As far as nuclear, putting aside the fuel and waste storage requirements of nuclear, what happens when a solar panel 'breaks'? not exactly a lot. It simply doesn't function. When a reactor 'breaks', well you've pretty well made the local area uninhabitable. And when your entire sustaining environment is localized to the reactor, you've got a pretty big problem. Unless you're planning on running miles of power cable in addition to just building the base...
Is a nuclear breach likely? probably not, but when you have zero backup capability you need to think hard about putting in things that can go spectacularly wrong.
You are aware that it is possible to design a nuclear reactor, which, according to the very laws of physics that govern its reaction, simply cannot go supercritical? In fact, the Chinese are planning on building several thousand of them because of that very fact. Look up the pebble bed reactor.
You just said MAD worked in the 1960s - who needs another deterrent against NK?
Nice try. I never said MAD worked in the 1960s -- MAD was never an official US State Department policy, so how could MAD ever have possibly worked?
My actual point was that we are still alive today, therefore we must have done at least something right as a species, regardless of how flawed political policies were. That doesn't mean we should use the 1960s as an example of good practice for the future. We need to learn from our mistakes, not repeat them endlessly. Then again, Congress is a great example of the latter...
Regardless, with North Korea, they seem to be so absolutely batshit insane over there that I would definitely not want to bet my life on the assumption that they would treat assured destruction as sufficient deterrent to not, say, launch a missile at Japan. By that reasoning, it is a sound policy to have some form of anti-missile defense in the region if just to protect NK's neighbors from this. Does it mean we should foot the entire bill? No, of course not -- but I'm sure that South Korea and Japan would have no issues paying their share to ensure their own security.
Let me guess, you're a fan of Stuart Slade's, aren't you?
What a nice ad hominem. If you have a problem with someone's arguments, provide a well-thought out, logical rebuttal and see what happens. On the other hand, if you don't have the decency to do that, you're just trolling and can kiss my ass.
The very idea that we should detonate nukes in the atmosphere is nuts. It is even more absurd as a defense to incoming weapons from enemies that don't exist any longer (China owns our debt; Russia has enough to deal with from the former client states) and Israel, N. Korea, India and Pakistan don't have ICBM delivery systems.
Regardless of the merits of nukes in anti-missile defense, the fact is that ICBMs were effectively obsolete in the 1960s. However, due to rampant idiocy and other political blunders, we forged ahead with them. Did it work out in the end? I suppose so. We're alive, aren't we? Does that mean the people in charge made the right decisions? I doubt it. We were left to foot a bill for a ridiculously overcomplicated, expensive system that has done absolutely nothing to help us in quality of life or scientific advancement.
For what it's worth, a high-altitude airburst releases less radiation into the atmosphere than your average coal plant spews out in thorium... yeah, that's a tragedy.
WHO are we developing this new system to defend against?
We're not. Nike Zeus was a strategic ABM defense system. It neatly countered the Russian threat of the 1960s. Would it be right to deploy an analogous system today? No -- as you said, where's the threat?
The airborne laser, on the other hand, can be deployed to a small combat theatre, or any possible danger zone where some idiot with some secondhand IRBMs might be tempted to shoot them off. It's a technology testbed more than anything else -- a proof of concept, if you will. Base a few out of Japan, keep them on patrols, and you've effectively neutralized any chance North Korea had of shooting anything off at their neighbors.
High energy lasers, frankly, make more sense in the modern battlefield than anti-missile missile defenses. Why shouldn't we be developing the technology?
Our anti-rocket defenses have been gross failures. This technology has a long way to go to be viable.
I'm glad that we have established that you just spout rhetoric made by idiots long before you. That line was first used by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (may he burn in hell). Mind you, that was the same man who was responsible for the Edsel at Ford and practically every idiotic military idea during his tenure at the Pentagon.
The Nike Zeus system was consistently shown to be able to achieve missile kills in the 1960s using its standard nuclear warhead. I've also heard that there was a (classified) number of tests where the Zeus rockets made skin kills without said warhead. A modified variant was also capable of ASAT kills. The Zeus system, combined with a bomber such as the B-70 Valkyrie, would have rendered ICBMs obsolete. It was only the fact that we had a SecDef with a hard-on for ICBMs that ensured their survival.
And, by the way -- Zeus + B-70 would have saved the US a ton of money, relatively speaking, compared to all the money we spend on missiles. We were forced to build hundreds of massive, hardened missile silos to protect our ineffective ICBMs from counterattack. This is an incredible waste of money compared to the cost it would have taken to upgrade our Air Force bases to be able to support an active fleet of B-70s. Not to mention we already had Nike missile sites in place around most major cities; these could have been simply upgraded to Zeus missiles, as had been done with the upgrade from Ajax to Hercules.
Meanwhile, we spend vast sums on this technology when we really ought to be looking to get outside of Earth orbit. 40 years is 30 years too long. We ought to have manned Moon and Mars bases by now.
I believe the wording you're looking for is "Meanwhile, we have spent vast sums on ground wars and Space Shuttle technology when we really ought to be...". The amount of money spent on ABM technology is a drop in the bucket compared both of the above mentioned boondoggles.
I hear all-too-frequently in the business world that "if the rest of the world is going with Microsoft, why do anything different?"
Just for that attitude alone, it would be a huge wakeup call to the rest of the world if Microsoft died off. For starters, it would show all the MBAs out there just how little they really know about business, namely, the part about "don't put all your eggs in one basket."
With a thorn like this in Microsoft's side, there is certainly a part of me that hopes that we will begin to see more OpenGL games released versus DirectX.
Don't get me wrong, DirectX is a nice graphics library, but the seriousness of the vendor lock-in is just staggering -- and scenarios like this are a perfect example of a game development company's worst fears.
