There it was, on page 1, my good old pal the Osborne 1.
My dad bought the Ozzie for his business to do spreadsheets and word processing and quickly outgrew it. Then I got it. All of my high school term papers and essays got cranked out on that thing (WordStar). The little screen (and any accessory monitor you might attach to it) would not accommodate 80 columns, so you had to press ctrl-<left/right_arrow> to scroll the viewable area around to see the hidden portions of the display.
It was a lot of fun. It ran CP/M and you could load "Microsoft Basic" (MBasic) or CBasic on it. I remember many nights spent writing file and disk utilities on it, and playing one of the three games it ran: Microsoft Adventure ("You are at Witt's end, passages extend off in all directions"), MyChess, and Invaders. I also learned all the ASCII codes and wrote a couple dopey driving games using those ASCII graphics blocks. The thrill of it!
That little Osborne 1 lasted me 9 years and got replaced by an IBM PS/2 in 1991. Years later, in the late 90s, my then wife was cleaning out the closets and came across old Ozzie. Since I had not used it in so long, I finally agreed that it should be "donated" to a charity scrap heap. I've never regretted anything so much since then. It was a fine machine, even if it was a bit quirky. I miss it.
I ditched my landline years ago and pay a flat-rate 40 bucks/mo for 400 minutes of talk time plus free US long distance.
The only time I've ever paid for calls on top of that amount is when I took my phone with me to the UK for 10 days. My mom called me every other day and we talked for about 20 minutes each time. For those calls alone, I paid $150, but all of the "local" calls I made to hotels/BritRail/Theaters/golf courses were included under my 400-minute plan.
I only travel internationally about every 3 years or so, but I do like the convenience of taking my GSM phone with me and being able to make and take calls just as I do normally. The premium I pay for that convenience (compared to the cost of plane tickets, trains, food & hotels) is pretty small and well worth it.
I don't see it as being terribly advantageous myself, but for different reasons. If you assume that you can indeed get reception at 30 miles away, what happens when you have to go somewhere that's 31 miles away? Yer screwed.
I used to think as you -- that cell phones were too darn costly -- then I ripped out my landline and went cell-only. I spend about the same amount of money as I used to on my landline and I can take my phone with me anywhere. I also get free long distance.
I'm not sure about other plans, but I have a t-mobile plan that gives me 400 min per month for about 40 bucks, which is a couple bucks more than what I paid for twisted pair service. I've never used up all of my time every month.
If you're the type of person that pretty much uses a phone all the time for everything, 400 minutes will get burnt up in a week, but I just don't blab on the phone that much.
The one time that I had some serious billing action is when I took my phone with me on a 10-day trip to the UK. My mom called me every other day or so, and we usually talked for about 20 minutes. I got charged about $150 to receive those calls (which she made by calling my regular number), but all the "local" calls I made to hotels/theaters/golf courses within the UK were included in my 400 mins per month.
Anyhow, all I'm saying is that once I found a cell plan that gave me just what I needed and wanted, I found that no landline scheme measured up -- in my own personal experience.
I have some beefs about the thing, frankly, bu the main one is that its so darn hard to know if and where its being abused. I'll come around to this point shortly, but first THE NINJAGIN BEEFS:
The USA-PATRIOT act was signed in the hysterical, paranoid aftermath (within weeks) of the the 9-11-01 attacks. It received broad bipartisan support, naturally. At the time, though, people in podunk towns all across America were deathly afraid that terrorists might fly planes into the local piggly-wiggly or tastee-freez. When a populace is hysterical and paranoid, they'll agree to anything that purports to increase safety or allow law enforcement greater power to identify and lock up the evildoers. Once you've identified a person or group of people as "Evil", you can do anything to them -- even inhuman, unethical things -- because they're not human.
The act allows library and bookstore records to be searched under secret warrant. If such a warrant is served, it is unlawful for the librarian/bookseller to disclose the event or its parameters -- the secrecy must be maintained because you don't want to tip the terrorists off and you can't compromise national security. What if someone's browsing for books about poisons or explosives? This would mean that they're thinking about poisons or explosives, and if they're thinking about these things, they may be thinking about a crime. So what is the secret search trying to find out? It's trying to find people who may be thinking about things that could be related to crime -- thoughtcrime. The Orwellian quality of it is frightening.
The act permits secret warrants to be issued for unannounced secret searches of any and all premises that are the subject of terror-related investigations. Anything can be confiscated or taken, without any public record, as a part of the search. The owner of the premises need not be informed of who did the search (or even that a search took place) or what was taken as a part of the secret investigation. The act basically allows law enforcement/intelligence/covert/homeland security agencies to conduct burglaries of any property in the US without any evidence or charges being brought beforehand. Speculation is all that is required, in addition to the secret sanction of a judge who (as it turns out) is bound by the law to not reveal that the investigation, warrant or subsequent search and seizure of property ever took place.
No-fly and watch lists -- enough has been posted about these already.
To return to my introductory point, so much of what the act allows is so secret that there is no way to determine if abuse has taken place. What's especially alarming is that in the 18 months following the 9-11-01 attacks, sooooo many things (like drug abuse and insurance fraud) were being implicitly associated with terrorism. What were ordinary instances of bad judgement or lawbreaking pre-09-11-01 suddenly became wrapped in terrorist clothes. After passage of the act, its scope seemed to snowball and since we don't have any way of knowing how the growth in scope has been exploited (since its all secret!), we may have unleased a Stasi-style security apparatus under the aegis of USA-PATRIOT.
The whole thing gives me the willies. It's doubleplusungood.
Wow. I was hoping someone would have more information about that. Thanks.
I seem to recall some figure like US$22,000 per kg to put something into orbit. Given how much further the moon is than orbit, the one million bucks per kg makes me think that a considerable percentage of that (maybe half) would be accounted for by transport.
What I'm wondering now is, if it is a million bucks per kg, how much energy could you get out of it in something like a fusion reactor? What would be the value of that energy?
What I'm driving at is -- if it costs a million smackeroos to get a kg of that stuff from the moon, and you can get, say, 20 million greenbacks for the energy, it'd seen like a viable industry.
Of course, I realize that I'm considering it in the most simple terms. It's thought-provoking nonetheless.
I think it's a marvelous thing. Given the wild and futuristic Japanese design aesthetic, I can't wait to see what it will look like.
My only question, and it's a question that crops up every time I hear about nations/people hollering for moon missions, is "What do you do once you get there?"
I've heard about mining and spaceship fabrication, but both of those have very high transportation costs involved. Just getting a habitable structure for the lunies (or is it "loonies"?) to stay in for weeks/months at a time is going to be a fantastic challenge -- do you use inflatables? -- do you burrow bug tunnels into the moon?
