Actually this is something that the US do during the war. There are bombs that are nothing but carbon filaments. They are dropped onto enemy electric lines which shorts out the lines - and with a near 0 load, the generators spin out of control, and kill people in the powerplant when it busts open / bursts into flames.
Actually it's a first stage attach to knock out power without using bombs. I still say it sucks for the people working at powerplants (when the generators suddenly explode), but pretty interesting.
Everything in Japan, as far as I know, has a time. A/C has a timer, bathtub has a timer, the oil-buring room-heater has a timer. I think more expensive fridges have timers too - which is weird, why would you have a timer on your fridge? In fact, I am pretty sure AIBO have a freaking timer, which means, yes, you have a timer on your dog. I think in shibuya they put timers on their kids too... (j/k)
Funny thing though - they (IIRC - on everything except the bathtub, cuz I never checked the bathtub's interoperability) all work in both 50 and 60Hz zones.
Before anybody asks, the bathtub timer allows automatically filling of a specific volumn of hot water at (a) specified time(s). neato! too bad gaijins like myself mostly sticks to showering.
I think you mean this. (Talks about how generators are kept in phase with stuff coming from different areas, for those people (especially moderators) who don't RT(F)A)
It's not the lower power / current / whatever. It's the lower frequencies on the AC lines.
And besides any quartz clock won't be affected anyway. The ones that will suffer is those bedside alarm clocks you plug in - those red / green ones that are oh-so-common in the US.
Any idea why there are 0 of them in Japan? Japan runs on 50Hz east side and 60Hz west side, which would make clocks like that completely fall over itself. (something about buying geneator equipment from siemens (europe) for the east side and from US for the west-side - and stuck)
Interesting, but I don't think it's really that much of a "news." should at least up the "it's funny" icon
Wonder if in 12 years (when the probe is supposed to reach Pluto) the public will be as fascinated with the pictures coming back as much as with the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft."
I do wonder if there will be humans left by that time, or humans who arn't fighting against nuclear winter to actually care.
It would be a great shame if the probe goes out there and send back pictures, only to have noone there to recieve them - especially considering that this will be the best chance to observe pluto in gosh knows how many centuries.
Seriously though, why can't Bush just chill out? Warning N. Korea that he may use a pre-emptive nuclear strike? wtf is he THINKING?
I don't see why we can't do the same thing on earth - I mean, The vomit comet will get you 20 seconds of zero-grav at a time, should be plenty to pull a water film out of a ziplock.
I'd be MUCH more interested in how such a thing behaves UNDER gravity, once made. Especially, how long does it last?
Also, if indeed it's gravity that's causing the water film to be impossible on earth, what if I froze a loop in some water, shaved off the rest (and only have the "frozen film" left), and then allowed it to melt? shouldn't I get the same thing? (for the skeptics, let's say I melt it from the center first, by blowing hot air on it or something.
In the end, though - I am guessing that it probably won't be possible because water will all try to flow to the bottom of the sag, and the ring part will break due to insufficient surface tension - but I am still gonna try it out w/ the fridge!
some people and their followers do not believe that machines will EVER achieve human level intelligence.
(overall a good read. certainly a buttload of speculation but no more (actually probably less) than found in Wolfram's book)
On the other hand, I see nothing wrong with offering a prize for what he believes in. Heck we have the Templeton prize out there (more than the Nobel, no less) for best achievement in religion (christianity specifically, methinks), so what's wrong with offering 100G of his own money? We also have the X-BOX cracking contest - who is willing to bet that the believing in the chance of solving a 2048bit key in a few monthes is MUCH dumber than trying to shoot for some "not everybody agree as AI" AI?
what will be funny is one day our radio waves will disrupt some alien civ's communications, when it reaches their place, and will continue for many years (about a century so far, and unless we all get wiped out I don't see it slowing down), much like the cosmic background radiation was puzzling the AT&T engineers - there will be engineering classes in alien universities on how to overcome the problem caused by us.
and then it will trigger some inter-galactic war because some revolutionary student decides that he / she / it has just HAD it with the repetitious ClearChannel broadcasts of B.Spears and the boy bands - which is on every frequency spectrum.
Since I have no clue what you just said - just two questions:
1) why in the world do you know this? (i mean, judging my the.sig, this is not your specialty) 2) where do you find the references? any data / book / website to back up / explain what you said?