This situation was created because not enough effort was put into OpenGL when it needed it the most to make it a truly cutting-edge standard. The blame for that particularly lies with Microsoft and their aggressive campaign for Direct3D (and DirectX). As a result, OpenGL languished for several years, with only incremental feature updates (to version 1.5, which IIRC wasn't even a real release, but more of a vendor patchset for 1.4). In the meantime, DirectX leapfrogged its way to version 9 with a ridiculous amount of features being added.
OpenGL 2.1 finally came out last August (http://www.opengl.org/documentation/current_versi on/) to very little fanfare. About the only companies it really mattered to were the Xbox competitors, namely, Sony and Nintendo. The PC gaming industry as a whole didn't care, because they had a solution that was "good enough" -- DirectX 9.
Now, OpenGL 3.0 is "on track" to be finalized at the end of this month. Whether that will happen is anyone's guess, but it looks like the DX10 situation has finally lit a fire under their collective asses. Who knows, we may even see an OpenGL 3.0 specification by September, but I'm not really holding my breath. http://www.opengl.org/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?u bb=get_topic;f=3;t=015351;p=0
Of course, even though there's a brand spanking OpenGL almost ready to again kick Direct3D's ass performance wise, Microsoft has already taken steps to ensure that won't happen. OpenGL 1.4 (yes, 1.4!) is implemented in Vista as a translation layer to run Direct3D calls on the hardware. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D_vs._OpenGL#P ortability This cripples OpenGL's performance advantage. Of course, if you want to run the newest OpenGL on the newest hardware, as you should, they've put another roadblock in the way with Vista: you have to use the Windows XP drivers, which disable the nice flashy Aero interface. At this point, you're probably thinking, "Wait, wasn't Aero a selling point of Vista?" Well, that certainly makes sense. Only hardcore gamers would want to trade off their interface for OpenGL's performance, but your average casual gamer doesn't care.
So even if OpenGL 3 is technically superior, publishers probably won't adopt it because of the widespread view that it's slow (thanks to Vista's emulation). iD Software will likely use it as they always have, but it'll become harder to explain to your average user why he needs to install unverified drivers and disable his nice flashy interface just so he can run said game.
It's almost sickening, really, when you think about the damage DirectX has done.
That is, the "one with the giant space amoeba", since an amoeba is probably the closest thing we have to a giant creature made of interstellar dust, albeit with a slight difference in scale. (Emphasis on the "slight".)
Gary Powers and his U-2 spy plane were captured by the Soviet Union because Gary Powers believed in self-preservation. A robot doesn't, and will destroy itself on command.
This is, of course, one reason why it's a very bad idea to use a self-aware android as a weapon.
Instead of the typical banding (caused by a. nozzles missing as the printhead travels side-to-side, or b. improper paper feed motion settings) you will get more of a "striping" effect caused as nozzles fail while the paper is in motion.
This will look somewhat like the white stripes you get on a laser printer when the toner begins to run out.
Banding caused by paper movement may still be an issue, but it doesn't show up very much in desktop machines as desktop media is almost all fairly uniform in thickness. However, it will be an issue on wide-format machines (such as the 51" monster they've announced), as different materials have widely varying thicknesses. For example, a 13oz vinyl banner material can be up to four times thicker than a glossy photo paper.
Additionally, I don't believe this kind of head technology will be well-suited to wide-format outdoor printing (the industry I work in as a service tech). This is because the outdoor printers use alcohol and solvent inks to improve adhesion and UV resistance, and as a side-effect of their more rapid drying times they are especially prone to head clogs if the piezo jets are left exposed to air.
What are you talking about? Obviously the poster was referring to the ability to run Windows Vista within a virtual server running on a Beowulf cluster of Linux computers.
If you have no idea what the f*** I just said, don't be hard on yourself. I think I just confused myself.
Thanks for the clarification. I had been told the basic story (which is what I repeated) but the specific details were unclear. For example, I didn't realize that Macromedia was involved.
From what I've seen posted in this discussion, most people hate Premier because they used an old version of it. Now, to clarify:
Final Cut Pro was written by the very same team that wrote Premier at Adobe. After version 5 of Premier was written, Apple convinced them to come work for them, and the result was Final Cut Pro.
Adobe was left holding the Premier bag, and didn't know what to do with it. The results were 5.5, 6.0, and finally 6.5 (all three of which were absolutely horrible in terms of bugs). In the meantime, Final Cut Pro was released. Adobe simply could not compete -- they didn't have a good enough program and they didn't have a good enough development team to devote energy to fixing Premier on the Mac.
As a result, Adobe hired an entirely new development team and started to completely redesign Premier from the ground up. The catch was that they didn't want to go head to head against Final Cut Pro yet -- Final Cut had the Mac market to itself, Premier was the only one for Windows. So they redesigned Premier on Windows and the result was Premier Pro 1.0.
Now that Adobe has Premier Pro refined enough, they feel they can go head-to-head with Final Cut (their old dev team). And with the platform turmoil, it makes sense that they would wait for the Intel decision to boil over before starting.
So instead of rushing in and saying how bad my OLD Premier experience was (I used it in my multimedia classes at college and hated it -- it was a completely useless pile of steaming crap but that's another matter) and comparing that to my Final Cut experience (works great but some features are a little lacking), I'm going to wait until the new Premier Pro comes out and make a comparison when they're actually on equal footing.
My conclusion: Premier Pro is a new codebase that has only a name in common with the old Premier. It's apparently going to be designed fresh for the OSX platform instead of being a kludge designed for OS9 and ported to OSX and Windows badly. I think it'll compare favorably, but I'm going to wait and see.
... why other people can take advantage of their computers?
I run a network in a medium-sized business. When I came in, there was no IT staff to speak of. All the workstations were Dell computers, mostly running the default installations of Windows XP. There was a Windows 2000 domain controller set up, but most of the computers were not set up for the domain, meaning that there were no default security policies. The E-mail server had an antivirus scanner installed but it wasn't updating its definitions.
