Tornado thing, that thing which is supposed to create a vortex?
I wonder would it work on my sidedrafts... Direct line to the intake port, and as the intake ports has been opened a bit, and the degree of entrance made lesser, it MIGHT just work, because the air will not be stopped, or has to turn significantly at any point, a bit crammed as the intake port gets smaller and smaller closer you get to the valve, but no steep turns.
However, i see one major problem with the whole idea, air has mass and inertia, and that vortex needs energy to put into motion (engine intake "sucking the air"), now, is the increased drag to make the vortex happen greater than that of possible benefit by mistifying the air:fuel mixture better, when it has to travel A LOT longer distance in the intake port, thus hitting more bumps, scratches etc. to mistify it more. Who knows, only dyno would show that, after tuning the carbs again for the usage of the things.
However, carbs, especially sidedrafts, has a huge problem with the mist on low rpm, fuel doesn't get mistifyed well enough. so it just might work for low RPM at the cost of high RPM, depending upon the tuneup, intake port size, carb and it's venturi size, the angles on which the "blades" are to create the vortex, and how much the blades block the intake.
Pictures of the things i've seen which create these vortexes looks like they block quite an area of the intake.
However, there is something which helps on it. I've not tested, but what i've read up on it sounds quite convincing: ACETONE. A very tiny amount (0.1-0.2%) of acetone in the fuel would decrease the surface tension of gas, and therefore it would mistifyi better. Downside? Some car's gaskets and hoses can't take acetone and swells.
I'm interested in hearing if anyone has tried acetone around in./, what were the results?
Exactly! I've seen bad maintenance double up the consumption... More precisely on my own car... When the piston rings failed, and i had been knowing the day is coming when things fail...
On old carburated cars aswell, their tuning is very important, but no one ever tunes them after they come out of the factory, therefore, overtime consumption increases as the cylinders gets looser, and crap piles up in the intake parts etc.
One often forgotten thing for fuel consumption is tire pressure, and width aswell. The rolling drag is way higher with wider tires, and with lower pressures.
But the stupidest thing is that most people could save up A LOT of gas by changing their driving style, yet, be where they need to be in time! Nothing beats human stupidity
Actually, modern electric motors can achieve even 96% efficiency, they are called brushless motors:)
Only touching points are the bearings, 3-phase, magnet in the center, coils around it. Very Very Very efficient. Also, theoretically they have unlimited torque. In practice, how much Amps you can supply to it dictates torque, and then how much your coils and wiring can take.
I swapped on a RC car from NiMH and brushed setting to a LiPo and Brushless setting. The change was mindstorming. From sluggish acceleration to around 40km/h, to hell of a fast acceleration till around 90km/h, the remainder of top speed till 108km/h taking most of the time.
NiMh brushed offered with competition 4000mAh package around 15mins of driving time. LiPo brushless with 8000mAh battery pack offered usually around 1½hour of driving time at best, and regularly 45-60mins.
never going to happen, there's always people wanting to gain access to such a system.
Their reasons to access LHC Grid might be many, maybe completely irrelevant to LHC itself, but gaining access to that grid. What secrets may lie in that network?
Or what could you accomplish with all that bandwidth, storage space and computational power within your grasb?
Think of the terrifying idea that in LHC GRID most of the servers in it could directly access internet on a very fast connection used as a botnet to send spam, or even worse and more likely, attack DNS root servers or something along those lines.
and like you said, some people just want to do it because they can.
This attack was catched, but think about the possibility of a stealth attack which has gone unnoticed.
you are wrong, some of us are using more manual charging of batteries still...
in RC circles, the cheapest charging methods usually are just "dumping" energy into them. Even i used still a year ago to use an 12V car battery charger, with an car light bulb to limit the flow a bit, attached directly to 7.2 4000mAh (4Ah) pack, warm? Almost full. Almost hurting warm? Full. And no my batteries didn't have very short lifespan. Comparatively speaking.
with RC cars, battery lifespan is ALWAYS very very short. Competition battery packs have a lifespan of max 20 charges, usually more like 5, depending upon who you ask. After that, they are used up enough for that battery being too weak for racing competitively. However, those packs usually is then sold cheap for "sunday drivers"/"backyard racers", who use them upto 200-400 charges more.
Maximum lifetime for such an pack is usually 1,000-2,000 before it's way too weak for any fast action, with excellent charger.
That all was speaking of NiMh, NiCD is only being used for the cheap end here.
