All of you open source developers hoping for the day that Linux/BSD/etc is taken seriously as a consumer platform I think you may be missing the point here. MS has always lived on its revenue stream generated by OS and Office. Over the last half-decade or more, the market growth has dwindled to represent a small percentage of their streams; this was inevitable as the installed base grew. Without upgrades on installed machines, their revenue drops.
That's bad. Really really bad. It's bad because they won't be able to afford to develop their way out of their problems if the cashflow into the OS division becomes a serious drag on the bottom line. The current Windows system is so large that it requires armies of programmers to develop it's many little pieces, and any sort of "global project" is simply impossible -- as Vista demonstrated.
The situation is extremely similar to Apple in the mid-90s with the Copland project (go read the wiki article). As the project grew it got to the point where they needed an infinite number of people to develop it (see "Mythical Man Month"). Combined with rapidly dwindling sales, and thus revenue, they couldn't even afford a finite number of developers, and the entire project imploded.
As Copeland demonstrated, the solution is to start over with a new plan. Let's not forget that Apple has switched platforms _four_times_ (68k -> PPC -> OS X -> Intel). If they can do it, so can MS. But if MS is going to do it, they are going to have to pull the trigger, and every release of the existing code base makes that decision harder and harder.
Working against MS is the fact that they are *not* near death. Apple's brush with extinction meant there was very few people to piss off when the inevitable happened and the old systems were semi-abandoned into the "penalty box" (Blue Box). MS has hundreds of millions of users, it's going to make their life extremely difficult. VMs may indeed work, given recent advances, and if they can isolate applications in different VMs then they might make the system more secure as a free offshoot.
Were you not paying attention when OSX came out? You just hook up an emulator and seamlessly integrate an older ("classic") version of the OS with the new one. That way you can still run older apps, but with reduced performance (or, about as fast as they used to run on old hardware). You have a funny definition of "just"...
For one things, lots of things didn't work even in Classic. It is true that the vast majority did, but only after watching a mac-in-a-mac "boot up" and then run at a speed that could only be described as glacial. About as fast as old hardware? Yeah, old as in Mac Plus.
there are still old games I love to play, that I'll dig out, but they take enough patching even to run on winxp, I don't even want to THINK about getting them to run under Vista. I'm in exactly the same boat. Sadly WINE has problems with the same set of programs:-(
"This should allow the majority of legacy applications to run perfectly," while Vista provided less than 60% of the same. And as anyone who actually tried to use Classic knows, it sucked. All it did was push Mac users to get new versions as soon as possible. This was actually a great thing for everyone involved -- developers got upgrade revenue, abandonware was replaced by new versions, and Apple got everyone to buy-in to the new system. If there was any problem, in my book, it was Carbon.
But there is one key aspect of the X story that has to be remembered: Apple was effectively a dead platform with a small user base. The vast majority of active Mac users today are new to the platform, or on a new-ish machine. There was little to no installed base to lose.
To think that Windows can pull off the same stunt strikes me as ridiculous. There is hope, surely, in the rapid rollout of ever-better virtualization systems, and API mappers (like WINE). But does anyone really think that the MASSIVE FREAKING installed base of Windows can afford a semi-solution like Classic while new versions of their software ships?
Case in point: I looked into the.net frameworks a few years back and basically gave up on it as massively underdeveloped. I knew this would improve as soon as Office was based on it. So I decided to wait until this happened, then I'd take another look. Still waiting. If MS's own applications end up running under emulation it will be unlikely to please. But if they don't, then you have to include all the legacy crap into the "base install". And if that happens, what, exactly, are you abandoning in the new code base?
Hey, maybe they'll pull off a miracle and make a compatibility layer that totally kicks ass. You know, like the new Office kicks ass.
> as we are approaching the limits of our current techniques
For sure... after many decades we _are_ approaching real physical limits. But I guess for me the real question is "so what?" Or to put it another way, "was silicon ever the problem?" My own computer is way faster than the rest of the computer it's attached to, and the bottlenecks are almost always either HD or GPU related.
If we really can extract vastly more performance though architecture changes, then at some point you have to do a price/performance comparison and decide where to move. The market seems to be _extremely_ effective at this. I'm watching these developments with interest (and various new memory technologies as well).
