Programmers cannot be measured by any simple metric -- this is true. It's been debated ad nauseam for years.
Still, I don't see why the hell people are trying. Quotas and flat numbers measuring simply by "production" are always stupid things in the long run, just as they were in factories.
In software, they'll cause the same problems that they did at brick and mortar factories before TQM principles were established -- people fearing the data and fudging it in desperation. If this is counted by, say, lines of code produced, you had better believe it will be written in the strangest manner possible in spite of defects. But with any quota/by objective system in place, no teamwork will take place -- they'll all be concerned about their own numbers or even hurting others. No one will experiment or come up with ideas and find any process improvements.
And the person who actually does a good job in realstic terms may not compare to someone who skewed the numbers objectively to feed their kids. This will not give them any pride in their workmanship and will be a serious demotivator, if not burning them out entirely from cynicism about their profession.
What's the alternative? Judge the programmers based on quality. Have the team define what quality code is, both what's good and what's bad, and attempt to try to find ways to measure that. All of that's going to be in the eye of the beholder and specific to an organization, as not all programming projects are the same. This is all part of greater total quality management principles, but...
When Iran cracked down on their citizens last time, during this summer's protests, Western companies such as Siemens and Nokia provided them the technology to do this.
I also highly doubt they're building massive databases with worldwide surveillance on Iranian citizens -- for the purposes of going after their relatives within Iran -- with their own home-brew technologies.
This takes some scary stuff some Iranian University students could not simply hash together -- things like deep-packet inspection of all internet traffic and massive data-mining algorithms in the scope of millions upon millions of megabytes.
As an American who moved to Australia a few years ago and married into citizenship, I actually support Australia's strong stance against violent video games and a violent society. The contrast is especially strong when you return to the states for a month or two.
What people generally don't seem to get is that violence is promoted by the mass media to make a quick buck. People here who want to get this game will, just as they will anything else out there -- but there's a difference between getting that in the underground and mass marketing it to society in a race to the bottom for a quarterly profit.
While AvP might not be the most violent video game out there, at least we have a line drawn in the sand. People even in their 20's and 30's grew up playing "games" of execution (Mortal Kombat) and mass murder simulators (Doom), alienating us from society.
But since then, we've had children, and we don't want our children to grow up with the wrongs we grew up with, especially since they get worse as time goes on.
What Australia is doing is really no different of a public safety measure than requiring seat belts in cars and enforcing people wearing it. Call that "Nanny State" all you want, and dream of days without it, but it saved and still saves lives.
It's not a popular opinion, so rate me down, do what you want, but I'm speaking how I and most other Australians I know feel.
It's really a hierarchical system based on making software a commodity -- most of the technologies in the open source world began as fully proprietary, then moved into the pragmatic domain for practical use, then became implemented by purists when the ability to develop it for cheap by hobbyists existed.
I could go into significant history of things such as UNIX, but for example, if it were not for Netscape, Firefox would not exist. Firefox would not exist in its current form if dogmatic people prevented the integration of Flash player into it. Eventually, a free and open source alternative will make a commodity of what is currently provided by Flash Player, but one able to run existing Action Script and what not. Then Firefox will finally be "pure."
Meanwhile, true purists are likely still using links2 on Plan9, which has capabilities far more than what existed commercially 15 years ago, but are practically useless today.
The bottom line is that with Open-Source Software, purists can only thrive because of the works of pragmatists, and the pragmatists can only thrive because of the works of proprietary systems.
If you're ever on a jury in the United States, the legal system will wrongly try to convince you that they're either guilty or not guilty, but there is a third way: nullification or veto powers.
This is when you think the law is bad, or you otherwise cannot convict them under it by your conscience. It still exists to this day, but simply remains mostly unknown.
In this case, I would have absolutely nullified a potential $2 million fine. Did she do it? Sure. But it's a bad law resulting in excessive fines.
It only takes one juror who knows his or her rights to stop this kind of crap. For more information as your rights at a juror, see the Fully Informed Jury Association.
Google itself will burst the bubble.
on
Dot-Com Bubble v2.0?
·
· Score: 1, Troll
Google is one of the most speculated companies out there -- enough so that, on paper, it's worth 127.62 gigadollars, which is more than 2/3 the value of Wal-Mart and 1/3 the value of Exxon. Even though it does make money, its price/earnings ratio is an astronomical 61, whereas Wal-Mart is around 14 and Exxon is 10, which is a definite sign of tulip fever not unlike what we saw in the late 90s.
