The problem seems to be that many video cards ship with inadequate cooling systems. At least that's been my experience. Back in the day, custom cooling solutions were pretty much reserved for those doing serious overclocking. Now cooling requirements have gone up, but manufacturers generally use the bare minimum, such that the GPU doesn't overheat as soon as it's powered up, and nothing more.
I've only got a 7900GTX, but after having it replaced once, and then getting more jaggies, slowdown, and stuttering, I decided to check the core temperature. I don't remember the number but it was quite high. I shelled out for a Zalman VF1000, and installation was fairly straightforward. After a brief heart-stopping moment when my PC wouldn't boot (I had negelected to reconnect the PCI-E 6 pin power connector), I got the system powered up, and found that all of my issues had been resolved.
Note also that if you live in a dusty environment (especially if you're a smoker), your fan/heatsink will need to be cleaned regularly. Dust is a good insulator, and will wreak havoc with your cooling if not removed.
To be fair, what sort of empathy do you expect from some guy who makes less in 5 years than the product he's supporting costs? If that were me, I'd be saying "Hello, how can I help you?" but I'd be thinking "Fuck you, I live in a hut and YOU'RE throwing a fit because your TV that's bigger than my bed has a tinge of red in the picture. I'm going to do everything I possibly can to avoid telling you to press MENU, Picture, Tint, then scroll the slider bar to the left, you stupid fuck. I hope you try to open the TV yourself and get electrocuted." "Yes, yes, I am understanding that you are having a problem with the red button. Is this correct?"
But that's why many companies are moving their call centers back to the US (or at least to Canada). The kid working at McDonalds may hate his job and his life, but at least he has the knowledge that this isn't the pinnacle of his career, and even if he develops no other skills, at least he can actually work his way up the corporate ladder there. I'm sure the people working at call centers are smart enough to know that even if they're the best goddamned phone support person this side of Shanghai, the most they can hope for is not to get fired for being late one day because the only road out of their village washed away in the last monsoon and they had to build a makeshift bridge out of bamboo and dead babies.
"First of all, when someone writes "football" on slashdot. Is he referring to what is commonly known as "football" all over the world, i.e. "soccer" or what is commonly referred to all over the world as "american football"?"
Could be, but Lexus micromanages their dealers pretty closely, and corporate takes a large interest in the feedback of their customers. If corporate put out the word to let buyers know how to opt-in/out, it's a safe bet that the dealers will do it. A large part of what Lexus sells is their customer care, and I don't see them forcing unsolicited ads down the throats of buyers.
At any rate, I'm not saying they're immune to the lure of the dark side, but if they go there it would be a significant change, not "more of the same." My personal experience with the company and several of its dealerships has been nothing but good.
It's not that I don't want to donate my brain, it's just that I've already promised other people that I would have my brain cryogenically frozen so that I can be resurrected at some point in the future, and I'd hate to let those people down.
the service will let Lexus send audio messages to participating owners
later
Those who want to participate will see whether they have any messages when they start the vehicle's engine.
Presumably the model and zip code info would be to send relevant info. There's no point sending info about a sedan to an SUV owner, or vice versa, just as there's little point sending info about an event in CA to a resident of FL.
I do get "newsletter" e-mails from the Lexus dealership every so often, and while they always contain ads for the new models, they also have lots of other useful information about events, perks, and other topics, and they always have an unsubscribe link at the bottom. I also have +Lexus appended to the email address they have for me, and I haven't received anything from other companies, which indicates (but does not guarantee, of course) that they haven't "shared" or sold my info. In my experience, Lexus takes much better care of their customers than most car companies, obviously including their parent company Toyota (since it's part of the incentive to "upgrade"), but also including BMW, and every domestic car I or my wife have ever owned (Ford, several divisions of GM, and Jeep). OTOH, I get spam from Pontiac all the time, and I'm quite sure I've never signed up for any info from them.
The distinctions between an OS and its UI are abstract and semantic at best. The fact that the ntoskrnl.exe, hal.dll, and explorer.exe are separate processes is true, but they're tightly coupled and arguably each one is useless without the others. (Although I'm sure some will argue that they're also useless as a whole.) They are modularized for convenience and functionality, not because they need be by some Commandment of Computer Science. About the only common thread between OSes is that they provide some sort of interface between hardware and software -- they need not have user interfaces at all, nor memory management, or filesystem management, or anything else that we consider to be pillars of a modern OS. To what degree that interface is implemented is left to the imagination.
As no/. argument would be complete without a car analogy: Saying that a taskbar is not an OS is just as true as saying a seat is not a car, however seats can be part of a car just as taskbars can be part of an OS. Take the seats out of the car, and you have a POS car.
