I agree, Inserection and the Movie with the Borg (seesh I've blocked out the name), were both insulting to the series. The Borg were much more frightening as a collective. They played on American's old fear of Communism and were a type of alien that could very quickly over run a plannet and had no obvious weakness. It is kind of like what they did to the Xenomorphs in Alien Resurection. The face-sucker, immature alien comming out of your chest, giant bug sequence was much more frightening than the birth sequence.
StarTrek, Der Aufstand (insurection) just blew it had nothing recomending it and there were certainly a few "to be continued" episodes from the series that were better (I was seriously ticked off when the "fire" command was given just before the "to be continued" message showed up). I had actually forgotten that it was a movie until I asked some of my coworkers what happened in Aufstand.
How much of a performance hit might PS2 backwards compatibility give to the PS3?
The way that Sony made the PS2 backwards compatable with the PS1 was to put an entire PS1 inside the PS2. When the system starts up the disk is scanned and the PS2 circuitry determines if it is a PS1 or PS2 game. If it is a PS1 game it is handled by the PS1 hardware, if it is a PS2 game it is handled by the PS2 hardware. Therefore, if Sony uses the same mechanism to make the PS3 backwards compatable in the same method (no reason they shouldn't the PS2 isn't that expensive to make any more, and would cost less when put on a single chip) there would be no performance hit.
The other thing that has impressed me with the PS2 is that with fairly limited hardware (I think it is a 400Mhz Mips with 32 Megs of RAM) it can render a little less than half the polygons the Xbox can with much better (and more expensive) hardware (1Ghz processor (PIII?), 128 Megs of RAM, specially made NVidia graphics processor) which was released more than 2 years later (Xbox was behind Moore's law when compaired to PS2). If the above article is correct the PS3 would come out about three years after the XBox and from a comparison with the rendering power of the PS2 and Xboxen and Moore's Law should have better than 4 times the rendering power of the Xbox (and 10 times the rendering power of the PS2). That would be enough additional power to get game developers to develop exclusives for it. The measly x2 f the Xbox is not.
It is especially dangerous for MS to follow their traditional PC-based strategy when trying to get into the living room (supposedly the reason they are dumping so much money into the XBox) because we are starting to hear about the playstation 3.
If Sony makes the PS3 backwards compatable with the PS2 like the PS2 was to the PS1, M$ will end up with technically superior compeditor with a crud load of games from the beginning. On top of this M$ has to deal with the reputation for instability and security issues which it has aquired on the desktop.
In general all non-standard batteries for comsumer electronics are made in a single run. For most types of rechargeable batteries (all but lead-acid) there is a shelf life. Therefore, if there is consumer electronics item which has a relatively short production run (basically call computers fall in this catagory) all the batteries were likely manufactured at the same time, and they should all go dead about the same time. Whether or not they are in use! This is a very common problem in camcorders, three years from the initial manufacture date even if you buy a replacement battery it will be crud.
It used to be the case that you could get an adaptor for using "standard" batteries (AA) in gateway notebook computers. If such a device is avalible for the IBM 600 notebooks you could get one and insert standard rechargeable batteries.
I think that something similar to this is actually a good idea. I know that I wouldn't approve of an 8 year old playing Dialbo II (that whole piles of corpses thing in act 3). After all movies have a rating system, as do books and magazines (think adult). However, I'ld be much happier with a scaled system similar to movies. Games with no violence would receive a general audience credential. Games with non-graphic violence or sexual situations or langauge would get a parental guidance suggested credential, and games with either gore or sex would get a restricted credential.
It is important to remember that the movie industry came up with their own self censorship/age rating scheme in responce to public cries for a government mandated one. Perhaps video game manufactures and resellers should get together on a similar scheme of their own in order to avoid government regulation.
This reminds me of a possibly apocriphal story or joke.
Bill Gates and Lee Iocoka happen to be at the same meeting. Bill walks up to Lee and comments that if the computer industry had been in charge of developing the automobile cars would be going 200 miles an hour and would cost 500$. Lee responds by pointing out that crashing twice a day is unacceptable for an automobile.
Certainly not all Turbo Tax users are software pirates, however, many people finish their taxes, and then ship their copy of Turbo Tax(TT) to their adult children which is technically piracy. I also wouldn't be too supprised if Intuit got more attempts to electronically file via TT than the number of copies they sold, or if too many people tried to claim the TT tax deduction. The new registration system should reduce the piracy problem.
