Your motherboard manufacturer could stick with the same capacitor manufacturer safely (most likely) unless the manufacturer was a REALLY shady company.
What happened was that a few years ago, it was discovered that one of the electrolyte manufacturers (basically a supplier to the capacitor manufacturers) was using a substandard mixture. By the time this was discovered, almost all capacitor manufacturers had bought at least some of the substandard electrolyte. A few years later, it's becoming obvious which capacitors used electrolyte from that bad batch (or batches.)
I forget most of the details, but even many of the traditionally reputable capacitor manufacturers were affected to some degree.
You have pymusique and its descendants (at least used to - not sure if SharpMusique, etc work anymore. I haven't purchased anything in a few months, basically not since the Slurpee/iTunes free music partnership ended.). AAC is an open standard as long as it's not DRMed, and in the case of pymusique and its descendants, you get un-DRMed AAC.
8 hours - That's pushing it with basically any reasonably sized device these days.
I have managed to get 5-6 hours of video playback out of my Treo 650 though, with approx. 36% battery left.
Carry a second battery for the 650 (they're small) and you can exceed 8 hours. Since the 650 has nonvolatile storage, you can swap batteries without consequences.
As to the ROKR - $149.99 with contract for a regular cell phone that happens to also play a limit of 100 MP3s, vs. $249.99 with contract for a combination PDA/phone that does video playback, email, web browsing, games, and music playback with no limit on the number of songs. No wonder the ROKR failed.
What crackhead would release an MP3 player with an artificial 100 song limit? The only reason to put a 100 song limit on a device is if you want to utterly kill it in the market.
Also, you can't seem to be able to temporarily buy extra votes once your subscription has started.
Transgaming needs to change their voting system - Rather than having a -3 to +3 range where users can select any of the choices, voters should be limited to only allocating X points between the available options. This will force people to choose actual priorities, rather than +3ing everything they like and -3ing everything they don't like.
"At least some ATI models are fully supported by the DRI project."
No they aren't. Not even close. Stuff like S3TC texture compression (Required for nearly any game made in the past 3-4 years or so) and numerous other features are missing. This is why Unreal Tournament 2003 was only playable on NVidia boards for a while until ATI released updated binary drivers - The open-source drivers just didn't support the features needed for even remotely modern applications. This is sadly the case with ALL 3D video cards. ATI is no better than NVidia in this respect, and in fact is worse because their closed-source drivers are bug-ridden shit. (Heck, they are under Windows too... It's scary how many people have to switch driver versions because Game A will only work with driver versions X and below, while Game B will only work with driver versions Y and above.)
Maybe you should read the post YOU replied to again.
His point was that there isn't really any choice. ATI doesn't publish source to their drivers either. In addition to that, their closed-source drivers UTTERLY SUCK.
This isn't entirely true - both ATI and NVidia have basic open-source drivers available. In both cases, they are missing many features critical to performance, and if you use the open-source drivers there is no difference between your video card and el-cheapo onboard integrated video. Same goes for every other chipset out there. Unfortunately, in all cases, it's not solely the decision of the video card chipset manufacturer, as they are licensing technologies from other companies that prevent an open-source implementation. If you have any need for 3D acceleration, there is no reason not to choose NVidia because of their closed-source drivers - there isn't a single manufacturer that has open-source drivers with modern 3D acceleration capabilities.
While Cerf is deserving of an award, its value is (IMO) diminished due to the number of people Bush has given it to. He's been basically giving them out like candy (and publicizing it) over the past two years, I'm getting the impression he's given out more than many of his predecessors combined. I hear about this medal in the media all the time now, it was never publicized much with previous presidents in recent history.
And as another poster said, while Cerf deserves the award for past accomplishments, he should have been given the award long ago. Cerf receiving the award now amounts to a kiss-up bribe from Bush to get Cerf's support for continued US control of the DNS system.
