the japanese school system is very rigid and regimented. It is the ultimate test market for these RFIDs since there is a predicable pattern to the student movements.
This allows the school to track down errant kids, make sure everyone is out in case of fire, and parents to know where their kids are, as many work long hours.
I am not saying RFID everything, but in this market (Japan) it works and fits in.
You only think it is. The reality is that molson canadian and some of the other big canadian beers have a deal with labatts (AFAIR) in the US to bottle under their name, and still only put in wuzzy american amounts of alcohol.
The XBox 2 will still have a hard drive in it. The reason for this is that one of the reasons that the xbox has been a success is the ability to rip your music onto it and play it in your favorite games.
This feature demands a hard drive as flash memory, while getting cheaper, does not have the amount of memory avaliable for 100+ songs for as cheap as a hard drive.
That said, I think we will see larger memory cards as saves get bigger, also I hope to see them drop in price.
Above all else, remember that no console has removed major hardware functionality yet. NES->SNES->N64->GC was all upgrades, each having more features than before GB->GBP->GBC->GBA->GBA-SP Same deal PS1->PS2 Dreamcast-> damn you for going under. We loved you.
I look forward to the xbox 2, and while I may not be a person to preorder it, or even get it within 6 months of release, it is on my list of things to get.
The problem with biometrics is that they are still unreliable.
I work for a security company that does install biometric systems..and one of our headaches is fingerprint scanners. the problem is that you must use the same finger, in the same position on the pad, at the same angle, and even then there are quirky. Retinal scanners are much better, however they can detect health information that has privacy issues and are hard to use in a vehicle.
No, a standard immobilizer is the best way (one of hte ones with the chip in the ignition, and maybe a keypad for a clear code for operation).
Two words... "internal security". Just because you have a firewall does not stop things from happenning. All it takes is one floppy from home and you are toast.
first off, what version of winamp.. because v3.x is pretty good (not the beta, the full version) and hasn't got memory leaks that I can see (running win2k).
second..why RealOne?! it has got to be one of the biggest pieces of crapola I have seen.. it IS a memory hog, slow, and pervasive..it gets everywhere... it takes over all your file associations without prompting you (which winamp does), sets itself to run automatically at startup (which winamp doesn't), and other wonderful crappy things.
Ok... I live in Vancouver, and have been to pubs/clubs in vancouver...
So here we go:
#1) NO drinking after 2
This is wrong. It is you cannot SELL liquor after 2am. However in the downtown core a number of bars have gotten permission to extend this to 4am.
#2) NO drinking after midnight on sundays
Again wrong... no selling liqour after midnight on sundays (2am for the downtown core bars right now)
#3) NO selling of hard alchohol except in government liqour stores
As the poster said, this was changed over a year ago. It is a non-issue. Also, this only applied to selling bottles, not to selling drinks.
#4) NO drinking in public
This is true. But a number of places have this law.
#5) NO smoking in bars
Actually, this is a bylaw that was put into effect by the city of vancouver that covers all places of work. Including bars, etc. Some tried to ignore it and got nailed. The initiative that failed was the WCB's (Workmans Compensation Board) attempt to apply this to all BC AFAIR. It should be mentioned that by and large Vancouver is not a smoking city.
There is one other thing to keep in mind. These laws for the most part are Provincial, not municipal. The drinking hours and selling permits are all done at the provincial level, so if the city wants to have a bar open until 4am, they have to get permission from higher levels of government.
Oh yeah, the drinking age in BC is 19. The only places in Canada where it is different AFAIK are Quebec and Alberta, where the age is 18.
And for the record, I have no problem with this whole scanning issue. It is just using technology to do what they have been doing the old fashioned way for years "*ring* Hi there, this is the bouncer from club x, we just had an altercation with a guy wearing y y z and he might be looking for another club to go to, keep an eye out." "thanks, club y out *click*".
I see no problem with this. This is no different than Safeway having their frequent buyer cards. Those keep track of all that information, and more (buying habits).
