The Placebo effect is powerful, especially when dealing with issues like chronic pain. Also, just because the Army is interested in something doesn't make it legitimate. There have been several projects funded over the years that in retrospect (and even at the time) were complete hogwash.
I dare you to find a major Chinese company that doesn't have close ties to the government, especially the local government. Even foreign governments that set up shop in China frequently have to set up a constant stream of bribes to the local government to get all of the preferential treatment and government largess needed to build a major factory.
It's not like the US has always had the best environmental record either. We've had our share of burning rivers. Just like it took years for us to enact all of the environmental legislation that has started to turn the country around, China will someday be forced to take a similar path. Sure it might mean more manufacturing jobs going to even shittier third world countries, but also means that they can't keep doing what they're doing forever.
I don't see how funding battery technology with tax dollars is authoritarian at all. Government deciding where my money goes seems to be the basis of socialism. I agree that they are two very different schools of thought, but this looks a lot more socialist than fascist to me.
My memory is a bit fuzzy on this, but I think the way it worked is that your units would shoot back, but they would not move to intercept. If your opponent had longer range, they would just sit there and let themselves get pounded to death instead of walking an inch over to start shooting back. Since you couldn't mass select, the game often came down to you rushing over and individually clicking units to tell them to move into range of the enemy before they finished pounding your guys into scrap.
Not to rain on your anecdote, but 10GB of changes a day isn't a whole lot. I have some systems that will read and write that in 8 seconds. We don't worry too much about drive fragmentation, but our file tend to be stored in gigantic chunks anyway and we don't do lots of little read/write accesses that would tend to fragment the system.
In my experiance, the best way to avoid fragmentation is to leave lots of free space on the disk. If you let the disk get above some threshold (I'm not exactly sure where it is, but I'm guessing somewhere around 75%) then it will start fragmenting a lot, especially if you update large files repeatedly (Databases).
Huh? The cache only contains a set of what the processor already things it is likely to need. It's not like it's loading a fixed window of memory over the entire cache space. How C and other such languages organize their own memory space shouldn't matter much at all. Switching to 32 bit offsets instead of 64 bit pointers is fine so long as you never need to reference more than 4 billion records, but one application does not a whole industry make.
Although C&C added some features that made it a massive improvement over Dune 2. For instance, you could hold your mouse button down to draw a rectangle on the screen to select a group of units. Units would also tend to fight back when shot at without explicit operator intervention. Dune 2 (was there ever a Dune 1?) had some great elements, but the interface was terrible really. That's why so few people remember it, it was a game that had the makings of a great game, but lacked the polish to be a superstar. Westwood didn't make a usable interface until C&C.
Of all of the technical and political roadblocks to building a space elevator, both of these seem quite minor in comparison. This is kind of like saying "I was going to bench press this Hummer H2, but since you added a fuzzy steering wheel cover it's going to be completely impossible now."
That's my thought. I still have a SDTV, why would I upgrade to a Series 3 TiVo? Especially since my Series 2 has lifetime service and is still going strong 5 years later. It sure beats having the cable company's "DVR".
Currently? A Dell Latitude D630 with a Core 2 Duo T7700, 2GB of physical memory, and some Seagate hard drive. Before the switch, if I left Outlook minimized for long enough switching back was always the same story: First the un-candyfied window appears, then the candy, then some of the toolbars, then the bottom bar, then finally the internal widgets would fill in. Typically it would take 15-20 seconds or so, and still be a bit sluggish about switching mails for a few more seconds (3-5 seconds to load a mail).
With the pagefile reduced to 2mb, it pops up in less than a second every time.
Now how bad it is depends on how long the application has been minimized. Windows XP appears to chip away at the memory bit by bit whenever something is minimized. It doesn't matter if you're actually doing anything on the machine (although I suppose you could speed it along by running something else that consumed a lot of memory), the primary factor is just how long it has sat minimized. It was always slow first thing in the morning, even if the last thing I did before leaving the night before is read my mail.
One caveat is that my work requires me to run full disk encryption software on the laptop (Pointsec), which makes disk access even more expensive than it normally is.
