Aggressive drivers that cut in and out of traffic causing people to break ultimately slow the roads down for everyone. It's actually a lot like the prisoner's dilemma - everyone would benefit if people just stuck with the flow of traffic and maintained a reasonable speed. However, a driver could gain a lot by driving aggressively in such a situation, but when enough people do it then the flow breaks down and everyone is worse off.
So they managed to re-create a phenomenon under controlled conditions that anyone who has ever driven on a crowded highway can readily observe ? Whoop-de-doo.
Anyone can observe a traffic jam, so what? Some traffic jams are obvious, but I'm sure that everyone knows atleast one spot of road that tends to back up for no apparent reason, and we can only speculate on the cause(s). Well, an experiment under controlled conditiions ought to tell us why a traffic jam occured, given that everything can be controlled, allowing us to learn more about how traffic actually works. But leave it to the armchair know-it-alls on slashdot like yourself to poo-poo all over it.
A lot of it has to do with cell phones. People talking on their cell phones generally don't have a lot of attention left over for the road, so they take the easy way out by mentally locking onto another vehicle then matching what it does rather than thinking about what they should be doing. This doesn't really matter much when they are locked onto a vehicle in the same lane, since they tend to match the speed and keep a relatively constant following distance. But it becomes a problem when they lock onto a vehicle in another lane, as it creates a rolling road block. It's interesting to mess around with these people sometimes on a clear road, as they will match relatively large swings in speed if you don't do it quickly. Drunk people are much the same way, and can even "lock" onto a parked/disabled car on the side of the road sometimes with disasterous results.
That's nice and all, but slow vehicles may still need to get on the highway if it's the only way across a river. Because of the way traffic works, the effects could be felt miles away from the bridge.
Or perhaps common sense. What do you think is going to happen when someone is cruising on the shoulder and the guy in the rightmost lane is exiting? In my area, buses are allowed to use the shoulders during rush hour. When they want to go past a busy exit it can become a problem quickly as they need to get accross a stream of exiting cars that aren't looking for and don't always expect a vehicle cruising on the shoulders at 50MPH. It's also a problem for emergency vehicles, but not so much since they can sound their sirens.
A lot of them may still be around. I still have my Trinitron CRTs, one of them on my main desktop, the others on secondary computers, plus a couple in the closets. The other CRTs are gone, either dead or scrapped as their picture quality degraded.
The ideas of "winter hours" and "summer hours" are hardly a new concept. It's just that workplaces that don't depend on sunlight (like your typical office building) don't implement them.
The whole DST is for farmers is a myth. A farmer's schedule depends mostly on when it is light outside so he can do work, and the biological clocks in the animals he cares for. Neither of which has anything to with what the clock says. DST actually annoys most farmers, because everyone else's schedule changes by an hour.
That being said, people out with their families late, enjoying the evening together at restaurants and pubs? Definitely a positive thing, I think, and something you don't get when the first four hours of daylight are useless.
Actually, that's something you wouldn't get if their employers made them start work well into the day, 4 hours after the sun rises. What numbers say on the clock really don't have anything to do with it.
Sure the N70 gets comparable talk time at twice the thickness to the iphone. I used to have an N70, the battery in it is huge in comparison to what is in the iPhone.
Physically, the N70's battery may be larger, but actually the iPhone's battery has about 50% more capacity than the N70, if you care to look up the actual specifications. The Nokia N70 battery is the BL-5C, which is a 3.6V 970mAh battery, while the iPhone sports a 3.7V 1400 mAh battery. Physical size differences are probably due to the iPhone's more advanced lithium polymer vs. the older lithium ion in the N70.
Not only is that incredibly wasteful, the cheap $13 power supplies run a real risk of damaging your other hardware. And as someone else pointed out, in a couple of years you will have paid for a decent power supply anyway.
My 5 year old Dell laptop runs at 1600x1200, why is this not common?
That's because the typical buyer only looks at screen size, not resolution or DPI. End result is that we end up with lots of large, low resolution screens. I still want my higher than 100 DPI desktop LCD screen.
