It sounds like if you brought a PSP on the flight that it would have more processing power than the plane itself.
Hey, it's not such a big deal when you consider the plane's mission. The plane is not to be seen. The plane is to drop a GPS-guided bomb over a target identified by GPS and visual verification.
The usual consumers of processing power on a high-end military aircraft are radar signal processing and targeting of enemy aircraft, neither of which is going to be a priority with this plane. Honestly, they're probably only doing this because the JOVIAL compilers are impossible to support, and the processors are custom and expensive.
Now, on the converse, the F-22 is finally getting an upgrade to the 1990s itself, replacing the custom CIP processors with more powerful, cheaper COTs processors from the F16 Block 60. Among other things, this will finally give it the power to perform SAR mapping. This is a very welcome upgrade, but unlike the B2 upgrade, this one has been in the pipeline for years.
They've been saying they'll give us affordable NVRAM without the drawbacks of flash for years, and it still hasn't happened.
MRAM - fast, but not as fast as DRAM. Very low-density. PRAM - more volatile than flash, because it can change state spontaneously based on temperature (thermally written). FeRAM - can't be made with cutting-edge processes, and even then can't match the density of flash. CBRAM - still experimental.
I'll just be surprised if HP can just produce a memory module that is as fast a DRAM, let alone as high-capacity as flash.
Basically, I can agree to lay off the streets if you acknowledge the usefulness of conscious (rather than habit or historically driven) urban planning.
Oh, absolutely, the idea that you can plan a city around foot traffic has been popular for years. There are thinkers who believed you could prioritize foot traffic in a city design, but still leave room for the automobile. Lewis Mumford was actually working on the concept of the "garden city," which represented a more comfortable meshing of foot traffic with auto traffic.
See Radburn, New Jersey for an example of Mumford's concepts of meshing the automobile with people.
The only problem is, it's not so easy to implement correctly, because the concept has many flaws that must be dealt with. See Columbia, Maryland for an example of this social experiment gone-haywire: in the last 20 years, the city has expanded without much thought, and the car is now the only way to get around. The only people who use the network of sidewalks and bridges are joggers and people walking their dogs.
The wide streets evolved before the internal combustion engine was every conceived. This is because you have to SUPPLY the city with goods in order to keep it running.
Unfortunately, people are not the only things the streets must bear. Unless you want us to haul our own goods on our backs (and shoot our efficiency to hell), you'll lay off the streets and realize they're necessary.
It's very easy for stray radiation to flip a bit in memory, not so much on a modern GMR HDD.
You are comparing flash memory to DRAM, which tells me you have no idea how flash memory works.
With flash, when you write data, you need a very high voltage compared to say, DRAM. This is because the electrons used to write to a flash cell need to tunnel through a thin gate insulator. This makes the amount of energy required to write a bit in flash much higher than what is required to write a bit in DRAM. Flash should be as robust against background radiation as magnetic disks.
Yeah, Sleator has some good stuff, I remember inhaling his books when I was younger. He writes the whole gamut, from off-beat stories like Fingers and Strange Attractors, to classics like like Interstellar Pig, The Boy Who Reversed Himself or The House Of Stairs. I recommend all of the above.
However, you might want to save The House of Stairs for last, because it's one of his darkest works.
Another suggestion: try Heinlien. Before Starship Troopers, he wrote books for teens. I actually read Tunnel In The Sky about the same time I was reading Interstellar Pig (6th grade), they were about equal in terms of accessability. Have Spacesuit Will Travel is also an excellent book, not all that dark.
1. You use "8-digit" to make it sound more like 10 million dollars, when the estimate is on the order of 70 million dollars (quite on the high side of 8 digits). Further, this is in early 1990s dollars. Today's dollars would peg the cost at around 110 million dollars per-weapon.
2. The article makes the note that the costs of the weapons DO NOT take into account the cost of designing and building the enrichmnent facilities, only the costs of running those facilities once all issues had been resolved. If you read the article I linked, you'll find that South Africa spent almost 10 years creating enough fissile material for their first bomb.
When you consider that the most expensive part of making a bomb is creating the highly-enriched uranium, and that those same facilities full-on could make enough material for one bomb every year, you get an idea of the high costs. Spending 10 years getting the plant to full efficiency probably made the first weapon 10x more expensive than those that followed. That puts the cost of fielding your first weapon in the 500 million range, a non-trivial amount for a country like Iraq.
