I think it's just you. Can you imagine what life would be like if some biological machines had to carry around some fuel to top off their own tanks from time to time? Yeah, that's right, we do the same thing carrying around a snickers as you'd be doing carrying around a tin of methanol-and-buckministerfullerene-laced gellatin.
Most likely this technology would be rechargeable; soak it in a special bath and it "recharges". Of course, in order not to deal with volitale chemicals at home, you'd send it off to have that done (or maybe it'll even be disposable; the chemicals don't sound too bad, but I dunno about that fullerene). And I'm certain if it's even being considered as a fuel, it's going to have a decent charge cycle.
Technologically we've had a way to deal with nuclear waste for years now as well; breeder reactors can tear apart free Uranium into once again fissibles, knock it apart for faster decomp (shorter half-lives), and through further uranium enrichment, you can take those materials and run them right through a nuclear reactor as well.
Also, on top of all of this, we are ignoring the fact that the waste is still radioactive, which means we can still draw power from it, even if it's at a much reduced scale. Combine that with heavy water and you get an almost geothermal-like effect, hot water rising, turns a turbine, releases heat, falls over the side into a collection tank which circulates its way back into the bottom of the tank. Of course, this would be a closed system, and you wouldn't have a "chain" reaction, but it's a good way to continue to draw power from it, while also keeping an eye on it.
Besides, nobody really needs your high five; if they're a small start up, they can get the attention of other small start ups, join forces, grow, acquire, grow.. and what you end up with is the environmentally friendly enron. Of course countries like Brazil would still laugh at you for entering the game so late, but hell, cheap fuel created from what's otherwise waste. Hard to beat. Economies of Scale will definitely help with a lot of the problem Biodiesel is having now, especially as the companies become more aware of each other. And as the infrastructure already exists, you just have to get the farmers, waste oil management companies, resteraunt chains and such onboard (which, to be truthful wouldn't be as hard as it sounds; you're offering to take their waste off their hands for virtually nothing to turn it into fuel which brings more food and thus more customers to them. It's win win).
While I agree with you on the main point (Eolas doesn't have the nuts to go after other browsers), it's for a totally different reason.
Take the second biggest browser competitor to Internet Explorer; Mozilla's Firefox. Firefox's developers are not (for the most part) incorporated, or in a lot of cases, even compensated for working on Firefox. So, when you go to sue, you can't sue Mozilla Firefox; you have to sue about a thousand individuals who released patches, or specifically pick off the ones that didn't modify the plugin code in any way. You're still looking at a law team just to find these invididuals, then you have to send them out, see what company they work for, and start legal proceedings with them.
Now, what's one of the largest Firefox supporters right now? Google. Does Eolas really want to unleash Google on them? Do no evil doesn't cover corporate takeovers for patent reasonings, I fear. While some people at Eolas would praise the giant buying them, I'm sure the laid off individuals would be quite pissed about it.
But, I only unleash one scenario, which just shows you how unlikely things would be that Eolas would dare. I could see them going after Apple, as they are a single corporate entity which is easier to attack, but if Apple plays the webcore defense, their up the same creek that they would be with Firefox; finding each individual, and suing them personally, or through the company that sponsored the development.
Eolas just stuck Microsoft with the bill because it was so easy; Microsoft can't afford to go to war anymore, and these are bad times for the big M. The euro hounds want them, the Justice department grumbles here and there, Google's ganging up on them, Apple's out dazzling them, open source companies are shooting up and grabbing capital all over, and on top of all of this, they decide to enter an entire new market which hates new hardware competitors (the gaming business).
Yes, it was opportunistic. But that's how you often have to be in the software world, and yes, that's how Microsoft rose to the top in the first place.
A) you could just use something else. But I agree, it's hard to find a dev studio that's any good, especially for Linux. Microsoft (or Apple) win in this area, and X-Code doesn't need ActiveX;)
B) isn't it a bit brain damaged to ship something on 7 CDs? That's like back when we shipped Windows on 15 floppies, when CDs were on the frenge of new technology. DVDs could still be considered technologically frenge devices, but when every major game console (sans Gamecube *rumble*), new PC, and Laptop ships with a dvd player.. well, it's hard to ignore it as a publication medium. Those 7 CDs would fit perfectly on a DVD with room to spare.
