I had Lasik 5 years ago, at age 29. Was about -3 sphere in one eye, -3.5 sphere plus about -1.5 cylinder (astigmatism) in the other. Needed glasses or contacts to do most anything, and don't much like contacts.
My wife is an optometrist, does pre-op/post-op care for Lasik (but not the surgery itself -- you need an opthamologist for that), and had interned at a laser eye surgery place and seen it done lots of times. So I had lots of information. Not sure if I'd have done it otherwise.
We went with a doctor she'd worked with, who she knew was very good, and who was willing to cut me a friends-and-family discount. That said, you want the best doctor you can find, not the cheapest. Ask how many times he's done this particular surgery. You want an answer in the hundreds. (Yes, that's somewhat unfair to the young docs, who need to learn on someone -- but let it be someone else.)
Certain characteristics, like thin corneas, make you a poor candidate for the procedure, and increase the risk. Ask.
The Lasik made my right eye perfect, but left a bit (0.25) of residual astigmatism in my left. My "bad" eye is perfectly good for seeing small text on a TV across the room, just not perfect.
The day of the surgery was no fun. Slice slice zap zap then dark glasses. I recovered quickly, though, and was back to work in a couple of days.
Some people have more glare problems at night after the surgery. I don't.
Some people's eyes change over time. Mine haven't noticably. My wife's vision got a lot worse after pregnancy, partially undoing the effect of her Lasik. Some doctors will do free reenhancements.
Everyone gets more farsighted as they get old. Lasik won't fix that. I'm 35 with almost perfect vision, but when I'm about 40 I'll start needing reading glasses for close work. Sucks to get old, but it beats dying. (Some doctors will do monovision Lasik -- deliberately leaving one eye undercorrected so you can use one eye more for close work and the other for far -- but I started nearsighted in both eyes and they won't deliberately overshoot and make you farsighted.)
Overall it was well worth it for me. Send me an email if you need more info.
Athlon boards will require as many as 8 layers to fit into an ATX form factor. IIRC, the industry standard is 4 or 6, so this would be a new (and likely expensive) manufacturing process that may require new tooling to produce in bulk.
The Asus A7M266 (Socket A, 761 northbridge, 686B southbridge, working PC2100 DDR support) is an 8-layer board. It's available now, though in short supply. Lowest price on Pricewatch is $185.
Dual-CPU boards always cost more than equivalent single-boards, but the delta doesn't have to be huge. If we assume that the good 761 boards will use 8 layers anyway, then the incremental variable cost of MP is whatever extra AMD charges for the 762 versus the 761, plus the extra CPU socket.
I predict that the first dual Socket A board (Tyan's?) will be ridiculously overpriced ($499?) due to lack of competition and will be aimed straight at the less price-conscious server market. But once competition kicks in, we should see several 760MP boards in the $200 range.
First of all, the keyboards sold at pckeyboard.com are real IBM keyboards. Recall that IBM spun off IBM Lexington, which made PC hardware like printers and keyboards, as Lexmark about a decade ago. A bit later, Lexmark spun off the keyboard division as Unicomp and focused on printers. pckeyboard.com is Unicomp. Some of the keyboards they sell say "IBM" on them, and some say "Lexmark," which doesn't really matter.
I've bought two of the "Customizer," which are basically just buckling-spring IBM PS/2 101-key keyboards. They're just about perfect. They weigh about as much as a small truck, have perfect springy tactile feel plus clicky audio feedback, and will probably last until we're no longer using keyboards. (I know a guy who still uses the keyboard from his 1986 IBM AT.)
The other nice thing about IBM PS/2 keyboards is that they're the de facto reference standard for the PS/2 keyboard interface. Some motherboards (most notoriously early Pentium II boards like the Abit LX6) have twitchy keyboard ports that will only work with some keyboards. If they work with any, they'll work with the IBM.
The threat that this model will be upgraded to include Win95 keys has been on the site for a couple of years, but they haven't done it yet. If they do, all is not lost: you can still order old IBM keyboards by model number.
The only things wrong with this keyboard are price ($79; a bit cheaper for the non-clicky ones with not-quite-perfect feel) and noise (my computers are in the basement, and I can hear my wife typing when I'm upstairs in the TV room, through a closed door.)
