This attitude seems to be floating around a lot, but WHY??? Why does the desire to play games at high resolution with high frame rates necessarily equal a person whith a high GQ (geek quotient)?
I can easily see somebody who works as a carpenter for a living wanting to come home and frag a little. Maybe they want more than what a PS2 or suXBox can provide. Maybe they would be a little nervous at providing their own tech support. Maybe they have more money than time.
But I must admit that I would have trouble spending $2K on a machine if I tried, much less $5K.
Instead of spending 5K over 5 years, spend a steady 1K per year in upgrades. You will be worse off after 1 year, less so after 2 years, and break-even after 3 years. Years 4 and 5 you will be ahead of the game.
And the "badness" of being behind is much greater than the "goodness" of being ahead. Running a current game at 500 FPS does not buy you much when a monitor runs at 75-85 Hz. But in 5 years, your favorite game may be 10 FPS, which would suck big time!
Besides, explaining a 1K purchase to the wife is a LOT easier than explaining a 5K one.
Just my humble opinion. It is worth every penny of what you paid for it.
Think of life an a game of russian roulette with over 1000 chambers and one bullet. I will freely admit that chemicals from electronics is a minor issue. But enough minor issues added together amount to a major issue. Life is not safe, and there are many things that I cannot control. But if there is something that I CAN control, then I would be a fool for not doing it. I am not saying that I am going to throw out my computer. I am just saying that if I can swab my mobo and processor with alcohol wipes first and help protect the health of my family, then it may be worth the effort.
Secondly the "chemicals may be emitted" phrase IS valid. Have you ever heard of a moth ball? There is not chemical reaction there, but vapors are present? It is a physical process called "sublimation." Sublimation is NOT a chemical process, but it does happen. Look it up.
Whenever you smell ANYTHING, it is because either particles or chemicals are in the air. So your theory of chemical reactions is false. Anything which can vaporize will emit chemicals. Plus, the problem is worse if there are porous materials saturated with a volatile chemical (volatile meaning that it can emite a vapor).
As far as cleaning everything first (if that would work), I am not worried about myself, but my children. I feel free to gamble a little with my life, but not those of my kids.
Also, using an air filter on the air intakes of my computer is a step to keep dust out. On my old PC, I found dust around the I/O connectors on my sound card, around the edges of the CD-Rom drives, etc. Then I installed an intake fan and found dust on all of the fans, and all over the processor heat sink. So I decided that I wanted filters to help keep the system running cool, and NOT for health reasons. But if the dust is the problem, then no dust in = no dust out. As simple as that.
If this turns out to be a threat that cannot be controlle, that I am happy to live with it. I am not getting paranoid here. I am still getting my computer. But if I can remove even a minor source of chemials easily, I will do so. If not, then I will just live with it and not worry about it. There is a difference between taking sensible precautions if possible, and spreading panic. Douglas Adams would be proud of me;)
I know that you are trying to be funny, but my budget allows me $1000 to build a new computer in the next couple of months (big news for me, since I use a Celeron 466 at home). I also have two small children at home -- a three-year-old and a two-year-old, and I love them very much and want them to be healthy.
What I want to know is if the "dust" is left on the item from manufacture, or if the "dust" is regular houshold dust which leeches chemicals from any exposed surface. The first one you can hope to clean off, the second one you can't. I did read a version of the article linked from the Yahoo new site (not sure how different it is from the article mentioned here). But in the article that I read, they just found dust, and apparently made no effort to determine the source, or if cleaning a new computer would help.
And if chemicals are being emitted by every available surface, are any airborne, or do they need a carrier such as dust in order to travel?
If the resudue can be cleaned off of the parts, what is a safe cleaner to use on a motherboard?
At least I am glad that I have already decided on an Antec server case which has air filters over the intake fans in the front. If I do find a way to clean off the mobo and other internal electronics, then I might be able to keep dust off of the inside of the case.
The business is big and immensely profitable: it accounted for about 30 percent of Hewlett-Packard's sales last year, but 80 percent of its earnings.
Either everything else HP did sucked (possible), or consumers are being gouged (more likely). I would be willing to bet that at least HALF of HP's total profits are from ink!
I like companies that innovate, but I hope that Dell puts the pressure on HP to lower ink prices. But this is not likely, since Dell is probably riding the same CMY&K-colored cash cow. They make noise about lowering ink costs, but I will believe it when I see it.
Ummmm. Mandrake only had 3 CDs unless you pony up to become a member. And $120 - $130 for their "recommended" level seems a bit steep. Win XP Pro OEM is that much, and it is not "free" software in ANY sense of the word.
This is slightly off-topic, but if YOU were buying a new vid card, what would you recommend for a person who has never re-compiled a kernel. Would an nVidia or an ATI be easier to get working?
