Iridium Satellite LLC is actually profitable, unlike the original Iridium LLC which went bankrupt promptly after launching the system and sold it to Iridium Satellite for pennies on the dollar.
Yeah, funny how it gets a lot easier to run the business when Motorola assumes the 5 billion of debt and sells it to you for $25 million. The success of Iridium Satellite LLC is subsidized by the ashes of the original company.
Proper management made the difference after the sale removed the debt, but even if the company had been properly managed from the beginning, it still would have folded. Even 300k subscribers is not going to pay off that 5 billion monster, not when they're only netting about 14 million a year (when they turn a profit, which they did not for 2010).
I wish them well milking what they can from their cheap windfall. But I laugh at the thought that they might build another multi-billion dollar constellation based off such a pitiful business plan. Yes, their subscribers are GROWING, but only because they can offer such insanely cheap rates without having to pay-off the painful debt.
As soon as they invest in their own new constellation, they will either have to conjure millions of new customers out of thin air, or they will have to raise prices (this will send customers running, so I'm going to go with option one). But since the DoD contracts are already pretty saturated (seriously, does the military need a contract for more than 20k users?), the customer growth would have to come from the commercial or consumer sector. Either way, they are doomed in this approach, and once again, investors are going to sat the losses and subsidize a successful network.
The description sounds like being a sumo wrestler, except for the video game part.
The description sounds like pretty much any major league sport in America.
If you want to get started right, you have to join private leagues to get a jump on everyone else, and you have to play each year and go to private training camps. All this is out of your own pocket.
You have to take things seriously and play continuously through middle and high school, or you'll never even get to start on a varsity team. You have to distinguish yourself, and winning a championship or four does not hurt your chances. You do not get paid, and you often have to pay for your own equipment, depending on how well funded the team is, and you have to pass classes at the same time.
If you wowed the right people and did the right things, then college recruiters will come knocking down your door. But unless you're amazing, you're not going to get paid to attend school. You might get a partial scholarship, but then you pay the difference. And since you're not going to waste any time at at school on any real academics, you're just paying to play.
Now, if you're an absolute standout, and you managed to start for a few years in college, you might get drafted directly into a major league. And for everyone else who plays well (but not amazing), you go into the minors where they pay you jack shit. No, seriously, the pay is so low for fresh minor league players, you'll need a second job to make ends meet. And the demands of the minor league schedule are just as harsh on your time as the majors, all without the big paycheck. But you do it because you might just get promoted someday.
Sound at-all familiar? Unions are not going to fix this mess. There is a finite amount of money fans are willing to pay for a sport, and most of that has to go to the big stars. If it were easy, anyone could do it.
So you are basically saying that education has no value at all? That society is dictated by the people within it, and their education level makes no difference?
No, I'm saying that the capability of education to drive GDP growth is systemically limited by the number of true geniuses / creative people we have.
For a genius, education is an enabler, but not the defining characteristic: there are a limited number of people who can move a society in new directions, and education can help them rise up out of the chaff.
In addition, the geniuses need a lot of educated people to help them shape the world into their desired image. So there is a demand for people who are just *SMART* to become educated, even if they lack ambition and/or real creativity. These are the support staff the creative people need to do their work, and they are just as essential as the geniuses they empower.
If we have too many educated people, and they have nowhere else to work, then they sit around jobless.
I also strongly disagree with his point and I'll explain why: If a society finds itself with an overabundance of qualified, educated people, the correct response is not to try and cut down on the overabundance, but to start doing more interesting things. It seems to me that after starting off with a promising few centuries, the USA has suddenly decided that the guiding principle of its society should be maintenance of the status quo, rather than progress.
Growth is limited by the number of true genius / creative people you have in a society. That percentage doesn't increase just because you can churn-out more college graduates.
Now, it's true that the small number of true creatives need large staffs of people to help them move mountains, but there is a limit to the number of people needed to make this happen. If you exceed this limit, you're "overstaffed."
The question has been asked: how is the iPad so much faster than the iPhone 3GS, despite having the same processor (sometimes more than double the speed)? The simple answer is: double the memory bandwidth!
And this is assuming the memory technologies / clock speeds did not change. If they also increased the memory clock, the bandwidth increase could be 3x or more. And since rich web media craves memory, bandwidth is a key limiter for rendering complex websites. Thus, it's not hard to see how a %66 faster core speed could translate to a double-or-more average benchmark improvement.
The interstate highway project killed rail transit in this country, and airline deregulation sealed the deal. The highway system was built at about the same time that the train world was looking into high-speed rail. It turned-out to be cheaper to build brand-new roads for cars than it was to upgrade existing track for high speeds, and add electrification to the entire network.
