I have bought several ATI cards over the years, and not once could I get the drivers that came with the card to install. I always had to download newer ones and install parts of those, reboot, then try to install the ones that came with it and get a little more to install, reboot, then try the new ones again, and they would bitch that I needed to install Y to be able to install X, but when I tried to install Y it required X, until I manually installed the card as a generic VGA card and then manually installed drivers for a much older card and then started over with alternating between different versions, etc. etc. etc.
My once many-hundreds-of-dollars top-of-the-line 850 XT PE AGP is still suiting me just fine (perhaps the fasted AGP card ever), but I haven't dared try to upgrade the drivers since I bought it years ago. But I might have to, CLI.exe or something crashes at bootup now.
Every nvidia card I've owned installed flawlessly the first time, without 3-30 reboots that ATIs require.
OMG someone please revive the original Command and Conquer. That game was so much fun, and such a good strategy game, and not complicated by 2700 possible upgrades like current RTS games. Just guile and strategy by the players.
So let me see if I got this straight: for 40 years Beatles fans have been fighting over what combination of frequencies were used in this chord, but not one of them thought to check what frequencies were being used in the chord until now?
For non-EEs out there, a Fourier transform is a basic algorithm to translate from the time domain to the frequency domain. Any audio program or player or graphic equalizer that displays the frequency spectrum instead of the actual wave coming out the speakers is using this transform. The idea that nobody thought to look at that display for 40 years is a more than a little absurd.
Finally some rationality is returning to the electoral system. Maybe someday we can move to a fairer system of voting, like approval voting or rank voting. One can dream...
Most of the sellers on Pricewatch are fraudulent. Always look them up in resellerratings.com. You'll find that the three lowest priced sellers almost always have the same address, and while Pricewatch gives them 5 stars and raving reviews resellerratings reviewers will give them 0/10 and share horror stories of receiving dead, used products that have obviously been shipped back and forth a dozen times and then be forced to pay to ship them back and pay restocking fees.
BTW, if you ever do receive a dead and used product and they want to you to pay to ship it back so they can defraud someone else, please do not aid and abet them in their crime. Please prevent the crime instead of helping them in their crime-based business model. Call your credit card company and report them: often you can keep the product for free, or at least not have to pay to ship it back and pay restocking fees.
I got a used, dusty motherboard and a drive for free when the seller refused to respond to my accusations about sending me used products and overcharging my CC. It was all worth about $200, were it new. That's when I discovered resellerratings.com and all the idiots who had paid to send back the same motherboard before I ended the cycle of crime.
1) Make sure the company who built the machines is 100% reliable and they do 100% effective background checks on 100% of their employees and 100% of their patches and upgrades are secure and legitimate, and that no human there ever errs.
2) Make sure that all your machines are 100% physically secure 100% of the time up to and after elections so that the internals cannot be swapped or hacked, and that no human in charge of this errs
3) Watch 100% of voters 100% of the time to make sure none of them alters or hacks the machines, and make sure none of your staff ever err
See? It's easy! All it requires is blind faith that humans are infallible and will never do wrong intentionally or through error.
Barely related... but as a South Texas resident, I wonder how much less I could run my A/C every year just because of the shade provided by solar cells on my roof? I believe I first used my A/C this year in February, so even a small decrease could be significant over the year.
I also always wondered why people don't advertise how much cooler CFL bulbs are than incandescent bulbs. I replaced 480W of lighting in a bathroom with 72W (replaced 60W clear bulbs with 9W vanity CFLs) and not only is it brighter and the light softer (and thus makes ladies feel prettier when doing whatever it is they do for hours in bathrooms) but it's a lot cooler. And they will pay for themselves in roughly 13 months.
And similar swaps make a really significant difference when sitting under the 5-bulb light that is just above the dining table. A friend of mine used to unscrew some of the bulbs when she did homework.
So basically now I save electricity while saving electricity.
My ex found some bug in a Fortran math library, and thought it was amusing that decades of simulations and other projects were now suspect. Soooo, I'm going to guess that Fortran math libraries are pretty old and apparently still in use.
