composite materials are very expensive compared to steel/concrete/wood/aluminum/etc. It seems to me that it will take a lot of development to get the cost anywhere close to that of the traditional solutions. Sure the light weight is great, but it all comes down to cost, unfortunately. Now, if the lighter weight means that builders can save money on installation methods, then that might be a way to offset the higher material cost.
The press releases of Intel and AMD are always somewhat of a game. They list the "suggested retail price in quantities greater than 1000" but that's not really how it works. There's no single "retail price" of a CPU. The chipmakers are constantly negotiating deals with suppliers for large lots of CPUs. The price fluctuates a lot and is often quite a bit less than what they quote in their press releases. I think the chipmakes use this system because it allows them good inventory control which is critical with such a fast-moving market. I think it also allows them to accurately gauge demand for their products, since the pipeline for producing a chip is many months. You need good info to make the right decisions about production.
both computers suffer from problems such as lock-ups, random reboots, and other compatability issues
I'm not a betting person, but if I were I'd put my money on cheap ram. Or at least, on anything but the actual processor. Fire up memtest86 some time and let it crank through it's longest tests, and see if you don't come up with some spotty ram issues.
It's interesting how the DIY hardware scene has changed over the years. The components that used to be no-name commodities are now becoming more critial. If building a system today, I would spend more time worrying about the brand of ram, power supply, and cooling than I ever would have five or ten years ago. It used to be that all you needed to know about ram and heatsinks was "it's 80ns" and "yeah it comes with a fan", respectively.
Excuse the skepticism, but $1 to $2.25 a CD, just to press it!?
The link listed that figure for the total cost to press the CD and ship it to the stores. Sure the raw materials and actual pressing are cheap, but you have to factor in some money to also print the liner notes, assemble the product in the case, shrinkwrap, box, inventory, and warehouse it, then ship it to the stores. I would say a buck or two sounds about right to do all that.
There is an article on Electronic Musician called Follow the Money: Who's Really Making the Dough? that breaks down exactly where that $18 goes and how the system works. (In case anyone's interested in facts and not speculation.)
Take a Sharpie marker pen and print one of the CSS descramblers on it. Hey, now you've got a convenient 2-in-1 DCMA infringement device. Somebody get the ThinkGeek product guys on the phone...
Seems like if they could make the probe kinda warm it would eventually sink through any amount of ice.
That's a bit of an understatement. Let's do a quick calculation, shall we?
The article says that the ice is at least 19km (11 miles) thick. Let's assume we can somehow magically make our probe fit into the volume of a square foot or 30cm per side. That means we have about 1700 square meters of ice to melt, which is around 2e6 kilograms.
Europa has no real atmosphere, the pressure at the surface is around 1e-11 bar (1e-6 Pa) -- i.e. almost nothing. So the ice would most certainly vaporize rather than melt, and at a temperature lower than 0C. See this neat phase diagram of water. As we go down farther the pressure will necessarily increase, but I don't feel like calculating it exactly. Based on the phase diagram I'll use 200K as the approximate transistion temperature. It's close enough to be within an order of magnitude of correct.
The surface temperature of Europa is approx -260 dF (111 Kelvin), so to raise it to 200K results in a temperature difference of 89K. The specific heat of ice is around 2e3 J/(kg*K). That means our task will require about 3.5e11 Joules of energy. Let's say we let this process take 100 years at a steady rate. This comes to about 111 Watts. Suddenly "kinda warm" really doesn't cut it.
When you have a self contained source of power that can supply 111 W constantly for 100 years and fit into a square foot of volume, please let me know. Surely, you would have solved our energy crisis by now.
PS - Solar panels are pretty much useless after you get farther from the sun than Mars. That's why probes like Cassini needs radio-isotope thermo-electric generators.
Dear Popular Science Webmaster:
on
Future Computers
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I would like to thank the webmasters at popsci.com for such a well done site.
I'm so tired of those "old school" web pages that use a readable font like the default 10pt Times. I love it so much when I get the opportunity to read an article in a miniscule 6 point sans serif font in a narrow column that takes up about a fifth of the width of the screen. I'm tired of all these websites that actually flow text to the size of the window I've chosen. It's so refreshing to have all that nice white space.
