I have been gaming on 64-bit Linux in GL mode since 2004. There aren't many titles to choose from, but everything that I have tried--Enemy Territory, UT2004, and a few others--run flawlessly and at higher framerates than they do in Windows XP, not to even get started with Win7. I have never had a video driver crash. I have been running NVIDIA 64-bit binary drivers the entire time.
At one point, I had a problem with ET not liking sound since it is Quake 3 based and was written to use OSS, but I was running Gentoo and of course had to spend a half hour trying to figure out how to restore sound. It runs flawlessly out of the box in Ubuntu.
The problem is not drivers and is entirely the selection of games out there. We will hopefully see some good Source-based games for Linux once Steam makes its way in.
Sony does tend to have that "sucks to own next year" thing going on (as does Toshiba), but there are manufacturing problems all across the board. And the biggest one?
RoHS
Electronics have been soldered together for close to a hundred years with leaded solder. Then, the Europeans decided that it would be a really good idea to just pull the lead out of everything. Good move.
What can you replace the lead with? That's a really tough question, and companies have been trying to figure this out in the aftermath. You can't just throw silver or copper into the mix and expect everything to be the same. It ends up that when you do, the solder has a significantly higher melting point (i.e. ever tried desoldering RoHS process solder?) and is incredibly brittle. Where lead would stretch or distort, RoHS solder snaps. And here is your problem.
With IC package miniaturization, consumer electronics now use chip packages without leads. Cellular phones, portable devices, video cards, and many more now use BGA packages, where there are hundreds of balls of solder on the underside of the chip. Each ball has very little mechanical stability as the balls are so small. When the chip's CTE is not exactly matched to the board's CTE, one expands (or contracts) more quickly than the other, and BAM! you have a cold solder joint.
So in the end, what is worse for the environment? Throwing away a Sony product and buying another every year rather than three? Or dumping/recycling the product after three?
The "small rancher" is a myth, just like the "family farm".
On what grounds do you say something so daft? Living in Georgia, I get all of my buffalo meat from a rancher with thirty head of buffalo in exchange for a little computer work every couple of weeks. If he offers beef, sometimes I'll take a little longhorn. Another friend gives me angus by the truckload because his parents have a small farm in Tennessee with a few dozen cattle. I know a lot of people with small active farms and ranches and do not personally know anyone who works for one of the big outfits. When I was a kid, we had a few hundred head of holsteins on our farm and were able to break even with milk sales. The truck came by from farm to farm to farm to fill up at these little dairies. Corporate "farming" may be the mainstay of our food supply, especially in the poultry industry, but please do not be so ignorant about this. The buffalo rancher was breaking even at $2.50/pound for ground bison but with the USDA inspection, he already has to mark it up to $4.00/pound after taking into consideration both inspection and transportation. Any such regulation on cattle does hurt the small man because not only does he not own his own slaughterhouse, but he has to transport his cattle elsewhere and has to deal with a lot more overhead per capita than the corporation.
Besides being one step away from tagging humans--say prisoners guilty of certain crimes--this program would unquestionably harm the many small farms out there.
And once it's publicized, is it really all that hard to throw a couple of wireless microphones out there under others' seats to "mix things up?" It would work if no one knew about it, but once it's out...
They don't let you use halon anymore these days. Back in '06 when my company was upgrading its datacenter, we had a similar fire issue. We had just gotten all of the servers moved into the new racks, and everything was running nicely for a few weeks.
Well, what do you know? The UPS blew up. Due to improper assembly of the UPS, one of the main cables was stretched and chafed along the chassis. Imagine, let's say, an array of 12 car batteries in series in a parallel arangement of 12 (144 total of course). The cable finally wore through late at night and arc gouged several inches of 12-gauge sheet metal chassis before it finally shorted and destroyed the batteries (from what I heard).
It was a very nasty mess, and half of the UPS was this blob of burnt-out circuitry. No fun. My company opted to spend several thousand dollars (over 10k IIRC) for a small FM-200 system.
My guess is that something like this happened to ThePlanet, but it was most likely a chemical like FM-200 that is less environmentally harmful than halon, not as cool nonetheless.
