Strange, it seemed just the opposite in DAoC. On almost any raid, everyone would/stick to either the raid leader or their group leader (who would/stick to the raid leader). The result - one big massive blob.
The exception, of course, was in any situation where people expected to get AoEd. Then they would spread out. Don't want to get killed because you were too close to Leeeroy when he agroed the wrong mob. Even in realm vs. realm combat, most raids would travel in/stick formation and only spread out if they suspected a threat. The end result would be embarassing 8v150 ganks - mez, stun, AoE, AoE, AoE, 150 dead at the hands of a single group. In short, in my observation people only spread out in MMOs when there are practical reasons for doing so, such as not getting AoEd or being able to figure out which person in your group has agro from the big bad monsters.:)
That said, all of the "non-Quake3" models, art, and sounds are done from scratch to match the "original" art and sounds as best as possible, but there are definately differences. Wirehead couldn't just rip the models/skins and especially sounds from the original games. The end result is that Slipgater (Quake 1 character) rocket explosion sounds are just as wimpy as in Quake 2 and Quake 3, not the incredible room-shaking BOOM that Quake 1 explosives had.:(
More importantly, don't add people to your friends list you don't want to be able to see such news.
I laughed when I saw all the "Get rid of the new stalker tool" groups. Um, only people on your friends list get your news items. By joining those groups claiming the news feed was a "stalker tool", people readily said, "I added my stalkers to my friends list to artificially inflate my friend count." Way to go!
For every person angry about the news feed that blew it WAY out of proportion, there are ten people like myself that can now figure out why the heck someone appeared on our "Friends with updates" list.
"For edge flipping and other "positional" controls at the corners of the screen, I assume you are talking about Brightside. It works alongside GNOME 2.14. What more did you need it to do?"
The most recent version of Brightside (1.3.0) compiled fine against GNOME 2.12, but it doesn't even compile against 2.14. Even after 2.14 became marked as stable in Gentoo, Brightside still would not work. (BTW, ecatmur is a Gentoo user that has written many useful Gentoo utils. He obviously has stopped maintaining Brightside though.)
Take a guess when I finally gave up and switched over to KDE.:)
At the time this research project started (I happen to know one of the researchers, she was involved with RUSLUG when I was a grad student at Rutgers), the Xbox 360 was not yet available.
Unlike an old PC which can only be obtained by scrounging, Xboxes were readily available off the shelf. This system was designed to be as cheap as possible.
Unfortunately, like its predecessor in the "economy VR glove" market (the Mattel Power Glove), the VR glove used is no longer available to my knowledge.:(
That's basically what is happening, and in fact Dentara is ENCOURAGING it.
Dentara put a 1 billion ISK bounty on himself, bought a top-end ship with top-end gear (another 500mill to 1bill), and started PvPing with it, AND told everyone he was doing so (although not where).
Note that Dentara is not necessarily that good at PvP - I've heard he's gone boom quite a bit already. That money is already being distributed to those who kill him and those who sell high end gear on the market.
As long as Dentara does not try to sell any of the ISK for real life money, this goes forward without any intervention by CCP. What Dentara did sucks, but as it was done without any exploiting of game mechanics, it is 100% legit as far as CCP rules go, as long as that ISK either stays within the game or is used only to buy game time cards.
"These ISK's can be exchanged for legal tender, and in the USA, that is called Income and is subject to taxation."
It's surely called something else (I'm not sure exactly where it would fall within the legal system) when the exchange of that ISK for cash is forbidden by contract (the game's EULA).
I am sure CCP is watching Dentara Rast closely. For now, they are allowing the theft to go forward, as it does not violate the rules of the game.
If Dentara wishes to, he can buy a lifetime's worth of game time cards, which are the ONLY real life item you may trade for in-game items. That said, trying to buy that many GTCs would completely foul up the exchange rate of GTCs to ISK.
MP3s are a media file. They cannot (at least not normall) contain executable code. While there have been instances of buffer overflow exploits in the ID3 tag parsers of some MP3 player software, I don't believe anything beyond a proof-of-concept exploit was ever released before all of the major players released patches.
There are plenty of less trustworthy sources than MySpace to get MP3s, and so far to my knowledge, no one has ever gotten rooted by media content downloaded from P2P networks, they have only gotten rooted by less-than-reputable vendors of P2P clients or by executable content ("gamez, appz, and warez") downloaded from said networks.
Say what you want about MySpace (it's an utterly crap site run by incompetent morons...), but claiming that there is anything more than an infinitesimal risk of their MP3s infecting you is a stupid and baseless accusation. If it were technically feasible, it would've happened already on the P2P networks.
HP and Compaq are about the only vendors selling such systems (and since they are the same company, are effectively a single vendor), and their quality track record for consumer-grade units leaves MUCH to be desired (hence my comment of "NOT HP or Compaq". As to Compaq, would you buy from a vendor with their awful track record and can't even spell properly on their ordering page? "Core solor", what's that?