LiPo is another beast then, afterall these packs DO explode from almost all malfunctions. Their lifespan is rather short lived too, upto how many charges i do not know, but i do got quite a few less than 2 year old cells which are way too dead for any serious usage. All of those cells has been taken good care of.
LiPo offers the maximum in power, but is very weak in low temperatures. At 7-10c i believe it's maximum output remaining is only like 15% compared to 25 celsius.
NiMh just works easier and when it's cold way better, but does not pack the PUNCH.
As for the power, my old drifter had a peak output of 400A at 7.4v, 2960W, or roughly 3kW. Continuous 740W. All that packed into 1½kg, with around 30-40 minutes of driving time. When you think that, then think of the hybrid cars...
Oh and my friend's next setup is going to be 25volts, 200A continuous, and peak 400A. All that packed into a few kilograms.
Salaries absolutely suck. If you remember to account for high taxation.
Here in Finland, the roof for PHP coder is around 3,000euros a month, with taxes of around 25% and living expenses near UK levels. Bottomline is, you are worse off here than in the UK.
In UK you can get upto 5,000-5,000euros a month, afaik lower taxes, but higher living costs. You will end up more cash in hand than in Finland. Plus from UK it's easier to travel around Europe.
Germany, very good location to go all around. Salaries i'm not sure, around 3,500-4,000euros i assume. But in Germany they are a bit technologically backwards, many of their IT solutions simply SUCK and are simply IDIOTIC. However, some exceptions exist there aswell. Many Germans refuse to speak English for some reason, aswell their language is a bit messy to learn, but you'll do fine with "Ich Spreche Kein Deutsch. English perhaps?"
France... Generally speaking, they are hard to work with, arrogant, very very arrogant people. You are an ahole if you cannot turn an ordinary PC into a super computer ranking in top 100, and you are ahole if you manage very high quality real time raytracing on 1600x1200 resolution on 3years old computer. Either way, generally, they do what they can to make you feel bad and rip you off, and benefit from you. Not all French people are like that, but a lot of them are. I and my dad have both had the tough luck to have to work with quite many french people, and very few of them have been what you'd consider "nice" or "cool" people.
That's my 2cents and my personal experience SO take it with a grain of salt:)
Over here in the UK some companies give you a discount on your account if you pay by Direct Debit (basically an instruction to your bank to give the company whatever they ask for each month). I say 'discount', of course it's really an extra fee for doing the work yourself. If you pay online with a card you pay extra. I think for my phone company it's an extra GBP4 per quarter.
Companies over here love Direct Debits. Every bill comes with a 'why not pay by Direct Debit?' leaflet. Sadly there's no tick box for "I really don't trust you". Stories of epic fails with DDs are legion - an extra zero on the bill makes the person go overdrawn, they get a bad credit record, they lose their house, they kill all their family and so on. I exaggerate. Slightly.
Sometimes I feel I'm the only one not paying by DD, but that's what they want me to feel...
I think there should be a middle road, so that the bills get automatically posted to your bank account, and automatically paid upto X amount with an confirmation email sent automatically to your inbox.
Those exceeding the amount you could manually go and approve, or if you wish, manually approve every single one. Easier and safer.
Here in Finland, Direct Debit is rarely used infact, and nothing really happens if you cannot afford the invoice, in the past they tried 4 times on 1 day intervals, each time accrued 2.8euros extra charges.
Most of my bills are transmitted electronically. The rest are mailed to Paytrust's P.O. box, and they post the scanned PDF for my review.
I set the payment rules via their website: pay full amount, pay full amount up to [limit], pay specified amount. Or I can just wait for the notification in my email and pay it myself with a few bill clicks.
That's rather an interesting concept for an service. Just as i were thinking reading the summary that why do not banks have "pay upto X amount" kind of limitations, you come up with a comment about paytrust:D
Unfortunately, i think there's no such service in Finland
Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies even closer. An old wisdom.
Brains are what makes humans to be humans, and Sun Tzu is still one of the greatest teachers for not only war, but also business and in other areas of life.
"Brain Will Be Battlefield of the Future, Warns US", sounds more like brain washing, mind control and stuff like that. Just a eye catcher headline, for nothing new.
and i paid 49EUROS (~74USD) for 8Mbps/1Mbps for YEARS, before agreeing on a 1 year contract.
I've had the 8/1 probably 4 years now, and the price used to be 65euros a month if i recall right.
Cheapest broaadband around here (Finland, Helsinki) is about 30USD.
Fastest practically available to public is ADSL2+ unlimited, if you are lucky you get that 22Mbps, usually more like 13-18Mbps.
