IPv6 will not run out of addresses - it will use 128-bit address space.
By my limited understanding of IPv6, this statement is rather false and misleading. Is the address space 128 bits? Yes, somewhat. But does that give a good account of the number of addresses available, NO. IPv6 has several different types of addresses, and the total number of actual addresses is far smaller that 2^128 would indicate.
$0.79 per song, but with a $9.99/month subscription.
So they expect people to pay $9.99 a month for the privledge of being allowed to pay them per song for lossy compressed songs? I guess there are some fools who will.
Sorry, but tunneling is a purely quantum phenomenon and we currently have no solid theory about quantum gravity. The blackhole "leaks" radiation from its event horizon due to pair creation.
Pair creation is simply a different way to look at tunneling. It doesn't matter if you call it pair creation or tunneling; they are the same thing with the same results just taken from two views that differ acording to relativity of the same event. If worshiping at the church of pair creation makes it easier for someone to believe, fine. The results are the same. This is quantum dynamics, and there are a lot stranger things in quantum dynamics than tunneling or pair creation (like wave/particle duality). You can't apply an understanding of the macro world to the quanta world to just dismiss tunneling.
First off, IANAQP (I am not a quantum physicist), but, that said, some corrections are in order... first of all black holes do
not release matter as they dissipate, they release radiation (according to Dr. Hawking at least).
Radiation - matter - energy - it's all the same thing. Matter is just lumpy energy. Look at it as radiation that would have non-zero rest mass, or look at it as the mass of the black hole is going down and so going somewhere. Beyond that it's just an exercise in relativity if you want to call what comes out of the event horizon matter or energy.
Erm... and progressivly loose money on every transaction just like
My point was that it would have been the same loss that would happen if the Aussie got his way and our penny was done away with (you can bet the stores will round up but not down, it happens now when something is 3 for a dollar but one costs 34 cents). If you want to take the loss fine, but I don't need someone from down under trying to screw up our currency system because he can't figure out you should give the store one or two pennies when he buys something to aviod getting three or four back in change.
it's really hard to work out how much an item is going to be before you come to pay for it... so rather than holding up the line while you count out the pennies...
Actually, if it's a single item I generally know. But even if it's a basket full of stuff you can easily be ready, just have 3 or 4 pennies handy (if you don't have 3 then what are you complaining about?) and give the clerk as many as are needed to avoid getting any pennies back, takes no time at all to figuree that out unless you're "special". No, you don't count out 96 cents in pennies to avoid getting four back, but if your total comes to $xx.96 it's easy enough to give them the dollars and an extra penny to get a nickel back rather than four coppers.
If you buy a collection of items that come to $19.92 you get it for $19.90
As said above, with an example, they never round down in the states. The customes looses.
pay for most things with credit card
Exactly! So why are you wanting to screw up another country's currency system to fit your own narrow view of how things "should be" when you could have bought most stuff with a credit card all along. No only would it have saved you from the awful burden of carrying a few pennies, but it is the best way to avoid paying extra for converting currency - you just put the charges on your plastic and Master Card or Visa do the conversion for you at the current exchange rate. You don't pay an outrageous fee to convert a lot of cash and you don't pay again to convert it back when you go home. (Whatever your last purchase is, or when you settle your hotel bill, pay whatever you have in local cash and put the rest on your cerdit card to avoid having to turn anything back into local currency when you get home. So your problem is solved and you can stop bitching about a currency system that isn't even yours and that you clearly could avoid having problems with.
The reference to the Hawkings Effect is the key. Steve H. has a well accepted theory that black holes leak. The smaller they are the faster they leak. (It's basically a quantum effect, if the black hole is low enough mass the singularity is close enough to the event horizon to let some matter tunnel out and escape. The event horizon shrinks further until the black hole evaporates.) If all goes right the holes we could create with our limited technology couldn't last long enough to cause any problems. This of course is all just theory, if he's wrong there will be hell to pay.
Man, that was the single thing that pissed me off the most about using money in the states, those damn pennies... get rid of them! Each week I'd accumulate a ridiculous weight in 1c coins... So I'm very happy to be back in Australia
where the lowest denomanation we have is the 5c, much less in the way of change.
