It's a dual core 2.8Ghz Intel Pentium 4 with a 4:3 ratio screen (1400x1050). The only thing that really drags it down is the Geforce 5600 graphics chip with 64Mbyte of RAM. With high performance applications moving to multithreading and parallel processing using CUDA and OpenCL, that is the big limitation.
Microsoft brags about their success but what they don't mention is that they need to over charge you for accessories (ie wifi adapters and hardrives) and they need to charge you for any little thing you do online.
Nintendo did that with the Ultra 64 - basic console had the single controller with Mario 64 bundled in. Want to play two player games? Better buy some more controllers. Want to play those RPG games with the huge levels? better buy some memory cards for the controllers. Want to play that racing game or shooting game? you need to buy the racing car controller or the light gun. I guess Nintendo learned from that experience - they got stung by the shift of the other console makers from cartridges to CD's and DVD's, who in turn got stung by the use of online DLC for PC's.
I've patched up my favorite laptop over five times now - replaced the LCD, upgraded the HDD, replaced the cooling fan assembly, upgraded the memory and replaced a circuit board that switched the LCD off. Each time it's been cheaper than buying a new laptop. Sending the machine away would have taken two weeks, cost at least a 200 pound service charge plus the price of marked up components, not forgetting the cost of return and delivery. Otherwise, just buying the parts and swapping them out just costs far less. Finding where to buy the spare parts was the hardest part.
Government contractors are required to support hardware for the entire lifetime that the hardware remains in use. This creates a market for warehouse companies to buy up all the spare hardware that the government didn't buy, store it, and resell it back when components are required.
There have been cases where toddlers weren't allowed to crawl around on a floor but instead kept in baby bouncers, would have depth perception problems - a ball thrown towards them wouldn't be perceived as an object moving towards them, but an object that remains out of reach but is getting larger.
There are other cases whether people who had cataracts since they were born, wouldn't be able to perceive shape or correctly. They wouldn't understand shadows, but instead assume there was a flat cardboard cutout with light and dark patches.
Those are the most important hours to get sleep as they are the darkest during the Summer. This is particularly important in Northern latitudes above 50N or below 50S, as they only get twilight and not full night-time (beautiful to see though - emerald/magenta/pale blue skies with the moon and stars still visible).
Back in the 1980's, Margaret Thatcher, the then Prime Minister of Great Britain took great pride in the fact that she only had 4 hours sleep/night and took cat-naps during the day. Now, she suffers from Alzheimers/dementia.
Going without a decent number of hours sleep is not something I would wish to risk.
There was a discussion some time ago on another website that people were being turned down for employment by companies due to the fact that they were in deep debt (maxed out credit cards, student loan, near empty checking account).
About 15 or 16 years ago, there was a debate in Microsoft (and other places) as to whether 24-bit framebuffers would ever be used by game developers or whether everyone would stick to use 8-bit color palettes. The Future of Gaming in OS/2
Then there was the Talisman project which aimed to optimise 3D rendering using image based techniques Talisman.
In the UK, the local cable TV company Virgin Media got into a bit of a tiff with Sky with the consequence that various channels (Sky One) with popular programs like Stargate, Battlestar Galactica became unavailable to cable TV viewers. Around 50,000 people canceled their premium rate subscriptions until this dispute was resolved, which took just under a year for both companies to feel the financial cost of their actions. For anyone who did reduce their TV selection to freeviw, they saved around 500 pounds.
It would like going back to the era of early DOS game programming where you just had the framebuffer, a sound function (sound), two keyboard input functions (getch/kbhit), and everyone wrote their own rendering code.
There was documentary made by a survey boat and divers who went into the water. The plastic garbage floats just below sea level - in 1 square mile there were 1 million pieces of plastic ( or 2 589 988.11 square meters). Or just about one piece of plastic in every 2.5 square meters, with the bits of plastic ranged from empty plastic bottles and torn up bits of plastic to small plastic pellets.
The size of the ocean dump ranges from 700,000 square km to 15,000,000 square km, so you are looking at sifting out up to 3 billion pieces of plastic from the ocean.
Density of neustonic plastics In a 2001 study, researchers (including Moore) found that in certain areas of the patch, concentrations of plastic reached one million particles per square mile.[12] The study found concentrations of plastics at 3.34 pieces with a mean mass of 5.1 milligrams per square meter. In many areas of the affected region, the overall concentration of plastics was greater than the concentration of zooplankton by a factor of seven.
he floating plastic particles resemble zooplankton, which can be inadvertently consumed by jellyfish. Many of these long-lasting plastics end up in the stomachs of marine birds and animals,[13] including sea turtles, and the Black-footed Albatross.
Our local TV station would do that all the time - if they were interviewing anyone from the city council, a head teacher, director, or city manager, the cameraman would practically crouch on the ground pointing the camera upwards. If they were showing a crowd of schoolkids at the school gates, then the camera would be held up high and pointed downwards. If there were any women in the shot, it wouldn't be their face that was at the center point of the screen.