Good point, but in all seriousness, there is no MIL-STD for ethernet cables, and Military Standards in general are obsolete as of the Perry Memo of 1994. They generally follow commercial and/or ISO9000 standards when possible:
...use performance and commercial specifications and standards in lieu of military specifications and standards, unless no practical alternative exists to meet the user's needs.
- Perry Memo
MIL-STDs generally stated exactly how to accomplish a task, such as a watertight connector which shall be 25mm in diameter, with two opposing studs on the receiving harness, 7 pins, rubber seal, blah blah. These days, they just specify what they want -- a watertight connection -- and let the contractor present his solution, except in relatively rare instances like Level I components (which are mostly just fasteners like bolts produced and tested with a high degree of confidence in materials and workmanship).
Anyway, yeah.. laboratory grade cables. That's what they are. CERN* has already placed an order** for 20,000 cables. Hurry before they're gone!
* CERN, or Create Entry Right Now, is the name of our test record in our inventory management database. No relation to the European Council for Nuclear Research is expressed or implied. ** Not actual orders.
Seriously.. I'm going to get in on the audiophile market. I just need to find a manufacturer who can make awesome-looking cases for the guts of a Sony receiver. Disable half the features and inputs, and voila.. one Specialized Blu-Ray Audio Amplifier and Sound Distribution System.
If you think that's good, you should try using a network cable designed for IPv6. A proper cable will allow you to enjoy the full richness of IPv6 sites without the harshness that results from using inferior cables. I'm developing one such cable, which demonstrates proper directional signal alignment with minimal crosstalk, providing the full digital experience so that you can finally see websites the way their creators intended them to be viewed.
Originally designed to provide maximum quality for streaming media, these cables offer an uncompromising blend of digital audio, video, and data transfer capabilities in an IPv6 protocol. They are also fully backward-compatible with IPv4, so you can use them to view websites replete with the aliveness and snap that you expect, with none of the soggy, diffuse, syrupy qualities that are a plague among cheaper imitation cables. Imagine a pure white background with the full flavors of the multispectral Google logo, each delicate cherry, azure, and emerald letter almost coming alive before your eyes.
My cable utilizes the latest in hermetically sealed insulation to provide years of reliable service with minimal degradation of the pure, solid silver conductors. As a bonus, our cables have already been put through a specially tailored burn-in process, ensuring that you receive maximum signal integrity from day one. These cables are not yet available to the general public, but through a special offer, I'm allowing a limited number of people to sign up for the beta-testing process. Rest assured that these cables have already been tested to ensure 100% compliance with our exacting quality standards, but we're looking for real-world users to verify our astounding results. As part of this program, you will receive a special discount on the proposed retail price of these cables:
If you require longer runs, custom lengths may be ordered at the special price of $9,000 per meter, for lengths greater than 20M only. We highly recommend that you do not couple multiple cables together, as there is currently no way of compensating for any fuzziness or wishy-washiness which may be introduced by the coupler. In the future, we plan to offer 100% compatible couplers in the low 5 figure price range.
Trust me, there's just as much poverty and dependence on government handouts in MS as in LA. I think there are plenty of other explanations equally or more plausible than "liberal welfare makes people stupid and incompetent."
* There's a higher population AND population density in NO, which is both more difficult to evacuate, and results in a larger raw number of people affected even if the percentage of people affected was the same. * People who live in the city may tend to have less of a fear/respect for nature, and therefore felt it unnecessary to evacuate. Most people have never experienced a flooded city in their lifetime, so it's not like they had a frame of reference. * Anyone who lives below sea level may be of questionable sanity to begin with.
Exactly. Even commonly used words and phrases are fine in a passphrase, and adding some random variation makes it extremely robust. There's no such thing as "uncrackable", but there is such a thing as impractical to crack.
Of course, in a few decades it will probably be possible to brute-force passwords/phrases longer than most people can remember, or are comfortable typing regularly, and if not, surveillance technology will likely have improved to the point where you'd need to live in a Faraday cage in a concrete bunker to avoid it.
The fact that we've existed in our present form for basically 200,000 years is evidence in and of itself that we were never defenseless, regardless of how slow or weak we are relative to other species. We may not have had fancy spears or arrows, but clearly those were not necessary for survival.
