Or...you could just save the $400 and take YOUR laptop over to grandmas. It probably has better than VGA resolution too.
This is about as gimicky as it gets. They should spend the R&D on less noisier sensors. I had a coolpix and it had the noisiest sensor I've ever seen and it broke after a two weeks with nary a single drop. The powershot that replaced it was rock solid till I dropped it from about 20 feet. I wouldn't want to drop my fz28, but it does take some pretty nice pictures and cost me a lot less than another useless POS, I mean P&S.
That's what I was thinking. I'm reading this on a P3-1ghz/w 512mb RAM running kubuntu 9.04. A 2ghz machine of any breed would smoke this thing. Of course running kubuntu 9.04 doesn't help, but hey at least I'm using swiftfox and it is indeed a lot faster.
So just wait for the laptop you want and buy it and install linux on it. Its not likely you are going to save much if anything on a windows free laptop and it sure isn't like linux costs anything to install. Just find something that gets good linux reviews and be happy.
When I buy things online I use prepaid visa cards. Nobody has to know my bank account information, social security number or anything. I also give as little information out as possible. The most they will likely find on me, outside of my social security number (which anyone can find with some digging and a few bucks) is my name and address and a frequently empty visa debit account. I've had friends who have had their identity hijacked and it is very hard to convince credit agencies that you really didn't get a credit card and buy all of that stuff. My credit is pretty destroyed, but if that is something you are worried about, it does help to continuously monitor your credit report and score and potentially catch things before time starts working against you.
That's kind of what I was thinking too. When you really start pushing the 300mb/s sata gives its hard to find something to complain about. Most of my hard drives max out at like 60-100mb a second and even the 15,000k drives are not a great deal faster. Low latency, fast speeds, increased reliability. This could get interesting in the next few years. Heck why not just build a raid 0 controller into the logic card with a sata connection and break the ssd into a bunch of little chunks and raid 0 them all max performance right out of the box so you get the performance advantages of raid without the cost of a card and the waste of a slot? PCIe SSD is quite interesting too..........
It is a problem with the optical components. Specifically the mirror and the lenses they are using to focus on their intended image. Compare to, say a canon powershot sx10 superzoom which exhibits the same optical qualities. Aberration is a long standing challenge in lens design.
looks like chromatic aberration to me. it is an optical problem and can be controlled with software, but pretty common on anything with any kind of optical magnification.
This is a pretty great image. I don't remember shots of jupiter looking anywhere near this good before. I really can't wait to see what the new hubble is capable of producing.
Did you try using the ubuntu drivers from the repository? I did and it fubarred up everything to the point where I had to reinstall ubuntu just to be able to proceed forward. I have an old FX5200 here or whatever and surprisingly nvidia still writes new drivers for older cards. After running their handy little install binary I was up and running with not a single issue. The biggest trick is purging everything ubuntu related (I just used synaptic and uninstalled every nvidia related package first). I really wish the old radeon 9250 i used to use in my old pc was even remotely supported. AMD really did their customers a disservice when they dropped all the older drivers in a state to where newer versions of xorg would not work with them. Lots of radeon dx9 cards out there with only open source drivers to use, which I hate to say are about 1000x slower than their windows counterparts. Virtually no 3d acceleration and very high cpu usage for just drawing 2d screens. I've always had less issues with nvidia, but that is just me I guess. Every nvidia card I ever tried to use just worked with the nvidia supplied drivers. Can't really complain about that other than the fact that you have to manually update your kernel and reinstall drivers every once in a while. Hell write a cronjob to do it... Big deal.
Aren't there laws against DOS attacks? If you jammed the RIAA's network you would surely go to jail if caught. They should leave the law enforcement to the police. Its too bad nobody can seem to get them on racketeering. They extort millions (heh, literally apparently) from the american public and at the same time have not paid millions of dollars owed to the artists that they supposedly represent.