Also note that those systems you linked to both have 15" displays. No 17", and HP doesn't sell any 17" systems with Turions from the looks of the site you linked to. Compaq doesn't sell any 17" systems at all, and both of their highest end systems (the ones with Turion 64 X2s available and 15" widescreens) are crippled with graphics cards that are OLD. One unit only has a GeForce 6150 Go (A full generation behind the times), and the other only has Radeon XPRESS integrated graphics.
Whatever benefits the Turion 64s may have, they are unfortunately nullified by the fact that they are only put into junky lowend systems by vendors with either no reputation (nonames) or very bad reputation (HP, Compaq).
HP - See my previous comment. I don't consider HP to be a reputable vendor when it comes to consumer systems (consumer desktops and notebooks) - every HP notebook I've seen has been flimsy low-quality junk. No surprise, HP and Compaq are the same company!
Acer - It is honestly not possible to tell whether you are right in this regard. Acer doesn't let you shop based on system specs at all, they just provide you with a massive list of 20+ TravelMate model numbers and 20+ Aspire model numbers with no indication what number maps to what type of system without loading a description of EVERY SINGLE ONE. If a vendor can't even be bothered to organize their website properly, it's not a vendor I'm going to be ordering from.
Fujitsu - No 17" Turion 64 X2-based systems. In fact, no X2 systems at all, just a single low-end Turion 64 system with a 13.3" screen
If there are any Turion64 X2-based systems from reputable vendors, I can't find them. AMD's page which lists X2-based systems pretty much exclusively lists Compaq, HP, and a bunch of noname vendors.
It's sad - whatever merits the Turion 64 (and T64 X2) may have, they are made irrelevant by the fact that they are always bundled with low-end systems.
"Since amd have a lot of CPU with dual core on the store now. I would like to see a comparative with Intel and AMD dual core 64 bits CPU."
No they don't. The Turion 64 X2 was only released very recently, and to this day, good systems (read, NOT from HP or Compaq) with Turion 64s (let alone X2 variants) are hard to find. In fact, in March when I bought my new Core Duo-based Dell, it was simply not possible to find a Turion 64-based laptop with a 17" screen, reputable vendor or not.
Remember, this article is talking about mobile CPUs, not desktops, where Intel has had a very strong lead for quite a while. If you want to see a comparison of Conroe vs. Athlon 64 X2, that's been covered in depth in the past 1-2 months.
It doesn't really say (without having to dig up "MobileMark 2005" specifics) what the conditions are.
Just under 2 hours for both cores fully loaded at full clock speed is pretty good. I don't think any laptop made in the past 5-6 years could manage much more than 2 hours at full tilt.
Just under 2 hours idling at low clock speed would be awful though.
I know my Core Duo based Inspiron E1705 lasted about 2 hours per battery at medium load, full screen brightness (at one point I was doing power measurements, and moving from min to max brightness increased battery current draw by over 50%), max clock speed. (I had made a mistake in my power management configuration under Linux - The whole CPU currently gets clocked at the maximum desired speed, so if you have one core set to "powersave" and forget to change the second from "performance" to "powersave", the whole CPU is clocked at max speed and uses the appropriate voltage settings for max speed.)
Haven't had an occasion to do real-world battery testing (watching DVDs while traveling) since I fixed that issue.:)
Doesn't seem to have stopped NVidia or Atheros - They have had no trouble writing a small open-source "glue" module to handle the ABI problems and keep the rest closed.
Admittedly in the case of Atheros the "glue" is a far larger portion of the code (compared to the Atheros HAL) than in the case of the NVidia drivers. I haven't had a case where a kernel upgrade has kept me without functioning NVidia drivers for more than a day or two before someone patches the glue. The only case I've heard of "long term" breakage with NV's drivers is with the latest and greatest version of xorg. Given that xorg breaks compatibility on a pretty infrequent basis, I don't think this is a problem.
BTW, the NVidia and Atheros drivers are a perfect example of the sort of short-term compromises ESR is saying we should make.
That said, I have no problem reccommending any camera which uses standard memory (Basically SD or CF at the moment) because card readers (including many built-in ones now) are very well supported under Linux.
I had the original Canon Digital Elph. To this day I don't know whether it is supported under Linux or not - a PCMCIA-to-CF adapter was WAY faster than its USB connection under Windows and I assume the same would have happened under Linux.
I now have a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX1 (their top-of-the-line compact). I think it may appear as a USB mass storage device, but I'm not sure. I don't have the faintest clue whether it works under Linux or not - It uses SD memory and my laptop's SD reader does work under Linux, which means I don't have to cart around Yet Another Cable.
Yeah, it sounds like something that would be used on a Microsoft variant of MySpace (perhaps to automatically reduce privileges of predators?)
If it were ever applied to networking, it would most likely be a bandwidth reservation system that gives good uploaders more download bandwidth on a P2P network. That sounds kind of familiar, isn't there a P2P protocol out there that already does this? I can't remember what it's called, something about bits and torrents?:)
"BPO is a monopoly on an in-game item. (Well, there's 12-20 BluePrint Originals for each rare item). You normally win them in the in-game lottery, and it's the gift that keeps on giving. For WoW players, it'd be like purples not dropping and only being available from 1 player crafter per shard."
