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User: dabraun

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  1. Re:What about Windows licensing issues? on Dual-Core Pentium 4 Slated For 2Q 2005 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Windows XP recognizes the difference between hyperthreading and seperate processors. I have XP Pro running on a dual P4 with HT enabled - that is, task manager shows four processors. This works fine. I'm not sure if the code to tell the difference was ever backported to Win2K (which shipped before HT existed.)

    Odds are that they will do the same thing for multi-core (i.e. not count each core but rather each chip - I am sure that Intel and AMD will provide a way to tell the difference just as they do with HT.)

    With HT there's actually more to it than just the lisencing issue - XP treats HT processors differently - it knows that if proc 1 and 2 are really the same chip / proc 3 and 4 are the other chip that given two threads it should prefer to run them on seperate physical processors when possible. I am not sure if issues like this would apply to multi core but they might since the two cores will likely still share some things.

  2. Re:But, cost is a consideration! on Hondas in Space · · Score: 1

    You might want to look up the definition of murder. The word you are looking for is suicide-cycle - not that many people are killed by motorcyclists (certainly fewer than are killed by cars/trucks - both in absolute terms and in per-vehicle terms).

    Doing something dangerous that only harms yourself - why would you ban that? Let people make themselves examples of natural selection at work - what do you care?

    I climb mountains. It carries risks. I'm still going to do it - it's part of what I enjoy in life and the risk is worth it to me. Not your problem.

  3. Re:finger on the problem on Fingerprints Replace Credit Cards in Seattle · · Score: 1

    What if the copyright on your fingerprints runs out before you die? Does it become legal for everyone to go around using your fingerprint?

  4. Re:All HELL is breaking loose ... on Fingerprints Replace Credit Cards in Seattle · · Score: 1

    These kind of concerns take care of themselves. Right now lots of people think that fingerprints are airtight evidence that you were present. The exact concerns you have though will change the widespread opinion about fingerprints if fingerprint scanners ever become common.

    Fingerprints are just another form of id. Credit card + signature is immensely easier to 'crack' - just how many clerks can tell the difference between what's written on the back of the card you are holding and the forgery of that signature that you made? How many even look?

    I think that something like fingerprint + pin number + photo on file that the clerk can see (or perhaps even just two of the above) would be extremely secure and when it's broken ... well - same thing as when someone steals your credit card number. You call them up and tell them it's fradulent - they remove the charges (and you change your pin ... and perhaps the vendor needs to provide a picture of the person who actually made the purchase if they want the charge to stick ... which would be helpful in tracking down the thief if it is the wrong person)

    Then again ... first you need to get past the privacy concerns of allowing anyone else to have your fingerprints on file.

  5. Re:World domination on Google Eyes Domain Registration Market · · Score: 1

    Another way to look at it ... Google is using their dominant position in the search market to extend themselves into other markets. That's not an opinion really - it's exactly what they are doing - and it's what any business that is successful in one market and wants to get into other markets must do.

    And it's what Microsoft does - except that somehow it's supposed to be "wrong" when Microsoft does it.

    Think it's different? Google has links to a variety of non-search services they offer on their search homepage. I don't see any way for 3rd parties to place their alternatives there ... Google is using that space which they have complete control over to promote their own services. Not all that different from Microsoft using the PC desktop to do the same thing.

    The problem for Microsoft is that they were *too* successful in their first few markets - so some people have decided they shouldn't be allowed to use their success to help them enter other markets.

    We all strive to succeed in this society. We all strive to take down those who have succeeded in this society.

  6. Re:Full article before their servers crash on Monitor Basics - LCD vs. CRT · · Score: 1

    Your assumption about the backlight running at 60hz is incorrect. Even a modern tube light with an electronic ballast runs at at least 22khz. I'm sure the rate varies from one monitor to another but it is certainly several orders of magnitude over 60hz.

  7. Re:Happy.. on Closed Digital Cameras - Does Anyone Care? · · Score: 1

    Alkaline batteries provice significantly more power for a given size vs. any type of rechargable battery.