"Our computer is programmable, but it's not universal," said Shapiro. "There are computing tasks it inherently can't do."
they should have put this quote in the FRONT of the article so we don't get all excited over nothing. saves a lot of reading too.
btw - I wonder how they will allow interation (no nasty thoughts please) to a DNA computer; actually - how do they make "JMP" instructions in DNA? enzymes don't just skip a few million pairs for shits and giggles. told it to do so...
wow, but you know why they call it "power4" and "power5" though.
the damn things have THOUSANDS of pins (like 8000+ on some iterations, iirc?), and drains MASSIVE current - as in, the kind that makes your dual O/C'd athlon look like an LCD clock.
I think IBM's power4/5 chips are as well "unsuitable for real world" as well, but for some different reasons. That's not to say they won't be put into some niice servers though - and that's the point, itanium2 wasn't meant for desktop (for at least a while) anyway, and I think in their world they play some different rules.
hmm, they missed an important part
on
Game Theory at 190mph
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
once you are in "line" you need to stick your head out once a while otherwise your engines overheat.
I am sure that contributes to a WHOLE other dimension of it - how do you know if the guy's going out for "fresh breath" or passing?
NHK just had a documentary about Earth Sim a few days ago, in fact. They showed some results from the computer. One I found especially interesting was a earthquake energy distribution if an earthquake was to occur near atama. Watch some TV and you can save big train-fare bux. =)
This way, the binary stream can be "stored" simply by reference to its starting digit, and its length.
ahh my boy (or girl) you have grasped one aspect of infinity but not the other.
Let's even assume that it is indeed possible to find sequences in Pi that will be everything you ever dreamed of.
Now - you are assuming that your sequence is occuring "early" enough so that your index number will be managable. This may simply not be the case. What if your "starting point," as it turns out, is a number that when represented, actually bigger (make that a LOG BIGGER) than your windows source code? Here what I mean is not that the number is big, but the number is LARGE, as in the storage space which it takes. a trillion is a "big" number but only still takes "128-bits." Now imagine a number that takes a trillion bits / digits / whatever to actually "write out" - and that's what your index will likely look like.
by the way there is an algorithm where you can calculate the digit(s) of Pi without calculating anything that goes before it. In a black-box version it's "int foo (int index)" where index is the digit you want to calculate, and foo will spit out the index-th digit of Pi without calculating any other digits. I think it may even be linear in respect to index (gasp!).
chips and tech becomes mature and their FAILURE RATE decreases. mature technology does not cost less to test. On the whole SCSI is still a more complex technology, and I would not be surprised if tested with higher margin / more thoroughly due to the "enterprise level reliability" thing.
besides, as devices gets more complex and more "mature," generally the testing costs increase because you have all these new features, plus the old features, plus the shit that keeps it backwards compatible, to test. you can do better on the profit margin / cost side by making ships that have a lower failure rate, but that does not mean chips gets tested less, or it takes shorter to test them. On the contrary, it usually goes the other way.
Anyhow, example: RAMBUS was expensive because it was a "cutting edge" manufacturing process. the output impedence of the chips had to be controled very precisely, which is difficult to do and a lot of it failed at test - driving up the cost. as process matured, less failed and price came down. but each chip still went through the same routine, and sat the same amount of time on the testers* and took the same number of pin-capacities**, so the TESTING COST stays the same***.
* as memory size increase, they sit longer, usually ** similarly, wider buses takes more pins *** so in the end testing cost usually increases.
hmm; don't think of it that way. it's simply not possible for people to go and plug in stuff by hand on a cable and test them. usually. that's wayyyyyyy in the end anyway - intergration testing in software people's terms?
I would *suspect* that scsi chipsets have more things to be tested than ATA ones, since as you may notice, they are supposed to work with 15 devices OR by themselves, possibly providing onboard termination or not.
testing often starts at the wafer stage (where each chip is probed and marked, failed ones are crushed, oftenly), and again when chips are packaged - usually speed sorted / repaird (if possible - a lot of memory devices support repair) at this time. After that, integration testing is actually EASIER because this is when you have a whole set of firmware commands to work with, etc.