But with the higher price you get:
* No traffic limits
* No traffic shaping
* No P2P Limits
* No Snooping on your traffic
* 24/7 works, rarely any outages
* Practically static IPs (changes every 90-180days, unless you don't turn off the computer in which case it is static)
and used to be able to get at 100% speed from EU, US and mostly AU too if their end was capable, now the EUUS link seems to be slightly saturated and you can't always get a guarantee of that.
Use 100% Upstream & Downstream 24/7 no one complains.
no no, the "public" portion of the encrypted volume, the one you let the customs officers see;) Now see what i mean?
That kinda stuff usually is quite personal, and some people would definitely want to keep other people's hands off of them.
and no matter do they see your truecrypt volume, the beauty is that you WANT them to see if they want to snoop around.
Furthermore, if you are clever, you can trick HDD SMART to hide an partition for you;) SMART works by having some extra sectors on the HDD which are being taken into use as some sectors go bad. Trick a bit with it, and you can hide data there.
See, there's ways to hide the stuff if you really have to have it on laptop hdd when you pass customs. Never mind how small an flash drive can be, hidden in ie. battery compartment.
The easiest way however is to have an server, you can access after you are past the customs.
Grab the encrypted volume through net, grab truecrypt, open:)
Tho... Then customs might be suspicious if they DO NOT find any priviledged information (personal, business or otherwise) on your laptop.
Better to have baits than squeeky clean, and those seminude pics would be quite good baits;) Depending upon how you look, naturally that wouldn't work if you look like a rockstar, but for a joe average it should do the trick.
There's plenty of ways around, and they never can catch you if you just stay on top of your game. TOR, Freenet, Strong encrypted volumes, PGP/GPG, secure VPN, tools are plenty, it's just matter of harnessing them.
Goverment might have lengthy hands, but they can't be bruteforcing every single encrypted volume they stumble upon.
Now as i've made these comments, i better not travel to the US or UK anytime soon X) (Like they would care about/. comments)
As for passing customs, add in the hidden volume provided by truecrypt. I bet most would eat answer "there is none";)
on the "public" portion, have semi-private personal pics, ie. your gf about naked, some sex stories from web and change them like they would be your experiences, love letters same thing, and other personalish data like that.
That "GF" doesn't be even YOUR gf, just grab some package of amateur pics of some website X)
Social engineering!
2nd solution: Public torrent based encrypted "backup" service, goes through the borders easily. Could be somekind of torrent & truecrypt mashup.
Could work if say you want to "backup" 5 gigs, you got to host atleast 10gigs. Gigantic waste of HDD space, Gigantic waste of bandwidth, no live usage, but have good key, and you are golden:)
In theory could work, anyone attempting something like this?
Shaders are a hack to achieve something which should need to be done using raytracing. Therefore, how are you going to accomplish raytracing as a shader? Isn't that a bit counter productive? Admittably, i do not know specifics how shaders work, perhaps i should boot up my dev environment, and for the first time in about 10 years code some 3d graphics:)
That demo was a proof of concept, with very little of the effects and capabilities implemented, the few that however were implemented WOW. Tech demos are often like that.
Furthermore, i hear they did not use textures in usual sense.
In any case, raytracing has for long had waayy superior capabilies compared to rasterization, and rasterization has gotten closer to raytracing capabilities due to increased computational power, however, now we are reaching the point where computational power is reaching the point we just can raytrace.
Rasterization does excellent job in what it's meant to do: A quick workaround to do 3d graphics.
Yeah, a lot of today's graphics revolves around shiny and glow.
But rasterization does not come to 90% of the image quality.
Actually increased geometry slows somewhat down, but by far not as much as rasterization. Checking what a ray hits becomes huge, and there probably isn't atleast any easy way to skip 99% of checking what the ray hits, and in what angle is that object. More geometry, more things to check for the rays to hit. But the increase in computational power needed by increase in complexity isn't nearly as huge as in rasterization, raytracing doesn't revolve around scene complexity for it's speed, mostly on amount of rays.
The increased complexity performance impact is considered neglible, and i'm sure there's tons of ways to optimize that. Unoptimized code would have a significant impact on that area.
and that's definitely one of the perks of raytracing, which adds to the main perk of ray tracing: realistic graphics.
Yeah, some haters will try to bash, but hey, that's just normal day of business when you actually are able to think outside of the box, and know a thing or two;)
Yes, definitely others will come around compete with Intel, and "abuse" the work intel has already done, but Intel is the one pioneering the field, thus with most experience and knowledge, and thus they will most likely do the technically best solutions for years to come. Or so i would think.