Back when I had an interest in tokamaks (those plasma-fusion-toroid-shaped doohickeys), I'd heard that the moon has a fairly rich quantity of Helium-3, a good fuel for tokamak-style fusion reactors. One shuttle bay full of moondust could power the whole earth for a year, supposedly. How much would it cost to get a shuttle to the moon, fill it with dirt and send it back? It must be a lot of moolah. Would it be worth it? I dunno.
Somehow, though, I'll bet the Chinese and the Japanese could work it out.
Still, my inner skeptic holds sway -- I don't believe it when the President says it, and I have a feeling that China and Japan will reconsider when the costs of such far-flung plans become real.
France is actually a really nice place. It's different, but still very nice. Spend a couple weeks there. I'm not sure what you've heard, but the food is good (as is the wine!), the people are friendly, the history of the country is tremendously interesting, the literature is great, and they've got one of the most open non-racist societies I've ever seen.
The academics in the country are kind of wrapped up in preserving their culture, which you point out is kind of annoying and anti-freedom. So what? It's their country, their quota system, and you don't have to live by it. French language and culture isn't dead or about to die at any time. There's no difference between what they're doing and the english-only proponents here in the states. To call them anti-freedom (whatever "anti-freedom" is supposed to mean) is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black.
We're the big force in popular culture and that's not going to change. At some level, they're whining about it, but they've been whining about it for fifty years and they're still around. Does whining make him a prick? I don't think so, since he was whining in French and writing in LeMonde, on the editorial page. Unless you're a regular reader of LeMonde, which I'm guessing you're not, why do you care?
As for where else French is spoken, you left out French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Belguim, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Monaco (I suppose you could argue that Monaco is a principality and not a country).
French was also one of the main languages in southeast asia, back when it was called indochina, and it's still spoken in parts of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Let's not also forget Guyana in South America, and the French Virgin Islands of the Carribean.
The bunch of little african countries you mention is actually quite large -- there are more than a dozen of them. Just looking at a map, you've got Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Cote d'Ivoire, Congo, Madagascar, Reunion, Togo, Chad, Snegal, Rwanda, Zaire, Central African Republic, Niger, Mauritania, Mali, Guinea, Gabon, Djibouti, Burundi, Benin, Cameroon and Burquina Fasso. The total land area of these nations is easily larger than the continental US.
So French is actually spoken all over the place, including Louisiana, here in the good old USA. It's also the official language of the united nations. Linguistically, French is an extremely precise language. It doesn't have much nuance to it -- it's very explicit and the grammatical rules are very strict, which makes it a very good intermediate language for negotiations. You can easily translate from French into any language.
The last above-ground nuclear test (in the 90s) was conducted by France. France also is the only nation in the world to generate most of their electricity (70%) with nuclear power. Next to us, France is the next oldest democracy in the world. Sure, France is not quite as powerful as it used to be, but it's still a center of technological innnovation and plays a major role in the greater European community.
Oh, I don't understand your use of "vicariously". Do you know what it means?
The French have a very protective attitude about the French language. When I was studying French and French literature in the late 80s, there was a big stink going on in the country wrt the Academie Francaise -- the main academic body that sets and polices French linguistic standards. Certain English words like "jet" and "hot dog" were becoming part of colloquial French, and the AF was in a tizzy about it. We're not so concerned about English here at home, but then again it's not a language we originated. There are a lot of Brits who are similarly protective of English, but the British Academic institutions are less vocal about getting people to toe the grammatical line.
Yes, it's easy to bash the French... especially if you don't know anything about them.
How you got modded insightful at one point I'll never understand, but I'm replying not only to challenge your supposed insight into the mind of smokers but to add some information on the topic.
Smoking isn't allowed in public buildings, on planes or buses or taxicabs, in elevators, in movie theaters, in concert halls, in office buildings, in hospitals, in schools. Certain outdoor areas and pedestrian malls in my state (Colorado) now prohibit smoking. Smoking is prohibited in all indoor and outdoor sports venues, and is banned or severely restricted in all airports. Most restaurants in Colorado are non-smoking (by choice, not by legislation). The only indoor public establishments wher smoking is permitted are bars and pubs, and most bowling alleys and pool halls.
Smoking, like the lottery, is a regressive tax. Most smokers (around 80%) are blue collar workers that earn less than 50K/year. Most smokers pay money into social security and die before they are old enough to collect benefits. Smokers are many times more likely to die suddenly than non-smokers, and pay 30% more for health insurance premiums. As for shirking taxes, most smokers do not buy tobacco online or on Native American reservations -- most tobacco products (including snuff and chewing tobacco) are sold in retail stores and bars. Not only is the tobacco taxed (and stamped accordingly by law), but the item is taxed a second time with a compounding sales tax.
Secondhand smoke, while an eye and respiratory irritant (apart from the unpleasant smell), does not have any statistically significant upward effect on cancer rates among non-smokers. It can be a trigger for asthma attacks and congestion. However, the most common triggers are pollen, mold, animal dander, dust and air pollution from cars/trucks/power plants. A study done some years ago (http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9802/10/smoke.ear/) did associate secondhand smoke with an increase in ear infections among children in smoking households. In households where someone does smoke, but does not smoke in the house, there is no increase in the rate of ear infections among children in those households. Dr. Spock's site also associates secondhand smoke with other sinus and respiratory infections, but not cancer. (See http://www.drspock.com/article/0,1510,5431,00.html )
To compare the danger of secondhand smoke (which contains carbon monoxide) against another common air pollutant like carbon monoxide from motor vehicles, you could try this simple experiment:
find ten smokers (you can find them out on the sidewalk in front of most city office buidings)
invite them into your garage and close all doors and windows for two hours
make sure that everyone but you lights up and remains smoking for two full hours
at the end of the 2 hour period, ventilate the area and assess the effects (You and your clothes will smell like smoke. Your eyes will probably be red and irritated. Your nose may be runny and your throat will probably be stratchy.)
shower, change clothes and wait a couple hours -- the symptoms will go away
go back into the garage, close all doors and windows and start your car
wait a half hour
after a half hour has passed, have an ambulance or your local coroner ventilate the area and assess the effects
Yes, smoking is a terrible habit, but it harms the smoker far more than it harms anyone else. Apart from having to suffer the negative health effects of the decision, smokers are socially ostracized as most men and women will not date a smoker. After years of smoking, a smoker's body begins to use the nicotine in tobacco smoke as a neurotransmitter in place of naturally produced acetylcholine and dopamine, and a very stubborn physical addiction ensues wherein smoking isn't a decision anymore -- it becomes a life-requirement. (See http://www.nida.nih.gov/MOM/TG/momtg-nicotine.html )
However, smokers boost state tax revenues and are a net benefit to social
As far as the validity of the study goes, it's hard to know from the article what the practical ramifications of "risk days" was, or what the weight of the risk was on a given "risk day". Just for the sake of example, let's say that you have a single continuum of 30 risk days but the level of risk is very high due to a gaping hole that cuts broadly across a wide range of server processes. Consider also that you could have a series of thirty individual one-day periods of risk where the scope of each risk was limited to specific areas of functionality. As I read the article, both cases would have the same number of risk days.