Unfortunately, we have two largemountain ranges splitting the country into pieces, and everyone knows building train lines to get over/around/through mountains can get very expensive, especially if you want to add electrical infrastructure in the middle of nowhere. And even if you built the line, you couldn't run the trains at high-speeds on grades and curves in mountainous country. Building a road for cars through the same mountain range requires a lot less engineering, and the cars can actually move quickly, because they're not trying to keep hundreds of tons of cargo from derailing.
Sure, you can build high-speed lines on the Great Plains, but there's not enough passenger demand to support such a thing. In the 1950s, you only had one major destination that was not cut-off by mountains (Chicago), so there was no need for a major transit corridor. If you wanted to go somewhere besides Chicago, you would've had to switch to diesel when you hit the mountains, so what was the point?
This is why we only have one high-speed train corridor, and why it's on the east coast. There are plenty of destinations worth hitting along that major corridor, so there's enough demand to justify (and flat enough land to allow) the building of high-speed electrical train lines. The interstate highway system may be overloaded near the coasts, but it is an absolute dream to drive in the interior of the country. For those needing faster transit, the airline industry has grown to meet that demand, so there's no really no need today for train transit.
WOW, that's a good pickup by Obsidian. I consider OOO Lite to be an absolute necessity for playing Oblivion. Bethesda created the world, and Oscuro made it a deep, enticing experience.
If he's involved in this, I will be buying. I liked Fallout 3 better than Oblivion, and adding OOO into the mix just SCREAMS quality!
Can most programmes really be written to take advantage of so many cores? I am not sure I want to have a 6-core processor, of which 5 spend most of the time idling as I am only running a single-core-aware programme. OK, one more core can be used by the OS to make everything snappy, but the question stands.
2 processing cores 4 threads 4MB cache to make multitasking smooth.
It has all the fancy features of it's bigger bother (including encryption acceleration), but with 1/3 the real cores. You get much better IPC than the Core 2 Duo line, and a great multitasking experience.
The 6-core behemoth to be released later this year is just to make server and workstation owners happy.
Yup, none of the access points are actually smart enough to switch channels and optimize frequency/power usage. So you end-up with the problem I encountered this December, when a neighbor across the way got a wireless router, and suddenly my internet stopped working. You couldn't even *see* my access point anymore, it was just overpowered.
My access point configuration was set to "Auto," but this just meant it kept trying to use channel 1 like an idiot. So I forced it to use channel 6, and the problem was solved.
But this isn't how things should be. The devices and the protocol should be smart enough to optimize spectrum, both by analyzing the noise at various frequencies and choosing the band with the least automatically, and by playing nice with other devices and dialing-down the power to that needed by the connected device furthest from the access point.
Too bad the above is just a pipe dream. I can't imagine how bad it is living in dense residential/apartments, where these users still don't know how to configure things, but there are 2 dozen within range instead of 5.
It can be as thin as you want, because the system is done with lasers and mirrors.
This is just a CRT screen where they have replaced the scanning electron gun with a laser, but you don't realize how revolutionary that is until you think about how this changes packaging: in the CRT you need a big magnet to steer the electron stream, but in this new system you need a tiny mirror (think MEMS), which will really cut-down the package size. Also, you probably don't need to contain the laser path in a vacuum like the CRT electron beam, so that will make manufacturing cheaper.
I'm really hoping this will have all the benefits of regular CRTs, only smaller, since SED never got off the ground.
I thought the big complaint on Linux was you couldn't run Firefox in 64-bit mode with 32-bit plugins (hence the 32-bit Flash complaint). I thought Linux in 64-bit mode could run legacy 32-bit application just like Windows. Am I wrong about this?
Or are there, say, compatibility issues using 32-bit and 64-bit libraries, or something of that nature?
Your roommate is really lucky you didn't throw him out. Hopefully you explained the concept of an emergency fund to him so that you don't have to do it in the future.
Well, actually, the only reason he did it is because he decided to shack-up with a girl he had met just a month before, and decided to skip-out on his last three months obligation on the lease.
His logic was: her lease was ending, and she needed to move somewhere. So instead of moving her in with us for three months until the end of his lease, he decided to move out, and stiff me on rent.
I'm going to file suit now that I know where he lives, but I doubt I'll see any of that money anytime soon.
It's cheap for an apartment or hotel. Looking over rent prices in Tokyo it seems an apartment isn't all that much more expensive than the San Francisco area, and it seems you can get one for around $850 if you're not too picky. It seems it would be cheaper to just get a roommate than to live in one of these boxes.
The problem with the whole "get a roommate" thing is this: can you trust him/her to pay their portion of the rent? How about if he loses his job? I had a roommate who stiffed me out of rent money after he was unemployed for 8 months last year, and I was lucky I could cover the rent at the time. I'll be lucky if I ever see that money again.