Since I came in, I've had to reformat & reinstall at least half of the workstations because they've been infected with spyware and viruses. This is because, despite having virus scanners, spybot scanners (Microsoft Anti-Spyware, Spybot, and Ad-Aware), and Firefox installed, the absence of IT staff meant that the company staff were ignoring spybot warnings, the antivirus was not up to date, and they were browsing the web with Internet Explorer.
I'm still fighting the use of Internet Explorer, since we have no real reason to be using it -- most all of the websites we access are Firefox friendly. However, the momentum means that I can't just block out access to it in the domain policy. People need to migrate their bookmarks and preferences over, and that isn't done overnight. It's maddening.
So who do I blame when I see headlines like this, or when I look at the company I work at and see a mess? My first point of blame lies with Microsoft for creating such a vulnerable infrastructure to begin with. And that's not because I'm an anti-MS or Linux zealot. It's true, I run Linux at home on every computer. It's also true that since coming in, I've set up a number of Linux servers and a Linux firewall. I know how to work with Microsoft products and lock them down to a reasonable state. It's just that it frustrates the hell out of me when a product built-in to the operating system has so many vulnerabilities, and it's a freaking product used to browse the web! Not something essential to the system like the kernel (which has problems too)... a web browser! Something that should have no system access!
So yes, I lay most of the blame for this kind of travesty at Microsoft's feet. Had they actually thought their design through before they started coding, I can almost assure you that we would not be having this kind of problem to begin with. There would be viruses for Windows, yes. There would be worms for Windows, yes. But I find it unlikely that a properly-designed Windows would have made it possible for there to be millions of zombie PCs across the world, able to be bought by the highest bidder.
The rest of the blame I lay on user education. Most people with computers are totally oblivious about what's on the Internet. They just click on the big 'e' and surf their favorite porn sites, check email for funny comments, et cetera. And then they wonder why they get hundreds of popups and their computer runs slow as frozen molasses. Some of this could be stopped if network admins took some effort to educate their users in a business environment (herculean but possible, and I know some organizations actually do so). Which leaves the home PC users. What do you do about them? Well, I think that's more Microsoft's responsibility, since they're the ones who created the product.
In the meantime, I'm setting up Ubuntu for people who want it, or giving out CDs with it on them and directions. And most people I've switched have been quite happy with it, since their main needs are web browsing and Email and it covers those. So until Microsoft produces a product that I can actually recommend to my mother, I cannot recommend Windows.
In my case (implementing a support server for the company I work at), I needed a Linux distro that would give me more or less what I needed right out of the box without too much fuss.
My first inclination was to try CentOS, but the machine I was attempting to install it on had a bad CD-ROM, which meant that most of the packages I tried to load got corrupted. I also had previously used Red Hat (before they did the Fedora/RHEL split) and disliked the fact that they tended to hook everything into X wherever possible.
Other distributions I considered briefly before installing Trustix were: Debian -- did not use because debian-stable has very outdated packages, debian-unstable seems rather unsuited for a server, etc... Mandriva -- I ran a Mandriva server once but again was encumbered by X libraries, and when those libraries were removed, most of the administrative tools (yes, even the command line ones) were messed up royally. Gentoo -- I nearly went this way, since I now run a Gentoo server and like the ease of updates, but I did not have the time or resources on hand to do a complete install from source. Plus the machine is a bit slow...
I will mention that I did not consider any of the BSDs in this due to my general lack of experience with BSD. I mean to learn it eventually, but for now I'm mainly a Linux admin. (And a Windows admin, but that's by necessity rather than choice.)
I finally read about Trustix and liked what I saw. CLI tools only, no unnecessary services, Red Hat based configuration... it all drew on what I knew and didn't have Red Hat's accompanying fat.
There are some other caveats I have from running it. First, there is a distinct lack of pre-built Perl packages available in Trustix. This is somewhat remedied by the availability of CPAN, but CPAN is a kludged system at its best of times and there are a number of Perl modules that I still *cannot* install. Which basically axed the idea of using any Perl-based web software.
The question on my mind is, what makes this so "new" and different from existing cable internet? The only thing he mentions is that download speed is 270Mbps.
I suppose they're probably using a higher frequency to transmit the data as opposed to existing cable internet.
The other concern is, won't the cable companies charge Verizon an arm and a leg to use *their* cable networks? I would imagine this would drive the price of this new solution up through the roof, to the point where its cost makes it prohibitive for the end-user (that is, you and me).
I don't understand this permanent woody for boxes in boxes, the non-Photoshop world abandonded that GUI a decade ago.
Even Photoshop never used that clunky interface originally. The Photoshop MDI originated from the fact that on the Macintosh, Photoshop looked a lot more like the GIMP -- except that the menubar was on top, mac-related stuff, etc. However, the Photoshop programming team didn't want to figure out how to do that on Windows, so they simply made a "container window" to hold everything.
Since then, a number of programs have emulated that, even though they never had to. It was simply a hack to get around a Mac-->Windows porting problem.
...is when is the Mozilla Suite (which is here now, reliable and stable) going to have the new features in Firefox like live bookmarks (RSS feeds as bookmarks) and improved tab controls (a pretty killer feature as you can set URLs opened by other programs to always open in a new tab instead of 'raping' your current one). Plus, when is the suite's mail client getting the juicy new features from Thunderbird such as RSS support, saved search folders (a real killer feature) and improved grouping?
That's why the Multizilla extension exists. I've used it for a while now with the Mozilla suite, and only switched off it because the default Mozilla package for Mandrake Cooker got too unstable for some reason (need to fix that, for now I just use Firefox).
From the Multizilla site:
What is MultiZilla?
MultiZilla was the first browser extension to introduce the tabbed UI for Mozilla. Current Mozilla builds make use of this idea but it is only partly integrated by the Mozilla team, so MultiZilla still has lots of extra features that cannot be found in today's Mozilla builds (although Firefox adds even more MultiZilla features like middle-click on bookmarks and some of the tabgroup features). However, we constantly work on new improvements and bug fixes. We're also very keen on keeping our users satisfied and work closely together towards a next release.