Your point is well-taken: all software has bugs. We didn't get any information in this article about how vulnerabilities were assessed and related to individual patches, though. Its possible that a single vulnerability can be expressed by five software bugs, for example. Does patching/fixing two of the bugs alleviate the vulnerability? I don't know the answer, but the study does not allude to the answer, either.
I suppose the other part that leads me to question is that the study didn't actually try any security tests. The setups were hypothetical, so I'm not sure what a "factual comparison of hypothetical system configurations" is supposed to yield. There's something vaguely oxymoronish about that premise, as I read it.
The last paragraph of TFA says that the hypothetical setups were meant to reflect the configuration that the average non-expert sysadmin would use, and I sense that the assumption was that no tweaking of either system would be taking place, apart from patching/updating. Improving the security of a system goes beyond just applying patches, though, so there are probably other unmeasured dimensions to risk and security that were not within the scope of the study.
So while I'd agree that there's a fair quantity of Linux fanboyism on/., questioning the study doesn't have to be related to a platform preference or technological zealotry. Part of the pro-linux bias when looking at these tests can be attributed to Microsoft's track record of only supporting tests that work out in their favor. This study appears to be more independent, which is a good thing, but I'm not sure how much it reveals in favor/against either system in a practical sense.
I'd like to see these guys follow this study up with others that offer more granular analyses of the risks and vulnerabilities, and explore hypothetical setups that include different approaches to configuration.
The unit can be immobilized easily, and blinded easily.
Any tourist in London can tell you about how fast the cops came after they were mugged or pick-pocketed in the tube. 10 minutes? 20 minutes?
I wouldn't leave beachball cameras in charge of an ice cream social.
Gimme ten seconds with a shovel while I'm wearin' a scarf and you'll have no clue who shut off the pansy digital eyes. One tube of Reynolds Wrap solves the entire problem, if you don't have a shovel or a scarf.
People are smarter and more mobile than cameras in motorized beachballs.
Show me the commandos who depend on disabled access, and I'll admit that motorized beachballs have the upper hand. Until then, this is just swedes lookin' for a grant.
Granted, a camera that rolls around inside a sealed sphere is a neat idea by itself, but the suggested security applications are just plain poorly-thought-out.
Consider that anyone with a weighted net or a tube of epoxy could immobilize the thing. A tarp with sandbag corners could both blind and immobilize the unit.
Consider that even though it can be sealed to eliminate the chance of water dirt or mud getting inside, covering it with mud will make it useless anyway, especially if immobilized.
One quarter-can of spray paint should be enough to cover the whole ball. Sure its mobile, but if it's blind it's not useful.
It can't climb stairs or ladders and it can't rattle doorknobs. It can't look into windows at eye-level and it can't shine a flashlight into areas. It can't collar, beat up or shoot trespassers/transgressors. There's no mention of audio monitoring capability, either.
To quote TFA; "In the security business as a whole there is a strong pressure to replace humans with technology in order to reduce costs and increase security. Substantial savings are possible because a single security officer can cost up to $200,000 for a 24 hour service."
Sure, hiring real people to do security work is expensive, but you get real people doing the work, and the capabilities of real people are far greater than a camera-in-a-beachball.
To be fair, I'll also grant that human security guards may be prone to laziness, sleeping on the job, not being observant, etc. However, the idea that a rolling ball has enough capability to replace a real person (eyes and ears, a nightstick, a flashlight, a gun and a loop of keys) is pretty far out. Even patrolling parking lots seem like a stretch to me.
I recall reading and article (with pictures) where a guy who had been water-cooling his CPU using a radiator and an in-window air conditioner.
To cut down on noise, he ran a 60-foot copper pipe out of his office, along his garage floor and back into his office. He filled it with gallons of water and had a pump recirculate the whole business over his CPU.
I thought that was a wcky idea, until I saw the movie of the liquid nitrogen 5 GHz overclock at Tom's hardware.
Yeah, ouch is right, and your description isn't a coincidence as far as my empirical experience goes.
I'm here at 5800 feet of elevation in Colorado, and I ski. I grew up in Minnesota, so I know what a northern latitude winter feels like. Out here, we're getting back out of a 5-year -=drought=- in one of the most prominent skiing states in the country. Snowpacks have been at 30-year lows for the past 5 years, even though we've had good periodic dumps. In the summers, I've been sitting and fishing on lakebed that used to grow the crap I snagged on ten years ago. (On the bright side, we mountain anglers still find a lot of free tackle and are slowly clearing some of those awful bait-stealing rocks.) We're at %100+ in most snowpack zones this year, but the zones have all shifted south. It changes water policy like crazy, since our mountains feed half of the southwest's water needs.
On the face of it, as a guy who likes warmer weather and full rivers and streams, global warming feels pretty good up here. I've lived here for thirty years and last week...
... IT RAINED IN LATE JANUARY...
=shakes head vigorously=
IT RAINED, I SWEAR, I KID YOU NOT.
To put this in perspective, for my childhood and teens, I was able (or unfortunate enough) to be able to go out on any given weeknight in January and February, on any given week, and shovel sidewalks & driveways for cold hard cash. There ain't a dollar in it anymore and snow shovels out here are almost free. When your shovel gets stolen, people don't even care anymore because the sun gets the job done a lot faster.
Empirically, yeah, it's getting warmer for me, and wetter (at last), but I do not know which weather cycle is the source. It would be nutty to believe that there's only one weather cycle at work, too. Weather and climate, especially over the long term, is really hard to assign to one cause -- especially out here where we get all 4 seasons in pretty equal measure.
Here in the Denver area, we do have one of the largest ice core libaries in the US. Both North and South NSF polar science support contractors are located here, too, so we like to think that we've got the pulse on a lot more than we really do.
I don't think our experience here is any different from elsewhere, but rather than trust my own back yard, wrt trying to understand the worldwide change in climate, I'd trust the records of permafrost and ice in polar regions first, and research done by nations on the Arctic Circle, and in Antarctica.
I used to think that "global warming" and/or "man-made climate change" were not "true" or "real". Then I met a half-dozen climatologists and glaciologists that do research in the north and south polar regions. Just talk to the people that do the research. The NSF can give you a list of all their polar research grantees, but I suggest starting with UA Fairbanks, where climate and geophysical research has been going on for decades:
http://www.cgc.uaf.edu/default.html
There is lots of evidence that the climate encounters rapid (25-50,000 year periods) cyclical changes (like the ice ages). The more disturbing parts of the research show that over the last 100 years or so, the rate of change in the percentage composition of the main atmospehric gasses (carbon dioxide, ozone, nitrogen and oxygen) trapped in glacial ice is quite remarkable. Over the last 100 years, shifts in the relative quantity of carbon dioxide and ozone are what the historical record would infer over a period of hundreds of thousands of years. That so much change could be packed into such a short timeframe is something to think about, as it coincides directly with industrial expansion and the advent of fossil fuels. Greenland's ice cap is melting at rates that the glacial record has never before shown to happen -=ever=-. Bear in mind that the most far-reaching ice core ever drilled only goes back some 900,000 years.
