Supposedly, one of the reasons McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate was to try and attract the disgruntled Hilary supporters over to his ticket. Now, if Hilary was nominated instead, perhaps McCain would have picked someone more sane as his running mate?
Instead we have a system where Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida determine the outcomes of elections, because they are the biggest of the swing states. New York and California, despite being very populous states, actually have almost no say because both sides assume all their votes will go to the Democratic Party's candidate so they get ignored.
Well, that explains something. I was recently playing around with a very old PC. It had a CGA card, however I don't have any CGA monitors that function. Luckily, I found an ISA VGA card in the old parts box so I threw it in the machine. It works... but no color! Now I know why.
Yeah, but you're just taking it from the morning. Here's a solution for you: Set your alarm an hour earlier during the summer and start your day earlier. Just keep your hands off of my damn clock.
The problem with the standard ones that have a red LED display and take a 9V battery as a back up is that the circuitry was designed in the 1970's and no one has bothered to change it since. When they have power, they keep time by the 60Hz line frequency, which is fine. When the power goes off, they use a RC oscillator that is not only really inaccurate, it drains the battery like crazy (about 1-2 days for a fresh battery). Really, there is no reason why a 9V battery shouldn't be able to keep the time a good part of a decade at this point.
The solution would be to find one of the ones that uses a LCD display. They generally keep good time when the power goes out, and the battery power will last a long time. You don't even really need to have it plugged in unless you want to have the backlight on all the time.
I like that idea. I wonder if the multi-million dollar render farm that each person would have to install in their home to make this would might be a slight limitation?
Have you completely failed to notice the incredibly powerful computers you can get nowadays for under $1000?
Re:Good way to get your laptop attacked
on
USB 'Dead Drops'
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· Score: 1
Not only that, but you're plugging in something that only appears to be a USB plug into your computer, but could in actuality be wired up to anything.
I'm talking about the 3.5-inch floppies that Apple was first to include in its Lisa and Macs. They were removed in the late 90s when nobody was using floppies anymore. If you're seriously arguing that 1.5MB floppies were still widely used by 2000, I don't know what to say.
You're off by a few years. Maybe try about 2003-2005 or so. In 2000, the first USB flash drives had just hit the market: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive#First_commercial_product. They were 8-16MB, and expensive. The most common OS in use by home users at the time, Windows 98, did not support USB mass storage devices without loading additional drivers (which commonly came on...a floppy!).
You still had CD burners (not yet common in 2000, though CD readers were pretty much ubiquitous), the network/internet - which for the typical home user in 2000 was dialup, and maybe if you were really lucky both computers had a ZIP drive you could utilize. And of course the 3.5" floppy diskette, which you could count on everyone being able to read (even the Mac users, as you were virtually guaranteed to find a USB floppy disk drive close by to any iMac you ran encountered in 2000).
So while floppies were definitely showing their age in 2000, they were still in common use because most people did not have a better way of conveniently moving small files between computers until USB flash drives became cheap and common, high speed internet became cheap and common, and CD burners became cheap and common which wasn't until a few years past 2000.
Re:Not sure I'll buy it.
on
Diablo 3 Hands-On
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Before the expansion pack and Pindle, there was Mephisto, who was a common boss to run for loot. Now, he was a bit more difficult to get to compared to Pindle because you had to run through a level that was randomly generated to get to him. Now, Diablo II has a design flaw where the full random map was sent to the client when a player entered a level, and the client would reveal the map to the player as the player explored it. Naturally, some one created was a program called Maphack that would reveal this map to the player. Blizzard never addressed this flaw - perhaps because it would require big changes to the game engine, but whatever. Obviously cheaters using Maphack would have an advantage running this boss, but there was pattern to the way the maps were generated, and once you learned this pattern (basically, go clockwise) a legit player could run Mephisto nearly as fast as a cheating player. Anyway, Blizzard noticed that people liked to run Mephisto, so their response was to drastically increase the size of the random level to get to Mephisto. This didn't affect the cheating player very much because they had Maphack so they knew where to go, but it really hurt the legit player because they could not do item runs nearly as fast as they could before.
Blizzard's whole way of dealing with the duped SOJ problem was rather poor if you ask me. SOJs were always duped en mass, but in the original game a legit player could easily get SOJs with some grinding as about 1 million gold gambling on rings would net you an SOJ. And if your goal was to gather gold you could make a few million in an evening. However, with every patch Blizzard kept on making SOJs harder and harder to get (the chances of gambling them went to something like one-in-a-million, and the random drop rate is damn near zero) while adding all kinds of powerful new ways of using SOJs in recipes, etc. to get rid of all the SOJs floating around the economy. All this did of course was make it nearly impossible for legit players to get SOJs and use the new recipes, while making the cheater's ill-gotten SOJs even more valuable. The proper response, if you ask me, would have been making SOJs easy to get that everyone would be able to get their hands on as many as they wanted, therefore making the economical value of them nearly worthless. Oh, and fixing the dupe hacks and start banning the cheaters that use them.