Not that I don't believe you, but I have to call in a fact check. Obviously you've done your homework and in a lot of ways that's better than a lot of slashdot articles that appear these days. A few links would be nice though.
By and large it's all the same stuff, and as long as it burns at nearly the same temperature and is a relatively small part of the mix it should be fine. My 74 Jeep's engine has been known to burn through anything that's petrolum based without really giving a hoot, but I'm sure if I stopped at a gas station and topped off the tank with all gasoline I'd probably burn out my seals and piston rings (and all kinds of other damage).
But, on the topic I'd love to start making my own biodiesel and I've been reading about it. It doesn't sound all that complicated, it just seems like it'd take quite a bit of room, and that's not something I have a ton of. The other problem it seems is that everyone's rigs to make biodiesel seems so ghetto rigged (for lack of a better term), and I'd probably want to send my own off for tests and at least try it out in some other engines before I topped off my jeep with it. But other than that it sounds great.
Good luck getting nuke-u-lar (as you so quaintly put it) through the fundie firewall.
Meanwhile scaling up biodiesel farm production wouldn't be all that bad. There are (of course) better materials to grow for higher yield and more effecient fuel (for example, rapeseed [canola] oil creates twice as much biodiesel after the conversion process than soy, and palm oil bests all of the below), and this can help a lot with the problems we're currently seeing in yield. But, as biodiesel is also diesel compatible (blendable), you can burn mixtures, which does a lot to help with the emmissions problems as well. Combine this with more and more ethanol blend fuels becoming available and we get better and better at managing our oil habit.
Nuclear is a good cut-and-run technology (especially blended with hydrogen vehicles and solar power), but we're just not ready for that leap societally, even though we were probably ready technologically at least 20 years ago. Especially with the big T word now being the hotbutton political issue.
Then again, the TiVo is a standalone machine whereas the Mac Mini is a networkable computer. This means video from the Mac mini can be shared (without hacks mind you), whereas video from the TiVo, can't. Of course, that'd probably get Apple in some kind of trouble, but I'm sure Apple will be smooth about it.
Your comment goes more towards validating my comment than against it, so I don't understand why you said it. Instruction logic "goto" statements may be a jmp instruction, but the fact is, it is still a jump, which is functionally, goto. Hell, I'm sure if you compiled an app using a goto jump and decompiled it, you'd most certainly find it.
The same goes for a lot of functions (depending on the programming language). If the function isn't inlined during compilation, the compiler will simply load the addresses/data of what's needed for that instruction into a register, jmp to the location of the function, complete the function, and return back to where it was in order.
As for the "no use for a goto when you have a function"; there are a _lot_ of instances where a jump instruction is useful, where a function simply won't do what you want to do. For example, inside of a switch or nested if statements, etc. There are situations where jumping simply can't be avoided. The reason they teach against it is simply because people tend to use it badly; it leads to running off the stack, memory leaks and they are typically difficult to debug. However, I'd love to see you write a kernel without using a goto statement somewhere.
Well the problem here is where money and time is spent. You can spend more money and time up front and get a product that will save you time and money later, or spend less money and time and get a product that will take longer later and thus cost more. Depending on the product, computational time might be more expensive or less expensive than development time, and that's how I choose to optimize.
If I'm working on an embedded processor, I'm going to spend the extra time and money it takes to get everything working smoothly and quickly now, and later it'll be fast and effecient. If I'm working on a massive supercomputer, I'm going to go more lax on the optimizing, since the computer can pick up a lot more of the slack. (Yes, this can be considered a "bad" practice, but then again, when you've gone balls-to-the-walls and optimized a program for a supercomputer to achieve maximum effeciency only to find that it saves roughly 5% processing time, you look and feel like a damn fool. I don't recommend it).