The problem is that the oceans and atmosphere are highly dynamic fluid environments, and climate change is never consistent across all parts of the earth. Here's a very interesting article that explores some of the variabilty issues:
Sure, you don't have to believe what the world's glaciologists and climatologists are telling you, but the rate of change (and variability of change) over the last 100 years has no precedent in any glacial record available to human beings. Can the planet strike a new balance? Sure. We've had periods of very intense volcanic acivity over the last 200,000 years, for example, and the atmosphere and oceans have been able to balance out. Back then, though, the coral reefs weren't dying off, the northern oceans weren't overfished, and there was twice as much old growth and rain forest as there is now. How does a planet adjust when the natural carbon sinks aren't there? Nobody knows the answer, yet, and while I'm sure I'll never know the answer in my lifetime, I'm also sure it's an answer I don't want to hear in the first place.
A few people to join in on the thread have mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson's Red-Blue-Green Mars trilogy of books. My ex was doing her tour in Antarctica when KSR was there researching the book, and much of the science in the series has direct parallels to what is being studied in polar regions.
While you say that "There is no life-ending catastrophe even on the most distant horizon.", you can't be sure of this. A meteor the size of Rhode Island could do a lot of life-ending and shift the climate in very powerful ways. That said, resourceful people have been inhabiting the planet for a long time, and even if there were a very significant change in global climate (more significant than the fairy-tale type explored in "the Day After Tomorrow", for example), the earth is unlikely to become completely "uninhabitable". Either way, if you wait until the "sky is falling" to become a better steward of the environment, you've waited too long.
Anyhow, to get back on-topic, I'd rather see NASA/NOAA spend money on studying/maintaining/improving our own climate than worrying about Mars. Nobody on Mars pays taxes, as far as I know.
So, will it still use socket 478, and when do we see moboards with the new accompanying chipsets and DDR2?
I'm a little leery of getting excited about having more juice squeezed out of the P4 line, and maybe it's because I'm not entirely clued into the extent of the benefits gained from dual-core P4s. Are they doing this just to gain time before they introduce a new architecture?
I'm looking to build a new AMD-based system this summer, even if they are a little later-to-the-dual-core-table. As far as I can tell, this news doesn't present any substantive reason for me to change that plan.
Can someone more knowledgeable help me get some perspective on this?
... a solar sail if you're beaming microwaves at a film with a coating that releases a gas, right?
For some reason I thought that solar sails captured photon pressure to accelerate an object by very very teeny tiny amounts over a long period of time.
As I read the article, they're still using the idea of a sail, but the acceleration comes from the release of gas. So isn't this a "gas sail"?
If it is a gas sail, then don't you have to worry about holes in the sail fabric/material? You're back to fluid pressure on a sail surface, aren't you?
It seems (admittedly, in my own uneducated, poorly-informed estimation) like the "gas sail" material would have to be more robust than with a solar sail.
My point was supposed to be about caution wrt accepting certain chipset cofigurations against P4 compatibility and compliance with DDR2 for the purpose of gaming.
My nomenclature got in the way, I guess.
I was also trying to introduce the experience of the half-dozen gamers and sytem builders in my group.
I am not an EE, though I do read spectrum. I, too, have had interesting and unusual problems with VIA chipsets in the past, particularly wrt firmware updates, but bus mastery has never been something I've paid any attention to. Perhaps I should, admittedly.
It's a fair question. I think there is a market for it, though.
That Intel has been having a rough go in high-perf/gaming is pretty obvious, however, as a gaming enthusiast with some hardware knowledge I can say that I'm still running a 2.7 GHz (533) P4 without problems (and I don't OC). Haven't come across anything I could not play.
I only build a new machine every couple years, but I can say that while many of my pals have built with the newer 800Mhz bus CPUs, they don't really seem to be getting that much improvement over my system. For that matter, the one guy I know with an Athlon64 may have better performance, but he's also had driver and OS problems out the bazoo.
I think the part that's most interesting to me is what the chipset does for DDR2 and PCI-x moboard configs -- and there is some improvement there. DDR2 and PCI-x are not specific to Intel, and I confess that I'm waiting for a flex-ATX AMD-supportive moboard with PCI-x and DDR2 support. Yet, unless I see some kind of real improvement in performance, I'm unlikely to bite.
In addition, there was a time when games (every year, it seemed) really needed to be run on the latest and greatest, and I think it's less true, now. So, between less-than-impressive improvements in performance in the hardware, and less-demanding software, I feel less inclined to shell out for the cutting edge, on top of being less-than-excited about Intel's latest offerings.
I'll wait for more reviews (I like lots of reviews by lots of different people), but I'll also be keeping an eye out for this chipset, just to see how it compares with others over time.
... triangles and squares. It seems pretty harmless enjoyment of 2-D geometry to me. I didn't see any icky-faces or similarly juvenile imagery, just a bunch of triangles and squares and a bunch of bullet points.
When I doodle, I end up with spheres and cubes and conic sections, not because I'm a great three-dimensional thinker, but because I like to practice light/shadows and foreshortening.
Maybe Bill was practicing his triangles? Even if they were Tony's doodles, what's so wrong with Tony practicing triangles?
What I get from it is this: Some of the most powerful people in the world have fun with triangles, so they must be okay to play with.
Rose colored glasses? No. Sales guy? No. Software Engineer? Yes.
There are nightmares, admittedly. Turn-up on a purchased system can take more than a few months, sometimes as long as a year to get all the pieces in place. Individual hospitals also like a lot of customization, so once the installation is finished and things are turned up, there's a long tweaking phase. We put our own engineers on-site for the entire turn-up, and a lot of our best people are on-call. Yeah, sometimes you find problems, but you patch as you need to and add the functionality/fix to the next release. No two hospitals are alike, either, so a one-size-one-flavor-fits-all product is simply not realistic.
The odd thing is that you never hear the engineers at the hospital mention that they ended up tacking on dozens of additional requirements on after the agreed-upon system was halfway through implementation or already in place. This happens all the time, too, and if it's not managed properly, you end up coding entire systems for individual sites out of whole cloth, which only increases the complexity and hassles. The whole "it's all the vendor's fault" complaint is always overblown. There are two sides to every story.