I worked for a company which was located in an industrial estate next to one of these areas. There weren't any jobs for which the local residents were suitably qualified (requiring skills from sales, management or engineering experience), they wouldn't have the right attitude about taking orders from someone else (they really don't like being dissed), and wouldn't speak clear English either. Their teenage offspring will be openly drinking alcohol in the streets and abuse any Taxi driver or bus driver that refuses them on, to the extent that these areas will be inaccessible by public transport. There was actually a shortage of bus and train drivers in that area, so you never knew whether a particular bus or train was actually going to arrive.
In the past, council housing was based on waiting list time, now it based upon who is most desperately in need (number of children, single parent, breadwinner in prison, drug addiction, mental illness), so all the other residents will end up wanting to leave, and the cycle continues.
I'd say that's rather impressive. But a couple of those projects are repeated three times (Battle Angel and Avatar), so that brings the total down to eleven. There is a whole pipeline from script-writing, auditioning, actual filming, visual effects, compositing and editing, so he might not be involved in all those stages. I would imagine he would concentrate on the visual effects.
Yes, it wasn't in fact an iceberg which sank the Titanic, but an alien craft which was frozen in the permafrost, was knocked onto the deck of the Titanic during the collision. This caused the alien occupants of the craft to defrost and become conscious again. Upon leaving their craft, they acid-drooled their way onto the lower decks and then attempted to burrow their way out of the ship. This in fact caused the ship to sink and forced the aliens to go back into cryo-sleep. A future salvage mission accidently brought the occupants on board where they proceed to eliminate the crew one by one.
But we would hope to see at least one Dyson sphere in construction. Maybe start off with a Ringworld as the first stage, then add a couple of rings going over the North and South poles, then fill in the remaining surface of the sphere.
Those giant wheel dispensers of toilet paper are probably the most annoying. You have spin the wheel in two directions to figure out whether the roll of paper has been installed clockwise or anticlockwise by the cleaner/janitor.
Slashdot Mirror
Or how about Building a 747 while in the sky.
It's a dual core 2.8Ghz Intel Pentium 4 with a 4:3 ratio screen (1400x1050). The only thing that really drags it down is the Geforce 5600 graphics chip with 64Mbyte of RAM. With high performance applications moving to multithreading and parallel processing using CUDA and OpenCL, that is the big limitation.
Microsoft brags about their success but what they don't mention is that they need to over charge you for accessories (ie wifi adapters and hardrives) and they need to charge you for any little thing you do online.
Nintendo did that with the Ultra 64 - basic console had the single controller with Mario 64 bundled in. Want to play two player games? Better buy some more controllers. Want to play those RPG games with the huge levels? better buy some memory cards for the controllers. Want to play that racing game or shooting game? you need to buy the racing car controller or the light gun. I guess Nintendo learned from that experience - they got stung by the shift of the other console makers from cartridges to CD's and DVD's, who in turn got stung by the use of online DLC for PC's.
I've patched up my favorite laptop over five times now - replaced the LCD, upgraded the HDD, replaced the cooling fan assembly, upgraded the memory and replaced a circuit board that switched the LCD off. Each time it's been cheaper than buying a new laptop. Sending the machine away would have taken two weeks, cost at least a 200 pound service charge plus the price of marked up components, not forgetting the cost of return and delivery. Otherwise, just buying the parts and swapping them out just costs far less. Finding where to buy the spare parts was the hardest part.
Government contractors are required to support hardware for the entire lifetime that the hardware remains in use. This creates a market for warehouse companies to buy up all the spare hardware that the government didn't buy, store it, and resell it back when components are required.
There have been cases where toddlers weren't allowed to crawl around on a floor but instead kept in baby bouncers, would have depth perception problems - a ball thrown towards them wouldn't be perceived as an object moving towards them, but an object that remains out of reach but is getting larger.
There are other cases whether people who had cataracts since they were born, wouldn't be able to perceive shape or correctly. They wouldn't understand shadows, but instead assume there was a flat cardboard cutout with light and dark patches.
Those are the most important hours to get sleep as they are the darkest during the Summer. This is particularly important in Northern latitudes above 50N or below 50S, as they only get twilight and not full night-time (beautiful to see though - emerald/magenta/pale blue skies with the moon and stars still visible).
Back in the 1980's, Margaret Thatcher, the then Prime Minister of Great Britain took great pride in the fact that she only had 4 hours sleep/night and took cat-naps during the day. Now, she suffers from Alzheimers/dementia.
Going without a decent number of hours sleep is not something I would wish to risk.
This article seems to list everything a corporation should consider:
Price of power
Networking infrastructure
Accessibility
Talent pool
Local incentives
.. would like to patent the concept of removing the creases from a newspaper by ironing it under a dry towel.