Let's not forget DARPA's hand in all of this, historically at least. Everyone remembers their efforts that led to the internet, but does anyone remember the VLSI Project? It was arguably as important to the current state of computing as anything else. I was rather saddened to see recent reports of their efforts being re-focused to short-term development of "weapons"-ish topics.
I've been hearing this claim every few years for the last 25. Remember optical computers in the mid-80s? How about gallium arsenide? CRAY-3 anyone?
And of course what's really reaching a limit is not the CPU's, but our ability to use them effectively. See "TRIPS architecture" on the wiki as an example end-run around the problem that offers hundred-times improvements using existing fabs.
Isn't this putting the cart before the horse? Of the deployed base of hundreds of millions of PC's (including all OS's and platforms) in the world, how many of those are used by "gamers"? 1%? 5? Now take 5-10% of that number. The result is going to be small no matter what.
I have a suggestion though; certainly one reason there aren't more Linux Gamers is that there aren't more Linux games. This may be a Catch 22, but no one said those don't really happen. Game companies have pretty much universally shunned the smaller platforms, both Mac and Linux, and that's only to be expected, it's hard enough to make a buck on the PC.
But one of the major reasons for this, IMHO, is the lack of a single platform. No, I'm not talking about the underlying disto, I'm talking about the lack of something similar to DirectX. On Windows there is a "gaming platform" and I can design to it, on the other OS's there is a plethora of packages that solve one of the many problems, but nothing that wraps them all up.
May I humbly suggest that there needs to be a single "OpenGP" (as in Gaming Platform) that _really_ works on the (new) Mac OS and Linux?
That all depends on your definition of "easy" and "sort through". The search engine can't even deal with whitespace or camel casing, let alone close hits. Invariably if I'm trying to find an article on the wiki I have to go to Google to find it. This is true even for articles I've written. Even if you start within an article chain, broken links and duplicate articles make navigation very difficult.
People are asking about traditional drag-n-drop or drag-n-menu, but let's try to be specific to the claims made. After reading them I am convinced Apple's "spring loaded folders" match the description. They were released in the 1990s, I believe in OS8.
"A computer-implemented method for manipulating objects in a user interface, comprising: providing the user interface including a first interface object operable to be selected and moved within the user interface;"
Since this is the "drag", this portion of the patent is prior-arted by just about everyone. Next...
"and in response to selection and movement of the first interface object in the user interface, presenting at least one additional interface object in the user interface in proximity of the first interface object, each additional interface object representing a drop target with which the first interface object may be associated.'
This is the key. Although other UIs might meet the first portion of this part of the claim, the second is more narrow. Specifically it has to open something near the first that is a drop target. Menus are not drop targets, so they don't apply. Launchers are not related to the original drop target, so they don't apply.
But spring loaded folders absolutely do. They opened in response to a "hesitant drop" over a folder, creating a new window under the cursor showing the contents folder (as if one had double-clicked it). This window is "at least one additional interface object", it is most definitely "near the first that is a drop target", it is definitely an "object representing a drop target", and finally, it is [related to] "the first interface object may be associated".
> FCC Chairman Kevin Martin wants to put forth a proposal for a more open > and competitive environment using a completely different standard
Like the way we now have a separate HDTV standard than everyone else in the world because they advocated a NTSC replacement even though the existing European standard was perfectly fine?
Perhaps they mean "standard" as in "Imperial Weights and Measures"? It's the "Imperial" part that always ends up being a problem.
> Punch $0.99 a watt into the calculator, and even good chunks of > Alaska become economical for installations.
That assumes, of course, that they can hit those numbers. A lot of other thin-film companies made the same claims and are nowhere near that number, and I'm including completely different technologies, like amorphous silicon and CdTe. These technologies are more expensive than traditional polysilicon panels, and to date have only found niche roles where flexibility trumps, well, everything else.
So then the question becomes whether or not Nanosolar has some secret sauce that makes their system scale downward more easily than the others. Maybe they do, but maybe you need to price out some indium...
Seriously, what is up with all the wiki bashing on Reg? I mean, it's not like they're known as the paragon of accurate reportage or open discussion! They continue to spin their SV conspiracy theory over multiple articles, and then censor comments that suggest they might have got something wrong.
For instance, consider their recent article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/06/wikipedia_and_overstock/ Here they describe this poor guy, Judd Bagley, who was hounded down by the evil wiki-conspiracy even though "he hadn't edited Wikipedia in over a year". And they state "It would seem that the address was banned because Judd Bagley has accused Wikipedia's uber-administrators of skewing the contents of four online articles."