But even for the future, as a long-term investment, it's the nature of the business which matters. Most of what google sells is merely advertising -- however, a brick-and-mortar advertising company with total saturation, such as Lamar, has a high P/E ratio as well, but only has $5.6 gigadollars in market cap. Even the ubiquitous Clear Channel only has a $7 gigadollar market cap, and that's with a high P/E ratio, as well.
When google is inevitably reduced to what it's worth (probably a single percentage point of what it is currently) by whatever means -- legal action, bad earnings reports, a downturn in the PC industry, accounting scandals, a recession, its spending away billions of dollars with no results, and what not -- other people will realize that google and every other modern web company is exactly the same way.
Then whammo, Webcrash 2.0.
I feel sorry for anyone who let history repeat itself and may have actually believed these companies would rival major brick-and-mortars in revenue and profitability. The only right thing to do in such situations is to short the stocks.
I'm rather tired of waiting for graphics to progress to the level they will be in in the year 2010 or so. I'd like to see these machines, which rendered Lord of the Rings, use their nearly unlimited processing power to let me play a game -- perhaps Half-Life or Quake 2 with a new rendering DLL -- to spit out 60fps of pure ray-traced bliss.
Or just fire up InTrace with a scene of 1 billion polygons of a super-detailed scene of sunflowers, with multiple reflections and all the other goodies, and crank it to 1600x1200.
Does anyone here really think that terrorists will try a 9/11 again? The federal government, in order to slowly erode privacy laws until the court rules draconian measures legal, is going quite overboard in restricting passengers on flights. Most likely, the system will have some hidden profiling features built in, like finding someone's perceived political affiliation, and especially religion and country of origin.
If I were a terrorist, of course, I wouldn't even bother with planes -- I would use mortars. They can be set up in complete defilade, and can be fired at huge ranges, even from wooded areas across the Potomac river. An explosive expert could probably build a mortar system, as they're primitive devices, but smuggling the parts for one into the country would be quite easy. Someone skilled with explosives could also put in radiological material and contaminate something like a nuclear power plant or a major business area indefinitely, and shut it down, causing havoc. Worst of all, they could get away with it.
What I mean to say, however, is that the eggs shouldn't be put in one basket for preventing more plane hijackings. They can lock down planes as much as they want, but the chain preventing terrorism is only as strong as the weakest link.
This project sounds quite interesting -- it could really help out projects like Echelon to help win the war on terrorism, if it's capable of understanding other languages of course, and could possibly build a whole database of information that's intercepted from other places. All that chatter, with the codewords they use, could possibly be understood by a football field full of Linux rackmounts, and might foil something.
Of course, such power could also be horribly misused if it came into the wrong hands. What if they wanted to enumerate every member or affiliate of the "terrorist" Green Party in the case of a "national emergency?" Feed WebFountain some data from the internet, and from ECHELON, and they would have a quick blacklist.
Or corporations, for that matter, as that's who it's designed for, could quickly blacklist people from employment who were considered "dangerous" such as whistleblowers, heavily involved union members, spies, watchdogs, and so forth.
It's ridiculous that they would go and have the compulsory meetings, deals, business trips, and so forth to secure the rights for a crooked, proprietary format that barely has any advantages over MP3s. That, plus trying to hack Microsoft's famously esoteric code into an iPod will take a team of software engineers quite awhile.
OGGV has free libraries for both floating-point AND now integer decoding with Tremor. OGGV doesn't require any deal making, as it's not just allowed, but WELCOMED to be used without permission in any software or hardware whatsoever. The way it's written, it would probably only take a few days for a talented coder to get it running.
At the CES expo, Fiorina expressed support for DRM handled by Microsoft. It's obvious OGG Vorbis is considered a threat, so they're giving it the cold shoulder.
It will all come down to one system
on
More ApeXtreme Info
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Why is another company with relatively little financial base compared to Sony and Microsoft trying to enter the console market?
Nintendo is already on its way out to becoming a software-only company like Sega was. Microsoft is doing reasonably well in the US, but flopping in Japan and Europe. Sony dominates in all three areas, because they've been the standard since the PS1 -- which they're still backwards compatible with, by the way.
With days of software being unportable due to heavy use of assembly language being a thing of the far past, and games being more modular, people are going to do what they do in the business world and bet on the winner.