Not quite. To clarify to others: BPO means "Blueprint Original". To produce any item in EVE, you need a blueprint and raw materials. Originals may be used for production, may be researched to reduce material costs and production time to a certain degree (the limit being the maximum reprocessing value of that item. i.e. if a maxed out refiner reprocesses an item that was produced with no material wastage due to good research and producer skills, no materials are lost.) Last, BPOs can be copied.
Note that copies cannot be researched, cannot be copied again, and are limited to a certain number of production runs before they go poof. At one point copies could be used for unlimited production, and this killed the economy for at least a year and a half. While CCP made all new copies limited-run within a matter of a few months, the unlims were left ingame for at least another year before they were all converted to maximum-run-count copies.
In the game, there are currently three main classes of items: Tech 1 - The baseline. The Tech 1 (referred to usually as T1) variant of any item is typically the worst variant (except for some items which have "Civilian or Basic" variants) T1 BPOs are one of the few things that can be bought off of the NPC market. There is an effectively infinite supply, so any player with enough money to invest in a T1 BPO can start producing it. For a while there was almost no money to be made in T1 unless you were first on the market (see the above comment about unlimited copies, from here on referred to as BPCs) Now that all BPCs are limited-run, there is now money to be made from T1 items, although not huge amounts.
Named items - All better than T1 variants, with increased effectiveness and reduced fitting requirements. They are NPC drops only, and no BPOs exist. Occasionally BPCs for these may be given out in various manners.
Tech 2 (T2) - T2 items have improved effectiveness at the cost of increased fitting requirements. (The exception being ships - they are just plain Better, and also are designed for specialization.) Some named items are better than T2 variants, although this is rare. T2 items can only be produced from BPOs that are essentially given out in a lottery, where lottery "tickets" are purchased by running missions for special NPCs in the game to gain what are called research points. There are only approximately 20 BPOs for any given T2 item in existence in the game. Additional BPOs are only given out if a BPO owner gets banned or CCP finds that they have gone inactive or have left the game. (i.e. the BPO isn't being used.) Due to the limited supply, T2 BPOs mean massive profits even though the material costs can be quite high. The thread linked to is talking about potentially buying out all (or most) BPOs of a given item, establishing a full monopoly on that item. You may see references in the thread to HACs - That stands for Heavy Assault Cruiser, and that particular type of ship is increasing in popularity but supply is not changing, so HACs are climbing steadily in price (and profit for the BPO owners).
Actually, so far I have not seen any indication that it actually was a Ponzi scheme.
According to the guy who perpetrated the scheme (he's come clean, so why would he lie), EIB started out legitimate. It's perfectly believable, there are plenty of ways that a shrewd investor can make money in EVE. The best ways ingame to make lots of money are very capital-intensive.
In the end, Dentara Rast (the main character of EIB's founder Cally) decided that rather than running an investment bank, they just wanted to take all the money. Many (including myself) say that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy as soon as the scam accusations started.
Think something more along the lines of Enron than Ponzi.
CCP just released a MAJOR patch yesterday. (Unrelated to the scam, I've heard a little about it but since I wasn't involved didn't know any of the details.) Needless to say, the day after patch day isn't exactly the game's most stable time.:)
"You make a good point, but because it would be royalty free, you would think manufactures would start including it in an attempt to begin replacing mp3."
Probably because the engineering design and development costs, plus (potentially) the additional hardware costs to support another format, far exceed the royalties paid. What if adding Ogg bumps your firmware size from 256KB to 512KB? This may not seem like much, but back when I interned for Lucent's Business Communications Systems division (now Avaya) in the 90s, there was a near-eternal raging debate between the human factors people and the cost management people over using two LEDs versus one as indicators next to the line buttons of Lucent's phones for Definity systems. That's 5 LEDs at 5-10 cents apiece (or likely less in large volumes) on phones that started at $300-400 for a lowend model and went upwards from there.
No, he's talking about the combined resources of a fleet of players.
To be more clear, I recall the description by a player of one of these major sieges as involving a count in local of 300-500. That's 300-500 players from both sides, so assuming an approximately half and half distribution on the low end of that count, you have 150 people on one side. Divide $30k by 150 and you get an average value of $200 per person.
Hmm, at the current exchange rates (100 million ISK for a $15 game time card) that seems a little high. It translates to an average of over a billion ISK per player in ships, which seems high since almost no alliances have yet to actially field motherships or titans. (I think worth 10-20 billion ISK each, only a handful of motherships exist and so far titans in the hands of players are only rumors with no substantiating evidence, although I believe those rumors are true and the owners of those titans are holding them in reserve.) Dreadys and the low-end carriers cost about a billion each but comprise at most 1/3 of the fleet is my guess. The rest is support ships (battleships and smaller) and I would guess the average value of these including high-end fittings to be 500 mill ($75) each or less. The uninsured component of a fleet heavily fitted with rare modules would probably be around 2/3 of the value of the fleet, so the total value of the fleet were it all to be lost might be $10k.