And I hate those sites that actually put the related content on one page. It's time more webmasters realize how much I appricate having an article arbitrarily spilt into seven different pages. And its so nice of them to save the screen space taken up by those pesky "Next Page" buttons. I really enjoy clicking on those tiny page numbers to flip pages. I thought for a minute that they'd made a mistake and that red rectangle image with the ">" symbol was the page flipper, but after clicking it about ten times it's apparent it doesn't do anything. Phew, that was close.
It's a good thing it was split up to many pages, I was really looking forward to seeing that insightful poll question "Will the Segway change transportation? Yes/No/Maybe." I thought I'd only get to see it once, but instead it was on each page, in case I missed it the first six times. Well done!
Now, usually most webmasters go soft and have a "print this" link that shows the entire article text in the default font, wrapped to the screen size. popsci does includes this link, but they get it! They realize that should I wish to print an article, I don't want to print the whole thing at once. Rather, I enjoy clicking the "print this" link on each page and sending off a different print job for each page. After all, why should my printer driver decide where to break up page boundaries? Is that really its job? Why would I possibly want to have all the article text in one place?
Slashdot Mirror
I decided to build a new system some time in the fall of 2000, but prior to that I had been running the original Windows 95 install that I did some time in mid 1996. There were some hardware upgrades, sure, but I never resorted to reinstalling. My systems are highly customized, I like to set everything just the way I like it. So to me a reinstall is not something I do lightly. The system was not unstable at all, it was quite a workhorse. Sure, every now and then it would have a lockup of some sort, but we're talking once every few weeks. Now that I run win2k it's very rare indeed.
.EXE, sort of like ldd. You must also be familiar with certain areas of the registry, such as the part where stuff is loaded on boot, the "pending file rename" section, the section where apps install their preferences, etc.
You can manage the cruft in windows. It's not impossible, even if you install/uninstall a lot of stuff. The important things are to know what's running (task list, services, run at startup, etc) and to get to know the registry. You must babysit for poor installation programs. Often they will add crap to startup, or icons on the desktop, or other weird things, which I would always delete. You also have to help some of them wipe their ass when you uninstall, as a lot of them leave junk behind. You have to be willing to go into the Windows system directory and examine questionable DLLs. There a lot of tools to help with this. I recommend everyone who is interested go to www.sysinternals.com. There you will find programs such as REGMON and FILEMON which show you every registry access or file access in realtime, with the ability to filter. Also very useful is LISTDLLS which shows you which DLLs are loaded by every process in memory. If there is a file that's locked you can often find out who is using in with this program. The 2k resource kit has a free utility called Dependancy Walker which will show you the library dependancies of any
I find a lot of times when I use someone else's windows machine I am appauled by the amount of crap they have loaded, and most of the time aren't aware of it. Programs that load stuff on startup without being very clear about it and asking you first really peeve me. I patrol the startup folder+registry entries very strictly, and keep the task list small.
You of course have to make sure your hardware is stable and you have to go through the process of finding a driver combination that is suitable. It can be very frustrating to mess with crap drivers and a ton of strange BIOS settings. But if you stick with it you can eventually find a combination that is bulletproof and will yield stability. If you don't put in the effort to do this, though, you will forever be messing with strange crashes.
It can be done, but it is not for the faint of heart.
Or a cheap radio tuned to a spot on the band that's static, connected to the line-in of the sound card?
It must have taken a lot of determination to build that, and I'm not talking about the months and months of actual construction -- which was a heaping load of blood, sweat, & tears in its own right. I'm talking about the crap that every homeowner has to deal with, such as convincing the wife to let him undertake this massive project, not pissing off the neighborhood with a giant eyesore (or making all the other neighborhood dads feel inadequate!), and dealing with the fact that you can basically never move out. Or, if you do, you have to find some way to remove the 700 lbs of wood 25 ft high in the air, resting on 500 lbs of steel frame, embedded three feet deep in the ground with 1300 pounds of concrete. I'd love to see the look on the face of the real estate agent called upon to sell the house... "and here we have the 25 foot tall mechwarrior playhouse."