The solution to that "problem" is simple, if you don't want the pennies just don't take them. Many places even have a small dish on the counter for just that reason, if you need a penny (to avoid getting 4 back) and you see one in the dish, just use it. And if you don't want a few pennies you get in change leave them in the dish for some other guy. Or just quit collecting them in your pocket, spend them on your next cash purchase that isn't an even multiple of 5 cents (that's what I do). Getting rid of them would just effectively raise prices on everything by several cents (by as much as 7 or 8 cents AU). We don't need that. If you're too lazy to get out a few cents when you have a pocket full of them and you make another purchase, you deserve to carry them around or leave them for someone who appreciates them.
Actually, we have a great anti-counterfitting technology in all US currency that could easily replace the stupid pens with an electronic pen that costs just a few dollars, and would not mark or harm the bill at all. In addition to the color changing ink, the watermark, and the embedded plastic stripe (which the conspiracy theorists amoung us know the gub'mint uses to detect how much money you carry through the airport with remote sensors), all U.S. bills are printed with magnetic ink. Run a small recording head over the portrait of a real bill and you'll get a nice detectable signal from the background of the picture. Move the recording pick-up at a known speed and you can even determine the denomination from the frequency. And the inkjet printers will produce a bill that gives no response at all, no matter what paper it's printed on.
(We have no 1 dollar notes, we have $1 and $2 coins, much better to use).
Don't get so smug. Considering the exchange rate for the AU$ and the US$, we in the U.S. have a coin roughly comparable to the AU$ coin, we just call it a half dollar (1 AUD = 0.658961 USD). I have a few in my pocket right now. We have no half dollar notes, so we're about the same there. We also have dollar coins, have for centuries, and although they are not as popular as paper currency, they are reasonably common. Again, have a few in my pocket and a bunch in my car. (And, of course, there are higher denomination coins that are still legal tender, but they are not in general circulation and not as commonly available unless you get them from a collector).
The reason we still have paper $1 currency is that we have resisted people telling us that a heavy pocket full of coins is "much better to use" than paper money. The government has tried to tell us that, but we know they always lie, and experience with several dollar coins over recent years has born that out.
The clock chip in question (and others like it) produces some pretty specific clock frequencies, but overall the frequencies provided don't seem to have much use. On the other hand, he's added a pic to the process, and by itself the pic could output a wide range of frequencies under program control. True, it can't directly output as high of frequencies, but I don't know what big use he could have for that limited selection of high frequencies.
I do like the idea of a usb controled and powered
frequency source, but I would settle for lower frequencies but greater tunability than just a dozen presets and use the PIC directly. Or better yet, use the PIC and a multiplier circuit if you want the high frequency values the PC clock circuit offers.
Since the clock chip in question uses a 14.318 mhz crystal and PLL frequency multiplication to get the higher frequencies, you might even be able to still use a hacked MB clock circuit, but feed it a clock generated by the PIC rather than from the clock crystal. The top end would still be lower with this approach (better to just use a stand alone PLL and a divider feedback circuit), but it would allow one to get reasonably high frequency by very tunable signals.
Since there are likely to be a number of people teading this that have good command of the topic, let me ask a question on isotopes. All through school I was taught that different isotopes of an element have the same chemical property. That information is still found in most articles on the subject. Yet I recently found a reference that Heavy Water was poisonous. Since there is no radiation danger, how can heavy water be poisonous if isotopes are chemically identical? What is going on here? And what are the indications of heavy water poisoning?
Ticket price is not the principle motivating
factor in the business model of most theaters
I disagree. I was visiting in Texas when X-men came out. Saw it in a first run, nice theater in the Dallas area. Matinee tickets were 2 bucks for an adult, Saturday evening tickets were $4. Back here in North Carolina the same tickets were $5.75 for the matinee show and over $8 for the evening show. Clearly the local theater was charging that to make extra profits, and their concession prices are so high that most people avoid them. Other local theaters (different chains) charge similar prices.
Less than 10$ in parts, but a hundred
bucks in software?
He gives you the compiled software, as well as the source, so you don't need VB to make your own. Guess you could still complain that he didn't give you a computer though, if you just want to cry about something.
