ATI was FAR behind NVidia (and even 3dfx) performance-wise until the Radeons were released.
Previous ATI cards sucked. The first one to have even acceptable performance was the Rage 128 - And that was at least two generations behind NVidia when released. (It was worse than the original TNT, wherease NVidia already had the TNT2 Ultra on the market and was very close to releasing or had already released the GeForce 256.) ATI sucked until the Radeon, and their driver quality is still abysmal.
I'll stick with NVidia - I'll take a little performance hit for the added reliability of their drivers. NVidia is not going the way of 3Dfx - One of 3Dfx's Achilles heels was their abysmal driver support. (Glide anyone?)
The "piracy tax" in the US is only placed on CDs that have been specifically flagged as being taxed. (i.e. they have a bit that will allow standalone audio CD recorders to burn to them.) For PC usage, this flag is irrelevant.
Piracy taxes in other countries are irrelevant since the cause of the problem is a law in the United States.
It will probably reduce a lot of the variation, but there will still be quite a bit.
Good news is that the thing this is most likely to eliminate are the "really bad" years, like last year in upstate NY - Almost every wine from that region last year sucked due to rain patterns, even my personal favorites which were pretty consistent with mild variation from year to year in the past.
There are plenty of other variables that are essentially at the discretion of the vintner (I believe that's the correct word?), all of whom have different tastes/beliefs.
Plus there's quite a bit of influence on the wine's taste in the genetics of the grapes themselves. Many wines are named based on the variety of grape that they use, and there are MANY.
Even with precise control over the variables the vintner can control, there are simply too many other variables he/she cannot.
Overall, I think this is good quality control, since IIRC moisture levels and sun tend to contribute the most to seasonal variations in wine. Sun is not very controllable (unless the vintner adds lighting/shades), moisture is. It's a good way to avoid "bad years", which I consider a good thing. (As almost all of my favorite wines had a "bad year" due to rain patterns last year. Wagner Vineyards in Lodi, NY usually produces an excellent Niagara, this past year it was horrendous, as were most of my other favorites from the area.)
Most cellular providers charge quite a bit for SMS on contract plans.
SMS is often *cheaper* on prepaid plans than contract plans. Unfortunately, almost no one except teenagers go for prepaid plans because the individual minutes are so expensive, and you don't get massive quantities of offpeak time. (I have virtually unlimited night/weekend calling.) The only reason teenagers go prepaid is because they legally are prohibited from getting a contract plan until they're 18.
As to the interface - I have a Kyocera 6035 Palm/phone combo. Graffiti is a wonderful way to write SMSes, but at 10 cents a message not included in my monthly bill, I usually call the person instead and use the minutes I've already paid for, unless I have reason to believe that they're in a situation where their phone ringing might be undesirable. (For example when my dad was on a business trip.)
My senior year of college, I had a desktop and a laptop. The desktop was always kept reasonably up-to-date for my entire college career. (That year it was a 1.1 GHz Athlon with DDR memory, etc etc.)
The laptop was an old cheap beat-up POS. Pentium 200MMX, 128M, 12" screen.
I used the laptop 95% of the time that year, for one reason: Even though the chair at my computer desk was pretty comfortable, the couch in my apartment's living room was ten times more comfortable. I pretty much did all my work that year either on the couch or sitting in a folding chair in the front lawn.
For quite a long time, SMS (text messaging) was rare in the US. It was also very expensive.
Over the past year or two, SMS prices have dropped considerably and providers have been pushing and marketing those features more.
It seems especially common to be marketed for prepaid phones - SMS on prepaid phones seems to be about the same cost as "contract" phones, while voice minutes are much more expensive. In addition, SMS is in addition to most contract plans, while it is taken from your prepaid allowance in prepaid plans. (I mentioned increased marketing of SMS - Almost ALL of Verizon's advertisements for SMS features are in conjunction with advertising for their prepaid FreeUP plans.)
So I don't see SMS becoming popular for older business users (who have monthly contract plans) anytime soon, but I think SMS is catching on with younger people (especially teens), who are more likely to get a prepaid phone. (In fact, teens under 18 can only get a prepaid phone unless the contract is in their parents' name.)
Most of these cards have internal restrictions (such as firmware) preventing out-of-band operation. At least Prisms do.
Even with wide-open drivers, I don't think you can force most Prism cards out-of-band because the firmware restricts it. (Which sucks, because all it takes is a 55-question multiple choice test and you can legally run 802.11 cards out of the ISM band and at much higher powers - The 2.4 GHz amateur (ham) band is adjacent to the ISM band, and many cards can be reclassified under Part 97 rules.)
What I would love to see is open specs for a cable modem chipset - it would make a perfect exciter for an amateur data network if combined with a transverter.
I'm surprised. The first time I heard of it was 3-4 years ago, when apparently my former high school started participating in the competition a year or two after I graduated. (Talk about bad timing... I wish they'd had something like FIRST when I was there.)
In the past 4-5 years, FIRST has gone from unheard of to every school in the area fielding a top-notch team. As sad is it may seem, you might have BattleBots and the like to thank for that.
Note: I live in Central Jersey. Not exactly the boonies.