But the point is, the chip had no vector unit to begin with, and the Pentium MMX showed just how easy it is to bolt-on a vector unit.
Taking a standard Pentium chip and bolting-on a 512-bit vector unit is a great idea because (excluding the Atom), the Pentium is Intel's best in-order proccessor. It is fairly simple, and with the right compiler optimizations you can execute two integer instructions per-clock. Since the only thing this core is likely to be doing is executing integer instructions and vector instructions, it looks like a good pairing.
The only problem is, the reliance on the 512-bit vector unit nullifies any of Intel's claims of x86-compatibility drawing customers in. Currently no SSE extensions support vectors that large, so it will be a whole new learning curve for developers. The only familar part will be the x86 code for scheduling use of the vector unit.
I agree. He was a horrible person, and performed unspeakable atrocities. However, the major reasons we gave the international community for assaulting the country were complete and utter bullshit, which makes us no better. In the process, we've killed almost as many Iraqi civillians as he did.
Wars should not be undertaken lightly, no matter how "noble" the cause. Unfortunately, there are far too many issues planners brush aside, because a true discussion on accountability, or mentioning the possibility of TENS OF THOUSANDS of civilian casualties would stop the US public opinion (and therefore the US war machine) in it's tracks.
The sad fact is because of a careful lack of accountability, we can't impeach the other horrible person who performed unspeakable atrocities. It's amazing what you can do with a properly-shaped public opinion machine.
Further: the reason Saddam had the Yellowcake was because he was actually putting together a nuclear reactor back in the 1980s. Thanks to bombings by Israel and the US, Saddam had no choice but to sit on the damaged reactors and fuel, and try to build a nuclear research program.
The fact that the nuclear fuel he'd had for years is completely unenriched just tells you how little cash he had to spend on the program. Simple fact: nuclear programs are fucking expensive, because enrichment is not a simple process. This is why I laughed my ass off when Bush claimed that Iraq might have a nuclear program to fear, even after we bombed them to the stone age in 1991, and then strangled their international trade for the next decade. Complete bullshit!
Yup, I remember running winamp 2 on my Pentium 133 overclocked to 150 (75x2). The player took about %20 of CPU time. A CPU half that speed could easily render an mp3, although it couldn't do anything else wile rendering.
A millisecond is an eternity in CPU time, especially because context switches typically happen more than once per second.
If you're eating up 10ms out of every second (%10) with context switches, that's a lot of overhead for a modern processor.
Multiple execution cores (or SMT) can save you from the overhead of context switches, but nothing will save you from the complexity of cache tainted by multiple processes. Two things:
1. For independent caches, you get the incredible overhead of keeping the caches coherent (same data reflected in all caches). If a processor changes data in memory, the supporting circuitry must make sure that if this memory is cached elsewhere, the entry is invalidated or updated. The complexity of these circuits increases with every extra processor you add.
2. For shared caches (like the Intel Nehalem and AMD Phenom L3), you get cache corruption as the current thread expunges entries used by other threads from the cache. More threads running simultaneously means more cache corruption.
Yes, this is correct, flash has terrible power consumption while writing. TWO REASONS:
1. When you re-write any data word inside a block, you have to re-write the entire block. This can get power-intensive if you are doing random writes, and even sequential writes can eat a lot of energy (yeah, show me a flash controller that can detect, cache and optimize every sequential write perfectly).
2. Write voltages on flash are much higher than the read voltages, because the write voltage forces electrons through a thin insulator (quantum tunneling).
With an almost pure read-only role, like an mp3 player, flash will use much less power than a mechanical drive.
being said, I've always use white text on a black background
I actually use something similar. I find that off-yellow text on a black background is by-far the least stressful on my eyes. The color specifically is (RGB) 242 242 0.
I'm willing to bet that light text on dark backgrounds are better for your eyes (less light to stare at), but there are no studies to back this up. You'll just have to find what works for you.
Yup, Windows 2000 added plug 'n play with USB support (notoriously absent from Windows NT), full DirectX support, better 16-bit compatibility support, a more fully-featured DOS emulator, and the easy network configuration developed for Win9x. You could also enable compatibility mode for older programs, although it was not enabled by default.