Keep in mind that sale of ships and other ingame items for real life money is forbidden by CCP, and due to the nature of EVE game mechanics, doesn't really happen very often. Direct sale of ISK for real-life money is also forbidden and not common, as CCP *does* allow players to sell game time cards for ISK. Why buy money direct and risk getting banned when you can just do it legitimately?:) ISK farmers, whether for direct sale or for time cards, don't have much impact on the total game economy as the areas of the game that are the most profitable are fully under player control and a known or even suspected ISK farm team wouldn't last more than 30 minutes out in 0.0. Hell, they don't even last long in lowsec empire space. It's almost unheard of to see them anywhere beyond the absolute safest systems, which also happen to be the lowest profit systems by over an order of magnitude compared to 0.0.
Note that almost all of those monitors play the exact same content at the exact same time? Wonder how they get multiple sources in such perfect sync?
They don't. Almost always, they have one source that is going through a splitter to multiple display devices. This has two effects:
1) It degrades the signal quality 2) Not all display devices have the same display resolution, so some won't be running at native res
The end result is that frequently a monitor/TV with BEAUTIFUL display quality will look like shit in a store because its input signal is shit. At one point Best Buy had a sale on a monitor that had decent reviews and was at a great price. My dad and I went in and saw the quality of the monitor and became hesitant to purchase the unit. We asked a salesperson if we could see the monitor connected directly to an appropriate display source, as we had noticed they were being all fed from one computer. The salesperson said that they (sadly) could not do so, but if we were not happy with the unit we could easily return it.
We decided to take the risk of having to make a second 20 minute round trip to return the thing, and bought it and took it home.
The monitor is still on my parents' desk and isn't going to get replaced any time soon, as the display quality is amazing, despite looking like shit due to a bad input signal at the store.
Note that computer monitors typically tend to be higher quality (despite equivalent prices) than similarly sized HDTV monitors.
For example, the specs of the Dell 2405PFW 24" widescreen monitor blow away any "HDTV" in its price/size range. This is partly due to the lack of built-in tuners, but 95%+ of HDTV purchasers are going to be using external video sources (Computers, DVD players, cable boxes) anyway.
Even my old 18" Dell normal-aspect-ratio monitor (which was $500 back in around 2002-2003 and far less for an equivalent unit now, 20" widescreen units sell for less) blows away the LCD HDTVs in the sub-$1000 range I've seen. Most LCD HDTVs are only 1366x768 or so, not enough to display 1080i content at full resolution, and have worse viewing angles and contrast ratios than even midrange LCD PC monitors from four years ago.
"To win what, exactly--popularity? For free software advocates popularity is not a goal. Freedom is a goal, a goal that is not achieved by installing non-free software on one's computer."
In that regard, ESR is more of a realist than an idealist. From his opinions in the past, and also talking with him (Talking to him in person is EXTREMELY interesting) and seeing one of his lectures back from a year or so after The Cathedral and The Bazaar, I think he has always been a realist that considers open source to be preferable, but if short-term compromises have to be made for open source software to succeed in the long term (essentially what this article suggests), he has no problems and I don't think he ever had. Back in the time around his paper and stint of evangelism/advocacy, he had some stories about cases where he actually suggested to companies that they not go open-source as it had no actual benefits for them (and honestly would not have benefitted the community much either). The example that stands out in memory was a logging company that had some special control software for their log cutter. While ESR advocated they use open source in other parts of their business, he suggested that open sourcing their control software would not benefit them, would not benefit the community in general, and would cost them a significant amount. (Remember, taking a closed-source program open-source is rarely a simple as taking a CVS snapshot and posting it to the public - there are often numerous legal ramifications to doing so. See the initial state of Mozilla - Netscape took 3-4 months ripping out the stuff they didn't have exclusive rights to before releasing the code, and when it was released it was essentially crippleware.)
Keep in mind that the metal fuselage of the aircraft provides quite a bit of RF shielding and radiation pattern distortion, I would not be surprised if you could use a cell phone near a window but not from an aisle.
It's a fact that people HAVE used cell phones on airplanes before, and back in the old AMPS analog days, the problem of hitting multiple cells was much worse. Not only did it cause interference problems at the additional cells, it often cause people to be billed multiple times for the same call and other such oddities because the network was designed with the assumption that a phone could NEVER be heard from a distance greater than a certain amount.
In the case of GSM, there is an inherent limit on the distance of a phone from a tower, I forget the exact limit. It could potentially cause GSM phones to completely fail above a certain altitiude, but you only need 1000-2000 feet of altitude (extremely low for an airliner) for the assumptions used in designing cellular networks to all go out the window.
Slashdot Mirror
Strange, it seemed just the opposite in DAoC. On almost any raid, everyone would /stick to either the raid leader or their group leader (who would /stick to the raid leader). The result - one big massive blob.