The carrier frequency is in the 900 MHz range, but the signal bandwidth used is signficantly less than that.
That said, any performance metric for power/spectral efficiency that doesn't involve SNR at the receiver is worthless. Any performance metric that states a linear relationship between wattage and achievable data rate is total bullshit, given that the relationship between achievable data rate and SNR is logarithmic, not linear.
Also, I don't know how far away WiMax is from the Shannon limit, but I'm 100% positive they're less than 30 dB away. Thus, it is impossible to be 1000 times more efficient than WiMax, because that would require this new technology to be breaking Shannon's Law.
You've always been able to mount filesystems as a normal user if you set up your fstab correctly. You will never be able to do so without some sort of prior configuration because it's a massive security risk if any user can mount/unmount any FS.
FUSE has nothing to do with security or user permissions for mounting. FUSE allows filesystem drivers to be run in userspace (most likely still with root permissions) rather than forcing them to be compiled into the kernel or loaded as a kernel module. (Similar to binfmt_misc for "executables", where the kernel does not directly execute certain executable files, but can be told which userspace program it can call in order to execute it.)
And if anything, it's worse. performing DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing - this fiber most likely carries 1024 or more slower channels that add up to a total 1 Tb/sec capacity) is difficult, more difficult than taking seperate fibers and connecting them to individual machines.
We don't know what side effects delta 32 might have. (Although the fact that there doesn't yet seem to be evidence of a higher prevalence of any diseases among the populations with high numbers of delta 32 mutations is a good sign.)
As to expressing the genes - It's a lot easier to get a cell coating protein expressed than one that affects the whole body. In this case, it might be possible to only modify the precursors to white blood cells, creating HIV-immune white blood cells. Once the white blood cells (specifically CD4 T-cells if I recall correctly) are protected, HIV is no longer such a big problem. HIV stops being such a nasty virus once its ability to compromise the immune system is removed. I've always wondered why medical researchers have never taken such an approach - rather than try to wipe out the virus with drugs, find a way to modify CD4 cells so that HIV can't attack them, and then let the (no longer compromisable) immune system clean up the virus.
As the parent to my post said, plague can be treated. While some of the linked articles note many similarities between plague and AIDS in the methods they use to attack the body, there is one key difference between the two. AIDS is viral, plague is bacterial. As a result, plague can be treated easily with modern antibiotics. Thus, providing immunity to plague as a side effect of AIDS immunity is not relevant, since plague can already be treated.
So far, the art of modifying a person's genetic makeup is in its infancy. (In face, I'm not sure if it has ever even been done yet... Too much controversy, plus humans are much more complex than most of the organisms which have been modified with the most success, such as single celled bacteria which humans have been tweaking since the mid to late 1970s.)
The biggest significance of this article (the plague->CCR5 delta 32 connection) is that as a result of plague outbreaks hundreds of years ago, the delta 32 gene was selected in large portions of exposed populations. (Such as Europeans and descendants of Europeans). The mutation may not have been common enough to be discovered if not for that selection occuring in recent history.
As someone who uses syringes multiple times a day (type 1 diabetic), a 5cc syringe is HUGE!
I use 3/10cc on a regular basis.
Finding a 5cc syringe legally is going to be tough. Well, finding ANY syring 100% legally will be tough, but at least the sub-CC ones can usually be obtained from one of your diabetic friends.:) I'm pretty sure insulin syringes are the most common syringes in existence, as Type 1 diabetes the most common disease that can be treated only with injections.
If you remember what these are (I bet the young'uns may not in the DVD area), these make an excellent laptop stand. Put the back of the laptop on the tape, let the front of the laptop sit on your table. Not only will it improve cooling, it will put your keyboard at a more comfortable angle.
