Ah. Okay. I never heard of that being a problem, though - memory bandwidth with respect to texture and geometry data to be processed by the card is more common. I do have some hazy memories of the RAMDAC being especially fast on some Nvidia card (this was in some review years ago), so that it could display very high resolutions (ie above 2000xwhatever) without any artifacts, I guess that's what this is about.
Mea culpa - there apparently is the term of active RFID, even though this is not the typical application of RFID. Which isn't surprising, the fact that RFID chips don't need a power source to function is the neat (almost magic) thing about them. Everything else still applies though.
Measuring things? Active mode? Sending over large distances? Keeping track of the health of all of the population? I have no idea what you are talking about - before your post, the topic was RFID tags, which can't do any of those things. All they can do currently is transmit a fixed number at very close distances.
Sue them. If you emailed them about it. Well, I guess that wouldn't work; you probably can't prohibit someone from linking to you. Even if it worked, it would also be a really mean thing to do, but I do think that this issue needs to be dealt with. Slashdotting strangers into oblivion is one thing, but slashdotting folks who have explicitly asked not to be linked to is just not acceptable. Especially with nyud.net available as a fairly painless way to reach sites.
(Before anyone says this: I'm aware that many folks behind company firewalls can't reach nyud.net:8090. Okay, so coralize everything by default, but offer an option to disable this to registred users. Or put the "real" links in the otherwise fairly useless link box that accompanies every story by default. The hard work of creating a distributed web proxy has already been done, updating Slashdot to make use of it appears trivial by comparison.)
That's the third reply stating that CRTs will display very high resolutions - I'm aware of that. You can also print 4pt fonts on a 350 dpi printer. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. Your Sony E400 has a dot pitch of 0.24 mm, (a) that means there are monitor width / 0.24 mm ~= 1650 phosphor dots horizontally, (b) which sets an upper bound for the resolution the monitor can display.
Now, as I mentioned before, I'm by no means an expert (unless having basic knowledge on how a CRT works makes me one), so both (a) and (b) could be wrong. So feel free to address those, but please don't just tell me how you're happily running your 15" CRT at 1800x(400*Pi).;) No offense intended.
On a sidenote, I've also never heard of being limited to a certain color-depth when running a CRT - not as long as you're talking about more than 1 bit, ie black and white. The CRT just gets analogue color values (voltages, in fact) anyway, so color depth as a bit value is really a feature of the graphics card and operating system. Unless you were talking about signal/noise ratio of the analogue monitor connection limiting the color precision or something.
And no, neither monitor is available for less than $1,000. But I didn't say I spent less than $1,000. These are $3,500+ monitors.
Nope, you didn't say that, and I did not intend to imply so. I was genuinely wondering, and also used the chance to try and find out whether there was any point to running a higher resolution than a monitor was designed for.
As I said, monitors will display it, just like my really old 15" CRT would display 1600x1200 (at an atrocious refresh rate, though). But you're projecting 1920 (horizontal) pixels at just about 1500 phosphor dots - I estimated 40 cm width and a 0.26 dot pitch; the numbers will be a bit off but the point stands.
1920x1600? What kind of display do you have? I doubt there is any device available for less than, say, a thousand bucks that can make use of that kind of resolutions. Oh, many CRTs will display it all right, but their phosphor coating won't be designer for anything above 1600x1200 for a 21". If anything, higher resolutions would result in some sort of anti-aliasing (aka blurring). Or am I wrong? I'm not a display engineer after all... Or maybe you simply do have a very expensive display.:)
How do you think I get my homework/sample essays/lecture notes from professors? File sharing.
File sharing as in P2P file sharing? (I guess a pedant might remark that HTTP is just another way of sharing files.) If so, that's odd. I'm certain the vast majority of universities distribute content via HTTP and email. Or paper, obviously - that's probably the number one distribution mechanism for the things you mention at the moment.
We've had computer science for decades and speech and language analysts for centuries before that and the only thing that they've concluded is that language is a very complex thing.