Unfortunately they don't have an extension for Firefox, although that may change when the main mozilla trunk is switched.
So, pray tell, how is making a horribly insecure third-party application model (DirectX) and then complaining about how people are exploiting it supposed to hold water? YOU ARE THE API DEVELOPER. IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO ANTICIPATE POTENTIAL ABUSES.
Because if I'm reading this right, then that's exactly what Gates is doing. No wonder Microsoft's products are so shitty; they think that security is something that happens to other people.
But anyway geese are actually a quite deterrent.
And the best thing about geese is: they work for grass.
Work too well for grass, that is.
Speaking as someone who until recently (racoons) had watch geese, all I can say is that they tend to make more of a mess of your yard than a dog will. A dog or two if untrained will dig holes and shit all over. A gaggle of geese, if left unchecked, will try to eat all available grass, while simultaneously shitting everywhere. And I mean EVERYWHERE.
We kept our gaggle of geese in a fenced-off area equal to about half of our backyard, which is perhaps a quarter of an acre. When we started, there was green grass growing in it. After several years, it resembled a desert.
Shit. I forgot to format it.
Ok, take two.
Well, TweakTown was promptly slashdotted, so here's the full text:
What's up with computer audio? - Page 1 [Introduction]
Introduction
Last month during QuakeCon near Dallas, Texas in the United States it became clearly apparent to me that computer audio has become somewhat of a forgotten component in the computer industry when talking to gamers and listening to companies at the gaming event.
When nVidia released the mighty onboard SoundStorm APU (Audio Processing Unit) back with their nForce chipset for the Athlon XP platform, gamers and general PC enthusiasts around the world were thrilled and thought they were in for a change for the years ahead as far as cinematic quality computer audio goes. It seems like they were wrong though as nVidia basically confirmed at QuakeCon that the hardware powered SoundStorm APU which is the only sound solution capable of encoding Dolby Digital (or AC-3) on the fly would not be part of the upcoming nForce4 chipset. When nVidia let this news out to gamers in the crowd, it was clear that the group was thoroughly disappointed.
Not only was the nVidia SoundStorm APU the only sound solution capable of encoding Dolby Digital on the fly (which produces true and accurate 5.1 surround sound via either optical or digital coaxial cable to a set of computer speakers supporting these connections or to an external amplifier), it was also hardware accelerated meaning it does not chew up precise CPU cycles like other inferior onboard solutions which in turn reduces frames per second and do not have the ability to send separate digital signals to anymore than two channels. You'll get 5.1 sound using three analog cables but this type of setup is nowhere near as impressive or realistic as what the SoundStorm produces.
But you might as well forget about high quality and impressive sound solutions such as the SoundStorm as nVidia and their motherboard partners in Taiwan don't seem to think this type of quality sound solution is important to consumers. If you can't justify spending hundreds of dollars on an external PCI sound card from companies like Creative, Phillips or Terratec (which is very understandable), also taking into account that all these sound solutions don't offer on the fly hardware encoding of Dolby Digital, you'll need to stick with the cheap and nasty onboard solutions from companies such as Cmedia and Realtek. While these onboard solutions have improved a little over the past few years as far as CPU utilization and general sound quality production goes, computer users deserve much better.
Steve (our news poster and resident SoundStorm expert) and I collected a total of five different sound solutions including onboard SoundStorm via the ABIT NF7-S motherboard, Terratec Sixpack 5.1+, Sound Blaster Live! Value, Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS Platinum Pro and a cheap Cmedia 8738 PCI sound card. We have then compared the true real-world performance (as hard as it was) of all five sound cards in a bunch of today's most popular games over an entire weekend via an expensive high-end Onkyo digital receiver and 5.1 Jamo speaker system . We'll present the benchmark numbers to you and the struggles involved in doing so as well as provide commentary along the way on our thoughts of computer audio solutions and what should be done.
It's the forgotten computer component but we are hoping today we can help kick start the revival of computer audio for the better, highlighting a few key points which seem not important to most of the design and manufacturing leaders in the industry.
What's up with computer audio? - Page 2 [What is so good about SoundStorm?]
What is so good about SoundStorm?
The best place to start is discussing exactly what is so good about SoundStorm and why it should be considered the benchmark for computer audio. In an ideal world, the standards the SoundStorm produce should be just that, the standard - and then we should be seeing improvemen
Well, TweakTown was promptly slashdotted, so here's the full text:
What's up with computer audio? - Page 1 [Introduction]
Introduction
Last month during QuakeCon near Dallas, Texas in the United States it became clearly apparent to me that computer audio has become somewhat of a forgotten component in the computer industry when talking to gamers and listening to companies at the gaming event.
When nVidia released the mighty onboard SoundStorm APU (Audio Processing Unit) back with their nForce chipset for the Athlon XP platform, gamers and general PC enthusiasts around the world were thrilled and thought they were in for a change for the years ahead as far as cinematic quality computer audio goes. It seems like they were wrong though as nVidia basically confirmed at QuakeCon that the hardware powered SoundStorm APU which is the only sound solution capable of encoding Dolby Digital (or AC-3) on the fly would not be part of the upcoming nForce4 chipset. When nVidia let this news out to gamers in the crowd, it was clear that the group was thoroughly disappointed.
Not only was the nVidia SoundStorm APU the only sound solution capable of encoding Dolby Digital on the fly (which produces true and accurate 5.1 surround sound via either optical or digital coaxial cable to a set of computer speakers supporting these connections or to an external amplifier), it was also hardware accelerated meaning it does not chew up precise CPU cycles like other inferior onboard solutions which in turn reduces frames per second and do not have the ability to send separate digital signals to anymore than two channels. You'll get 5.1 sound using three analog cables but this type of setup is nowhere near as impressive or realistic as what the SoundStorm produces.