/stick formation and only spread out if they suspected a threat. The end result would be embarassing 8v150 ganks - mez, stun, AoE, AoE, AoE, 150 dead at the hands of a single group. In short, in my observation people only spread out in MMOs when there are practical reasons for doing so, such as not getting AoEd or being able to figure out which person in your group has agro from the big bad monsters. :)
The exception, of course, was in any situation where people expected to get AoEd. Then they would spread out. Don't want to get killed because you were too close to Leeeroy when he agroed the wrong mob. Even in realm vs. realm combat, most raids would travel in
Generations is still around - http://www.wireheadstudios.org/generations/
:(
That said, all of the "non-Quake3" models, art, and sounds are done from scratch to match the "original" art and sounds as best as possible, but there are definately differences. Wirehead couldn't just rip the models/skins and especially sounds from the original games. The end result is that Slipgater (Quake 1 character) rocket explosion sounds are just as wimpy as in Quake 2 and Quake 3, not the incredible room-shaking BOOM that Quake 1 explosives had.
More importantly, don't add people to your friends list you don't want to be able to see such news.
I laughed when I saw all the "Get rid of the new stalker tool" groups. Um, only people on your friends list get your news items. By joining those groups claiming the news feed was a "stalker tool", people readily said, "I added my stalkers to my friends list to artificially inflate my friend count." Way to go!
For every person angry about the news feed that blew it WAY out of proportion, there are ten people like myself that can now figure out why the heck someone appeared on our "Friends with updates" list.
"For edge flipping and other "positional" controls at the corners of the screen, I assume you are talking about Brightside. It works alongside GNOME 2.14. What more did you need it to do?"
:)
The most recent version of Brightside (1.3.0) compiled fine against GNOME 2.12, but it doesn't even compile against 2.14. Even after 2.14 became marked as stable in Gentoo, Brightside still would not work. (BTW, ecatmur is a Gentoo user that has written many useful Gentoo utils. He obviously has stopped maintaining Brightside though.)
Take a guess when I finally gave up and switched over to KDE.
At the time this research project started (I happen to know one of the researchers, she was involved with RUSLUG when I was a grad student at Rutgers), the Xbox 360 was not yet available.
:(
Unlike an old PC which can only be obtained by scrounging, Xboxes were readily available off the shelf. This system was designed to be as cheap as possible.
Unfortunately, like its predecessor in the "economy VR glove" market (the Mattel Power Glove), the VR glove used is no longer available to my knowledge.
That's basically what is happening, and in fact Dentara is ENCOURAGING it.
Dentara put a 1 billion ISK bounty on himself, bought a top-end ship with top-end gear (another 500mill to 1bill), and started PvPing with it, AND told everyone he was doing so (although not where).
Note that Dentara is not necessarily that good at PvP - I've heard he's gone boom quite a bit already. That money is already being distributed to those who kill him and those who sell high end gear on the market.
As long as Dentara does not try to sell any of the ISK for real life money, this goes forward without any intervention by CCP. What Dentara did sucks, but as it was done without any exploiting of game mechanics, it is 100% legit as far as CCP rules go, as long as that ISK either stays within the game or is used only to buy game time cards.
"These ISK's can be exchanged for legal tender, and in the USA, that is called Income and is subject to taxation."
It's surely called something else (I'm not sure exactly where it would fall within the legal system) when the exchange of that ISK for cash is forbidden by contract (the game's EULA).
I am sure CCP is watching Dentara Rast closely. For now, they are allowing the theft to go forward, as it does not violate the rules of the game.
If Dentara wishes to, he can buy a lifetime's worth of game time cards, which are the ONLY real life item you may trade for in-game items. That said, trying to buy that many GTCs would completely foul up the exchange rate of GTCs to ISK.
MP3s are a media file. They cannot (at least not normall) contain executable code. While there have been instances of buffer overflow exploits in the ID3 tag parsers of some MP3 player software, I don't believe anything beyond a proof-of-concept exploit was ever released before all of the major players released patches.
There are plenty of less trustworthy sources than MySpace to get MP3s, and so far to my knowledge, no one has ever gotten rooted by media content downloaded from P2P networks, they have only gotten rooted by less-than-reputable vendors of P2P clients or by executable content ("gamez, appz, and warez") downloaded from said networks.
Say what you want about MySpace (it's an utterly crap site run by incompetent morons...), but claiming that there is anything more than an infinitesimal risk of their MP3s infecting you is a stupid and baseless accusation. If it were technically feasible, it would've happened already on the P2P networks.
Did you bother to read the original post at all?
HP and Compaq are about the only vendors selling such systems (and since they are the same company, are effectively a single vendor), and their quality track record for consumer-grade units leaves MUCH to be desired (hence my comment of "NOT HP or Compaq". As to Compaq, would you buy from a vendor with their awful track record and can't even spell properly on their ordering page? "Core solor", what's that?