There sort of have been language analysts for hundreds of years, but linguistics as a serious, scientific discipline is a quite recent thing. About the same as computer science really, in more than one way. And I get the impression there's more to it than "language is very complex" - that's true, but if there wasn't more to it my upcoming exam in semantics and sociolinguistics would be fairly brief.;)
You also have to wonder: does superman have super-human humour? I mean, humour is an in-born talent, and it really doesn't make a lot of sense for it to be enhanced under the yellow sun of Earth as opposed to a red sun. On the other hand, everything else about him is super, it'd be weird if that wasn't true for his humour. Then again, I haven't heard him say anything particularly funny.
Yeah, compatibility is a problem. It's not a big one, though, at least not for me - all of the sites I regularly visit render fine. On those occasions when a site doesn't render properly, I just fire up IE or Firefox to display it. You can actually add a context menu item in Opera to display the same page in IE (or lynx or whatever). That said, if one of my standard websites were disfunctional, that would be more of a problem, but so far my GMail account is more of a placeholder than anything.:P
Also, the copy link address menu item is something I'm surprised Firefox hasn't picked up on as it's such a common task.
It's available as "copy link location" in a link's context menu. A frame's address doesn't seem as easily available, though, you need to go into the properties first.
Many comments opine that further additional feature for Firefox should be realised as extensions to keep the main program fast and lean. Some argue that the RSS support in the current version should have been an extension. Those were my first thoughts, too, but I do wonder: how does plugin performance compare to "native" performance? That is, in terms of memory usage, processor usage, interface latency, etc. I'm fairly clueless wrt the plugin mechanism, but apparently plugins work platform-independent, ie. a given plugin works in Windows Firefox, on *nix and on Mac OS. I assume there is some XUL (is that the word) magics going on behind the scenes, but isn't that fairly slow compared to a platform native approach?
Here in Germany, they have these pathetic adverts that try to fool people into thinking AOL is short for Alles OnLine ("everything online"). They are doing fairly well, though, they have a huge number of users. The relative numbers might be about the same as in the US, in fact, but I'm not sure.
Is that so? I know it was true for the previous betas, but today I was able to create an account and start downloading the game... So unless they check your IP when logging in, you should be fine. Do they?
That's an interesting question, actually. In Germany, we call the worst case scenario in the context of nuclear power plants a GAU. This is typically said to mean Größter Anzunehmender Unfall, or worst accident that has to be taken into account. But it could also mean Größter Angenommener Unfall, worst accident that has been taken into account. The two should be the same, but sometimes aren't...
Anyway. I just saw Fog of War, the movie about Robert McNamara, and in it he says about nuclear bombs (not energy) that single persons make errors, and no single person should have control over a nuclear bomb, because this increases the possible results of the errors of a single human from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of casualties. The reason many people I know who're opposed to nuclear energy seem to think something similar applies to nuclear energy.
And this is worse than a runaway greenhouse effect how?
Maybe it isn't, I don't know. Being opposed to nuclear energy doesn't mean one is a fan of fossile fuels, it can mean being a fan of energy efficient power plants, emission efficient power plants, energy conservation, regenerative energy and so on.
These ten countries possess about 96% of the global uranium reserves. With their 2 billion tonnes, all 433 world-wide operated nuclear power plants can be supplied for several decades. If mining costs of up to 130 $/kg are taken into consideration the global uranium reserves are increased by further 3 million tonnes. The uranium resources are estimated to be 15 to 20 million tonnes.
First of all, apparently my numbers aren't way off, even if you take those numbers as they are. I'm actually surprised how low their estimate is - do they really say that the known reserved would fuel the existing nuclear plants for only some decades? That would still be in the same ballbark (or order of magnitude) of my estimate.
However, note, crucially, that I wondered how long reserves would last in a situation where nuclear energy has replaced fossile fuels. Fuel usage rate would be vastly higher than that of 433 power plants, we'd need what, 3, 5, 10 times as many nuclear reactors? Something like that probably. And as I mentioned, that'd still leave emissions by cars and planes out of the picture, at least the former of which eventually could be replaced by nuclear energy, too.