The winner? Sony. They're too big, and most likely can't be dethroned. They're also in bed with Linux, which is a good thing. In Japan, they released a TIVO/DVD-R/PS2 combo, and are on their way to creating and dominating with a single living room device.
Microsoft wants to do more than make sure there are Windows-powered devices in every office, home, cell phone, and car.
Then came the Big Three: speeches by Dell's Michael Dell, HP's Carly Fiorina, and Intel's Paul Otellini. All three PC companies now are fully ensconced in the world of consumer electronics, none more so than HP, which has wholeheartedly endorsed DRM as the wave of the future. And when someone endorses DRM these days, Hollywood pays tribute. Ben Affleck, Doctor Dre, Alicia Keys, and The Edge on the same stage? Entertainment Tonight should have been there.
Well, that's not good for the future -- it looks like companies are determined to push digital rights management, and with Microsoft making aggressive attempts at expanding its software as usual, will they team up and begin making moves to implement the P word sometime this year?
Of course, Linux doesn't have a standard for DRM, with Macrovision being the only one in portation, but given recent events (deCSS), Linux is thankfully not the friendliest platform for such things. Perhaps more people will switch over to Linux once they learn their days of free downloading may be over if they stick with Microsoft?
The thing I always liked about Intel chips was their low power absorption and their low heat. Though they're a bit pricy in comparison, AMD chips were power-hungry and thus produced heat as if they had uranium cores.
Intel chips were great for Mini-ITX cube PCs if you didn't want them to burn, as they ran cool enough to easily run with heat pipe technology. They were even better for laptops, since you didn't have them draining the battery like crazy . On the regular PC front, they would famously run cool overclocked to extremes, like from 1.6-2.4 or from 2.2-3.0 on cheap stock cooling alone.
The way around all this insecure, computerized Diebold mess is simple: absentee ballots.
All absentee ballots have to be counted by hand, and it also leaves a tangible paper trail. Each state's website has a page on how to vote in absentia, which only requires a quick entry into google of your state's name and the word "absentee."
If you don't trust your votes to the Diebold corporation and their known political views, vote absentee in the 2004 election.
The moon is a giant rock that happens to be covered in a consistent layer of Helium 3. Harvesting that could, combined with the advent of Fusion power, provide us enough power to light the entire planet for thousands of years. Oh, and we'd make a tidy profit from it. The Moon is also a really fine source of raw material for building other things in orbit alot cheaper than lofting them from earth. It's also likely we can find sufficient raw materials to seperate out vital components for rocket fuel, also a lot cheaper per pound than trying to bring it up from Earth.
Mars is a spooky prospect for me, too. I'm not thrilled with the idea of bringing back samples, let alone sending people there. Bringing samples back to a well isolated lab on the Moon (or in some other spot, like a lagrange point) is another matter.
I'd a lot rather have us go from the Moon to the asteroids anyway -- now there's some profit potential! Plus, what we don't find a direct commmercial use for we can always drop down the gravity well on terrorists at really nice velocities. Kinetic energy is our friend.:D
Considering that an Apple would most likely be on every desktop if they had allowed licensing of their products in the 1980s like IBM did, it's quite wise for them to allow licensing of another succesful, revolutionary product that brings the fruits of technology to the average joe.
I'm glad a good man like Steve Jobs no longer ruminates over his mistake, and instead learns from it. Ironically enough, he even works hand in hand with IBM, now.
Since this whole thing is happening, Microsoft had better hurry up with service pack 2, which sets "NO" as the default action for accepting verisign certificates.
For all the poor folks working in tech support (sympathy excluded for those in India), expect endless calls and irate customers complaining about spyware once those greedy bastards figure out to take advantage of this. The least Mr. Gates could do about this is release part of the patch that makes "NO" the default option for installing crap, as well as a few other features, part of a mandatory Windows update.
Until then, you could always get or recommend to loved ones Mozilla Firebird for Wintel machines.
At $7/GB, that's quite expensive. CD-Rs are usually free with a rebate, and store nearly a GB for $0.07 otherise. CD-RWs are in the same price neighborhood. Mini-DVDs would pack much more, and would be a lot cheaper than $7/GB.
Why doesn't Sony give up on this technology? Optical discs are the way to go, with flash cards being a good enough technology for the rest. This is like re-incarnating the Betamax.