Uhhh, no. As anyone with mousing skills could easily find out, Bagley's "hadn't edited Wikipedia" because he was _banned_. Why was he banned? Because he appeared on the wiki with a series of edits that inserted libelous information into the article in question, and surreptitiously re-directed links from existing major sources to his own web page! Now that's not bannable, that's simply revertable, and when other editors did so he started a shitstorm of abuse on everyone involved. This escalated to the point where he attempted to "out" another editor, a serious no-no even when you get it right (which he didn't), and thats when the admins arrived, who he then yelled at, and eventually got himself blocked.
After the initial block went down for "outing", he immediately reappeared as a variety of new accounts over a range of IPs in order to continue the abuse, and in the end the entire range had to be blocked. Contrary to the article, which claims he was recently banned for making edits on his own page, all of this happened over a one-month period over a year ago. And then to top it all off, Bagley admits to putting "spyware" in an e-mail to SV. The seeming illegality of this activity is ignored, but "According to Bagley" he got some sort of ping from Weiss. No evidence is offered. Nice!
I built up a lengthy rebuttal, pointing out links to edits that countered every one of their "claims". I attempted to post it in their forum, but it was censored.
This is a perfect example of why the wiki is so important.
I actually took the time to write a letter. Dead trees and the whole thing. To my dying day I'll claim to that it was both well written and convincing. All I said is that it seemed like a _very_ bad idea to be deciding on copyright law in the midst of one of the most dramatic changes in the real-world IP practice that I can recall. If all the IP holders are dropping DRM, maybe it's not the greatest idea to be enacting laws about legitimizing DRM... Right? I sent it on Thursday.
Here's to having absolutely no effect whatsoever on the debate. Vive la insignificance!
> Is this a sign that a true competitor, from Microsoft no less, > has finally broken into the Apple-dominated MP3 player market?
Yes, of course. It was only a matter of time. There are some great players out there now. If there's anything that's interesting in this story, it's how long it took for this to happen. But it was going to happen.
> And will this spell more success for Windows-media based > music subscription services like Napster?"
No. Napster uses PlaysForSure, Zune doesn't. Stick a fork in it.
Well I hesitate to make claims about what other people "really meant", but even assuming this is the case (which I don't), asking for help is always a good idea in any unfamiliar territory. Articles that don't follow certain guidelines will be deleted, and avoiding this fate is not entirely difficult. It is, however, a case of RTFM, or alternately, asking for help from an experienced editor like myself. I think the confusion might be due to this statement:
> The basis of the site is for any random person to add information.
This is certainly not the basis for the site. The wiki is not a collection of random information, it is and has to be culled to keep it encyclopedia-like. Maybe this will not always be the case, perhaps in the future articles on cheats and key sequencies in videogames will be welcomed, but for the time being articles with little merit will be deleted.
Now how is one to know what a basic "acceptable" article is? Well, you could read the introductory information, which no one does (myself included), or you could ask. Sadly, as smart as the wiki is, direct brain-download isn't included (yet).
I never got it to work. Admittedly I didn't try THAT hard, but my experience is generally it works or it doesn't, so when it doesn't I basically throw in the towel.
> The shitty ATI 1900 in my Macpro desktop overheats > and crashes the system pretty consistently though.
File a bug report! Apple is convinced I'm the only one having this problem! The OS simply isn't listening to the temperature in the PCI bay and correct for it properly. Making matters worse, the OS doesn't look at the temperature from the card itself at all.
And to actually "fix" it, go get a copy of smcFanControl. Make a setting called "Gaming" and crank the PCI bay fan to about 900-1200. Presto, the problem is gone. Unfortunately this sets the _lower_ speed of the fans only, so the noise level goes up even in idle.
But to put this in perspective, I can run WoW and Halo all day long completely maxed out at 2560 x 1600 without any problems. And when I'm not playing, I simply reset the fans to Default.
> No. Too many scientists have too much invested in it to let it go.
Bologna. Everyone says shit like this, but it's always crap.
Scientists LOVE being wrong. Not personally, but in the collective. LOVE it. They love it precisely because it clears away all the stratification. Fresh start time, open field, go nuts!
> Brans-Dicke theory and it shows nothing about angular momentum
You're right. That sucks.