I think we are soon going to start FINALLY seeing mroe and more of hybrid rendering. Which i think isn't even that hard to do, and am amazed it's not being done in large scale already. And part by part is more and more rendered by raytracing, until finally fully raytraced.
Those comments were "raytracing sucks", "only intel can throw in 6,000$ to do $60 radeon's job", and general trolling like that.
And i didn't say dumb, it's your own low self-esteem if you think i said you are dumb. I merely said about the level of knowledge about a subject and human behavior. A human is completely comfortable about talking a subject they know shit about.
I don't even claim to know much about ray tracing, but i do know some of the basics:) Enough to know most of the comments were utter bullshit:D
well, yes it's not 100% exactly how real world works, in raytracing we leave out the stuff we don't need, thus you could say direction is opposite than in real world, and you could say we "back trace" how the light bounced around:)
hybrid model is still a cheap trick, and faked to somewhere there. However, how movie studios do it has it's perks as well.
The direction is full ray tracing and radiosity tracing. Everything is doable, put brilliant enough mind into the task, and the world doesn't live WITHIN the box anymore. That's a problem with a lot of people, they can't think outside of the box, those who can make things realize, things like real time photorealistic raytracing.
Real time photorealistic ray tracing has been demonstrated times and times over, just look at Demoscene, it's old news, what's new is making the scenes complex like in a game, and maintaining high FPS.
and like someone else said, you can do all of that in raytracing.
And you missed the point of realistic reflections and refractions:D
I think they were still missing radiosity as well. The demo is proof of concept, intended to show off only reflections and refractions. Google or something for raytraced graphics which have everything included.
Take the demo as it is: Proof of concept. When have you seen proof of concept being a finished product?:)
Who ever expected that stuff from screen to materialize? The REAL thing in here is the representation looking real. With raytracing you can achieve photorealistic graphics.
I meant those which are sold as meat substitute things.
I eat soy almost daily:)
Oh, and you could say i'm pretty much vegan, sometimes rarely i treat myself with an big mac or something with animal products in it, but 95% of time i eat like a vegan:)
Most people don't understand the beauty of ray tracing.... oh wait a minute, most people are DUMB! that's right >;D
Seeing these comments reflects very well the average human intellect about a subject before talking about it.
Then what's so special in ray tracing versus rasterization?
It's actual real world based mimickery. Ray tracing mimicks how real world works.
Ask yourself would you prefer physics to correlate to real world physics, or something quickly around the corner which is something like that but not quite? That's the difference between rasterization and ray tracing. Rasterization comes close, but never is quite the real thing, while ray tracing works to replicate real world physics of light.
Yes, it actually is physics calculations, in this case, the physics of light and visualizing it.
Then there's things like radiosity tracing aswell...
With Raytracing / radiosity tracing just provide enough computational power, and you can make it look real, like an photo. With rasterization you can't do that, to rasterize, and make proper looking shaders, they never get quite there, but even doing the shaders, you need to think about how the real world works first, how light travels, how it interacts with what it hits, in other words how the rays interact with objects.
Rasterization is JUST a cheap trick to make it look something like that, nothing else.
It's a bit like comparing veggie soy "meat" to the real thing It's something like it, but not really, just a "cheap trick".
Now they used 16 cores to that, 4 cpus. Moore's law, CPU power doubles every 18 months, that means JUST 3 years before high end home users can enjoy something like that. in 4.5 years it becomes common, 6 years and it's every day. Be prepared for the coming of Ray Tracing. In about 7.5 to 9 years all graphics are probably ray tracing.
And that all without any software, or architectural advantages, it'll probably happer sooner with Intel making a hard effort to make it reality.
Actually that metalshield is nothing new neither, i have quite a few cables which have in that area an metal shield aswell. And i think they didn't even cost any more than one without:)
These sizes are still useful for putting in external USB enclosures and using as a laptop backup drive (with something like Ghost).
Ghost is useless nowadays, when symantec bought norton, they screwed it up. Remember to take an very old version:)
How they screwed up? A) You can't even easily do full drive images with it anymore B) Where's the DOS based tools? C) Even recovering from it's "backup" is a doomed failure without installed OS + Ghost.
Ghost is a ghost of itself from back when it was usefull.
Slashdot Mirror
Tornado thing, that thing which is supposed to create a vortex?
I wonder would it work on my sidedrafts ... Direct line to the intake port, and as the intake ports has been opened a bit, and the degree of entrance made lesser, it MIGHT just work, because the air will not be stopped, or has to turn significantly at any point, a bit crammed as the intake port gets smaller and smaller closer you get to the valve, but no steep turns.