First off, anybody who thinks that NAT is a long term solution to the IP address shortage is fooling themselves. NAT is a stopgap solution that has a scant handful of years left in it (some estimates say as little as 3-4 years). IPv6 is the only long term solution we have at the moment.
The biggest thing holding me back from switching is that my ISP doesn't seem to care one whiff about switching. The only way I have available to get on is to set up a tunnel, which seems to defeat the entire purpose of IPv6. I don't want to run IPv6 just for the sake of saying that I run IPv6, I want to run it so I can have an address for every device and finally get rid of the annoying NAT solutions.
I don't notice any difference at all browsing around the filesystem. I have enough memory in the system that the disk cache is more than adequate. The choice between keeping a file I last accessed 30 minutes ago and an active application that I switch back to on a regular basis in memory is an easy one for me.
Man, I hated that assumption in 2000, and I hate it in XP. It's the one that means when you bring Firefox up after it has been minimized, that the OS will have to laboriously swap in all of the memory for it from disk, which takes forever when you're talking about a slow laptop hard drive. I made it a habit of switching the paging file management to "manual" and reducing the paging size down to 2mb. It makes the whole system way more responsive when you're like me and have a bunch of applications open at once and in the background, and memory is so cheap that buying a little extra so you never run out (2GB) is easy.
The C64 used the same joystick the Atari did, so they were pretty easy to find and cheap. Granted, it wasn't particularly ergonomic and the build quality was iffy on a lot of them, but they did work. The amazing thing about the 2600 port is that they managed to keep most of the features on a system that was literally an order of magnitude less capable than the C64.
Interestingly enough, the Ghostbusters cart for the 2600 was one of the best games on the system. It had an amazing amount of gameplay given the (severe) limitations of the 2600 hardware.
If ISPs started setting the QoS bits to favor voice traffic and send Bittorrent into the lowest priority queue, I guarantee that it won't take long for a BitTorrent client to start disguising itself as voice traffic.
Setting and honoring QoS bits won't help IMHO. The biggest problem is that they're not honored on the internet at large, so they'll basically only work for your organization, and won't work at all at keeping your users from clogging the last mile uplinks unless you make every single home router smart enough to set and honor the bits on their own. DSL and Fiber should be ok (although it would likely require upgrade of a LOT of COs), but Cable and Wireless are hosed since they're shared at the last mile.
Also, people seem to think that having Bittorrent work at the packet level is somehow a bad thing, which seems crazy to me since that's how the internet works. It would be a bad idea to plop an 8k UDP packet on the wire (or whatever your BT block size is) and expect it to make it through the network intact (IP fragmentation is going to murder your data transfer if you're congested anywhere, since losing any fragment will cause the stack to drop your whole packet on the floor).
I'm also not sold on implementing your own flow control in BT over UDP (it's not as easy as it looks) just because you don't want to incur the queuing penalty to reorder packets (which on the internet is not typically a problem anyway!). People may not like the 3-way handshake, but it's extremely useful for preventing you from spewing data a host that no longer exists. Frankly, TCP is pretty good at bulk data transfer and that's exactly what BT is doing (granted, the data is chunked up, but you're still sending it in bulk to and from many hosts).
It's such a shame Multicast doesn't work on the internet. This is one area where it could really do some good.
That misses the point. UDP senders don't know when they're flooding the connection, so they just keep doing it. A TCP stream would back off to try to be fair, but your UDP stream is just going to keep on blasting at full speed.
Think of it this way, you have a congested router that has 1mbps of available bandwidth. Normally you have 5 TCP streams sharing it at 200kbps each. Everybody is happy. Now you replace one of the TCP streams with your UDP sender which is configured to transmit at 800kbps. It will continue to pound the router with 800kbps worth of traffic while the TCP streams all throttle back to 50kbps. Now you're not playing fair, and there's nothing the other TCP guys can do about it because they're all trying to play fair still.
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The Placebo effect is powerful, especially when dealing with issues like chronic pain. Also, just because the Army is interested in something doesn't make it legitimate. There have been several projects funded over the years that in retrospect (and even at the time) were complete hogwash.