Well, I'm sure they meant that when the wind blows it is 100%.
Anyway, there is always wind blowing somewhere. If City A has extra, it can help power City B if they don't have much wind that day, and vice versa. There is far more wind energy on Earth than man could ever use, so if we just tapped a tiny fraction of it we wouldn't have to burn any more coal.
I vaguely recall someone once made the analogue that using PGP for email was like having a letter delivered by armored car by armed guards and then left on your doorstep.
You have to decrypt it to read it, so it exists unencrypted in RAM at the very least and can be read by other programs, possibly even long after you close the email. In addition, a camera in the room looking over your shoulder could read it, or someone using a "tempest" system could read the EM radiation from you monitor at great distance and read it that way.
So, PGP is great to avoid the drift-net type of surveillance Bush authorized, but it wont stop a really determined government. But then again, for all the lawyer knows his face-to-face meetings are bugged, too.
I never would have guessed you were referring to file sizes. That's an obscure thing to refer to, and odd to write it in a way that looks like you're taking about drive size limits and DVDs when even movie DVDs aren't just one giant file on a disc.
In fact, I don't think you were talking about file sizes, I think you were confused and came up with the cockamamie alibi after the fact to save face and cover up your crimes against nerdom.
I owned a 8-bit SB, SB16, SBAWE64Gold (cost me $200 when I was a poor college student) then a SBLive (also about $200 at the time plus I spent like $250 on Cambridge Soundworks speakers for it) and now an X-Fi Platinum ($150 I think).
I don't plan on ever buying a creative product again.
This is just crap. I spent days setting up a media PC just to get stereo-only sound. I called Creative and they told me there is no 5.1 digital output possible. So I took everything apart and bought a shitty Divx DVD player. Now I learn that all along the card did support Dolby Digital Live and it was crippled in the drivers.
I spent days trying to set up a media PC just to find my $200 X-Fi doesn't support Dolby Digital Live, so no 5.1 sound. I even called them and they said to wasn't supported.
Now I learn they lied to me, and all X-Fis support DDL and it was crippled in the drivers.
How do I find fixed XP drivers? I went to his site and it was just a list of executables with gibberish filenames and no descriptions...
I only bought their soundcards, usually the top of their line.
Now I own a Platinum XFi that wont let me use the mic port on the Platinum drive bay (making the bay utterly worthless, thanks a lot creative, I'd like my money back), forcing me to use the shared jack ($200 and it shares jacks!?!) on the card which is not only inconvenient but means I can not use the digital output, forcing me to use analog which gives me an annoying 60Hz hum and booms when I turn the ceiling fan on or off.
I couple years ago I tried watching a basketball playoff game on a friend's HDTV. The lines on the court all looked like jagged lines, like spastic lightning bolts zapping up and down as the camera panned the court. To say it was distracting is a huge understatement. Also the crowd in the background was motionless except for once a second when the keyframe updated and everybody in the stadium was in a new position or pose for another second.
Some of TWCs analog channels also update once a second, but it's out of sync with the interlacing so text and still lines bounce up and down, up and down, one line, once a second.
I would complain, but for two years the TWC commercials playing on TWC had the sound so high it clipped to the point of being completely unintelligible, so I figured it was pointless.
There are two problems with the first paragraph of your argument: 1) you are assuming that everything is in 100% perfect working order 100% of the time 2) you are ignoring documented instances of very bad things happening on planes when personal electronic devices were turned on.
I find it hard to believe that the only place NASA could think of finding 4 *million* dollars was in the most successful, most popular, most world-renowned, most scientifically important program they have ever done, which just happens to be on the cusp of determining whether or not there was life on Mars.
Why not cut one bolt from that floating waste of money, the IST?
Is it me, or does NASA spend $100 on manned programs for every $1 on robot programs, when the robot programs return at least 1000:1 in scientific discoveries?
So, you are claiming that the human eye has more than R G and B receptors? I would be very interested to see any evidence of that, as I suspect would most scientists who study vision.