However, i see one major problem with the whole idea, air has mass and inertia, and that vortex needs energy to put into motion (engine intake "sucking the air"), now, is the increased drag to make the vortex happen greater than that of possible benefit by mistifying the air:fuel mixture better, when it has to travel A LOT longer distance in the intake port, thus hitting more bumps, scratches etc. to mistify it more. Who knows, only dyno would show that, after tuning the carbs again for the usage of the things.
However, carbs, especially sidedrafts, has a huge problem with the mist on low rpm, fuel doesn't get mistifyed well enough. so it just might work for low RPM at the cost of high RPM, depending upon the tuneup, intake port size, carb and it's venturi size, the angles on which the "blades" are to create the vortex, and how much the blades block the intake.
Pictures of the things i've seen which create these vortexes looks like they block quite an area of the intake.
However, there is something which helps on it. I've not tested, but what i've read up on it sounds quite convincing: ACETONE. A very tiny amount (0.1-0.2%) of acetone in the fuel would decrease the surface tension of gas, and therefore it would mistifyi better. Downside? Some car's gaskets and hoses can't take acetone and swells.
I'm interested in hearing if anyone has tried acetone around in ./, what were the results?
Exactly! I've seen bad maintenance double up the consumption ... More precisely on my own car ... When the piston rings failed, and i had been knowing the day is coming when things fail ...
On old carburated cars aswell, their tuning is very important, but no one ever tunes them after they come out of the factory, therefore, overtime consumption increases as the cylinders gets looser, and crap piles up in the intake parts etc.
One often forgotten thing for fuel consumption is tire pressure, and width aswell. The rolling drag is way higher with wider tires, and with lower pressures.
But the stupidest thing is that most people could save up A LOT of gas by changing their driving style, yet, be where they need to be in time! Nothing beats human stupidity
Actually, modern electric motors can achieve even 96% efficiency, they are called brushless motors :)
Only touching points are the bearings, 3-phase, magnet in the center, coils around it. Very Very Very efficient. Also, theoretically they have unlimited torque. In practice, how much Amps you can supply to it dictates torque, and then how much your coils and wiring can take.
I swapped on a RC car from NiMH and brushed setting to a LiPo and Brushless setting. The change was mindstorming. From sluggish acceleration to around 40km/h, to hell of a fast acceleration till around 90km/h, the remainder of top speed till 108km/h taking most of the time.
NiMh brushed offered with competition 4000mAh package around 15mins of driving time. LiPo brushless with 8000mAh battery pack offered usually around 1½hour of driving time at best, and regularly 45-60mins.
never going to happen, there's always people wanting to gain access to such a system.
Their reasons to access LHC Grid might be many, maybe completely irrelevant to LHC itself, but gaining access to that grid. What secrets may lie in that network?
Or what could you accomplish with all that bandwidth, storage space and computational power within your grasb?
Think of the terrifying idea that in LHC GRID most of the servers in it could directly access internet on a very fast connection used as a botnet to send spam, or even worse and more likely, attack DNS root servers or something along those lines.
and like you said, some people just want to do it because they can.
This attack was catched, but think about the possibility of a stealth attack which has gone unnoticed.
you are wrong, some of us are using more manual charging of batteries still...
in RC circles, the cheapest charging methods usually are just "dumping" energy into them. Even i used still a year ago to use an 12V car battery charger, with an car light bulb to limit the flow a bit, attached directly to 7.2 4000mAh (4Ah) pack, warm? Almost full. Almost hurting warm? Full.
And no my batteries didn't have very short lifespan. Comparatively speaking.
with RC cars, battery lifespan is ALWAYS very very short. Competition battery packs have a lifespan of max 20 charges, usually more like 5, depending upon who you ask. After that, they are used up enough for that battery being too weak for racing competitively. However, those packs usually is then sold cheap for "sunday drivers"/"backyard racers", who use them upto 200-400 charges more.
Maximum lifetime for such an pack is usually 1,000-2,000 before it's way too weak for any fast action, with excellent charger.
That all was speaking of NiMh, NiCD is only being used for the cheap end here.
LiPo is another beast then, afterall these packs DO explode from almost all malfunctions. Their lifespan is rather short lived too, upto how many charges i do not know, but i do got quite a few less than 2 year old cells which are way too dead for any serious usage. All of those cells has been taken good care of.
LiPo offers the maximum in power, but is very weak in low temperatures. At 7-10c i believe it's maximum output remaining is only like 15% compared to 25 celsius.