Besides, you can already get 1GB MP3-playing drives in the size of a keychain, great for jogging or sneaking in class. Sony's are much bigger, being about 3/4 the size of a CD player.
It's much more efficient, easier to fuel, infinitely more intelligent, far less expensive, and most likely stronger than anything a machine could muster without using up a ridiculous amount of energy by carrying around battery packs.
How big of a buffer does this thing have? If this thing uses DVDs for a turntable, then it must mean it has over 5GB of RAM to get around the lag of spinning the disk to find the part of the video.
Unless, of course, it only goes over the span of a few seconds, but since video/audio streams take up a ton of data, then it must have something like 512MB of ram built in to do it.
That, plus they have to find a way to capture the results of the delta frames, or else they're going to have artifacts.
At 40GB, why the heck doesn't this thing not only have ogg and mp3 support, but also a few RCA jacks and support a few video codecs? They're licensing WMA anyways, so they could at least use WMV, in addition to all the open MPEG and OGM formats.
40GB is roughly three weeks worth of MP3s, and most people outside of hardcore music enthusiasts will never accumulate nearly that many, and no one but semi-truckers would need to take that much with them. Video would be a very necessary complement to justify that much of an increase in storage space.
Is a custom solution. No company would dare make such an air cooling system.
What you need:
1) Bore a large hole on the plate behind the where the CPU is behind the motherboard, and drill a hole in the left side of the case and mount a SUNON 120mm fan on it, blowing out.
2) Get an ALPHA heatsink with a 80mm fan mount, it'll cost you about $50. It requires that you have those 4 holes around the CPU to mount it, since it's so huge.
3) Get an 80mm-120mm fan adapter and mount a 120mm SUNON fan on the alpha heatsink, blowing outwards. You should also have another 120mm SUNON fan on the outside of the case in front of the CPU, blowing outwards.
I've seen a Barton 2500+ overclocked to 4000 with it, on air alone. At 2500, it ran at 15*C idle, and at 4000, it runs at about 35-40*C. It's a lot cheaper and easier than watercooling.
Slashdot Mirror
Programmers cannot be measured by any simple metric -- this is true. It's been debated ad nauseam for years.
Still, I don't see why the hell people are trying. Quotas and flat numbers measuring simply by "production" are always stupid things in the long run, just as they were in factories.
In software, they'll cause the same problems that they did at brick and mortar factories before TQM principles were established -- people fearing the data and fudging it in desperation. If this is counted by, say, lines of code produced, you had better believe it will be written in the strangest manner possible in spite of defects. But with any quota/by objective system in place, no teamwork will take place -- they'll all be concerned about their own numbers or even hurting others. No one will experiment or come up with ideas and find any process improvements.
And the person who actually does a good job in realstic terms may not compare to someone who skewed the numbers objectively to feed their kids. This will not give them any pride in their workmanship and will be a serious demotivator, if not burning them out entirely from cynicism about their profession.
What's the alternative? Judge the programmers based on quality. Have the team define what quality code is, both what's good and what's bad, and attempt to try to find ways to measure that. All of that's going to be in the eye of the beholder and specific to an organization, as not all programming projects are the same. This is all part of greater total quality management principles, but...
When Iran cracked down on their citizens last time, during this summer's protests, Western companies such as Siemens and Nokia provided them the technology to do this.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124562668777335653.html
I also highly doubt they're building massive databases with worldwide surveillance on Iranian citizens -- for the purposes of going after their relatives within Iran -- with their own home-brew technologies.
This takes some scary stuff some Iranian University students could not simply hash together -- things like deep-packet inspection of all internet traffic and massive data-mining algorithms in the scope of millions upon millions of megabytes.
As an American who moved to Australia a few years ago and married into citizenship, I actually support Australia's strong stance against violent video games and a violent society. The contrast is especially strong when you return to the states for a month or two.
What people generally don't seem to get is that violence is promoted by the mass media to make a quick buck. People here who want to get this game will, just as they will anything else out there -- but there's a difference between getting that in the underground and mass marketing it to society in a race to the bottom for a quarterly profit.
While AvP might not be the most violent video game out there, at least we have a line drawn in the sand. People even in their 20's and 30's grew up playing "games" of execution (Mortal Kombat) and mass murder simulators (Doom), alienating us from society.
But since then, we've had children, and we don't want our children to grow up with the wrongs we grew up with, especially since they get worse as time goes on.