    Li-Ion and Li-Polymer batteries are the most dense rechargable battery on the market. They are also unaffected by partial charging/recharging (though their detection circuitry that reports the % remaining can get confused if you never fully charge the battery.) Li based cells are never fully discharged (electronics prevent this - if they do in fact get fully discharged they can not be recharged with anything a consumer would have access to.)

    On the downside they have a lifespan of about three years before their growing internal resistance makes them all but useless - and this is pretty much unaffected by your usage of the battery.

    On the issue of 'in-camera charging' - I have had a Canon S100 and S230 - both used the same basic battery (NB-1L / NB-1LH) and the battery charger was a seperate device (i.e. not charged inside the camera.) Extra batteries are easy to find on the net.

    I also have a Canon ZR-20 (camcorder) and a Canon 20D DSLR - their batteries are also compatible with each other (though they are different.) The Rebel / 300D battery is also compatible with these (though it is also a bit different than either the ZR20's or 20Ds.) The camcorder came with a charger wire to charge tbe battery inside the camera. The 20D came with a seperate charger that works for both batteries.

  8. Re:Camera hardware on Closed Digital Cameras - Does Anyone Care? · · Score: 1

    It also sports some improvements over the 10D and a cheaper body.

    The software is part of the price tag. Microsoft sells XP Pro and Home for different amounts despite the fact that it costs the same to press one CD or the other. It costs more to develop the pro version, to support the pro version, and it allows them to sell into multiple markets.

    That said, if Canon included all of the 10D firware features in the software that they installed on the Rebels and just flipped some bits to disable certain features ... well then anyone who is changing those bits back on their own device is just making use of what they bought (though asking for warranty service after hacking the device like this is a stretch.) If someone actually took the firmware from a 10D and copied it onto their Rebel then that might be approaching 'pirating' of the software.

  9. Re:Newssflash on Creative Gunning For the iPod · · Score: 1
    The iPod is more popular because it was the first out of the gate


    Creative was actually selling hard drive based portable MP3 players before Apple came out with the iPod (by at least a year.) Apple did a much better job though and marketed it in ways that Creative will never be able to match.
  10. Re:Not true. on Comcast Raises Bandwidth in Shot at DSL · · Score: 1

    Bittorrent does not really make as much sense as it's creator claims for large scale distribution.

    Every chunk of data transferred via bittorrent requires an 'up' path from a residence to the backbone and a 'down' path to the target residence. It is way more effecient to store the copies on the backbone (say, comcast's server for comcast's customers) than to have bittorrent clients in households playing this game.

    The limiting factor is network bandwidth, not server performance.

  11. Re:Roughly 25%, but who's counting? on Breakthrough In JPEG Compression · · Score: 1
    Currently, the fastest continuous shooting digital camera (the Nikon D2X) can only take 4 shots in a row before its memory buffers get full and the whole camera becomes useless. Compare that with the 9 shots per second F5 and you can see that the speed of shooting isn't going to cut it for digital cameras.
    Actually, my Canon 20D takes 5 frames per second and can buffer a minnimun of 23 highest quality JPEG images or 6 RAW images. That's the spec with a slow memory card. In practice with my 2GB Lexar 80X CF card it can shoot almost indefinitely for JPEG files (if I recall when I tried this it started slowing down around image 100 or so.) I don't remember how many RAW images I got in a row but it can certainly do more than 6 with the fast CF card.
  12. Re:I wondered how long this would take on Giant Iceberg to Collide with Glacier · · Score: 1

    Since we are headed for another ice age you could view greenhouse gas emmisions as a good thing and a long term pro-environment approach to preventing an expected natural distaster (that is, the next ice age)

    Looked at that way do you really think we could prevent an ice age? About as likely as it would be for our emmisions to cause the polar ice caps to melt. Not very.

  13. Re:16-bit programs do not run on 64-bit Windows XP Tested And Reviewed · · Score: 1

    There were plenty of DOS apps that required you to effectively exit Win9X to run them, and that don't work at all on XP or any flavor of NT. DOS AutoCAD comes to mind (and many many DOS games) ... there comes a time when something is old enough that supporting it is more of a liability than an asset.