Worth the $79? Hell yeah, if you type a lot.
As far as the company goes, I've ordered twice from them with no problems. Shipping charges were reasonable. Not much of a sample size, I know, but they're legit.
t-bird, mustang, corvette, spitfire, are all WWII fighter planes.
Right.
But Allied fighter planes were used to fight Germany in World War 2. And AMD wants to sell processors to Germans. Plus AMD's best fab is in Dresden, Germany, which was destroyed during the war by a horrible firebombing. AMD would like to be especially nice to Germans, becaues they're important as both potential consumers and potential employees. So AMD decided to use the same codenames, but pretend they referred to cars instead of planes. (Also, AMD's chipset partner Via renamed the KZ133 chipset to the KT133, because KZ has nasty concentration-camp connotations.)
This worked pretty well, because car companies love to steal airplane names. But AMD took it too far, and named their next-generation Athlon the Corvette, and the budget version of the Corvette the Camaro. The Corvette is a boat, but the combination of Corvette and Camaro is too obvious to be a coincidence. GM took offense, so AMD had to rename things again to avoid trademarks. (Never mind that trademarks are only valid within one industry; Duron is both an outdoor paint and a processor. It's not wise to mess with companies that can afford legions of lawyers over trivial stuff like codenames.)
So AMD decided to use horse names instead of car names. The long-entrenched Mustang ("It's a fighter plane! No, it's a pony car! No, it's a pony!") name stuck. Corvette became Palomino and Camaro became Morgan (which is horse and also a car, but not a plane).
Personally, I like Apple's way with codenames better. (Not quite enough to actually buy a product made by the innovators of the look-and-feel lawsuit, though.) Carl Sagan didn't like the Sagan codename and sued, so they called it the Butt-Head Astronomer. The Corvette should be renamed the Rattletrap and the Camaro should be renamed the POS.
Clearly everyone should use those naming firms to pick unique, lawsuit-proof codenames that don't offend anyone anywhere. I think I'll start one of those companies right now. Here's a free sample: "fjso457lfdsjfl297."
Some Athlon support has been added to gcc over the last few months by SuSE's Jan Hubicka. (There hasn't been an official gcc release since 2.95.2 last year, so you need to grab a recent weekly snapshot, or pull from CVS.)
I wouldn't bet on 3DNow! support in gcc. 3DNow! (and SSE) still seem to be supported primarily through inline assembly.
But I think there's a decent chance we'll get an Athlon-optimized (i.e. recompiled with Athlon flags) SuSE distribution. That would be an easy way for SuSE to grab a bit of market/mind share among Athlon users from Red Hat/Debian.
There was no Linux retail box available anywhere near the release date of Quake / Quake 2. So there wasn't any choice but to buy the Windows version and download the Linux binary.
It's hard to track downloads by anon ftp. There are many mirror sites. And even if they could all be tracked, it would be easy for us to inflate the numbers by downloading multiple times with a shell script and wget, ncftpget, etc. The only real way to track downloads is to allow downloading from only a few secure sites with custom logging (per IP address, code included with the game, etc.), which is inconvenient (for us) and expensive (for the company paying for all that bandwidth, rather than spreading the load to free mirrors).
When Q3A is released, I'll check the local stores for the Linux version. If they have it, I'll buy. If they don't, I'll whine, then mail-order it. (Whine: I hate paying $6 shipping on a $35 purchase. More companies should offer Priority Mail.)
Game companies do pay attention to those registration / comment cards. If you care more about Linux ports of games than about junk mail, fill out the card in every game that you buy, and mention Linux.
See Interplay's order page. Unfortunately, the DVD version is identical to the CD version; they didn't bundle in the expansion.
Publishers will continue to release CDROM versions as long as they think it makes economic sense to do so, as they did with floppies. When something you really want comes out only on DVD, don't pout too much: 2X DVD-ROM drives are down to $40.
Glide wrappers do not in general violate 3dfx's copyright. Cloning an API is completely legal. Good thing, or we'd have no WINE, or Samba, or Ghostscript, or Linux.