You seem to contend that ANY new system is worse than the old one being replaced. Oh, yes, that's why hospitals and healthcare companies buy informatics software -- to get less functionality and piss off the physicians! Yeah! Makes perfect sense!
Pshaw. It sounds like fear of change to me. Since you're disgruntled, why not find another line of work? I hear EA is hiring, fwiw.
Your heated grousing is understandable but the experience of delivery and turn-up for informatics software is NO DIFFERENT from any ERP system. I have plenty of experience with ERPs and I can tell you that it works the same way for SAP, the late PeopleSoft, the late JDEdwards, Baan, and Oracle. Hospital informatics systems are, at their root, ERPs for healthcare. It can be easily argued that they're much more complex than a traditional ERP since the margin of error is zero and it's very much a person-to-person service industry.
When you implement an ERP installation, there are always groups of grousy, irritated people that fear change, resist it, sabotage the systems, circumvent the new processes and make it harder than it needs to be. Most of these same folks eventually come around over time, but if management is doing their part to manage the change, facilitating training and transition, there are fewer problems getting folks used to a new system at the outset.
I always like hearing about how powerful healthcare companies are robbing patients and taxpayers. Gives me a real chuckle. If you want socialized medicine, it's right across the border or across the pond.
Slashdot Mirror
There it was, on page 1, my good old pal the Osborne 1.
My dad bought the Ozzie for his business to do spreadsheets and word processing and quickly outgrew it. Then I got it. All of my high school term papers and essays got cranked out on that thing (WordStar). The little screen (and any accessory monitor you might attach to it) would not accommodate 80 columns, so you had to press ctrl-<left/right_arrow> to scroll the viewable area around to see the hidden portions of the display.
It was a lot of fun. It ran CP/M and you could load "Microsoft Basic" (MBasic) or CBasic on it. I remember many nights spent writing file and disk utilities on it, and playing one of the three games it ran: Microsoft Adventure ("You are at Witt's end, passages extend off in all directions"), MyChess, and Invaders. I also learned all the ASCII codes and wrote a couple dopey driving games using those ASCII graphics blocks. The thrill of it!
That little Osborne 1 lasted me 9 years and got replaced by an IBM PS/2 in 1991. Years later, in the late 90s, my then wife was cleaning out the closets and came across old Ozzie. Since I had not used it in so long, I finally agreed that it should be "donated" to a charity scrap heap. I've never regretted anything so much since then. It was a fine machine, even if it was a bit quirky. I miss it.
-=sniffle=-
I ditched my landline years ago and pay a flat-rate 40 bucks/mo for 400 minutes of talk time plus free US long distance.
The only time I've ever paid for calls on top of that amount is when I took my phone with me to the UK for 10 days. My mom called me every other day and we talked for about 20 minutes each time. For those calls alone, I paid $150, but all of the "local" calls I made to hotels/BritRail/Theaters/golf courses were included under my 400-minute plan.
I only travel internationally about every 3 years or so, but I do like the convenience of taking my GSM phone with me and being able to make and take calls just as I do normally. The premium I pay for that convenience (compared to the cost of plane tickets, trains, food & hotels) is pretty small and well worth it.
I used to think as you -- that cell phones were too darn costly -- then I ripped out my landline and went cell-only. I spend about the same amount of money as I used to on my landline and I can take my phone with me anywhere. I also get free long distance.
I'm not sure about other plans, but I have a t-mobile plan that gives me 400 min per month for about 40 bucks, which is a couple bucks more than what I paid for twisted pair service. I've never used up all of my time every month.
If you're the type of person that pretty much uses a phone all the time for everything, 400 minutes will get burnt up in a week, but I just don't blab on the phone that much.
The one time that I had some serious billing action is when I took my phone with me on a 10-day trip to the UK. My mom called me every other day or so, and we usually talked for about 20 minutes. I got charged about $150 to receive those calls (which she made by calling my regular number), but all the "local" calls I made to hotels/theaters/golf courses within the UK were included in my 400 mins per month.
Anyhow, all I'm saying is that once I found a cell plan that gave me just what I needed and wanted, I found that no landline scheme measured up -- in my own personal experience.
The USA-PATRIOT act was signed in the hysterical, paranoid aftermath (within weeks) of the the 9-11-01 attacks. It received broad bipartisan support, naturally. At the time, though, people in podunk towns all across America were deathly afraid that terrorists might fly planes into the local piggly-wiggly or tastee-freez. When a populace is hysterical and paranoid, they'll agree to anything that purports to increase safety or allow law enforcement greater power to identify and lock up the evildoers. Once you've identified a person or group of people as "Evil", you can do anything to them -- even inhuman, unethical things -- because they're not human.
The act allows library and bookstore records to be searched under secret warrant. If such a warrant is served, it is unlawful for the librarian/bookseller to disclose the event or its parameters -- the secrecy must be maintained because you don't want to tip the terrorists off and you can't compromise national security. What if someone's browsing for books about poisons or explosives? This would mean that they're thinking about poisons or explosives, and if they're thinking about these things, they may be thinking about a crime. So what is the secret search trying to find out? It's trying to find people who may be thinking about things that could be related to crime -- thoughtcrime. The Orwellian quality of it is frightening.
The act permits secret warrants to be issued for unannounced secret searches of any and all premises that are the subject of terror-related investigations. Anything can be confiscated or taken, without any public record, as a part of the search. The owner of the premises need not be informed of who did the search (or even that a search took place) or what was taken as a part of the secret investigation. The act basically allows law enforcement/intelligence/covert/homeland security agencies to conduct burglaries of any property in the US without any evidence or charges being brought beforehand. Speculation is all that is required, in addition to the secret sanction of a judge who (as it turns out) is bound by the law to not reveal that the investigation, warrant or subsequent search and seizure of property ever took place.
No-fly and watch lists -- enough has been posted about these already.
To return to my introductory point, so much of what the act allows is so secret that there is no way to determine if abuse has taken place. What's especially alarming is that in the 18 months following the 9-11-01 attacks, sooooo many things (like drug abuse and insurance fraud) were being implicitly associated with terrorism. What were ordinary instances of bad judgement or lawbreaking pre-09-11-01 suddenly became wrapped in terrorist clothes. After passage of the act, its scope seemed to snowball and since we don't have any way of knowing how the growth in scope has been exploited (since its all secret!), we may have unleased a Stasi-style security apparatus under the aegis of USA-PATRIOT.
The whole thing gives me the willies. It's doubleplusungood.
I seem to recall some figure like US$22,000 per kg to put something into orbit. Given how much further the moon is than orbit, the one million bucks per kg makes me think that a considerable percentage of that (maybe half) would be accounted for by transport.
What I'm wondering now is, if it is a million bucks per kg, how much energy could you get out of it in something like a fusion reactor? What would be the value of that energy?
What I'm driving at is -- if it costs a million smackeroos to get a kg of that stuff from the moon, and you can get, say, 20 million greenbacks for the energy, it'd seen like a viable industry.