Frequently chips have dedicated testing commands, though (that you don't get to know), so things are not completely dire. most flash memory have test modes, for example, where if you put in a code sequence it will write the entire array into, say, a checker board pattern. This is to avoid massive delays of half microsecond writing each location, sequentially. Logic chips (like, say, scsi chipsets) usually have a different challenge - they have embedded subsections, often cache, that you don't have access to directly.
now, to get "into the chip" you will have to sequentially put in the test patterns / vectors into special registers that reside on the lines that run between each embedded component. one register at a time (usually sequentially through a few (dozen or less) pins. testing is expensive, but pins more so;). after each "scan burst" you toggle the clock, and sequentially read out all the registers to see if the chip did what you wanted it to do.
this gets back to the scsi being harder to test - probably the control chipsets are more complex. I can't imagine the mechanical sections being any different (besides the 15krpm ones, anyhow) - generally when something have to communicate with a bunch of other things (like scsi) versus just a few (ATA), the former is more pain in the butt testing wise.
oh, btw - more PIN is also another factor to costs. testers have a limited number of pins, so if you have more pins to test, you test less per turn. can't speak authoratatively on the pincount of drive controller chipsets... just FYI here.
side note: one thing you realize after being in testing is that semiconductor manufacturs often (or, sometimes - depending on the manufacture) puts a LOT of margin into their chips. when they say the chip is rated 75 degrees C, they really mean 75 degrees because the chip was TESTED at that temperature.
Interestingly enough, they mention the reason for the traditional difference in price between ATA and SCSI which I never have seen mentioned here - it has to do with testing costs, not controller electronics|platter quality|etc.
being IN the semiconductor test industry, it's really interesting how rarely does people really consider the necessity, and challenges, let alone costs, in testing.
few people realize that, for example (I am saying this example purely based on speculation, but a well-formed one) that the athlon MP chip cost difference is in a large part the extra test they run on it. You see - testing cost money, anything that would make test run longer means that more money has been spent on that part "making" it. One of the things the test industry is always talking about is speeding up testing, as a way to reduce testing costs.
aaanyway... next time anybody look at some nifty / advanced gadget, think to yourself "how the heck do they test THAT?" especially with things that have fast interfaces or embedded components...
anyway. erm - to stay on topic: ATA drives could handle 10k platters; I think the point about scsi has always been the more "industrial scalability / reliability / throughput / whatever" that's the selling point. well, and the fact that back in the day you can't buy IDE CDR drives.
yeah but that's sort of my point, though, if you look at it from the other side:
Now let's assume in EVERY APPLICATION, triangles always represents state / status information - this would accomplish a few things:
1) it would deter most sane people people from making their UI where they have triangle buttons. 2) even if they did, people who have used computers for a while would know what they are getting into (hey, i have seen triangles like this somewhere else before).
Of course, if it gets too confusing, you can always do the universal escape sequence to re-skin your UI.
The trouble is when some people use triangles for status and some don't - that's when it gets confusing. As long as we have a UI standard to go by and all the developers conform to it, I don't think UI customizablity will ever be a problem.
I mean, most FPS games have a universal key-bind system; similarly for most fighting games on consoles back in the days.
granted, fewer keys, ui mostly same, blah blah. but in the end what you really need is just ONE escape sequence that is atomic / universal (i.e. control-shift-esc ALWAYS gets you back to the UI config screen, say), and you can go from there.
I don't see why OSs can't be done like that. besides - most people use their OWN systems, where they already remembered that f5 is copy instead of refresh - it's having developers go with the same design methodology that really is going to be painful - especially in linux, methinks.
you don't need to tell *me* what's it about. I watched the whole thing.
The entire story was to me (heck they say it themselves) a non-serious parody inside a parody. I think they were trying to get a chuckle out of their decscription of anime fans who takes it way too seriously.
I mean, still good, but "giant robot anime" to me would be probably ones that actually focuse on the *robots*. Nadesico focuses on *ANIME about giant robots* and also on the fans of the said genre; which is one of the reason why it's good, considering that the drawing and the storyline isn't exactly on par with many of the other series.
small difference, you might say - but an important one nontheless.
Nadesico doesn't take itself seriously enough to be considered "giant robot series," methinks.
On the other hand, I am waiting for the day when US TV is open enough to air the entire series of NGE unedited - including the part right before a certain female pilot went into a multi-episode coma.
But I get a feeling that might not happen any times soon; Forces of darkness - erm, TV censoring - is still strong in the states.
Actually, Athlon SMP boards are not all that bad - they are just not cutting edge because, again, the demand for them are not so high.
Don't even think about overclocking them suckers.