When 3dfx's lawyers started threatening authors of various Glide wrappers, their claim was not copyright violation. It was that the authors had used the Glide SDK and violated its EULA.
(The Creative situation is different, because Creative used to be a big customer of 3dfx, so there are all kinds of agreements between the two. The case is still pending.)
A reverse-engineered Glide wrapper, using no licensed 3dfx docs or code, would be completely legal. However, 3dfx would be sure to file a frivolous lawsuit against the author anyway. Who's got the guts to stand up to a big company in court and fight for what's right? (Paging Phil Z...)
3dfx's persecution of Glide wrapper authors is completely unacceptable. If MS went after WINE or Samba, or Adobe went after Ghostscript, the outcry would be immediate. Boycott 3dfx already, people. The principle is way more important than silly brand loyalty.
I agree that writing a good Glide wrapper is non-trivial. See http://www.soundblaster.com/hotgraphics/unified/ga meinfo.html for the sad truth about Unified.
The EIT exam is easy. It looks intimidating because it's a very general test and there will be questions in fields you know very little about (for an EE, things like fluid dynamics). But it's graded on a gigantic curve, so any half-competent fourth-year engineering student should have no problem with it. It's good that you're taking a review course, but don't kill yourself studying for it. Your real classes are more important.
Will you need that PE certificate down the line? For a EE, probably not. But take the EIT now anyway. It's a nice thing to have on your resume. And it'll be easier to pass the EIT now than five years down the road, when you've forgotten a lot of the things you haven't needed to use in the real world.
I agree that it's nice to be able to do a minimal install and play off the CD, if you're short on disk space.
It's also nice to be able to do a full install and file the CD away in the closet if you have lots of disk space.
Tomb Raider is an example of a game with a stupid copy-protection CD check plus mandatory Redbook audio. The user is forced to fiddle with CDs like he's using a Playstation, even if he has 20 GB of free disk space.
I only buy games at stores that allow returns, and tend to return games with copy protection that pisses me off. Loki did the right thing with Civ:CTP, and I hope they continue to do so with future ports. Pissing off your paying customers is not a good way to increase sales, something a lot of game publishers haven't figured out yet.
I have a laptop (usually running Linux, occasionally running Win98) that gets its IP address via DHCP (from a Linux server at home, an NT server at work).
At home, because it's almost always the only DHCP client, my laptop always gets 192.168.0.10 (the beginning of my assigned DHCP range), so I can pretend it has a fixed IP address for local DNS purposes. At work, it gets a different IP address almost every day. WINS can resolve its name anyway; DNS can't because we don't have DDNS yet. MS supporting DDNS is good; my Solaris and Linux machines (which have clients for DNS but not WINS) would be able to look up my laptop by name, just like my Windows box (which has clients for both DNS and WINS).
Yes, MS might screw up DDNS, through malice or incompetence, and provide something only 99% compatible with the RFC. Recall the pump DHCP client included with Red Hat 6.0, which worked great with most Unix DHCP servers but not with NT's. But note that it was quickly patched to work with NT. Open-sourced clients can quickly deal with a bit of incompatibility, whether malicious or accidental.
The fact that MS supports a new open standard like DDNS before your favorite OS does is a reason to start working on an open DDNS client, not an excuse to bash MS. DDNS is good. NT becoming more standards-compliant is good. If at some point in the future MS starts changing their DDNS server around to deliberately cause problems with other people's clients, *then* bash MS, and suggest to your local sysadmin that he run DHCP and DNS from a cheap Linux/*BSD/whatever box instead of an NT server to maintain maximum compatibility with existing clients. But bashing MS in advance just for announcing the intent to support a good, new, open standard is counterproductive. Would you really prefer WINS?
It's not a casual anti-MS rant for the sake of ranting. The book comes with some Excel spreadsheets. Because MS breaks.xls compatibility with every version of Excel, the author had to release multiple versions of his spreadsheets. The rant was on-topic for the chapter.
I haven't bothered trying to import the older spreadsheets into Excel 97 or StarOffice. If that works, then perhaps the rant is a bit less deserved.