While we're on the subject, just who do you think is going to rent-out an apartment to someone who is jobless and on unemployment? This is the reason jobless people flock to the hotels: no credit checks and no references required!
That, and you don't have to stay every night: you can pay for a room a few times a week to get a shower and a good rest, and bum-around the remainder of the time to save your money.
That's awesome. Try working 20 or more hours a week and doing all-of-the-above, and then tell me you have enough time to to do sports, music and academics. Some people have to go to work as soon as they're able to help with the bills. And try doing all the things you did without your own car (or person to drive you around).
I managed to get out of high school with a 3.6 GPA and lots of time spent with marching/jazz band and other clubs, plus 20 hours a week working during the school year. I didn't have a car, and had to bum rides from practices and events, or wait hours for my mom. I don't know how I survived - I was really close to the breaking point as far as stress goes.
The Wii version is already in the works - Heavy Rain Beach Resort Conga Party.
Yeah, it will make use of the new Wii Motion Plus to give players a never-before experienced feeling of immersion.
When you're cooking dinner, you'll get 1:1 interaction with sharp implements. Don't slice-off your hands with your virtual Ginzu!
When you're using the restroom, you'll get 1:1 interaction with virtual genetailia! If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie, wipe the seatie.
When your character dies, you'll get 1:1 interaction with a pine box being burned in a crematorium.
Don't let them burn me, James! Jimmy, don't let them burn me! I'm in here! Oh, God! Don't let them do it! Don't let them do it! I'm in here. No! I gotta live! I wanna live! Oh, God! I wanna live! I wanna live! I wanna live!
Because diesel is a lot more expensive than gasoline here. Diesel used to be way cheaper tan gas, I don't know what changed to make diesel more expensive. Taxes, maybe?
I'm going to quote a very insightful post I once read. But first, the cliff notes:
1. Diesel is more in-demand in this country than most people think, because there is a very high demand for heating oil in the winter. Heating Oil ~= Diesel with a different dye added.
2. Given a barrel of oil, you can only extract about half as much Diesel fuel as you can regular gasoline. This limits the amount we can supply in-relation to regular gasoline, which is why Diesel (already im high demand) is more expensive.
3. Diesel is more heavily taxed than heating oil or regular gasoline, so in-addition to the fact that diesel is already heavily in-demand, it is the most highly taxed fuel on the road.
So really, the diesel revolution everyone wants to happen in this country is not going to happen. If we had as many Diesel cars as Europe, the fuel prices would go through the roof, because our demand for Diesel/Fuel Oil is already very high.
And now, the quote:
Because the price is set, like all prices in a capitalist economy, by what the market will bear rather than by absolute cost of production. They call this process "market forces," as if they exist outside of themselves, when talking to consumers, but refer to "record profits" when talking to stockholders.
Diesel used to be much cheaper than gasoline, until it became popular to put it into consumer vehicles, but several things have happened to change the production cost of the fuel at the pump.
First is the transition to ultra-low sulfur diesel, which adds perhaps five to eight cents per gallon, counting both direct costs -- the purchase price of low sulfur oil is higher than oil o lesser quality -- and investment costs required to further refine ordinary oil.
The second is taxes. Diesel fuel is essentially the same stuff as heating oil, but is taxed at a higher rate. 18% of the average price at the pump, according to the DOE, is taxes, 54% is the cost of the oil itself, 22% is the cost of refining, and 18% is distribution, marketing, and profit.
Of course many companies sell themselves their own oil, so there may be substantial profit on that transaction as well.
For gasoline, again according to the ODE, 15% of the price is taxes, 55% the cost of the oil, 15% the cost of the refining process, and 14% distribution, marketing, and profit.
In 1990, the average price of gasoline was $1.16 per gallon, the average cost of diesel fuel was $0.73 per gallon, and the average cost of heating fuel was $1.06.
In 2002, the average cost of gasoline was $1.36 per gallon, the average cost of diesel fuel was $0.76 per gallon, and the average cost of heating fuel was $1.13.
1in 2005, the average cost of gasoline was $1.87 per gallon, the average cost of diesel fuel was $1.95 per gallon, and the average cost of heating fuel was $2.05.
As you can easily see, the relative prices have varied all over the map.
The obvious inference is that, despite the higher taxes on diesel fuel in comparison to heating oil, and very similar costs of production, people are more driven to heat their homes than they are to drive their diesel cars, so the companies can charge more.
Likewise, in 1990, diesel cars were uncommon, and the primary users of diesel fuel were commercial, driving large trucks or tractors.