If you REALLY want 4-way, old (as in really old) platforms you can usually get for pretty cheap. We obtained a PPro 4-way board with the chips for something like 200 bux total - this was about two / three years ago - so nowaways you might get P2 Xeon boards for that much or slightly more. But really now; go with Athlon SMPs.
by the way; saying things like "if such and such was priced at this much I'd snatch one up" is total nonsense. If I can get a 911 Turbo for 30k I'd snatch one up too. But similarly - it ain't gonna happen.
EVERYBODY (I am serious) went to win2k pretty much as soon as it came out. and that supports SMP out of box.
If you don't believe me, just think how many people exactly uses their parallel "home OS?" This would be windowsME, btw.
People who didn't want to shell out the dough generally sticked with win98; the ones who saw the need generally went with win2k - and that's a lot of people.
besides - dual CPU really wasn't a big deal until about that time when win2k was *just* about to come out anyhow. They were big for a while - especially when the celerons could be hacked into dualie systems, but now their demand seems to have waned, especially in a large part due to the fact that you have to shell out xeon dollars do get an intel dual setup.
It's definitely not because of the OS(s); linux and BSD had SMP support even before win2k was there - in the stable builds.
And to be honest about it, Back five years it would take you DAYS to render the same amount of video. So give it a while longer, you'll be alright.
I really think that the 4-way system niche is so small that even AMD went to try to fill it, it would not be worth their investment.
On the other hand, I would like to see more selections of dual platforms. But as you may see even the demand for those are few and far between.
Back to the original thing: you can do "fast previews" on most 3D programs now if you got a good video card; I don't see how you can gripe that much about it; for long runs just leave it running overnight. or hell, maybe cheap render-farm out of Xboxes =)
I think if you randomize you will get a chance to fudge some data; I mean, if in the end your average price of item turns out to be like 49.68 cents averaged over long term, you will have a very unlikely chance of noticing this discrepency. especially most (ALL?) financial software rounds to the cent.
At the same time, the above is assuming that EVERYTHING is 50 cents. Now, imaging there are things costing different amounts of money, and calculating if papercoin is ripping you off that 0.3% becomes difficult if not impossible.
Now, of course, I can't quite figure out how does papercoin charges the consumer. That's really weird because THEY can't be hit with the 25c charge everytime either or they will go under; so they will either have to
1) act like a bank / paypal and have you keep a balance. 2) wait until your "sum" is large enough and charge it all at once.
both have serious problem.
Of course - this entire thing is really a credit card system problem, that can really only be solved by the credit card companies - but they seem to have no incentive to do so, so... we might be stuck here for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually this is something that the US do during the war. There are bombs that are nothing but carbon filaments. They are dropped onto enemy electric lines which shorts out the lines - and with a near 0 load, the generators spin out of control, and kill people in the powerplant when it busts open / bursts into flames.
Actually it's a first stage attach to knock out power without using bombs. I still say it sucks for the people working at powerplants (when the generators suddenly explode), but pretty interesting.
Is that right...
Everything in Japan, as far as I know, has a time. A/C has a timer, bathtub has a timer, the oil-buring room-heater has a timer. I think more expensive fridges have timers too - which is weird, why would you have a timer on your fridge? In fact, I am pretty sure AIBO have a freaking timer, which means, yes, you have a timer on your dog. I think in shibuya they put timers on their kids too... (j/k)
Funny thing though - they (IIRC - on everything except the bathtub, cuz I never checked the bathtub's interoperability) all work in both 50 and 60Hz zones.
Before anybody asks, the bathtub timer allows automatically filling of a specific volumn of hot water at (a) specified time(s). neato! too bad gaijins like myself mostly sticks to showering.
I think you mean this. (Talks about how generators are kept in phase with stuff coming from different areas, for those people (especially moderators) who don't RT(F)A)
It's not the lower power / current / whatever. It's the lower frequencies on the AC lines.
And besides any quartz clock won't be affected anyway. The ones that will suffer is those bedside alarm clocks you plug in - those red / green ones that are oh-so-common in the US.
Any idea why there are 0 of them in Japan? Japan runs on 50Hz east side and 60Hz west side, which would make clocks like that completely fall over itself. (something about buying geneator equipment from siemens (europe) for the east side and from US for the west-side - and stuck)
Interesting, but I don't think it's really that much of a "news." should at least up the "it's funny" icon
I do wonder if there will be humans left by that time, or humans who arn't fighting against nuclear winter to actually care.
It would be a great shame if the probe goes out there and send back pictures, only to have noone there to recieve them - especially considering that this will be the best chance to observe pluto in gosh knows how many centuries.