Other solutions - Make sure your heatsink and fans are clean. If your laptop used to be fine and is now overheating, it is probably because of dust accumulation. Also potentially use a software solution that increases fan speed. I use i8kFanGUI on my Dell Inspiron 8200 under Windows, and i8kmon from i8ktools under Linux. Both allow you to increase the fan speed above BIOS defaults, yet retain temperature control. (The BIOS defaults tend towards allowing a very hot machine.) As posted by others, "always-on" solutions will wear out your fans early. If you hear any signs that your fans are dying (buzzing, etc), replace them. Almost all laptop manufacturers sell replacement fans.
Any modern OS lets you change the DPI settings for your fonts, so that you can run 1600x1200 on a 15" display without having microscopic text. My Dell Inspiron 8200 has a screen with those exact specs.
Of course, it's an LCD, so its viewable area is approximately equivalent to a 17" CRT.
They work better than the Ryckebush hardware posted in the original article (I would know, I wasted probably $50-100 in building the hardware and trying to tweak it to get it to work well). The Philips HN100s and HN110s (same thing except different style as far as I can tell) are only $15 INCLUDING shipping on eBay if you look hard enough.
Far better battery life than the Ryckebush design (40ish hours on a single AAA instead of 2-3 hours AT BEST on a pair of expensive 9vs), somewhat better cancellation, and far more compact and better looking (important when going through airline security, my homebuilts basically became useless to me after 9/11).
There are too many challenges involved in doing it in PC hardware when it can be done so cheaply with off-the-shelf headphones. In THEORY, PC hardware could deliver incredibly good cancellation using some adaptive noise cancellation techniques, but 99%+ of PC sound cards are not of sufficient quality for this to work. Having sample-accurate synchronization between input and output is critical, but apparently most sound cards just don't do this. (I've looked into doing acoustic echo cancellation for audio conferencing, which has similar hardware requirements. Most PC sound cards just aren't up to the task.)
While the electromagnetic spectrum is in theory infinite, the physically usable spectrum is finite.
We have at most 20-24 GHz of economically usable bandwidth. For some applications (point-to-multipoint broadcast), LOS restrictions and the difficulty of generating appreciable amounts of power at higher microwave frequencies limits us to far less than that.
Honestly, the only economical transceivers I know of that work above the 5.8 GHz ISM band are specialty devices not well suited to communications. (Gunn diode and magnetron sources at 10 GHz and 24 GHz. Good for radar, not good for communications due to large amounts of noise and frequency drift.) Generating more than a few milliwatts above 5.8 GHz is HARD and expensive! To handle high power, an amplifying device (i.e. transistor) must be large, but at microwave frequencies, the device size is a more significant portion of the wavelength of the frequency to be amplified. Developing more than a watt or so at 2.4 GHz and above requires either hundreds of dollars, or specialty vacuum tubes (magnetrons as used in microwave ovens, or traveling wave tubes.) Note that magnetrons are very noisy and unstable sources that are useless for all but Morse code communications.
Anyone who things the FCC can be made obsolete in less than 50-100 years is ignorant to the realities of communications systems and RF engineering. Software defined radios are a big step forward, but they're still best considered to be an infant technology. The only SDRs that are actually in use today are by people who ABSOLUTELY need the flexibility *at any cost* (read: military applications). Broadband RF design techniques and high-speed general-purpose DSPs needed for a flexible SDR designs exist, but both broadband RF design and high-speed general-purpose DSPs are EXPENSIVE.
Even 50-100 years from now, we're going to still need the FCC to make sure that people's SDRs play nicely with each other, otherwise (as a previous poster mentioned) someone will fire up a multi-kilowatt spark gap attached to a microcontroller and call it a "smart radio".
Slashdot Mirror
Your motherboard manufacturer could stick with the same capacitor manufacturer safely (most likely) unless the manufacturer was a REALLY shady company.
What happened was that a few years ago, it was discovered that one of the electrolyte manufacturers (basically a supplier to the capacitor manufacturers) was using a substandard mixture. By the time this was discovered, almost all capacitor manufacturers had bought at least some of the substandard electrolyte. A few years later, it's becoming obvious which capacitors used electrolyte from that bad batch (or batches.)