Basically the idea behind BD, and the other ST and STV theories, is that there is an additional field, not just the tensor field of GR. One of the side-effects of the field in the BD theory is that angular momentum "falls out" of the universe. This is actually kinda important.
In traditional models, the conservation laws you know don't really _have_ to exist. For instance, if the universe was shaped like an egg, billiard balls would always roll into one corner of the table because there's more mass on that side of the universe. The fact that it is conserved says a lot about the universe, specifically that is symmetric around any point in 3-space. Conservation of angular momentum is similar; it says the universe is symmetric around other axis as well -- linear momentum would still be conserved in a universe shaped like a cigar, along any axis the gravity is still even, but in this case a spinning object would speed up and slow down. Conservation of energy is due to the fact that the universe is symmetrical in time, physics in the past is the same as it is today.
Ok, but like I said, those laws don't _have_ to be true, and this bugged the hell out of a lot of people over the years. I forget which one of them, I think Brans, was thinking about what would happen if you spun a dish full of water in an empty universe... would the water rise up the sides? And if it doesn't, why not? Isn't either answer a little weird?
The extra field in DB theory answers the question -- the answer is "yes", the water will rise up on the sides. It wasn't designed to do that, at least I don't think so, but it ends up popping out of the math.
So basically if you end up with odd angular momentum terms in the universe, it MAY suggest that some other model of gravity might be more correct. Right now everything we've ever measured can't tell between the various models, but this might.
> What's the relationship between the angular momentum of the Universe and the rotational > velocity anomalies of outlying material in galaxies or intra-cluster excess mass?
Nothing directly, but it's a pattern to an end.
Every time we turn on a new telescope we see something that shouldn't exist. First galaxies had too much rotational energy, so, after ignoring it as a non-issue for a couple of decades, we invented dark matter.
Then we had this other problem that the universe's large-scale structure could not have possibly condensed into the super-clusters, so we invented another kind of dark matter, and needed ten times as much of it as the other stuff we couldn't find.
And then we started seeing fully formed galaxies at distances that meant they formed in a period of time that simply could not have possibly happened through gravity alone. So some more hand waving started, and everyone decided it was some other dark matter effect.
Ok, well you can pile up all the dark matter you want, but that's not going to make all the galaxies point in the same direction. And when we figure THAT out, I doubt there'll be any dark matter in there at all. MOND, STV, whatever, its time to stop with the warts and get on with the work.
Slashdot Mirror
That's bad. Really really bad. It's bad because they won't be able to afford to develop their way out of their problems if the cashflow into the OS division becomes a serious drag on the bottom line. The current Windows system is so large that it requires armies of programmers to develop it's many little pieces, and any sort of "global project" is simply impossible -- as Vista demonstrated.
The situation is extremely similar to Apple in the mid-90s with the Copland project (go read the wiki article). As the project grew it got to the point where they needed an infinite number of people to develop it (see "Mythical Man Month"). Combined with rapidly dwindling sales, and thus revenue, they couldn't even afford a finite number of developers, and the entire project imploded.
As Copeland demonstrated, the solution is to start over with a new plan. Let's not forget that Apple has switched platforms _four_times_ (68k -> PPC -> OS X -> Intel). If they can do it, so can MS. But if MS is going to do it, they are going to have to pull the trigger, and every release of the existing code base makes that decision harder and harder.
Working against MS is the fact that they are *not* near death. Apple's brush with extinction meant there was very few people to piss off when the inevitable happened and the old systems were semi-abandoned into the "penalty box" (Blue Box). MS has hundreds of millions of users, it's going to make their life extremely difficult. VMs may indeed work, given recent advances, and if they can isolate applications in different VMs then they might make the system more secure as a free offshoot.
Maury
For one things, lots of things didn't work even in Classic. It is true that the vast majority did, but only after watching a mac-in-a-mac "boot up" and then run at a speed that could only be described as glacial. About as fast as old hardware? Yeah, old as in Mac Plus.
Maury
Maury
But there is one key aspect of the X story that has to be remembered: Apple was effectively a dead platform with a small user base. The vast majority of active Mac users today are new to the platform, or on a new-ish machine. There was little to no installed base to lose.
To think that Windows can pull off the same stunt strikes me as ridiculous. There is hope, surely, in the rapid rollout of ever-better virtualization systems, and API mappers (like WINE). But does anyone really think that the MASSIVE FREAKING installed base of Windows can afford a semi-solution like Classic while new versions of their software ships?
