Did you even read what I said? I'm talking about what's coming out tomorrow, and isn't available today. With my PC, it's trivial to add the new functionality (USB3, whatever), but impossible on a Mac.
Well, at the very least, you can assume that the Psystar will stay cool and won't suffer from the same heat problems that the iMacs suffer from. It seems that Apple really didn't take into consideration the heat generated by the hardware they use when they cram it into an ultrathin case.
They could starting querying the hardware more. Right now, OSX will run on a Pentium 4 chip, despite no Mac ever shipping with a P4 (except some early development loaner machines). It would be pretty trivial to have OSX query the CPU, and if it detects a P4 or some other chip that no Mac has shipped with, not run. And so on and so forth.
Then to take it one step further, they could start using DRM like the TPM chip to ensure the machine is a Mac. This might take some hardware changes, but if they started adding it tomorrow to their computers, at the rate they kill support for old products they could stop supporting the machines that don't have the chip in about 2 years and the Mac crowd would just roll over and take it.
It's not always about today, what about tomorrow? My PC started it's life with just the AGP slot populated. Over time, it's gotten firewire card, upgraded network card, and an upgraded sound card (should have started off with that in the beginning, but oh well). I've breathed life into older PCs by adding a USB2 card so they can use newer USB devices without them being godawfully slow. I bet the people with older iMacs wished they could do that when Apple screwed them by dropping Firewire on the iPod.
Well said John:) If I had the points I'd deffinitely mod you up. All these idiots who are currently demonizing the Bush admin seem to have been born in 2001. Either that, or their memory is so faulty that they've forgotten all the scandals of past administrations.
Either that, or they don't buy the "But they did it too!" argument you typically hear from children on the playground.
Now the idea that terrorist would buy a car to blow up rather than stealing one so it can't be tracked back to them seems rather ridiculous.
I wouldn't think it so ridiculous. I can think of two bombings in recent history (the Oklahoma City bombing and the first attack against the WTC in 1993) where they were able to trace the vehicles back to the people who did the bombings. Granted, in both those cases they were rentals, but they weren't stolen.
I've found older ATI cards like the 9000 series work really well in Linux, and the open source driver seems to support them well so you don't have to run to the ATI one. Probably one of the better solutions if you don't want to use a binary blob driver or one of Intel's integrated solutions.
Yeah, I don't get that either. SP2 broke all kinds of things, for that reason I still use XP SP1 on one of my machines. I don't have any issues with the machine at all, and it's perfectly stable. Though if you are already on SP2, you can probably move to SP3 pretty safely as it appears there aren't any huge changes in this release.
Seek time is a mechanical thing, the heads can only move so fast. If you want faster seek times and want to spend some money, look into solid state drives. Though granted, all the ones I've seen run at 0 RPM.
That's not a really fair comparison, if I'm going to a larger 15" screen I'd rather have the 1600x1200. Or if I was to stay at 14.1" I'd much prefer the 1400x1050 to the crappy 1440x900 widescreen.
You can still get 4:3 or 5:4 separate monitors easily enough.
Sort of. The highest resolution 4:3 LCD that I have seen for sale is 1600x1200. After that, you have to go widescreen for a larger display, and you really have to go big to get more than 1200 vertical pixels. I would love to have a 2048x1536 (or even higher) resolution LCD, but I'm only aware of one model that was ever made (IBM T210) and that was discontinued several years.
Clearly you're one of those morons who thinks that the constitution grants rights to the people, rather than outlining what the government can and can't do. So I'd like you can point out where in the constitution where the government can use invasive and intrusive means to secure vessels of travel. Especially when those vessel are operated by private entities i.e. not the government. Otherwise, you're just spewing crap.
Well, a $2000 Mac nowadays is going to be an iMac, and the base 24" iMac with 2.4Ghz processor and 1GB is not very impressive for $1800. Sure, the 24" monitor will blow your $500 budget, but if care more about what's under the hood then the DIY PC is going to give you a lot more bang for the buck.