Also note that those systems you linked to both have 15" displays. No 17", and HP doesn't sell any 17" systems with Turions from the looks of the site you linked to. Compaq doesn't sell any 17" systems at all, and both of their highest end systems (the ones with Turion 64 X2s available and 15" widescreens) are crippled with graphics cards that are OLD. One unit only has a GeForce 6150 Go (A full generation behind the times), and the other only has Radeon XPRESS integrated graphics.
Whatever benefits the Turion 64s may have, they are unfortunately nullified by the fact that they are only put into junky lowend systems by vendors with either no reputation (nonames) or very bad reputation (HP, Compaq).
Asus - http://usa.asus.com/products2.aspx?l1=5&l2=70 - Not a single AMD-based 17" notebook. In fact, even in their other size ranges, no AMD CPUs
HP - See my previous comment. I don't consider HP to be a reputable vendor when it comes to consumer systems (consumer desktops and notebooks) - every HP notebook I've seen has been flimsy low-quality junk. No surprise, HP and Compaq are the same company!
Acer - It is honestly not possible to tell whether you are right in this regard. Acer doesn't let you shop based on system specs at all, they just provide you with a massive list of 20+ TravelMate model numbers and 20+ Aspire model numbers with no indication what number maps to what type of system without loading a description of EVERY SINGLE ONE. If a vendor can't even be bothered to organize their website properly, it's not a vendor I'm going to be ordering from.
Fujitsu - No 17" Turion 64 X2-based systems. In fact, no X2 systems at all, just a single low-end Turion 64 system with a 13.3" screen
If there are any Turion64 X2-based systems from reputable vendors, I can't find them. AMD's page which lists X2-based systems pretty much exclusively lists Compaq, HP, and a bunch of noname vendors.
It's sad - whatever merits the Turion 64 (and T64 X2) may have, they are made irrelevant by the fact that they are always bundled with low-end systems.
"Since amd have a lot of CPU with dual core on the store now. I would like to see a comparative with Intel and AMD dual core 64 bits CPU."
No they don't. The Turion 64 X2 was only released very recently, and to this day, good systems (read, NOT from HP or Compaq) with Turion 64s (let alone X2 variants) are hard to find. In fact, in March when I bought my new Core Duo-based Dell, it was simply not possible to find a Turion 64-based laptop with a 17" screen, reputable vendor or not.
Remember, this article is talking about mobile CPUs, not desktops, where Intel has had a very strong lead for quite a while. If you want to see a comparison of Conroe vs. Athlon 64 X2, that's been covered in depth in the past 1-2 months.
It doesn't really say (without having to dig up "MobileMark 2005" specifics) what the conditions are.
:)
Just under 2 hours for both cores fully loaded at full clock speed is pretty good. I don't think any laptop made in the past 5-6 years could manage much more than 2 hours at full tilt.
Just under 2 hours idling at low clock speed would be awful though.
I know my Core Duo based Inspiron E1705 lasted about 2 hours per battery at medium load, full screen brightness (at one point I was doing power measurements, and moving from min to max brightness increased battery current draw by over 50%), max clock speed. (I had made a mistake in my power management configuration under Linux - The whole CPU currently gets clocked at the maximum desired speed, so if you have one core set to "powersave" and forget to change the second from "performance" to "powersave", the whole CPU is clocked at max speed and uses the appropriate voltage settings for max speed.)
Haven't had an occasion to do real-world battery testing (watching DVDs while traveling) since I fixed that issue.
Doesn't seem to have stopped NVidia or Atheros - They have had no trouble writing a small open-source "glue" module to handle the ABI problems and keep the rest closed.
Admittedly in the case of Atheros the "glue" is a far larger portion of the code (compared to the Atheros HAL) than in the case of the NVidia drivers. I haven't had a case where a kernel upgrade has kept me without functioning NVidia drivers for more than a day or two before someone patches the glue. The only case I've heard of "long term" breakage with NV's drivers is with the latest and greatest version of xorg. Given that xorg breaks compatibility on a pretty infrequent basis, I don't think this is a problem.
BTW, the NVidia and Atheros drivers are a perfect example of the sort of short-term compromises ESR is saying we should make.
Only their high end units do CF.
That said, I have no problem reccommending any camera which uses standard memory (Basically SD or CF at the moment) because card readers (including many built-in ones now) are very well supported under Linux.
I had the original Canon Digital Elph. To this day I don't know whether it is supported under Linux or not - a PCMCIA-to-CF adapter was WAY faster than its USB connection under Windows and I assume the same would have happened under Linux.
I now have a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX1 (their top-of-the-line compact). I think it may appear as a USB mass storage device, but I'm not sure. I don't have the faintest clue whether it works under Linux or not - It uses SD memory and my laptop's SD reader does work under Linux, which means I don't have to cart around Yet Another Cable.
Yeah, it sounds like something that would be used on a Microsoft variant of MySpace (perhaps to automatically reduce privileges of predators?)
:)
If it were ever applied to networking, it would most likely be a bandwidth reservation system that gives good uploaders more download bandwidth on a P2P network. That sounds kind of familiar, isn't there a P2P protocol out there that already does this? I can't remember what it's called, something about bits and torrents?