I dare you to find a major Chinese company that doesn't have close ties to the government, especially the local government. Even foreign governments that set up shop in China frequently have to set up a constant stream of bribes to the local government to get all of the preferential treatment and government largess needed to build a major factory.
It's not like the US has always had the best environmental record either. We've had our share of burning rivers. Just like it took years for us to enact all of the environmental legislation that has started to turn the country around, China will someday be forced to take a similar path. Sure it might mean more manufacturing jobs going to even shittier third world countries, but also means that they can't keep doing what they're doing forever.
I don't see how funding battery technology with tax dollars is authoritarian at all. Government deciding where my money goes seems to be the basis of socialism. I agree that they are two very different schools of thought, but this looks a lot more socialist than fascist to me.
My memory is a bit fuzzy on this, but I think the way it worked is that your units would shoot back, but they would not move to intercept. If your opponent had longer range, they would just sit there and let themselves get pounded to death instead of walking an inch over to start shooting back. Since you couldn't mass select, the game often came down to you rushing over and individually clicking units to tell them to move into range of the enemy before they finished pounding your guys into scrap.
Not to rain on your anecdote, but 10GB of changes a day isn't a whole lot. I have some systems that will read and write that in 8 seconds. We don't worry too much about drive fragmentation, but our file tend to be stored in gigantic chunks anyway and we don't do lots of little read/write accesses that would tend to fragment the system. In my experiance, the best way to avoid fragmentation is to leave lots of free space on the disk. If you let the disk get above some threshold (I'm not exactly sure where it is, but I'm guessing somewhere around 75%) then it will start fragmenting a lot, especially if you update large files repeatedly (Databases).
Huh? The cache only contains a set of what the processor already things it is likely to need. It's not like it's loading a fixed window of memory over the entire cache space. How C and other such languages organize their own memory space shouldn't matter much at all. Switching to 32 bit offsets instead of 64 bit pointers is fine so long as you never need to reference more than 4 billion records, but one application does not a whole industry make.
Wouldn't the mime type be set for Wordpad then? I don't see how this would help.
Although C&C added some features that made it a massive improvement over Dune 2. For instance, you could hold your mouse button down to draw a rectangle on the screen to select a group of units. Units would also tend to fight back when shot at without explicit operator intervention. Dune 2 (was there ever a Dune 1?) had some great elements, but the interface was terrible really. That's why so few people remember it, it was a game that had the makings of a great game, but lacked the polish to be a superstar. Westwood didn't make a usable interface until C&C.
Of all of the technical and political roadblocks to building a space elevator, both of these seem quite minor in comparison. This is kind of like saying "I was going to bench press this Hummer H2, but since you added a fuzzy steering wheel cover it's going to be completely impossible now."
As as Slashdotter, I resent the implication that I am not, in fact, a mammal.
That's my thought. I still have a SDTV, why would I upgrade to a Series 3 TiVo? Especially since my Series 2 has lifetime service and is still going strong 5 years later. It sure beats having the cable company's "DVR".
But they have Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter available for streaming, what else could you want?
Isn't this the foundation of Ebay?
Currently? A Dell Latitude D630 with a Core 2 Duo T7700, 2GB of physical memory, and some Seagate hard drive. Before the switch, if I left Outlook minimized for long enough switching back was always the same story: First the un-candyfied window appears, then the candy, then some of the toolbars, then the bottom bar, then finally the internal widgets would fill in. Typically it would take 15-20 seconds or so, and still be a bit sluggish about switching mails for a few more seconds (3-5 seconds to load a mail).
With the pagefile reduced to 2mb, it pops up in less than a second every time.
Now how bad it is depends on how long the application has been minimized. Windows XP appears to chip away at the memory bit by bit whenever something is minimized. It doesn't matter if you're actually doing anything on the machine (although I suppose you could speed it along by running something else that consumed a lot of memory), the primary factor is just how long it has sat minimized. It was always slow first thing in the morning, even if the last thing I did before leaving the night before is read my mail.
One caveat is that my work requires me to run full disk encryption software on the laptop (Pointsec), which makes disk access even more expensive than it normally is.