Luckily, Firefox is open source so you could get Firefox 3 to run on Windows 98 if you wanted to spend the time to do it. Or you could look around the internet and see if anyone else did the work for you.
On the moon, due to its low angle of inclination towards the sun there are peaks of eternal light on some crater rims near the south pole where the sun never sets. Not only could those places potentially be a good place to grow plants, they should also be an excellent location for solar panels for almost continous solar power. The reason I have to say 'almost' is that you do have to deal with the occasional lunar eclipse blocking the sun for a few hours. I believe the moon may be unique in this regard in the solar system, though there is speculation that peaks of eternal light may also exist on Mercury.
I think the non-rotating sphere could work. It would have to be fairly light as the solar wind is not that strong, so I don't think you would be able to have oceans on it or things like that. If done right, you should have the the force of the solar wind approximately equal to the force of the gravity, so the total force on it would be close to nil. Of course, you've still got the problem of objects sitting on the inside falling into the sun, but if you wanted to use the outer "dark" side things should stay put. You would still have the minor detail of having to clear out all those asteroids and comets that come close to the sun, but if you can build a Dyson sphere I imagine you could deal with the asteroids.
How do you expect Windows to have drivers for a machine newer than it is? Take a fairly generic machine with hardware from 1998-2003 or so (for SP2) and you'll find that XP will have a driver for most everything in the machine.
2) This isn't true for Linux any more (for years). Windows has similar problems because dual monitor support is part of the driver given by the manufacturer, so windows is SOL quite often
What planet have you been living on? Dual monitor support has always been built into Windows XP. Windows 2000 was the last version that relied on the manufacturer's drivers. Interestingly enough, this wasn't the case for Windows 98 and ME though, so Windows has had dual monitor support for close to 10 years now. On the other hand, getting dual monitors to work in Linux today all too often requires manually hacking config files, and if the card is anything newish, installing the binary blobs from ATI or nVidia. It's far easier to get a multi-head set up going on Windows than Linux.
Your idea would work if you had some system to keep the sun in the exact center of the ring. However, if it is not in the exact center, you have problems. Imagine that the system is just a bit off-kilter. By Kepler's laws, your orbit needed around the sun is no longer circular, it is now eliptical. This is a problem for the ring, as it's going to want to bend and this will stress the ring. Even if you allowed it to flex, the friction and ring's equilivent of tidal heating from constanly having to flex will sap energy from the system, you'll need to add energy to the system to keep the ring from slowing down enough that the sun's gravity tears it apart.
But you also have a bigger problem, the part closest to the sun is going to have to have a orbital velocity than the part farthest from the sun. For a rigid ring, this is simply impossible and if it is not sufficiently strong, the forces will rip it apart. The final problem is that the ring is not stable. It is correct that a sun placed in the exact center of the ring will have all the forces cancel out and the system is in equilibrium. But the equilibrium is unstable. If part of the circular ring is closer to the sun, then the gravity will tug on that section a bit more, pulling it a bit closer, which then increases the amount of the tug, etc. Basically, even the smallest perturbation will lead to disaster unless you have some system to correct it.
A better system would be to split the ring up into independent sections, essentially a chain of planets. This solves the flexing and different velocity problems, though it is still not stable - any pertubation in the orbit of any one of the planets would result in them eventually smashing into each other or having them ejected into new orbits until there was only one mass left in the "chain" (kind of like the "clearing the neighborhood" requirement in the definition of a planet).
Rotation doesn't have anything to do with the stability problem - there is still nothing to keep the sun in the middle of it. Plus, if you don't rotate it, objects placed on the inside of the ring are going to have a tendency to fall off and into the sun.
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Did you even read what I said? I'm talking about what's coming out tomorrow, and isn't available today. With my PC, it's trivial to add the new functionality (USB3, whatever), but impossible on a Mac.
Well, at the very least, you can assume that the Psystar will stay cool and won't suffer from the same heat problems that the iMacs suffer from. It seems that Apple really didn't take into consideration the heat generated by the hardware they use when they cram it into an ultrathin case.