And, as an extra bonus, you cut down on population explosion by getting yourself smeared all over the highway in an accident.
What amounts to a minor fender-bender in a car can easily turn fatal on a motorcycle Motorcycles scare me. My wife wants one real bad, but I am just to chicken. I do not want to leave a couple of orphans behind.
Yes. Sit back and laugh. You seem like an intelligent person. Why would you possibly want to e-mail somebody who is do dumb that they have to use AOL. If you ask me, they are doing you a favor.
This also keeps your e-mail address out of the computers that are most likely to pick up trojans, spyware, and viruses.
A 9600 baud serial link is only 960 characters per second. There are ten bits per byte, because you have a start bit and a stop bit for each character. That makes 10 bits per byte.
Things get even stranger over ethernet... When measuring bandwidth in terms of bytes/sec, if you use FTP to measure it, then your measurment throws out the ethernet headers, which results in a lower number.
Anti-virus makers have been reluctant to enter the spy-ware arena for fear of getting sued by adware companies. If a big name (like Google) published a spec like this, perhaps it will give the anti-virus comanies a little amunition to take to court. They can now say "Our software block your spyware because you do not follow the industry standard for software installation." I do admit that it is not likely, but I can dream...
What if company X is right to sue XFree (as in your example)? Then taking away their right to use OSS patents amounts to bullying.
Nobody said anything about taking away their rights to use OSS software. They just can't use any Open Patents in THEIR products.
Also, lets say that company X sues me (and I have a little OSS project running). It's just an allegation with no real substance, but it still goes to court (al la SCO). I don't have the funds to fight it and so I will go under as a result. They might not even care about their rights to OSS patents but Ive still been put out of business. Where's my advantage? I have none and have no guarantee that company X even uses OSS patents in their own products.
True, but if Company X is then using Open Patents in their product portfolio, then they have to change that or face the posibility of a lawsuit. If they don't use any open patents, then they have nothing to loose.
I see the posibility of open patents as a kind of good neighbor idea. You can borrow my drill if you don't mind if I come in and borrow your ladder. But if you say "you can't borrow from me," then I have every right to say "you can't borrow my stuff either." Game theory has even proven that "tit for tat" is a wonderful strategy in some circumstances.
There WOULD be an advantage! If some lawyers who love Linux would step up to the plate and do this, then the advantage would be if company X sues XFree (for example) for patent infringement, then company X would loose all rights to use any OSS patents. If OSS has enough patents, then it would be a big stick to use, expecially if company X was using this technology in one of their other products.
This would be sort of like the USA/USSR arms race. If you shoot me, I shoot back and we both die.
OSS people need to file for patents, and lots of them.
Then, call them "Open patents." They are free for ANYBODY to use AS LONG AS they do not file any patent suits against open-source projects. This would create an interesting arms race. "We will use yours, but then you get to use ours. If you start a fight, we take our ball and go home." Of course, for this to work, there has to be a substantial body of open patents...
Yup! A "gamer" is just a person who wants to spend the bucks to play a game! This would not be my path, but if this shaves a little off of the price of something similar to an Alienware, while allowing people to drive downtown to buy one vs. waiting a week for shipping, then this is a good thing!
Why would anybody want to buy and then use one of those, when you could just send your master CD to a fulfillment operation that duplicates CDs for a living?
My church uses those things to make copies of the sermons to sell for $2.00. This fills a perfect need. If you need onsies or twosies, use a computer. If you need a thousand, use a commercial house. If you need a few dozen in an hour or so, a duplicator is perfect!
Excel is an extremely poor tool for doing anything other than basic graphs and calculations. For engineering purposes, it's near useless.
This may be true, but it is not very compelling. Spreadsheets were invented for the bean counters. A CPA could spend his/her entire career without EVER using SIN, or COS. Budgets require the basic four functions, and some sort of IF statement. To do compound interest, it helps to have e^x. If you just provide that and graphs, then you have 95% of the user base covered. I suspect that it is the minority of users who ever use the more complicated functions.
If I was still stuck on dial-up, I would pay $5 or $6 for this. My phone lines were so bad, I could reach 28.8K on a good day. So for me, it was order CDs from shovelware sites or do without.
This is something that the average joe can buy at Wal-Mart, and just plug it in and play. No worrying about which emulator works the best (and many emulators are crippleware, unless you shell out $20), trying to find and download roms (and the associated legal/ethical dilemmas), etc. Plus, if I had something like this, I could just hand it to my kids and not have to worry about them messing up my computer. Or have the kids tying up my computer while daddy wants to play "big kid" videogames.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course there is a guarantee...
Just buy a boatload of ram and disable virtual memory. Problem solved.