I'd say that Blizzard expects people to play the game on Battlenet. Take a look at Diablo II - all the later patches basically made it harder and harder to "solo" the hardest difficulty to encourage team play. However, the single player game got all the same changes so now it's difficult to complete the game in single player unless you choose one of the overpowered, unbalanced builds and spend lots of time grinding for the items you'll need (since you can't trade).
There's a few builds that can more or less solo the game. Whirlwind + berserk barbs, Orb + misc fire/lightning spell sorc, and the almighty blessed hammer paladin (this skill is bugged in terms of the immunities, so this build can kill nearly every monster in the game). At least that's the way it was when I last played. Of course, this means that these builds are pretty much the only ones you'll ever see in the game.
Actually, IE7 is the Vista of browsers, in the sense that everyone is either sticking with the old stuff (IE6/XP), or are keeping current with the new stuff (IE8/Windows 7). But who uses IE7 and why?
In a perfect market, if Microsoft's margins were high enough, people would see that there is money to be made and competitors would enter the market. The competition would drive prices down until only the most efficient companies would be left (which may or may not include Microsoft), with these companies only making slim profits. However, since Microsoft the 800 lbs gorilla who isn't scared to throw its weight around, we don't have a perfect market and thus Microsoft gets away with charging more for many of their products.
Alternatively, it could be that people are willing to pay more for products if it comes from a company that makes large charitable contributions, but I doubt that. Especially since I was unaware of Microsoft's policies in that regard (though I am aware of Bill Gates' charitable activities outside of Microsoft).
And we'd be stuck at 3GB for ram forever in that case, unable to take advantage of our fancy 64 bit CPUs. (Yeah, I know about XP64, but for all intents and purposes it's not the same OS as XP)
I've used Vista for a while now, and overall I think the complaints about are way overblown. It's very similar to Windows 7, in the sense that it's to forget which of the two OSes you're using. I've found it to be very stable (better than 2000 or XP, more along the lines of NT4), haven't had any performance issues - even on older hardware, and the new interface and UAC isn't too annoying, though I wish I could customize the new themes like I can with "classic". Things like application-level volume control is nifty. I like the performance monitor and the new start menu. Speedboost is nice for older machines where adding more ram isn't feasible. Decoupling Windows update from IE was also a good move. Compared to XP there is less rebooting for things like installing drivers.
Though the one big issue I have had (other than things like no drivers for ancient 10 year old scanners and webcams) is that copying and especially moving files over network shares is so horribly broken it's not even funny. Operations take forever due to random pauses and dropouts, and the operation will just abort for no good reason without notifying me. If Microsoft could just fix that one thing then I would be totally happy with Vista.
On the other hand, I'm not sure what Microsoft did with the way codecs work in Windows 7, but it's hell getting Windows 7 to play all my videos, which more or less is easy with Vista as it was for XP. At least there is still VLC.
What can be done is have two DVI (or DisplayPort) cables going to the monitor, which hook up to a dual-head video card. Each cable controls half the pixels. To the computer, the monitor shows up as two 2000x2000 displays. Set the driver to span the image across the two displays and there you go. This is more or less how some of the super high-res displays like the IBM T221 work.
Have you ever had a SSD fail like that? Generally by the time you realize that something is amiss, the data on the drive you are trying to retrieve is already badly corrupted.
A lot depends on the amount of ram you have. Windows will typically create a pagefile about the same size as your ram capacity. If you enable hibernation you'll get another file that size of your ram capacity. And if you have full memory dumps enabled for some reason, you'll get yet another file the size of your ram if the computer ever blue..err..red...err...whateverscreens. All by default stored on the boot drive. So if you have 8GB of ram, that's 16-24GB that can be eaten up without even trying.
The thing that hurts the older Mac Minis more than anything else are their glacially slow 4200RPM hard drives. A Core 2 Duo of any speed is more than plenty to do web browsing. I really don't notice a slowdown until I get to something like a 2Ghz P4, and that's usually because of Flash.
You never know. I had a 1.5TB in a AMD Socket A computer for a while - one of the first motherboards that came with SATA. The BIOS reported the drive as having a size of "M" (shouldn't that be MD?), but the OS saw everything properly.
In theory yes. In practice file systems don't know how to deal with media that is part read-write and part read-only, especially if a file ends up with blocks on both. And you have drive controllers that don't verify the writes so you don't know there is an issue until you try and read back the data and get something you didn't expect. And then you have controllers that for whatever reason don't recognize when blocks have failed and won't mark them as unusable. Thanks to the wear-leveling mechanisms the location of these bad blocks move around randomly so you can't even mark them as bad in the filesystem and move on. Once an SSD has started to go bad it's pretty much useless at that point.