But you might as well forget about high quality and impressive sound solutions such as the SoundStorm as nVidia and their motherboard partners in Taiwan don't seem to think this type of quality sound solution is important to consumers. If you can't justify spending hundreds of dollars on an external PCI sound card from companies like Creative, Phillips or Terratec (which is very understandable), also taking into account that all these sound solutions don't offer on the fly hardware encoding of Dolby Digital, you'll need to stick with the cheap and nasty onboard solutions from companies such as Cmedia and Realtek. While these onboard solutions have improved a little over the past few years as far as CPU utilization and general sound quality production goes, computer users deserve much better.
Steve (our news poster and resident SoundStorm expert) and I collected a total of five different sound solutions including onboard SoundStorm via the ABIT NF7-S motherboard, Terratec Sixpack 5.1+, Sound Blaster Live! Value, Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS Platinum Pro and a cheap Cmedia 8738 PCI sound card. We have then compared the true real-world performance (as hard as it was) of all five sound cards in a bunch of today's most popular games over an entire weekend via an expensive high-end Onkyo digital receiver and 5.1 Jamo speaker system . We'll present the benchmark numbers to you and the struggles involved in doing so as well as provide commentary along the way on our thoughts of computer audio solutions and what should be done.
It's the forgotten computer component but we are hoping today we can help kick start the revival of computer audio for the better, highlighting a few key points which seem not important to most of the design and manufacturing leaders in the industry.
What's up with computer audio? - Page 2 [What is so good about SoundStorm?]
What is so good about SoundStorm?
The best place to start is discussing exactly what is so good about SoundStorm and why it should be considered the benchmark for computer audio. In an ideal world, the standards the SoundStorm produce should be just that, the standard - and then we should be seeing improvements over those base standards much more often than we do at the moment.
First and foremost, the beauty of the nVidia SoundStorm APU is th
Slashdot Mirror
However, it should be pointed out that America was the first to launch a manned spacecraft... and actually get the astronaut back safely.
As far as nuclear, putting aside the fuel and waste storage requirements of nuclear, what happens when a solar panel 'breaks'? not exactly a lot. It simply doesn't function. When a reactor 'breaks', well you've pretty well made the local area uninhabitable. And when your entire sustaining environment is localized to the reactor, you've got a pretty big problem. Unless you're planning on running miles of power cable in addition to just building the base... Is a nuclear breach likely? probably not, but when you have zero backup capability you need to think hard about putting in things that can go spectacularly wrong.
You are aware that it is possible to design a nuclear reactor, which, according to the very laws of physics that govern its reaction, simply cannot go supercritical? In fact, the Chinese are planning on building several thousand of them because of that very fact. Look up the pebble bed reactor.
You just said MAD worked in the 1960s - who needs another deterrent against NK?
Nice try. I never said MAD worked in the 1960s -- MAD was never an official US State Department policy, so how could MAD ever have possibly worked?
My actual point was that we are still alive today, therefore we must have done at least something right as a species, regardless of how flawed political policies were. That doesn't mean we should use the 1960s as an example of good practice for the future. We need to learn from our mistakes, not repeat them endlessly. Then again, Congress is a great example of the latter...
Regardless, with North Korea, they seem to be so absolutely batshit insane over there that I would definitely not want to bet my life on the assumption that they would treat assured destruction as sufficient deterrent to not, say, launch a missile at Japan. By that reasoning, it is a sound policy to have some form of anti-missile defense in the region if just to protect NK's neighbors from this. Does it mean we should foot the entire bill? No, of course not -- but I'm sure that South Korea and Japan would have no issues paying their share to ensure their own security.
Let me guess, you're a fan of Stuart Slade's, aren't you?
What a nice ad hominem. If you have a problem with someone's arguments, provide a well-thought out, logical rebuttal and see what happens. On the other hand, if you don't have the decency to do that, you're just trolling and can kiss my ass.
If your idea of an anti-missile is a nuke, yeah it is effective - about as effective as horseshoes played with hand grenades.
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/4925129/description.html is the patent for the transponder - enabled target missile.
The very idea that we should detonate nukes in the atmosphere is nuts. It is even more absurd as a defense to incoming weapons from enemies that don't exist any longer (China owns our debt; Russia has enough to deal with from the former client states) and Israel, N. Korea, India and Pakistan don't have ICBM delivery systems.
Regardless of the merits of nukes in anti-missile defense, the fact is that ICBMs were effectively obsolete in the 1960s. However, due to rampant idiocy and other political blunders, we forged ahead with them. Did it work out in the end? I suppose so. We're alive, aren't we? Does that mean the people in charge made the right decisions? I doubt it. We were left to foot a bill for a ridiculously overcomplicated, expensive system that has done absolutely nothing to help us in quality of life or scientific advancement.
For what it's worth, a high-altitude airburst releases less radiation into the atmosphere than your average coal plant spews out in thorium... yeah, that's a tragedy.
WHO are we developing this new system to defend against?
We're not. Nike Zeus was a strategic ABM defense system. It neatly countered the Russian threat of the 1960s. Would it be right to deploy an analogous system today? No -- as you said, where's the threat? The airborne laser, on the other hand, can be deployed to a small combat theatre, or any possible danger zone where some idiot with some secondhand IRBMs might be tempted to shoot them off. It's a technology testbed more than anything else -- a proof of concept, if you will. Base a few out of Japan, keep them on patrols, and you've effectively neutralized any chance North Korea had of shooting anything off at their neighbors. High energy lasers, frankly, make more sense in the modern battlefield than anti-missile missile defenses. Why shouldn't we be developing the technology?
It is potentially everone on the planet.
Yes it is.. including the old, disabled and those wiithout computers.
And don't forget the dearly departed.
Our anti-rocket defenses have been gross failures. This technology has a long way to go to be viable.
I'm glad that we have established that you just spout rhetoric made by idiots long before you. That line was first used by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (may he burn in hell). Mind you, that was the same man who was responsible for the Edsel at Ford and practically every idiotic military idea during his tenure at the Pentagon.