The only things XP offered on top of this were better DOS emulation, compatibility mode already enabled, slightly tweaked schedulers and kernel, remote terminal support (XP Pro), and of course, a shiny new interface.
The Japanese definition of "rural" is nowhere near the definition of rural here in the US. this is because they have an ungodly amount of people for the land they inhabit.
Basically, what I am saying is the Japanese idea of rural is, at best, like a marginally populated suburban neighborhood in the US.
Here are some raw numbers to better illustrate my point (from this study, year 2000 numbers):
Japan total rural area (sq km): 273,646 Japan total rural population: 13,498,527 Japan rural population density (people/sq km): 49.32
US total rural area (sq km): 8,423,867 US total rural population: 54,936,968 US rural population density (people/sq km): 6.52
SEE THE DIFFERENCE? It's almost an order of magnitude! And the urban numebrs show a 3x difference between the US and Japan; closer, but still nowhere near each other.
Of course we have infrastructure problesm here in then US, and they largely don't; it just comes with the territory.
The murder rate in Chicago has more than halved since the early 1990s when gun control was introduced. Is the national rate of decrease really that dramatic?
Yes. The US national rate dropped from 9.4 to 5.7 in that same time period.
While I'm certain it had some benefit, stricter gun controls are not a large contributor to the reduced crime rates we've seen in this country.
Sure, there's some correlation in that one instance. But when you put it under additional scrutiny, it falls apart.
Take a look at homicide rates. Spain makes a great example: they have an incredibly low gun death rate, but they still manage to kill themselves almost as much as Americans (last reported rate 3.35). The Swiss have been catching-up as well, with their homicide rate TRIPLING in the last five years, even though gun ownership rates have not grown significantly.
What does this teach us? First, it shows that countries with low gun ownership and low gun fatalities can still have relatively high murder rates (Spain). For the record, Spain had VERY low murder rates throughout the 80s and 90s, and only peaked in the last five years; this is not due to gun ownership, as your graph makes plain.
Second, it shows that high gun ownwership does not automatically translate into higher murder rates (Switzerland): the Swiss had extremely low murder rates for the entirety of the 1990s, only peaking in the last 5 years. Their gun ownership numbers have hardly changed in that time. By comparison, in this same period of time, the USA murder rate has dropped by half AND has remained flat throughout the 2000s, despite growing gun ownership. Even violent crimes that didn't result in homicide are down for the same period.
What you're thinking of was SD. It was limited to 2GB by FAT16.,a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital_card#SDHC">SDHC could support up to 2TB using FAT32, but it is artifically limited to 32GB.
Windows puts an arbitrary limit on FAT32 volume size creation of 32GB, but it will happily read any sized FAT32 partition, all the way up to 2TB.
I have a feeling the SDHC folks decided to not exceed 32GB so people wouldn't call and complain when trying to format their new SDHC cards directly in a computer. It's unfortunate that Microsoft pulled this bullshit, because otherwise we wouldn't need yet another format upgrade in the next few years.
I'm actually curious about what format the next version of SD will use. Will it be exFAT (vista and xp)? Will it be ext2 (has a windows driver)?
Most laser printers have sleep modes that they fall into when idle. This is why it takes so long before that first page comes out - the printer is warming-up the fuser.
Even my ancient Brother HL-1200 (2001) sleeps when idle. Sure, it uses a hefy 340w when printing, but when asleep it uses lees than 5w.
Clearly, you're doing this to defend the rights of all the other people who enjoy poking dogs with sticks. That's freedom!
Yes, it is. The very same freedom, in fact, that allows you to beat the ever-living shit out of someone who physically threatens you.
And just like physical beatings, you can fight-back against words all you want. That is the essence of freedom.
I think the point people are trying to make is this: if you curtail speech, it would be like making you defend yourself physically with one arm tied behind your back. The full range of language is often as essential as your second fist; you wouldn't want to be caught-out half-defenseless, would you?
A one time registration providing a key with your registration detail is all that is required. I fill out and send in a registration form either online or snail mail and they send back a key. The key then when used with the software, unlocks it and proudly displays "Registered to Technician" (real contact information). I can re-install it as many times as needed from hardware upgrades, dead hard drives, etc. I'm not posting my key online. Piracy is not an issue.