Slashdot Mirror
Supposedly, one of the reasons McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate was to try and attract the disgruntled Hilary supporters over to his ticket. Now, if Hilary was nominated instead, perhaps McCain would have picked someone more sane as his running mate?
Instead we have a system where Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida determine the outcomes of elections, because they are the biggest of the swing states. New York and California, despite being very populous states, actually have almost no say because both sides assume all their votes will go to the Democratic Party's candidate so they get ignored.
Well, that explains something. I was recently playing around with a very old PC. It had a CGA card, however I don't have any CGA monitors that function. Luckily, I found an ISA VGA card in the old parts box so I threw it in the machine. It works... but no color! Now I know why.
You do realize that it is the Executive branch is the one that writes the budget, not Congress? (Congress still has to approve it, of course).
Yeah, but you're just taking it from the morning. Here's a solution for you: Set your alarm an hour earlier during the summer and start your day earlier. Just keep your hands off of my damn clock.
The problem with the standard ones that have a red LED display and take a 9V battery as a back up is that the circuitry was designed in the 1970's and no one has bothered to change it since. When they have power, they keep time by the 60Hz line frequency, which is fine. When the power goes off, they use a RC oscillator that is not only really inaccurate, it drains the battery like crazy (about 1-2 days for a fresh battery). Really, there is no reason why a 9V battery shouldn't be able to keep the time a good part of a decade at this point.
The solution would be to find one of the ones that uses a LCD display. They generally keep good time when the power goes out, and the battery power will last a long time. You don't even really need to have it plugged in unless you want to have the backlight on all the time.
How about plugging the soldering iron into the UPS? Nothing like the risk of electrocution to make sure you do it right.
Have you completely failed to notice the incredibly powerful computers you can get nowadays for under $1000?
Not only that, but you're plugging in something that only appears to be a USB plug into your computer, but could in actuality be wired up to anything.
You're off by a few years. Maybe try about 2003-2005 or so. In 2000, the first USB flash drives had just hit the market: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive#First_commercial_product. They were 8-16MB, and expensive. The most common OS in use by home users at the time, Windows 98, did not support USB mass storage devices without loading additional drivers (which commonly came on...a floppy!).
You still had CD burners (not yet common in 2000, though CD readers were pretty much ubiquitous), the network/internet - which for the typical home user in 2000 was dialup, and maybe if you were really lucky both computers had a ZIP drive you could utilize. And of course the 3.5" floppy diskette, which you could count on everyone being able to read (even the Mac users, as you were virtually guaranteed to find a USB floppy disk drive close by to any iMac you ran encountered in 2000).
So while floppies were definitely showing their age in 2000, they were still in common use because most people did not have a better way of conveniently moving small files between computers until USB flash drives became cheap and common, high speed internet became cheap and common, and CD burners became cheap and common which wasn't until a few years past 2000.
Before the expansion pack and Pindle, there was Mephisto, who was a common boss to run for loot. Now, he was a bit more difficult to get to compared to Pindle because you had to run through a level that was randomly generated to get to him. Now, Diablo II has a design flaw where the full random map was sent to the client when a player entered a level, and the client would reveal the map to the player as the player explored it. Naturally, some one created was a program called Maphack that would reveal this map to the player. Blizzard never addressed this flaw - perhaps because it would require big changes to the game engine, but whatever. Obviously cheaters using Maphack would have an advantage running this boss, but there was pattern to the way the maps were generated, and once you learned this pattern (basically, go clockwise) a legit player could run Mephisto nearly as fast as a cheating player. Anyway, Blizzard noticed that people liked to run Mephisto, so their response was to drastically increase the size of the random level to get to Mephisto. This didn't affect the cheating player very much because they had Maphack so they knew where to go, but it really hurt the legit player because they could not do item runs nearly as fast as they could before.
Blizzard's whole way of dealing with the duped SOJ problem was rather poor if you ask me. SOJs were always duped en mass, but in the original game a legit player could easily get SOJs with some grinding as about 1 million gold gambling on rings would net you an SOJ. And if your goal was to gather gold you could make a few million in an evening. However, with every patch Blizzard kept on making SOJs harder and harder to get (the chances of gambling them went to something like one-in-a-million, and the random drop rate is damn near zero) while adding all kinds of powerful new ways of using SOJs in recipes, etc. to get rid of all the SOJs floating around the economy. All this did of course was make it nearly impossible for legit players to get SOJs and use the new recipes, while making the cheater's ill-gotten SOJs even more valuable. The proper response, if you ask me, would have been making SOJs easy to get that everyone would be able to get their hands on as many as they wanted, therefore making the economical value of them nearly worthless. Oh, and fixing the dupe hacks and start banning the cheaters that use them.