What Australia is doing is really no different of a public safety measure than requiring seat belts in cars and enforcing people wearing it. Call that "Nanny State" all you want, and dream of days without it, but it saved and still saves lives.
It's not a popular opinion, so rate me down, do what you want, but I'm speaking how I and most other Australians I know feel.
It's really a hierarchical system based on making software a commodity -- most of the technologies in the open source world began as fully proprietary, then moved into the pragmatic domain for practical use, then became implemented by purists when the ability to develop it for cheap by hobbyists existed.
I could go into significant history of things such as UNIX, but for example, if it were not for Netscape, Firefox would not exist. Firefox would not exist in its current form if dogmatic people prevented the integration of Flash player into it. Eventually, a free and open source alternative will make a commodity of what is currently provided by Flash Player, but one able to run existing Action Script and what not. Then Firefox will finally be "pure."
Meanwhile, true purists are likely still using links2 on Plan9, which has capabilities far more than what existed commercially 15 years ago, but are practically useless today.
The bottom line is that with Open-Source Software, purists can only thrive because of the works of pragmatists, and the pragmatists can only thrive because of the works of proprietary systems.
If you're ever on a jury in the United States, the legal system will wrongly try to convince you that they're either guilty or not guilty, but there is a third way: nullification or veto powers.
This is when you think the law is bad, or you otherwise cannot convict them under it by your conscience. It still exists to this day, but simply remains mostly unknown.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
In this case, I would have absolutely nullified a potential $2 million fine. Did she do it? Sure. But it's a bad law resulting in excessive fines.
It only takes one juror who knows his or her rights to stop this kind of crap. For more information as your rights at a juror, see the Fully Informed Jury Association.
http://fija.org/
-SKO
Google is one of the most speculated companies out there -- enough so that, on paper, it's worth 127.62 gigadollars, which is more than 2/3 the value of Wal-Mart and 1/3 the value of Exxon. Even though it does make money, its price/earnings ratio is an astronomical 61, whereas Wal-Mart is around 14 and Exxon is 10, which is a definite sign of tulip fever not unlike what we saw in the late 90s.
But even for the future, as a long-term investment, it's the nature of the business which matters. Most of what google sells is merely advertising -- however, a brick-and-mortar advertising company with total saturation, such as Lamar, has a high P/E ratio as well, but only has $5.6 gigadollars in market cap. Even the ubiquitous Clear Channel only has a $7 gigadollar market cap, and that's with a high P/E ratio, as well.
When google is inevitably reduced to what it's worth (probably a single percentage point of what it is currently) by whatever means -- legal action, bad earnings reports, a downturn in the PC industry, accounting scandals, a recession, its spending away billions of dollars with no results, and what not -- other people will realize that google and every other modern web company is exactly the same way.
Then whammo, Webcrash 2.0.
I feel sorry for anyone who let history repeat itself and may have actually believed these companies would rival major brick-and-mortars in revenue and profitability. The only right thing to do in such situations is to short the stocks.
I'm rather tired of waiting for graphics to progress to the level they will be in in the year 2010 or so. I'd like to see these machines, which rendered Lord of the Rings, use their nearly unlimited processing power to let me play a game -- perhaps Half-Life or Quake 2 with a new rendering DLL -- to spit out 60fps of pure ray-traced bliss.
:)
Or just fire up InTrace with a scene of 1 billion polygons of a super-detailed scene of sunflowers, with multiple reflections and all the other goodies, and crank it to 1600x1200.
I can dream, can't I?
Considering that I'm both a 12 year old girl and a Linux user, this doesn't fare well for me.
I can see it now... it'll be something like this:
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/riaa-psa.html
Does anyone here really think that terrorists will try a 9/11 again? The federal government, in order to slowly erode privacy laws until the court rules draconian measures legal, is going quite overboard in restricting passengers on flights. Most likely, the system will have some hidden profiling features built in, like finding someone's perceived political affiliation, and especially religion and country of origin.
If I were a terrorist, of course, I wouldn't even bother with planes -- I would use mortars. They can be set up in complete defilade, and can be fired at huge ranges, even from wooded areas across the Potomac river. An explosive expert could probably build a mortar system, as they're primitive devices, but smuggling the parts for one into the country would be quite easy. Someone skilled with explosives could also put in radiological material and contaminate something like a nuclear power plant or a major business area indefinitely, and shut it down, causing havoc. Worst of all, they could get away with it.