I have a Pentium III computer here. It runs Windows 2000, and typically has Azereus open, Winamp open, Opera open, and it runs AVG. I have it hooked up to a 1600x1200 screen. While there is no mistaking it for my Sempron 3000 or Core 2 Duo laptop, it's certainly usable. It's a 1Ghz machine with 512MB of ram. It could use a little more ram, but sadly the bios limits the machine to 512MB which could be the eventual end of this machine (I even have the 512MB sticks to put in it, but it won't boot with 1024MB).
(The price for gaming rigs, on the other hand, has skyrocketed.)
How so? I could put together a pretty nice gaming rig for about $2000. It won't be the absolute top of the line, but it will be nearly there. I remember about 15 years ago, the typical price for a PC computer was about $2000, and those computers were intended for office/business use (though in practice, they also generally had the speed/graphics capability to play most of the games of the time, though you might still need to add a sound card).
Words cannot adequately describe how idiotic that statement is... Divx is MPEG-4 ASP, much older and less advanced than H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which is the primary codec used to encode highdef discs.
How in the world you're expecting to use an OLD codec to reencode a video stored in a NEW codec, to reduce the file-size of a video by a factor of 5, while NOT losing HUGE amounts of picture quality, is vastly beyond my comprehension.
Perhaps he means no huge visible loss of quality? Especially if he has a lower resolution laptop display, in which case you can throw away tons of information with no loss in quality, since the HD source would have to be scaled down anyway.
You can argue about the artistic quality of the music the past few decades, but when it comes to the technical side of things, the quality of CDs have been taking a huge nosedive the past few years. Take a look at the loudness wars, as it's being called. That's why I find many recent CDs are hard to listen to. It's not that the music itself is bad, it's just that it sounds like total shit.
Re:It is all about the platform.
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 1
When Tom's Hardware removed the heatsink from the Pentium 4, the chip continued to run at (at a seriously reduced clock rate). That was the big deal behind the test. If he showed that if you remove the heatsink from an Intel chip and an AMD chip and they both were ruined, it wouldn't have been such a big deal and the AMD fanboys wouldn't be so worked up about it. It's not hard to verify correct operation of the chip either after something like that happens, a few runs of something like Prime95 once things are back to the way they should be should verify it. I've never heard of anyone wrecking their Intel CPUs due to heat, atleast anyone that ran the chip at the rated voltage. You're right about parts of the chips heating up very quickly, now that I think about it, it's pretty likely it also came down to the fact that the Intel chip came with a heat spreader while the AMD chip had the die exposed, buying the Intel chip a few ms of time to shutdown/throttle back. Timing was the whole reason the thermal sensor was moved into the K8 instead of staying on the motherboard like the for the late K7 was that motherboard sensor was too slow and was only good enough to catch a failed fan (that and I imagine AMD counldn't count on heap motherboards manufacturers to spend the few cents per board to implement it).
Your car analogy still doesn't make sense. It might make sense if engines were typically built to shut down if they detected the radiator came unhooked, and then someone built an engine that didn't shut down, and people were like "you shouldn't run it like that anyway".
Re:It is all about the platform.
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 1
You must have missed the part where Tom's Hardware did the same thing to Pentium chips and they didn't fry. You'll also notice that AMD learned their lesson and put similar functionality into the next generation K8 chips. Perhaps you should stick to topics you know a thing or two about.
Instead of looking at as a massive object hitting the Earth, you might want to consider it more as the Earth hitting a very hot, very massive object in 7.6 billion years.
No, this is news because we can say it will happen with a better explanation of why. Before, it was just kind of assumed that Earth would be swallowed up by the Sun, but it became less clear when people started questioning that assumption. Though stay tuned, as I could see it going the other way when someone else makes a new model that "now takes into account X".
I would be more worried about the drag myself from being under the surface. I would assume that it would be significant enough to pull the Earth down into a progressively lower and lower orbit given a few million years.