Presumably, a fellow filling up a truck with 300 gallons of diesel fuel every day or two is in a better position to drive a hard bargain than is a fellow filling his VW diesel with 16 gallons one a week or so.
Ahh, the good old days. I left my computer on overnight so I could download the game on my "640Kbps" (really only about 480Kbps sustained) DSL line. Remember back when hosts didn't have lines for servers, and everyone was downloading at-once at 5KB/s? That was exatly my experience downloading America's Army.
Then after all the wait, I installed the game and - hey, why can't I connect to multiplayer servers? It turned out, you had to go through "basic training" before you could play online on the official servers. Part of the training was single player on your local machine, and that was easily completed, but the second half was online.
Here was the problem with the online training servers:
(1) There were not enough training servers to handle the load, and dozens of people were sitting there waiting for when a training session was over, and the server would clear-out.
(2) The training session was an ungodly 45 minutes long, and if you failed any part (or got disconnected), you had to start over.
I gave up after just 2 45 minute failures, and decided to bypass the whole "official" server system, just to see what kind of game I was missing out on. The game, it turns out, was not any more interesting to play than say Return to Castle Wolfenstein multiplayer, and it paled in comparison to the upcoming Battlefield 1942 (demo released the following month). I uninstalled AA and never touched the series again.
So, what did the Army get for their millions? A marginal free team FPS that got trounced by better game developers. I don't think that's worth it.
Your *last* ATI card was designed seven years ago, and was a budget card with no T&L unit so how exactly could you claim you have relevant experience? I ran an ATI 8500, and then an Nvidia 6600GT, and had the following problems with both cards:
ATI 8500:
Battlefield 1942 flickering textures. Never resolved fully (but it happened less and less with newer drivers). And unlike you, I had no issues playing Wolfenstein on my 8500.
Nvidia 6600GT:
Water shaders incorrectly rendered in Source Engine. This bug was never fixed. Battlefield 2: game would eventually freeze, did not happen on other Nvidia 6-series cards. This bug was never fixed.
BOTH cards had shitty drivers.
But here's my RECENT experience with both ATI and Nvidia
Nvidia 7900GT: no serious problems with games. One serious issue: the fan would not throttle-down between 2D and 3D modes (happened with a lot of 7900GT cards), had to get a 3rd-party cooler to get the noise down.
ATI 4850: no serious issues.
In this day and age, both Nvidia and ATI have quality drivers that are generally equal in compatibility and performance. The only exception today is Crossfire/SLI, where Nvidia has a slight edge...but for single-card setups (%95 of the gaming population), you'll be happy with either company.
Further, Apple, Commodore and Atari made the jump from 6502 to other architectures because they had no choice. MOS Technology dropped the ball after they developed the 6502: they ran out of money, and most of the engineering team left before Commodore bought them out. Since Commodore tasked the remaining engineers to design computers, there was little talent free to develop 16 and 32-bit extensions of the original.
The 16-bit 65C816 was developed independently by Bill Mensch at Western Design Center, but by the time he had samples ready (1984), the market had already turned toward Motorola's hybrid 16/32-bit 68000 series. Motorola won that battle because they presented the market with a chip that had a planned future, whereas the future of 6502 architecture was murky.
It's funny you mention the SNES: this is the only console EVER to make use of the 16-bit 65C816. Nintendo started development with it because they wanted to offer NES backward compatibility, but decided mid-project to scrap the idea.
Addressing DRAM is not the problem 128-bits is being considered for.
128-bit addressing is being considered right now for the off chance that a technology like PRAM catches-on. Once you have non-volatile RAM at much higher densities than typical DRAM, you can ditch the hard drive altogether.
This poses a problem, because disks and SSDs are currently I/O mapped and accessed via an SATA controller, which adds latency. But what people don't realize is how much memory-map space this arrangement saves us: consider that you can access TERABYTES of data in a device that requires less than 100MB of your memory map. And you don't typically care about the added latency, because the speed of disks is many orders of magnitude slower than DRAM.
Now, imagine the disk is replaced by something just as capacious, but also just as fast as DRAM. PRAM in the capacities to rival a hard disk would likely need to be direct memory-mapped I/O to achieve good performance, and for that we really need to consider 128-bit addressing, because current hard disks (single disk and storage arrays) are already pushing those respective 40 and 52-bit limits.
Slashdot Mirror
Iridium Satellite LLC is actually profitable, unlike the original Iridium LLC which went bankrupt promptly after launching the system and sold it to Iridium Satellite for pennies on the dollar.
Yeah, funny how it gets a lot easier to run the business when Motorola assumes the 5 billion of debt and sells it to you for $25 million. The success of Iridium Satellite LLC is subsidized by the ashes of the original company.