There's a reason animal attacks make the news: They're very, very rare. There's basically only 2 times that animals attack people, which are when they're defending their young (because they know humans are a threat), or when they mistake us for something else (surfers & seals). This isn't a coincidence. The animals that attacked people are pretty much dead now, and we live with the ancestors of the ones who were fearful. It wasn't just civilization that accomplished this; it was the 10s of thousands of years before that, when some stupid tiger wandered into a camp looking for a meal and got clubbed in the fucking face shortly before it was turned into clothes and a cool necklace. Unless you're one of those idiots who tries to live in the middle of a grizzly bear den, or you stumble into one accidentally, you can go pretty much anywhere you want without worrying about something trying to eat you.
Just as long as they're not leveling a DK in WoW. Jesus, that's got to the the most mind-numbing thing I've ever attempted, with the possible exception of injecting Novocaine directly into my temples.
That's why you use pass phrases. "Peter Piper Picked A Pickled Pepper!" is a far better password than #$q%{:}, and it's easier to remember. As a bonus, using natural language won't "wear down the keys" any differently, as a sibling poster suggested (although it's a ridiculous idea to begin with and sounds like something out of a movie).
Yeah! Things that make driving easier, and/or provide increased visibility around/behind opaque objects are stupid, and anyone who uses them is stupid too!
Personally, I took all of those useless mirrors off my baby, and if I can't see something behind me, I hang out the window. And if I still can't see it, I get my daughter to hold the wheel while I put a stick on the floor to hold down the appropriate pedal, then I climb out of the vehicle -- onto the roof, sidestep, antenna.. whatever's handy -- until I damn well see what I'm trying to see. A big "F you" to all the drivers using those fancy schmancy technologies to drive. A car is a simple machine, like a lever, except with an internal combustion engine, steering, and suspension, that were the result of decades of development, precision engineering, and careful assembly. But aside from that, it's just 5 wheels -- four on the pavement and one in my hands -- and I'll be DAMNED if any technology takes away from that driver/machine bond.
First with the seats, then the roofs, then the doors, then the seatbelts?!? Hell, I'm about 5 seconds away from slapping a 350 in my soapbox and calling it a day. Ye haw! <pow> <pow>
Slashdot Mirror
The problem seems to be that many video cards ship with inadequate cooling systems. At least that's been my experience. Back in the day, custom cooling solutions were pretty much reserved for those doing serious overclocking. Now cooling requirements have gone up, but manufacturers generally use the bare minimum, such that the GPU doesn't overheat as soon as it's powered up, and nothing more.
I've only got a 7900GTX, but after having it replaced once, and then getting more jaggies, slowdown, and stuttering, I decided to check the core temperature. I don't remember the number but it was quite high. I shelled out for a Zalman VF1000, and installation was fairly straightforward. After a brief heart-stopping moment when my PC wouldn't boot (I had negelected to reconnect the PCI-E 6 pin power connector), I got the system powered up, and found that all of my issues had been resolved.
Note also that if you live in a dusty environment (especially if you're a smoker), your fan/heatsink will need to be cleaned regularly. Dust is a good insulator, and will wreak havoc with your cooling if not removed.
To be fair, what sort of empathy do you expect from some guy who makes less in 5 years than the product he's supporting costs? If that were me, I'd be saying "Hello, how can I help you?" but I'd be thinking "Fuck you, I live in a hut and YOU'RE throwing a fit because your TV that's bigger than my bed has a tinge of red in the picture. I'm going to do everything I possibly can to avoid telling you to press MENU, Picture, Tint, then scroll the slider bar to the left, you stupid fuck. I hope you try to open the TV yourself and get electrocuted." "Yes, yes, I am understanding that you are having a problem with the red button. Is this correct?"
But that's why many companies are moving their call centers back to the US (or at least to Canada). The kid working at McDonalds may hate his job and his life, but at least he has the knowledge that this isn't the pinnacle of his career, and even if he develops no other skills, at least he can actually work his way up the corporate ladder there. I'm sure the people working at call centers are smart enough to know that even if they're the best goddamned phone support person this side of Shanghai, the most they can hope for is not to get fired for being late one day because the only road out of their village washed away in the last monsoon and they had to build a makeshift bridge out of bamboo and dead babies.
It's all fun and games till you discover that green aliens bear a striking resemblance to Roseanne.
Puff on a fag and refer to the FAQ.
Could be, but Lexus micromanages their dealers pretty closely, and corporate takes a large interest in the feedback of their customers. If corporate put out the word to let buyers know how to opt-in/out, it's a safe bet that the dealers will do it. A large part of what Lexus sells is their customer care, and I don't see them forcing unsolicited ads down the throats of buyers.
At any rate, I'm not saying they're immune to the lure of the dark side, but if they go there it would be a significant change, not "more of the same." My personal experience with the company and several of its dealerships has been nothing but good.
It's not that I don't want to donate my brain, it's just that I've already promised other people that I would have my brain cryogenically frozen so that I can be resurrected at some point in the future, and I'd hate to let those people down.