Seriously though, why can't Bush just chill out? Warning N. Korea that he may use a pre-emptive nuclear strike? wtf is he THINKING?
I don't see why we can't do the same thing on earth - I mean, The vomit comet will get you 20 seconds of zero-grav at a time, should be plenty to pull a water film out of a ziplock.
I'd be MUCH more interested in how such a thing behaves UNDER gravity, once made. Especially, how long does it last?
Also, if indeed it's gravity that's causing the water film to be impossible on earth, what if I froze a loop in some water, shaved off the rest (and only have the "frozen film" left), and then allowed it to melt? shouldn't I get the same thing? (for the skeptics, let's say I melt it from the center first, by blowing hot air on it or something.
In the end, though - I am guessing that it probably won't be possible because water will all try to flow to the bottom of the sag, and the ring part will break due to insufficient surface tension - but I am still gonna try it out w/ the fridge!
(overall a good read. certainly a buttload of speculation but no more (actually probably less) than found in Wolfram's book)
On the other hand, I see nothing wrong with offering a prize for what he believes in. Heck we have the Templeton prize out there (more than the Nobel, no less) for best achievement in religion (christianity specifically, methinks), so what's wrong with offering 100G of his own money? We also have the X-BOX cracking contest - who is willing to bet that the believing in the chance of solving a 2048bit key in a few monthes is MUCH dumber than trying to shoot for some "not everybody agree as AI" AI?
what will be funny is one day our radio waves will disrupt some alien civ's communications, when it reaches their place, and will continue for many years (about a century so far, and unless we all get wiped out I don't see it slowing down), much like the cosmic background radiation was puzzling the AT&T engineers - there will be engineering classes in alien universities on how to overcome the problem caused by us.
and then it will trigger some inter-galactic war because some revolutionary student decides that he / she / it has just HAD it with the repetitious ClearChannel broadcasts of B.Spears and the boy bands - which is on every frequency spectrum.
Since I have no clue what you just said - just two questions:
.sig, this is not your specialty)
1) why in the world do you know this? (i mean, judging my the
2) where do you find the references? any data / book / website to back up / explain what you said?
thanks in advance
they should have put this quote in the FRONT of the article so we don't get all excited over nothing. saves a lot of reading too.
btw - I wonder how they will allow interation (no nasty thoughts please) to a DNA computer; actually - how do they make "JMP" instructions in DNA? enzymes don't just skip a few million pairs for shits and giggles. told it to do so...
wow, but you know why they call it "power4" and "power5" though.
the damn things have THOUSANDS of pins (like 8000+ on some iterations, iirc?), and drains MASSIVE current - as in, the kind that makes your dual O/C'd athlon look like an LCD clock.
I think IBM's power4/5 chips are as well "unsuitable for real world" as well, but for some different reasons. That's not to say they won't be put into some niice servers though - and that's the point, itanium2 wasn't meant for desktop (for at least a while) anyway, and I think in their world they play some different rules.
once you are in "line" you need to stick your head out once a while otherwise your engines overheat.
I am sure that contributes to a WHOLE other dimension of it - how do you know if the guy's going out for "fresh breath" or passing?
NHK just had a documentary about Earth Sim a few days ago, in fact. They showed some results from the computer. One I found especially interesting was a earthquake energy distribution if an earthquake was to occur near atama. Watch some TV and you can save big train-fare bux. =)
ahh my boy (or girl) you have grasped one aspect of infinity but not the other.
Let's even assume that it is indeed possible to find sequences in Pi that will be everything you ever dreamed of.
Now - you are assuming that your sequence is occuring "early" enough so that your index number will be managable. This may simply not be the case. What if your "starting point," as it turns out, is a number that when represented, actually bigger (make that a LOG BIGGER) than your windows source code? Here what I mean is not that the number is big, but the number is LARGE, as in the storage space which it takes. a trillion is a "big" number but only still takes "128-bits." Now imagine a number that takes a trillion bits / digits / whatever to actually "write out" - and that's what your index will likely look like.
by the way there is an algorithm where you can calculate the digit(s) of Pi without calculating anything that goes before it. In a black-box version it's "int foo (int index)" where index is the digit you want to calculate, and foo will spit out the index-th digit of Pi without calculating any other digits. I think it may even be linear in respect to index (gasp!).
i believe you are thinking of different things.
chips and tech becomes mature and their FAILURE RATE decreases. mature technology does not cost less to test. On the whole SCSI is still a more complex technology, and I would not be surprised if tested with higher margin / more thoroughly due to the "enterprise level reliability" thing.
besides, as devices gets more complex and more "mature," generally the testing costs increase because you have all these new features, plus the old features, plus the shit that keeps it backwards compatible, to test. you can do better on the profit margin / cost side by making ships that have a lower failure rate, but that does not mean chips gets tested less, or it takes shorter to test them. On the contrary, it usually goes the other way.