I forget most of the details, but even many of the traditionally reputable capacitor manufacturers were affected to some degree.
You have pymusique and its descendants (at least used to - not sure if SharpMusique, etc work anymore. I haven't purchased anything in a few months, basically not since the Slurpee/iTunes free music partnership ended.). AAC is an open standard as long as it's not DRMed, and in the case of pymusique and its descendants, you get un-DRMed AAC.
8 hours - That's pushing it with basically any reasonably sized device these days.
I have managed to get 5-6 hours of video playback out of my Treo 650 though, with approx. 36% battery left.
Carry a second battery for the 650 (they're small) and you can exceed 8 hours. Since the 650 has nonvolatile storage, you can swap batteries without consequences.
As to the ROKR - $149.99 with contract for a regular cell phone that happens to also play a limit of 100 MP3s, vs. $249.99 with contract for a combination PDA/phone that does video playback, email, web browsing, games, and music playback with no limit on the number of songs. No wonder the ROKR failed.
What crackhead would release an MP3 player with an artificial 100 song limit? The only reason to put a 100 song limit on a device is if you want to utterly kill it in the market.
Also, you can't seem to be able to temporarily buy extra votes once your subscription has started.
Transgaming needs to change their voting system - Rather than having a -3 to +3 range where users can select any of the choices, voters should be limited to only allocating X points between the available options. This will force people to choose actual priorities, rather than +3ing everything they like and -3ing everything they don't like.
"At least some ATI models are fully supported by the DRI project."
No they aren't. Not even close. Stuff like S3TC texture compression (Required for nearly any game made in the past 3-4 years or so) and numerous other features are missing. This is why Unreal Tournament 2003 was only playable on NVidia boards for a while until ATI released updated binary drivers - The open-source drivers just didn't support the features needed for even remotely modern applications. This is sadly the case with ALL 3D video cards. ATI is no better than NVidia in this respect, and in fact is worse because their closed-source drivers are bug-ridden shit. (Heck, they are under Windows too... It's scary how many people have to switch driver versions because Game A will only work with driver versions X and below, while Game B will only work with driver versions Y and above.)
Hasn't ATI ever heard of regression testing???
Maybe you should read the post YOU replied to again.
His point was that there isn't really any choice. ATI doesn't publish source to their drivers either. In addition to that, their closed-source drivers UTTERLY SUCK.
This isn't entirely true - both ATI and NVidia have basic open-source drivers available. In both cases, they are missing many features critical to performance, and if you use the open-source drivers there is no difference between your video card and el-cheapo onboard integrated video. Same goes for every other chipset out there. Unfortunately, in all cases, it's not solely the decision of the video card chipset manufacturer, as they are licensing technologies from other companies that prevent an open-source implementation. If you have any need for 3D acceleration, there is no reason not to choose NVidia because of their closed-source drivers - there isn't a single manufacturer that has open-source drivers with modern 3D acceleration capabilities.
While Cerf is deserving of an award, its value is (IMO) diminished due to the number of people Bush has given it to. He's been basically giving them out like candy (and publicizing it) over the past two years, I'm getting the impression he's given out more than many of his predecessors combined. I hear about this medal in the media all the time now, it was never publicized much with previous presidents in recent history.
And as another poster said, while Cerf deserves the award for past accomplishments, he should have been given the award long ago. Cerf receiving the award now amounts to a kiss-up bribe from Bush to get Cerf's support for continued US control of the DNS system.
Sams Club and Wal-Mart are the same company.
The carrier frequency is in the 900 MHz range, but the signal bandwidth used is signficantly less than that.
That said, any performance metric for power/spectral efficiency that doesn't involve SNR at the receiver is worthless. Any performance metric that states a linear relationship between wattage and achievable data rate is total bullshit, given that the relationship between achievable data rate and SNR is logarithmic, not linear.