These guidelines should also go into language selection and memory usage, but basically, it's a good way to tell a good programmer from a more shoddy one.
Your argument against Goto is even less logical. Goto is a conditional jump, where the condition is always true. It's an if (true) { do; }.
Our brains have plenty of Goto's hardcoded into them; "repeat" is typically implemented through in a "goto" fashion, but you'll want to ignore that if you're a modern computer. The correct way is to instead unroll the loop and have no jump instruction at all (if you can get around it).
Sigh. Why don't they teach assembly anymore. It should be a pre-req to learning higher level languages.
Point taken, but in the early days goto still made a lot of sense, but a lot of conventional, old practices have gone the wayside with compilers that are smarter and better optimizing, and with better standardization in languages overall.
The *first* time I learned C, goto was perfectly acceptible (yay K&R original C material).
But really, my point is that a computer doesn't see things in the sense of functions; it sees things in the sense of labels (memory addresses), and in a sense, programming using functions is simply another way of getting around labeling a routine.
To those historically blind, this is Microsoft's second time of taking a practically complete operating system, promising a million features, cutting 999,990 of them, and shipping those remaining features half assed and crippled. Of course the Operating System I'm talking about is Memphis; Microsoft Windows 97... 98.
Of course, people will still buy it, it'll still ship with computers, and Microsoft will still make money off of Vista, but the fact will remain that a sour mouthed community that has been screwed by Microsoft twice over in updates in the past decade might give a few users impetus to try a new operating system, especially a prettier, easier to use, trendier one. Ponying up an extra $100 (give or take) premium for a whole new machine vs. paying the (assuredly) astronomical licensing fees to upgrade to Vista sounds like a safe bet in a lot of households and businesses I know about.
Back when MS was shipping a new OS version every 18 months or so, I think they delivered a product earlier than originally planned at least once. It might have been Windows 98.
No, they didn't. Windows 98 was supposed to be Windows 97, and it was supposed to have been spades better than Windows 95, but (not to anyone's surprise), it was a highly overhyped, half-finished piece of junk that lead Microsoft to need to release a "Second Edition" later just to fix all of the holes in the operating system.
It might have been in the NT family, but I highly doubt that seeing as Microsoft's mantra is seemingly "Better Late Than Never". I'm frankly amazed they put together the 360 in as short a time as they did, but then again, they've already been seen to have dropped the ball in one court (the Power supply is "roughly 1000 times the size of earth", to paraphrase IGN).
Excuse me princess, but I download my linux distros, music (creative commons of course), videos (CC and PD), and game patches if they're large enough to bother with using Bittorrent. Unlike practically every other P2P application, BT actually has some premise out side of porn.
Still waiting on that BT-Browser fusion device to combat slashdottings...
TFA says the moondust is extremely statically charged, which if you've ever just combed your hair, you realize how much can stick to a comb with emmense strength.
Now think about a particle 1/20th the size of most earthbound stuff with a much stronger static charge. It's going to stick very, very tightly to whatever its on.
Besides, what's caught to the body of the suit isn't as much a deal as what was on the shoes, and they had covers, IIRC. Not to mention everyone was in quaranteen and extreme medical supervision after being returned to earth. I'd be more worried about living next to Dow chemical or drinking the Ohio river water than getting exposed to a little moon dust for a few days over twenty years ago.
Definitely go with the moon dust. At least it'll be a hundred times more valuable and something cool to show/threaten your friends with. Whereas the Xbox 360 will just overheat and die and can't be appreciated nicely without a grand being spent on a new TV.
Yeah I'm totally sure the Apollo astronauts opened up their visors and took a deep breath of Luna's magnificent, polution free atmosphere, only to find they later have suffered from Silicosis and Lung Cancer worse than asbestos could have ever caused...
or maybe they died from the extreme cold, lack of oxygen and mass radiation exposure.. I can't remember the details.