From TFA:
the service will let Lexus send audio messages to participating owners
later
Those who want to participate will see whether they have any messages when they start the vehicle's engine.
Presumably the model and zip code info would be to send relevant info. There's no point sending info about a sedan to an SUV owner, or vice versa, just as there's little point sending info about an event in CA to a resident of FL.
I do get "newsletter" e-mails from the Lexus dealership every so often, and while they always contain ads for the new models, they also have lots of other useful information about events, perks, and other topics, and they always have an unsubscribe link at the bottom. I also have +Lexus appended to the email address they have for me, and I haven't received anything from other companies, which indicates (but does not guarantee, of course) that they haven't "shared" or sold my info. In my experience, Lexus takes much better care of their customers than most car companies, obviously including their parent company Toyota (since it's part of the incentive to "upgrade"), but also including BMW, and every domestic car I or my wife have ever owned (Ford, several divisions of GM, and Jeep). OTOH, I get spam from Pontiac all the time, and I'm quite sure I've never signed up for any info from them.
The distinctions between an OS and its UI are abstract and semantic at best. The fact that the ntoskrnl.exe, hal.dll, and explorer.exe are separate processes is true, but they're tightly coupled and arguably each one is useless without the others. (Although I'm sure some will argue that they're also useless as a whole.) They are modularized for convenience and functionality, not because they need be by some Commandment of Computer Science. About the only common thread between OSes is that they provide some sort of interface between hardware and software -- they need not have user interfaces at all, nor memory management, or filesystem management, or anything else that we consider to be pillars of a modern OS. To what degree that interface is implemented is left to the imagination.
As no /. argument would be complete without a car analogy: Saying that a taskbar is not an OS is just as true as saying a seat is not a car, however seats can be part of a car just as taskbars can be part of an OS. Take the seats out of the car, and you have a POS car.
Good point, but in all seriousness, there is no MIL-STD for ethernet cables, and Military Standards in general are obsolete as of the Perry Memo of 1994. They generally follow commercial and/or ISO9000 standards when possible:
- Perry Memo
MIL-STDs generally stated exactly how to accomplish a task, such as a watertight connector which shall be 25mm in diameter, with two opposing studs on the receiving harness, 7 pins, rubber seal, blah blah. These days, they just specify what they want -- a watertight connection -- and let the contractor present his solution, except in relatively rare instances like Level I components (which are mostly just fasteners like bolts produced and tested with a high degree of confidence in materials and workmanship).
Anyway, yeah.. laboratory grade cables. That's what they are. CERN* has already placed an order** for 20,000 cables. Hurry before they're gone!
* CERN, or Create Entry Right Now, is the name of our test record in our inventory management database. No relation to the European Council for Nuclear Research is expressed or implied.
** Not actual orders.
Seriously.. I'm going to get in on the audiophile market. I just need to find a manufacturer who can make awesome-looking cases for the guts of a Sony receiver. Disable half the features and inputs, and voila.. one Specialized Blu-Ray Audio Amplifier and Sound Distribution System.
If you think that's good, you should try using a network cable designed for IPv6. A proper cable will allow you to enjoy the full richness of IPv6 sites without the harshness that results from using inferior cables. I'm developing one such cable, which demonstrates proper directional signal alignment with minimal crosstalk, providing the full digital experience so that you can finally see websites the way their creators intended them to be viewed.
Originally designed to provide maximum quality for streaming media, these cables offer an uncompromising blend of digital audio, video, and data transfer capabilities in an IPv6 protocol. They are also fully backward-compatible with IPv4, so you can use them to view websites replete with the aliveness and snap that you expect, with none of the soggy, diffuse, syrupy qualities that are a plague among cheaper imitation cables. Imagine a pure white background with the full flavors of the multispectral Google logo, each delicate cherry, azure, and emerald letter almost coming alive before your eyes.
My cable utilizes the latest in hermetically sealed insulation to provide years of reliable service with minimal degradation of the pure, solid silver conductors. As a bonus, our cables have already been put through a specially tailored burn-in process, ensuring that you receive maximum signal integrity from day one. These cables are not yet available to the general public, but through a special offer, I'm allowing a limited number of people to sign up for the beta-testing process. Rest assured that these cables have already been tested to ensure 100% compliance with our exacting quality standards, but we're looking for real-world users to verify our astounding results. As part of this program, you will receive a special discount on the proposed retail price of these cables:
Solid-Core Conductor, Hermetically Sealed, with Specially Molded Connectors -- 1 Meter: $16,000
Solid-Core Conductor, Hermetically Sealed, with Specially Molded Connectors -- 2 Meters: $26,000
Solid-Core Conductor, Hermetically Sealed, with Specially Molded Connectors -- 10 Meters: $99,000
If you require longer runs, custom lengths may be ordered at the special price of $9,000 per meter, for lengths greater than 20M only. We highly recommend that you do not couple multiple cables together, as there is currently no way of compensating for any fuzziness or wishy-washiness which may be introduced by the coupler. In the future, we plan to offer 100% compatible couplers in the low 5 figure price range.