Of course, I realize that I'm considering it in the most simple terms. It's thought-provoking nonetheless.
My only question, and it's a question that crops up every time I hear about nations/people hollering for moon missions, is "What do you do once you get there?"
I've heard about mining and spaceship fabrication, but both of those have very high transportation costs involved. Just getting a habitable structure for the lunies (or is it "loonies"?) to stay in for weeks/months at a time is going to be a fantastic challenge -- do you use inflatables? -- do you burrow bug tunnels into the moon?
Back when I had an interest in tokamaks (those plasma-fusion-toroid-shaped doohickeys), I'd heard that the moon has a fairly rich quantity of Helium-3, a good fuel for tokamak-style fusion reactors. One shuttle bay full of moondust could power the whole earth for a year, supposedly. How much would it cost to get a shuttle to the moon, fill it with dirt and send it back? It must be a lot of moolah. Would it be worth it? I dunno.
Somehow, though, I'll bet the Chinese and the Japanese could work it out.
Still, my inner skeptic holds sway -- I don't believe it when the President says it, and I have a feeling that China and Japan will reconsider when the costs of such far-flung plans become real.
The academics in the country are kind of wrapped up in preserving their culture, which you point out is kind of annoying and anti-freedom. So what? It's their country, their quota system, and you don't have to live by it. French language and culture isn't dead or about to die at any time. There's no difference between what they're doing and the english-only proponents here in the states. To call them anti-freedom (whatever "anti-freedom" is supposed to mean) is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black.
We're the big force in popular culture and that's not going to change. At some level, they're whining about it, but they've been whining about it for fifty years and they're still around. Does whining make him a prick? I don't think so, since he was whining in French and writing in LeMonde, on the editorial page. Unless you're a regular reader of LeMonde, which I'm guessing you're not, why do you care?
As for where else French is spoken, you left out French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Belguim, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Monaco (I suppose you could argue that Monaco is a principality and not a country).
French was also one of the main languages in southeast asia, back when it was called indochina, and it's still spoken in parts of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Let's not also forget Guyana in South America, and the French Virgin Islands of the Carribean.
The bunch of little african countries you mention is actually quite large -- there are more than a dozen of them. Just looking at a map, you've got Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Cote d'Ivoire, Congo, Madagascar, Reunion, Togo, Chad, Snegal, Rwanda, Zaire, Central African Republic, Niger, Mauritania, Mali, Guinea, Gabon, Djibouti, Burundi, Benin, Cameroon and Burquina Fasso. The total land area of these nations is easily larger than the continental US.
So French is actually spoken all over the place, including Louisiana, here in the good old USA. It's also the official language of the united nations. Linguistically, French is an extremely precise language. It doesn't have much nuance to it -- it's very explicit and the grammatical rules are very strict, which makes it a very good intermediate language for negotiations. You can easily translate from French into any language.
The last above-ground nuclear test (in the 90s) was conducted by France. France also is the only nation in the world to generate most of their electricity (70%) with nuclear power. Next to us, France is the next oldest democracy in the world. Sure, France is not quite as powerful as it used to be, but it's still a center of technological innnovation and plays a major role in the greater European community.
Oh, I don't understand your use of "vicariously". Do you know what it means?
The French have a very protective attitude about the French language. When I was studying French and French literature in the late 80s, there was a big stink going on in the country wrt the Academie Francaise -- the main academic body that sets and polices French linguistic standards. Certain English words like "jet" and "hot dog" were becoming part of colloquial French, and the AF was in a tizzy about it. We're not so concerned about English here at home, but then again it's not a language we originated. There are a lot of Brits who are similarly protective of English, but the British Academic institutions are less vocal about getting people to toe the grammatical line.
Yes, it's easy to bash the French... especially if you don't know anything about them.
Smoking isn't allowed in public buildings, on planes or buses or taxicabs, in elevators, in movie theaters, in concert halls, in office buildings, in hospitals, in schools. Certain outdoor areas and pedestrian malls in my state (Colorado) now prohibit smoking. Smoking is prohibited in all indoor and outdoor sports venues, and is banned or severely restricted in all airports. Most restaurants in Colorado are non-smoking (by choice, not by legislation). The only indoor public establishments wher smoking is permitted are bars and pubs, and most bowling alleys and pool halls.
Smoking, like the lottery, is a regressive tax. Most smokers (around 80%) are blue collar workers that earn less than 50K/year. Most smokers pay money into social security and die before they are old enough to collect benefits. Smokers are many times more likely to die suddenly than non-smokers, and pay 30% more for health insurance premiums. As for shirking taxes, most smokers do not buy tobacco online or on Native American reservations -- most tobacco products (including snuff and chewing tobacco) are sold in retail stores and bars. Not only is the tobacco taxed (and stamped accordingly by law), but the item is taxed a second time with a compounding sales tax.
Secondhand smoke, while an eye and respiratory irritant (apart from the unpleasant smell), does not have any statistically significant upward effect on cancer rates among non-smokers. It can be a trigger for asthma attacks and congestion. However, the most common triggers are pollen, mold, animal dander, dust and air pollution from cars/trucks/power plants. A study done some years ago (http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9802/10/smoke.ear/) did associate secondhand smoke with an increase in ear infections among children in smoking households. In households where someone does smoke, but does not smoke in the house, there is no increase in the rate of ear infections among children in those households. Dr. Spock's site also associates secondhand smoke with other sinus and respiratory infections, but not cancer. (See http://www.drspock.com/article/0,1510,5431,00.html )
To compare the danger of secondhand smoke (which contains carbon monoxide) against another common air pollutant like carbon monoxide from motor vehicles, you could try this simple experiment:
Yes, smoking is a terrible habit, but it harms the smoker far more than it harms anyone else. Apart from having to suffer the negative health effects of the decision, smokers are socially ostracized as most men and women will not date a smoker. After years of smoking, a smoker's body begins to use the nicotine in tobacco smoke as a neurotransmitter in place of naturally produced acetylcholine and dopamine, and a very stubborn physical addiction ensues wherein smoking isn't a decision anymore -- it becomes a life-requirement. (See http://www.nida.nih.gov/MOM/TG/momtg-nicotine.html )
However, smokers boost state tax revenues and are a net benefit to social
Your point is well-taken: all software has bugs. We didn't get any information in this article about how vulnerabilities were assessed and related to individual patches, though. Its possible that a single vulnerability can be expressed by five software bugs, for example. Does patching/fixing two of the bugs alleviate the vulnerability? I don't know the answer, but the study does not allude to the answer, either.
I suppose the other part that leads me to question is that the study didn't actually try any security tests. The setups were hypothetical, so I'm not sure what a "factual comparison of hypothetical system configurations" is supposed to yield. There's something vaguely oxymoronish about that premise, as I read it.