Proper management made the difference after the sale removed the debt, but even if the company had been properly managed from the beginning, it still would have folded. Even 300k subscribers is not going to pay off that 5 billion monster, not when they're only netting about 14 million a year (when they turn a profit, which they did not for 2010).
I wish them well milking what they can from their cheap windfall. But I laugh at the thought that they might build another multi-billion dollar constellation based off such a pitiful business plan. Yes, their subscribers are GROWING, but only because they can offer such insanely cheap rates without having to pay-off the painful debt.
As soon as they invest in their own new constellation, they will either have to conjure millions of new customers out of thin air, or they will have to raise prices (this will send customers running, so I'm going to go with option one). But since the DoD contracts are already pretty saturated (seriously, does the military need a contract for more than 20k users?), the customer growth would have to come from the commercial or consumer sector. Either way, they are doomed in this approach, and once again, investors are going to sat the losses and subsidize a successful network.
The description sounds like being a sumo wrestler, except for the video game part.
The description sounds like pretty much any major league sport in America.
If you want to get started right, you have to join private leagues to get a jump on everyone else, and you have to play each year and go to private training camps. All this is out of your own pocket.
You have to take things seriously and play continuously through middle and high school, or you'll never even get to start on a varsity team. You have to distinguish yourself, and winning a championship or four does not hurt your chances. You do not get paid, and you often have to pay for your own equipment, depending on how well funded the team is, and you have to pass classes at the same time.
If you wowed the right people and did the right things, then college recruiters will come knocking down your door. But unless you're amazing, you're not going to get paid to attend school. You might get a partial scholarship, but then you pay the difference. And since you're not going to waste any time at at school on any real academics, you're just paying to play.
Now, if you're an absolute standout, and you managed to start for a few years in college, you might get drafted directly into a major league. And for everyone else who plays well (but not amazing), you go into the minors where they pay you jack shit. No, seriously, the pay is so low for fresh minor league players, you'll need a second job to make ends meet. And the demands of the minor league schedule are just as harsh on your time as the majors, all without the big paycheck. But you do it because you might just get promoted someday.
Sound at-all familiar? Unions are not going to fix this mess. There is a finite amount of money fans are willing to pay for a sport, and most of that has to go to the big stars. If it were easy, anyone could do it.
So you are basically saying that education has no value at all? That society is dictated by the people within it, and their education level makes no difference?
No, I'm saying that the capability of education to drive GDP growth is systemically limited by the number of true geniuses / creative people we have.
For a genius, education is an enabler, but not the defining characteristic: there are a limited number of people who can move a society in new directions, and education can help them rise up out of the chaff.
In addition, the geniuses need a lot of educated people to help them shape the world into their desired image. So there is a demand for people who are just *SMART* to become educated, even if they lack ambition and/or real creativity. These are the support staff the creative people need to do their work, and they are just as essential as the geniuses they empower.
If we have too many educated people, and they have nowhere else to work, then they sit around jobless.
I also strongly disagree with his point and I'll explain why: If a society finds itself with an overabundance of qualified, educated people, the correct response is not to try and cut down on the overabundance, but to start doing more interesting things. It seems to me that after starting off with a promising few centuries, the USA has suddenly decided that the guiding principle of its society should be maintenance of the status quo, rather than progress.
Growth is limited by the number of true genius / creative people you have in a society. That percentage doesn't increase just because you can churn-out more college graduates.
Now, it's true that the small number of true creatives need large staffs of people to help them move mountains, but there is a limit to the number of people needed to make this happen. If you exceed this limit, you're "overstaffed."
The question has been asked: how is the iPad so much faster than the iPhone 3GS, despite having the same processor (sometimes more than double the speed)? The simple answer is: double the memory bandwidth!
iPhone 3GS: 32-bit memory bus, 600 MHz core
iPad: 64-bit memory bus, 1000 MHz core.
And this is assuming the memory technologies / clock speeds did not change. If they also increased the memory clock, the bandwidth increase could be 3x or more. And since rich web media craves memory, bandwidth is a key limiter for rendering complex websites. Thus, it's not hard to see how a %66 faster core speed could translate to a double-or-more average benchmark improvement.
And Stephen King had the protagonist of The Running Man crash his plane into The Network headquarters tower. This was in 1982.
Not exactly a new idea.
The interstate highway project killed rail transit in this country, and airline deregulation sealed the deal. The highway system was built at about the same time that the train world was looking into high-speed rail. It turned-out to be cheaper to build brand-new roads for cars than it was to upgrade existing track for high speeds, and add electrification to the entire network.
Unfortunately, we have two large mountain ranges splitting the country into pieces, and everyone knows building train lines to get over/around/through mountains can get very expensive, especially if you want to add electrical infrastructure in the middle of nowhere. And even if you built the line, you couldn't run the trains at high-speeds on grades and curves in mountainous country. Building a road for cars through the same mountain range requires a lot less engineering, and the cars can actually move quickly, because they're not trying to keep hundreds of tons of cargo from derailing.
