Yep, farmed salmon won't save us. The farms here in BC import pellets made from fish protein harvested in South America to feed the farmed salmon. It's NOT protein efficient. Imagine catching wild meat like deer or ducks and grinding them up to make food pellets to raise pigs or cows. We wouldn't do that, but for some reason it's OK to do the same for aquaculture. Out-of-sight out-of-mind, I guess.
Mind you, some types of aquaculture are better. I think the linked article mentions clams and catfish which feed much lower on the food chain.
I think that time has proven that the majority of (non-slashdotters) will click yes to just about any prompt. I know my parents would. So would the majority of my co-workers. So, I do expect MSN traffic (IE7 seems to have reset my homepage!) and search to jump.
I have a an XP Pro upgrade disk kicking around the office. All I needed to do when re-installing is to put a qualifying OS CD in the drive. The XP installer then browses the CD to validate the hash or something on the CD. Then it asks for the XP Upgrade disc back. This all happens early in the XP install. There's no need to install the previous OS. Perhaps the Dell OEM disks work differently.
Nvidia doesn't really have a choice in this matter. They need to at least explore the option of creating a CPU or be relegated to niche status.
It's pretty clear that both Intel and AMD are intent on swallowing up the lower 3/4 (hand-waving guess) of the GPU market over the next few years. And I believe that ATI will still be fighting it out at the top end over that remaining 25%.
That would leave Nvidea as a niche player in the uber high end, making GPUs strictly for graphics professionals and gamers with too much money. You can survive as a niche player in technology... but it's a tenuous life. Just ask Cray, SGI, Transmeta, Sun, Cisco, and hundreds of others*. Only the latter two of resemble themselves in their primes -- but even then, they've lost influence.
* Whatever happened to Gravis and the Gravis Ultrasound?
Who's surprised? Consoles take time... what do you expect the team to do after the product has launched? Sit around for a couple years? Of course they're going to start planning the next console now!
It makes it harder to pirate the disks in the future. Imagine if the Dreamcast had a strict policy of filling all game disks to the full 1GB with garbage data that was inseparable from the game code. It would have been much, much, harder for people to distribute pirated games. The same goes for the Xbox and DVDs. Mind you, now that dual layer writeable DVDs are affordable, this is a bit moot.
People are buying Oracle, not an OS
on
Oracle Linux?
·
· Score: 1
This makes sense to me. Folks installing Oracle don't really want to care about the OS that it's running on... they're far more insterested in making sure that it just runs and runs forever.
Actually, I've been wondering when Oracle would do this. The database guys are one of the few people who can still benefit from the extra bit of customization that owning the whole stack can bring. IMHO, most other apps would be better off shipping a VMWare image.
A cheaper 80+ 250W PSU would cost a little under $40 before taxes. (I think 80+ is the new buzzword for 80% or more efficient PSUs). Older PSUs, say 2+ years, were typically in the 70% efficiency range. There are a bunch of articles at http://silentpcreview.com/ and other sites about this sort of thing.
I ran the numbers a while ago for one of the PC's around here. The last time I ran the calculations, it costs around $50/year to power that PC for about 6 hours per day. So the break even for me is somewhere around 5-8 years! So while the power grid would get a bit of a break, financially, I wouldn't.
I still might get a new PSU, but that's more because I have serious doubts about the quality of the power coming out of the current one (a suspicious # of hard drive deaths...) but that's a separate issue.
For new purchases, definitely go for the more efficient PSUs... as far as "upgarding" goes... it's borderline at best, at least for me.
I think that this is just a rumour and that it will not happen. It might be a ploy to drive up the bidding price by other companies that are actually looking at YouTube.
A few reasons why:
1. When was the last time Google spent a billion dollars on any takeover -- the answer, I think, is never. They've made small purchases here and there of $50-200M, but this would be the largest and most complex by far. (Unless the price being rumoured is wrong too, which is possible). Why rock the boat with large outside purchases?
2. The liability is HUGE. It just doesn't seem smart to me. Mark Cuban summed it up nicely last week, YouTube is a lawsuit waiting to happen. EVEN IF Google immediately axed the copywritten material (which itself is no easy task), they would STILL be liable for previous infringments! And how on earth is Google (or anyone) supposed to monitor new content for infringements? That's a LOT of manpower. Google has a lot of smart folks, but I don't think that even they would be able to automate that.