I'd say that Blizzard expects people to play the game on Battlenet. Take a look at Diablo II - all the later patches basically made it harder and harder to "solo" the hardest difficulty to encourage team play. However, the single player game got all the same changes so now it's difficult to complete the game in single player unless you choose one of the overpowered, unbalanced builds and spend lots of time grinding for the items you'll need (since you can't trade).
There's a few builds that can more or less solo the game. Whirlwind + berserk barbs, Orb + misc fire/lightning spell sorc, and the almighty blessed hammer paladin (this skill is bugged in terms of the immunities, so this build can kill nearly every monster in the game). At least that's the way it was when I last played. Of course, this means that these builds are pretty much the only ones you'll ever see in the game.
Actually, IE7 is the Vista of browsers, in the sense that everyone is either sticking with the old stuff (IE6/XP), or are keeping current with the new stuff (IE8/Windows 7). But who uses IE7 and why?
In a perfect market, if Microsoft's margins were high enough, people would see that there is money to be made and competitors would enter the market. The competition would drive prices down until only the most efficient companies would be left (which may or may not include Microsoft), with these companies only making slim profits. However, since Microsoft the 800 lbs gorilla who isn't scared to throw its weight around, we don't have a perfect market and thus Microsoft gets away with charging more for many of their products.
Alternatively, it could be that people are willing to pay more for products if it comes from a company that makes large charitable contributions, but I doubt that. Especially since I was unaware of Microsoft's policies in that regard (though I am aware of Bill Gates' charitable activities outside of Microsoft).
And we'd be stuck at 3GB for ram forever in that case, unable to take advantage of our fancy 64 bit CPUs. (Yeah, I know about XP64, but for all intents and purposes it's not the same OS as XP)
I've used Vista for a while now, and overall I think the complaints about are way overblown. It's very similar to Windows 7, in the sense that it's to forget which of the two OSes you're using. I've found it to be very stable (better than 2000 or XP, more along the lines of NT4), haven't had any performance issues - even on older hardware, and the new interface and UAC isn't too annoying, though I wish I could customize the new themes like I can with "classic". Things like application-level volume control is nifty. I like the performance monitor and the new start menu. Speedboost is nice for older machines where adding more ram isn't feasible. Decoupling Windows update from IE was also a good move. Compared to XP there is less rebooting for things like installing drivers.
Though the one big issue I have had (other than things like no drivers for ancient 10 year old scanners and webcams) is that copying and especially moving files over network shares is so horribly broken it's not even funny. Operations take forever due to random pauses and dropouts, and the operation will just abort for no good reason without notifying me. If Microsoft could just fix that one thing then I would be totally happy with Vista.
On the other hand, I'm not sure what Microsoft did with the way codecs work in Windows 7, but it's hell getting Windows 7 to play all my videos, which more or less is easy with Vista as it was for XP. At least there is still VLC.
What can be done is have two DVI (or DisplayPort) cables going to the monitor, which hook up to a dual-head video card. Each cable controls half the pixels. To the computer, the monitor shows up as two 2000x2000 displays. Set the driver to span the image across the two displays and there you go. This is more or less how some of the super high-res displays like the IBM T221 work.
Have you ever had a SSD fail like that? Generally by the time you realize that something is amiss, the data on the drive you are trying to retrieve is already badly corrupted.
A lot depends on the amount of ram you have. Windows will typically create a pagefile about the same size as your ram capacity. If you enable hibernation you'll get another file that size of your ram capacity. And if you have full memory dumps enabled for some reason, you'll get yet another file the size of your ram if the computer ever blue..err..red...err...whateverscreens. All by default stored on the boot drive. So if you have 8GB of ram, that's 16-24GB that can be eaten up without even trying.
The thing that hurts the older Mac Minis more than anything else are their glacially slow 4200RPM hard drives. A Core 2 Duo of any speed is more than plenty to do web browsing. I really don't notice a slowdown until I get to something like a 2Ghz P4, and that's usually because of Flash.
You mean on the onramps that were designed and built in the 1960's and have been used for decades for all kinds of different vehicles?
The Walkman had already been killed by the Discman long before the MP3 players entered the scene.
You never know. I had a 1.5TB in a AMD Socket A computer for a while - one of the first motherboards that came with SATA. The BIOS reported the drive as having a size of "M" (shouldn't that be MD?), but the OS saw everything properly.
In theory yes. In practice file systems don't know how to deal with media that is part read-write and part read-only, especially if a file ends up with blocks on both. And you have drive controllers that don't verify the writes so you don't know there is an issue until you try and read back the data and get something you didn't expect. And then you have controllers that for whatever reason don't recognize when blocks have failed and won't mark them as unusable. Thanks to the wear-leveling mechanisms the location of these bad blocks move around randomly so you can't even mark them as bad in the filesystem and move on. Once an SSD has started to go bad it's pretty much useless at that point.