Anyhow, example: RAMBUS was expensive because it was a "cutting edge" manufacturing process. the output impedence of the chips had to be controled very precisely, which is difficult to do and a lot of it failed at test - driving up the cost. as process matured, less failed and price came down. but each chip still went through the same routine, and sat the same amount of time on the testers* and took the same number of pin-capacities**, so the TESTING COST stays the same***.
* as memory size increase, they sit longer, usually
** similarly, wider buses takes more pins
*** so in the end testing cost usually increases.
separate the two concepts.
hmm; don't think of it that way. it's simply not possible for people to go and plug in stuff by hand on a cable and test them. usually. that's wayyyyyyy in the end anyway - intergration testing in software people's terms?
;). after each "scan burst" you toggle the clock, and sequentially read out all the registers to see if the chip did what you wanted it to do.
I would *suspect* that scsi chipsets have more things to be tested than ATA ones, since as you may notice, they are supposed to work with 15 devices OR by themselves, possibly providing onboard termination or not.
testing often starts at the wafer stage (where each chip is probed and marked, failed ones are crushed, oftenly), and again when chips are packaged - usually speed sorted / repaird (if possible - a lot of memory devices support repair) at this time. After that, integration testing is actually EASIER because this is when you have a whole set of firmware commands to work with, etc.
Frequently chips have dedicated testing commands, though (that you don't get to know), so things are not completely dire. most flash memory have test modes, for example, where if you put in a code sequence it will write the entire array into, say, a checker board pattern. This is to avoid massive delays of half microsecond writing each location, sequentially. Logic chips (like, say, scsi chipsets) usually have a different challenge - they have embedded subsections, often cache, that you don't have access to directly.
now, to get "into the chip" you will have to sequentially put in the test patterns / vectors into special registers that reside on the lines that run between each embedded component. one register at a time (usually sequentially through a few (dozen or less) pins. testing is expensive, but pins more so
this gets back to the scsi being harder to test - probably the control chipsets are more complex. I can't imagine the mechanical sections being any different (besides the 15krpm ones, anyhow) - generally when something have to communicate with a bunch of other things (like scsi) versus just a few (ATA), the former is more pain in the butt testing wise.
oh, btw - more PIN is also another factor to costs. testers have a limited number of pins, so if you have more pins to test, you test less per turn. can't speak authoratatively on the pincount of drive controller chipsets... just FYI here.
side note: one thing you realize after being in testing is that semiconductor manufacturs often (or, sometimes - depending on the manufacture) puts a LOT of margin into their chips. when they say the chip is rated 75 degrees C, they really mean 75 degrees because the chip was TESTED at that temperature.
ok. long rant... gotta stop now.
being IN the semiconductor test industry, it's really interesting how rarely does people really consider the necessity, and challenges, let alone costs, in testing.
few people realize that, for example (I am saying this example purely based on speculation, but a well-formed one) that the athlon MP chip cost difference is in a large part the extra test they run on it. You see - testing cost money, anything that would make test run longer means that more money has been spent on that part "making" it. One of the things the test industry is always talking about is speeding up testing, as a way to reduce testing costs.
aaanyway... next time anybody look at some nifty / advanced gadget, think to yourself "how the heck do they test THAT?" especially with things that have fast interfaces or embedded components...
anyway. erm - to stay on topic: ATA drives could handle 10k platters; I think the point about scsi has always been the more "industrial scalability / reliability / throughput / whatever" that's the selling point. well, and the fact that back in the day you can't buy IDE CDR drives.
yeah but that's sort of my point, though, if you look at it from the other side:
Now let's assume in EVERY APPLICATION, triangles always represents state / status information - this would accomplish a few things:
1) it would deter most sane people people from making their UI where they have triangle buttons.
2) even if they did, people who have used computers for a while would know what they are getting into (hey, i have seen triangles like this somewhere else before).
Of course, if it gets too confusing, you can always do the universal escape sequence to re-skin your UI.