There was a discussion some time ago on another website that people were being turned down for employment by companies due to the fact that they were in deep debt (maxed out credit cards, student loan, near empty checking account).
About 15 or 16 years ago, there was a debate in Microsoft (and other places) as to whether 24-bit framebuffers would ever be used by game developers or whether everyone would stick to use 8-bit color palettes.
The Future of Gaming in OS/2
Then there was the Talisman project which aimed to optimise 3D rendering using image based techniques Talisman.
Now the current battlefield seem to be wide-gamut displays.
In the UK, the local cable TV company Virgin Media got into a bit of a tiff with Sky with the consequence that various channels (Sky One) with popular programs like Stargate, Battlestar Galactica became unavailable to cable TV viewers. Around 50,000 people canceled their premium rate subscriptions until this dispute was resolved, which took just under a year for both companies to feel the financial cost of their actions. For anyone who did reduce their TV selection to freeviw, they saved around 500 pounds.
Written into an employment contract:
"There will be no fighting between staff in the main reception during office hours."
You leave my goddamn tubes alone! there's nothing wrong with my plumbing.
Plastic is made from hydrocarbons, just hydrogen and carbon.
http://www.ider.herts.ac.uk/school/courseware/materials/plastics/polymer.html
There are
And bacteria which feed on propane and butane
There is even the bacterium Bacillus cereus DQ01, which has evolved the ability to feed on the hydrocarbon n-hexadecane.
It would like going back to the era of early DOS game programming where you just had the framebuffer, a sound function (sound), two keyboard input functions (getch/kbhit), and everyone wrote their own rendering code.
There was documentary made by a survey boat and divers who went into the water. The plastic garbage floats just below sea level - in 1 square mile there were 1 million pieces of plastic ( or 2 589 988.11 square meters). Or just about one piece of plastic in every 2.5 square meters, with the bits of plastic ranged from empty plastic bottles and torn up bits of plastic to small plastic pellets.
The size of the ocean dump ranges from 700,000 square km to 15,000,000 square km, so you are looking at sifting out up to 3 billion pieces of plastic from the ocean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch
Density of neustonic plastics
In a 2001 study, researchers (including Moore) found that in certain areas of the patch, concentrations of plastic reached one million particles per square mile.[12] The study found concentrations of plastics at 3.34 pieces with a mean mass of 5.1 milligrams per square meter. In many areas of the affected region, the overall concentration of plastics was greater than the concentration of zooplankton by a factor of seven.
he floating plastic particles resemble zooplankton, which can be inadvertently consumed by jellyfish. Many of these long-lasting plastics end up in the stomachs of marine birds and animals,[13] including sea turtles, and the Black-footed Albatross.
Our local TV station would do that all the time - if they were interviewing anyone from the city council, a head teacher, director, or city manager, the cameraman would practically crouch on the ground pointing the camera upwards. If they were showing a crowd of schoolkids at the school gates, then the camera would be held up high and pointed downwards. If there were any women in the shot, it wouldn't be their face that was at the center point of the screen.
I worked for a company which was located in an industrial estate next to one of these areas. There weren't any jobs for which the local residents were suitably qualified (requiring skills from sales, management or engineering experience), they wouldn't have the right attitude about taking orders from someone else (they really don't like being dissed), and wouldn't speak clear English either. Their teenage offspring will be openly drinking alcohol in the streets and abuse any Taxi driver or bus driver that refuses them on, to the extent that these areas will be inaccessible by public transport. There was actually a shortage of bus and train drivers in that area, so you never knew whether a particular bus or train was actually going to arrive.
In the past, council housing was based on waiting list time, now it based upon who is most desperately in need (number of children, single parent, breadwinner in prison, drug addiction, mental illness), so all the other residents will end up wanting to leave, and the cycle continues.
I'd say that's rather impressive. But a couple of those projects are repeated three times (Battle Angel and Avatar), so that brings the total down to eleven. There is a whole pipeline from script-writing, auditioning, actual filming, visual effects, compositing and editing, so he might not be involved in all those stages. I would imagine he would concentrate on the visual effects.
Yes, it wasn't in fact an iceberg which sank the Titanic, but an alien craft which was frozen in the permafrost, was knocked onto the deck of the Titanic during the collision. This caused the alien occupants of the craft to defrost and become conscious again. Upon leaving their craft, they acid-drooled their way onto the lower decks and then attempted to burrow their way out of the ship. This in fact caused the ship to sink and forced the aliens to go back into cryo-sleep. A future salvage mission accidently brought the occupants on board where they proceed to eliminate the crew one by one.
But we would hope to see at least one Dyson sphere in construction. Maybe start off with a Ringworld as the first stage, then add a couple of rings going over the North and South poles, then fill in the remaining surface of the sphere.
Those giant wheel dispensers of toilet paper are probably the most annoying. You have spin the wheel in two directions to figure out whether the roll of paper has been installed clockwise or anticlockwise by the cleaner/janitor.