Case in point: I looked into the
Hey, maybe they'll pull off a miracle and make a compatibility layer that totally kicks ass. You know, like the new Office kicks ass.
Maury
> as we are approaching the limits of our current techniques
For sure... after many decades we _are_ approaching real physical limits. But I guess for me the real question is "so what?" Or to put it another way, "was silicon ever the problem?" My own computer is way faster than the rest of the computer it's attached to, and the bottlenecks are almost always either HD or GPU related.
If we really can extract vastly more performance though architecture changes, then at some point you have to do a price/performance comparison and decide where to move. The market seems to be _extremely_ effective at this. I'm watching these developments with interest (and various new memory technologies as well).
Let's not forget DARPA's hand in all of this, historically at least. Everyone remembers their efforts that led to the internet, but does anyone remember the VLSI Project? It was arguably as important to the current state of computing as anything else. I was rather saddened to see recent reports of their efforts being re-focused to short-term development of "weapons"-ish topics.
Maury
I've been hearing this claim every few years for the last 25. Remember optical computers in the mid-80s? How about gallium arsenide? CRAY-3 anyone?
And of course what's really reaching a limit is not the CPU's, but our ability to use them effectively. See "TRIPS architecture" on the wiki as an example end-run around the problem that offers hundred-times improvements using existing fabs.
Maury
Isn't this putting the cart before the horse? Of the deployed base of hundreds of millions of PC's (including all OS's and platforms) in the world, how many of those are used by "gamers"? 1%? 5? Now take 5-10% of that number. The result is going to be small no matter what.
I have a suggestion though; certainly one reason there aren't more Linux Gamers is that there aren't more Linux games. This may be a Catch 22, but no one said those don't really happen. Game companies have pretty much universally shunned the smaller platforms, both Mac and Linux, and that's only to be expected, it's hard enough to make a buck on the PC.
But one of the major reasons for this, IMHO, is the lack of a single platform. No, I'm not talking about the underlying disto, I'm talking about the lack of something similar to DirectX. On Windows there is a "gaming platform" and I can design to it, on the other OS's there is a plethora of packages that solve one of the many problems, but nothing that wraps them all up.
May I humbly suggest that there needs to be a single "OpenGP" (as in Gaming Platform) that _really_ works on the (new) Mac OS and Linux?
Maury
> It's already easy to sort through
That all depends on your definition of "easy" and "sort through". The search engine can't even deal with whitespace or camel casing, let alone close hits. Invariably if I'm trying to find an article on the wiki I have to go to Google to find it. This is true even for articles I've written. Even if you start within an article chain, broken links and duplicate articles make navigation very difficult.
Maury
Wait, let me be sure I read this correctly...
simple XSL stylesheets
Wow. No, I wasn't just imaging it.
Maury
> Is this like when you drag
Perhaps, but the task bar is not the same as the original or final object. That seems to be key to the patent.
Maury
People are asking about traditional drag-n-drop or drag-n-menu, but let's try to be specific to the claims made. After reading them I am convinced Apple's "spring loaded folders" match the description. They were released in the 1990s, I believe in OS8.
"A computer-implemented method for manipulating objects in a user interface, comprising: providing the user interface including a first interface object operable to be selected and moved within the user interface;"
Since this is the "drag", this portion of the patent is prior-arted by just about everyone. Next...
"and in response to selection and movement of the first interface object in the user interface, presenting at least one additional interface object in the user interface in proximity of the first interface object, each additional interface object representing a drop target with which the first interface object may be associated.'
This is the key. Although other UIs might meet the first portion of this part of the claim, the second is more narrow. Specifically it has to open something near the first that is a drop target. Menus are not drop targets, so they don't apply. Launchers are not related to the original drop target, so they don't apply.
But spring loaded folders absolutely do. They opened in response to a "hesitant drop" over a folder, creating a new window under the cursor showing the contents folder (as if one had double-clicked it). This window is "at least one additional interface object", it is most definitely "near the first that is a drop target", it is definitely an "object representing a drop target", and finally, it is [related to] "the first interface object may be associated".
Flush.
Maury
> FCC Chairman Kevin Martin wants to put forth a proposal for a more open
> and competitive environment using a completely different standard
Like the way we now have a separate HDTV standard than everyone else in the world because they advocated a NTSC replacement even though the existing European standard was perfectly fine?