Something tells me that Apple may see the writing on the wall and positioned themselves to eventually become a software vendor like Microsoft. It would certainly throw the world into a whirlwind if they started offering OS X for off the shelf commodity PC hardware. They may see their position as a hardware vendor as precarious and could have been planning for a potential plummet. If their software already ran on PCs it would be a very easy switch to just stop producing hardware and go software only. I don't think the move had anything to do with laptop chips, though that certainly was a sore point at the time and something that probably tipped the scales towards x86. PPC just wasn't where it needed to be and it wasn't going to get there in time to be competitive as well. I loved the PPC chips, and they were a big reason I liked the macs back in the day, but I don't really think the switch has hurt apple in many ways and they certainly have benefited from cheaper, faster hardware and have really put an end to a great deal of the mac/pc compatibility problems. We really need more OS competition on PCs. A Linux/Windows only world really doesn't cut it. (lets not get into the bsds or solaris, no desktop penetration atm....) Blah. Running behind. Ramble on.
Yeah, but how do you produce any quantity of hydrogen cheaply? Current ideas swirl around creating hydrogen at a power plant via electrolysis. It would seem vastly more efficient to just take the 15% transmission loss and apply the power directly to the wheels with an ultra efficient electric motor. That still gives you like 75-80% or better. What's the loss with hydrogen? I'd imagine it can't compete. Batteries are an obstacle and will be surmounted. We went to the freaking moon. Think we can't invent better batteries? The cost will go down significantly with mass production. What do you think is more expensive to produce? A modern car with thousands of moving parts or an electric car with two motors and a battery? If you are really after a hybrid, serial seems the way to go, but honda has certainly shown that you can drive a parallel hybrid to some pretty impressive numbers. The wheels are in motion for automakers to perhaps try and outdo each other at this point because the public perception is now that the internal combustion engine is going go the way of the dodo. Lots of opportunities for some really good ideas to come out of this.
Also you might have a hard time finding a good LZ that isn't covered in water...so you might want to prepare for those thermal tiles to conveniently float.
That would survive the drop from space. Terminal velocity would be far easier for it to survive. I'm too tired to do math, but you can find the equation here:
What's really sad is that he'll be facing federal felony charges if he is tried and convicted. Felony charges. For words. This country is out of hand. This is approaching thought crime, and I don't think I'm the only one that finds this disturbing. Just scare the kid and make him do a few hundred hours of community service. This isn't something that anybody needs to go to federal pound me in the ass prison at the sweet age of 18 over. When did all of our laws suddenly become felonies? Felonies really destroy your life. No passport, etc. You are a second class citizen, who has done their time, but gets to pay for their crime the rest of their life in oh so many ways. Sad really.
Yes. I store just about all of my pictures in raw format at 12 megs per shot. Seeing as how I have thousands of saved shots, it adds up to many gigs. I also have about 40,000 mp3s/oggs/flacs, which eats up around 300 gigs or so. I have every episode of star trek TOS and TNG. A bunch of HBO shows and a whole bunch of movies. Oh I have like 100 gigs of classic PC games and about 50 gigs of PSX games and like every single NES/SNES/Genesis/GBA/GB/NEO-GEO rom known to man. I probably have like 50 gigs of comic books too and a whole crapload of e-books. Also add in backups of isos for various commercial software and it all really starts to add up quick. I need to get at least another TB drive just to back up my backups.:)
I wish there was somewhere where I could just throw it all up on ftp for you fellow geeks. If anyone's really interested...my e-mail is public on slashdot.
That's kind of how I feel about this whole thing as well. I was all excited initially that these were copies of the original tapes, and now, that doesn't seem to be the case. How tragic that the only original witness is now lost forever. You would think they would place a higher value on the telemetry tapes. And then to admit "recycling" the tapes. Wow. You think a few billion could buy you a couple of extra tapes....
In NASA's defence, it would certainly seem to them at the time that landing on the moon was about to become a real regular thing, but you know, I don't think there is any defence for this the more I think about it. I mean to land on the moon and just go, ok, we don't need *that* footage anymore. Queue up the dozens of rabid moon conspiracy retards. The real reason is because it either a) never happened or b) they found aliens or some crap. I can almost hear it now. (oh wait, I just have to scroll through the comments.....) Its kind of sad. People aren't nearly as enamoured with astronauts on the moon any more. Even by apollo 16 (or was it 15?) it was interfering with network ratings.