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I had Lasik 5 years ago, at age 29. Was about -3 sphere in one eye, -3.5 sphere plus about -1.5 cylinder (astigmatism) in the other. Needed glasses or contacts to do most anything, and don't much like contacts.
My wife is an optometrist, does pre-op/post-op care for Lasik (but not the surgery itself -- you need an opthamologist for that), and had interned at a laser eye surgery place and seen it done lots of times. So I had lots of information. Not sure if I'd have done it otherwise.
We went with a doctor she'd worked with, who she knew was very good, and who was willing to cut me a friends-and-family discount. That said, you want the best doctor you can find, not the cheapest. Ask how many times he's done this particular surgery. You want an answer in the hundreds. (Yes, that's somewhat unfair to the young docs, who need to learn on someone -- but let it be someone else.)
Certain characteristics, like thin corneas, make you a poor candidate for the procedure, and increase the risk. Ask.
The Lasik made my right eye perfect, but left a bit (0.25) of residual astigmatism in my left. My "bad" eye is perfectly good for seeing small text on a TV across the room, just not perfect.
The day of the surgery was no fun. Slice slice zap zap then dark glasses. I recovered quickly, though, and was back to work in a couple of days.
Some people have more glare problems at night after the surgery. I don't.
Some people's eyes change over time. Mine haven't noticably. My wife's vision got a lot worse after pregnancy, partially undoing the effect of her Lasik. Some doctors will do free reenhancements.
Everyone gets more farsighted as they get old. Lasik won't fix that. I'm 35 with almost perfect vision, but when I'm about 40 I'll start needing reading glasses for close work. Sucks to get old, but it beats dying. (Some doctors will do monovision Lasik -- deliberately leaving one eye undercorrected so you can use one eye more for close work and the other for far -- but I started nearsighted in both eyes and they won't deliberately overshoot and make you farsighted.)
Overall it was well worth it for me. Send me an email if you need more info.
Athlon boards will require as many as 8 layers to fit into an ATX form factor. IIRC, the industry standard is 4 or 6, so this would be a new (and likely expensive) manufacturing process that may require new tooling to produce in bulk.
The Asus A7M266 (Socket A, 761 northbridge, 686B southbridge, working PC2100 DDR support) is an 8-layer board. It's available now, though in short supply. Lowest price on Pricewatch is $185.
Dual-CPU boards always cost more than equivalent single-boards, but the delta doesn't have to be huge. If we assume that the good 761 boards will use 8 layers anyway, then the incremental variable cost of MP is whatever extra AMD charges for the 762 versus the 761, plus the extra CPU socket.
I predict that the first dual Socket A board (Tyan's?) will be ridiculously overpriced ($499?) due to lack of competition and will be aimed straight at the less price-conscious server market. But once competition kicks in, we should see several 760MP boards in the $200 range.
First of all, the keyboards sold at pckeyboard.com are real IBM keyboards. Recall that IBM spun off IBM Lexington, which made PC hardware like printers and keyboards, as Lexmark about a decade ago. A bit later, Lexmark spun off the keyboard division as Unicomp and focused on printers. pckeyboard.com is Unicomp. Some of the keyboards they sell say "IBM" on them, and some say "Lexmark," which doesn't really matter.
I've bought two of the "Customizer," which are basically just buckling-spring IBM PS/2 101-key keyboards. They're just about perfect. They weigh about as much as a small truck, have perfect springy tactile feel plus clicky audio feedback, and will probably last until we're no longer using keyboards. (I know a guy who still uses the keyboard from his 1986 IBM AT.)
The other nice thing about IBM PS/2 keyboards is that they're the de facto reference standard for the PS/2 keyboard interface. Some motherboards (most notoriously early Pentium II boards like the Abit LX6) have twitchy keyboard ports that will only work with some keyboards. If they work with any, they'll work with the IBM.
The threat that this model will be upgraded to include Win95 keys has been on the site for a couple of years, but they haven't done it yet. If they do, all is not lost: you can still order old IBM keyboards by model number.
The only things wrong with this keyboard are price ($79; a bit cheaper for the non-clicky ones with not-quite-perfect feel) and noise (my computers are in the basement, and I can hear my wife typing when I'm upstairs in the TV room, through a closed door.)