"BPO is a monopoly on an in-game item. (Well, there's 12-20 BluePrint Originals for each rare item). You normally win them in the in-game lottery, and it's the gift that keeps on giving. For WoW players, it'd be like purples not dropping and only being available from 1 player crafter per shard."
Not quite. To clarify to others: BPO means "Blueprint Original". To produce any item in EVE, you need a blueprint and raw materials. Originals may be used for production, may be researched to reduce material costs and production time to a certain degree (the limit being the maximum reprocessing value of that item. i.e. if a maxed out refiner reprocesses an item that was produced with no material wastage due to good research and producer skills, no materials are lost.) Last, BPOs can be copied.
Note that copies cannot be researched, cannot be copied again, and are limited to a certain number of production runs before they go poof. At one point copies could be used for unlimited production, and this killed the economy for at least a year and a half. While CCP made all new copies limited-run within a matter of a few months, the unlims were left ingame for at least another year before they were all converted to maximum-run-count copies.
In the game, there are currently three main classes of items:
Tech 1 - The baseline. The Tech 1 (referred to usually as T1) variant of any item is typically the worst variant (except for some items which have "Civilian or Basic" variants) T1 BPOs are one of the few things that can be bought off of the NPC market. There is an effectively infinite supply, so any player with enough money to invest in a T1 BPO can start producing it. For a while there was almost no money to be made in T1 unless you were first on the market (see the above comment about unlimited copies, from here on referred to as BPCs) Now that all BPCs are limited-run, there is now money to be made from T1 items, although not huge amounts.
Named items - All better than T1 variants, with increased effectiveness and reduced fitting requirements. They are NPC drops only, and no BPOs exist. Occasionally BPCs for these may be given out in various manners.
Tech 2 (T2) - T2 items have improved effectiveness at the cost of increased fitting requirements. (The exception being ships - they are just plain Better, and also are designed for specialization.) Some named items are better than T2 variants, although this is rare. T2 items can only be produced from BPOs that are essentially given out in a lottery, where lottery "tickets" are purchased by running missions for special NPCs in the game to gain what are called research points. There are only approximately 20 BPOs for any given T2 item in existence in the game. Additional BPOs are only given out if a BPO owner gets banned or CCP finds that they have gone inactive or have left the game. (i.e. the BPO isn't being used.) Due to the limited supply, T2 BPOs mean massive profits even though the material costs can be quite high. The thread linked to is talking about potentially buying out all (or most) BPOs of a given item, establishing a full monopoly on that item. You may see references in the thread to HACs - That stands for Heavy Assault Cruiser, and that particular type of ship is increasing in popularity but supply is not changing, so HACs are climbing steadily in price (and profit for the BPO owners).
Actually, so far I have not seen any indication that it actually was a Ponzi scheme.
According to the guy who perpetrated the scheme (he's come clean, so why would he lie), EIB started out legitimate. It's perfectly believable, there are plenty of ways that a shrewd investor can make money in EVE. The best ways ingame to make lots of money are very capital-intensive.
In the end, Dentara Rast (the main character of EIB's founder Cally) decided that rather than running an investment bank, they just wanted to take all the money. Many (including myself) say that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy as soon as the scam accusations started.
Think something more along the lines of Enron than Ponzi.
CCP just released a MAJOR patch yesterday. (Unrelated to the scam, I've heard a little about it but since I wasn't involved didn't know any of the details.) Needless to say, the day after patch day isn't exactly the game's most stable time. :)
"You make a good point, but because it would be royalty free, you would think manufactures would start including it in an attempt to begin replacing mp3."
Probably because the engineering design and development costs, plus (potentially) the additional hardware costs to support another format, far exceed the royalties paid. What if adding Ogg bumps your firmware size from 256KB to 512KB? This may not seem like much, but back when I interned for Lucent's Business Communications Systems division (now Avaya) in the 90s, there was a near-eternal raging debate between the human factors people and the cost management people over using two LEDs versus one as indicators next to the line buttons of Lucent's phones for Definity systems. That's 5 LEDs at 5-10 cents apiece (or likely less in large volumes) on phones that started at $300-400 for a lowend model and went upwards from there.
No, he's talking about the combined resources of a fleet of players.
:) ISK farmers, whether for direct sale or for time cards, don't have much impact on the total game economy as the areas of the game that are the most profitable are fully under player control and a known or even suspected ISK farm team wouldn't last more than 30 minutes out in 0.0. Hell, they don't even last long in lowsec empire space. It's almost unheard of to see them anywhere beyond the absolute safest systems, which also happen to be the lowest profit systems by over an order of magnitude compared to 0.0.
To be more clear, I recall the description by a player of one of these major sieges as involving a count in local of 300-500. That's 300-500 players from both sides, so assuming an approximately half and half distribution on the low end of that count, you have 150 people on one side. Divide $30k by 150 and you get an average value of $200 per person.