NASA needs to make their missions a little less boring in presentation. You ever watch the NASA channel? I mean they could make a few jokes or something to liven things up. Maybe some babes in bikinis every 30 seconds. Put celebrities on the ISS? ISS reality TV where 2 russians and 2 americans bloody each other up over a playboy has been? (speaking of which, has anyone joined the orbital club yet?) Explosions? People love to watch things blow up. Over and over again.
"1 Tb for $5000 is nice. Size is one thing, but the underlying software is another thing. "
"Did this remind anyone else of Machrone's Law (which held up pretty nicely through the 80's and into the early 90's):"The computer you want always costs $5000"."
" I have 5 gigs of music myself, non-repeating (it isn't too hard to find, actually). However, here's the real hard drive killer: video. I'm into anime (yahoo), and my full/almost full collections of Ranma (TV Seasons 1 - 5 + OAV), Tenchi, O!MG, Lodoss, Evangelion, Lain, and the like are currently killing my 40 gig hard drive. Some of the full length movies (fan-dubbed) can run to half a gig alone. That will quickly kill alot of hard drives. "
is the rc code just frozen in time with security updates or are they going to upgrade it to rtm levels? i'm asking because i was actually thinking about installing the rc and using it for a while on a laptop. $300 is not much less than the cost of the damned laptop. You think OEM licenses will be cheap?:)
I read about it a bit because I was curious and the low down seems to be that it was a nice little device that played gba and nes games just fine, but snes emulation is a bit spotty. Don't know how it deals with genesis games, but I'm guessing not so good. The sound emulation seems pretty crappy from what I read as well. Seems like you might have better luck with a gp32, but they are a bit more expensive. For what its worth, the PSP does emulation too. I personally just prefer a laptop. You can even play playstation and N64 games without issue and get a decent sized screen to boot. Just don't complain about the battery life....:)
You are pretty lucky. I've had quite a few drives fail over time, some containing very irreplaceable data, but such is life. I just recently lost the logic board an an 80gig drive. It contained 6 months worth of work on it that I was meaning to back up again, but never got around to. I think I can fix it, but maybe I can't, so it may just come as a lesson learned. Anymore if a drive lasts beyond a few months it might be ok for some time, but you should probably worry about it after a year or so. However, you still really need some sort of backup plan as even a good power surge will likely fry your drive and its data. I like external usb drives because, while pretty slow, they can be unplugged and thrown in a closet or something and will generally last for some time due to their infrequent use. Drives can sometimes survive fires as well, that is unless your house becomes a pile of smoldering toothpicks. Off site is always the way to go, but not everyone has that luxury. A good idea might be to leave a usb drive at mom's with your most important data or some sort of remote storage.
I have a 750gb that I filled with compressed video. My huge mp3 collection would be four times as large if I upgraded it to flac. A few terrabytes is not all that much and I could probably fill a 5TB array about as fast as 12mb/s would get me. With video now, especially HD video, drives are going to get filled up faster than ever. Also digital photography is pushing beyond film now with 50 megapixel sensors. They are quite expensive, but imagine what it will be like in another 5 years or so. Even my 10-meg camera stores 12 megabyte raws. Its not hard to fill up a 4gig card at around 300 images.
What can I say? Hoarding is also addicting. Who knows. Maybe one day society will collapse and these huge caches of media will be some of our only copies of our cultural history. I think it is important for music to be preserved, and with many things going out of print and obscure record companies dissolving, it is getting rather hard to find underground stuff from even the 90s.
Slashdot Mirror
Or...you could just save the $400 and take YOUR laptop over to grandmas. It probably has better than VGA resolution too.
This is about as gimicky as it gets. They should spend the R&D on less noisier sensors. I had a coolpix and it had the noisiest sensor I've ever seen and it broke after a two weeks with nary a single drop. The powershot that replaced it was rock solid till I dropped it from about 20 feet. I wouldn't want to drop my fz28, but it does take some pretty nice pictures and cost me a lot less than another useless POS, I mean P&S.