Sure, you can build high-speed lines on the Great Plains, but there's not enough passenger demand to support such a thing. In the 1950s, you only had one major destination that was not cut-off by mountains (Chicago), so there was no need for a major transit corridor. If you wanted to go somewhere besides Chicago, you would've had to switch to diesel when you hit the mountains, so what was the point?
This is why we only have one high-speed train corridor, and why it's on the east coast. There are plenty of destinations worth hitting along that major corridor, so there's enough demand to justify (and flat enough land to allow) the building of high-speed electrical train lines. The interstate highway system may be overloaded near the coasts, but it is an absolute dream to drive in the interior of the country. For those needing faster transit, the airline industry has grown to meet that demand, so there's no really no need today for train transit.
WOW, that's a good pickup by Obsidian. I consider OOO Lite to be an absolute necessity for playing Oblivion. Bethesda created the world, and Oscuro made it a deep, enticing experience.
If he's involved in this, I will be buying. I liked Fallout 3 better than Oblivion, and adding OOO into the mix just SCREAMS quality!
Can most programmes really be written to take advantage of so many cores? I am not sure I want to have a 6-core processor, of which 5 spend most of the time idling as I am only running a single-core-aware programme. OK, one more core can be used by the OS to make everything snappy, but the question stands.
Intel agrees with you, and that is why their first 32nm release was their mainstream processor codenamed Clarksdale:
2 processing cores
4 threads
4MB cache to make multitasking smooth.
It has all the fancy features of it's bigger bother (including encryption acceleration), but with 1/3 the real cores. You get much better IPC than the Core 2 Duo line, and a great multitasking experience.
The 6-core behemoth to be released later this year is just to make server and workstation owners happy.
Yup, none of the access points are actually smart enough to switch channels and optimize frequency/power usage. So you end-up with the problem I encountered this December, when a neighbor across the way got a wireless router, and suddenly my internet stopped working. You couldn't even *see* my access point anymore, it was just overpowered.
My access point configuration was set to "Auto," but this just meant it kept trying to use channel 1 like an idiot. So I forced it to use channel 6, and the problem was solved.
But this isn't how things should be. The devices and the protocol should be smart enough to optimize spectrum, both by analyzing the noise at various frequencies and choosing the band with the least automatically, and by playing nice with other devices and dialing-down the power to that needed by the connected device furthest from the access point.
Too bad the above is just a pipe dream. I can't imagine how bad it is living in dense residential/apartments, where these users still don't know how to configure things, but there are 2 dozen within range instead of 5.
It can be as thin as you want, because the system is done with lasers and mirrors.
This is just a CRT screen where they have replaced the scanning electron gun with a laser, but you don't realize how revolutionary that is until you think about how this changes packaging: in the CRT you need a big magnet to steer the electron stream, but in this new system you need a tiny mirror (think MEMS), which will really cut-down the package size. Also, you probably don't need to contain the laser path in a vacuum like the CRT electron beam, so that will make manufacturing cheaper.
I'm really hoping this will have all the benefits of regular CRTs, only smaller, since SED never got off the ground.
I thought the big complaint on Linux was you couldn't run Firefox in 64-bit mode with 32-bit plugins (hence the 32-bit Flash complaint). I thought Linux in 64-bit mode could run legacy 32-bit application just like Windows. Am I wrong about this?
Or are there, say, compatibility issues using 32-bit and 64-bit libraries, or something of that nature?
Your roommate is really lucky you didn't throw him out. Hopefully you explained the concept of an emergency fund to him so that you don't have to do it in the future.
Well, actually, the only reason he did it is because he decided to shack-up with a girl he had met just a month before, and decided to skip-out on his last three months obligation on the lease.
His logic was: her lease was ending, and she needed to move somewhere. So instead of moving her in with us for three months until the end of his lease, he decided to move out, and stiff me on rent.
I'm going to file suit now that I know where he lives, but I doubt I'll see any of that money anytime soon.
It's cheap for an apartment or hotel. Looking over rent prices in Tokyo it seems an apartment isn't all that much more expensive than the San Francisco area, and it seems you can get one for around $850 if you're not too picky. It seems it would be cheaper to just get a roommate than to live in one of these boxes.
The problem with the whole "get a roommate" thing is this: can you trust him/her to pay their portion of the rent? How about if he loses his job? I had a roommate who stiffed me out of rent money after he was unemployed for 8 months last year, and I was lucky I could cover the rent at the time. I'll be lucky if I ever see that money again.