Anyway, the incident at my company was completely avoidable, and I would wager to guess that the one at ThePlanet was competely avoidable as well. I am just glad that ThePlanet lost my business about a year ago for price gouging a loyal customer after three years of service.
And to blur the line a little more, how about importing 10000 units of a camera that can only do stills but has a 10MP sensor, a killer image processor, and plenty of extra buffers to do "more" with? Just get the manufacturer to agree to help you with a custom firmware before you place the order, import the suckers, and flash them. Hey, they weren't capable of video when they were imported, now were they?
Provincial driver's licenses have been like that for quite a few years now in Canada. It has had no effect whatsoever on my freedom or privacy.
Owning a car is another matter altogether however, there is no end to the ways that the state and its corrupt law enforcement officers can harass you if you own a car.
Step 1: Mandate barcode and digital ID Step 2: Mandate federal database of such info Step 3: Mandate ISO7816 smartcard chip to be placed in every ID (can't be accessed wirelessly!) Step 4: Require all federal buildings to authenticate the person with data stored on the smartcard Step 5: Mandate states to require SSN, birthdate, birth place, a fingerprint, and other biometric data to be stored on the card Step 6: Mandate federal database of such info Step 7: Make it illegal to enter any federal building, register a car, withdraw funds from a bank without such a card Step 8: Require all future ID's to implement RFID and/or ISO7816 Step 9: Allow major credit card companies to place card numbers within the ID Step 10: ??? Step 11: Profit
At this point, the government has built a database of a great deal of info on every person, and every person is virtually compelled to carry the card because it is a convenience and becomes habit and soon necessity. If you lose your card (or just as likely, it is stolen), your life is gone because it's in the hand of an ID thief. Law enforcement knows too much about you before you are so much as a suspect of any crime.
Just keep pushing the envelope a little further each time. Eventually, it gets out of hands. Those who have rejected the Real ID Act have looked a few steps into the future. You should, too.
I don't know about you in Canada, but in the U.S., I sure value my freedoms and privacy.
Just drive down Ferst any day, and you will see very few SUV's. Half the people at Tech post on Slashdot at least twice a day, and those who don't are management or psychology majors. It's probably half-Indian/Oriental at this point, so no, not that many SUV-driving rednecks.
I was wandering about this for some time, you look at any electronics board, the biggest things on them are chips, which are actually many many small components, and capacitors, which are disproportionately big in comparison to everything else which has been turned into miniscule gizmos integrated into everything else.
It could change the size of certain capacitors whose values and tolerances it matches. However, a more space-efficient capacitor would not necessarily lower the number of capacitors required unless you are considering cases such as big parallel banks of caps.
There are about a dozen types of capacitors in mainstream use today, some with extreme values, and some with very tight tolerances. One new type will not be able to replace the rest.
For the television show, fifty or so of these cars were produced, so it wouldn't be as hard as you would think to purchase one. Then, of course, you could always build one!
"More than 120 scientists across seven federal agencies have been pressured to remove the phrases 'global warming' and 'climate change' from various documents."
Can anyone find the one big thing wrong with this statement?
Wait for it....wait for it...
This statement is in the passive voice. No one is directly referred to here. The problem with this? The poster makes a statement and forces assumptions on who has been putting this pressure of censorship. I am not sure which is worse--deliberate censorship or subtle trickery as is in the first line of the "summary." I am not some Republican good buddy here to bash global warming theory or anything, but the summary is nothing but flamebait.
The destruction of a domain that is of no use, is nothing to be upset about.
But how much effort does it take to maintain a database of three million Soviet Union TLD's? The time alone to register these domains alone would be twenty-eight and one-half man years at five minutes to register. Just to register them. How much time would it take to switch domain names? How much to try to update links? How much to one's clients trying to get to a site that can no longer exist? Tens of thousands of man years?
I would be. Millimeter waves (microwaves) can do a lot of unpredictable things. I know that from some research, cops that shoot traffic radar for a long period (e.g. 20 to 30 years) frequently (daily or weekly) have a much higher tendency to contract cancer than those who don't.