The human eye has detectors for exactly 3 colors: red, green, and blue (barring some genetic mutations). The author claims that RGB will let you get close to any color, when in fact it will produce exactly everything the human eye can see and there is no more color information to be obtained by the human eye, period. He then went on to design an elaborate device with for more than the three primary colors.
Artistically, it's pretty cool.
Scientifically, I they could have done this with 3 LEDs tuned to exactly the frequency of the viewer's primary colors, with no stray frequencies to activate other color receptors, plus maybe UVA and UVB for other effects. Also, I believe there are two frequencies or red and blue that humans may be tuned for, and since they are carried on the X chromosome a woman could have up to 5 primary colors. That would be an interesting project: designing a light just for her.
Agreed. When my friend moved to a new home and wanted her mail, I told her she should create her own town with her own post office to handle mail portability for her. How difficult is that to understand?
Have you ever moved to a new house? What is the first form you file at the post office? A mail forwarding form. But I suppose it's unreasonable to expect ISPs to keep up with the cutting edge technology implemented by the US postal service. Oop, though I turned sarcasm off.
Yes, I do. It's called forwarding. Just like with physical mail when I move to a new house, they should forward messages for X amount of time until everyone learns my new address.
My school (WPI) allows alumni to set up an email address that does nothing but bounce messages to whatever address you are using at the time, and a lot of places allow me to set up a "reply to" address field in my email. I don't see why this is such an unreasonable request.
"Computer experts advise backing up all important e-mail."
Yeah, you stupid ass users. Why didn't you cut and paste every single message from the web interface into text files? What, do you expect these billion-dollar corporations to shell out for backing up YOUR MESSAGES their own drive? And since when do they have to give you warning or recourse before wiping THEIR DRIVES? Get a brain morans.
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That was two years ago, I hope they are less insane now. That's $775 a month for internet, over $9,000 per year.
Their gym costs the same.
I have bought several ATI cards over the years, and not once could I get the drivers that came with the card to install. I always had to download newer ones and install parts of those, reboot, then try to install the ones that came with it and get a little more to install, reboot, then try the new ones again, and they would bitch that I needed to install Y to be able to install X, but when I tried to install Y it required X, until I manually installed the card as a generic VGA card and then manually installed drivers for a much older card and then started over with alternating between different versions, etc. etc. etc.
My once many-hundreds-of-dollars top-of-the-line 850 XT PE AGP is still suiting me just fine (perhaps the fasted AGP card ever), but I haven't dared try to upgrade the drivers since I bought it years ago. But I might have to, CLI.exe or something crashes at bootup now.
Every nvidia card I've owned installed flawlessly the first time, without 3-30 reboots that ATIs require.
OMG someone please revive the original Command and Conquer. That game was so much fun, and such a good strategy game, and not complicated by 2700 possible upgrades like current RTS games. Just guile and strategy by the players.
There is a setting in Firefox to prevent that, but it should be the default...
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Config.trim_on_minimize
So let me see if I got this straight: for 40 years Beatles fans have been fighting over what combination of frequencies were used in this chord, but not one of them thought to check what frequencies were being used in the chord until now?
For non-EEs out there, a Fourier transform is a basic algorithm to translate from the time domain to the frequency domain. Any audio program or player or graphic equalizer that displays the frequency spectrum instead of the actual wave coming out the speakers is using this transform. The idea that nobody thought to look at that display for 40 years is a more than a little absurd.
Finally some rationality is returning to the electoral system. Maybe someday we can move to a fairer system of voting, like approval voting or rank voting. One can dream...
Most of the sellers on Pricewatch are fraudulent. Always look them up in resellerratings.com. You'll find that the three lowest priced sellers almost always have the same address, and while Pricewatch gives them 5 stars and raving reviews resellerratings reviewers will give them 0/10 and share horror stories of receiving dead, used products that have obviously been shipped back and forth a dozen times and then be forced to pay to ship them back and pay restocking fees.