NiMh just works easier and when it's cold way better, but does not pack the PUNCH.
As for the power, my old drifter had a peak output of 400A at 7.4v, 2960W, or roughly 3kW. Continuous 740W. All that packed into 1½kg, with around 30-40 minutes of driving time. When you think that, then think of the hybrid cars...
Oh and my friend's next setup is going to be 25volts, 200A continuous, and peak 400A. All that packed into a few kilograms.
LiPo + Brushless == Ecstatic trip of power.
Here we get free banking until the age of 25 :)
DO NOT COME! I repeat: DO NOT COME TO WORK IN EU!
Salaries absolutely suck. If you remember to account for high taxation.
Here in Finland, the roof for PHP coder is around 3,000euros a month, with taxes of around 25% and living expenses near UK levels. Bottomline is, you are worse off here than in the UK.
In UK you can get upto 5,000-5,000euros a month, afaik lower taxes, but higher living costs. You will end up more cash in hand than in Finland. Plus from UK it's easier to travel around Europe.
Germany, very good location to go all around. Salaries i'm not sure, around 3,500-4,000euros i assume. But in Germany they are a bit technologically backwards, many of their IT solutions simply SUCK and are simply IDIOTIC. However, some exceptions exist there aswell. Many Germans refuse to speak English for some reason, aswell their language is a bit messy to learn, but you'll do fine with "Ich Spreche Kein Deutsch. English perhaps?"
France ... Generally speaking, they are hard to work with, arrogant, very very arrogant people. You are an ahole if you cannot turn an ordinary PC into a super computer ranking in top 100, and you are ahole if you manage very high quality real time raytracing on 1600x1200 resolution on 3years old computer. Either way, generally, they do what they can to make you feel bad and rip you off, and benefit from you. Not all French people are like that, but a lot of them are. I and my dad have both had the tough luck to have to work with quite many french people, and very few of them have been what you'd consider "nice" or "cool" people.
That's my 2cents and my personal experience SO take it with a grain of salt :)
Because it's cheaper?
Over here in the UK some companies give you a discount on your account if you pay by Direct Debit (basically an instruction to your bank to give the company whatever they ask for each month). I say 'discount', of course it's really an extra fee for doing the work yourself. If you pay online with a card you pay extra. I think for my phone company it's an extra GBP4 per quarter.
Companies over here love Direct Debits. Every bill comes with a 'why not pay by Direct Debit?' leaflet. Sadly there's no tick box for "I really don't trust you". Stories of epic fails with DDs are legion - an extra zero on the bill makes the person go overdrawn, they get a bad credit record, they lose their house, they kill all their family and so on. I exaggerate. Slightly.
Sometimes I feel I'm the only one not paying by DD, but that's what they want me to feel...
I think there should be a middle road, so that the bills get automatically posted to your bank account, and automatically paid upto X amount with an confirmation email sent automatically to your inbox.
Those exceeding the amount you could manually go and approve, or if you wish, manually approve every single one. Easier and safer.
Here in Finland, Direct Debit is rarely used infact, and nothing really happens if you cannot afford the invoice, in the past they tried 4 times on 1 day intervals, each time accrued 2.8euros extra charges.
http://www.paytrust.com/
Most of my bills are transmitted electronically. The rest are mailed to Paytrust's P.O. box, and they post the scanned PDF for my review.
I set the payment rules via their website: pay full amount, pay full amount up to [limit], pay specified amount. Or I can just wait for the notification in my email and pay it myself with a few bill clicks.
That's rather an interesting concept for an service. Just as i were thinking reading the summary that why do not banks have "pay upto X amount" kind of limitations, you come up with a comment about paytrust :D
Unfortunately, i think there's no such service in Finland
Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies even closer. An old wisdom.
Brains are what makes humans to be humans, and Sun Tzu is still one of the greatest teachers for not only war, but also business and in other areas of life.
"Brain Will Be Battlefield of the Future, Warns US", sounds more like brain washing, mind control and stuff like that. Just a eye catcher headline, for nothing new.
and i paid 49EUROS (~74USD) for 8Mbps/1Mbps for YEARS, before agreeing on a 1 year contract.
I've had the 8/1 probably 4 years now, and the price used to be 65euros a month if i recall right.
Cheapest broaadband around here (Finland, Helsinki) is about 30USD.
Fastest practically available to public is ADSL2+ unlimited, if you are lucky you get that 22Mbps, usually more like 13-18Mbps.