That is over a long period of time, but we are talking about powers of microwatts or milliwatts at most from 10-34GHz being absorbed. I'd argue that this "heat ray" throws decawatts at a body.
Who cares about TLDs, what I want to know is who controls the IPs?
Yes, but the UN doesn't. For all practicality's sake, they don't even know what an IP is. They don't know how the Internet and Web work, but they certainly think that it shouldn't be something that the originator (the US) shouldn't have control of...for whatever reason. Maybe the UN should peitition the US with a list of grievances of mismanagement in order to have a reason for the whole thing to be handed over. Having control over IP addresses is a much more encompassing leash that IANA has and just like ICANN does not abuse.
It's all black and white to the UN, two dimensional rather than three, and there are so many levels of ubiquity, ambiguity, and abstraction that they do and will continue to fail to see.
The UN needs to have no control over the Internet. They have demonstrated time and time again (e.g. Oil-for-Food campaign) that they are incompetent with managing programs.
If TLD's are such an issue, let them have their own DNS system. No one is forcing anyone to use ICANN or even IANA.
Dell should start using these for their GX-270 line. I (1 out of 5 at the site I worked) have replaced a good 30 270 Motherbo--- (sorry per dell, system boards) that have video problems. All stem from bulgin and leaky capacitors. Most of these systems where between 1-2 years old (none over three).
On the GX270's, there is now a lifetime replacement warranty on the motherboards. Capacitors blow on these things, whether that is six months down the road, or four years. We got a bunch of 270's around 2003 and still have several dozen of them here at the company where I work. A few months ago, we called Dell, and they sent two boxes complete with new motherboards and return labels for the old ones.
As a CmpE (currently working in I.T.), I will tell you that electrolytics are absolutely fine. I have electronics from the 60's and 70's with electrolytics that hold up. If the manufacturing process is botched, something may go wrong. But you can end up with a mess also if you manfacture tants, micas, polypropylene, even ceramic disc capacitors incorrectly. "Solid" capacitors are more of a sure-fire thing, but they can fail, too.
Democrats => Authoritarian, Too pretentiously arrogant for a Constitution, e.g. individual rights Republicans => Authoritarian, Too managerial for a Constitution, e.g. individual rights
If you don't like it, don't elect them. The big parties are all the same now excepting abortion.
When I vote, I see who's running, check to see whether the Libertarian is a good candidate (so far, soo good), and I go for it. There are lots of other small parties out there that represent exactly what you want in US government. Go for it! If you don't, you get what you ask for.
Sure, you have your DSLR cameras. You also have your point-and-shoots. However, just because a camera isn't a DSLR does NOT mean that you can call it a point-and-shoot. Take for example this camera. It classifies as neither. Just to keep everybody informed! (There still is a middle ground.)
Slashdot Mirror
I have been gaming on 64-bit Linux in GL mode since 2004. There aren't many titles to choose from, but everything that I have tried--Enemy Territory, UT2004, and a few others--run flawlessly and at higher framerates than they do in Windows XP, not to even get started with Win7. I have never had a video driver crash. I have been running NVIDIA 64-bit binary drivers the entire time.
At one point, I had a problem with ET not liking sound since it is Quake 3 based and was written to use OSS, but I was running Gentoo and of course had to spend a half hour trying to figure out how to restore sound. It runs flawlessly out of the box in Ubuntu.
The problem is not drivers and is entirely the selection of games out there. We will hopefully see some good Source-based games for Linux once Steam makes its way in.
Sony does tend to have that "sucks to own next year" thing going on (as does Toshiba), but there are manufacturing problems all across the board. And the biggest one?
RoHS
Electronics have been soldered together for close to a hundred years with leaded solder. Then, the Europeans decided that it would be a really good idea to just pull the lead out of everything. Good move.
What can you replace the lead with? That's a really tough question, and companies have been trying to figure this out in the aftermath. You can't just throw silver or copper into the mix and expect everything to be the same. It ends up that when you do, the solder has a significantly higher melting point (i.e. ever tried desoldering RoHS process solder?) and is incredibly brittle. Where lead would stretch or distort, RoHS solder snaps. And here is your problem.