As for bigger part of your post, I'm not familiar enough with the issue to reply to it properly. For instance, I have no idea whether your number for the total energy needs of the world is correct. I think it's fairly preposterous to just take the amount of uranium times it's theoretical energy content as a serious figure: you don't take into account the inefficiencies of the uranium to heat and the heat to electricity conversions (the latter is about 50% for modern reactors), and you assume we can use up every last ounce of that uranium, which we haven't, so far.
In a nutshell, it's mostly two things: dealing with a source of energy where a worst case scenario has such catastrophic consequences, and dealing with a source of energy where the used-up fuel is dangerous for generations.
Apart from those fundamental issues, there is also the question of the amount of fuel that we can economically obtain. If we switched coal and oil power plants (not to mention transportation) to nuclear, how long would the fuel last? I've heard numbers in the range of only about 10 to 15 years. That's at least one order of magnitude to low to be a useful suggestion. Anything more than that would require the usage of breeder reactors.
Yes, having an illuminated skull (with what, a brick in it?) is really sophisticated, it virtually screams style.
Although apparently you can turn off the lights: The blue lights are there because they look cool, and will impress your friends. And there is a switch on the back of FragBox 2's so you can turn them off.
I still wouldn't want to pay $2,100 for their default config, but the world is full of people with weird priorities and too much money.
That startled me, too. Phishers don't typically target individual users, they send out the same mail to every address they can get hoping that some percentage will actually have an account with that bank.
I've also gotten scam mails for various banks. The sophisticated ones took into account that my address is German (ends in.de), but I also get some for American banks. Some of the German ones actually got the institution right, but that's not too hard: there are a couple of really large names that probably cover about 90% of the German private bank accounts.
If there are more reasons to believe that they know more about him, he didn't mention them. The fact that they "got it right" the first time isn't enough, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if he gets more scam mails for other banks in the future.
Wow, that sounds like a really cool project. If they manage to pull off what they seem to intend - emulate everything on everything - this would be the mother of all emulators. And they're already half way there...
I might have missed it, but if there wasn't a Slashdot post about it, there ought to be, if only to give the project some publicity.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah. Okay. I never heard of that being a problem, though - memory bandwidth with respect to texture and geometry data to be processed by the card is more common. I do have some hazy memories of the RAMDAC being especially fast on some Nvidia card (this was in some review years ago), so that it could display very high resolutions (ie above 2000xwhatever) without any artifacts, I guess that's what this is about.
Mea culpa - there apparently is the term of active RFID, even though this is not the typical application of RFID. Which isn't surprising, the fact that RFID chips don't need a power source to function is the neat (almost magic) thing about them. Everything else still applies though.
Measuring things? Active mode? Sending over large distances? Keeping track of the health of all of the population? I have no idea what you are talking about - before your post, the topic was RFID tags, which can't do any of those things. All they can do currently is transmit a fixed number at very close distances.
Sue them. If you emailed them about it. Well, I guess that wouldn't work; you probably can't prohibit someone from linking to you. Even if it worked, it would also be a really mean thing to do, but I do think that this issue needs to be dealt with. Slashdotting strangers into oblivion is one thing, but slashdotting folks who have explicitly asked not to be linked to is just not acceptable. Especially with nyud.net available as a fairly painless way to reach sites.
(Before anyone says this: I'm aware that many folks behind company firewalls can't reach nyud.net:8090. Okay, so coralize everything by default, but offer an option to disable this to registred users. Or put the "real" links in the otherwise fairly useless link box that accompanies every story by default. The hard work of creating a distributed web proxy has already been done, updating Slashdot to make use of it appears trivial by comparison.)
That's the third reply stating that CRTs will display very high resolutions - I'm aware of that. You can also print 4pt fonts on a 350 dpi printer. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. Your Sony E400 has a dot pitch of 0.24 mm, (a) that means there are monitor width / 0.24 mm ~= 1650 phosphor dots horizontally, (b) which sets an upper bound for the resolution the monitor can display.
;) No offense intended.