The trouble is when some people use triangles for status and some don't - that's when it gets confusing. As long as we have a UI standard to go by and all the developers conform to it, I don't think UI customizablity will ever be a problem.
Anyway - just my little thought.
I mean, most FPS games have a universal key-bind system; similarly for most fighting games on consoles back in the days.
granted, fewer keys, ui mostly same, blah blah. but in the end what you really need is just ONE escape sequence that is atomic / universal (i.e. control-shift-esc ALWAYS gets you back to the UI config screen, say), and you can go from there.
I don't see why OSs can't be done like that. besides - most people use their OWN systems, where they already remembered that f5 is copy instead of refresh - it's having developers go with the same design methodology that really is going to be painful - especially in linux, methinks.
you don't need to tell *me* what's it about. I watched the whole thing.
The entire story was to me (heck they say it themselves) a non-serious parody inside a parody. I think they were trying to get a chuckle out of their decscription of anime fans who takes it way too seriously.
I mean, still good, but "giant robot anime" to me would be probably ones that actually focuse on the *robots*. Nadesico focuses on *ANIME about giant robots* and also on the fans of the said genre; which is one of the reason why it's good, considering that the drawing and the storyline isn't exactly on par with many of the other series.
small difference, you might say - but an important one nontheless.
Nadesico doesn't take itself seriously enough to be considered "giant robot series," methinks.
On the other hand, I am waiting for the day when US TV is open enough to air the entire series of NGE unedited - including the part right before a certain female pilot went into a multi-episode coma.
But I get a feeling that might not happen any times soon; Forces of darkness - erm, TV censoring - is still strong in the states.
Actually, Athlon SMP boards are not all that bad - they are just not cutting edge because, again, the demand for them are not so high.
Don't even think about overclocking them suckers.
If you REALLY want 4-way, old (as in really old) platforms you can usually get for pretty cheap. We obtained a PPro 4-way board with the chips for something like 200 bux total - this was about two / three years ago - so nowaways you might get P2 Xeon boards for that much or slightly more. But really now; go with Athlon SMPs.
by the way; saying things like "if such and such was priced at this much I'd snatch one up" is total nonsense. If I can get a 911 Turbo for 30k I'd snatch one up too. But similarly - it ain't gonna happen.
erm. not true.
EVERYBODY (I am serious) went to win2k pretty much as soon as it came out. and that supports SMP out of box.
If you don't believe me, just think how many people exactly uses their parallel "home OS?" This would be windowsME, btw.
People who didn't want to shell out the dough generally sticked with win98; the ones who saw the need generally went with win2k - and that's a lot of people.
besides - dual CPU really wasn't a big deal until about that time when win2k was *just* about to come out anyhow. They were big for a while - especially when the celerons could be hacked into dualie systems, but now their demand seems to have waned, especially in a large part due to the fact that you have to shell out xeon dollars do get an intel dual setup.
It's definitely not because of the OS(s); linux and BSD had SMP support even before win2k was there - in the stable builds.
And to be honest about it, Back five years it would take you DAYS to render the same amount of video. So give it a while longer, you'll be alright.
I really think that the 4-way system niche is so small that even AMD went to try to fill it, it would not be worth their investment.
On the other hand, I would like to see more selections of dual platforms. But as you may see even the demand for those are few and far between.
Back to the original thing: you can do "fast previews" on most 3D programs now if you got a good video card; I don't see how you can gripe that much about it; for long runs just leave it running overnight. or hell, maybe cheap render-farm out of Xboxes =)
I think if you randomize you will get a chance to fudge some data; I mean, if in the end your average price of item turns out to be like 49.68 cents averaged over long term, you will have a very unlikely chance of noticing this discrepency. especially most (ALL?) financial software rounds to the cent.
At the same time, the above is assuming that EVERYTHING is 50 cents. Now, imaging there are things costing different amounts of money, and calculating if papercoin is ripping you off that 0.3% becomes difficult if not impossible.
Now, of course, I can't quite figure out how does papercoin charges the consumer. That's really weird because THEY can't be hit with the 25c charge everytime either or they will go under; so they will either have to
1) act like a bank / paypal and have you keep a balance.
2) wait until your "sum" is large enough and charge it all at once.
both have serious problem.
Of course - this entire thing is really a credit card system problem, that can really only be solved by the credit card companies - but they seem to have no incentive to do so, so... we might be stuck here for a while.