Perhaps they mean "standard" as in "Imperial Weights and Measures"? It's the "Imperial" part that always ends up being a problem.
Maury
> Punch $0.99 a watt into the calculator, and even good chunks of
> Alaska become economical for installations.
That assumes, of course, that they can hit those numbers. A lot of other thin-film companies made the same claims and are nowhere near that number, and I'm including completely different technologies, like amorphous silicon and CdTe. These technologies are more expensive than traditional polysilicon panels, and to date have only found niche roles where flexibility trumps, well, everything else.
So then the question becomes whether or not Nanosolar has some secret sauce that makes their system scale downward more easily than the others. Maybe they do, but maybe you need to price out some indium...
http://www.nrel.gov/pv/thin_film/docs/indium_supply_and_demand%5B1%5D.doc
Maury
Seriously, what is up with all the wiki bashing on Reg? I mean, it's not like they're known as the paragon of accurate reportage or open discussion! They continue to spin their SV conspiracy theory over multiple articles, and then censor comments that suggest they might have got something wrong.
For instance, consider their recent article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/06/wikipedia_and_overstock/ Here they describe this poor guy, Judd Bagley, who was hounded down by the evil wiki-conspiracy even though "he hadn't edited Wikipedia in over a year". And they state "It would seem that the address was banned because Judd Bagley has accused Wikipedia's uber-administrators of skewing the contents of four online articles."
Uhhh, no. As anyone with mousing skills could easily find out, Bagley's "hadn't edited Wikipedia" because he was _banned_. Why was he banned? Because he appeared on the wiki with a series of edits that inserted libelous information into the article in question, and surreptitiously re-directed links from existing major sources to his own web page! Now that's not bannable, that's simply revertable, and when other editors did so he started a shitstorm of abuse on everyone involved. This escalated to the point where he attempted to "out" another editor, a serious no-no even when you get it right (which he didn't), and thats when the admins arrived, who he then yelled at, and eventually got himself blocked.
After the initial block went down for "outing", he immediately reappeared as a variety of new accounts over a range of IPs in order to continue the abuse, and in the end the entire range had to be blocked. Contrary to the article, which claims he was recently banned for making edits on his own page, all of this happened over a one-month period over a year ago. And then to top it all off, Bagley admits to putting "spyware" in an e-mail to SV. The seeming illegality of this activity is ignored, but "According to Bagley" he got some sort of ping from Weiss. No evidence is offered. Nice!
I built up a lengthy rebuttal, pointing out links to edits that countered every one of their "claims". I attempted to post it in their forum, but it was censored.
This is a perfect example of why the wiki is so important.
Maury
Don't worry, you can clean the spittle off your keyboard with a j-cloth.
> You are using either a 32-bit plugin wrapper ... or?
> essence giving in to the Windows crowd wholesale
*sigh* It's religious arguments like this that make me glad they changed the spec.
Maury
Wow!
I actually took the time to write a letter. Dead trees and the whole thing. To my dying day I'll claim to that it was both well written and convincing. All I said is that it seemed like a _very_ bad idea to be deciding on copyright law in the midst of one of the most dramatic changes in the real-world IP practice that I can recall. If all the IP holders are dropping DRM, maybe it's not the greatest idea to be enacting laws about legitimizing DRM... Right? I sent it on Thursday.
Here's to having absolutely no effect whatsoever on the debate. Vive la insignificance!
Maury
> Is this a sign that a true competitor, from Microsoft no less,
> has finally broken into the Apple-dominated MP3 player market?
Yes, of course. It was only a matter of time. There are some great players out there now. If there's anything that's interesting in this story, it's how long it took for this to happen. But it was going to happen.
> And will this spell more success for Windows-media based
> music subscription services like Napster?"
No. Napster uses PlaysForSure, Zune doesn't. Stick a fork in it.
Maury
> The GP's point
Well I hesitate to make claims about what other people "really meant", but even assuming this is the case (which I don't), asking for help is always a good idea in any unfamiliar territory. Articles that don't follow certain guidelines will be deleted, and avoiding this fate is not entirely difficult. It is, however, a case of RTFM, or alternately, asking for help from an experienced editor like myself. I think the confusion might be due to this statement:
> The basis of the site is for any random person to add information.