  14. Re:Come on, use your head on U.S. Makes Plans for GPS Shutdown · · Score: 1

    Flying a military F15 means that the military can't use it while you are and the military needs to pay more to maintain the plane.

    Using GPS has zero impact on either the ability of the military to also use it or the cost of maintaining the system.

    GPS receivers only recieve signals - it's like watching over the air TV. More viewers does not mean higher costs.

  15. Re:Tried with the IBM enhancements? on Boot Process Visualization · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Something like Windows XP has been doing for years?

    XP not only boots processes in parallel - it monitors which sectors of the disk are read during bootup, moves them around so they all sit in order in the same place on the disk as a background process, and prefetches the whole damn thing during subsequent bootups.

    It also does the same thing for application launches - you start an app, it profiles what is read from disk, reorders it, and prefetches it when you run the app again later.

  16. Comparison of VOIP providers? on AOL Canada To Offer VoIP · · Score: 1

    Has anyone seen any good reviews comparing the current crop of VOIP providers? I recently set up a Vonage VOIP line and so far I am not particularly happy with the quality:

    - Background noise that starts before you even dial (coming from the linksys VOIP router I guess)
    - Significantly more lag than a normal phone line - perhaps 500ms vs. 100ms or less for a normal phone line
    - One person talking often cuts out the other person talking - I want to say that it is sort of 'single duplex' but there are definitely times when you can both hear eachother so it's not clear to me.

  17. Re:what's the big deal? on Australian Police Given Power To Use Spyware · · Score: 1

    Wiretaps used to be installed in or close to the actual home being tapped. It is only because the phone companies (were required to) make it easy to tap at the CO that they don't need to do this anymore.

    They can still get warrants to tap homes for actual sound within the home. And they don't need to tell the person being tapped - they just need the appropriate warrant.

  18. Re:they are not 200 watt equivalents on Screw-in LED Floodlights · · Score: 1

    Modern flourescent tubes run at around 20khz - the older flourescents just ran at the 60hz wall frequency (in the US.) You still see tubes flickering sometimes because the ballast controls the frequency and not the tube - the ballast does not need to be replaced very often.

    CF bulbs integrate an electronic ballast (in or around the 20khz range) and a tube into a small package. They tube part of the CF could be quite a bit cheaper if it was replacable / seperate from the base - but the interest in replacable CF tubes is limited by the fact that the units are supposed to last for 5-10 years so 'who cares.'

    The reality is that the length of time they last is pretty variable due to the quality of CFs made by many manufacturers. They rely heavily on the fact that no one is going to bring them up on their warranty.

    I replaced every bulb in my house with a CF bulb a year ago. Two or three have already failed.

  19. Re:look and feel on MSN Search Roundup · · Score: 1

    Altavista and Webcrawler in the early days had simple UIs that looked an awful lot like Google does now. Yes, some search engines bloated their front pages over time - and those are exactly the search engines that no one uses any more.

    I tend to use the build in search sidebar in IE most of the time (nothing but a search entryfield - zero extra UI) and google when I am not satisfied with the results from the IE search bar.

  20. Re:To be fair ... UltimateTV is (was) pretty good. on Microsoft Takes on TiVo · · Score: 1

    UltimateTV failed for many reasons but not because 'it sucked' - the fact that it could only work with DirectTV service was one of the main factors (and also the reason it's picture quality was better than Tivo - no recompression -> no loss.) Tivo realized that they had to start out with a product that would work with any TV service (or, most importantly, would work with Cable TV without needing to get any buy-in from the Cable companies.) Tivo is now building products that work the way UltimateTV did for Satellite services.

    Microsoft has taken what they learned from UltimateTV and build both Media Center and Microsoft TV Foundation (which from what I can tell don't look all that similar.) It will be interesting to see how this pans out. It seems like it is inevitable that standalone PVRs/DVRs will fall by the wayside as the 'service model' units provided for a monthly fee by cable and satellite providers improve.

    Microsoft wants to be one of the companies competing for that platform. We'll see what happens - Tivo can compete in that space as well I'm sure. Anything is better than GemStar.