..or a more simple solution (and an answer to the Original Poster) is good ol' human co-operation? If someone in the area is willing to host a WAP, contact them and build a network bridge, not only extending the strenght of the network, but also the availability and range, instead of setting up your own, paying for the equipment, connection, etc.
Part of me hates the idea of Regional WISPs for this reason, they'll come in and wreck everyone's private networks. But part of me will also realize that the people who don't need to host their own WAP, won't, and that'll make the whole area a more network friendly area.
Once some of the hype dies down, networks will get better, but for now, just grit your teeth and talk to your neighbor. God forbid you get some free internet access out of it, or pay a nominal fee to help with his bandwidth bill.
In all good fun, go read Digg. Their "news" is super-up-to-date and all their users know how to do is gripe and moan and spit around incorrect information. It's a lot like slashdot used to be;). Thank goodness for mature readers.
This seems very odd to me. Intel's usually at least competitive, now it seems that Intel has almost stopped competing in raw performance entirely. This isn't because they can't build fast chips; everyone remembers how heated those battles used to get (both metaphorically and physically).
But in all seriousness, where is Intel? Parts of me think they've almost entirely abandoned the race with AMD simply out of spite the Pentium 4 didn't work out as well as they had hoped, or that they're trying to move everyone into Mobile computing mode with their new chips which have been on the burner for the better half of the new century.
When were the latest chips released by each company? It seems Intel's gone into hibernation mode kind of like they did right before releasing the Pentium 4 in the first place. (Allowing the P3 [and now P4?] market(s) to stagnate and die off?) Come on Intel, what are you up to???
Not that I don't love AMD winning; it just seems AMD does their best when they're pushed excessively by Intel to produce. Now AMD doesn't even make chipsets and their mobile offering is still quite the joke in the face of the Pentium M.
Eagerly awaiting the speed wars to start back up.. I'm ready for some bargains!
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's just you. Can you imagine what life would be like if some biological machines had to carry around some fuel to top off their own tanks from time to time? Yeah, that's right, we do the same thing carrying around a snickers as you'd be doing carrying around a tin of methanol-and-buckministerfullerene-laced gellatin.
Most likely this technology would be rechargeable; soak it in a special bath and it "recharges". Of course, in order not to deal with volitale chemicals at home, you'd send it off to have that done (or maybe it'll even be disposable; the chemicals don't sound too bad, but I dunno about that fullerene). And I'm certain if it's even being considered as a fuel, it's going to have a decent charge cycle.
Fruit rollups aren't fuel? :( I'll have to tell my mommy to stop packing them in my lunch pail then.
Technologically we've had a way to deal with nuclear waste for years now as well; breeder reactors can tear apart free Uranium into once again fissibles, knock it apart for faster decomp (shorter half-lives), and through further uranium enrichment, you can take those materials and run them right through a nuclear reactor as well.
Also, on top of all of this, we are ignoring the fact that the waste is still radioactive, which means we can still draw power from it, even if it's at a much reduced scale. Combine that with heavy water and you get an almost geothermal-like effect, hot water rising, turns a turbine, releases heat, falls over the side into a collection tank which circulates its way back into the bottom of the tank. Of course, this would be a closed system, and you wouldn't have a "chain" reaction, but it's a good way to continue to draw power from it, while also keeping an eye on it.
Besides, nobody really needs your high five; if they're a small start up, they can get the attention of other small start ups, join forces, grow, acquire, grow.. and what you end up with is the environmentally friendly enron. Of course countries like Brazil would still laugh at you for entering the game so late, but hell, cheap fuel created from what's otherwise waste. Hard to beat. Economies of Scale will definitely help with a lot of the problem Biodiesel is having now, especially as the companies become more aware of each other. And as the infrastructure already exists, you just have to get the farmers, waste oil management companies, resteraunt chains and such onboard (which, to be truthful wouldn't be as hard as it sounds; you're offering to take their waste off their hands for virtually nothing to turn it into fuel which brings more food and thus more customers to them. It's win win).
Beaten to the punch
(pun).