While we're on the subject, just who do you think is going to rent-out an apartment to someone who is jobless and on unemployment? This is the reason jobless people flock to the hotels: no credit checks and no references required!
That, and you don't have to stay every night: you can pay for a room a few times a week to get a shower and a good rest, and bum-around the remainder of the time to save your money.
That's awesome. Try working 20 or more hours a week and doing all-of-the-above, and then tell me you have enough time to to do sports, music and academics. Some people have to go to work as soon as they're able to help with the bills. And try doing all the things you did without your own car (or person to drive you around).
I managed to get out of high school with a 3.6 GPA and lots of time spent with marching/jazz band and other clubs, plus 20 hours a week working during the school year. I didn't have a car, and had to bum rides from practices and events, or wait hours for my mom. I don't know how I survived - I was really close to the breaking point as far as stress goes.
The Wii version is already in the works - Heavy Rain Beach Resort Conga Party.
Yeah, it will make use of the new Wii Motion Plus to give players a never-before experienced feeling of immersion.
When you're cooking dinner, you'll get 1:1 interaction with sharp implements. Don't slice-off your hands with your virtual Ginzu!
When you're using the restroom, you'll get 1:1 interaction with virtual genetailia! If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie, wipe the seatie.
When your character dies, you'll get 1:1 interaction with a pine box being burned in a crematorium.
Don't let them burn me, James!
Jimmy, don't let them burn me!
I'm in here! Oh, God!
Don't let them do it!
Don't let them do it! I'm in here.
No!
I gotta live!
I wanna live!
Oh, God! I wanna live!
I wanna live!
I wanna live!
Because diesel is a lot more expensive than gasoline here. Diesel used to be way cheaper tan gas, I don't know what changed to make diesel more expensive. Taxes, maybe?
I'm going to quote a very insightful post I once read. But first, the cliff notes:
1. Diesel is more in-demand in this country than most people think, because there is a very high demand for heating oil in the winter. Heating Oil ~= Diesel with a different dye added.
2. Given a barrel of oil, you can only extract about half as much Diesel fuel as you can regular gasoline. This limits the amount we can supply in-relation to regular gasoline, which is why Diesel (already im high demand) is more expensive.
3. Diesel is more heavily taxed than heating oil or regular gasoline, so in-addition to the fact that diesel is already heavily in-demand, it is the most highly taxed fuel on the road.
So really, the diesel revolution everyone wants to happen in this country is not going to happen. If we had as many Diesel cars as Europe, the fuel prices would go through the roof, because our demand for Diesel/Fuel Oil is already very high.
And now, the quote:
Because the price is set, like all prices in a capitalist economy, by what the market will bear rather than by absolute cost of production. They call this process "market forces," as if they exist outside of themselves, when talking to consumers, but refer to "record profits" when talking to stockholders.
Diesel used to be much cheaper than gasoline, until it became popular to put it into consumer vehicles, but several things have happened to change the production cost of the fuel at the pump.
First is the transition to ultra-low sulfur diesel, which adds perhaps five to eight cents per gallon, counting both direct costs -- the purchase price of low sulfur oil is higher than oil o lesser quality -- and investment costs required to further refine ordinary oil.
The second is taxes. Diesel fuel is essentially the same stuff as heating oil, but is taxed at a higher rate. 18% of the average price at the pump, according to the DOE, is taxes, 54% is the cost of the oil itself, 22% is the cost of refining, and 18% is distribution, marketing, and profit.
Of course many companies sell themselves their own oil, so there may be substantial profit on that transaction as well.
For gasoline, again according to the ODE, 15% of the price is taxes, 55% the cost of the oil, 15% the cost of the refining process, and 14% distribution, marketing, and profit.
In 1990, the average price of gasoline was $1.16 per gallon, the average cost of diesel fuel was $0.73 per gallon, and the average cost of heating fuel was $1.06.
In 2002, the average cost of gasoline was $1.36 per gallon, the average cost of diesel fuel was $0.76 per gallon, and the average cost of heating fuel was $1.13.
1in 2005, the average cost of gasoline was $1.87 per gallon, the average cost of diesel fuel was $1.95 per gallon, and the average cost of heating fuel was $2.05.
As you can easily see, the relative prices have varied all over the map.
The obvious inference is that, despite the higher taxes on diesel fuel in comparison to heating oil, and very similar costs of production, people are more driven to heat their homes than they are to drive their diesel cars, so the companies can charge more.
Likewise, in 1990, diesel cars were uncommon, and the primary users of diesel fuel were commercial, driving large trucks or tractors.
Presumably, a fellow filling up a truck with 300 gallons of diesel fuel every day or two is in a better position to drive a hard bargain than is a fellow filling his VW diesel with 16 gallons one a week or so.