That's what I was thinking. I'm reading this on a P3-1ghz /w 512mb RAM running kubuntu 9.04. A 2ghz machine of any breed would smoke this thing. Of course running kubuntu 9.04 doesn't help, but hey at least I'm using swiftfox and it is indeed a lot faster.
So just wait for the laptop you want and buy it and install linux on it. Its not likely you are going to save much if anything on a windows free laptop and it sure isn't like linux costs anything to install. Just find something that gets good linux reviews and be happy.
When I buy things online I use prepaid visa cards. Nobody has to know my bank account information, social security number or anything. I also give as little information out as possible. The most they will likely find on me, outside of my social security number (which anyone can find with some digging and a few bucks) is my name and address and a frequently empty visa debit account. I've had friends who have had their identity hijacked and it is very hard to convince credit agencies that you really didn't get a credit card and buy all of that stuff. My credit is pretty destroyed, but if that is something you are worried about, it does help to continuously monitor your credit report and score and potentially catch things before time starts working against you.
That's kind of what I was thinking too. When you really start pushing the 300mb/s sata gives its hard to find something to complain about. Most of my hard drives max out at like 60-100mb a second and even the 15,000k drives are not a great deal faster. Low latency, fast speeds, increased reliability. This could get interesting in the next few years. Heck why not just build a raid 0 controller into the logic card with a sata connection and break the ssd into a bunch of little chunks and raid 0 them all max performance right out of the box so you get the performance advantages of raid without the cost of a card and the waste of a slot? PCIe SSD is quite interesting too..........
It is a problem with the optical components. Specifically the mirror and the lenses they are using to focus on their intended image. Compare to, say a canon powershot sx10 superzoom which exhibits the same optical qualities. Aberration is a long standing challenge in lens design.
looks like chromatic aberration to me. it is an optical problem and can be controlled with software, but pretty common on anything with any kind of optical magnification.
This is a pretty great image. I don't remember shots of jupiter looking anywhere near this good before. I really can't wait to see what the new hubble is capable of producing.
Did you try using the ubuntu drivers from the repository? I did and it fubarred up everything to the point where I had to reinstall ubuntu just to be able to proceed forward. I have an old FX5200 here or whatever and surprisingly nvidia still writes new drivers for older cards. After running their handy little install binary I was up and running with not a single issue. The biggest trick is purging everything ubuntu related (I just used synaptic and uninstalled every nvidia related package first). I really wish the old radeon 9250 i used to use in my old pc was even remotely supported. AMD really did their customers a disservice when they dropped all the older drivers in a state to where newer versions of xorg would not work with them. Lots of radeon dx9 cards out there with only open source drivers to use, which I hate to say are about 1000x slower than their windows counterparts. Virtually no 3d acceleration and very high cpu usage for just drawing 2d screens. I've always had less issues with nvidia, but that is just me I guess. Every nvidia card I ever tried to use just worked with the nvidia supplied drivers. Can't really complain about that other than the fact that you have to manually update your kernel and reinstall drivers every once in a while. Hell write a cronjob to do it... Big deal.
Aren't there laws against DOS attacks? If you jammed the RIAA's network you would surely go to jail if caught. They should leave the law enforcement to the police. Its too bad nobody can seem to get them on racketeering. They extort millions (heh, literally apparently) from the american public and at the same time have not paid millions of dollars owed to the artists that they supposedly represent.
If its so secret, how do you know about it?