For the love of God, when will the PC industry stop with these damned limits?
FYI, for anyone interested in reading a nice list of all such limits with a technical description for each one, I suggest this link.
The reason is that you can achieve the same speedup with RAID without having to create custom hardware. There are a number of problems with doing multiple heads, and the truth is that the HD industry is cutthroat. You must sell millions to recoop R&D costs, and the vast majority of users would not want to pay for the considerable extra expense of multiple heads. You would be duplicating a significant amount of hardware without gaining any extra storage--for the same price you could buy two of the "standard" model and have the speedup AND twice the capacity.
And yes, this has been tried before a long time ago (the Connor Peripherals Chinook model) and it was a failure.
Read more here.
...or is that the site you were referring to with "Been to Mathematica"?
I don't think this technology is meant to compete with high quality LCDs. It's meant to compete where cost is the biggest issue. They are not nearly as concerned with resolution, refresh rate, or lifetime as they are with cost. The goal is to produce a cheap process which can be integrated with current manufacturing methods used to create packaging. The holy grail of this field is to be able to produce an entire system (display complete with driver, logic, memory, power source) in this process, using high volume, nonprecision techniques. I wouldn't expect to see this in a laptop, it's a different market.
Think flashing Doritos bags, cereal boxes with animated cartoons, etc. There's a lot of money to be made by calling attention to your product amongst a number of similar looking products. Just look at the boxes of kids' cereals these days: fancy inks, vivid colors -- they've even started incluing free CDROMs on the cereal box.
Okay, so some features aren't implemented right and there are still a few gotchas, most notably alpha channel support. Surprisingly, IE for the Mac has perfect alpha channel rendering, yet it remains broken on the Windows version.
because the US patent system has some real flaws
Such as the fact that it's in the best interest of lawmakers to encourage numerous patent filings (regardless of legitimacy) because the Office of Management and Budget can shuffle funds from the patent filing fees (which are supposed to hire and support engineers, scientists, researchers, etc. to verify claims) into the general fund. Worse, there's little oversight since none of the fees are taxpayer dollars so they fall under the radar. When you need some extra cash for your pet project this sort of thing is great.
How much money are we talking about? The USPTO receives zero taxpayer dollars -- its entire budget is based on its fees. The fees amount to $710 to file an application, $1,240 due at issuance, followed by periodic maintenance fees of $850 due 3-1/2 years post-issue, $1,950 at seven years, and $2,990 at year 11. These fees are reduced by about half for independent inventors and small companies.
The fees are supposed to nearly exactly track the actual costs of maintaining patents and paying researchers. However, when Congress can freely dip into the pool for cash it's not hard to see why they resort to retarded monkeys that wouldn't know prior art if it crawled up their ass and died.
A web application is software and should be treated as such.
I see your point, but there's a difference between a quick 20 line script to check for dead links and a million-line code base that has revision control and regression testing. In other words, the target audience does not want to write serious code -- they just want a few extra tools in the toolbox to help with some of the more mundane tasks. Sure, some might read this and try to write a sprawling custom order tracking backend and probably fail or introduce serious security issues, but I think it's a minority. The "I'm an editor not a programmer" types would probably agree that they want to write the minimum amount of code necessary to get the job done.
Or, put another way, most of the people who would need this book have only a few options: browse through code snippets and blindly cut+paste until something finally works, pay/beg someone else to do it, or read this book and get off on a running start to actually understanding the strange and bizarre world of perl.
A far better solution would be to build a powerful enough ground based laser system to convert the garbage into vapor.
How can you possibly believe that?
First, a laser on the ground would have to have a crapload of power since the vast majority of it would be dissipated by the atmosphere.
Next you have to refine the optics to an extremely high degree so that the beam is still focused at the target. Even the slightest bit of divergence really adds up over hundreds of kilometers. To vaporize high tensile strength steel requires a lot of energy, and most of these objects are very small -- both are reasons for needing a focused beam.