Hmm, at the current exchange rates (100 million ISK for a $15 game time card) that seems a little high. It translates to an average of over a billion ISK per player in ships, which seems high since almost no alliances have yet to actially field motherships or titans. (I think worth 10-20 billion ISK each, only a handful of motherships exist and so far titans in the hands of players are only rumors with no substantiating evidence, although I believe those rumors are true and the owners of those titans are holding them in reserve.) Dreadys and the low-end carriers cost about a billion each but comprise at most 1/3 of the fleet is my guess. The rest is support ships (battleships and smaller) and I would guess the average value of these including high-end fittings to be 500 mill ($75) each or less. The uninsured component of a fleet heavily fitted with rare modules would probably be around 2/3 of the value of the fleet, so the total value of the fleet were it all to be lost might be $10k.
Keep in mind that sale of ships and other ingame items for real life money is forbidden by CCP, and due to the nature of EVE game mechanics, doesn't really happen very often. Direct sale of ISK for real-life money is also forbidden and not common, as CCP *does* allow players to sell game time cards for ISK. Why buy money direct and risk getting banned when you can just do it legitimately?
Note that almost all of those monitors play the exact same content at the exact same time? Wonder how they get multiple sources in such perfect sync?
They don't. Almost always, they have one source that is going through a splitter to multiple display devices. This has two effects:
1) It degrades the signal quality
2) Not all display devices have the same display resolution, so some won't be running at native res
The end result is that frequently a monitor/TV with BEAUTIFUL display quality will look like shit in a store because its input signal is shit. At one point Best Buy had a sale on a monitor that had decent reviews and was at a great price. My dad and I went in and saw the quality of the monitor and became hesitant to purchase the unit. We asked a salesperson if we could see the monitor connected directly to an appropriate display source, as we had noticed they were being all fed from one computer. The salesperson said that they (sadly) could not do so, but if we were not happy with the unit we could easily return it.
We decided to take the risk of having to make a second 20 minute round trip to return the thing, and bought it and took it home.
The monitor is still on my parents' desk and isn't going to get replaced any time soon, as the display quality is amazing, despite looking like shit due to a bad input signal at the store.
Note that computer monitors typically tend to be higher quality (despite equivalent prices) than similarly sized HDTV monitors.
For example, the specs of the Dell 2405PFW 24" widescreen monitor blow away any "HDTV" in its price/size range. This is partly due to the lack of built-in tuners, but 95%+ of HDTV purchasers are going to be using external video sources (Computers, DVD players, cable boxes) anyway.
Even my old 18" Dell normal-aspect-ratio monitor (which was $500 back in around 2002-2003 and far less for an equivalent unit now, 20" widescreen units sell for less) blows away the LCD HDTVs in the sub-$1000 range I've seen. Most LCD HDTVs are only 1366x768 or so, not enough to display 1080i content at full resolution, and have worse viewing angles and contrast ratios than even midrange LCD PC monitors from four years ago.
"To win what, exactly--popularity? For free software advocates popularity is not a goal. Freedom is a goal, a goal that is not achieved by installing non-free software on one's computer."
In that regard, ESR is more of a realist than an idealist. From his opinions in the past, and also talking with him (Talking to him in person is EXTREMELY interesting) and seeing one of his lectures back from a year or so after The Cathedral and The Bazaar, I think he has always been a realist that considers open source to be preferable, but if short-term compromises have to be made for open source software to succeed in the long term (essentially what this article suggests), he has no problems and I don't think he ever had. Back in the time around his paper and stint of evangelism/advocacy, he had some stories about cases where he actually suggested to companies that they not go open-source as it had no actual benefits for them (and honestly would not have benefitted the community much either). The example that stands out in memory was a logging company that had some special control software for their log cutter. While ESR advocated they use open source in other parts of their business, he suggested that open sourcing their control software would not benefit them, would not benefit the community in general, and would cost them a significant amount. (Remember, taking a closed-source program open-source is rarely a simple as taking a CVS snapshot and posting it to the public - there are often numerous legal ramifications to doing so. See the initial state of Mozilla - Netscape took 3-4 months ripping out the stuff they didn't have exclusive rights to before releasing the code, and when it was released it was essentially crippleware.)
Was he near a window or not?
Keep in mind that the metal fuselage of the aircraft provides quite a bit of RF shielding and radiation pattern distortion, I would not be surprised if you could use a cell phone near a window but not from an aisle.
It's a fact that people HAVE used cell phones on airplanes before, and back in the old AMPS analog days, the problem of hitting multiple cells was much worse. Not only did it cause interference problems at the additional cells, it often cause people to be billed multiple times for the same call and other such oddities because the network was designed with the assumption that a phone could NEVER be heard from a distance greater than a certain amount.
In the case of GSM, there is an inherent limit on the distance of a phone from a tower, I forget the exact limit. It could potentially cause GSM phones to completely fail above a certain altitiude, but you only need 1000-2000 feet of altitude (extremely low for an airliner) for the assumptions used in designing cellular networks to all go out the window.