What I mean to say, however, is that the eggs shouldn't be put in one basket for preventing more plane hijackings. They can lock down planes as much as they want, but the chain preventing terrorism is only as strong as the weakest link.
Does that $699 charge have anything to do with SCO?
This project sounds quite interesting -- it could really help out projects like Echelon to help win the war on terrorism, if it's capable of understanding other languages of course, and could possibly build a whole database of information that's intercepted from other places. All that chatter, with the codewords they use, could possibly be understood by a football field full of Linux rackmounts, and might foil something.
Of course, such power could also be horribly misused if it came into the wrong hands. What if they wanted to enumerate every member or affiliate of the "terrorist" Green Party in the case of a "national emergency?" Feed WebFountain some data from the internet, and from ECHELON, and they would have a quick blacklist.
Or corporations, for that matter, as that's who it's designed for, could quickly blacklist people from employment who were considered "dangerous" such as whistleblowers, heavily involved union members, spies, watchdogs, and so forth.
It's ridiculous that they would go and have the compulsory meetings, deals, business trips, and so forth to secure the rights for a crooked, proprietary format that barely has any advantages over MP3s. That, plus trying to hack Microsoft's famously esoteric code into an iPod will take a team of software engineers quite awhile.
OGGV has free libraries for both floating-point AND now integer decoding with Tremor. OGGV doesn't require any deal making, as it's not just allowed, but WELCOMED to be used without permission in any software or hardware whatsoever. The way it's written, it would probably only take a few days for a talented coder to get it running.
At the CES expo, Fiorina expressed support for DRM handled by Microsoft. It's obvious OGG Vorbis is considered a threat, so they're giving it the cold shoulder.
Why is another company with relatively little financial base compared to Sony and Microsoft trying to enter the console market?
Nintendo is already on its way out to becoming a software-only company like Sega was. Microsoft is doing reasonably well in the US, but flopping in Japan and Europe. Sony dominates in all three areas, because they've been the standard since the PS1 -- which they're still backwards compatible with, by the way.
With days of software being unportable due to heavy use of assembly language being a thing of the far past, and games being more modular, people are going to do what they do in the business world and bet on the winner.
The winner? Sony. They're too big, and most likely can't be dethroned. They're also in bed with Linux, which is a good thing. In Japan, they released a TIVO/DVD-R/PS2 combo, and are on their way to creating and dominating with a single living room device.
Microsoft wants to do more than make sure there are Windows-powered devices in every office, home, cell phone, and car.
Then came the Big Three: speeches by Dell's Michael Dell, HP's Carly Fiorina, and Intel's Paul Otellini. All three PC companies now are fully ensconced in the world of consumer electronics, none more so than HP, which has wholeheartedly endorsed DRM as the wave of the future. And when someone endorses DRM these days, Hollywood pays tribute. Ben Affleck, Doctor Dre, Alicia Keys, and The Edge on the same stage? Entertainment Tonight should have been there.
Well, that's not good for the future -- it looks like companies are determined to push digital rights management, and with Microsoft making aggressive attempts at expanding its software as usual, will they team up and begin making moves to implement the P word sometime this year?
Of course, Linux doesn't have a standard for DRM, with Macrovision being the only one in portation, but given recent events (deCSS), Linux is thankfully not the friendliest platform for such things. Perhaps more people will switch over to Linux once they learn their days of free downloading may be over if they stick with Microsoft?
The thing I always liked about Intel chips was their low power absorption and their low heat. Though they're a bit pricy in comparison, AMD chips were power-hungry and thus produced heat as if they had uranium cores.
Intel chips were great for Mini-ITX cube PCs if you didn't want them to burn, as they ran cool enough to easily run with heat pipe technology. They were even better for laptops, since you didn't have them draining the battery like crazy . On the regular PC front, they would famously run cool overclocked to extremes, like from 1.6-2.4 or from 2.2-3.0 on cheap stock cooling alone.
Now, it seems like they've lost that advantage.
The way around all this insecure, computerized Diebold mess is simple: absentee ballots.
All absentee ballots have to be counted by hand, and it also leaves a tangible paper trail. Each state's website has a page on how to vote in absentia, which only requires a quick entry into google of your state's name and the word "absentee."
If you don't trust your votes to the Diebold corporation and their known political views, vote absentee in the 2004 election.