Turbo Tax's web-based product worked great for me last year. My favorite part was I could do it via Linux. A close second was that I don't have to re-enter all my address/ssn information from last year this year. Finally, it was kinda cool to watch the "tracking" information on their website (kinda like when you ship a package via UPS).
Guess I need to defend myself, which is odd, because everthing that didn't start with something akin to "in my opinion..."
from Linux1394: What exactly is IEEE 1394? It is a serial bus similar in principle to USB, but runs at speeds of up to 400 Mbit/s and is not centered around a PC (i.e. there may be none or multiple PCs on the same bus). It has a mode of transmission which guarantees bandwidth which makes it ideal for digital video cameras and similar devices.
from Linux-USB:The specification (version 1.0) was first released in January 1996 and the latest official version 1.1 was released in September 1998 The document is still under development and a version 2.0 was announced in 1999. The USB is strictly hierarchical and it is controlled by one host. The host uses a master / slave protocol to communicate with attached USB devices. This means that every kind of communication is initiated by the host and devices cannot establish any direct connection to other devices. This seems to be a drawback in comparison to other bus architectures but it is not because the USB was designed as a compromise of costs and performance. The master / slave protocol solves implicitly problems like collision avoidance or distributed bus arbitration. The current implementation of the USB allows 127 devices to be connected at the same time and the total communication bandwidth is limited to 12Mbit/s. Howewer use of low speed devices, management of USB "interrupts" and other overheads mean that actual throughput cannot exceed about 8.5Mbit/s under near ideal conditions, and typical performance may be around 2Mbit/s.
finally, for the speed of USB2, check out any one of numerous product descriptions such as this one:USB 2.0 runs at up to 480 Mbits/sec.
The Ivy League originally refered to an athletic organization. The point of which was to have real schollar-athletes and therefore did not grant athletic scholarships.
GNU/Linux sucks for actually getting anything accomplished other than hacking around.
I probably shouldn't reply to a flame, but I think I have to respond to this one. First, I'm in nuclear physics and we do most of our research using Linux computers. Second, Industrial Light and Magic uses a farm of Linux boxes to do their digital editing and effects. Lucas has raved about it. Third, many recent news articles have speculated that upwards of 60% of all webservers are running Linux. Finally, if you want to directly compare the iApps to Linux applications. I will conceed that there is not an equivalent of the authoring software from iDVD (but ILM apparently gets around this problem somehow. I guess if you want to edit home movies, use a Mac; If you want to make a multi-million dollar movie, run Linux). However, Xine can play DVDs perfectly, Gnome and KDE provided thumbnails of images instead of Icons before Windows XP (which did it before Mac OSX), gimp is second only to Adobe Photoshop for photo editing, and XMMS is superior to and prior to iTunes, and Grip can rip+encode audio in more formats.
Before you spout about citations, I remind you that if there are 4 or more citiations for 1 fact it is unnessasary, as it is considered general knowledge.
Both USB2 and Firewire are faster than current harddrives. Technically USB2 is faster than Firewire (480 Mb/s vs. 400 Mb/s), but they work using 2 fundamentally different methods of communication. Firewire uses a peer-to-peer method where USB2 (and USB) use a master-slave method. Personally, for computer to device communication I'ld perfer the USB2 (since the master would be much faster than the slave), but for device to device communication I'ld perfer Firewire (since both devices should be about the same speed).
The biggest problem with the iPod (in my mind simply a portable harddrive) is that it is too easy to use. I have seen people walk into a computer store, buy an iPod, open the box, and then download all the software off the demonstration Macs. That could be really bad for Apple, since that keeps people from buying (and therefore making) software for Macs. Hopefully, Mac OS-10 (OSX is a different operating system by a different company) keeps this from happening.
But moving away from the PPC platform for these reasons is rather childish.
I think that Apple owns quite a few of software side pattents for the PPC platform. It is not "open source" hardware like the x86 chips. In the early days of computers IBM made a descision to allow anyone to build hardware or program software for their computers. This gave them a much smaller slice of a huge pie instead of a big slice of a small pie. Apple opted for a small slice of a big pie by keeping their hardware and software propriatary. As late as 1997 to write "official" software for a Mac you had to send Apple money.
Companies who want a "multimedia OS" but DON'T want Linux or Microsoft, I could see an oppurtunity here for Apple (if they don't go after the appliance market all themselves, as they seem to be consiering).