Worth the $79? Hell yeah, if you type a lot.
As far as the company goes, I've ordered twice from them with no problems. Shipping charges were reasonable. Not much of a sample size, I know, but they're legit.
t-bird, mustang, corvette, spitfire, are all WWII fighter planes.
Right.
But Allied fighter planes were used to fight Germany in World War 2. And AMD wants to sell processors to Germans. Plus AMD's best fab is in Dresden, Germany, which was destroyed during the war by a horrible firebombing. AMD would like to be especially nice to Germans, becaues they're important as both potential consumers and potential employees. So AMD decided to use the same codenames, but pretend they referred to cars instead of planes. (Also, AMD's chipset partner Via renamed the KZ133 chipset to the KT133, because KZ has nasty concentration-camp connotations.)
This worked pretty well, because car companies love to steal airplane names. But AMD took it too far, and named their next-generation Athlon the Corvette, and the budget version of the Corvette the Camaro. The Corvette is a boat, but the combination of Corvette and Camaro is too obvious to be a coincidence. GM took offense, so AMD had to rename things again to avoid trademarks. (Never mind that trademarks are only valid within one industry; Duron is both an outdoor paint and a processor. It's not wise to mess with companies that can afford legions of lawyers over trivial stuff like codenames.)
So AMD decided to use horse names instead of car names. The long-entrenched Mustang ("It's a fighter plane! No, it's a pony car! No, it's a pony!") name stuck. Corvette became Palomino and Camaro became Morgan (which is horse and also a car, but not a plane).
Personally, I like Apple's way with codenames better. (Not quite enough to actually buy a product made by the innovators of the look-and-feel lawsuit, though.) Carl Sagan didn't like the Sagan codename and sued, so they called it the Butt-Head Astronomer. The Corvette should be renamed the Rattletrap and the Camaro should be renamed the POS.
Clearly everyone should use those naming firms to pick unique, lawsuit-proof codenames that don't offend anyone anywhere. I think I'll start one of those companies right now. Here's a free sample: "fjso457lfdsjfl297."
Some Athlon support has been added to gcc over the last few months by SuSE's Jan Hubicka. (There hasn't been an official gcc release since 2.95.2 last year, so you need to grab a recent weekly snapshot, or pull from CVS.) I wouldn't bet on 3DNow! support in gcc. 3DNow! (and SSE) still seem to be supported primarily through inline assembly. But I think there's a decent chance we'll get an Athlon-optimized (i.e. recompiled with Athlon flags) SuSE distribution. That would be an easy way for SuSE to grab a bit of market/mind share among Athlon users from Red Hat/Debian.
Only USAA's auto and property insurance is restricted to the military. Their other products are available to the general public.
There was no Linux retail box available anywhere near the release date of Quake / Quake 2. So there wasn't any choice but to buy the Windows version and download the Linux binary.
It's hard to track downloads by anon ftp. There are many mirror sites. And even if they could all be tracked, it would be easy for us to inflate the numbers by downloading multiple times with a shell script and wget, ncftpget, etc. The only real way to track downloads is to allow downloading from only a few secure sites with custom logging (per IP address, code included with the game, etc.), which is inconvenient (for us) and expensive (for the company paying for all that bandwidth, rather than spreading the load to free mirrors).
When Q3A is released, I'll check the local stores for the Linux version. If they have it, I'll buy. If they don't, I'll whine, then mail-order it. (Whine: I hate paying $6 shipping on a $35 purchase. More companies should offer Priority Mail.)
Game companies do pay attention to those registration / comment cards. If you care more about Linux ports of games than about junk mail, fill out the card in every game that you buy, and mention Linux.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
"Friends don't let friends shop at Best Buy."
See Interplay's order page. Unfortunately, the DVD version is identical to the CD version; they didn't bundle in the expansion.
Publishers will continue to release CDROM versions as long as they think it makes economic sense to do so, as they did with floppies. When something you really want comes out only on DVD, don't pout too much: 2X DVD-ROM drives are down to $40.
IANAL.
a meinfo.html for the sad truth about Unified.