Cheers,
Lee Anne
Ahh, the good old days. I left my computer on overnight so I could download the game on my "640Kbps" (really only about 480Kbps sustained) DSL line. Remember back when hosts didn't have lines for servers, and everyone was downloading at-once at 5KB/s? That was exatly my experience downloading America's Army.
Then after all the wait, I installed the game and - hey, why can't I connect to multiplayer servers? It turned out, you had to go through "basic training" before you could play online on the official servers. Part of the training was single player on your local machine, and that was easily completed, but the second half was online.
Here was the problem with the online training servers:
(1) There were not enough training servers to handle the load, and dozens of people were sitting there waiting for when a training session was over, and the server would clear-out.
(2) The training session was an ungodly 45 minutes long, and if you failed any part (or got disconnected), you had to start over.
I gave up after just 2 45 minute failures, and decided to bypass the whole "official" server system, just to see what kind of game I was missing out on. The game, it turns out, was not any more interesting to play than say Return to Castle Wolfenstein multiplayer, and it paled in comparison to the upcoming Battlefield 1942 (demo released the following month). I uninstalled AA and never touched the series again.
So, what did the Army get for their millions? A marginal free team FPS that got trounced by better game developers. I don't think that's worth it.
Well, it looks like I've been doing it wrong all this time. I've been trying to hack the cloud with an axe.
I just keep whiffing.
Your *last* ATI card was designed seven years ago, and was a budget card with no T&L unit so how exactly could you claim you have relevant experience? I ran an ATI 8500, and then an Nvidia 6600GT, and had the following problems with both cards:
ATI 8500:
Battlefield 1942 flickering textures. Never resolved fully (but it happened less and less with newer drivers).
And unlike you, I had no issues playing Wolfenstein on my 8500.
Nvidia 6600GT:
Water shaders incorrectly rendered in Source Engine. This bug was never fixed.
Battlefield 2: game would eventually freeze, did not happen on other Nvidia 6-series cards. This bug was never fixed.
BOTH cards had shitty drivers.
But here's my RECENT experience with both ATI and Nvidia
Nvidia 7900GT: no serious problems with games. One serious issue: the fan would not throttle-down between 2D and 3D modes (happened with a lot of 7900GT cards), had to get a 3rd-party cooler to get the noise down.
ATI 4850: no serious issues.
In this day and age, both Nvidia and ATI have quality drivers that are generally equal in compatibility and performance. The only exception today is Crossfire/SLI, where Nvidia has a slight edge...but for single-card setups (%95 of the gaming population), you'll be happy with either company.
But I'm from Scunthorphe, and I was merely trying to talk about my pet raccoon!
Yeah, how are we supposed to have a serious discussion about Essex when you won't stop touching my Ballston?
Further, Apple, Commodore and Atari made the jump from 6502 to other architectures because they had no choice. MOS Technology dropped the ball after they developed the 6502: they ran out of money, and most of the engineering team left before Commodore bought them out. Since Commodore tasked the remaining engineers to design computers, there was little talent free to develop 16 and 32-bit extensions of the original.
The 16-bit 65C816 was developed independently by Bill Mensch at Western Design Center, but by the time he had samples ready (1984), the market had already turned toward Motorola's hybrid 16/32-bit 68000 series. Motorola won that battle because they presented the market with a chip that had a planned future, whereas the future of 6502 architecture was murky.
It's funny you mention the SNES: this is the only console EVER to make use of the 16-bit 65C816. Nintendo started development with it because they wanted to offer NES backward compatibility, but decided mid-project to scrap the idea.
But window is halogen for nine months without salted pork. How the can deer can stand the sight of violent mustard? On;y my stomach knows the truth.
So going to 128 bits wouldn't help?
Addressing DRAM is not the problem 128-bits is being considered for.
128-bit addressing is being considered right now for the off chance that a technology like PRAM catches-on. Once you have non-volatile RAM at much higher densities than typical DRAM, you can ditch the hard drive altogether.
This poses a problem, because disks and SSDs are currently I/O mapped and accessed via an SATA controller, which adds latency. But what people don't realize is how much memory-map space this arrangement saves us: consider that you can access TERABYTES of data in a device that requires less than 100MB of your memory map. And you don't typically care about the added latency, because the speed of disks is many orders of magnitude slower than DRAM.
Now, imagine the disk is replaced by something just as capacious, but also just as fast as DRAM. PRAM in the capacities to rival a hard disk would likely need to be direct memory-mapped I/O to achieve good performance, and for that we really need to consider 128-bit addressing, because current hard disks (single disk and storage arrays) are already pushing those respective 40 and 52-bit limits.
lol, butts.
Oh wait, wrong article!