3. What's wrong with Google Video that can't be solved with a few programmers? Google has the ability to support Google Video in ways that it hasn't exploited yet. GoogleToolbar, GMail, Adwords and Adsense... all of those can be used to help promote Google Video when the time is right. Mind you, my point 2 about liability would apply to Google Video too.
Anyway, there's my prediction. YouTube will get sold someday for some outrageous sum, but my guess is that it'll go to someone with more media ties.
Who wants to pay for ads on some twerps MySpace page? No one, unless it's dirt cheap. Who wants to advertise on a quality gaming site? Lots of people and therefore, the rates are pretty high. Using page views as way to compare two vastly different sites is just plain wrong.
I have an ancient Yahoo (originally Geocities) email box that I check every few days. I like the new interface. It's nice to be able to highlight multiple messages with the shift-down arrow and have tabs for each message window, and other things that make it much more like a full email client than anything I've seen elsewhere.
I wouldn't personally switch, mostly since I don't use "free" email anymore. But I have recommended other people to at least try it before opening yet another gmail account.
But yeah, it's got to be one of the stupidest naming schemes from a major vendor of anything that I've seen in a long time.
I was looking forward to a Pentium V. Sure it would have seemed a bit redundant, but so is the Core 2 Duo chip that's in the new laptop I've been eyeing...
I got curious about how much better Lithium Ion batteries were than Nickel Metal Hydride. So, here are a few numbers I quickly grabbed from the Wikipedia.
My laptop gets a couple hours of battery life with Li-Ion. It looks like I'd get about 40% of that with NiMH -- not that appealing. I don't think we'll be turning back any time soon.
I just hope that the next generation of battery technolgy is inherently less likely to explode.
If you browse the various web master forums, you'll find lots of stories of people being banned from Google Adsense for click-fraud. Just to be safe, I never click the ads on my sites. Anything that I find interesting, will get visits by me entering the URL manually.
True, I'm probably being a bit paranoid. But it's not like I have any power in my advertising relationship with Google.
I quite often take photos of receipts and forms rather than walk to the other room to boot up the PC with the scanner. The trick for me is to force the focus to 1 metre and take the photo from about a meter away while using the optical zoom to make the paper fill in the field of view.
I admit that the quality isn't quite as good as the scanner, but it's a heck of a lot more convenient and it's good enough for many uses.
FWIW, macro mode doesn't really work well on my old digicam, plus, I'm not sure it makes sense to use it in this case.
I've been told that anything less than $xxx almost never gets a signature check. Over some unknown limit, however, the signature does get validated.
If you still get voided (is that the term?) cheques returned to you, you can see hints of this sometimes. I've seen this on a few cheques -- there's a little sticker with a lot of extra routing information, employee ID numbers, and initials on it.
FWIW, two signatures required accounts can still be opened, at least here in Canada. I had to do that about 2 years ago.
produce several thousand low-cost PCs
They're going to have a hard time making those CPUs cost effective if they're only doing a few thousand. I'm thinking that either something was lost in translation, or the $150 price is some estimate after sales ramp, or it's all calculated in that every wishy-washy government slush fund kind of way.
Anyone care to guess what fab technology they're using?
I've actually been trying to spec. out a PC based PVR the last few days -- my total pretax cost is coming around to CAD 450.
It should be relatively easy to get your power usage to under 150W at load, and half of that at idle. It's still a lot more than a DVD player, but certainly not 350W. The trick is to be selective about components -- you don't need the highest end, most power consuming, hardware for this. Here's a link to an article at Silent PC Review on these things -- note, the system they've tested does not include a TV tuner, and uses a laptop harddrive, so figure on them being on the low side.
Don't forget, after you've built a PC based PVR, you get a whole lot more flexability that you could possibly get from a standalone device. Imagine 3 years down the road you want to switch to HDTV, use next-gen DVD's, or get multiple TV tuners? Well, each of those will be a simple $100-200 dollar upgrade.
I doubt that AMD has launched a new process within 6 months of Intel in the last decade. It's a almost a basic fact of life. Intel has the money and experience to manufacture at smaller dimensions sooner than AMD. Sometimes 6 months, this time about a year.