While I agree with you on the main point (Eolas doesn't have the nuts to go after other browsers), it's for a totally different reason.
Take the second biggest browser competitor to Internet Explorer; Mozilla's Firefox. Firefox's developers are not (for the most part) incorporated, or in a lot of cases, even compensated for working on Firefox. So, when you go to sue, you can't sue Mozilla Firefox; you have to sue about a thousand individuals who released patches, or specifically pick off the ones that didn't modify the plugin code in any way. You're still looking at a law team just to find these invididuals, then you have to send them out, see what company they work for, and start legal proceedings with them.
Now, what's one of the largest Firefox supporters right now? Google. Does Eolas really want to unleash Google on them? Do no evil doesn't cover corporate takeovers for patent reasonings, I fear. While some people at Eolas would praise the giant buying them, I'm sure the laid off individuals would be quite pissed about it.
But, I only unleash one scenario, which just shows you how unlikely things would be that Eolas would dare. I could see them going after Apple, as they are a single corporate entity which is easier to attack, but if Apple plays the webcore defense, their up the same creek that they would be with Firefox; finding each individual, and suing them personally, or through the company that sponsored the development.
Eolas just stuck Microsoft with the bill because it was so easy; Microsoft can't afford to go to war anymore, and these are bad times for the big M. The euro hounds want them, the Justice department grumbles here and there, Google's ganging up on them, Apple's out dazzling them, open source companies are shooting up and grabbing capital all over, and on top of all of this, they decide to enter an entire new market which hates new hardware competitors (the gaming business).
Yes, it was opportunistic. But that's how you often have to be in the software world, and yes, that's how Microsoft rose to the top in the first place.
A) you could just use something else. But I agree, it's hard to find a dev studio that's any good, especially for Linux. Microsoft (or Apple) win in this area, and X-Code doesn't need ActiveX ;)
B) isn't it a bit brain damaged to ship something on 7 CDs? That's like back when we shipped Windows on 15 floppies, when CDs were on the frenge of new technology. DVDs could still be considered technologically frenge devices, but when every major game console (sans Gamecube *rumble*), new PC, and Laptop ships with a dvd player.. well, it's hard to ignore it as a publication medium. Those 7 CDs would fit perfectly on a DVD with room to spare.
Not that I don't believe you, but I have to call in a fact check. Obviously you've done your homework and in a lot of ways that's better than a lot of slashdot articles that appear these days. A few links would be nice though.
By and large it's all the same stuff, and as long as it burns at nearly the same temperature and is a relatively small part of the mix it should be fine. My 74 Jeep's engine has been known to burn through anything that's petrolum based without really giving a hoot, but I'm sure if I stopped at a gas station and topped off the tank with all gasoline I'd probably burn out my seals and piston rings (and all kinds of other damage).
But, on the topic I'd love to start making my own biodiesel and I've been reading about it. It doesn't sound all that complicated, it just seems like it'd take quite a bit of room, and that's not something I have a ton of. The other problem it seems is that everyone's rigs to make biodiesel seems so ghetto rigged (for lack of a better term), and I'd probably want to send my own off for tests and at least try it out in some other engines before I topped off my jeep with it. But other than that it sounds great.
Good luck getting nuke-u-lar (as you so quaintly put it) through the fundie firewall.
Meanwhile scaling up biodiesel farm production wouldn't be all that bad. There are (of course) better materials to grow for higher yield and more effecient fuel (for example, rapeseed [canola] oil creates twice as much biodiesel after the conversion process than soy, and palm oil bests all of the below), and this can help a lot with the problems we're currently seeing in yield. But, as biodiesel is also diesel compatible (blendable), you can burn mixtures, which does a lot to help with the emmissions problems as well. Combine this with more and more ethanol blend fuels becoming available and we get better and better at managing our oil habit.
Nuclear is a good cut-and-run technology (especially blended with hydrogen vehicles and solar power), but we're just not ready for that leap societally, even though we were probably ready technologically at least 20 years ago. Especially with the big T word now being the hotbutton political issue.