If only..
O silver bard, how I long to hold you directly whist you sing your sweet, sweet melody.
These new TVs will be identical to other TVs sold elsewhere in the country, except that have a governor that limits the brightness to 7.
Maybe they had Sony batteries in their laptops.
Meesa likes!
Trust me, there's just as much poverty and dependence on government handouts in MS as in LA. I think there are plenty of other explanations equally or more plausible than "liberal welfare makes people stupid and incompetent."
* There's a higher population AND population density in NO, which is both more difficult to evacuate, and results in a larger raw number of people affected even if the percentage of people affected was the same.
* People who live in the city may tend to have less of a fear/respect for nature, and therefore felt it unnecessary to evacuate. Most people have never experienced a flooded city in their lifetime, so it's not like they had a frame of reference.
* Anyone who lives below sea level may be of questionable sanity to begin with.
There was a question in there?
On the other hand, upgrading roads and bridges keeps us from falling into sinkholes and ravines en masse.
At any rate, this is a false dichotomy, and there's every indication that Obama plans to focus on improving both forms of infrastructure.
Exactly. Even commonly used words and phrases are fine in a passphrase, and adding some random variation makes it extremely robust. There's no such thing as "uncrackable", but there is such a thing as impractical to crack.
Of course, in a few decades it will probably be possible to brute-force passwords/phrases longer than most people can remember, or are comfortable typing regularly, and if not, surveillance technology will likely have improved to the point where you'd need to live in a Faraday cage in a concrete bunker to avoid it.
The fact that we've existed in our present form for basically 200,000 years is evidence in and of itself that we were never defenseless, regardless of how slow or weak we are relative to other species. We may not have had fancy spears or arrows, but clearly those were not necessary for survival.
There's a reason animal attacks make the news: They're very, very rare. There's basically only 2 times that animals attack people, which are when they're defending their young (because they know humans are a threat), or when they mistake us for something else (surfers & seals). This isn't a coincidence. The animals that attacked people are pretty much dead now, and we live with the ancestors of the ones who were fearful. It wasn't just civilization that accomplished this; it was the 10s of thousands of years before that, when some stupid tiger wandered into a camp looking for a meal and got clubbed in the fucking face shortly before it was turned into clothes and a cool necklace. Unless you're one of those idiots who tries to live in the middle of a grizzly bear den, or you stumble into one accidentally, you can go pretty much anywhere you want without worrying about something trying to eat you.
Just as long as they're not leveling a DK in WoW. Jesus, that's got to the the most mind-numbing thing I've ever attempted, with the possible exception of injecting Novocaine directly into my temples.
Are you insane?
Let me break it down. TVs have four sides. Triceratops have three horns. NOW do you see the problem?!?
It's like mom always said: You can take the CRT out of the trash, but you can never take the trash out of the CRT.
That's why you use pass phrases. "Peter Piper Picked A Pickled Pepper!" is a far better password than #$q%{:}, and it's easier to remember. As a bonus, using natural language won't "wear down the keys" any differently, as a sibling poster suggested (although it's a ridiculous idea to begin with and sounds like something out of a movie).
Yeah! Things that make driving easier, and/or provide increased visibility around/behind opaque objects are stupid, and anyone who uses them is stupid too!
Personally, I took all of those useless mirrors off my baby, and if I can't see something behind me, I hang out the window. And if I still can't see it, I get my daughter to hold the wheel while I put a stick on the floor to hold down the appropriate pedal, then I climb out of the vehicle -- onto the roof, sidestep, antenna.. whatever's handy -- until I damn well see what I'm trying to see. A big "F you" to all the drivers using those fancy schmancy technologies to drive. A car is a simple machine, like a lever, except with an internal combustion engine, steering, and suspension, that were the result of decades of development, precision engineering, and careful assembly. But aside from that, it's just 5 wheels -- four on the pavement and one in my hands -- and I'll be DAMNED if any technology takes away from that driver/machine bond.
First with the seats, then the roofs, then the doors, then the seatbelts?!? Hell, I'm about 5 seconds away from slapping a 350 in my soapbox and calling it a day. Ye haw! <pow> <pow>