Unfortunately, if there is an alternative to a propriatary technology hardware manufacturers will go for it. This is why most PC's don't come with Apple's Firewire (the extra $1). With the razor thin profit margins in catagories of electronics manufacturers simply cannot afford to add propriatary technology in their products. Regardless of how much better anyone thinks it is.
One of the big reasons why a lot of OSS has poorer (or no) GUI when compared to CSS is that OSS is developed via an evolutionary approach. Many developers discover that no one has written an application which suits a particular need, and they all start working on their own projects. After a while they make their work avalible and start to interact. When this happens, they all borrow eachothers' ideas and the good ideas are kept and the bad ones eventually die out. Unfortunately, the GUI is ussually one of the last parts that everyone agrees on. In contrast, closed source projects ussually have one person calling the shots (ussually cause they are providing the money). In this case the person calling the shots is ussually not all that technically savy (wheither or not they will admit it) and is going to be mainly interested in how the final project looks. The added drawback is since there is probably a profit motive and a release date, the GUI ends up getting more attention than the actual program. After all, it can be patched later.
To truely compare the usablility of OSS vs CSS I think that you need to look at the more mature projects. Therefore, compare Mozilla to Internet explorer, compare Star Office 6.0 and OpenOffice.org to Microsoft Office, compare gcc/emacs/gdb to visual c/visual fortran (does that exist)/visual basic/visual c++/D-Flat(same as C#), compare postsql and mysql to access and DB2, compare bash to ?DOS6.2?, ssh to ?what?, TCP/IP to ?what?. Don't compare emacs functionality as a WYSYWIG wordprocessor to Word. It's just dumb.
At work we have a very simple method of backup. We keep two copies in different buildings. This method is only really useful if what you want to backup doesn't change very often. Or if you have a very geographically diverse and fast network. For home use we generally only backup data which we generate ourselves (if we downloaded something it is effectively already backed up). Then I put the backup in the trnk of my car.
Wal-Mart sells Linux boxes (and Lindows boxes) starting at $199.99. That is less than the cost of Windows XP Home. Given, for 200$ you don't get too much computer, but it would be more than enough for wordprocessing/webbrowsing/AIM/e-mail.
Both particles and gammay rays (high energy light) have penetration depths. For particles they stop faster if they are more massive (since the collisions with the nuclei in your skin will be more inelastic). They also stop much faster if they are charged since electromagentism is a long-range force. So, an ideal source would be something which was fairly easy to isolate, fairly common, had a low energy beta decay to the ground state of the daughter nucleus, and was chemically inert. Sounds like an ideal source would be Carbon-14. I've worked with it, and while the betas are very easy to stop (about a foot of air will do it, or a peice of paper), if it is in its elemental form it flakes appart due to self-charging (carbon is an insulator) and it becomes messy very quickly. On the other hand in say, its Iron Carbide form it is very stable.
Now now much carbon-14 would we need to get a 1.5Volt AAA battery? The answer of course, depends on how much current you want to draw. Carbon-14 has a half life of 5740 years. So it takes approx 2*10^11 atoms of Carbon-14 to give us one electron/sec. We need one mol of electrons to give us an amp. So we need 2*10^11 mols of Carbon-14 to draw an amp of current directly from the betas. That is a crap load of Carbon-14.
Old style (in use now and aboard the Voyager space crafts) use the heat generated by one of the Plutonium Isotopes to get power via the peizoelectric effect.
Slashdot Mirror
StarTrek, Der Aufstand (insurection) just blew it had nothing recomending it and there were certainly a few "to be continued" episodes from the series that were better (I was seriously ticked off when the "fire" command was given just before the "to be continued" message showed up). I had actually forgotten that it was a movie until I asked some of my coworkers what happened in Aufstand.
Since a 2 word Word 2002 document takes 20kB I don't think that the Xbox has enough resources for the MS version of a 2600 game.
The way that Sony made the PS2 backwards compatable with the PS1 was to put an entire PS1 inside the PS2. When the system starts up the disk is scanned and the PS2 circuitry determines if it is a PS1 or PS2 game. If it is a PS1 game it is handled by the PS1 hardware, if it is a PS2 game it is handled by the PS2 hardware. Therefore, if Sony uses the same mechanism to make the PS3 backwards compatable in the same method (no reason they shouldn't the PS2 isn't that expensive to make any more, and would cost less when put on a single chip) there would be no performance hit.