Then again, the TiVo is a standalone machine whereas the Mac Mini is a networkable computer. This means video from the Mac mini can be shared (without hacks mind you), whereas video from the TiVo, can't. Of course, that'd probably get Apple in some kind of trouble, but I'm sure Apple will be smooth about it.
Your comment goes more towards validating my comment than against it, so I don't understand why you said it. Instruction logic "goto" statements may be a jmp instruction, but the fact is, it is still a jump, which is functionally, goto. Hell, I'm sure if you compiled an app using a goto jump and decompiled it, you'd most certainly find it.
The same goes for a lot of functions (depending on the programming language). If the function isn't inlined during compilation, the compiler will simply load the addresses/data of what's needed for that instruction into a register, jmp to the location of the function, complete the function, and return back to where it was in order.
As for the "no use for a goto when you have a function"; there are a _lot_ of instances where a jump instruction is useful, where a function simply won't do what you want to do. For example, inside of a switch or nested if statements, etc. There are situations where jumping simply can't be avoided. The reason they teach against it is simply because people tend to use it badly; it leads to running off the stack, memory leaks and they are typically difficult to debug. However, I'd love to see you write a kernel without using a goto statement somewhere.
Well the problem here is where money and time is spent. You can spend more money and time up front and get a product that will save you time and money later, or spend less money and time and get a product that will take longer later and thus cost more. Depending on the product, computational time might be more expensive or less expensive than development time, and that's how I choose to optimize.
If I'm working on an embedded processor, I'm going to spend the extra time and money it takes to get everything working smoothly and quickly now, and later it'll be fast and effecient. If I'm working on a massive supercomputer, I'm going to go more lax on the optimizing, since the computer can pick up a lot more of the slack. (Yes, this can be considered a "bad" practice, but then again, when you've gone balls-to-the-walls and optimized a program for a supercomputer to achieve maximum effeciency only to find that it saves roughly 5% processing time, you look and feel like a damn fool. I don't recommend it).
These guidelines should also go into language selection and memory usage, but basically, it's a good way to tell a good programmer from a more shoddy one.
The thing is, "Goto" isn't logical.
Your argument against Goto is even less logical. Goto is a conditional jump, where the condition is always true. It's an if (true) { do; }.
Our brains have plenty of Goto's hardcoded into them; "repeat" is typically implemented through in a "goto" fashion, but you'll want to ignore that if you're a modern computer. The correct way is to instead unroll the loop and have no jump instruction at all (if you can get around it).
Sigh. Why don't they teach assembly anymore. It should be a pre-req to learning higher level languages.
Point taken, but in the early days goto still made a lot of sense, but a lot of conventional, old practices have gone the wayside with compilers that are smarter and better optimizing, and with better standardization in languages overall.
The *first* time I learned C, goto was perfectly acceptible (yay K&R original C material).
But really, my point is that a computer doesn't see things in the sense of functions; it sees things in the sense of labels (memory addresses), and in a sense, programming using functions is simply another way of getting around labeling a routine.
Remind you of a previous time Microsoft did this?
To those historically blind, this is Microsoft's second time of taking a practically complete operating system, promising a million features, cutting 999,990 of them, and shipping those remaining features half assed and crippled. Of course the Operating System I'm talking about is Memphis; Microsoft Windows 97... 98.
Of course, people will still buy it, it'll still ship with computers, and Microsoft will still make money off of Vista, but the fact will remain that a sour mouthed community that has been screwed by Microsoft twice over in updates in the past decade might give a few users impetus to try a new operating system, especially a prettier, easier to use, trendier one. Ponying up an extra $100 (give or take) premium for a whole new machine vs. paying the (assuredly) astronomical licensing fees to upgrade to Vista sounds like a safe bet in a lot of households and businesses I know about.
Back when MS was shipping a new OS version every 18 months or so, I think they delivered a product earlier than originally planned at least once. It might have been Windows 98.