Sounds great. Now, excuse me while I walk into the local Mailboxes Etc, and rent a mailbox for a month. What, you're not going to honor requests mailed to these addresses? Good luck with that, because they look just like regular street addresses (no obvious giveaways like a PO Box number).
Don't think pirates will do this? These are the same kind of people who spend cash on hosting the latest-and-greatest cracked programs, just to get props in the community. You bet your ass they would do it.
The one type of DRM I can stomach is Steam. Why? Not only is there no CD check, but you can download and install the game on any computer. Further, there's no limit to how many computers you can use your Steam account on, you simply cannot log into your account on more than one at a time. I consider this kind of flexibility a nice tradeoff, so I'm ok with purchasing Steam games.
But I agree, all this annoying phone-home DRM adds complexity I don't want, and gives me NONE of the above benefits. I will not be purchasing this or any other such annoying game.
I don't buy it...you think of middle class as the home buyers. In my area, which isn't really high price in the US...avg. price of a house is in the $220K range. You are NOT gonna be able to buy a house on $30K.
But you can on 60k, if the media income in your area is 30k. Did you even stop to think of that for one second?
Most households have BOTH partners working precisely because you cannot easily afford a house on single income.
The reasons you can't you afford a house on single income anymore:
* The strength of the dollar has fallen. * There is no-longer a glut of cheap land to develop (well, land that people actually WANT). * The average house size has almost doubled since the 1970s, thus potentially doubling the house price.
I think the last point is bigger than you imagine in affecting house prices. I mean, 40 years ago, if you had 2 or more kids, they shared a bedroom or two, and you all shared 1-2 bathrooms. Today, people with three kids are buying houses large enough to give them all their own bedroom, plus their own bathrooms, garages, dens, etc.
What this mean to you: you need to re-evaluate what you consider "middle-class," because you're entirely dependent on defining that as "home-ownership." These days, A middle-class *family* with two breadwinners can easily afford a home, but they have to combine their incomes because the target level of luxury in a home has gone up tremendously. A single earner will have to scrape to purchase one of these fancy new homes, or can rent comfortably. My point is, you can still be middle-class without owning a home; if you want to own a home, you have to combine incomes or scrape-by, which is why I'd consider NEW home ownership in the US to be either A: a mostly upper-middle class thing or B: a combined middle-class income thing.
USA home ownership hit a high of about %70 recently, but it has been on the decline recently. Heavily-populated (but still high-earning) countries like Japan have home ownership rates closer to %60 (and HALF that is shared housing). They also have smaller home sizes (~1000 sqft versus our average of 2400 sqft). We're already headed in that direction, so don't get your feathers ruffled if the number of homes owners declines over the next few years, and the average home size falters. In my mind, it's just the market correcting itself, just like drops in the DOW.
I've been holding out this generation, holding onto my 7900GT. I like the GT because it delivers solid performance for only 60w, which is half the power ATI's x1900 series was offering at the time. I've also been able to stall because games like Team Fortress 2 and Quakewars ET still look great on my current card.
Only now with the release of the 8800GT and 9600GT is the power consumption/performance ratio getting reasonable (and yes, the ATI 3870 has similar power consumption to the 8800GT, but cannot match it in performance). I'm actually enticed by the 55nm 9800GT (due out in July), which should cut the power consumption of the 8800GT to the same as my 7900GT:)
The only other card I'm considering is the 4850. Only time will tell if it delivers better performance than the 8800GT without breaking my power budget.
The part was designed by ATI, that is not in-dispute.
What the article insinuates is that the fabricated part (the MASK) was designed by Microsoft.
Microsoft bought the IP for Xenos from ATI. They did this because of the poor relationship they had buying GPUs directly from Nvidia with the Xbox. Microsoft saw how Sony bought the IP for graphics parts for the PS2 (and now PS3), and created their own ASIC layouts. Microsoft figured they could do the same.
The only problem with that logic: Microsoft has never done a chip design as complex as Xenos, and they do so few chip designs that it's hard to hang on to personel. The kind of tricks you need to use to make sure a high-performance chip doesn't bleed power - those are exactly the kind of honed skills a newbie chip design house lacks.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like if you brought a PSP on the flight that it would have more processing power than the plane itself.