I don't see this being big brother as they aren't tracking how many drinks you have, what you order, or how long you were in the bar (you aren't scanned as you leave). This is only for identification for a) insurance purposes, b) business purposes [less hassle=better business], c) underage drinking, and d) legal purposes.
Excuse me for a sec...
fucking wads. What the hell are you thinking!!! I had to deal with one of you fuckwits who thought XP Pro supported mirroring. In the documentation on MS's site it even says in glaring letters "mirroring only supported on computers running win2k server/AS/datacenter".
Go home and cry to your mommies. fuckwits.
One additional thing that should be mentioned is not only the Raid 1, but the fact that (at least the adaptec) they also support Raid 0 and 0+1. This means that with 4 drives (2 on each IDE chain) you can stripe the data between two drives AND have it mirrored. Fast as hell reads and faster writes.
I don't know if the promise card has it, but it should.
I personally use a promise IDE controller at home.. it is rock solid. Just make sure that you do do their firmware updates. It does make a difference.
As far as I see it.. 1 vendor = bad, promise = 'we make controller cards... we will expand into raid cards', adaptec = 'ohh...people want cheaper raid, time to go IDE'. I have had a adaptec 1200A go south on me once, but luckily I hadn't finished setting up the system.
Don't mention NeXt... I had to put together a working NeXt box on friday... it took me 3 hours. Mostly because the hardware we had for it...had died. And I needed an intact, working boot drive with NeXt on it.
All I wanted to do was attach a secondary HDD and format it for NeXt so we could send it to a client.
You have to remember that one of the ways that oracle gets its performance is by loading the DB into RAM. It then just writes to disk when there are changes. Of course, this is an oversimplification, but it is true nonetheless.
So if you were disappointed by oracle's performance, try having 1GB+ of RAM, it makes a WORLD of difference.
I work for a company that uses oracle on the systems we sell/support. And I wouldn't go to any other DB for it. (Radiology management/storage)
Speaking as someone who works for a company that does systems for hospitals... I can say that there is normally a reason that we require X windows OS. Normally it is for remote access, or certain features, or it must run certain software.
This effectively prevents linux replacement. Also of note, these NT boxes are secured down so only admins have access to even the start menu, everyone else it opens the program only and when you close it it closes it out.
I'm 22 now and have been shaving since I was 12. I have a very tough growth and it grows fast. Eg: I buy a bic and it doesn't do a good job and is dulled before the end of the shave.
I recently purchased a good $200CDN Phillishave electric shaver which has been good so far. But I still have to use blades for special occasions. Normally I get 1-3 uses out of a Sensor Excel blade before it is dull and gonna nick me.
however most modern motherboards only have about 5 PCI slots..possibly 6 at most.
So by the time you have the requisite NIC, your video card (PCI or AGP), you are left with 3-5 slots left for audio cards.
Then you have issues with the bus bandwidth and that many audio cards.
People have mentioned using 3 card and use the front/rear outputs for different streams, but the cards don't work that way (or at least not without at LOT of driver coding, and no way you can easily get your audio player to recognise this)
There are several solutions to this:
Use more than one machine (cheap machines in each room connected to a central fileserver)
Buy soundcards that have the 5 output streams (note, this is 10 outputs, but 5 streams [L/R audio for each]), but this is expensive
Go to a pro audio shop and ask them, they have stuff built for this.
This is a reason why bosses should never touch servers.
I worked in a place that had a mix of NT4, 2k, 98, and Linux (98 was workstations only) and we ran AD. no problems. The main issues are that you have to set it up right in the first place. It will only replicate what it needs to. IF you are doing something silly with it, no wonder you have problems.
You could FUBAR things just as easily on linux.
BTW: I have the 2.4 kernel, it wouldn't work on a reliable IBM motherboard with SCSI, even though 2.2 did. It is a known issue and yet no-one has fixed it.
actually, our gov does not heavily subsidise forestry.