No, they didn't. Windows 98 was supposed to be Windows 97, and it was supposed to have been spades better than Windows 95, but (not to anyone's surprise), it was a highly overhyped, half-finished piece of junk that lead Microsoft to need to release a "Second Edition" later just to fix all of the holes in the operating system.
It might have been in the NT family, but I highly doubt that seeing as Microsoft's mantra is seemingly "Better Late Than Never". I'm frankly amazed they put together the 360 in as short a time as they did, but then again, they've already been seen to have dropped the ball in one court (the Power supply is "roughly 1000 times the size of earth", to paraphrase IGN).
Excuse me princess, but I download my linux distros, music (creative commons of course), videos (CC and PD), and game patches if they're large enough to bother with using Bittorrent. Unlike practically every other P2P application, BT actually has some premise out side of porn.
Still waiting on that BT-Browser fusion device to combat slashdottings...
and then they come in and there's a dupe! Come on editors, you had ample time to check them for dupes where they disappeared on you.
TFA says the moondust is extremely statically charged, which if you've ever just combed your hair, you realize how much can stick to a comb with emmense strength.
Now think about a particle 1/20th the size of most earthbound stuff with a much stronger static charge. It's going to stick very, very tightly to whatever its on.
Besides, what's caught to the body of the suit isn't as much a deal as what was on the shoes, and they had covers, IIRC. Not to mention everyone was in quaranteen and extreme medical supervision after being returned to earth. I'd be more worried about living next to Dow chemical or drinking the Ohio river water than getting exposed to a little moon dust for a few days over twenty years ago.
Definitely go with the moon dust. At least it'll be a hundred times more valuable and something cool to show/threaten your friends with. Whereas the Xbox 360 will just overheat and die and can't be appreciated nicely without a grand being spent on a new TV.
Yeah I'm totally sure the Apollo astronauts opened up their visors and took a deep breath of Luna's magnificent, polution free atmosphere, only to find they later have suffered from Silicosis and Lung Cancer worse than asbestos could have ever caused...
or maybe they died from the extreme cold, lack of oxygen and mass radiation exposure.. I can't remember the details.
I just moved to an operating system with 4.0. Wonder how long this'll take to hit the repositories.
..or a more simple solution (and an answer to the Original Poster) is good ol' human co-operation? If someone in the area is willing to host a WAP, contact them and build a network bridge, not only extending the strenght of the network, but also the availability and range, instead of setting up your own, paying for the equipment, connection, etc.
Part of me hates the idea of Regional WISPs for this reason, they'll come in and wreck everyone's private networks. But part of me will also realize that the people who don't need to host their own WAP, won't, and that'll make the whole area a more network friendly area.
Once some of the hype dies down, networks will get better, but for now, just grit your teeth and talk to your neighbor. God forbid you get some free internet access out of it, or pay a nominal fee to help with his bandwidth bill.
In all good fun, go read Digg. Their "news" is super-up-to-date and all their users know how to do is gripe and moan and spit around incorrect information. It's a lot like slashdot used to be ;). Thank goodness for mature readers.
This seems very odd to me. Intel's usually at least competitive, now it seems that Intel has almost stopped competing in raw performance entirely. This isn't because they can't build fast chips; everyone remembers how heated those battles used to get (both metaphorically and physically).
But in all seriousness, where is Intel? Parts of me think they've almost entirely abandoned the race with AMD simply out of spite the Pentium 4 didn't work out as well as they had hoped, or that they're trying to move everyone into Mobile computing mode with their new chips which have been on the burner for the better half of the new century.
When were the latest chips released by each company? It seems Intel's gone into hibernation mode kind of like they did right before releasing the Pentium 4 in the first place. (Allowing the P3 [and now P4?] market(s) to stagnate and die off?) Come on Intel, what are you up to???
Not that I don't love AMD winning; it just seems AMD does their best when they're pushed excessively by Intel to produce. Now AMD doesn't even make chipsets and their mobile offering is still quite the joke in the face of the Pentium M.
Eagerly awaiting the speed wars to start back up.. I'm ready for some bargains!