This is certainly not the basis for the site. The wiki is not a collection of random information, it is and has to be culled to keep it encyclopedia-like. Maybe this will not always be the case, perhaps in the future articles on cheats and key sequencies in videogames will be welcomed, but for the time being articles with little merit will be deleted.
Now how is one to know what a basic "acceptable" article is? Well, you could read the introductory information, which no one does (myself included), or you could ask. Sadly, as smart as the wiki is, direct brain-download isn't included (yet).
Maury
Find yourself a wikifriend. I'd be happy to volunteer (look me up on the wiki, I'm not hard to find).
One new article with comments from a long-timer and you'll be off to the races.
I never got it to work. Admittedly I didn't try THAT hard, but my experience is generally it works or it doesn't, so when it doesn't I basically throw in the towel.
> The shitty ATI 1900 in my Macpro desktop overheats
> and crashes the system pretty consistently though.
File a bug report! Apple is convinced I'm the only one having this problem! The OS simply isn't listening to the temperature in the PCI bay and correct for it properly. Making matters worse, the OS doesn't look at the temperature from the card itself at all.
And to actually "fix" it, go get a copy of smcFanControl. Make a setting called "Gaming" and crank the PCI bay fan to about 900-1200. Presto, the problem is gone. Unfortunately this sets the _lower_ speed of the fans only, so the noise level goes up even in idle.
But to put this in perspective, I can run WoW and Halo all day long completely maxed out at 2560 x 1600 without any problems. And when I'm not playing, I simply reset the fans to Default.
Maury
> No. Too many scientists have too much invested in it to let it go.
Bologna. Everyone says shit like this, but it's always crap.
Scientists LOVE being wrong. Not personally, but in the collective. LOVE it. They love it precisely because it clears away all the stratification. Fresh start time, open field, go nuts!
Maury
> Brans-Dicke theory and it shows nothing about angular momentum
You're right. That sucks.
Basically the idea behind BD, and the other ST and STV theories, is that there is an additional field, not just the tensor field of GR. One of the side-effects of the field in the BD theory is that angular momentum "falls out" of the universe. This is actually kinda important.
In traditional models, the conservation laws you know don't really _have_ to exist. For instance, if the universe was shaped like an egg, billiard balls would always roll into one corner of the table because there's more mass on that side of the universe. The fact that it is conserved says a lot about the universe, specifically that is symmetric around any point in 3-space. Conservation of angular momentum is similar; it says the universe is symmetric around other axis as well -- linear momentum would still be conserved in a universe shaped like a cigar, along any axis the gravity is still even, but in this case a spinning object would speed up and slow down. Conservation of energy is due to the fact that the universe is symmetrical in time, physics in the past is the same as it is today.
Ok, but like I said, those laws don't _have_ to be true, and this bugged the hell out of a lot of people over the years. I forget which one of them, I think Brans, was thinking about what would happen if you spun a dish full of water in an empty universe... would the water rise up the sides? And if it doesn't, why not? Isn't either answer a little weird?
The extra field in DB theory answers the question -- the answer is "yes", the water will rise up on the sides. It wasn't designed to do that, at least I don't think so, but it ends up popping out of the math.
So basically if you end up with odd angular momentum terms in the universe, it MAY suggest that some other model of gravity might be more correct. Right now everything we've ever measured can't tell between the various models, but this might.
Maury
> What's the relationship between the angular momentum of the Universe and the rotational
> velocity anomalies of outlying material in galaxies or intra-cluster excess mass?
Nothing directly, but it's a pattern to an end.
Every time we turn on a new telescope we see something that shouldn't exist. First galaxies had too much rotational energy, so, after ignoring it as a non-issue for a couple of decades, we invented dark matter.
Then we had this other problem that the universe's large-scale structure could not have possibly condensed into the super-clusters, so we invented another kind of dark matter, and needed ten times as much of it as the other stuff we couldn't find.
And then we started seeing fully formed galaxies at distances that meant they formed in a period of time that simply could not have possibly happened through gravity alone. So some more hand waving started, and everyone decided it was some other dark matter effect.
Ok, well you can pile up all the dark matter you want, but that's not going to make all the galaxies point in the same direction. And when we figure THAT out, I doubt there'll be any dark matter in there at all. MOND, STV, whatever, its time to stop with the warts and get on with the work.
Maury