Single-cell replacement - BAD Charge/discharge "reconditioning" - REALLY BAD Replacement of all cells - You should be fine. The pack will be nearly as good as the OEM pack, sometimes better.
An example of a good pack reconditioner is Raymond Sarrio's business (www.batteriesamerica.com) - Although his selection of laptop batteries is limited, his specialty is in amateur (ham) radio batteries. Sarrio is well known as an excellent dealer in ham circles. Many of Sarrio's repacks are regarded as BETTER than the original packs. (The NiCd ones are only slightly better, but Sarrio offers NiMH repacks for equipment that was originally NiCd and never had a NiMH option.)
I did a NiMH repack myself in my Alinco DJ-580T's pack, with excellent results. I now have close to twice the battery life I had before, and that's using dirt-cheap super-low-capacity (1200 mAh) NiMHs.
"calibration" of charging circuitry is BS. Look at the datasheets of any of the charge controller ICs from TI, National Semiconductor, etc. None of these have any "calibration", they are pretty generic. Li-Ion is actually not as hard to charge as many make it out to be, it is simply VERY different in its needs than NiCd or NiMH. In fact, proper charging of a LiIon is easier than proper charging of NiMH, although NiMH is much more resilient to improper charging.
Li-Ion charge cycle: Constant current, up to a maximum charging voltage. Constant-voltage at either 4.1 or 4.2 volts/cell depending on cell chemistry. (There are two different classes of Li-Ion cell, depending on the makeup of one of the electrodes.) It's not that hard. NiCd and NiMH need fancy charging schemes such as reverse slope detection. (Once fully charged, a NiCd or NiMH battery will actually REDUCE its voltage as it accepts more charge - "smart" NiMH chargers detect this.)
Battery meters (gas gauges) do need recalibration, and I admit that cell matching is reasonably important. Replacing a single cell in a pack is a no-no. Replacing all cells at once with new ones should be fine.
As to refurb printer cartridges: It's not the contacts on the HPs that are the issue, it's the method that HP uses to drive the ink droplets out. HP's inkjets are "thermal inkjets" - Each nozzle in the head has a small resistor in it. When the printer wants to shoot an ink droplet out, current is run through this resistor, and it vaporizes some of the ink. Needless to say, these resistors start burning out soon after the design life of the cart.
Canon and Epson printers are different - They use piezoelectric drivers which have near-infinite life. As a result, both Canon and Epson don't have nozzles and drivers in the cartridge, the cartridges are merely tanks of ink and nothing more. These can be refilled safely many times. (One just has to be careful about residual dried ink.) Some companies sell kits that allow you to do away with the cartridge and draw ink directly from a bulk ink bottle.
Almost all laptops made for the past 5-6 years use Lithium-Ion batteries.
Charging circuity designed for Li-Ion is totally unsuitable for laptops.
Putting out a battery pack that accepted arbitrary Li-Ion cells is currently illegal - In order to purchase bare Li-Ion sells you apparently have to have some sort of a license. (If you look for bare Li-Ion cells online, they are ALWAYS sold in packs, even if they might be advertised as a "pair of cells", reading the fine print often reveals that they're in a pack with overcharge/overdischarge protection circuitry.) This is because Li-Ion cells w/o protection circuitry can be extremely hazardous. (Think of the incredible exploding Powerbooks in the past.)
If any laptop manufacturer still used NiCd or NiMH, we might see such packs. But they don't.
Interesting note: Most amateur (ham) radio equipment manufacturers sell "dry cell holder" battery packs for their handhelds that are exactly what you're asking for, although almost all hams will still use their main (expensive) pack.
"My stack is bigger than yours"
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 1
A lot of patents are filed for the simple reason of increasing the patent count of a company for threat/marketing purposes.
It also depends on who invented it - Some inventors are given special treatment because they're so valuable to the company, even though they might be a bit eccentric.
Back when my dad was in IP for a major company, some of them would rate patents on a scale of 1 to 5. 1 was "really important, use our best lawyers to draft and file", 4 was essentially "get some wino off the street to draft it up and file it", 5 was "patently stupid".
Most 5s were thrown away, but said company had a few Nobel Prize winners that had some REALLY crazy ideas patented because Lucent wanted to treat them well, and also so they could say, "Person Y works for us and has filed N patents"
I guess it depends on what sort of benchmark you were doing, but I find it very odd that an SDR system beat a DDR system unless something was done to stack the competition in favor of the SDRAM system. (Small loop that fits in CPU cache combined with a faster CPU for example.)
For programs that fit in CPU cache, or spend a lot of time on the cache contents before moving on to a new dataset, DDR vs. SDR doesn't matter as much as programs that are not cache-efficient. (FYI, older FPS games, esp. Quake I/II and maybe III, were known for being very cache-efficient, where 128kb cache was "enough" and having 128kb of corespeed cache was better than 256k of halfspeed cache. This and it inherent overclockability are why the Celeron was so popular with gamers. But the moment you needed more than 128k of cache the Celeron sucked and the fact that the PII had double the cache made it win despite the cache being half the speed.)