Hey, it's not such a big deal when you consider the plane's mission. The plane is not to be seen. The plane is to drop a GPS-guided bomb over a target identified by GPS and visual verification.
The usual consumers of processing power on a high-end military aircraft are radar signal processing and targeting of enemy aircraft, neither of which is going to be a priority with this plane. Honestly, they're probably only doing this because the JOVIAL compilers are impossible to support, and the processors are custom and expensive.
Now, on the converse, the F-22 is finally getting an upgrade to the 1990s itself, replacing the custom CIP processors with more powerful, cheaper COTs processors from the F16 Block 60. Among other things, this will finally give it the power to perform SAR mapping. This is a very welcome upgrade, but unlike the B2 upgrade, this one has been in the pipeline for years.
(Psst. Yes, I work in the industry)
They've been saying they'll give us affordable NVRAM without the drawbacks of flash for years, and it still hasn't happened.
MRAM - fast, but not as fast as DRAM. Very low-density.
PRAM - more volatile than flash, because it can change state spontaneously based on temperature (thermally written).
FeRAM - can't be made with cutting-edge processes, and even then can't match the density of flash.
CBRAM - still experimental.
I'll just be surprised if HP can just produce a memory module that is as fast a DRAM, let alone as high-capacity as flash.
Basically, I can agree to lay off the streets if you acknowledge the usefulness of conscious (rather than habit or historically driven) urban planning.
Oh, absolutely, the idea that you can plan a city around foot traffic has been popular for years. There are thinkers who believed you could prioritize foot traffic in a city design, but still leave room for the automobile. Lewis Mumford was actually working on the concept of the "garden city," which represented a more comfortable meshing of foot traffic with auto traffic.
See Radburn, New Jersey for an example of Mumford's concepts of meshing the automobile with people.
The only problem is, it's not so easy to implement correctly, because the concept has many flaws that must be dealt with. See Columbia, Maryland for an example of this social experiment gone-haywire: in the last 20 years, the city has expanded without much thought, and the car is now the only way to get around. The only people who use the network of sidewalks and bridges are joggers and people walking their dogs.
The wide streets evolved before the internal combustion engine was every conceived. This is because you have to SUPPLY the city with goods in order to keep it running.
Unfortunately, people are not the only things the streets must bear. Unless you want us to haul our own goods on our backs (and shoot our efficiency to hell), you'll lay off the streets and realize they're necessary.
It's very easy for stray radiation to flip a bit in memory, not so much on a modern GMR HDD.
You are comparing flash memory to DRAM, which tells me you have no idea how flash memory works.
With flash, when you write data, you need a very high voltage compared to say, DRAM. This is because the electrons used to write to a flash cell need to tunnel through a thin gate insulator. This makes the amount of energy required to write a bit in flash much higher than what is required to write a bit in DRAM. Flash should be as robust against background radiation as magnetic disks.
Yeah, Sleator has some good stuff, I remember inhaling his books when I was younger. He writes the whole gamut, from off-beat stories like Fingers and Strange Attractors, to classics like like Interstellar Pig, The Boy Who Reversed Himself or The House Of Stairs. I recommend all of the above.
However, you might want to save The House of Stairs for last, because it's one of his darkest works.
Another suggestion: try Heinlien. Before Starship Troopers, he wrote books for teens. I actually read Tunnel In The Sky about the same time I was reading Interstellar Pig (6th grade), they were about equal in terms of accessability. Have Spacesuit Will Travel is also an excellent book, not all that dark.
How about south Africas nuclear weapons research? Supposedly they managed to build a gun type bomb spending an 8 digit amount of money in US$ equiv.
Yes, according to this article that is correct, but:
1. You use "8-digit" to make it sound more like 10 million dollars, when the estimate is on the order of 70 million dollars (quite on the high side of 8 digits). Further, this is in early 1990s dollars. Today's dollars would peg the cost at around 110 million dollars per-weapon.
2. The article makes the note that the costs of the weapons DO NOT take into account the cost of designing and building the enrichmnent facilities, only the costs of running those facilities once all issues had been resolved. If you read the article I linked, you'll find that South Africa spent almost 10 years creating enough fissile material for their first bomb.