First off, anybody who thinks that NAT is a long term solution to the IP address shortage is fooling themselves. NAT is a stopgap solution that has a scant handful of years left in it (some estimates say as little as 3-4 years). IPv6 is the only long term solution we have at the moment.
The biggest thing holding me back from switching is that my ISP doesn't seem to care one whiff about switching. The only way I have available to get on is to set up a tunnel, which seems to defeat the entire purpose of IPv6. I don't want to run IPv6 just for the sake of saying that I run IPv6, I want to run it so I can have an address for every device and finally get rid of the annoying NAT solutions.
I don't notice any difference at all browsing around the filesystem. I have enough memory in the system that the disk cache is more than adequate. The choice between keeping a file I last accessed 30 minutes ago and an active application that I switch back to on a regular basis in memory is an easy one for me.
Man, I hated that assumption in 2000, and I hate it in XP. It's the one that means when you bring Firefox up after it has been minimized, that the OS will have to laboriously swap in all of the memory for it from disk, which takes forever when you're talking about a slow laptop hard drive. I made it a habit of switching the paging file management to "manual" and reducing the paging size down to 2mb. It makes the whole system way more responsive when you're like me and have a bunch of applications open at once and in the background, and memory is so cheap that buying a little extra so you never run out (2GB) is easy.
You assume too much. The C64 used the Atari joysticks. They were no more capable.
The C64 used the same joystick the Atari did, so they were pretty easy to find and cheap. Granted, it wasn't particularly ergonomic and the build quality was iffy on a lot of them, but they did work. The amazing thing about the 2600 port is that they managed to keep most of the features on a system that was literally an order of magnitude less capable than the C64.
Interestingly enough, the Ghostbusters cart for the 2600 was one of the best games on the system. It had an amazing amount of gameplay given the (severe) limitations of the 2600 hardware.
I just bought Half Life off of Steam. Valve had a deal where you could get it for $0.99 and I figured I liked Half Life 2, so why not.
It's also a popular way to kill off ethnic groups that aren't your own.
If ISPs started setting the QoS bits to favor voice traffic and send Bittorrent into the lowest priority queue, I guarantee that it won't take long for a BitTorrent client to start disguising itself as voice traffic.
Setting and honoring QoS bits won't help IMHO. The biggest problem is that they're not honored on the internet at large, so they'll basically only work for your organization, and won't work at all at keeping your users from clogging the last mile uplinks unless you make every single home router smart enough to set and honor the bits on their own. DSL and Fiber should be ok (although it would likely require upgrade of a LOT of COs), but Cable and Wireless are hosed since they're shared at the last mile.
Also, people seem to think that having Bittorrent work at the packet level is somehow a bad thing, which seems crazy to me since that's how the internet works. It would be a bad idea to plop an 8k UDP packet on the wire (or whatever your BT block size is) and expect it to make it through the network intact (IP fragmentation is going to murder your data transfer if you're congested anywhere, since losing any fragment will cause the stack to drop your whole packet on the floor).
I'm also not sold on implementing your own flow control in BT over UDP (it's not as easy as it looks) just because you don't want to incur the queuing penalty to reorder packets (which on the internet is not typically a problem anyway!). People may not like the 3-way handshake, but it's extremely useful for preventing you from spewing data a host that no longer exists. Frankly, TCP is pretty good at bulk data transfer and that's exactly what BT is doing (granted, the data is chunked up, but you're still sending it in bulk to and from many hosts).
It's such a shame Multicast doesn't work on the internet. This is one area where it could really do some good.
That misses the point. UDP senders don't know when they're flooding the connection, so they just keep doing it. A TCP stream would back off to try to be fair, but your UDP stream is just going to keep on blasting at full speed.
Think of it this way, you have a congested router that has 1mbps of available bandwidth. Normally you have 5 TCP streams sharing it at 200kbps each. Everybody is happy. Now you replace one of the TCP streams with your UDP sender which is configured to transmit at 800kbps. It will continue to pound the router with 800kbps worth of traffic while the TCP streams all throttle back to 50kbps. Now you're not playing fair, and there's nothing the other TCP guys can do about it because they're all trying to play fair still.