There are a couple reasons why we are cheaper:
a) our softwood lumber is a higher quality (due to trees/climate b) we modernized our mills many years ago, the US mills are only just now modernizing like we did c) the only "subsidy" is that they can get the land at decent rates. But they also have to plant new trees to replace the old ones (and pay for it)
The thing is that the US lumber idiots have a lobby on dubya. The man who can find a way to fall off a segway while his father doesn't.
Well, I hate to point it out as it will burst your bubble...
But the Marquis De Sade, who lived in france in the time leading up the the french revolution, and during it, was a worse sicko than most people would ever think of. He is where we get the term "sadist" from. Frankly there is a large subculture around the world that goes for rectal penetration, candle wax, and alot worse (electrocution, beastiality, necrophelia to name a few).
Some hentai caters to these people.
As far as the "tentacle monster" genre, there is a reason for that. There is a censor group in japan that deemed that A) you can't show pubic hair, and B) you can't show penises. To get around these censors the artists removed pubic hair (which had the effect of making the characters looks younger, although japanese women tend to look young in the first place), and rather than having a man having sex with these women, they used phallic replacements..and thus was born the tentacle monster.
For a good analysis of this, listen to the commentary track on the La Blue Girl Returns DVD (unfortunately priced very high).
Hypertransport, more bits to address the ram and AGP, more cache, and able to run in 32 or 64bit modes on the fly....
uhh..yeah... This will kick some series intel butt.
AMD has a history of waiting..haveing everyone almost give up on them, then coming out with something which utterly trounces intel, and leaves them struggling to play the press game so they can try to hold on.
They have supposedly equiped the army with a more advanced version of this.
of course they aren't even letting allies have a modified version... which helps allow for mistakes like a hopped up pilot with too much pent-up agression to drop a bomb or two on friendly canadian troops.
well... the flight principle would work at those depths. Assuming the parts can stand the pressure (what they are trying to get done).
even though the pressure has changed, the resistance of the water will be essencially unchanged. (since the propellers will be biting more in the water, producing more thrust, this will ofset any drag problems). Since it is designed to cut through the water rather than force its way through (conventional sub) it should work.
The problems at 39k feet are following:
#1) materials that can stand up to it. I'm sure that a piece of solid metal can, but can the cockpit?
#2) If anything goes wrong...ANYTHING. you are dead.
#3) Making sure your seals can stand the pressure (any that rupture - see 1 & 2)
However if the cockpit can sustain the pressures (since it is smaller than a full regular sub it should be able to take more pressure.) then it should be able to hit those depths no problem. Not only that, but at the proposed dive/accent speeds they might have to worry about the bends. at 400ft/min to go 37,000ft would only take 1.5h. All the "modern" subs/deep subs take much longer than that to hit those depths ('cept some military ones...but they don't go as deep [as far as we know])
This concept has actually been around for a while, however I give massive kudos to these guys for pulling it off not once, but twice. I watched the documentary on discovery about Deep Flight and that was cool. DF Aviator is definately a step in the right direction as it gets rid of the classic sub image.
As for increasing the speed for more than 6knots.. that is a simple equation.
Running time = battery power / draw of props (increases as revs go higher)
So either increase the battery capacity (for the same weight) and speed for the same running time. Or you will sacrifice run time.
Eg: To make it go ~12knots it would take roughly twice the battery power, reducing its effective time from 8h to 4h (I know there are more things..but that is the major factor).
Another technique is to increase the size of the props. But that takes more energy to get them spinning (for more thrust though).
I haven't seen any problems with it. Couple things it may have been:
Maybe it needed a degaussing
Maybe the settings were tweaked in an odd way
Interference
The only oddity I found was when I cranked my stereo speakers (which are on either side of the monitor) and it was at such a level the vibrations and such caused some funky flicker effect in areas. But that was due to exterior causes.
The artist CAN'T declare bankruptsy anymore. They cannot get out of their contract by going bankrupt. Which means the artist is liable for that "loan", not the company.
And the reason unknown artists will give their left nut to be picked up by an album is twofold. one: they have no clue what they are getting into. two: a contract with a major studio is one of the ONLY ways you will get any sort of >local recognition.