Something tells me that Apple may see the writing on the wall and positioned themselves to eventually become a software vendor like Microsoft. It would certainly throw the world into a whirlwind if they started offering OS X for off the shelf commodity PC hardware. They may see their position as a hardware vendor as precarious and could have been planning for a potential plummet. If their software already ran on PCs it would be a very easy switch to just stop producing hardware and go software only. I don't think the move had anything to do with laptop chips, though that certainly was a sore point at the time and something that probably tipped the scales towards x86. PPC just wasn't where it needed to be and it wasn't going to get there in time to be competitive as well. I loved the PPC chips, and they were a big reason I liked the macs back in the day, but I don't really think the switch has hurt apple in many ways and they certainly have benefited from cheaper, faster hardware and have really put an end to a great deal of the mac/pc compatibility problems. We really need more OS competition on PCs. A Linux/Windows only world really doesn't cut it. (lets not get into the bsds or solaris, no desktop penetration atm....) Blah. Running behind. Ramble on.
Yeah, but how do you produce any quantity of hydrogen cheaply? Current ideas swirl around creating hydrogen at a power plant via electrolysis. It would seem vastly more efficient to just take the 15% transmission loss and apply the power directly to the wheels with an ultra efficient electric motor. That still gives you like 75-80% or better. What's the loss with hydrogen? I'd imagine it can't compete. Batteries are an obstacle and will be surmounted. We went to the freaking moon. Think we can't invent better batteries? The cost will go down significantly with mass production. What do you think is more expensive to produce? A modern car with thousands of moving parts or an electric car with two motors and a battery? If you are really after a hybrid, serial seems the way to go, but honda has certainly shown that you can drive a parallel hybrid to some pretty impressive numbers. The wheels are in motion for automakers to perhaps try and outdo each other at this point because the public perception is now that the internal combustion engine is going go the way of the dodo. Lots of opportunities for some really good ideas to come out of this.
Its good for core dumps. You gotta watch though, if your dump is too big, you run out of space.
Who cares about performance when you are in the middle of a dump?
1. Thermal tiles/Heat Shield.
2. GPS / Homing Beacon Transmitter
Also you might have a hard time finding a good LZ that isn't covered in water...so you might want to prepare for those thermal tiles to conveniently float.
That would survive the drop from space. Terminal velocity would be far easier for it to survive. I'm too tired to do math, but you can find the equation here:
http://www.vias.org/physics/example_1_6_08.html
I'd imagine a lot of rubber padding would certainly be the key. (no pun intended)
Apparently humans can somehow survive terminal velocity in rare instances, or I've heard too many urban legends.... (citation needed)
Don't know why your comment was marked funny. I personally found it insightful.
What's really sad is that he'll be facing federal felony charges if he is tried and convicted. Felony charges. For words. This country is out of hand. This is approaching thought crime, and I don't think I'm the only one that finds this disturbing. Just scare the kid and make him do a few hundred hours of community service. This isn't something that anybody needs to go to federal pound me in the ass prison at the sweet age of 18 over. When did all of our laws suddenly become felonies? Felonies really destroy your life. No passport, etc. You are a second class citizen, who has done their time, but gets to pay for their crime the rest of their life in oh so many ways. Sad really.
Since you asked....
Yes. I store just about all of my pictures in raw format at 12 megs per shot. Seeing as how I have thousands of saved shots, it adds up to many gigs. I also have about 40,000 mp3s/oggs/flacs, which eats up around 300 gigs or so. I have every episode of star trek TOS and TNG. A bunch of HBO shows and a whole bunch of movies. Oh I have like 100 gigs of classic PC games and about 50 gigs of PSX games and like every single NES/SNES/Genesis/GBA/GB/NEO-GEO rom known to man. I probably have like 50 gigs of comic books too and a whole crapload of e-books. Also add in backups of isos for various commercial software and it all really starts to add up quick. I need to get at least another TB drive just to back up my backups. :)
I wish there was somewhere where I could just throw it all up on ftp for you fellow geeks. If anyone's really interested...my e-mail is public on slashdot.
That's kind of how I feel about this whole thing as well. I was all excited initially that these were copies of the original tapes, and now, that doesn't seem to be the case. How tragic that the only original witness is now lost forever. You would think they would place a higher value on the telemetry tapes. And then to admit "recycling" the tapes. Wow. You think a few billion could buy you a couple of extra tapes....