Slashdot Mirror
Aggressive drivers that cut in and out of traffic causing people to break ultimately slow the roads down for everyone. It's actually a lot like the prisoner's dilemma - everyone would benefit if people just stuck with the flow of traffic and maintained a reasonable speed. However, a driver could gain a lot by driving aggressively in such a situation, but when enough people do it then the flow breaks down and everyone is worse off.
So they managed to re-create a phenomenon under controlled conditions that anyone who has ever driven on a crowded highway can readily observe ? Whoop-de-doo.
Anyone can observe a traffic jam, so what? Some traffic jams are obvious, but I'm sure that everyone knows atleast one spot of road that tends to back up for no apparent reason, and we can only speculate on the cause(s). Well, an experiment under controlled conditiions ought to tell us why a traffic jam occured, given that everything can be controlled, allowing us to learn more about how traffic actually works. But leave it to the armchair know-it-alls on slashdot like yourself to poo-poo all over it.
A lot of it has to do with cell phones. People talking on their cell phones generally don't have a lot of attention left over for the road, so they take the easy way out by mentally locking onto another vehicle then matching what it does rather than thinking about what they should be doing. This doesn't really matter much when they are locked onto a vehicle in the same lane, since they tend to match the speed and keep a relatively constant following distance. But it becomes a problem when they lock onto a vehicle in another lane, as it creates a rolling road block. It's interesting to mess around with these people sometimes on a clear road, as they will match relatively large swings in speed if you don't do it quickly. Drunk people are much the same way, and can even "lock" onto a parked/disabled car on the side of the road sometimes with disasterous results.
That's nice and all, but slow vehicles may still need to get on the highway if it's the only way across a river. Because of the way traffic works, the effects could be felt miles away from the bridge.
Or perhaps common sense. What do you think is going to happen when someone is cruising on the shoulder and the guy in the rightmost lane is exiting? In my area, buses are allowed to use the shoulders during rush hour. When they want to go past a busy exit it can become a problem quickly as they need to get accross a stream of exiting cars that aren't looking for and don't always expect a vehicle cruising on the shoulders at 50MPH. It's also a problem for emergency vehicles, but not so much since they can sound their sirens.
Heh. According to them, you can't take over Windows 2000 with it either.
A lot of them may still be around. I still have my Trinitron CRTs, one of them on my main desktop, the others on secondary computers, plus a couple in the closets. The other CRTs are gone, either dead or scrapped as their picture quality degraded.
The ideas of "winter hours" and "summer hours" are hardly a new concept. It's just that workplaces that don't depend on sunlight (like your typical office building) don't implement them.
The whole DST is for farmers is a myth. A farmer's schedule depends mostly on when it is light outside so he can do work, and the biological clocks in the animals he cares for. Neither of which has anything to with what the clock says. DST actually annoys most farmers, because everyone else's schedule changes by an hour.
That being said, people out with their families late, enjoying the evening together at restaurants and pubs? Definitely a positive thing, I think, and something you don't get when the first four hours of daylight are useless.
Actually, that's something you wouldn't get if their employers made them start work well into the day, 4 hours after the sun rises. What numbers say on the clock really don't have anything to do with it.
To be fair, from my understanding of how anti-phishing filters work they wouldn't catch DNS poisoning, as the URL would still be legit.
Or have the anti-phishing filters advanced to the point where they now check IPs too?
Sure the N70 gets comparable talk time at twice the thickness to the iphone. I used to have an N70, the battery in it is huge in comparison to what is in the iPhone.
Physically, the N70's battery may be larger, but actually the iPhone's battery has about 50% more capacity than the N70, if you care to look up the actual specifications. The Nokia N70 battery is the BL-5C, which is a 3.6V 970mAh battery, while the iPhone sports a 3.7V 1400 mAh battery. Physical size differences are probably due to the iPhone's more advanced lithium polymer vs. the older lithium ion in the N70.
Hmm.... maybe it's the Amiga fanboys then?
If you want a low power GPU and are willing to accept lower performance, then what's the problem with integrated graphics?
Not only is that incredibly wasteful, the cheap $13 power supplies run a real risk of damaging your other hardware. And as someone else pointed out, in a couple of years you will have paid for a decent power supply anyway.