I just bought an HP notebook a few months ago (here in the U.S., where I couldn't avoid the M$ tax). Since then I've seen another HP notebook with a faster Athlon and bigger hard disk (40 gig vs. 30 gig) for the same $850 I paid. Considering that HP will build the systems with 20, 30 or 40 gig drives, will put a 14.5 inch rather than a 15 inch screen, give a choice of CPU, and will sell it with a DVD drive rather than the DVD/CDRW drive I got, it certainly makes sense that you can get a decent Linux notebook for this price, although I would expect a 40 gig version with a DVD/CDRW drive and a hot processor to certainly be more. But HP could well sell decent notebooks here at that price too if they dropped the M$ tax.
"I've used computers for about 30 years and over that time their hardware reliability has improved (but not that much), but their software reliability has remained largely unchanged.
I've been using computers a few years longer. Heck, I've owned computers a few years longer (yes, that makes my first one prior to the 8080 micro chip). But even 25 years ago I saw Data General systems with a lot less raw power than a Pentium that ran a multi-user OS and supported an office full of users, and routinely ran without crashing or even being shut down from year to year, and were only rebooted when the tech came around to give them a scheduled prevenative maintence. Sure, some systems did fail (and some in quite interesting ways), but it was the exception, not the rule. The thing that I see as having changed is that Bill Gates became the richest man in the world, while at the same time giving us an OS that crashed so regularly that it just can't stay up. And somehow people accepted it. How he got away with it I don't understand.
Roxio bought the Napster brand and assets
at a bankruptcy auction last year and plans to resurrect Napster as a legal service."
Well, this will certainly be the end of Roxio.
The Napster model just will not work expecting users to pay for the service and also spend their own bandwidth and hard disk storage to supply music files Roxio can make money on. Also, they will not have good results trying to get people to pay for music when the quality is as questionable as what might be found on a random user's system. And there would even be resistance on the user community's part against anything that made a buck for the RIAA. As a "free" underground system the Napster approach worked well, but it's just not viable as a pay system, never was.
Considering the direction other Roxio products have taken, good ridance.
tapes will start from three to five
minutes before the cop turned on the recorder.
The cop should never "turn on the recorder". In a world with growing police abuse, this recorder should always be on, making a record that accurately records what happened at all times, not just when the cop turns on the recorder. Current video technology and hard drive size certainly could allow for a 24 hour capture and a download to the central server (that 3.4 terabyte does seem small for video for a fleet of cars though) on a daily basis when the car comes back to the station. I would also advocate a little data captured with the video, including car speed and status of the lights and siren at the least.
It would do a lot to impprove my faith in the cops if I knew there was a record of their activity that is not turned on and off at their whim.
AMD, the article says, doesn't want you to use anything "other than Shin Estu G 749.
And what kind of stupid look do you think I would get if I went into my local computer retailer, ever the one with the AMD logo pasted on their wall, and siad I wanted to buy Shin Estu G 749.
AMD doesn't want to be responsible for people using too weak of heatsink/fans or too much thermal grease. What is the problem here?
Let me explain the problem with a simple example. And this has nothing to do with those who want to overclock their CPU or otherwise soup up their system.
The fan on the "stock heatsink" they talk about is less than quiet, but more importantly is poor enough that in many cases it will not even last the life of the warranty on the CPU. And the phase change material is "one use", you can't remove the heat sink and reapply it again with the same strip of heat sink material and have it function properly. When my heat sink fan died some months after I started using it (as detected by the BIOS seeing it slowing down considerably and a reelated increase in CPU temperature), I went to the local CompUSA and got a replacement copper fan. The "stock heatsink" just isn't always available. The replacement heatsink does a far better job, but I had to use a non-conductive thermal grease to install it. By this proclimation, I would have voided my warranty in two ways, using thermal grease and a better but non-standard heat sink.
I much prefer AMD over Intel, but if AMD is going to do this they need to consider some real world situations. As far as I know they don't warranty the heatsink fan, and even if they were to start it would not be reasonable for them to expect a user to not use their computer for the time it takes to ship back a bad fan and get a replacement. If they were supplying a fan and heatsink that would never need replacement, they might be on a more moral high ground, but having a stock fan that dies easily and then claiming you void the warranty if you correctly replace the heat sink isn't user friendly. And, of course, there are some people wo have a problem with the noise the stock fan makes, and while the argument is not as strong as the one I just made, I think they should be able to replace the stock haetsink and fan with a quieter one if they want, as long as they follow good technical procedures. I certainly don't have a problem with AMD stating they will not be responsiable for problems caused by conductive thermal grease, but this policy does seem to go too far, particularly given the fan they supply on that heatsink.