Of course, you could always use Knoppix or something similar whenever buying on-line. This would also solve the problem for the truly paranoid.
At my job, people who do clasified work do this. It is called a "vault." And the radio reception in there is terrible. No music :(
This attitude seems to be floating around a lot, but WHY??? Why does the desire to play games at high resolution with high frame rates necessarily equal a person whith a high GQ (geek quotient)?
I can easily see somebody who works as a carpenter for a living wanting to come home and frag a little. Maybe they want more than what a PS2 or suXBox can provide. Maybe they would be a little nervous at providing their own tech support. Maybe they have more money than time.
But I must admit that I would have trouble spending $2K on a machine if I tried, much less $5K.
Instead of spending 5K over 5 years, spend a steady 1K per year in upgrades. You will be worse off after 1 year, less so after 2 years, and break-even after 3 years. Years 4 and 5 you will be ahead of the game.
And the "badness" of being behind is much greater than the "goodness" of being ahead. Running a current game at 500 FPS does not buy you much when a monitor runs at 75-85 Hz. But in 5 years, your favorite game may be 10 FPS, which would suck big time!
Besides, explaining a 1K purchase to the wife is a LOT easier than explaining a 5K one.
Just my humble opinion. It is worth every penny of what you paid for it.
Think of life an a game of russian roulette with over 1000 chambers and one bullet. I will freely admit that chemicals from electronics is a minor issue. But enough minor issues added together amount to a major issue. Life is not safe, and there are many things that I cannot control. But if there is something that I CAN control, then I would be a fool for not doing it. I am not saying that I am going to throw out my computer. I am just saying that if I can swab my mobo and processor with alcohol wipes first and help protect the health of my family, then it may be worth the effort.
;)
Secondly the "chemicals may be emitted" phrase IS valid. Have you ever heard of a moth ball? There is not chemical reaction there, but vapors are present? It is a physical process called "sublimation." Sublimation is NOT a chemical process, but it does happen. Look it up.
Whenever you smell ANYTHING, it is because either particles or chemicals are in the air. So your theory of chemical reactions is false. Anything which can vaporize will emit chemicals. Plus, the problem is worse if there are porous materials saturated with a volatile chemical (volatile meaning that it can emite a vapor).
As far as cleaning everything first (if that would work), I am not worried about myself, but my children. I feel free to gamble a little with my life, but not those of my kids.
Also, using an air filter on the air intakes of my computer is a step to keep dust out. On my old PC, I found dust around the I/O connectors on my sound card, around the edges of the CD-Rom drives, etc. Then I installed an intake fan and found dust on all of the fans, and all over the processor heat sink. So I decided that I wanted filters to help keep the system running cool, and NOT for health reasons. But if the dust is the problem, then no dust in = no dust out. As simple as that.
If this turns out to be a threat that cannot be controlle, that I am happy to live with it. I am not getting paranoid here. I am still getting my computer. But if I can remove even a minor source of chemials easily, I will do so. If not, then I will just live with it and not worry about it. There is a difference between taking sensible precautions if possible, and spreading panic. Douglas Adams would be proud of me
I know that you are trying to be funny, but my budget allows me $1000 to build a new computer in the next couple of months (big news for me, since I use a Celeron 466 at home). I also have two small children at home -- a three-year-old and a two-year-old, and I love them very much and want them to be healthy.
What I want to know is if the "dust" is left on the item from manufacture, or if the "dust" is regular houshold dust which leeches chemicals from any exposed surface. The first one you can hope to clean off, the second one you can't. I did read a version of the article linked from the Yahoo new site (not sure how different it is from the article mentioned here). But in the article that I read, they just found dust, and apparently made no effort to determine the source, or if cleaning a new computer would help.
And if chemicals are being emitted by every available surface, are any airborne, or do they need a carrier such as dust in order to travel?
If the resudue can be cleaned off of the parts, what is a safe cleaner to use on a motherboard?
At least I am glad that I have already decided on an Antec server case which has air filters over the intake fans in the front. If I do find a way to clean off the mobo and other internal electronics, then I might be able to keep dust off of the inside of the case.
I agree about the account information. The e-mail piling up is kind of strange, though. That would bother me.
For technical details, see HERE and HERE.
Try a labelmaker. Put any relevant notes right on the hardware itself.
I prefer the Brother labeling units. The per-unit cost of the labels is cheaper than the Casio models -- same razor/blades and printer/ink argument.
From the atricle (about printing):
Either everything else HP did sucked (possible), or consumers are being gouged (more likely). I would be willing to bet that at least HALF of HP's total profits are from ink!
I like companies that innovate, but I hope that Dell puts the pressure on HP to lower ink prices. But this is not likely, since Dell is probably riding the same CMY&K-colored cash cow. They make noise about lowering ink costs, but I will believe it when I see it.