One exception to these rules would be The Offspring. But only because they pretty much had their own label and studio set up by the time they made it big (nitro records if I remember right).
Slashdot Mirror
the japanese school system is very rigid and regimented. It is the ultimate test market for these RFIDs since there is a predicable pattern to the student movements.
This allows the school to track down errant kids, make sure everyone is out in case of fire, and parents to know where their kids are, as many work long hours.
I am not saying RFID everything, but in this market (Japan) it works and fits in.
Actually, it isn't.
You only think it is. The reality is that molson canadian and some of the other big canadian beers have a deal with labatts (AFAIR) in the US to bottle under their name, and still only put in wuzzy american amounts of alcohol.
True beers START at 5%.
And we went back and torched the white house. Go canucks!
I live in Canada
The XBox 2 will still have a hard drive in it. The reason for this is that one of the reasons that the xbox has been a success is the ability to rip your music onto it and play it in your favorite games.
This feature demands a hard drive as flash memory, while getting cheaper, does not have the amount of memory avaliable for 100+ songs for as cheap as a hard drive.
That said, I think we will see larger memory cards as saves get bigger, also I hope to see them drop in price.
Above all else, remember that no console has removed major hardware functionality yet.
NES->SNES->N64->GC was all upgrades, each having more features than before
GB->GBP->GBC->GBA->GBA-SP Same deal
PS1->PS2
Dreamcast-> damn you for going under. We loved you.
I look forward to the xbox 2, and while I may not be a person to preorder it, or even get it within 6 months of release, it is on my list of things to get.
The problem with biometrics is that they are still unreliable.
I work for a security company that does install biometric systems..and one of our headaches is fingerprint scanners. the problem is that you must use the same finger, in the same position on the pad, at the same angle, and even then there are quirky. Retinal scanners are much better, however they can detect health information that has privacy issues and are hard to use in a vehicle.
No, a standard immobilizer is the best way (one of hte ones with the chip in the ignition, and maybe a keypad for a clear code for operation).
Two words... "internal security". Just because you have a firewall does not stop things from happenning. All it takes is one floppy from home and you are toast.
first off, what version of winamp.. because v3.x is pretty good (not the beta, the full version) and hasn't got memory leaks that I can see (running win2k).
second..why RealOne?! it has got to be one of the biggest pieces of crapola I have seen.. it IS a memory hog, slow, and pervasive..it gets everywhere... it takes over all your file associations without prompting you (which winamp does), sets itself to run automatically at startup (which winamp doesn't), and other wonderful crappy things.
So here we go:
#1) NO drinking after 2
This is wrong. It is you cannot SELL liquor after 2am. However in the downtown core a number of bars have gotten permission to extend this to 4am.
#2) NO drinking after midnight on sundays
Again wrong... no selling liqour after midnight on sundays (2am for the downtown core bars right now)
#3) NO selling of hard alchohol except in government liqour stores
As the poster said, this was changed over a year ago. It is a non-issue. Also, this only applied to selling bottles, not to selling drinks.
#4) NO drinking in public
This is true. But a number of places have this law.
#5) NO smoking in bars
Actually, this is a bylaw that was put into effect by the city of vancouver that covers all places of work. Including bars, etc. Some tried to ignore it and got nailed. The initiative that failed was the WCB's (Workmans Compensation Board) attempt to apply this to all BC AFAIR. It should be mentioned that by and large Vancouver is not a smoking city.
There is one other thing to keep in mind. These laws for the most part are Provincial, not municipal. The drinking hours and selling permits are all done at the provincial level, so if the city wants to have a bar open until 4am, they have to get permission from higher levels of government.
Oh yeah, the drinking age in BC is 19. The only places in Canada where it is different AFAIK are Quebec and Alberta, where the age is 18.
And for the record, I have no problem with this whole scanning issue. It is just using technology to do what they have been doing the old fashioned way for years "*ring* Hi there, this is the bouncer from club x, we just had an altercation with a guy wearing y y z and he might be looking for another club to go to, keep an eye out." "thanks, club y out *click*".