When you consider that the most expensive part of making a bomb is creating the highly-enriched uranium, and that those same facilities full-on could make enough material for one bomb every year, you get an idea of the high costs. Spending 10 years getting the plant to full efficiency probably made the first weapon 10x more expensive than those that followed. That puts the cost of fielding your first weapon in the 500 million range, a non-trivial amount for a country like Iraq.
But the point is, the chip had no vector unit to begin with, and the Pentium MMX showed just how easy it is to bolt-on a vector unit.
Taking a standard Pentium chip and bolting-on a 512-bit vector unit is a great idea because (excluding the Atom), the Pentium is Intel's best in-order proccessor. It is fairly simple, and with the right compiler optimizations you can execute two integer instructions per-clock. Since the only thing this core is likely to be doing is executing integer instructions and vector instructions, it looks like a good pairing.
The only problem is, the reliance on the 512-bit vector unit nullifies any of Intel's claims of x86-compatibility drawing customers in. Currently no SSE extensions support vectors that large, so it will be a whole new learning curve for developers. The only familar part will be the x86 code for scheduling use of the vector unit.
I agree. He was a horrible person, and performed unspeakable atrocities. However, the major reasons we gave the international community for assaulting the country were complete and utter bullshit, which makes us no better. In the process, we've killed almost as many Iraqi civillians as he did.
Wars should not be undertaken lightly, no matter how "noble" the cause. Unfortunately, there are far too many issues planners brush aside, because a true discussion on accountability, or mentioning the possibility of TENS OF THOUSANDS of civilian casualties would stop the US public opinion (and therefore the US war machine) in it's tracks.
The sad fact is because of a careful lack of accountability, we can't impeach the other horrible person who performed unspeakable atrocities. It's amazing what you can do with a properly-shaped public opinion machine.
Further: the reason Saddam had the Yellowcake was because he was actually putting together a nuclear reactor back in the 1980s. Thanks to bombings by Israel and the US, Saddam had no choice but to sit on the damaged reactors and fuel, and try to build a nuclear research program.
The fact that the nuclear fuel he'd had for years is completely unenriched just tells you how little cash he had to spend on the program. Simple fact: nuclear programs are fucking expensive, because enrichment is not a simple process. This is why I laughed my ass off when Bush claimed that Iraq might have a nuclear program to fear, even after we bombed them to the stone age in 1991, and then strangled their international trade for the next decade. Complete bullshit!
Yup, I remember running winamp 2 on my Pentium 133 overclocked to 150 (75x2). The player took about %20 of CPU time. A CPU half that speed could easily render an mp3, although it couldn't do anything else wile rendering.
A millisecond is an eternity in CPU time, especially because context switches typically happen more than once per second.
If you're eating up 10ms out of every second (%10) with context switches, that's a lot of overhead for a modern processor.
Multiple execution cores (or SMT) can save you from the overhead of context switches, but nothing will save you from the complexity of cache tainted by multiple processes. Two things:
1. For independent caches, you get the incredible overhead of keeping the caches coherent (same data reflected in all caches). If a processor changes data in memory, the supporting circuitry must make sure that if this memory is cached elsewhere, the entry is invalidated or updated. The complexity of these circuits increases with every extra processor you add.
2. For shared caches (like the Intel Nehalem and AMD Phenom L3), you get cache corruption as the current thread expunges entries used by other threads from the cache. More threads running simultaneously means more cache corruption.
Yes, this is correct, flash has terrible power consumption while writing. TWO REASONS:
1. When you re-write any data word inside a block, you have to re-write the entire block. This can get power-intensive if you are doing random writes, and even sequential writes can eat a lot of energy (yeah, show me a flash controller that can detect, cache and optimize every sequential write perfectly).
2. Write voltages on flash are much higher than the read voltages, because the write voltage forces electrons through a thin insulator (quantum tunneling).
With an almost pure read-only role, like an mp3 player, flash will use much less power than a mechanical drive.
being said, I've always use white text on a black background
I actually use something similar. I find that off-yellow text on a black background is by-far the least stressful on my eyes. The color specifically is (RGB) 242 242 0.
I'm willing to bet that light text on dark backgrounds are better for your eyes (less light to stare at), but there are no studies to back this up. You'll just have to find what works for you.
Yup, Windows 2000 added plug 'n play with USB support (notoriously absent from Windows NT), full DirectX support, better 16-bit compatibility support, a more fully-featured DOS emulator, and the easy network configuration developed for Win9x. You could also enable compatibility mode for older programs, although it was not enabled by default.