My 5 year old Dell laptop runs at 1600x1200, why is this not common?
That's because the typical buyer only looks at screen size, not resolution or DPI. End result is that we end up with lots of large, low resolution screens. I still want my higher than 100 DPI desktop LCD screen.
I have a Pentium III computer here. It runs Windows 2000, and typically has Azereus open, Winamp open, Opera open, and it runs AVG. I have it hooked up to a 1600x1200 screen. While there is no mistaking it for my Sempron 3000 or Core 2 Duo laptop, it's certainly usable. It's a 1Ghz machine with 512MB of ram. It could use a little more ram, but sadly the bios limits the machine to 512MB which could be the eventual end of this machine (I even have the 512MB sticks to put in it, but it won't boot with 1024MB).
(The price for gaming rigs, on the other hand, has skyrocketed.)
How so? I could put together a pretty nice gaming rig for about $2000. It won't be the absolute top of the line, but it will be nearly there. I remember about 15 years ago, the typical price for a PC computer was about $2000, and those computers were intended for office/business use (though in practice, they also generally had the speed/graphics capability to play most of the games of the time, though you might still need to add a sound card).
Words cannot adequately describe how idiotic that statement is... Divx is MPEG-4 ASP, much older and less advanced than H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which is the primary codec used to encode highdef discs.
How in the world you're expecting to use an OLD codec to reencode a video stored in a NEW codec, to reduce the file-size of a video by a factor of 5, while NOT losing HUGE amounts of picture quality, is vastly beyond my comprehension.
Perhaps he means no huge visible loss of quality? Especially if he has a lower resolution laptop display, in which case you can throw away tons of information with no loss in quality, since the HD source would have to be scaled down anyway.
You can argue about the artistic quality of the music the past few decades, but when it comes to the technical side of things, the quality of CDs have been taking a huge nosedive the past few years. Take a look at the loudness wars, as it's being called. That's why I find many recent CDs are hard to listen to. It's not that the music itself is bad, it's just that it sounds like total shit.
When Tom's Hardware removed the heatsink from the Pentium 4, the chip continued to run at (at a seriously reduced clock rate). That was the big deal behind the test. If he showed that if you remove the heatsink from an Intel chip and an AMD chip and they both were ruined, it wouldn't have been such a big deal and the AMD fanboys wouldn't be so worked up about it. It's not hard to verify correct operation of the chip either after something like that happens, a few runs of something like Prime95 once things are back to the way they should be should verify it. I've never heard of anyone wrecking their Intel CPUs due to heat, atleast anyone that ran the chip at the rated voltage. You're right about parts of the chips heating up very quickly, now that I think about it, it's pretty likely it also came down to the fact that the Intel chip came with a heat spreader while the AMD chip had the die exposed, buying the Intel chip a few ms of time to shutdown/throttle back. Timing was the whole reason the thermal sensor was moved into the K8 instead of staying on the motherboard like the for the late K7 was that motherboard sensor was too slow and was only good enough to catch a failed fan (that and I imagine AMD counldn't count on heap motherboards manufacturers to spend the few cents per board to implement it).
Your car analogy still doesn't make sense. It might make sense if engines were typically built to shut down if they detected the radiator came unhooked, and then someone built an engine that didn't shut down, and people were like "you shouldn't run it like that anyway".
You must have missed the part where Tom's Hardware did the same thing to Pentium chips and they didn't fry. You'll also notice that AMD learned their lesson and put similar functionality into the next generation K8 chips. Perhaps you should stick to topics you know a thing or two about.
Instead of looking at as a massive object hitting the Earth, you might want to consider it more as the Earth hitting a very hot, very massive object in 7.6 billion years.
No, this is news because we can say it will happen with a better explanation of why. Before, it was just kind of assumed that Earth would be swallowed up by the Sun, but it became less clear when people started questioning that assumption. Though stay tuned, as I could see it going the other way when someone else makes a new model that "now takes into account X".
I would be more worried about the drag myself from being under the surface. I would assume that it would be significant enough to pull the Earth down into a progressively lower and lower orbit given a few million years.