Glide wrappers do not in general violate 3dfx's copyright. Cloning an API is completely legal. Good thing, or we'd have no WINE, or Samba, or Ghostscript, or Linux.
When 3dfx's lawyers started threatening authors of various Glide wrappers, their claim was not copyright violation. It was that the authors had used the Glide SDK and violated its EULA.
(The Creative situation is different, because Creative used to be a big customer of 3dfx, so there are all kinds of agreements between the two. The case is still pending.)
A reverse-engineered Glide wrapper, using no licensed 3dfx docs or code, would be completely legal. However, 3dfx would be sure to file a frivolous lawsuit against the author anyway. Who's got the guts to stand up to a big company in court and fight for what's right? (Paging Phil Z...)
3dfx's persecution of Glide wrapper authors is completely unacceptable. If MS went after WINE or Samba, or Adobe went after Ghostscript, the outcry would be immediate. Boycott 3dfx already, people. The principle is way more important than silly brand loyalty.
I agree that writing a good Glide wrapper is non-trivial. See http://www.soundblaster.com/hotgraphics/unified/g
The EIT exam is easy. It looks intimidating because it's a very general test and there will be questions in fields you know very little about (for an EE, things like fluid dynamics). But it's graded on a gigantic curve, so any half-competent fourth-year engineering student should have no problem with it. It's good that you're taking a review course, but don't kill yourself studying for it. Your real classes are more important.
Will you need that PE certificate down the line? For a EE, probably not. But take the EIT now anyway. It's a nice thing to have on your resume. And it'll be easier to pass the EIT now than five years down the road, when you've forgotten a lot of the things you haven't needed to use in the real world.
I agree that it's nice to be able to do a minimal install and play off the CD, if you're short on disk space.
It's also nice to be able to do a full install and file the CD away in the closet if you have lots of disk space.
Tomb Raider is an example of a game with a stupid copy-protection CD check plus mandatory Redbook audio. The user is forced to fiddle with CDs like he's using a Playstation, even if he has 20 GB of free disk space.
I only buy games at stores that allow returns, and tend to return games with copy protection that pisses me off. Loki did the right thing with Civ:CTP, and I hope they continue to do so with future ports. Pissing off your paying customers is not a good way to increase sales, something a lot of game publishers haven't figured out yet.
I have a laptop (usually running Linux, occasionally running Win98) that gets its IP address via DHCP (from a Linux server at home, an NT server at work).
At home, because it's almost always the only DHCP client, my laptop always gets 192.168.0.10 (the beginning of my assigned DHCP range), so I can pretend it has a fixed IP address for local DNS purposes. At work, it gets a different IP address almost every day. WINS can resolve its name anyway; DNS can't because we don't have DDNS yet. MS supporting DDNS is good; my Solaris and Linux machines (which have clients for DNS but not WINS) would be able to look up my laptop by name, just like my Windows box (which has clients for both DNS and WINS).
Yes, MS might screw up DDNS, through malice or incompetence, and provide something only 99% compatible with the RFC. Recall the pump DHCP client included with Red Hat 6.0, which worked great with most Unix DHCP servers but not with NT's. But note that it was quickly patched to work with NT. Open-sourced clients can quickly deal with a bit of incompatibility, whether malicious or accidental.
The fact that MS supports a new open standard like DDNS before your favorite OS does is a reason to start working on an open DDNS client, not an excuse to bash MS. DDNS is good. NT becoming more standards-compliant is good. If at some point in the future MS starts changing their DDNS server around to deliberately cause problems with other people's clients, *then* bash MS, and suggest to your local sysadmin that he run DHCP and DNS from a cheap Linux/*BSD/whatever box instead of an NT server to maintain maximum compatibility with existing clients. But bashing MS in advance just for announcing the intent to support a good, new, open standard is counterproductive. Would you really prefer WINS?
It's not a casual anti-MS rant for the sake of ranting. The book comes with some Excel spreadsheets. Because MS breaks .xls compatibility with every version of Excel, the author had to release multiple versions of his spreadsheets. The rant was on-topic for the chapter.
I haven't bothered trying to import the older spreadsheets into Excel 97 or StarOffice. If that works, then perhaps the rant is a bit less deserved.