BTW, if you ever do receive a dead and used product and they want to you to pay to ship it back so they can defraud someone else, please do not aid and abet them in their crime. Please prevent the crime instead of helping them in their crime-based business model. Call your credit card company and report them: often you can keep the product for free, or at least not have to pay to ship it back and pay restocking fees.
I got a used, dusty motherboard and a drive for free when the seller refused to respond to my accusations about sending me used products and overcharging my CC. It was all worth about $200, were it new. That's when I discovered resellerratings.com and all the idiots who had paid to send back the same motherboard before I ended the cycle of crime.
1) Make sure the company who built the machines is 100% reliable and they do 100% effective background checks on 100% of their employees and 100% of their patches and upgrades are secure and legitimate, and that no human there ever errs.
2) Make sure that all your machines are 100% physically secure 100% of the time up to and after elections so that the internals cannot be swapped or hacked, and that no human in charge of this errs
3) Watch 100% of voters 100% of the time to make sure none of them alters or hacks the machines, and make sure none of your staff ever err
See? It's easy! All it requires is blind faith that humans are infallible and will never do wrong intentionally or through error.
I'll stick to paper.
Barely related... but as a South Texas resident, I wonder how much less I could run my A/C every year just because of the shade provided by solar cells on my roof? I believe I first used my A/C this year in February, so even a small decrease could be significant over the year.
I also always wondered why people don't advertise how much cooler CFL bulbs are than incandescent bulbs. I replaced 480W of lighting in a bathroom with 72W (replaced 60W clear bulbs with 9W vanity CFLs) and not only is it brighter and the light softer (and thus makes ladies feel prettier when doing whatever it is they do for hours in bathrooms) but it's a lot cooler. And they will pay for themselves in roughly 13 months.
And similar swaps make a really significant difference when sitting under the 5-bulb light that is just above the dining table. A friend of mine used to unscrew some of the bulbs when she did homework.
So basically now I save electricity while saving electricity.
My ex found some bug in a Fortran math library, and thought it was amusing that decades of simulations and other projects were now suspect. Soooo, I'm going to guess that Fortran math libraries are pretty old and apparently still in use.
Well, I'm sure they meant that when the wind blows it is 100%.
Anyway, there is always wind blowing somewhere. If City A has extra, it can help power City B if they don't have much wind that day, and vice versa. There is far more wind energy on Earth than man could ever use, so if we just tapped a tiny fraction of it we wouldn't have to burn any more coal.
I vaguely recall someone once made the analogue that using PGP for email was like having a letter delivered by armored car by armed guards and then left on your doorstep.
You have to decrypt it to read it, so it exists unencrypted in RAM at the very least and can be read by other programs, possibly even long after you close the email. In addition, a camera in the room looking over your shoulder could read it, or someone using a "tempest" system could read the EM radiation from you monitor at great distance and read it that way.
So, PGP is great to avoid the drift-net type of surveillance Bush authorized, but it wont stop a really determined government. But then again, for all the lawyer knows his face-to-face meetings are bugged, too.
So, you both win, now kiss and play nice.
I never would have guessed you were referring to file sizes. That's an obscure thing to refer to, and odd to write it in a way that looks like you're taking about drive size limits and DVDs when even movie DVDs aren't just one giant file on a disc.
In fact, I don't think you were talking about file sizes, I think you were confused and came up with the cockamamie alibi after the fact to save face and cover up your crimes against nerdom.
CONVICT!
I'm thinking the same thing as you.
I owned a 8-bit SB, SB16, SBAWE64Gold (cost me $200 when I was a poor college student) then a SBLive (also about $200 at the time plus I spent like $250 on Cambridge Soundworks speakers for it) and now an X-Fi Platinum ($150 I think).
I don't plan on ever buying a creative product again.
This is just crap. I spent days setting up a media PC just to get stereo-only sound. I called Creative and they told me there is no 5.1 digital output possible. So I took everything apart and bought a shitty Divx DVD player. Now I learn that all along the card did support Dolby Digital Live and it was crippled in the drivers.