The last paragraph of TFA says that the hypothetical setups were meant to reflect the configuration that the average non-expert sysadmin would use, and I sense that the assumption was that no tweaking of either system would be taking place, apart from patching/updating. Improving the security of a system goes beyond just applying patches, though, so there are probably other unmeasured dimensions to risk and security that were not within the scope of the study.
So while I'd agree that there's a fair quantity of Linux fanboyism on /., questioning the study doesn't have to be related to a platform preference or technological zealotry. Part of the pro-linux bias when looking at these tests can be attributed to Microsoft's track record of only supporting tests that work out in their favor. This study appears to be more independent, which is a good thing, but I'm not sure how much it reveals in favor/against either system in a practical sense.
I'd like to see these guys follow this study up with others that offer more granular analyses of the risks and vulnerabilities, and explore hypothetical setups that include different approaches to configuration.
The unit can be immobilized easily, and blinded easily.
Any tourist in London can tell you about how fast the cops came after they were mugged or pick-pocketed in the tube. 10 minutes? 20 minutes?
I wouldn't leave beachball cameras in charge of an ice cream social.
Gimme ten seconds with a shovel while I'm wearin' a scarf and you'll have no clue who shut off the pansy digital eyes. One tube of Reynolds Wrap solves the entire problem, if you don't have a shovel or a scarf.
People are smarter and more mobile than cameras in motorized beachballs.
Show me the commandos who depend on disabled access, and I'll admit that motorized beachballs have the upper hand. Until then, this is just swedes lookin' for a grant.
Granted, a camera that rolls around inside a sealed sphere is a neat idea by itself, but the suggested security applications are just plain poorly-thought-out.
Consider that anyone with a weighted net or a tube of epoxy could immobilize the thing. A tarp with sandbag corners could both blind and immobilize the unit.
Consider that even though it can be sealed to eliminate the chance of water dirt or mud getting inside, covering it with mud will make it useless anyway, especially if immobilized.
One quarter-can of spray paint should be enough to cover the whole ball. Sure its mobile, but if it's blind it's not useful.
It can't climb stairs or ladders and it can't rattle doorknobs. It can't look into windows at eye-level and it can't shine a flashlight into areas. It can't collar, beat up or shoot trespassers/transgressors. There's no mention of audio monitoring capability, either.
To quote TFA; "In the security business as a whole there is a strong pressure to replace humans with technology in order to reduce costs and increase security. Substantial savings are possible because a single security officer can cost up to $200,000 for a 24 hour service."
Sure, hiring real people to do security work is expensive, but you get real people doing the work, and the capabilities of real people are far greater than a camera-in-a-beachball.
To be fair, I'll also grant that human security guards may be prone to laziness, sleeping on the job, not being observant, etc. However, the idea that a rolling ball has enough capability to replace a real person (eyes and ears, a nightstick, a flashlight, a gun and a loop of keys) is pretty far out. Even patrolling parking lots seem like a stretch to me.
I was very sorry to get this news, especially because it takes the focus off of North Korea's real problem: long and/or unkempt hair. See:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4157121.st m
Good grooming is more important than ever!
I recall reading and article (with pictures) where a guy who had been water-cooling his CPU using a radiator and an in-window air conditioner.
To cut down on noise, he ran a 60-foot copper pipe out of his office, along his garage floor and back into his office. He filled it with gallons of water and had a pump recirculate the whole business over his CPU.
I thought that was a wcky idea, until I saw the movie of the liquid nitrogen 5 GHz overclock at Tom's hardware.
I'm here at 5800 feet of elevation in Colorado, and I ski. I grew up in Minnesota, so I know what a northern latitude winter feels like. Out here, we're getting back out of a 5-year -=drought=- in one of the most prominent skiing states in the country. Snowpacks have been at 30-year lows for the past 5 years, even though we've had good periodic dumps. In the summers, I've been sitting and fishing on lakebed that used to grow the crap I snagged on ten years ago. (On the bright side, we mountain anglers still find a lot of free tackle and are slowly clearing some of those awful bait-stealing rocks.) We're at %100+ in most snowpack zones this year, but the zones have all shifted south. It changes water policy like crazy, since our mountains feed half of the southwest's water needs.
On the face of it, as a guy who likes warmer weather and full rivers and streams, global warming feels pretty good up here. I've lived here for thirty years and last week ...
=shakes head vigorously=
IT RAINED, I SWEAR, I KID YOU NOT.
To put this in perspective, for my childhood and teens, I was able (or unfortunate enough) to be able to go out on any given weeknight in January and February, on any given week, and shovel sidewalks & driveways for cold hard cash. There ain't a dollar in it anymore and snow shovels out here are almost free. When your shovel gets stolen, people don't even care anymore because the sun gets the job done a lot faster.
Empirically, yeah, it's getting warmer for me, and wetter (at last), but I do not know which weather cycle is the source. It would be nutty to believe that there's only one weather cycle at work, too. Weather and climate, especially over the long term, is really hard to assign to one cause -- especially out here where we get all 4 seasons in pretty equal measure.
Here in the Denver area, we do have one of the largest ice core libaries in the US. Both North and South NSF polar science support contractors are located here, too, so we like to think that we've got the pulse on a lot more than we really do.
I don't think our experience here is any different from elsewhere, but rather than trust my own back yard, wrt trying to understand the worldwide change in climate, I'd trust the records of permafrost and ice in polar regions first, and research done by nations on the Arctic Circle, and in Antarctica.
http://www.cgc.uaf.edu/default.html
There is lots of evidence that the climate encounters rapid (25-50,000 year periods) cyclical changes (like the ice ages). The more disturbing parts of the research show that over the last 100 years or so, the rate of change in the percentage composition of the main atmospehric gasses (carbon dioxide, ozone, nitrogen and oxygen) trapped in glacial ice is quite remarkable. Over the last 100 years, shifts in the relative quantity of carbon dioxide and ozone are what the historical record would infer over a period of hundreds of thousands of years. That so much change could be packed into such a short timeframe is something to think about, as it coincides directly with industrial expansion and the advent of fossil fuels. Greenland's ice cap is melting at rates that the glacial record has never before shown to happen -=ever=-. Bear in mind that the most far-reaching ice core ever drilled only goes back some 900,000 years.
The problem is that the oceans and atmosphere are highly dynamic fluid environments, and climate change is never consistent across all parts of the earth. Here's a very interesting article that explores some of the variabilty issues:
http://www.antarcticconnection.com/antarctic/news/ 2004/082404-glaciers.shtml
Sure, you don't have to believe what the world's glaciologists and climatologists are telling you, but the rate of change (and variability of change) over the last 100 years has no precedent in any glacial record available to human beings. Can the planet strike a new balance? Sure. We've had periods of very intense volcanic acivity over the last 200,000 years, for example, and the atmosphere and oceans have been able to balance out. Back then, though, the coral reefs weren't dying off, the northern oceans weren't overfished, and there was twice as much old growth and rain forest as there is now. How does a planet adjust when the natural carbon sinks aren't there? Nobody knows the answer, yet, and while I'm sure I'll never know the answer in my lifetime, I'm also sure it's an answer I don't want to hear in the first place.