But with the higher price you get:
* No traffic limits
* No traffic shaping
* No P2P Limits
* No Snooping on your traffic
* 24/7 works, rarely any outages
* Practically static IPs (changes every 90-180days, unless you don't turn off the computer in which case it is static)
and used to be able to get at 100% speed from EU, US and mostly AU too if their end was capable, now the EUUS link seems to be slightly saturated and you can't always get a guarantee of that.
Use 100% Upstream & Downstream 24/7 no one complains.
no no, the "public" portion of the encrypted volume, the one you let the customs officers see ;)
;) SMART works by having some extra sectors on the HDD which are being taken into use as some sectors go bad. Trick a bit with it, and you can hide data there.
:)
... Then customs might be suspicious if they DO NOT find any priviledged information (personal, business or otherwise) on your laptop.
;) Depending upon how you look, naturally that wouldn't work if you look like a rockstar, but for a joe average it should do the trick.
/. comments)
Now see what i mean?
That kinda stuff usually is quite personal, and some people would definitely want to keep other people's hands off of them.
and no matter do they see your truecrypt volume, the beauty is that you WANT them to see if they want to snoop around.
Furthermore, if you are clever, you can trick HDD SMART to hide an partition for you
See, there's ways to hide the stuff if you really have to have it on laptop hdd when you pass customs. Never mind how small an flash drive can be, hidden in ie. battery compartment.
The easiest way however is to have an server, you can access after you are past the customs.
Grab the encrypted volume through net, grab truecrypt, open
Tho
Better to have baits than squeeky clean, and those seminude pics would be quite good baits
There's plenty of ways around, and they never can catch you if you just stay on top of your game. TOR, Freenet, Strong encrypted volumes, PGP/GPG, secure VPN, tools are plenty, it's just matter of harnessing them.
Goverment might have lengthy hands, but they can't be bruteforcing every single encrypted volume they stumble upon.
Now as i've made these comments, i better not travel to the US or UK anytime soon X) (Like they would care about
As for passing customs, add in the hidden volume provided by truecrypt. I bet most would eat answer "there is none" ;)
:)
on the "public" portion, have semi-private personal pics, ie. your gf about naked, some sex stories from web and change them like they would be your experiences, love letters same thing, and other personalish data like that.
That "GF" doesn't be even YOUR gf, just grab some package of amateur pics of some website X)
Social engineering!
2nd solution: Public torrent based encrypted "backup" service, goes through the borders easily. Could be somekind of torrent & truecrypt mashup.
Could work if say you want to "backup" 5 gigs, you got to host atleast 10gigs. Gigantic waste of HDD space, Gigantic waste of bandwidth, no live usage, but have good key, and you are golden
In theory could work, anyone attempting something like this?
Live in sweden: secure VPN out of sweden first :)
Easy thing to do, really no companies however offer this service
Shaders are a hack to achieve something which should need to be done using raytracing. Therefore, how are you going to accomplish raytracing as a shader? Isn't that a bit counter productive? :)
Admittably, i do not know specifics how shaders work, perhaps i should boot up my dev environment, and for the first time in about 10 years code some 3d graphics
That demo was a proof of concept, with very little of the effects and capabilities implemented, the few that however were implemented WOW.
Tech demos are often like that.
Furthermore, i hear they did not use textures in usual sense.
In any case, raytracing has for long had waayy superior capabilies compared to rasterization, and rasterization has gotten closer to raytracing capabilities due to increased computational power, however, now we are reaching the point where computational power is reaching the point we just can raytrace.
Rasterization does excellent job in what it's meant to do: A quick workaround to do 3d graphics.
Yeah, a lot of today's graphics revolves around shiny and glow.
But rasterization does not come to 90% of the image quality.
Actually increased geometry slows somewhat down, but by far not as much as rasterization. Checking what a ray hits becomes huge, and there probably isn't atleast any easy way to skip 99% of checking what the ray hits, and in what angle is that object.
More geometry, more things to check for the rays to hit.
But the increase in computational power needed by increase in complexity isn't nearly as huge as in rasterization, raytracing doesn't revolve around scene complexity for it's speed, mostly on amount of rays.
The increased complexity performance impact is considered neglible, and i'm sure there's tons of ways to optimize that. Unoptimized code would have a significant impact on that area.
and that's definitely one of the perks of raytracing, which adds to the main perk of ray tracing: realistic graphics.
Yeah, some haters will try to bash, but hey, that's just normal day of business when you actually are able to think outside of the box, and know a thing or two ;)
Yes, definitely others will come around compete with Intel, and "abuse" the work intel has already done, but Intel is the one pioneering the field, thus with most experience and knowledge, and thus they will most likely do the technically best solutions for years to come. Or so i would think.