The Nike Zeus system was consistently shown to be able to achieve missile kills in the 1960s using its standard nuclear warhead. I've also heard that there was a (classified) number of tests where the Zeus rockets made skin kills without said warhead. A modified variant was also capable of ASAT kills. The Zeus system, combined with a bomber such as the B-70 Valkyrie, would have rendered ICBMs obsolete. It was only the fact that we had a SecDef with a hard-on for ICBMs that ensured their survival.
And, by the way -- Zeus + B-70 would have saved the US a ton of money, relatively speaking, compared to all the money we spend on missiles. We were forced to build hundreds of massive, hardened missile silos to protect our ineffective ICBMs from counterattack. This is an incredible waste of money compared to the cost it would have taken to upgrade our Air Force bases to be able to support an active fleet of B-70s. Not to mention we already had Nike missile sites in place around most major cities; these could have been simply upgraded to Zeus missiles, as had been done with the upgrade from Ajax to Hercules.
Meanwhile, we spend vast sums on this technology when we really ought to be looking to get outside of Earth orbit. 40 years is 30 years too long. We ought to have manned Moon and Mars bases by now.
I believe the wording you're looking for is "Meanwhile, we have spent vast sums on ground wars and Space Shuttle technology when we really ought to be...". The amount of money spent on ABM technology is a drop in the bucket compared both of the above mentioned boondoggles.
I hear all-too-frequently in the business world that "if the rest of the world is going with Microsoft, why do anything different?"
Just for that attitude alone, it would be a huge wakeup call to the rest of the world if Microsoft died off. For starters, it would show all the MBAs out there just how little they really know about business, namely, the part about "don't put all your eggs in one basket."
With a thorn like this in Microsoft's side, there is certainly a part of me that hopes that we will begin to see more OpenGL games released versus DirectX.
i on/) to very little fanfare. About the only companies it really mattered to were the Xbox competitors, namely, Sony and Nintendo. The PC gaming industry as a whole didn't care, because they had a solution that was "good enough" -- DirectX 9.
u bb=get_topic;f=3;t=015351;p=0
P ortability This cripples OpenGL's performance advantage. Of course, if you want to run the newest OpenGL on the newest hardware, as you should, they've put another roadblock in the way with Vista: you have to use the Windows XP drivers, which disable the nice flashy Aero interface. At this point, you're probably thinking, "Wait, wasn't Aero a selling point of Vista?" Well, that certainly makes sense. Only hardcore gamers would want to trade off their interface for OpenGL's performance, but your average casual gamer doesn't care.
Don't get me wrong, DirectX is a nice graphics library, but the seriousness of the vendor lock-in is just staggering -- and scenarios like this are a perfect example of a game development company's worst fears.
This situation was created because not enough effort was put into OpenGL when it needed it the most to make it a truly cutting-edge standard. The blame for that particularly lies with Microsoft and their aggressive campaign for Direct3D (and DirectX). As a result, OpenGL languished for several years, with only incremental feature updates (to version 1.5, which IIRC wasn't even a real release, but more of a vendor patchset for 1.4). In the meantime, DirectX leapfrogged its way to version 9 with a ridiculous amount of features being added.
OpenGL 2.1 finally came out last August (http://www.opengl.org/documentation/current_vers
Now, OpenGL 3.0 is "on track" to be finalized at the end of this month. Whether that will happen is anyone's guess, but it looks like the DX10 situation has finally lit a fire under their collective asses. Who knows, we may even see an OpenGL 3.0 specification by September, but I'm not really holding my breath.
http://www.opengl.org/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?
Of course, even though there's a brand spanking OpenGL almost ready to again kick Direct3D's ass performance wise, Microsoft has already taken steps to ensure that won't happen. OpenGL 1.4 (yes, 1.4!) is implemented in Vista as a translation layer to run Direct3D calls on the hardware. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D_vs._OpenGL#
So even if OpenGL 3 is technically superior, publishers probably won't adopt it because of the widespread view that it's slow (thanks to Vista's emulation). iD Software will likely use it as they always have, but it'll become harder to explain to your average user why he needs to install unverified drivers and disable his nice flashy interface just so he can run said game.
It's almost sickening, really, when you think about the damage DirectX has done.
I've seen a few episodes posted here, but when I heard this, the one that immediately came to mind was "The Immunity Syndrome" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immunity_Syndrom e_(TOS_episode)
)That is, the "one with the giant space amoeba", since an amoeba is probably the closest thing we have to a giant creature made of interstellar dust, albeit with a slight difference in scale. (Emphasis on the "slight".)
This is, of course, one reason why it's a very bad idea to use a self-aware android as a weapon.
Instead of the typical banding (caused by a. nozzles missing as the printhead travels side-to-side, or b. improper paper feed motion settings) you will get more of a "striping" effect caused as nozzles fail while the paper is in motion.
This will look somewhat like the white stripes you get on a laser printer when the toner begins to run out.
Banding caused by paper movement may still be an issue, but it doesn't show up very much in desktop machines as desktop media is almost all fairly uniform in thickness. However, it will be an issue on wide-format machines (such as the 51" monster they've announced), as different materials have widely varying thicknesses. For example, a 13oz vinyl banner material can be up to four times thicker than a glossy photo paper.
Additionally, I don't believe this kind of head technology will be well-suited to wide-format outdoor printing (the industry I work in as a service tech). This is because the outdoor printers use alcohol and solvent inks to improve adhesion and UV resistance, and as a side-effect of their more rapid drying times they are especially prone to head clogs if the piezo jets are left exposed to air.
What are you talking about? Obviously the poster was referring to the ability to run Windows Vista within a virtual server running on a Beowulf cluster of Linux computers.
If you have no idea what the f*** I just said, don't be hard on yourself. I think I just confused myself.
Thanks for the clarification. I had been told the basic story (which is what I repeated) but the specific details were unclear. For example, I didn't realize that Macromedia was involved.