The only things XP offered on top of this were better DOS emulation, compatibility mode already enabled, slightly tweaked schedulers and kernel, remote terminal support (XP Pro), and of course, a shiny new interface.
The Japanese definition of "rural" is nowhere near the definition of rural here in the US. this is because they have an ungodly amount of people for the land they inhabit.
Basically, what I am saying is the Japanese idea of rural is, at best, like a marginally populated suburban neighborhood in the US.
Here are some raw numbers to better illustrate my point (from this study, year 2000 numbers):
Japan total rural area (sq km): 273,646
Japan total rural population: 13,498,527
Japan rural population density (people/sq km): 49.32
US total rural area (sq km): 8,423,867
US total rural population: 54,936,968
US rural population density (people/sq km): 6.52
SEE THE DIFFERENCE? It's almost an order of magnitude! And the urban numebrs show a 3x difference between the US and Japan; closer, but still nowhere near each other.
Of course we have infrastructure problesm here in then US, and they largely don't; it just comes with the territory.
The murder rate in Chicago has more than halved since the early 1990s when gun control was introduced. Is the national rate of decrease really that dramatic?
Yes. The US national rate dropped from 9.4 to 5.7 in that same time period.
While I'm certain it had some benefit, stricter gun controls are not a large contributor to the reduced crime rates we've seen in this country.
Sure, there's some correlation in that one instance. But when you put it under additional scrutiny, it falls apart.
Take a look at homicide rates. Spain makes a great example: they have an incredibly low gun death rate, but they still manage to kill themselves almost as much as Americans (last reported rate 3.35). The Swiss have been catching-up as well, with their homicide rate TRIPLING in the last five years, even though gun ownership rates have not grown significantly.
What does this teach us? First, it shows that countries with low gun ownership and low gun fatalities can still have relatively high murder rates (Spain). For the record, Spain had VERY low murder rates throughout the 80s and 90s, and only peaked in the last five years; this is not due to gun ownership, as your graph makes plain.
Second, it shows that high gun ownwership does not automatically translate into higher murder rates (Switzerland): the Swiss had extremely low murder rates for the entirety of the 1990s, only peaking in the last 5 years. Their gun ownership numbers have hardly changed in that time. By comparison, in this same period of time, the USA murder rate has dropped by half AND has remained flat throughout the 2000s, despite growing gun ownership. Even violent crimes that didn't result in homicide are down for the same period.
What you're thinking of was SD. It was limited to 2GB by FAT16. ,a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital_card#SDHC">SDHC could support up to 2TB using FAT32, but it is artifically limited to 32GB.
Windows puts an arbitrary limit on FAT32 volume size creation of 32GB, but it will happily read any sized FAT32 partition, all the way up to 2TB.
I have a feeling the SDHC folks decided to not exceed 32GB so people wouldn't call and complain when trying to format their new SDHC cards directly in a computer. It's unfortunate that Microsoft pulled this bullshit, because otherwise we wouldn't need yet another format upgrade in the next few years.
I'm actually curious about what format the next version of SD will use. Will it be exFAT (vista and xp)? Will it be ext2 (has a windows driver)?
Most laser printers have sleep modes that they fall into when idle. This is why it takes so long before that first page comes out - the printer is warming-up the fuser.
Even my ancient Brother HL-1200 (2001) sleeps when idle. Sure, it uses a hefy 340w when printing, but when asleep it uses lees than 5w.
Clearly, you're doing this to defend the rights of all the other people who enjoy poking dogs with sticks. That's freedom!
Yes, it is. The very same freedom, in fact, that allows you to beat the ever-living shit out of someone who physically threatens you.
And just like physical beatings, you can fight-back against words all you want. That is the essence of freedom.
I think the point people are trying to make is this: if you curtail speech, it would be like making you defend yourself physically with one arm tied behind your back. The full range of language is often as essential as your second fist; you wouldn't want to be caught-out half-defenseless, would you?
A one time registration providing a key with your registration detail is all that is required. I fill out and send in a registration form either online or snail mail and they send back a key. The key then when used with the software, unlocks it and proudly displays "Registered to Technician" (real contact information). I can re-install it as many times as needed from hardware upgrades, dead hard drives, etc. I'm not posting my key online. Piracy is not an issue.