Ummmm. Mandrake only had 3 CDs unless you pony up to become a member. And $120 - $130 for their "recommended" level seems a bit steep. Win XP Pro OEM is that much, and it is not "free" software in ANY sense of the word.
This is slightly off-topic, but if YOU were buying a new vid card, what would you recommend for a person who has never re-compiled a kernel. Would an nVidia or an ATI be easier to get working?
And, as an extra bonus, you cut down on population explosion by getting yourself smeared all over the highway in an accident.
What amounts to a minor fender-bender in a car can easily turn fatal on a motorcycle Motorcycles scare me. My wife wants one real bad, but I am just to chicken. I do not want to leave a couple of orphans behind.
Yes. Sit back and laugh. You seem like an intelligent person. Why would you possibly want to e-mail somebody who is do dumb that they have to use AOL. If you ask me, they are doing you a favor.
This also keeps your e-mail address out of the computers that are most likely to pick up trojans, spyware, and viruses.
Aparently nits are in season again. Pick them while you can!
Perhaps not.
A 9600 baud serial link is only 960 characters per second. There are ten bits per byte, because you have a start bit and a stop bit for each character. That makes 10 bits per byte.
Things get even stranger over ethernet... When measuring bandwidth in terms of bytes/sec, if you use FTP to measure it, then your measurment throws out the ethernet headers, which results in a lower number.
So it all depends on how you measure.
Perhaps, but you miss the point (I hope).
Anti-virus makers have been reluctant to enter the spy-ware arena for fear of getting sued by adware companies. If a big name (like Google) published a spec like this, perhaps it will give the anti-virus comanies a little amunition to take to court. They can now say "Our software block your spyware because you do not follow the industry standard for software installation." I do admit that it is not likely, but I can dream...
Try here: Alphasmart. They even have many models which will work off of AA batteries.
Nobody said anything about taking away their rights to use OSS software. They just can't use any Open Patents in THEIR products.
True, but if Company X is then using Open Patents in their product portfolio, then they have to change that or face the posibility of a lawsuit. If they don't use any open patents, then they have nothing to loose.
I see the posibility of open patents as a kind of good neighbor idea. You can borrow my drill if you don't mind if I come in and borrow your ladder. But if you say "you can't borrow from me," then I have every right to say "you can't borrow my stuff either." Game theory has even proven that "tit for tat" is a wonderful strategy in some circumstances.
There WOULD be an advantage! If some lawyers who love Linux would step up to the plate and do this, then the advantage would be if company X sues XFree (for example) for patent infringement, then company X would loose all rights to use any OSS patents. If OSS has enough patents, then it would be a big stick to use, expecially if company X was using this technology in one of their other products.
This would be sort of like the USA/USSR arms race. If you shoot me, I shoot back and we both die.
OSS people need to file for patents, and lots of them.
Then, call them "Open patents." They are free for ANYBODY to use AS LONG AS they do not file any patent suits against open-source projects. This would create an interesting arms race. "We will use yours, but then you get to use ours. If you start a fight, we take our ball and go home." Of course, for this to work, there has to be a substantial body of open patents...
Yup! A "gamer" is just a person who wants to spend the bucks to play a game! This would not be my path, but if this shaves a little off of the price of something similar to an Alienware, while allowing people to drive downtown to buy one vs. waiting a week for shipping, then this is a good thing!
My church uses those things to make copies of the sermons to sell for $2.00. This fills a perfect need. If you need onsies or twosies, use a computer. If you need a thousand, use a commercial house. If you need a few dozen in an hour or so, a duplicator is perfect!
This may be true, but it is not very compelling. Spreadsheets were invented for the bean counters. A CPA could spend his/her entire career without EVER using SIN, or COS. Budgets require the basic four functions, and some sort of IF statement. To do compound interest, it helps to have e^x. If you just provide that and graphs, then you have 95% of the user base covered. I suspect that it is the minority of users who ever use the more complicated functions.
If I was still stuck on dial-up, I would pay $5 or $6 for this. My phone lines were so bad, I could reach 28.8K on a good day. So for me, it was order CDs from shovelware sites or do without.
This is something that the average joe can buy at Wal-Mart, and just plug it in and play. No worrying about which emulator works the best (and many emulators are crippleware, unless you shell out $20), trying to find and download roms (and the associated legal/ethical dilemmas), etc. Plus, if I had something like this, I could just hand it to my kids and not have to worry about them messing up my computer. Or have the kids tying up my computer while daddy wants to play "big kid" videogames.
I would also like to point out these:
Activision Game
Atari Game
Namco Game
These are actually presents that any geek would love! And the Commodore 64 game would be just continuation of this same theme...