With IC package miniaturization, consumer electronics now use chip packages without leads. Cellular phones, portable devices, video cards, and many more now use BGA packages, where there are hundreds of balls of solder on the underside of the chip. Each ball has very little mechanical stability as the balls are so small. When the chip's CTE is not exactly matched to the board's CTE, one expands (or contracts) more quickly than the other, and BAM! you have a cold solder joint.
So in the end, what is worse for the environment? Throwing away a Sony product and buying another every year rather than three? Or dumping/recycling the product after three?
RoHS: Planned Obsolescence
The "small rancher" is a myth, just like the "family farm".
On what grounds do you say something so daft? Living in Georgia, I get all of my buffalo meat from a rancher with thirty head of buffalo in exchange for a little computer work every couple of weeks. If he offers beef, sometimes I'll take a little longhorn. Another friend gives me angus by the truckload because his parents have a small farm in Tennessee with a few dozen cattle. I know a lot of people with small active farms and ranches and do not personally know anyone who works for one of the big outfits. When I was a kid, we had a few hundred head of holsteins on our farm and were able to break even with milk sales. The truck came by from farm to farm to farm to fill up at these little dairies. Corporate "farming" may be the mainstay of our food supply, especially in the poultry industry, but please do not be so ignorant about this. The buffalo rancher was breaking even at $2.50/pound for ground bison but with the USDA inspection, he already has to mark it up to $4.00/pound after taking into consideration both inspection and transportation. Any such regulation on cattle does hurt the small man because not only does he not own his own slaughterhouse, but he has to transport his cattle elsewhere and has to deal with a lot more overhead per capita than the corporation.
Besides being one step away from tagging humans--say prisoners guilty of certain crimes--this program would unquestionably harm the many small farms out there.
And once it's publicized, is it really all that hard to throw a couple of wireless microphones out there under others' seats to "mix things up?" It would work if no one knew about it, but once it's out...
Pretty much a moot idea.
how about a magnetically secured line attached to the work surface?
You are assuming that there exists a ferromagnetic surface which would attract a magnet. Remember what the ISS is mostly made of.
I began to build one a while back but held off because I didn't know enough DSP at the time...
:)
And I wanted to write the processing portion
http://www.signalone.com/radioastronomy/telescope/
http://www.radiosky.com/faq.html
http://www.mtmscientific.com/radiotelescope.html
http://www.radiotelescopebuilder.com/
One of these days, I'll put that 3 meter dish to use.
They don't let you use halon anymore these days. Back in '06 when my company was upgrading its datacenter, we had a similar fire issue. We had just gotten all of the servers moved into the new racks, and everything was running nicely for a few weeks.
Well, what do you know? The UPS blew up. Due to improper assembly of the UPS, one of the main cables was stretched and chafed along the chassis. Imagine, let's say, an array of 12 car batteries in series in a parallel arangement of 12 (144 total of course). The cable finally wore through late at night and arc gouged several inches of 12-gauge sheet metal chassis before it finally shorted and destroyed the batteries (from what I heard).
It was a very nasty mess, and half of the UPS was this blob of burnt-out circuitry. No fun. My company opted to spend several thousand dollars (over 10k IIRC) for a small FM-200 system.
My guess is that something like this happened to ThePlanet, but it was most likely a chemical like FM-200 that is less environmentally harmful than halon, not as cool nonetheless.
Anyway, the incident at my company was completely avoidable, and I would wager to guess that the one at ThePlanet was competely avoidable as well. I am just glad that ThePlanet lost my business about a year ago for price gouging a loyal customer after three years of service.
And to blur the line a little more, how about importing 10000 units of a camera that can only do stills but has a 10MP sensor, a killer image processor, and plenty of extra buffers to do "more" with? Just get the manufacturer to agree to help you with a custom firmware before you place the order, import the suckers, and flash them. Hey, they weren't capable of video when they were imported, now were they?