They could starting querying the hardware more. Right now, OSX will run on a Pentium 4 chip, despite no Mac ever shipping with a P4 (except some early development loaner machines). It would be pretty trivial to have OSX query the CPU, and if it detects a P4 or some other chip that no Mac has shipped with, not run. And so on and so forth.
Then to take it one step further, they could start using DRM like the TPM chip to ensure the machine is a Mac. This might take some hardware changes, but if they started adding it tomorrow to their computers, at the rate they kill support for old products they could stop supporting the machines that don't have the chip in about 2 years and the Mac crowd would just roll over and take it.
Make it work on generic PC hardware will likely decrease the stability of the OS.
Only on that cheap, flakey hardware. Windows and Linux don't have issues with stability on quality hardware either.
It's not always about today, what about tomorrow? My PC started it's life with just the AGP slot populated. Over time, it's gotten firewire card, upgraded network card, and an upgraded sound card (should have started off with that in the beginning, but oh well). I've breathed life into older PCs by adding a USB2 card so they can use newer USB devices without them being godawfully slow. I bet the people with older iMacs wished they could do that when Apple screwed them by dropping Firewire on the iPod.
I wouldn't knock the cheap Walmart PC so bad. It probably has the same integrated Intel graphics that the $1500 MacBook has.
I could build a prety nice quad-core processor computer for half that. Sure, it wouldn't have a Xeon processor or ECC memory, but that's the point.
Well said John :) If I had the points I'd deffinitely mod you up. All these idiots who are currently demonizing the Bush admin seem to have been born in 2001. Either that, or their memory is so faulty that they've forgotten all the scandals of past administrations.
Either that, or they don't buy the "But they did it too!" argument you typically hear from children on the playground.
Now the idea that terrorist would buy a car to blow up rather than stealing one so it can't be tracked back to them seems rather ridiculous.
I wouldn't think it so ridiculous. I can think of two bombings in recent history (the Oklahoma City bombing and the first attack against the WTC in 1993) where they were able to trace the vehicles back to the people who did the bombings. Granted, in both those cases they were rentals, but they weren't stolen.
Not surprising. If I ran an insurance agency I wouldn't want to give life insurance to someone who's just going to strap a bomb to his chest.
On the other hand, it would probably be a good deal for health insurers.
I've found older ATI cards like the 9000 series work really well in Linux, and the open source driver seems to support them well so you don't have to run to the ATI one. Probably one of the better solutions if you don't want to use a binary blob driver or one of Intel's integrated solutions.
Yeah, I don't get that either. SP2 broke all kinds of things, for that reason I still use XP SP1 on one of my machines. I don't have any issues with the machine at all, and it's perfectly stable. Though if you are already on SP2, you can probably move to SP3 pretty safely as it appears there aren't any huge changes in this release.
Seek time is a mechanical thing, the heads can only move so fast. If you want faster seek times and want to spend some money, look into solid state drives. Though granted, all the ones I've seen run at 0 RPM.
That's not a really fair comparison, if I'm going to a larger 15" screen I'd rather have the 1600x1200. Or if I was to stay at 14.1" I'd much prefer the 1400x1050 to the crappy 1440x900 widescreen.
You can still get 4:3 or 5:4 separate monitors easily enough.
Sort of. The highest resolution 4:3 LCD that I have seen for sale is 1600x1200. After that, you have to go widescreen for a larger display, and you really have to go big to get more than 1200 vertical pixels. I would love to have a 2048x1536 (or even higher) resolution LCD, but I'm only aware of one model that was ever made (IBM T210) and that was discontinued several years.
Clearly you're one of those morons who thinks that the constitution grants rights to the people, rather than outlining what the government can and can't do. So I'd like you can point out where in the constitution where the government can use invasive and intrusive means to secure vessels of travel. Especially when those vessel are operated by private entities i.e. not the government. Otherwise, you're just spewing crap.