Games may be good for learning the
process of putting together a Burger King hamburger (p264), but would a game be practical
for learning Java programming?
The problem as I see it is that "Educational" games and "Educational software" in general are never any fun, at least none that I've seen come to mind (I'll admit there's a chance that someone has a good educational game I've not seen). On the other hand, I think a lot of software that is not presented as "educational" can teach you a lot. Programs like flight sims, while not a substitute for real flying training, can give you a good background in the subject, while many puzzle games can challenge the play to think and in doing so teach many logical and abstract math concepts. There are plenty of other examples wher programs presented as games or toys or simply interesting software are far more educational that anything marketed as "educational software". It's just a shame that software presented as "Educational software" is synonymous with "software that will bore you to death".
As to would a game be practical for learning Java programming?, Yes, but not in the playing of it. I find games are a great way to teach programming, let the users play games, and a few bright inquiring minds will want to know how the game works. They will want to be able to write their own. They will have a different idea for a game. While I've actually seen some "educational" environments that prohibited users from writing games, I believe it should be strongly encouraged. With a few simple resources (even the source for a prior game), may intelligent and interested people can teach themselves to program, be it Java, or C, or other languages. The motivation and a task to accomplish are the important things a game contributes. Those who never get the motivation but just move on to the next consumer game likely would not have made great programmers anyway.
A simpler solution would just be to put a bounty on the head of the spammer, and let us hunt them down and bring them in dead or alive, but preferably the former. First few bounties collected this way would do a lot to resolve the problem.
get a better tailor, it doesn't fit
on
Mini-Box M-100
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Looks tailor-made for a home audio/visual system.
Hardly. At $500 for a tiny box that can't even hold a CD or DVD drive, and extremely restricts what else you can do with it, it seem a very expensive tiny toy.
For not much more you can get a decent laptop, which would include a DVD drive/cd writer, an LCD display, hard drive, TV out and all the rest and take up about the same amount of space while the laptop is closed. Or just get a much less expensive small desktop system or put together your own.
There might be some valid use for this little thing at that price, but only in very specific dedicated applications, and certainly not for a home audio/visual system.
That you can't run FoxPro on Wine is such bullshit. This Microsoft complaint against Hentzen shows as much as anything else does that they indeed do abuse thier OS monopoly to affect the products, a key argument that they denied in the antitrust trial.
Personally, I think he should just ignore M$, the claim is bigus. But on the chance that he doesn't have the billions it would take for an honest man to stand up against these crooks in court, the solution here is obvious. FoxPro wasn't always a Microsoft product. He should get a legal copy of a pre-microsoft version of FoxPro (ebay, or from some good soul who has it and will send it to him), and start demoing the hell out of it and wine to really piss of Microsoft. Microsoft's opposition to his doing this will only help make him ten times more visable, with a solution that they have no legal standing to object to at all.
Slashdot Mirror
By my limited understanding of IPv6, this statement is rather false and misleading. Is the address space 128 bits? Yes, somewhat. But does that give a good account of the number of addresses available, NO. IPv6 has several different types of addresses, and the total number of actual addresses is far smaller that 2^128 would indicate.
So they expect people to pay $9.99 a month for the privledge of being allowed to pay them per song for lossy compressed songs? I guess there are some fools who will.
Pair creation is simply a different way to look at tunneling. It doesn't matter if you call it pair creation or tunneling; they are the same thing with the same results just taken from two views that differ acording to relativity of the same event. If worshiping at the church of pair creation makes it easier for someone to believe, fine. The results are the same. This is quantum dynamics, and there are a lot stranger things in quantum dynamics than tunneling or pair creation (like wave/particle duality). You can't apply an understanding of the macro world to the quanta world to just dismiss tunneling.
Radiation - matter - energy - it's all the same thing. Matter is just lumpy energy. Look at it as radiation that would have non-zero rest mass, or look at it as the mass of the black hole is going down and so going somewhere. Beyond that it's just an exercise in relativity if you want to call what comes out of the event horizon matter or energy.