From what I've seen posted in this discussion, most people hate Premier because they used an old version of it. Now, to clarify:
Final Cut Pro was written by the very same team that wrote Premier at Adobe. After version 5 of Premier was written, Apple convinced them to come work for them, and the result was Final Cut Pro.
Adobe was left holding the Premier bag, and didn't know what to do with it. The results were 5.5, 6.0, and finally 6.5 (all three of which were absolutely horrible in terms of bugs). In the meantime, Final Cut Pro was released. Adobe simply could not compete -- they didn't have a good enough program and they didn't have a good enough development team to devote energy to fixing Premier on the Mac.
As a result, Adobe hired an entirely new development team and started to completely redesign Premier from the ground up. The catch was that they didn't want to go head to head against Final Cut Pro yet -- Final Cut had the Mac market to itself, Premier was the only one for Windows. So they redesigned Premier on Windows and the result was Premier Pro 1.0.
Now that Adobe has Premier Pro refined enough, they feel they can go head-to-head with Final Cut (their old dev team). And with the platform turmoil, it makes sense that they would wait for the Intel decision to boil over before starting.
So instead of rushing in and saying how bad my OLD Premier experience was (I used it in my multimedia classes at college and hated it -- it was a completely useless pile of steaming crap but that's another matter) and comparing that to my Final Cut experience (works great but some features are a little lacking), I'm going to wait until the new Premier Pro comes out and make a comparison when they're actually on equal footing.
My conclusion: Premier Pro is a new codebase that has only a name in common with the old Premier. It's apparently going to be designed fresh for the OSX platform instead of being a kludge designed for OS9 and ported to OSX and Windows badly. I think it'll compare favorably, but I'm going to wait and see.
In my case (implementing a support server for the company I work at), I needed a Linux distro that would give me more or less what I needed right out of the box without too much fuss.
My first inclination was to try CentOS, but the machine I was attempting to install it on had a bad CD-ROM, which meant that most of the packages I tried to load got corrupted. I also had previously used Red Hat (before they did the Fedora/RHEL split) and disliked the fact that they tended to hook everything into X wherever possible.
Other distributions I considered briefly before installing Trustix were:
Debian -- did not use because debian-stable has very outdated packages, debian-unstable seems rather unsuited for a server, etc...
Mandriva -- I ran a Mandriva server once but again was encumbered by X libraries, and when those libraries were removed, most of the administrative tools (yes, even the command line ones) were messed up royally.
Gentoo -- I nearly went this way, since I now run a Gentoo server and like the ease of updates, but I did not have the time or resources on hand to do a complete install from source. Plus the machine is a bit slow...
I will mention that I did not consider any of the BSDs in this due to my general lack of experience with BSD. I mean to learn it eventually, but for now I'm mainly a Linux admin. (And a Windows admin, but that's by necessity rather than choice.)
I finally read about Trustix and liked what I saw. CLI tools only, no unnecessary services, Red Hat based configuration... it all drew on what I knew and didn't have Red Hat's accompanying fat.
There are some other caveats I have from running it. First, there is a distinct lack of pre-built Perl packages available in Trustix. This is somewhat remedied by the availability of CPAN, but CPAN is a kludged system at its best of times and there are a number of Perl modules that I still *cannot* install. Which basically axed the idea of using any Perl-based web software.
Hope that helps.
The question on my mind is, what makes this so "new" and different from existing cable internet? The only thing he mentions is that download speed is 270Mbps.
I suppose they're probably using a higher frequency to transmit the data as opposed to existing cable internet.
The other concern is, won't the cable companies charge Verizon an arm and a leg to use *their* cable networks? I would imagine this would drive the price of this new solution up through the roof, to the point where its cost makes it prohibitive for the end-user (that is, you and me).
Even Photoshop never used that clunky interface originally. The Photoshop MDI originated from the fact that on the Macintosh, Photoshop looked a lot more like the GIMP -- except that the menubar was on top, mac-related stuff, etc. However, the Photoshop programming team didn't want to figure out how to do that on Windows, so they simply made a "container window" to hold everything.
Since then, a number of programs have emulated that, even though they never had to. It was simply a hack to get around a Mac-->Windows porting problem.
That's why the Multizilla extension exists. I've used it for a while now with the Mozilla suite, and only switched off it because the default Mozilla package for Mandrake Cooker got too unstable for some reason (need to fix that, for now I just use Firefox).
From the Multizilla site:
Unfortunately they don't have an extension for Firefox, although that may change when the main mozilla trunk is switched.
Aaaaaugh. It's late, and I meant ActiveX... before people jump all over me in flames, since DirectX isn't that bad...
So, pray tell, how is making a horribly insecure third-party application model (DirectX) and then complaining about how people are exploiting it supposed to hold water? YOU ARE THE API DEVELOPER. IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO ANTICIPATE POTENTIAL ABUSES.
Because if I'm reading this right, then that's exactly what Gates is doing. No wonder Microsoft's products are so shitty; they think that security is something that happens to other people.
Work too well for grass, that is.
Speaking as someone who until recently (racoons) had watch geese, all I can say is that they tend to make more of a mess of your yard than a dog will. A dog or two if untrained will dig holes and shit all over. A gaggle of geese, if left unchecked, will try to eat all available grass, while simultaneously shitting everywhere. And I mean EVERYWHERE.
We kept our gaggle of geese in a fenced-off area equal to about half of our backyard, which is perhaps a quarter of an acre. When we started, there was green grass growing in it. After several years, it resembled a desert.
Ok, take two.
Well, TweakTown was promptly slashdotted, so here's the full text:
What's up with computer audio? - Page 1 [Introduction]
Introduction
Last month during QuakeCon near Dallas, Texas in the United States it became clearly apparent to me that computer audio has become somewhat of a forgotten component in the computer industry when talking to gamers and listening to companies at the gaming event.