It's not necessarily "hurting them [AMD] bad" though. The Opterons are still quite competitive in power use versus the latest Core 2's (certainly not as bad as the P4 vs the Opteron). Plus, there are time and cost benefits to letting Intel work out the kinks in the system -- obviously Intel doesn't tell AMD what to do, but there are changes that affect shared suppliers that benefit everyone.
Our webhost, who offered us secondary MX for "free", changed their hostnames for SMTP servers. Apparently they updated DNS records of those whose DNS records they manage.... and didn't bother to tell anyone else. Now I have to test the secondary MX services every few months just to make sure they still work.
I've got no problems with my ISP having some sort of limit to let them make a few bucks. As much as I like to complain about the cost of hi-speed cable internet, I know that if I was to run it at max 6Mbps 24/7 there's no way they would make any money.
Specific filters for Bittorrent bug me though, they're not a long term solution. The next step that BT programs will take is to make BT traffic look like VPN or HTTPS traffic -- then what? They're going to severely throttle VPN or bank website access? Sooner or later it will cost them customers in the long run.
IMHO, "all" that ISPs need to do is throttle by volume of data by hour. Say, the first 400MB in any one day gets through without any throttle, then start throttling down to say, 100MB per hour. Then leave the taps wide-open at night. It's FAR easier to throttle based on overall data useage rather than by specific protocals. And an open and clear system will let people figure out their useage appropriately. In my case, I'd schedule my VPS backups for off-hours.
Both the black and color cartridges on the el-cheapo multifunction Lexmark I bought a 1.5 years ago are running low. For the same amount of money as a set of cartridges, I'm very tempted to pick up a newer model, and probably a different brand. Why? I'm only marginally satisfied with the scanner in my model, and I think I can do better. Besides, I'm sure I can find a friend who will take the older unit off my hands, if only for the scanner.
The printer was bought primarily for the scanner functions, the 99% of printing goes to the 8 year old laser. In the end, I'll probably try my luck at refilled carts...
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, farmed salmon won't save us. The farms here in BC import pellets made from fish protein harvested in South America to feed the farmed salmon. It's NOT protein efficient. Imagine catching wild meat like deer or ducks and grinding them up to make food pellets to raise pigs or cows. We wouldn't do that, but for some reason it's OK to do the same for aquaculture. Out-of-sight out-of-mind, I guess.
Mind you, some types of aquaculture are better. I think the linked article mentions clams and catfish which feed much lower on the food chain.
I think that time has proven that the majority of (non-slashdotters) will click yes to just about any prompt. I know my parents would. So would the majority of my co-workers. So, I do expect MSN traffic (IE7 seems to have reset my homepage!) and search to jump.
But that would be no different than ANY phone call that someone answers on a cell phone in the USA (or Canada).
IMHO,t his JahJah service actually looks pretty useful...
I have a an XP Pro upgrade disk kicking around the office. All I needed to do when re-installing is to put a qualifying OS CD in the drive. The XP installer then browses the CD to validate the hash or something on the CD. Then it asks for the XP Upgrade disc back. This all happens early in the XP install. There's no need to install the previous OS. Perhaps the Dell OEM disks work differently.
Nvidia doesn't really have a choice in this matter. They need to at least explore the option of creating a CPU or be relegated to niche status.
It's pretty clear that both Intel and AMD are intent on swallowing up the lower 3/4 (hand-waving guess) of the GPU market over the next few years. And I believe that ATI will still be fighting it out at the top end over that remaining 25%.
That would leave Nvidea as a niche player in the uber high end, making GPUs strictly for graphics professionals and gamers with too much money. You can survive as a niche player in technology... but it's a tenuous life. Just ask Cray, SGI, Transmeta, Sun, Cisco, and hundreds of others*. Only the latter two of resemble themselves in their primes -- but even then, they've lost influence.
* Whatever happened to Gravis and the Gravis Ultrasound?
Who's surprised? Consoles take time... what do you expect the team to do after the product has launched? Sit around for a couple years? Of course they're going to start planning the next console now!
It makes it harder to pirate the disks in the future. Imagine if the Dreamcast had a strict policy of filling all game disks to the full 1GB with garbage data that was inseparable from the game code. It would have been much, much, harder for people to distribute pirated games. The same goes for the Xbox and DVDs. Mind you, now that dual layer writeable DVDs are affordable, this is a bit moot.