Now, as I mentioned before, I'm by no means an expert (unless having basic knowledge on how a CRT works makes me one), so both (a) and (b) could be wrong. So feel free to address those, but please don't just tell me how you're happily running your 15" CRT at 1800x(400*Pi).
On a sidenote, I've also never heard of being limited to a certain color-depth when running a CRT - not as long as you're talking about more than 1 bit, ie black and white. The CRT just gets analogue color values (voltages, in fact) anyway, so color depth as a bit value is really a feature of the graphics card and operating system. Unless you were talking about signal/noise ratio of the analogue monitor connection limiting the color precision or something.
And no, neither monitor is available for less than $1,000. But I didn't say I spent less than $1,000. These are $3,500+ monitors.
Nope, you didn't say that, and I did not intend to imply so. I was genuinely wondering, and also used the chance to try and find out whether there was any point to running a higher resolution than a monitor was designed for.
As I said, monitors will display it, just like my really old 15" CRT would display 1600x1200 (at an atrocious refresh rate, though). But you're projecting 1920 (horizontal) pixels at just about 1500 phosphor dots - I estimated 40 cm width and a 0.26 dot pitch; the numbers will be a bit off but the point stands.
1920x1600? What kind of display do you have? I doubt there is any device available for less than, say, a thousand bucks that can make use of that kind of resolutions. Oh, many CRTs will display it all right, but their phosphor coating won't be designer for anything above 1600x1200 for a 21". If anything, higher resolutions would result in some sort of anti-aliasing (aka blurring). Or am I wrong? I'm not a display engineer after all... Or maybe you simply do have a very expensive display. :)
How do you think I get my homework/sample essays/lecture notes from professors? File sharing.
File sharing as in P2P file sharing? (I guess a pedant might remark that HTTP is just another way of sharing files.) If so, that's odd. I'm certain the vast majority of universities distribute content via HTTP and email. Or paper, obviously - that's probably the number one distribution mechanism for the things you mention at the moment.
We've had computer science for decades and speech and language analysts for centuries before that and the only thing that they've concluded is that language is a very complex thing.
;)
There sort of have been language analysts for hundreds of years, but linguistics as a serious, scientific discipline is a quite recent thing. About the same as computer science really, in more than one way. And I get the impression there's more to it than "language is very complex" - that's true, but if there wasn't more to it my upcoming exam in semantics and sociolinguistics would be fairly brief.
You also have to wonder: does superman have super-human humour? I mean, humour is an in-born talent, and it really doesn't make a lot of sense for it to be enhanced under the yellow sun of Earth as opposed to a red sun. On the other hand, everything else about him is super, it'd be weird if that wasn't true for his humour. Then again, I haven't heard him say anything particularly funny.
So does it only need to connect to Steam when installing?
Essentially, yes. You don't have to be connected to the net while playing it single player.
Yeah, compatibility is a problem. It's not a big one, though, at least not for me - all of the sites I regularly visit render fine. On those occasions when a site doesn't render properly, I just fire up IE or Firefox to display it. You can actually add a context menu item in Opera to display the same page in IE (or lynx or whatever). That said, if one of my standard websites were disfunctional, that would be more of a problem, but so far my GMail account is more of a placeholder than anything. :P
Also, the copy link address menu item is something I'm surprised Firefox hasn't picked up on as it's such a common task.
It's available as "copy link location" in a link's context menu. A frame's address doesn't seem as easily available, though, you need to go into the properties first.
... and you can gz compress any files you send to it.
Just as an aside, you can send compressed data over HTTP to Opera, too. I think nearly all modern browsers know how to deal with that.
Many comments opine that further additional feature for Firefox should be realised as extensions to keep the main program fast and lean. Some argue that the RSS support in the current version should have been an extension. Those were my first thoughts, too, but I do wonder: how does plugin performance compare to "native" performance? That is, in terms of memory usage, processor usage, interface latency, etc.