When nVidia released the mighty onboard SoundStorm APU (Audio Processing Unit) back with their nForce chipset for the Athlon XP platform, gamers and general PC enthusiasts around the world were thrilled and thought they were in for a change for the years ahead as far as cinematic quality computer audio goes. It seems like they were wrong though as nVidia basically confirmed at QuakeCon that the hardware powered SoundStorm APU which is the only sound solution capable of encoding Dolby Digital (or AC-3) on the fly would not be part of the upcoming nForce4 chipset. When nVidia let this news out to gamers in the crowd, it was clear that the group was thoroughly disappointed.
Not only was the nVidia SoundStorm APU the only sound solution capable of encoding Dolby Digital on the fly (which produces true and accurate 5.1 surround sound via either optical or digital coaxial cable to a set of computer speakers supporting these connections or to an external amplifier), it was also hardware accelerated meaning it does not chew up precise CPU cycles like other inferior onboard solutions which in turn reduces frames per second and do not have the ability to send separate digital signals to anymore than two channels. You'll get 5.1 sound using three analog cables but this type of setup is nowhere near as impressive or realistic as what the SoundStorm produces.
But you might as well forget about high quality and impressive sound solutions such as the SoundStorm as nVidia and their motherboard partners in Taiwan don't seem to think this type of quality sound solution is important to consumers. If you can't justify spending hundreds of dollars on an external PCI sound card from companies like Creative, Phillips or Terratec (which is very understandable), also taking into account that all these sound solutions don't offer on the fly hardware encoding of Dolby Digital, you'll need to stick with the cheap and nasty onboard solutions from companies such as Cmedia and Realtek. While these onboard solutions have improved a little over the past few years as far as CPU utilization and general sound quality production goes, computer users deserve much better.
Steve (our news poster and resident SoundStorm expert) and I collected a total of five different sound solutions including onboard SoundStorm via the ABIT NF7-S motherboard, Terratec Sixpack 5.1+, Sound Blaster Live! Value, Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS Platinum Pro and a cheap Cmedia 8738 PCI sound card. We have then compared the true real-world performance (as hard as it was) of all five sound cards in a bunch of today's most popular games over an entire weekend via an expensive high-end Onkyo digital receiver and 5.1 Jamo speaker system . We'll present the benchmark numbers to you and the struggles involved in doing so as well as provide commentary along the way on our thoughts of computer audio solutions and what should be done.
It's the forgotten computer component but we are hoping today we can help kick start the revival of computer audio for the better, highlighting a few key points which seem not important to most of the design and manufacturing leaders in the industry.
What's up with computer audio? - Page 2 [What is so good about SoundStorm?]
What is so good about SoundStorm?
The best place to start is discussing exactly what is so good about SoundStorm and why it should be considered the benchmark for computer audio. In an ideal world, the standards the SoundStorm produce should be just that, the standard - and then we should be seeing improvemen
Well, TweakTown was promptly slashdotted, so here's the full text: What's up with computer audio? - Page 1 [Introduction] Introduction Last month during QuakeCon near Dallas, Texas in the United States it became clearly apparent to me that computer audio has become somewhat of a forgotten component in the computer industry when talking to gamers and listening to companies at the gaming event. When nVidia released the mighty onboard SoundStorm APU (Audio Processing Unit) back with their nForce chipset for the Athlon XP platform, gamers and general PC enthusiasts around the world were thrilled and thought they were in for a change for the years ahead as far as cinematic quality computer audio goes. It seems like they were wrong though as nVidia basically confirmed at QuakeCon that the hardware powered SoundStorm APU which is the only sound solution capable of encoding Dolby Digital (or AC-3) on the fly would not be part of the upcoming nForce4 chipset. When nVidia let this news out to gamers in the crowd, it was clear that the group was thoroughly disappointed. Not only was the nVidia SoundStorm APU the only sound solution capable of encoding Dolby Digital on the fly (which produces true and accurate 5.1 surround sound via either optical or digital coaxial cable to a set of computer speakers supporting these connections or to an external amplifier), it was also hardware accelerated meaning it does not chew up precise CPU cycles like other inferior onboard solutions which in turn reduces frames per second and do not have the ability to send separate digital signals to anymore than two channels. You'll get 5.1 sound using three analog cables but this type of setup is nowhere near as impressive or realistic as what the SoundStorm produces. But you might as well forget about high quality and impressive sound solutions such as the SoundStorm as nVidia and their motherboard partners in Taiwan don't seem to think this type of quality sound solution is important to consumers. If you can't justify spending hundreds of dollars on an external PCI sound card from companies like Creative, Phillips or Terratec (which is very understandable), also taking into account that all these sound solutions don't offer on the fly hardware encoding of Dolby Digital, you'll need to stick with the cheap and nasty onboard solutions from companies such as Cmedia and Realtek. While these onboard solutions have improved a little over the past few years as far as CPU utilization and general sound quality production goes, computer users deserve much better. Steve (our news poster and resident SoundStorm expert) and I collected a total of five different sound solutions including onboard SoundStorm via the ABIT NF7-S motherboard, Terratec Sixpack 5.1+, Sound Blaster Live! Value, Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS Platinum Pro and a cheap Cmedia 8738 PCI sound card. We have then compared the true real-world performance (as hard as it was) of all five sound cards in a bunch of today's most popular games over an entire weekend via an expensive high-end Onkyo digital receiver and 5.1 Jamo speaker system . We'll present the benchmark numbers to you and the struggles involved in doing so as well as provide commentary along the way on our thoughts of computer audio solutions and what should be done. It's the forgotten computer component but we are hoping today we can help kick start the revival of computer audio for the better, highlighting a few key points which seem not important to most of the design and manufacturing leaders in the industry. What's up with computer audio? - Page 2 [What is so good about SoundStorm?] What is so good about SoundStorm? The best place to start is discussing exactly what is so good about SoundStorm and why it should be considered the benchmark for computer audio. In an ideal world, the standards the SoundStorm produce should be just that, the standard - and then we should be seeing improvements over those base standards much more often than we do at the moment. First and foremost, the beauty of the nVidia SoundStorm APU is th