Also consider that they are traveling at tens of thousands of MPH. It would be almost impossible to servo track the object, so your laser would have to work with a single high-energy pulse. You'll need a very high peak pulse power to deliver enough energy to do any serious damage. And this ignores the fact that we can't actually track the majority of the debris. The ground based laser thing would need extremely precise tracking information which is just not available for anything but the large stuff -- which we can already do a fine job of working around. Also consider the aiming accuracy necessary to precisely hit a small target a few centimeters or smaller from hundreds or thousands of kilometers away. Then there's the issue of all the crap in the way between your laser and the target which could cause diffraction, scattering, dissipation, etc.
In the 80s the Star Wars thing was going to cost how many billions (75?) to disable (not totally vaporize as you propose) much larger objects traveling at more certain orbits, and was called a technical impossibility by many engineers who read the proposal. And even this plan would have used space-based lasers so the distances and dissipation factors was not as bad.
What you are proposing would never work. Get real.
Gilles Tran has done incredible stuff with POV-Ray. (plus there's all those funky stories in the book of beginnings)
Yes, and if you look closely you can really see his attention to detail.
You've got to be really into porn and/or warez to go for the 5G/day plan. When you decide to take it to that level you should factor in the extra monthly recurring costs of Astro Glide and/or blank CDRs.
Circa 1995 I bought a PC game, I think it was Alone in the Dark. It came with a stack of these special cards. They were about the same size and material as playing cards, but they had rows and columns of abstract symbols in various colors. Each card also had a few holes punched out in random locations, and each card was numbered. The game would ask you to put card X on top of card Y and then enter the symbol that was visible at a certain row and column location. I can't remember how elaborate the procedure was but I do remember that it was not too cumbersome.
This certainly falls in the category of "certainly not impossible to duplicate but would be a real pain in the ass."
I also remember buying the game Serf City (around 95-96) and it came with a page full of symbols, and when you ran the game it displayed a palette of these glyphs and you had to enter the proper sequence from the specified location on the sheet of paper. The funny thing was that the game came with this sheet of codes as a PDF file on the CD! The game had been out for a while when I bought it, and it had apparently just been re-released on CD. (This was around the time when getting games on CD was still new.) I'm assuming the original packaging came with a manual that had these codes in a photocopier-unfriendly manner, but the game had been repackaged for the bargain bins as just a jewel case/CD, no manual. They didn't want to rewrite the game to remove the protection so they just included it as a PDF file on the CD.
Yeah, seriously, it looks to my eye like all of the pictures showing a real application (as opposed to someone holding it) are doctored. I can understand that, but it really doesn't help their credibility to pass off "simulated" pictures as real. Especially this one, but also this and this.
Also, they mention that it costs less than similar fiber-composite structures, but that isn't really saying much since most composite materials are very expensive compared to steel/concrete/wood/aluminum/etc. It seems to me that it will take a lot of development to get the cost anywhere close to that of the traditional solutions. Sure the light weight is great, but it all comes down to cost, unfortunately. Now, if the lighter weight means that builders can save money on installation methods, then that might be a way to offset the higher material cost.
The press releases of Intel and AMD are always somewhat of a game. They list the "suggested retail price in quantities greater than 1000" but that's not really how it works. There's no single "retail price" of a CPU. The chipmakers are constantly negotiating deals with suppliers for large lots of CPUs. The price fluctuates a lot and is often quite a bit less than what they quote in their press releases. I think the chipmakes use this system because it allows them good inventory control which is critical with such a fast-moving market. I think it also allows them to accurately gauge demand for their products, since the pipeline for producing a chip is many months. You need good info to make the right decisions about production.
both computers suffer from problems such as lock-ups, random reboots, and other compatability issues
I'm not a betting person, but if I were I'd put my money on cheap ram. Or at least, on anything but the actual processor. Fire up memtest86 some time and let it crank through it's longest tests, and see if you don't come up with some spotty ram issues.
It's interesting how the DIY hardware scene has changed over the years. The components that used to be no-name commodities are now becoming more critial. If building a system today, I would spend more time worrying about the brand of ram, power supply, and cooling than I ever would have five or ten years ago. It used to be that all you needed to know about ram and heatsinks was "it's 80ns" and "yeah it comes with a fan", respectively.