The moon is a giant rock that happens to be covered in a consistent layer of Helium 3. Harvesting that could, combined with the advent of Fusion power, provide us enough power to light the entire planet for thousands of years. Oh, and we'd make a tidy profit from it. The Moon is also a really fine source of raw material for building other things in orbit alot cheaper than lofting them from earth. It's also likely we can find sufficient raw materials to seperate out vital components for rocket fuel, also a lot cheaper per pound than trying to bring it up from Earth.
:D
Mars is a spooky prospect for me, too. I'm not thrilled with the idea of bringing back samples, let alone sending people there. Bringing samples back to a well isolated lab on the Moon (or in some other spot, like a lagrange point) is another matter.
I'd a lot rather have us go from the Moon to the asteroids anyway -- now there's some profit potential! Plus, what we don't find a direct commmercial use for we can always drop down the gravity well on terrorists at really nice velocities. Kinetic energy is our friend.
Considering that an Apple would most likely be on every desktop if they had allowed licensing of their products in the 1980s like IBM did, it's quite wise for them to allow licensing of another succesful, revolutionary product that brings the fruits of technology to the average joe.
I'm glad a good man like Steve Jobs no longer ruminates over his mistake, and instead learns from it. Ironically enough, he even works hand in hand with IBM, now.
Since this whole thing is happening, Microsoft had better hurry up with service pack 2, which sets "NO" as the default action for accepting verisign certificates.
For all the poor folks working in tech support (sympathy excluded for those in India), expect endless calls and irate customers complaining about spyware once those greedy bastards figure out to take advantage of this. The least Mr. Gates could do about this is release part of the patch that makes "NO" the default option for installing crap, as well as a few other features, part of a mandatory Windows update.
Until then, you could always get or recommend to loved ones Mozilla Firebird for Wintel machines.
At $7/GB, that's quite expensive. CD-Rs are usually free with a rebate, and store nearly a GB for $0.07 otherise. CD-RWs are in the same price neighborhood. Mini-DVDs would pack much more, and would be a lot cheaper than $7/GB.
Why doesn't Sony give up on this technology? Optical discs are the way to go, with flash cards being a good enough technology for the rest. This is like re-incarnating the Betamax.
Besides, you can already get 1GB MP3-playing drives in the size of a keychain, great for jogging or sneaking in class. Sony's are much bigger, being about 3/4 the size of a CD player.
Why not just use a real dog?
It's much more efficient, easier to fuel, infinitely more intelligent, far less expensive, and most likely stronger than anything a machine could muster without using up a ridiculous amount of energy by carrying around battery packs.
Linus Torvalds has become a metrosexual!
How big of a buffer does this thing have? If this thing uses DVDs for a turntable, then it must mean it has over 5GB of RAM to get around the lag of spinning the disk to find the part of the video.
Unless, of course, it only goes over the span of a few seconds, but since video/audio streams take up a ton of data, then it must have something like 512MB of ram built in to do it.
That, plus they have to find a way to capture the results of the delta frames, or else they're going to have artifacts.
Pretty amazing stuff.
At 40GB, why the heck doesn't this thing not only have ogg and mp3 support, but also a few RCA jacks and support a few video codecs? They're licensing WMA anyways, so they could at least use WMV, in addition to all the open MPEG and OGM formats.
40GB is roughly three weeks worth of MP3s, and most people outside of hardcore music enthusiasts will never accumulate nearly that many, and no one but semi-truckers would need to take that much with them. Video would be a very necessary complement to justify that much of an increase in storage space.
Is a custom solution. No company would dare make such an air cooling system.
What you need:
1) Bore a large hole on the plate behind the where the CPU is behind the motherboard, and drill a hole in the left side of the case and mount a SUNON 120mm fan on it, blowing out.
2) Get an ALPHA heatsink with a 80mm fan mount, it'll cost you about $50. It requires that you have those 4 holes around the CPU to mount it, since it's so huge.
3) Get an 80mm-120mm fan adapter and mount a 120mm SUNON fan on the alpha heatsink, blowing outwards. You should also have another 120mm SUNON fan on the outside of the case in front of the CPU, blowing outwards.
I've seen a Barton 2500+ overclocked to 4000 with it, on air alone. At 2500, it ran at 15*C idle, and at 4000, it runs at about 35-40*C. It's a lot cheaper and easier than watercooling.