My point was that it would have been the same loss that would happen if the Aussie got his way and our penny was done away with (you can bet the stores will round up but not down, it happens now when something is 3 for a dollar but one costs 34 cents). If you want to take the loss fine, but I don't need someone from down under trying to screw up our currency system because he can't figure out you should give the store one or two pennies when he buys something to aviod getting three or four back in change.
it's really hard to work out how much an item is going to be before you come to pay for it... so rather than holding up the line while you count out the pennies...
Actually, if it's a single item I generally know. But even if it's a basket full of stuff you can easily be ready, just have 3 or 4 pennies handy (if you don't have 3 then what are you complaining about?) and give the clerk as many as are needed to avoid getting any pennies back, takes no time at all to figuree that out unless you're "special". No, you don't count out 96 cents in pennies to avoid getting four back, but if your total comes to $xx.96 it's easy enough to give them the dollars and an extra penny to get a nickel back rather than four coppers.
If you buy a collection of items that come to $19.92 you get it for $19.90
As said above, with an example, they never round down in the states. The customes looses.
pay for most things with credit card
Exactly! So why are you wanting to screw up another country's currency system to fit your own narrow view of how things "should be" when you could have bought most stuff with a credit card all along. No only would it have saved you from the awful burden of carrying a few pennies, but it is the best way to avoid paying extra for converting currency - you just put the charges on your plastic and Master Card or Visa do the conversion for you at the current exchange rate. You don't pay an outrageous fee to convert a lot of cash and you don't pay again to convert it back when you go home. (Whatever your last purchase is, or when you settle your hotel bill, pay whatever you have in local cash and put the rest on your cerdit card to avoid having to turn anything back into local currency when you get home. So your problem is solved and you can stop bitching about a currency system that isn't even yours and that you clearly could avoid having problems with.
The reference to the Hawkings Effect is the key. Steve H. has a well accepted theory that black holes leak. The smaller they are the faster they leak. (It's basically a quantum effect, if the black hole is low enough mass the singularity is close enough to the event horizon to let some matter tunnel out and escape. The event horizon shrinks further until the black hole evaporates.) If all goes right the holes we could create with our limited technology couldn't last long enough to cause any problems. This of course is all just theory, if he's wrong there will be hell to pay.
The solution to that "problem" is simple, if you don't want the pennies just don't take them. Many places even have a small dish on the counter for just that reason, if you need a penny (to avoid getting 4 back) and you see one in the dish, just use it. And if you don't want a few pennies you get in change leave them in the dish for some other guy. Or just quit collecting them in your pocket, spend them on your next cash purchase that isn't an even multiple of 5 cents (that's what I do). Getting rid of them would just effectively raise prices on everything by several cents (by as much as 7 or 8 cents AU). We don't need that. If you're too lazy to get out a few cents when you have a pocket full of them and you make another purchase, you deserve to carry them around or leave them for someone who appreciates them.
Actually, we have a great anti-counterfitting technology in all US currency that could easily replace the stupid pens with an electronic pen that costs just a few dollars, and would not mark or harm the bill at all. In addition to the color changing ink, the watermark, and the embedded plastic stripe (which the conspiracy theorists amoung us know the gub'mint uses to detect how much money you carry through the airport with remote sensors), all U.S. bills are printed with magnetic ink. Run a small recording head over the portrait of a real bill and you'll get a nice detectable signal from the background of the picture. Move the recording pick-up at a known speed and you can even determine the denomination from the frequency. And the inkjet printers will produce a bill that gives no response at all, no matter what paper it's printed on.
Don't get so smug. Considering the exchange rate for the AU$ and the US$, we in the U.S. have a coin roughly comparable to the AU$ coin, we just call it a half dollar (1 AUD = 0.658961 USD). I have a few in my pocket right now. We have no half dollar notes, so we're about the same there. We also have dollar coins, have for centuries, and although they are not as popular as paper currency, they are reasonably common. Again, have a few in my pocket and a bunch in my car. (And, of course, there are higher denomination coins that are still legal tender, but they are not in general circulation and not as commonly available unless you get them from a collector).