I'm fairly clueless wrt the plugin mechanism, but apparently plugins work platform-independent, ie. a given plugin works in Windows Firefox, on *nix and on Mac OS. I assume there is some XUL (is that the word) magics going on behind the scenes, but isn't that fairly slow compared to a platform native approach?
Nope, neither did I. I guess this time around open really means open.
Here in Germany, they have these pathetic adverts that try to fool people into thinking AOL is short for Alles OnLine ("everything online"). They are doing fairly well, though, they have a huge number of users. The relative numbers might be about the same as in the US, in fact, but I'm not sure.
Is that so? I know it was true for the previous betas, but today I was able to create an account and start downloading the game... So unless they check your IP when logging in, you should be fine. Do they?
What worst case scenario?
That's an interesting question, actually. In Germany, we call the worst case scenario in the context of nuclear power plants a GAU. This is typically said to mean Größter Anzunehmender Unfall, or worst accident that has to be taken into account. But it could also mean Größter Angenommener Unfall, worst accident that has been taken into account. The two should be the same, but sometimes aren't...
Anyway. I just saw Fog of War, the movie about Robert McNamara, and in it he says about nuclear bombs (not energy) that single persons make errors, and no single person should have control over a nuclear bomb, because this increases the possible results of the errors of a single human from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of casualties. The reason many people I know who're opposed to nuclear energy seem to think something similar applies to nuclear energy.
And this is worse than a runaway greenhouse effect how?
Maybe it isn't, I don't know. Being opposed to nuclear energy doesn't mean one is a fan of fossile fuels, it can mean being a fan of energy efficient power plants, emission efficient power plants, energy conservation, regenerative energy and so on.
However, note, crucially, that I wondered how long reserves would last in a situation where nuclear energy has replaced fossile fuels. Fuel usage rate would be vastly higher than that of 433 power plants, we'd need what, 3, 5, 10 times as many nuclear reactors? Something like that probably. And as I mentioned, that'd still leave emissions by cars and planes out of the picture, at least the former of which eventually could be replaced by nuclear energy, too.
As for bigger part of your post, I'm not familiar enough with the issue to reply to it properly. For instance, I have no idea whether your number for the total energy needs of the world is correct. I think it's fairly preposterous to just take the amount of uranium times it's theoretical energy content as a serious figure: you don't take into account the inefficiencies of the uranium to heat and the heat to electricity conversions (the latter is about 50% for modern reactors), and you assume we can use up every last ounce of that uranium, which we haven't, so far.
In a nutshell, it's mostly two things: dealing with a source of energy where a worst case scenario has such catastrophic consequences, and dealing with a source of energy where the used-up fuel is dangerous for generations.
Apart from those fundamental issues, there is also the question of the amount of fuel that we can economically obtain. If we switched coal and oil power plants (not to mention transportation) to nuclear, how long would the fuel last? I've heard numbers in the range of only about 10 to 15 years. That's at least one order of magnitude to low to be a useful suggestion. Anything more than that would require the usage of breeder reactors.
Yes, having an illuminated skull (with what, a brick in it?) is really sophisticated, it virtually screams style.
Although apparently you can turn off the lights: The blue lights are there because they look cool, and will impress your friends. And there is a switch on the back of FragBox 2's so you can turn them off.
I still wouldn't want to pay $2,100 for their default config, but the world is full of people with weird priorities and too much money.
That startled me, too. Phishers don't typically target individual users, they send out the same mail to every address they can get hoping that some percentage will actually have an account with that bank.
.de), but I also get some for American banks. Some of the German ones actually got the institution right, but that's not too hard: there are a couple of really large names that probably cover about 90% of the German private bank accounts.
I've also gotten scam mails for various banks. The sophisticated ones took into account that my address is German (ends in
If there are more reasons to believe that they know more about him, he didn't mention them. The fact that they "got it right" the first time isn't enough, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if he gets more scam mails for other banks in the future.
Wow, that sounds like a really cool project. If they manage to pull off what they seem to intend - emulate everything on everything - this would be the mother of all emulators. And they're already half way there...
I might have missed it, but if there wasn't a Slashdot post about it, there ought to be, if only to give the project some publicity.