I think we are soon going to start FINALLY seeing mroe and more of hybrid rendering. Which i think isn't even that hard to do, and am amazed it's not being done in large scale already. And part by part is more and more rendered by raytracing, until finally fully raytraced.
I think you didn't look at the other comments :)
:) Enough to know most of the comments were utter bullshit :D
Those comments were "raytracing sucks", "only intel can throw in 6,000$ to do $60 radeon's job", and general trolling like that.
And i didn't say dumb, it's your own low self-esteem if you think i said you are dumb. I merely said about the level of knowledge about a subject and human behavior. A human is completely comfortable about talking a subject they know shit about.
I don't even claim to know much about ray tracing, but i do know some of the basics
well, yes it's not 100% exactly how real world works, in raytracing we leave out the stuff we don't need, thus you could say direction is opposite than in real world, and you could say we "back trace" how the light bounced around :)
:)
hybrid model is still a cheap trick, and faked to somewhere there. However, how movie studios do it has it's perks as well.
The direction is full ray tracing and radiosity tracing. Everything is doable, put brilliant enough mind into the task, and the world doesn't live WITHIN the box anymore. That's a problem with a lot of people, they can't think outside of the box, those who can make things realize, things like real time photorealistic raytracing.
Real time photorealistic ray tracing has been demonstrated times and times over, just look at Demoscene, it's old news, what's new is making the scenes complex like in a game, and maintaining high FPS.
and like someone else said, you can do all of that in raytracing.
Look at POV-Ray for example
And you missed the point of realistic reflections and refractions :D
:)
I think they were still missing radiosity as well. The demo is proof of concept, intended to show off only reflections and refractions. Google or something for raytraced graphics which have everything included.
Take the demo as it is: Proof of concept. When have you seen proof of concept being a finished product?
and you are merely a troll.
Who ever expected that stuff from screen to materialize? The REAL thing in here is the representation looking real. With raytracing you can achieve photorealistic graphics.
I meant those which are sold as meat substitute things.
:)
:)
I eat soy almost daily
Oh, and you could say i'm pretty much vegan, sometimes rarely i treat myself with an big mac or something with animal products in it, but 95% of time i eat like a vegan
Most people don't understand the beauty of ray tracing .... oh wait a minute, most people are DUMB! that's right >;D
...
Seeing these comments reflects very well the average human intellect about a subject before talking about it.
Then what's so special in ray tracing versus rasterization?
It's actual real world based mimickery. Ray tracing mimicks how real world works.
Ask yourself would you prefer physics to correlate to real world physics, or something quickly around the corner which is something like that but not quite? That's the difference between rasterization and ray tracing. Rasterization comes close, but never is quite the real thing, while ray tracing works to replicate real world physics of light.
Yes, it actually is physics calculations, in this case, the physics of light and visualizing it.
Then there's things like radiosity tracing aswell
With Raytracing / radiosity tracing just provide enough computational power, and you can make it look real, like an photo. With rasterization you can't do that, to rasterize, and make proper looking shaders, they never get quite there, but even doing the shaders, you need to think about how the real world works first, how light travels, how it interacts with what it hits, in other words how the rays interact with objects.
Rasterization is JUST a cheap trick to make it look something like that, nothing else.
It's a bit like comparing veggie soy "meat" to the real thing It's something like it, but not really, just a "cheap trick".
Now they used 16 cores to that, 4 cpus. Moore's law, CPU power doubles every 18 months, that means JUST 3 years before high end home users can enjoy something like that. in 4.5 years it becomes common, 6 years and it's every day. Be prepared for the coming of Ray Tracing. In about 7.5 to 9 years all graphics are probably ray tracing.
And that all without any software, or architectural advantages, it'll probably happer sooner with Intel making a hard effort to make it reality.
Actually that metalshield is nothing new neither, i have quite a few cables which have in that area an metal shield aswell. And i think they didn't even cost any more than one without :)
:)
Tho, that cable looks just sweet
These sizes are still useful for putting in external USB enclosures and using as a laptop backup drive (with something like Ghost).
Ghost is useless nowadays, when symantec bought norton, they screwed it up. Remember to take an very old versionHow they screwed up?
A) You can't even easily do full drive images with it anymore
B) Where's the DOS based tools?
C) Even recovering from it's "backup" is a doomed failure without installed OS + Ghost.
Ghost is a ghost of itself from back when it was usefull.