Also, I don't know how far away WiMax is from the Shannon limit, but I'm 100% positive they're less than 30 dB away. Thus, it is impossible to be 1000 times more efficient than WiMax, because that would require this new technology to be breaking Shannon's Law.
And look up Shannon's Law.
Guess who the stupid one is in this case?
They fixed SBP2 device removal!
(Previously, removing the SBP2, aka IEEE 1394 storage device, driver from the kernel had a habit of doing Bad Things.)
You've always been able to mount filesystems as a normal user if you set up your fstab correctly. You will never be able to do so without some sort of prior configuration because it's a massive security risk if any user can mount/unmount any FS.
FUSE has nothing to do with security or user permissions for mounting. FUSE allows filesystem drivers to be run in userspace (most likely still with root permissions) rather than forcing them to be compiled into the kernel or loaded as a kernel module. (Similar to binfmt_misc for "executables", where the kernel does not directly execute certain executable files, but can be told which userspace program it can call in order to execute it.)
And if anything, it's worse. performing DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing - this fiber most likely carries 1024 or more slower channels that add up to a total 1 Tb/sec capacity) is difficult, more difficult than taking seperate fibers and connecting them to individual machines.
Tb = Terabit = 0.125 TB = 125 GB
We don't know what side effects delta 32 might have. (Although the fact that there doesn't yet seem to be evidence of a higher prevalence of any diseases among the populations with high numbers of delta 32 mutations is a good sign.)
As to expressing the genes - It's a lot easier to get a cell coating protein expressed than one that affects the whole body. In this case, it might be possible to only modify the precursors to white blood cells, creating HIV-immune white blood cells. Once the white blood cells (specifically CD4 T-cells if I recall correctly) are protected, HIV is no longer such a big problem. HIV stops being such a nasty virus once its ability to compromise the immune system is removed. I've always wondered why medical researchers have never taken such an approach - rather than try to wipe out the virus with drugs, find a way to modify CD4 cells so that HIV can't attack them, and then let the (no longer compromisable) immune system clean up the virus.
As the parent to my post said, plague can be treated. While some of the linked articles note many similarities between plague and AIDS in the methods they use to attack the body, there is one key difference between the two. AIDS is viral, plague is bacterial. As a result, plague can be treated easily with modern antibiotics. Thus, providing immunity to plague as a side effect of AIDS immunity is not relevant, since plague can already be treated.
So far, the art of modifying a person's genetic makeup is in its infancy. (In face, I'm not sure if it has ever even been done yet... Too much controversy, plus humans are much more complex than most of the organisms which have been modified with the most success, such as single celled bacteria which humans have been tweaking since the mid to late 1970s.)
The biggest significance of this article (the plague->CCR5 delta 32 connection) is that as a result of plague outbreaks hundreds of years ago, the delta 32 gene was selected in large portions of exposed populations. (Such as Europeans and descendants of Europeans). The mutation may not have been common enough to be discovered if not for that selection occuring in recent history.
Plague doesn't cause the mutation, it SELECTS the mutation.
i.e. if you don't have the mutation, plague won't give it to you. It just won't kill you even if you don't get treated if you have the mutation.
I know someone who contemplated joining the Navy, but decided against it because he couldn't bear being addressed as "Seaman Sample".
He wants to keep Joe Wardriver Leech out, but doesn't see a need to restrict his users.
As someone who uses syringes multiple times a day (type 1 diabetic), a 5cc syringe is HUGE!
:) I'm pretty sure insulin syringes are the most common syringes in existence, as Type 1 diabetes the most common disease that can be treated only with injections.
I use 3/10cc on a regular basis.
Finding a 5cc syringe legally is going to be tough. Well, finding ANY syring 100% legally will be tough, but at least the sub-CC ones can usually be obtained from one of your diabetic friends.