The other thing that has impressed me with the PS2 is that with fairly limited hardware (I think it is a 400Mhz Mips with 32 Megs of RAM) it can render a little less than half the polygons the Xbox can with much better (and more expensive) hardware (1Ghz processor (PIII?), 128 Megs of RAM, specially made NVidia graphics processor) which was released more than 2 years later (Xbox was behind Moore's law when compaired to PS2). If the above article is correct the PS3 would come out about three years after the XBox and from a comparison with the rendering power of the PS2 and Xboxen and Moore's Law should have better than 4 times the rendering power of the Xbox (and 10 times the rendering power of the PS2). That would be enough additional power to get game developers to develop exclusives for it. The measly x2 f the Xbox is not.
Shasput, I think I've started a flame war.
If Sony makes the PS3 backwards compatable with the PS2 like the PS2 was to the PS1, M$ will end up with technically superior compeditor with a crud load of games from the beginning. On top of this M$ has to deal with the reputation for instability and security issues which it has aquired on the desktop.
It used to be the case that you could get an adaptor for using "standard" batteries (AA) in gateway notebook computers. If such a device is avalible for the IBM 600 notebooks you could get one and insert standard rechargeable batteries.
In the mean time I'm glad I bought a desknote.
It is important to remember that the movie industry came up with their own self censorship/age rating scheme in responce to public cries for a government mandated one. Perhaps video game manufactures and resellers should get together on a similar scheme of their own in order to avoid government regulation.
Bill Gates and Lee Iocoka happen to be at the same meeting. Bill walks up to Lee and comments that if the computer industry had been in charge of developing the automobile cars would be going 200 miles an hour and would cost 500$. Lee responds by pointing out that crashing twice a day is unacceptable for an automobile.
like a rotisere chicken
Certainly not all Turbo Tax users are software pirates, however, many people finish their taxes, and then ship their copy of Turbo Tax(TT) to their adult children which is technically piracy. I also wouldn't be too supprised if Intuit got more attempts to electronically file via TT than the number of copies they sold, or if too many people tried to claim the TT tax deduction. The new registration system should reduce the piracy problem.
Turbo Tax's web-based product worked great for me last year. My favorite part was I could do it via Linux. A close second was that I don't have to re-enter all my address/ssn information from last year this year. Finally, it was kinda cool to watch the "tracking" information on their website (kinda like when you ship a package via UPS).
from Linux1394: What exactly is IEEE 1394? It is a serial bus similar in principle to USB, but runs at speeds of up to 400 Mbit/s and is not centered around a PC (i.e. there may be none or multiple PCs on the same bus). It has a mode of transmission which guarantees bandwidth which makes it ideal for digital video cameras and similar devices.
from Linux-USB:The specification (version 1.0) was first released in January 1996 and the latest official version 1.1 was released in September 1998 The document is still under development and a version 2.0 was announced in 1999. The USB is strictly hierarchical and it is controlled by one host. The host uses a master / slave protocol to communicate with attached USB devices. This means that every kind of communication is initiated by the host and devices cannot establish any direct connection to other devices. This seems to be a drawback in comparison to other bus architectures but it is not because the USB was designed as a compromise of costs and performance. The master / slave protocol solves implicitly problems like collision avoidance or distributed bus arbitration. The current implementation of the USB allows 127 devices to be connected at the same time and the total communication bandwidth is limited to 12Mbit/s. Howewer use of low speed devices, management of USB "interrupts" and other overheads mean that actual throughput cannot exceed about 8.5Mbit/s under near ideal conditions, and typical performance may be around 2Mbit/s.
finally, for the speed of USB2, check out any one of numerous product descriptions such as this one:USB 2.0 runs at up to 480 Mbits/sec.
The Ivy League originally refered to an athletic organization. The point of which was to have real schollar-athletes and therefore did not grant athletic scholarships.
I probably shouldn't reply to a flame, but I think I have to respond to this one. First, I'm in nuclear physics and we do most of our research using Linux computers. Second, Industrial Light and Magic uses a farm of Linux boxes to do their digital editing and effects. Lucas has raved about it. Third, many recent news articles have speculated that upwards of 60% of all webservers are running Linux. Finally, if you want to directly compare the iApps to Linux applications. I will conceed that there is not an equivalent of the authoring software from iDVD (but ILM apparently gets around this problem somehow. I guess if you want to edit home movies, use a Mac; If you want to make a multi-million dollar movie, run Linux). However, Xine can play DVDs perfectly, Gnome and KDE provided thumbnails of images instead of Icons before Windows XP (which did it before Mac OSX), gimp is second only to Adobe Photoshop for photo editing, and XMMS is superior to and prior to iTunes, and Grip can rip+encode audio in more formats.