The reason we still have paper $1 currency is that we have resisted people telling us that a heavy pocket full of coins is " much better to use " than paper money. The government has tried to tell us that, but we know they always lie, and experience with several dollar coins over recent years has born that out.
I do like the idea of a usb controled and powered frequency source, but I would settle for lower frequencies but greater tunability than just a dozen presets and use the PIC directly. Or better yet, use the PIC and a multiplier circuit if you want the high frequency values the PC clock circuit offers.
Since the clock chip in question uses a 14.318 mhz crystal and PLL frequency multiplication to get the higher frequencies, you might even be able to still use a hacked MB clock circuit, but feed it a clock generated by the PIC rather than from the clock crystal. The top end would still be lower with this approach (better to just use a stand alone PLL and a divider feedback circuit), but it would allow one to get reasonably high frequency by very tunable signals.
Since there are likely to be a number of people teading this that have good command of the topic, let me ask a question on isotopes. All through school I was taught that different isotopes of an element have the same chemical property. That information is still found in most articles on the subject. Yet I recently found a reference that Heavy Water was poisonous. Since there is no radiation danger, how can heavy water be poisonous if isotopes are chemically identical? What is going on here? And what are the indications of heavy water poisoning?
I disagree. I was visiting in Texas when X-men came out. Saw it in a first run, nice theater in the Dallas area. Matinee tickets were 2 bucks for an adult, Saturday evening tickets were $4. Back here in North Carolina the same tickets were $5.75 for the matinee show and over $8 for the evening show. Clearly the local theater was charging that to make extra profits, and their concession prices are so high that most people avoid them. Other local theaters (different chains) charge similar prices.
He gives you the compiled software, as well as the source, so you don't need VB to make your own. Guess you could still complain that he didn't give you a computer though, if you just want to cry about something.
I just bought an HP notebook a few months ago (here in the U.S., where I couldn't avoid the M$ tax). Since then I've seen another HP notebook with a faster Athlon and bigger hard disk (40 gig vs. 30 gig) for the same $850 I paid. Considering that HP will build the systems with 20, 30 or 40 gig drives, will put a 14.5 inch rather than a 15 inch screen, give a choice of CPU, and will sell it with a DVD drive rather than the DVD/CDRW drive I got, it certainly makes sense that you can get a decent Linux notebook for this price, although I would expect a 40 gig version with a DVD/CDRW drive and a hot processor to certainly be more. But HP could well sell decent notebooks here at that price too if they dropped the M$ tax.
I've been using computers a few years longer. Heck, I've owned computers a few years longer (yes, that makes my first one prior to the 8080 micro chip). But even 25 years ago I saw Data General systems with a lot less raw power than a Pentium that ran a multi-user OS and supported an office full of users, and routinely ran without crashing or even being shut down from year to year, and were only rebooted when the tech came around to give them a scheduled prevenative maintence. Sure, some systems did fail (and some in quite interesting ways), but it was the exception, not the rule. The thing that I see as having changed is that Bill Gates became the richest man in the world, while at the same time giving us an OS that crashed so regularly that it just can't stay up. And somehow people accepted it. How he got away with it I don't understand.
Well, this will certainly be the end of Roxio. The Napster model just will not work expecting users to pay for the service and also spend their own bandwidth and hard disk storage to supply music files Roxio can make money on. Also, they will not have good results trying to get people to pay for music when the quality is as questionable as what might be found on a random user's system. And there would even be resistance on the user community's part against anything that made a buck for the RIAA. As a "free" underground system the Napster approach worked well, but it's just not viable as a pay system, never was.
Considering the direction other Roxio products have taken, good ridance.
The cop should never "turn on the recorder". In a world with growing police abuse, this recorder should always be on, making a record that accurately records what happened at all times, not just when the cop turns on the recorder. Current video technology and hard drive size certainly could allow for a 24 hour capture and a download to the central server (that 3.4 terabyte does seem small for video for a fleet of cars though) on a daily basis when the car comes back to the station. I would also advocate a little data captured with the video, including car speed and status of the lights and siren at the least.
It would do a lot to impprove my faith in the cops if I knew there was a record of their activity that is not turned on and off at their whim.
I sure don't think so. It would have been hard to make a post a year ago that refuted an AMD policy that is apparently new now.