This makes sense to me. Folks installing Oracle don't really want to care about the OS that it's running on... they're far more insterested in making sure that it just runs and runs forever. Actually, I've been wondering when Oracle would do this. The database guys are one of the few people who can still benefit from the extra bit of customization that owning the whole stack can bring. IMHO, most other apps would be better off shipping a VMWare image.
A cheaper 80+ 250W PSU would cost a little under $40 before taxes. (I think 80+ is the new buzzword for 80% or more efficient PSUs). Older PSUs, say 2+ years, were typically in the 70% efficiency range. There are a bunch of articles at http://silentpcreview.com/ and other sites about this sort of thing.
I ran the numbers a while ago for one of the PC's around here. The last time I ran the calculations, it costs around $50/year to power that PC for about 6 hours per day. So the break even for me is somewhere around 5-8 years! So while the power grid would get a bit of a break, financially, I wouldn't.
I still might get a new PSU, but that's more because I have serious doubts about the quality of the power coming out of the current one (a suspicious # of hard drive deaths...) but that's a separate issue.
For new purchases, definitely go for the more efficient PSUs... as far as "upgarding" goes... it's borderline at best, at least for me.
I think that this is just a rumour and that it will not happen. It might be a ploy to drive up the bidding price by other companies that are actually looking at YouTube.
A few reasons why:
1. When was the last time Google spent a billion dollars on any takeover -- the answer, I think, is never. They've made small purchases here and there of $50-200M, but this would be the largest and most complex by far. (Unless the price being rumoured is wrong too, which is possible). Why rock the boat with large outside purchases?
2. The liability is HUGE. It just doesn't seem smart to me. Mark Cuban summed it up nicely last week, YouTube is a lawsuit waiting to happen. EVEN IF Google immediately axed the copywritten material (which itself is no easy task), they would STILL be liable for previous infringments! And how on earth is Google (or anyone) supposed to monitor new content for infringements? That's a LOT of manpower. Google has a lot of smart folks, but I don't think that even they would be able to automate that.
3. What's wrong with Google Video that can't be solved with a few programmers? Google has the ability to support Google Video in ways that it hasn't exploited yet. GoogleToolbar, GMail, Adwords and Adsense... all of those can be used to help promote Google Video when the time is right. Mind you, my point 2 about liability would apply to Google Video too.
Anyway, there's my prediction. YouTube will get sold someday for some outrageous sum, but my guess is that it'll go to someone with more media ties.
Who wants to pay for ads on some twerps MySpace page? No one, unless it's dirt cheap. Who wants to advertise on a quality gaming site? Lots of people and therefore, the rates are pretty high. Using page views as way to compare two vastly different sites is just plain wrong.
I have an ancient Yahoo (originally Geocities) email box that I check every few days. I like the new interface. It's nice to be able to highlight multiple messages with the shift-down arrow and have tabs for each message window, and other things that make it much more like a full email client than anything I've seen elsewhere.
I wouldn't personally switch, mostly since I don't use "free" email anymore. But I have recommended other people to at least try it before opening yet another gmail account.
I'd say no. It's not a particularly specialized mag. Generic hardware and software reviews are a dime a dozen.
But yeah, it's got to be one of the stupidest naming schemes from a major vendor of anything that I've seen in a long time. I was looking forward to a Pentium V. Sure it would have seemed a bit redundant, but so is the Core 2 Duo chip that's in the new laptop I've been eyeing...
I got curious about how much better Lithium Ion batteries were than Nickel Metal Hydride. So, here are a few numbers I quickly grabbed from the Wikipedia.
_ battery
Li-Ion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_ion_battery
Energy/weight ~150 Wh/kg
Energy/size ~250 Wh/L
NiMH:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_metal_hydride
Energy/weight 60-?? Wh/kg
Energy/size 100 Wh/L
My laptop gets a couple hours of battery life with Li-Ion. It looks like I'd get about 40% of that with NiMH -- not that appealing. I don't think we'll be turning back any time soon.
I just hope that the next generation of battery technolgy is inherently less likely to explode.
If you browse the various web master forums, you'll find lots of stories of people being banned from Google Adsense for click-fraud. Just to be safe, I never click the ads on my sites. Anything that I find interesting, will get visits by me entering the URL manually.
True, I'm probably being a bit paranoid. But it's not like I have any power in my advertising relationship with Google.