Before you spout about citations, I remind you that if there are 4 or more citiations for 1 fact it is unnessasary, as it is considered general knowledge.
Under certain Ideal conditions
Both USB2 and Firewire are faster than current harddrives. Technically USB2 is faster than Firewire (480 Mb/s vs. 400 Mb/s), but they work using 2 fundamentally different methods of communication. Firewire uses a peer-to-peer method where USB2 (and USB) use a master-slave method. Personally, for computer to device communication I'ld perfer the USB2 (since the master would be much faster than the slave), but for device to device communication I'ld perfer Firewire (since both devices should be about the same speed).
The biggest problem with the iPod (in my mind simply a portable harddrive) is that it is too easy to use. I have seen people walk into a computer store, buy an iPod, open the box, and then download all the software off the demonstration Macs. That could be really bad for Apple, since that keeps people from buying (and therefore making) software for Macs. Hopefully, Mac OS-10 (OSX is a different operating system by a different company) keeps this from happening.
Are the PowerPC chips lagging Athelons and Pentiums again?
Or even better, install GNU/Linux on your Mac.
I think that Apple owns quite a few of software side pattents for the PPC platform. It is not "open source" hardware like the x86 chips. In the early days of computers IBM made a descision to allow anyone to build hardware or program software for their computers. This gave them a much smaller slice of a huge pie instead of a big slice of a small pie. Apple opted for a small slice of a big pie by keeping their hardware and software propriatary. As late as 1997 to write "official" software for a Mac you had to send Apple money.
Unfortunately, if there is an alternative to a propriatary technology hardware manufacturers will go for it. This is why most PC's don't come with Apple's Firewire (the extra $1). With the razor thin profit margins in catagories of electronics manufacturers simply cannot afford to add propriatary technology in their products. Regardless of how much better anyone thinks it is.
And then I think that it is only for Regicide or high treason.
On the other hand France has guilitined someone during my lifetime.
One of the big reasons why a lot of OSS has poorer (or no) GUI when compared to CSS is that OSS is developed via an evolutionary approach. Many developers discover that no one has written an application which suits a particular need, and they all start working on their own projects. After a while they make their work avalible and start to interact. When this happens, they all borrow eachothers' ideas and the good ideas are kept and the bad ones eventually die out. Unfortunately, the GUI is ussually one of the last parts that everyone agrees on. In contrast, closed source projects ussually have one person calling the shots (ussually cause they are providing the money). In this case the person calling the shots is ussually not all that technically savy (wheither or not they will admit it) and is going to be mainly interested in how the final project looks. The added drawback is since there is probably a profit motive and a release date, the GUI ends up getting more attention than the actual program. After all, it can be patched later.
To truely compare the usablility of OSS vs CSS I think that you need to look at the more mature projects. Therefore, compare Mozilla to Internet explorer, compare Star Office 6.0 and OpenOffice.org to Microsoft Office, compare gcc/emacs/gdb to visual c/visual fortran (does that exist)/visual basic/visual c++/D-Flat(same as C#), compare postsql and mysql to access and DB2, compare bash to ?DOS6.2?, ssh to ?what?, TCP/IP to ?what?. Don't compare emacs functionality as a WYSYWIG wordprocessor to Word. It's just dumb.
Of Course Toyoda will have an all hybrid-electric fleet.
At work we have a very simple method of backup. We keep two copies in different buildings. This method is only really useful if what you want to backup doesn't change very often. Or if you have a very geographically diverse and fast network. For home use we generally only backup data which we generate ourselves (if we downloaded something it is effectively already backed up). Then I put the backup in the trnk of my car.
Wal-Mart sells Linux boxes (and Lindows boxes) starting at $199.99. That is less than the cost of Windows XP Home. Given, for 200$ you don't get too much computer, but it would be more than enough for wordprocessing/webbrowsing/AIM/e-mail.
Pheonix being "mozilla-lite." Personally I think it should be mo-thra.
Now now much carbon-14 would we need to get a 1.5Volt AAA battery? The answer of course, depends on how much current you want to draw. Carbon-14 has a half life of 5740 years. So it takes approx 2*10^11 atoms of Carbon-14 to give us one electron/sec. We need one mol of electrons to give us an amp. So we need 2*10^11 mols of Carbon-14 to draw an amp of current directly from the betas. That is a crap load of Carbon-14.
Old style (in use now and aboard the Voyager space crafts) use the heat generated by one of the Plutonium Isotopes to get power via the peizoelectric effect.