I see no problem with this. This is no different than Safeway having their frequent buyer cards. Those keep track of all that information, and more (buying habits).
I don't see this being big brother as they aren't tracking how many drinks you have, what you order, or how long you were in the bar (you aren't scanned as you leave). This is only for identification for a) insurance purposes, b) business purposes [less hassle=better business], c) underage drinking, and d) legal purposes.
Excuse me for a sec... fucking wads. What the hell are you thinking!!! I had to deal with one of you fuckwits who thought XP Pro supported mirroring. In the documentation on MS's site it even says in glaring letters "mirroring only supported on computers running win2k server/AS/datacenter". Go home and cry to your mommies. fuckwits.
Both cards are good quality.
One additional thing that should be mentioned is not only the Raid 1, but the fact that (at least the adaptec) they also support Raid 0 and 0+1. This means that with 4 drives (2 on each IDE chain) you can stripe the data between two drives AND have it mirrored. Fast as hell reads and faster writes.
I don't know if the promise card has it, but it should.
I personally use a promise IDE controller at home.. it is rock solid. Just make sure that you do do their firmware updates. It does make a difference.
As far as I see it.. 1 vendor = bad, promise = 'we make controller cards... we will expand into raid cards', adaptec = 'ohh...people want cheaper raid, time to go IDE'. I have had a adaptec 1200A go south on me once, but luckily I hadn't finished setting up the system.
All I wanted to do was attach a secondary HDD and format it for NeXt so we could send it to a client.
You have to remember that one of the ways that oracle gets its performance is by loading the DB into RAM. It then just writes to disk when there are changes. Of course, this is an oversimplification, but it is true nonetheless.
So if you were disappointed by oracle's performance, try having 1GB+ of RAM, it makes a WORLD of difference.
I work for a company that uses oracle on the systems we sell/support. And I wouldn't go to any other DB for it. (Radiology management/storage)
Speaking as someone who works for a company that does systems for hospitals... I can say that there is normally a reason that we require X windows OS. Normally it is for remote access, or certain features, or it must run certain software.
This effectively prevents linux replacement. Also of note, these NT boxes are secured down so only admins have access to even the start menu, everyone else it opens the program only and when you close it it closes it out.
I'm 22 now and have been shaving since I was 12. I have a very tough growth and it grows fast. Eg: I buy a bic and it doesn't do a good job and is dulled before the end of the shave.
I recently purchased a good $200CDN Phillishave electric shaver which has been good so far. But I still have to use blades for special occasions. Normally I get 1-3 uses out of a Sensor Excel blade before it is dull and gonna nick me.
So by the time you have the requisite NIC, your video card (PCI or AGP), you are left with 3-5 slots left for audio cards.
Then you have issues with the bus bandwidth and that many audio cards.
People have mentioned using 3 card and use the front/rear outputs for different streams, but the cards don't work that way (or at least not without at LOT of driver coding, and no way you can easily get your audio player to recognise this)
There are several solutions to this:
Good Luck
I worked in a place that had a mix of NT4, 2k, 98, and Linux (98 was workstations only) and we ran AD. no problems. The main issues are that you have to set it up right in the first place. It will only replicate what it needs to. IF you are doing something silly with it, no wonder you have problems.
You could FUBAR things just as easily on linux.
BTW: I have the 2.4 kernel, it wouldn't work on a reliable IBM motherboard with SCSI, even though 2.2 did. It is a known issue and yet no-one has fixed it.
jeez...
If you buy a $2.00 item in British Columbia you have 7% GST (14 cents) + 7.5% PST (15 cents), giving you a total of $2.29.
Now, let us use $1.99, 7% = 13.94 cents, 7.5% = 14.925. This is 2.27865, rounded up to $2.28.
Wow, you paid 1 less cent, like the one you had different on the price. It is a psycological pricing.
actually, our gov does not heavily subsidise forestry.