Sounds great. Now, excuse me while I walk into the local Mailboxes Etc, and rent a mailbox for a month. What, you're not going to honor requests mailed to these addresses? Good luck with that, because they look just like regular street addresses (no obvious giveaways like a PO Box number).
Don't think pirates will do this? These are the same kind of people who spend cash on hosting the latest-and-greatest cracked programs, just to get props in the community. You bet your ass they would do it.
The one type of DRM I can stomach is Steam. Why? Not only is there no CD check, but you can download and install the game on any computer. Further, there's no limit to how many computers you can use your Steam account on, you simply cannot log into your account on more than one at a time. I consider this kind of flexibility a nice tradeoff, so I'm ok with purchasing Steam games.
But I agree, all this annoying phone-home DRM adds complexity I don't want, and gives me NONE of the above benefits. I will not be purchasing this or any other such annoying game.
I don't buy it...you think of middle class as the home buyers. In my area, which isn't really high price in the US...avg. price of a house is in the $220K range. You are NOT gonna be able to buy a house on $30K.
But you can on 60k, if the media income in your area is 30k. Did you even stop to think of that for one second?
Most households have BOTH partners working precisely because you cannot easily afford a house on single income.
The reasons you can't you afford a house on single income anymore:
* The strength of the dollar has fallen.
* There is no-longer a glut of cheap land to develop (well, land that people actually WANT).
* The average house size has almost doubled since the 1970s, thus potentially doubling the house price.
I think the last point is bigger than you imagine in affecting house prices. I mean, 40 years ago, if you had 2 or more kids, they shared a bedroom or two, and you all shared 1-2 bathrooms. Today, people with three kids are buying houses large enough to give them all their own bedroom, plus their own bathrooms, garages, dens, etc.
What this mean to you: you need to re-evaluate what you consider "middle-class," because you're entirely dependent on defining that as "home-ownership." These days, A middle-class *family* with two breadwinners can easily afford a home, but they have to combine their incomes because the target level of luxury in a home has gone up tremendously. A single earner will have to scrape to purchase one of these fancy new homes, or can rent comfortably. My point is, you can still be middle-class without owning a home; if you want to own a home, you have to combine incomes or scrape-by, which is why I'd consider NEW home ownership in the US to be either A: a mostly upper-middle class thing or B: a combined middle-class income thing.
USA home ownership hit a high of about %70 recently, but it has been on the decline recently. Heavily-populated (but still high-earning) countries like Japan have home ownership rates closer to %60 (and HALF that is shared housing). They also have smaller home sizes (~1000 sqft versus our average of 2400 sqft). We're already headed in that direction, so don't get your feathers ruffled if the number of homes owners declines over the next few years, and the average home size falters. In my mind, it's just the market correcting itself, just like drops in the DOW.
I've been holding out this generation, holding onto my 7900GT. I like the GT because it delivers solid performance for only 60w, which is half the power ATI's x1900 series was offering at the time. I've also been able to stall because games like Team Fortress 2 and Quakewars ET still look great on my current card.
:)
Only now with the release of the 8800GT and 9600GT is the power consumption/performance ratio getting reasonable (and yes, the ATI 3870 has similar power consumption to the 8800GT, but cannot match it in performance). I'm actually enticed by the 55nm 9800GT (due out in July), which should cut the power consumption of the 8800GT to the same as my 7900GT
The only other card I'm considering is the 4850. Only time will tell if it delivers better performance than the 8800GT without breaking my power budget.
The part was designed by ATI, that is not in-dispute.
What the article insinuates is that the fabricated part (the MASK) was designed by Microsoft.
Microsoft bought the IP for Xenos from ATI. They did this because of the poor relationship they had buying GPUs directly from Nvidia with the Xbox. Microsoft saw how Sony bought the IP for graphics parts for the PS2 (and now PS3), and created their own ASIC layouts. Microsoft figured they could do the same.
The only problem with that logic: Microsoft has never done a chip design as complex as Xenos, and they do so few chip designs that it's hard to hang on to personel. The kind of tricks you need to use to make sure a high-performance chip doesn't bleed power - those are exactly the kind of honed skills a newbie chip design house lacks.