And what kind of stupid look do you think I would get if I went into my local computer retailer, ever the one with the AMD logo pasted on their wall, and siad I wanted to buy Shin Estu G 749.
Let me explain the problem with a simple example. And this has nothing to do with those who want to overclock their CPU or otherwise soup up their system.
The fan on the "stock heatsink" they talk about is less than quiet, but more importantly is poor enough that in many cases it will not even last the life of the warranty on the CPU. And the phase change material is "one use", you can't remove the heat sink and reapply it again with the same strip of heat sink material and have it function properly. When my heat sink fan died some months after I started using it (as detected by the BIOS seeing it slowing down considerably and a reelated increase in CPU temperature), I went to the local CompUSA and got a replacement copper fan. The "stock heatsink" just isn't always available. The replacement heatsink does a far better job, but I had to use a non-conductive thermal grease to install it. By this proclimation, I would have voided my warranty in two ways, using thermal grease and a better but non-standard heat sink.
I much prefer AMD over Intel, but if AMD is going to do this they need to consider some real world situations. As far as I know they don't warranty the heatsink fan, and even if they were to start it would not be reasonable for them to expect a user to not use their computer for the time it takes to ship back a bad fan and get a replacement. If they were supplying a fan and heatsink that would never need replacement, they might be on a more moral high ground, but having a stock fan that dies easily and then claiming you void the warranty if you correctly replace the heat sink isn't user friendly. And, of course, there are some people wo have a problem with the noise the stock fan makes, and while the argument is not as strong as the one I just made, I think they should be able to replace the stock haetsink and fan with a quieter one if they want, as long as they follow good technical procedures. I certainly don't have a problem with AMD stating they will not be responsiable for problems caused by conductive thermal grease, but this policy does seem to go too far, particularly given the fan they supply on that heatsink.
The problem as I see it is that "Educational" games and "Educational software" in general are never any fun, at least none that I've seen come to mind (I'll admit there's a chance that someone has a good educational game I've not seen). On the other hand, I think a lot of software that is not presented as "educational" can teach you a lot. Programs like flight sims, while not a substitute for real flying training, can give you a good background in the subject, while many puzzle games can challenge the play to think and in doing so teach many logical and abstract math concepts. There are plenty of other examples wher programs presented as games or toys or simply interesting software are far more educational that anything marketed as "educational software". It's just a shame that software presented as "Educational software" is synonymous with "software that will bore you to death".
As to would a game be practical for learning Java programming?, Yes, but not in the playing of it. I find games are a great way to teach programming, let the users play games, and a few bright inquiring minds will want to know how the game works. They will want to be able to write their own. They will have a different idea for a game. While I've actually seen some "educational" environments that prohibited users from writing games, I believe it should be strongly encouraged. With a few simple resources (even the source for a prior game), may intelligent and interested people can teach themselves to program, be it Java, or C, or other languages. The motivation and a task to accomplish are the important things a game contributes. Those who never get the motivation but just move on to the next consumer game likely would not have made great programmers anyway.
A simpler solution would just be to put a bounty on the head of the spammer, and let us hunt them down and bring them in dead or alive, but preferably the former. First few bounties collected this way would do a lot to resolve the problem.
Hardly. At $500 for a tiny box that can't even hold a CD or DVD drive, and extremely restricts what else you can do with it, it seem a very expensive tiny toy.
For not much more you can get a decent laptop, which would include a DVD drive/cd writer, an LCD display, hard drive, TV out and all the rest and take up about the same amount of space while the laptop is closed. Or just get a much less expensive small desktop system or put together your own.
There might be some valid use for this little thing at that price, but only in very specific dedicated applications, and certainly not for a home audio/visual system.
Perhaps with all the heated argument over the name, the Mozilla browser should not be called Firebird but rather it should be named Flamethrower.
Personally, I think he should just ignore M$, the claim is bigus. But on the chance that he doesn't have the billions it would take for an honest man to stand up against these crooks in court, the solution here is obvious. FoxPro wasn't always a Microsoft product. He should get a legal copy of a pre-microsoft version of FoxPro (ebay, or from some good soul who has it and will send it to him), and start demoing the hell out of it and wine to really piss of Microsoft. Microsoft's opposition to his doing this will only help make him ten times more visable, with a solution that they have no legal standing to object to at all.