A few people to join in on the thread have mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson's Red-Blue-Green Mars trilogy of books. My ex was doing her tour in Antarctica when KSR was there researching the book, and much of the science in the series has direct parallels to what is being studied in polar regions.
While you say that "There is no life-ending catastrophe even on the most distant horizon.", you can't be sure of this. A meteor the size of Rhode Island could do a lot of life-ending and shift the climate in very powerful ways. That said, resourceful people have been inhabiting the planet for a long time, and even if there were a very significant change in global climate (more significant than the fairy-tale type explored in "the Day After Tomorrow", for example), the earth is unlikely to become completely "uninhabitable". Either way, if you wait until the "sky is falling" to become a better steward of the environment, you've waited too long.
Anyhow, to get back on-topic, I'd rather see NASA/NOAA spend money on studying/maintaining/improving our own climate than worrying about Mars. Nobody on Mars pays taxes, as far as I know.
I'm a little leery of getting excited about having more juice squeezed out of the P4 line, and maybe it's because I'm not entirely clued into the extent of the benefits gained from dual-core P4s. Are they doing this just to gain time before they introduce a new architecture?
I'm looking to build a new AMD-based system this summer, even if they are a little later-to-the-dual-core-table. As far as I can tell, this news doesn't present any substantive reason for me to change that plan.
Can someone more knowledgeable help me get some perspective on this?
Wired had a little writeup about this thing a couple months back. Looked pretty cool. The price ain't so bad, either.
Are all of the puzzles tetris-ish? Is it possible to play the game without doing any puzzles?
Can anyone offer some of their experience with it?
For some reason I thought that solar sails captured photon pressure to accelerate an object by very very teeny tiny amounts over a long period of time.
As I read the article, they're still using the idea of a sail, but the acceleration comes from the release of gas. So isn't this a "gas sail"?
If it is a gas sail, then don't you have to worry about holes in the sail fabric/material? You're back to fluid pressure on a sail surface, aren't you?
It seems (admittedly, in my own uneducated, poorly-informed estimation) like the "gas sail" material would have to be more robust than with a solar sail.
Can someone clarify for me?
Sorry about the confusion. I meant PCI-express.
My point was supposed to be about caution wrt accepting certain chipset cofigurations against P4 compatibility and compliance with DDR2 for the purpose of gaming.
My nomenclature got in the way, I guess.
I was also trying to introduce the experience of the half-dozen gamers and sytem builders in my group.
I am not an EE, though I do read spectrum. I, too, have had interesting and unusual problems with VIA chipsets in the past, particularly wrt firmware updates, but bus mastery has never been something I've paid any attention to. Perhaps I should, admittedly.
Thank you for bringing the error to my attention.
That Intel has been having a rough go in high-perf/gaming is pretty obvious, however, as a gaming enthusiast with some hardware knowledge I can say that I'm still running a 2.7 GHz (533) P4 without problems (and I don't OC). Haven't come across anything I could not play.
I only build a new machine every couple years, but I can say that while many of my pals have built with the newer 800Mhz bus CPUs, they don't really seem to be getting that much improvement over my system. For that matter, the one guy I know with an Athlon64 may have better performance, but he's also had driver and OS problems out the bazoo.
I think the part that's most interesting to me is what the chipset does for DDR2 and PCI-x moboard configs -- and there is some improvement there. DDR2 and PCI-x are not specific to Intel, and I confess that I'm waiting for a flex-ATX AMD-supportive moboard with PCI-x and DDR2 support. Yet, unless I see some kind of real improvement in performance, I'm unlikely to bite.
In addition, there was a time when games (every year, it seemed) really needed to be run on the latest and greatest, and I think it's less true, now. So, between less-than-impressive improvements in performance in the hardware, and less-demanding software, I feel less inclined to shell out for the cutting edge, on top of being less-than-excited about Intel's latest offerings.
I'll wait for more reviews (I like lots of reviews by lots of different people), but I'll also be keeping an eye out for this chipset, just to see how it compares with others over time.
When I doodle, I end up with spheres and cubes and conic sections, not because I'm a great three-dimensional thinker, but because I like to practice light/shadows and foreshortening.
Maybe Bill was practicing his triangles? Even if they were Tony's doodles, what's so wrong with Tony practicing triangles?
What I get from it is this: Some of the most powerful people in the world have fun with triangles, so they must be okay to play with.
There are nightmares, admittedly. Turn-up on a purchased system can take more than a few months, sometimes as long as a year to get all the pieces in place. Individual hospitals also like a lot of customization, so once the installation is finished and things are turned up, there's a long tweaking phase. We put our own engineers on-site for the entire turn-up, and a lot of our best people are on-call. Yeah, sometimes you find problems, but you patch as you need to and add the functionality/fix to the next release. No two hospitals are alike, either, so a one-size-one-flavor-fits-all product is simply not realistic.
The odd thing is that you never hear the engineers at the hospital mention that they ended up tacking on dozens of additional requirements on after the agreed-upon system was halfway through implementation or already in place. This happens all the time, too, and if it's not managed properly, you end up coding entire systems for individual sites out of whole cloth, which only increases the complexity and hassles. The whole "it's all the vendor's fault" complaint is always overblown. There are two sides to every story.
You seem to contend that ANY new system is worse than the old one being replaced. Oh, yes, that's why hospitals and healthcare companies buy informatics software -- to get less functionality and piss off the physicians! Yeah! Makes perfect sense!
Pshaw. It sounds like fear of change to me. Since you're disgruntled, why not find another line of work? I hear EA is hiring, fwiw.
Your heated grousing is understandable but the experience of delivery and turn-up for informatics software is NO DIFFERENT from any ERP system. I have plenty of experience with ERPs and I can tell you that it works the same way for SAP, the late PeopleSoft, the late JDEdwards, Baan, and Oracle. Hospital informatics systems are, at their root, ERPs for healthcare. It can be easily argued that they're much more complex than a traditional ERP since the margin of error is zero and it's very much a person-to-person service industry.
When you implement an ERP installation, there are always groups of grousy, irritated people that fear change, resist it, sabotage the systems, circumvent the new processes and make it harder than it needs to be. Most of these same folks eventually come around over time, but if management is doing their part to manage the change, facilitating training and transition, there are fewer problems getting folks used to a new system at the outset.
I always like hearing about how powerful healthcare companies are robbing patients and taxpayers. Gives me a real chuckle. If you want socialized medicine, it's right across the border or across the pond.