If you remember what these are (I bet the young'uns may not in the DVD area), these make an excellent laptop stand. Put the back of the laptop on the tape, let the front of the laptop sit on your table. Not only will it improve cooling, it will put your keyboard at a more comfortable angle.
Other solutions - Make sure your heatsink and fans are clean. If your laptop used to be fine and is now overheating, it is probably because of dust accumulation. Also potentially use a software solution that increases fan speed. I use i8kFanGUI on my Dell Inspiron 8200 under Windows, and i8kmon from i8ktools under Linux. Both allow you to increase the fan speed above BIOS defaults, yet retain temperature control. (The BIOS defaults tend towards allowing a very hot machine.) As posted by others, "always-on" solutions will wear out your fans early. If you hear any signs that your fans are dying (buzzing, etc), replace them. Almost all laptop manufacturers sell replacement fans.
Any modern OS lets you change the DPI settings for your fonts, so that you can run 1600x1200 on a 15" display without having microscopic text. My Dell Inspiron 8200 has a screen with those exact specs.
Of course, it's an LCD, so its viewable area is approximately equivalent to a 17" CRT.
Mobile OBjects, not Monster OBjects
They work better than the Ryckebush hardware posted in the original article (I would know, I wasted probably $50-100 in building the hardware and trying to tweak it to get it to work well). The Philips HN100s and HN110s (same thing except different style as far as I can tell) are only $15 INCLUDING shipping on eBay if you look hard enough.
Far better battery life than the Ryckebush design (40ish hours on a single AAA instead of 2-3 hours AT BEST on a pair of expensive 9vs), somewhat better cancellation, and far more compact and better looking (important when going through airline security, my homebuilts basically became useless to me after 9/11).
There are too many challenges involved in doing it in PC hardware when it can be done so cheaply with off-the-shelf headphones. In THEORY, PC hardware could deliver incredibly good cancellation using some adaptive noise cancellation techniques, but 99%+ of PC sound cards are not of sufficient quality for this to work. Having sample-accurate synchronization between input and output is critical, but apparently most sound cards just don't do this. (I've looked into doing acoustic echo cancellation for audio conferencing, which has similar hardware requirements. Most PC sound cards just aren't up to the task.)
While the electromagnetic spectrum is in theory infinite, the physically usable spectrum is finite.
We have at most 20-24 GHz of economically usable bandwidth. For some applications (point-to-multipoint broadcast), LOS restrictions and the difficulty of generating appreciable amounts of power at higher microwave frequencies limits us to far less than that.
Honestly, the only economical transceivers I know of that work above the 5.8 GHz ISM band are specialty devices not well suited to communications. (Gunn diode and magnetron sources at 10 GHz and 24 GHz. Good for radar, not good for communications due to large amounts of noise and frequency drift.) Generating more than a few milliwatts above 5.8 GHz is HARD and expensive! To handle high power, an amplifying device (i.e. transistor) must be large, but at microwave frequencies, the device size is a more significant portion of the wavelength of the frequency to be amplified. Developing more than a watt or so at 2.4 GHz and above requires either hundreds of dollars, or specialty vacuum tubes (magnetrons as used in microwave ovens, or traveling wave tubes.) Note that magnetrons are very noisy and unstable sources that are useless for all but Morse code communications.
Anyone who things the FCC can be made obsolete in less than 50-100 years is ignorant to the realities of communications systems and RF engineering. Software defined radios are a big step forward, but they're still best considered to be an infant technology. The only SDRs that are actually in use today are by people who ABSOLUTELY need the flexibility *at any cost* (read: military applications). Broadband RF design techniques and high-speed general-purpose DSPs needed for a flexible SDR designs exist, but both broadband RF design and high-speed general-purpose DSPs are EXPENSIVE.
Even 50-100 years from now, we're going to still need the FCC to make sure that people's SDRs play nicely with each other, otherwise (as a previous poster mentioned) someone will fire up a multi-kilowatt spark gap attached to a microcontroller and call it a "smart radio".