There are a couple reasons why we are cheaper:
a) our softwood lumber is a higher quality (due to trees/climate
b) we modernized our mills many years ago, the US mills are only just now modernizing like we did
c) the only "subsidy" is that they can get the land at decent rates. But they also have to plant new trees to replace the old ones (and pay for it)
The thing is that the US lumber idiots have a lobby on dubya. The man who can find a way to fall off a segway while his father doesn't.
The reason it was eliminated was the negative connutations of it. a $2 bill used to be the going rate for a Hooker. (Hense the phrase "a $2 whore")
It was eliminated due to thus negative stigma attached to it.
But the Marquis De Sade, who lived in france in the time leading up the the french revolution, and during it, was a worse sicko than most people would ever think of. He is where we get the term "sadist" from. Frankly there is a large subculture around the world that goes for rectal penetration, candle wax, and alot worse (electrocution, beastiality, necrophelia to name a few).
Some hentai caters to these people.
As far as the "tentacle monster" genre, there is a reason for that. There is a censor group in japan that deemed that A) you can't show pubic hair, and B) you can't show penises. To get around these censors the artists removed pubic hair (which had the effect of making the characters looks younger, although japanese women tend to look young in the first place), and rather than having a man having sex with these women, they used phallic replacements..and thus was born the tentacle monster.
For a good analysis of this, listen to the commentary track on the La Blue Girl Returns DVD (unfortunately priced very high).
uhh..yeah... This will kick some series intel butt.
AMD has a history of waiting..haveing everyone almost give up on them, then coming out with something which utterly trounces intel, and leaves them struggling to play the press game so they can try to hold on.
They have supposedly equiped the army with a more advanced version of this.
of course they aren't even letting allies have a modified version... which helps allow for mistakes like a hopped up pilot with too much pent-up agression to drop a bomb or two on friendly canadian troops.
The problems at 39k feet are following:
#1) materials that can stand up to it. I'm sure that a piece of solid metal can, but can the cockpit? #2) If anything goes wrong...ANYTHING. you are dead. #3) Making sure your seals can stand the pressure (any that rupture - see 1 & 2)
However if the cockpit can sustain the pressures (since it is smaller than a full regular sub it should be able to take more pressure.) then it should be able to hit those depths no problem. Not only that, but at the proposed dive/accent speeds they might have to worry about the bends. at 400ft/min to go 37,000ft would only take 1.5h. All the "modern" subs/deep subs take much longer than that to hit those depths ('cept some military ones...but they don't go as deep [as far as we know])
This concept has actually been around for a while, however I give massive kudos to these guys for pulling it off not once, but twice. I watched the documentary on discovery about Deep Flight and that was cool. DF Aviator is definately a step in the right direction as it gets rid of the classic sub image.
As for increasing the speed for more than 6knots.. that is a simple equation.
Running time = battery power / draw of props (increases as revs go higher)
So either increase the battery capacity (for the same weight) and speed for the same running time. Or you will sacrifice run time.
Eg: To make it go ~12knots it would take roughly twice the battery power, reducing its effective time from 8h to 4h (I know there are more things..but that is the major factor).
Another technique is to increase the size of the props. But that takes more energy to get them spinning (for more thrust though).
Maybe it needed a degaussing
Maybe the settings were tweaked in an odd way
Interference
The only oddity I found was when I cranked my stereo speakers (which are on either side of the monitor) and it was at such a level the vibrations and such caused some funky flicker effect in areas. But that was due to exterior causes.
There is a problem with this though...
Read courtney's article.
The artist CAN'T declare bankruptsy anymore. They cannot get out of their contract by going bankrupt. Which means the artist is liable for that "loan", not the company.
And the reason unknown artists will give their left nut to be picked up by an album is twofold. one: they have no clue what they are getting into. two: a contract with a major studio is one of the ONLY ways you will get any sort of >local recognition.
One exception to these rules would be The Offspring. But only because they pretty much had their own label and studio set up by the time they made it big (nitro records if I remember right).