Step 1: Mandate barcode and digital ID
Step 2: Mandate federal database of such info
Step 3: Mandate ISO7816 smartcard chip to be placed in every ID (can't be accessed wirelessly!)
Step 4: Require all federal buildings to authenticate the person with data stored on the smartcard
Step 5: Mandate states to require SSN, birthdate, birth place, a fingerprint, and other biometric data to be stored on the card
Step 6: Mandate federal database of such info
Step 7: Make it illegal to enter any federal building, register a car, withdraw funds from a bank without such a card
Step 8: Require all future ID's to implement RFID and/or ISO7816
Step 9: Allow major credit card companies to place card numbers within the ID
Step 10: ???
Step 11: Profit
At this point, the government has built a database of a great deal of info on every person, and every person is virtually compelled to carry the card because it is a convenience and becomes habit and soon necessity. If you lose your card (or just as likely, it is stolen), your life is gone because it's in the hand of an ID thief. Law enforcement knows too much about you before you are so much as a suspect of any crime.
Just keep pushing the envelope a little further each time. Eventually, it gets out of hands. Those who have rejected the Real ID Act have looked a few steps into the future. You should, too.
I don't know about you in Canada, but in the U.S., I sure value my freedoms and privacy.
Just drive down Ferst any day, and you will see very few SUV's. Half the people at Tech post on Slashdot at least twice a day, and those who don't are management or psychology majors. It's probably half-Indian/Oriental at this point, so no, not that many SUV-driving rednecks.
There are about a dozen types of capacitors in mainstream use today, some with extreme values, and some with very tight tolerances. One new type will not be able to replace the rest.
For the television show, fifty or so of these cars were produced, so it wouldn't be as hard as you would think to purchase one. Then, of course, you could always build one!
Wait for it....wait for it...
This statement is in the passive voice. No one is directly referred to here. The problem with this? The poster makes a statement and forces assumptions on who has been putting this pressure of censorship. I am not sure which is worse--deliberate censorship or subtle trickery as is in the first line of the "summary." I am not some Republican good buddy here to bash global warming theory or anything, but the summary is nothing but flamebait.
Who even calls this nullification? I consider it a flat-out rejection.
If this whole thing is true, from the bottom of my heart, I thank you, Maine.
That is over a long period of time, but we are talking about powers of microwatts or milliwatts at most from 10-34GHz being absorbed. I'd argue that this "heat ray" throws decawatts at a body.
There will be repercussions.
It's all black and white to the UN, two dimensional rather than three, and there are so many levels of ubiquity, ambiguity, and abstraction that they do and will continue to fail to see.
The UN needs to have no control over the Internet. They have demonstrated time and time again (e.g. Oil-for-Food campaign) that they are incompetent with managing programs.
If TLD's are such an issue, let them have their own DNS system. No one is forcing anyone to use ICANN or even IANA.
As a CmpE (currently working in I.T.), I will tell you that electrolytics are absolutely fine. I have electronics from the 60's and 70's with electrolytics that hold up. If the manufacturing process is botched, something may go wrong. But you can end up with a mess also if you manfacture tants, micas, polypropylene, even ceramic disc capacitors incorrectly. "Solid" capacitors are more of a sure-fire thing, but they can fail, too.
Democrats => Authoritarian, Too pretentiously arrogant for a Constitution, e.g. individual rights
Republicans => Authoritarian, Too managerial for a Constitution, e.g. individual rights
If you don't like it, don't elect them. The big parties are all the same now excepting abortion.
When I vote, I see who's running, check to see whether the Libertarian is a good candidate (so far, soo good), and I go for it. There are lots of other small parties out there that represent exactly what you want in US government. Go for it! If you don't, you get what you ask for.
Correct.
...and I know that I wouldn't get it. But here's your sad end result: porn.
Now if they would now divert their attention elsewhere with that $50 million. Case closed!
A little side note here...
Sure, you have your DSLR cameras. You also have your point-and-shoots. However, just because a camera isn't a DSLR does NOT mean that you can call it a point-and-shoot. Take for example this camera. It classifies as neither. Just to keep everybody informed! (There still is a middle ground.)
Spelling correction:
conscious --> conscience