In NASA's defence, it would certainly seem to them at the time that landing on the moon was about to become a real regular thing, but you know, I don't think there is any defence for this the more I think about it. I mean to land on the moon and just go, ok, we don't need *that* footage anymore. Queue up the dozens of rabid moon conspiracy retards. The real reason is because it either a) never happened or b) they found aliens or some crap. I can almost hear it now. (oh wait, I just have to scroll through the comments.....) Its kind of sad. People aren't nearly as enamoured with astronauts on the moon any more. Even by apollo 16 (or was it 15?) it was interfering with network ratings.
NASA needs to make their missions a little less boring in presentation. You ever watch the NASA channel? I mean they could make a few jokes or something to liven things up. Maybe some babes in bikinis every 30 seconds. Put celebrities on the ISS? ISS reality TV where 2 russians and 2 americans bloody each other up over a playboy has been? (speaking of which, has anyone joined the orbital club yet?) Explosions? People love to watch things blow up. Over and over again.
LOL
"1 Tb for $5000 is nice. Size is one thing, but the underlying software is another thing. "
"Did this remind anyone else of Machrone's Law (which held up pretty nicely through the 80's and into the early 90's):"The computer you want always costs $5000"."
" I have 5 gigs of music myself, non-repeating (it isn't too hard to find, actually). However, here's the real hard drive killer: video. I'm into anime (yahoo), and my full/almost full collections of Ranma (TV Seasons 1 - 5 + OAV), Tenchi, O!MG, Lodoss, Evangelion, Lain, and the like are currently killing my 40 gig hard drive. Some of the full length movies (fan-dubbed) can run to half a gig alone. That will quickly kill alot of hard drives. "
We've come a long way baby.
I never get too attached to any windows installation. :)
is the rc code just frozen in time with security updates or are they going to upgrade it to rtm levels? i'm asking because i was actually thinking about installing the rc and using it for a while on a laptop. $300 is not much less than the cost of the damned laptop. You think OEM licenses will be cheap? :)
Sometimes the jokes just write themselves.
I read about it a bit because I was curious and the low down seems to be that it was a nice little device that played gba and nes games just fine, but snes emulation is a bit spotty. Don't know how it deals with genesis games, but I'm guessing not so good. The sound emulation seems pretty crappy from what I read as well. Seems like you might have better luck with a gp32, but they are a bit more expensive. For what its worth, the PSP does emulation too. I personally just prefer a laptop. You can even play playstation and N64 games without issue and get a decent sized screen to boot. Just don't complain about the battery life.... :)
You are pretty lucky. I've had quite a few drives fail over time, some containing very irreplaceable data, but such is life. I just recently lost the logic board an an 80gig drive. It contained 6 months worth of work on it that I was meaning to back up again, but never got around to. I think I can fix it, but maybe I can't, so it may just come as a lesson learned. Anymore if a drive lasts beyond a few months it might be ok for some time, but you should probably worry about it after a year or so. However, you still really need some sort of backup plan as even a good power surge will likely fry your drive and its data. I like external usb drives because, while pretty slow, they can be unplugged and thrown in a closet or something and will generally last for some time due to their infrequent use. Drives can sometimes survive fires as well, that is unless your house becomes a pile of smoldering toothpicks. Off site is always the way to go, but not everyone has that luxury. A good idea might be to leave a usb drive at mom's with your most important data or some sort of remote storage.
I have a 750gb that I filled with compressed video. My huge mp3 collection would be four times as large if I upgraded it to flac. A few terrabytes is not all that much and I could probably fill a 5TB array about as fast as 12mb/s would get me. With video now, especially HD video, drives are going to get filled up faster than ever. Also digital photography is pushing beyond film now with 50 megapixel sensors. They are quite expensive, but imagine what it will be like in another 5 years or so. Even my 10-meg camera stores 12 megabyte raws. Its not hard to fill up a 4gig card at around 300 images.
What can I say? Hoarding is also addicting. Who knows. Maybe one day society will collapse and these huge caches of media will be some of our only copies of our cultural history. I think it is important for music to be preserved, and with many things going out of print and obscure record companies dissolving, it is getting rather hard to find underground stuff from even the 90s.