I quite often take photos of receipts and forms rather than walk to the other room to boot up the PC with the scanner. The trick for me is to force the focus to 1 metre and take the photo from about a meter away while using the optical zoom to make the paper fill in the field of view.
I admit that the quality isn't quite as good as the scanner, but it's a heck of a lot more convenient and it's good enough for many uses.
FWIW, macro mode doesn't really work well on my old digicam, plus, I'm not sure it makes sense to use it in this case.
If you need porn in your mailbox, someone will figure out a way to do it. One frame at a time if they need to!
FWIW, you obviously don't get the same spam that I do...
I've been told that anything less than $xxx almost never gets a signature check. Over some unknown limit, however, the signature does get validated. If you still get voided (is that the term?) cheques returned to you, you can see hints of this sometimes. I've seen this on a few cheques -- there's a little sticker with a lot of extra routing information, employee ID numbers, and initials on it. FWIW, two signatures required accounts can still be opened, at least here in Canada. I had to do that about 2 years ago.
produce several thousand low-cost PCs
They're going to have a hard time making those CPUs cost effective if they're only doing a few thousand. I'm thinking that either something was lost in translation, or the $150 price is some estimate after sales ramp, or it's all calculated in that every wishy-washy government slush fund kind of way.
Anyone care to guess what fab technology they're using?
I've actually been trying to spec. out a PC based PVR the last few days -- my total pretax cost is coming around to CAD 450.
It should be relatively easy to get your power usage to under 150W at load, and half of that at idle. It's still a lot more than a DVD player, but certainly not 350W. The trick is to be selective about components -- you don't need the highest end, most power consuming, hardware for this. Here's a link to an article at Silent PC Review on these things -- note, the system they've tested does not include a TV tuner, and uses a laptop harddrive, so figure on them being on the low side.
Don't forget, after you've built a PC based PVR, you get a whole lot more flexability that you could possibly get from a standalone device. Imagine 3 years down the road you want to switch to HDTV, use next-gen DVD's, or get multiple TV tuners? Well, each of those will be a simple $100-200 dollar upgrade.
I doubt that AMD has launched a new process within 6 months of Intel in the last decade. It's a almost a basic fact of life. Intel has the money and experience to manufacture at smaller dimensions sooner than AMD. Sometimes 6 months, this time about a year.
It's not necessarily "hurting them [AMD] bad" though. The Opterons are still quite competitive in power use versus the latest Core 2's (certainly not as bad as the P4 vs the Opteron). Plus, there are time and cost benefits to letting Intel work out the kinks in the system -- obviously Intel doesn't tell AMD what to do, but there are changes that affect shared suppliers that benefit everyone.
Yep, had that happen before....
Our webhost, who offered us secondary MX for "free", changed their hostnames for SMTP servers. Apparently they updated DNS records of those whose DNS records they manage.... and didn't bother to tell anyone else. Now I have to test the secondary MX services every few months just to make sure they still work.
I've got no problems with my ISP having some sort of limit to let them make a few bucks. As much as I like to complain about the cost of hi-speed cable internet, I know that if I was to run it at max 6Mbps 24/7 there's no way they would make any money.
Specific filters for Bittorrent bug me though, they're not a long term solution. The next step that BT programs will take is to make BT traffic look like VPN or HTTPS traffic -- then what? They're going to severely throttle VPN or bank website access? Sooner or later it will cost them customers in the long run.
IMHO, "all" that ISPs need to do is throttle by volume of data by hour. Say, the first 400MB in any one day gets through without any throttle, then start throttling down to say, 100MB per hour. Then leave the taps wide-open at night. It's FAR easier to throttle based on overall data useage rather than by specific protocals. And an open and clear system will let people figure out their useage appropriately. In my case, I'd schedule my VPS backups for off-hours.
Both the black and color cartridges on the el-cheapo multifunction Lexmark I bought a 1.5 years ago are running low. For the same amount of money as a set of cartridges, I'm very tempted to pick up a newer model, and probably a different brand. Why? I'm only marginally satisfied with the scanner in my model, and I think I can do better. Besides, I'm sure I can find a friend who will take the older unit off my hands, if only for the scanner.
The printer was bought primarily for the scanner functions, the 99% of printing goes to the 8 year old laser. In the end, I'll probably try my luck at refilled carts...