Well, a $2000 Mac nowadays is going to be an iMac, and the base 24" iMac with 2.4Ghz processor and 1GB is not very impressive for $1800. Sure, the 24" monitor will blow your $500 budget, but if care more about what's under the hood then the DIY PC is going to give you a lot more bang for the buck.
Luckily, Firefox is open source so you could get Firefox 3 to run on Windows 98 if you wanted to spend the time to do it. Or you could look around the internet and see if anyone else did the work for you.
On the moon, due to its low angle of inclination towards the sun there are peaks of eternal light on some crater rims near the south pole where the sun never sets. Not only could those places potentially be a good place to grow plants, they should also be an excellent location for solar panels for almost continous solar power. The reason I have to say 'almost' is that you do have to deal with the occasional lunar eclipse blocking the sun for a few hours. I believe the moon may be unique in this regard in the solar system, though there is speculation that peaks of eternal light may also exist on Mercury.
I think the non-rotating sphere could work. It would have to be fairly light as the solar wind is not that strong, so I don't think you would be able to have oceans on it or things like that. If done right, you should have the the force of the solar wind approximately equal to the force of the gravity, so the total force on it would be close to nil. Of course, you've still got the problem of objects sitting on the inside falling into the sun, but if you wanted to use the outer "dark" side things should stay put. You would still have the minor detail of having to clear out all those asteroids and comets that come close to the sun, but if you can build a Dyson sphere I imagine you could deal with the asteroids.
How do you expect Windows to have drivers for a machine newer than it is? Take a fairly generic machine with hardware from 1998-2003 or so (for SP2) and you'll find that XP will have a driver for most everything in the machine.
2) This isn't true for Linux any more (for years). Windows has similar problems because dual monitor support is part of the driver given by the manufacturer, so windows is SOL quite often
What planet have you been living on? Dual monitor support has always been built into Windows XP. Windows 2000 was the last version that relied on the manufacturer's drivers. Interestingly enough, this wasn't the case for Windows 98 and ME though, so Windows has had dual monitor support for close to 10 years now. On the other hand, getting dual monitors to work in Linux today all too often requires manually hacking config files, and if the card is anything newish, installing the binary blobs from ATI or nVidia. It's far easier to get a multi-head set up going on Windows than Linux.
Your idea would work if you had some system to keep the sun in the exact center of the ring. However, if it is not in the exact center, you have problems. Imagine that the system is just a bit off-kilter. By Kepler's laws, your orbit needed around the sun is no longer circular, it is now eliptical. This is a problem for the ring, as it's going to want to bend and this will stress the ring. Even if you allowed it to flex, the friction and ring's equilivent of tidal heating from constanly having to flex will sap energy from the system, you'll need to add energy to the system to keep the ring from slowing down enough that the sun's gravity tears it apart.
But you also have a bigger problem, the part closest to the sun is going to have to have a orbital velocity than the part farthest from the sun. For a rigid ring, this is simply impossible and if it is not sufficiently strong, the forces will rip it apart. The final problem is that the ring is not stable. It is correct that a sun placed in the exact center of the ring will have all the forces cancel out and the system is in equilibrium. But the equilibrium is unstable. If part of the circular ring is closer to the sun, then the gravity will tug on that section a bit more, pulling it a bit closer, which then increases the amount of the tug, etc. Basically, even the smallest perturbation will lead to disaster unless you have some system to correct it.
A better system would be to split the ring up into independent sections, essentially a chain of planets. This solves the flexing and different velocity problems, though it is still not stable - any pertubation in the orbit of any one of the planets would result in them eventually smashing into each other or having them ejected into new orbits until there was only one mass left in the "chain" (kind of like the "clearing the neighborhood" requirement in the definition of a planet).
Nope, by a promise of a big check. If they get the money right away, what would be their incentive?
More large sums of money?
Rotation doesn't have anything to do with the stability problem - there is still nothing to keep the sun in the middle of it. Plus, if you don't rotate it, objects placed on the inside of the ring are going to have a tendency to fall off and into the sun.