In case anyone is curious, according to pricewatch, the cheapest memory-for-the-money deals:
solid state storage: about $356 per gig (256MB = $89)
hard-drive: about $1.15 per gig (80GB = $92)
So yeah, it will be awhile before flash becomes reasonable compared to a standard HD.
Excuse the skepticism, but $1 to $2.25 a CD, just to press it!?
The link listed that figure for the total cost to press the CD and ship it to the stores. Sure the raw materials and actual pressing are cheap, but you have to factor in some money to also print the liner notes, assemble the product in the case, shrinkwrap, box, inventory, and warehouse it, then ship it to the stores. I would say a buck or two sounds about right to do all that.
There is an article on Electronic Musician called Follow the Money: Who's Really Making the Dough? that breaks down exactly where that $18 goes and how the system works. (In case anyone's interested in facts and not speculation.)
Take a Sharpie marker pen and print one of the CSS descramblers on it. Hey, now you've got a convenient 2-in-1 DCMA infringement device. Somebody get the ThinkGeek product guys on the phone...
Seems like if they could make the probe kinda warm it would eventually sink through any amount of ice.
That's a bit of an understatement. Let's do a quick calculation, shall we?
The article says that the ice is at least 19km (11 miles) thick. Let's assume we can somehow magically make our probe fit into the volume of a square foot or 30cm per side. That means we have about 1700 square meters of ice to melt, which is around 2e6 kilograms.
Europa has no real atmosphere, the pressure at the surface is around 1e-11 bar (1e-6 Pa) -- i.e. almost nothing. So the ice would most certainly vaporize rather than melt, and at a temperature lower than 0C. See this neat phase diagram of water. As we go down farther the pressure will necessarily increase, but I don't feel like calculating it exactly. Based on the phase diagram I'll use 200K as the approximate transistion temperature. It's close enough to be within an order of magnitude of correct.
The surface temperature of Europa is approx -260 dF (111 Kelvin), so to raise it to 200K results in a temperature difference of 89K. The specific heat of ice is around 2e3 J/(kg*K). That means our task will require about 3.5e11 Joules of energy. Let's say we let this process take 100 years at a steady rate. This comes to about 111 Watts. Suddenly "kinda warm" really doesn't cut it.
When you have a self contained source of power that can supply 111 W constantly for 100 years and fit into a square foot of volume, please let me know. Surely, you would have solved our energy crisis by now.
PS - Solar panels are pretty much useless after you get farther from the sun than Mars. That's why probes like Cassini needs radio-isotope thermo-electric generators.
I would like to thank the webmasters at popsci.com for such a well done site.
I'm so tired of those "old school" web pages that use a readable font like the default 10pt Times. I love it so much when I get the opportunity to read an article in a miniscule 6 point sans serif font in a narrow column that takes up about a fifth of the width of the screen. I'm tired of all these websites that actually flow text to the size of the window I've chosen. It's so refreshing to have all that nice white space.
And I hate those sites that actually put the related content on one page. It's time more webmasters realize how much I appricate having an article arbitrarily spilt into seven different pages. And its so nice of them to save the screen space taken up by those pesky "Next Page" buttons. I really enjoy clicking on those tiny page numbers to flip pages. I thought for a minute that they'd made a mistake and that red rectangle image with the ">" symbol was the page flipper, but after clicking it about ten times it's apparent it doesn't do anything. Phew, that was close.
It's a good thing it was split up to many pages, I was really looking forward to seeing that insightful poll question "Will the Segway change transportation? Yes/No/Maybe." I thought I'd only get to see it once, but instead it was on each page, in case I missed it the first six times. Well done!
Now, usually most webmasters go soft and have a "print this" link that shows the entire article text in the default font, wrapped to the screen size. popsci does includes this link, but they get it! They realize that should I wish to print an article, I don't want to print the whole thing at once. Rather, I enjoy clicking the "print this" link on each page and sending off a different print job for each page. After all, why should my printer driver decide where to break up page boundaries? Is that really its job? Why would I possibly want to have all the article text in one place?
Finally, a webmaster that "gets it"!