  21. Re:Osama makes more sense than either Bush OR Kerr on New Bin Laden Tape Surfaces · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Bush is waging a war to bring people who use such tactics to justice.

    I find it pretty sad that people like you have convinced yourself that attacking Iraq was somehow related to bringing terrorists to justice.

  22. Re:Osama makes more sense than either Bush OR Kerr on New Bin Laden Tape Surfaces · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The figure I heard was 21,800 Iraqi Civilians - that was on the McLaughlin Report a few weeks ago. That of course doesn't include the number of dead American soldiers and the number of dead Iraqi soldiers.

    I wouldn't go so far as to say that I trust Osama bin Laden ... at all - but I will say that Bush Jr. has murdered at least seven times as many Iraqi civilians as Osama murdered Americans. And while I am an American I will not be so arrogant as to pretend that American lives are somehow more valuable than Iraqi lives.

    I feel it is perfectly fair to pin these as 'murderes at the hand of Bush Jr.' - just as fair as it is to say that Bin Laden killed people on Sept. 11th. Neither of them did the actual killing - both of them did the planning and made the call to have the people killed.

    In this regard Bush Jr. has shown himself to be a larger risk to the safety of the people of this world than Osama has. There are of course other factors and I'm not sure I could decide which one I trust _less_ ... but they are both terrible people.

  23. Re:MCE 2005 on G4 Tech TV Reviews Three New HDTV DVRs · · Score: 1

    Actually - there is no way at all to set up 5c/hdcp firewire recording on a PC. You can record over firewire for non-5c encrypted signals (depends on the market as to whether or not they have started using 5c yet) - using a variety of non-trivial-to-configure pieces of software.

    The problem is that the firewire port on a PC simply does not support 5c and I don't think that anyone will be allowed to get the license to add such a port without going through great measures to prove that all the content will remain copy protected once it goes through the port.

  24. Re:too bad... on Microsoft Bringing TV to Xbox · · Score: 4, Informative

    I was listing a variety of options - not everything in the list is required to get useful functionality.

    You obviously need a PC with MCE to start with - and yes, that is a significant barrier to entry, to so speak.

    The MCE remote for the PC is not required - and not very interesting (IMO) if you don't plan to hook the PC up directly to a TV.

    The XBox extender software is one option - primarily targeted at current XBOX owners but since it's actually cheaper to buy an XBOX and get the XBox Extender Kit than it is to buy a standalone Extender device - some people will go that way - with some downsides:

    - The XBOX is not silent - the standalone extenders are.
    - The XBOX can't be turned physically on/off with a remote - the standalone devices can be (though I think they technically stay in a sort of standby mode)
    - The XBOX doesn't come with wireless support - the extenders I've seen so far include that in the box.
    - The extenders from what I've seen also come with component out included in the box - whereas you need to buy the HD kit for the XBOX to get that there - but since I don't think that the extenders currently support actual HD resolutions I'm not clear on what the point is (other than to enable a software upgrade with HD support in the future)

    You could add even more to the list of 'required components' - like having a router - and a wireless one if you want to use the extender that way ... and an internet connection for certain functionlity - but these are incremental. Some set of the population already has some of the parts required. For some it's too much to buy all at once.

    For the technically inclined who already have LANs at home - this amounts to MCE for the PC and an extender device (whether XBOX based or not) ... so two things. Of course if you have an MCE PC already you only need to buy one thing.

  25. Re:I'd rather... on Microsoft Bringing TV to Xbox · · Score: 5, Informative

    You are factually incorrect. I have the XBOX Media Center software. It DOES:

    - Allow for watching live TV / changing channels / pausing live TV / etc.

    - Allow for scheduling recordings (UI is pretty much identical to what you get on the PC itself)

    Everything that works on XP Media Center Edition works on the extenders with a few exceptions. They are basically remote-desktop'd in to the server (with a seperate protocol/channel tunneling the video through)

    Multiple extenders hosted off the same PC can show different content at the same time (including different live TV channels assuming you have multiple tuners installed)