They wasted my time and my money.
but creative disabled it in drivers
I spent days trying to set up a media PC just to find my $200 X-Fi doesn't support Dolby Digital Live, so no 5.1 sound. I even called them and they said to wasn't supported.
Now I learn they lied to me, and all X-Fis support DDL and it was crippled in the drivers.
How do I find fixed XP drivers? I went to his site and it was just a list of executables with gibberish filenames and no descriptions...
I only bought their soundcards, usually the top of their line.
Now I own a Platinum XFi that wont let me use the mic port on the Platinum drive bay (making the bay utterly worthless, thanks a lot creative, I'd like my money back), forcing me to use the shared jack ($200 and it shares jacks!?!) on the card which is not only inconvenient but means I can not use the digital output, forcing me to use analog which gives me an annoying 60Hz hum and booms when I turn the ceiling fan on or off.
And I can't upgrade to Vista, either.
I couple years ago I tried watching a basketball playoff game on a friend's HDTV. The lines on the court all looked like jagged lines, like spastic lightning bolts zapping up and down as the camera panned the court. To say it was distracting is a huge understatement. Also the crowd in the background was motionless except for once a second when the keyframe updated and everybody in the stadium was in a new position or pose for another second.
Some of TWCs analog channels also update once a second, but it's out of sync with the interlacing so text and still lines bounce up and down, up and down, one line, once a second.
I would complain, but for two years the TWC commercials playing on TWC had the sound so high it clipped to the point of being completely unintelligible, so I figured it was pointless.
There are two problems with the first paragraph of your argument:
1) you are assuming that everything is in 100% perfect working order 100% of the time
2) you are ignoring documented instances of very bad things happening on planes when personal electronic devices were turned on.
I find it hard to believe that the only place NASA could think of finding 4 *million* dollars was in the most successful, most popular, most world-renowned, most scientifically important program they have ever done, which just happens to be on the cusp of determining whether or not there was life on Mars.
Why not cut one bolt from that floating waste of money, the IST?
Is it me, or does NASA spend $100 on manned programs for every $1 on robot programs, when the robot programs return at least 1000:1 in scientific discoveries?
So, you are claiming that the human eye has more than R G and B receptors? I would be very interested to see any evidence of that, as I suspect would most scientists who study vision.
The human eye has detectors for exactly 3 colors: red, green, and blue (barring some genetic mutations). The author claims that RGB will let you get close to any color, when in fact it will produce exactly everything the human eye can see and there is no more color information to be obtained by the human eye, period. He then went on to design an elaborate device with for more than the three primary colors.
Artistically, it's pretty cool.
Scientifically, I they could have done this with 3 LEDs tuned to exactly the frequency of the viewer's primary colors, with no stray frequencies to activate other color receptors, plus maybe UVA and UVB for other effects. Also, I believe there are two frequencies or red and blue that humans may be tuned for, and since they are carried on the X chromosome a woman could have up to 5 primary colors. That would be an interesting project: designing a light just for her.
Agreed. When my friend moved to a new home and wanted her mail, I told her she should create her own town with her own post office to handle mail portability for her. How difficult is that to understand?
Have you ever moved to a new house? What is the first form you file at the post office? A mail forwarding form. But I suppose it's unreasonable to expect ISPs to keep up with the cutting edge technology implemented by the US postal service. Oop, though I turned sarcasm off.
Yes, I do. It's called forwarding. Just like with physical mail when I move to a new house, they should forward messages for X amount of time until everyone learns my new address.
My school (WPI) allows alumni to set up an email address that does nothing but bounce messages to whatever address you are using at the time, and a lot of places allow me to set up a "reply to" address field in my email. I don't see why this is such an unreasonable request.
"Computer experts advise backing up all important e-mail."
Yeah, you stupid ass users. Why didn't you cut and paste every single message from the web interface into text files? What, do you expect these billion-dollar corporations to shell out for backing up YOUR MESSAGES their own drive? And since when do they have to give you warning or recourse before wiping THEIR DRIVES? Get a brain morans.