If you perform operations on datasets larger than the CPU cache (Large matrix multiplications for example, which are common in scientific computing), memory bandwidth makes a HUGE difference. A few years ago I worked in a scientific research facility. We had a benchmark that performed incresingly large matrix operations. When I benchmarked it on my 800 MHz Athlon at home, I tried both 100 and 133 MHz memory speeds. For small matrix operations, they were even. For larger operations, the extra memory BW made a huge difference. Later I benchmarked my 1.1 GHz Athlon with DDR memory against it - It was only a bit faster for small matrices, but for large matrices it was significantly faster thanks to the DDR memory.
The neat thing about the benchmark was that you could clearly see the effects of various caches, as performance would drop like a rock when you exceeded a cache size. The exception was one of the SGI Origins or an old Cray at work, which had INSANE memory bandwidth and only had a gradual dropoff.
SCO is crazy
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
When suing someone else in the corporate world, you must be very careful of one thing:
Make sure they can't countersue you on something else.
If IBM were smart, they'd go looking through their patents and technology and countersue SCO into the stone age.
Chances are EXTREMELY good that a company as large as IBM has something to fire back at SCO. Patents are as useful for defending oneself against extortion as they are for extorting money from people in the corporate world. (Many companies file patents solely for defensive purposes - If someone goes after them for patent infringement, they hope that they can strike back with their own patent infringement claim.)
Chances are that you could make a pretty decent ultrasonic repeller for a fraction of the price of commercial ones. Look around at some electronics sites, but the basics would be:
555 timer - Set it to free-run somewhere in the 26-30 kHz range. You might have to experiment a bit. It will probably be most effective 1-2 kHz over the highest frequency that causes you discomfort.
Audio amplifier - LM386 audio amps are cheap and easy to use. They're a high-power op-amp for all practical purposes.
The silicon and additional passives would cost you under $10 most likely, which leaves you $20-30 for a speaker with good ultrasonic response and still be a fraction of the price of these $80-120 commerical units people talk about.
Bonus is that you can retune it down a few kHz if you want to intentionally piss someone off. This is more effective if you add circuitry that sweeps the frequency over a few kHz. (This might hold true for animals too.)
It's a known fact that some animals (especially smaller ones) can hear a much wider frequency range than humans can.
"genetically similar" means nothing - A few kilohertz can make a lot of difference.
But one has to be careful not to get TOO close to the human hearing range, as within 3-4 kHz of the human hearing range, it causes US discomfort. A bit above that and it won't cause pain for humans at all, but will sound like an unholy shriek to a small animal.
Note: I'm talking about the ultrasonic-only ones. And having multiple small units scattered around is probably better for our ears than one large super-loud unit, as one superloud unit might still have enough SPL to damage someone's ears even though we can't hear it. (Although it helps that the ear won't have any resonances at those frequencies - This is why smaller animals can hear higher freqs, smaller ear canals = higher resonant freqs.)
Simple. Properly designed hotswap hardware should have current limiting circuitry built in.
Similar to a fuse/circuit breaker (Good to have those in there too!), but they don't permanently shut down.
I work in an RF power amplifier development lab - Trust me, current limiting power supplies are a reality and they are a truly wonderful thing. (Yeah, we short out a lot of stuff here.:)
X10 the protocol was developed by X10 the company, which still owns a number of patents on it.
So sadly, www.x10.com is the official site for the x10 protocol (although you can't find any details on the exact protocol these days.)
Great opportunity for Roxio
on
PressPlay + Roxio?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If they can quickly "get in on the ground floor", Roxio stands to make a killing if they rearchitecture Pressplay into a system modeled after Apple's music store but PC-accessible.
Essentially, Roxio has 6 months or so to enter the market with a comparable product. If they're late, Apple's planned PC port will enter and become entrenched. If Roxio enters first with a decent product, they will become entrenched in the PC market and Apple will be forced into a niche market of Mac users.
In short, Apple was incredibly stupid not to make their store web-based or have plans for PC availability in the very short term, as it leaves the PC market wide open for someone to copy Apple's service and take over the market. I'd love for Apple to win this, but now they had better move quickly or they'll be forced to stay in their niche.
But it takes extra CPU on the spammer's end, and *MUCH* more importantly, it takes a lot more bandwidth.
As another poster said, any mail server program will already provide the functionality you describe. But it moves the CPU usage and the bulk of the bandwidth to the spammer and not the open relay he/she is abusing.
Slashdot Mirror
ATI was FAR behind NVidia (and even 3dfx) performance-wise until the Radeons were released.
Previous ATI cards sucked. The first one to have even acceptable performance was the Rage 128 - And that was at least two generations behind NVidia when released. (It was worse than the original TNT, wherease NVidia already had the TNT2 Ultra on the market and was very close to releasing or had already released the GeForce 256.) ATI sucked until the Radeon, and their driver quality is still abysmal.
I'll stick with NVidia - I'll take a little performance hit for the added reliability of their drivers. NVidia is not going the way of 3Dfx - One of 3Dfx's Achilles heels was their abysmal driver support. (Glide anyone?)
The "piracy tax" in the US is only placed on CDs that have been specifically flagged as being taxed. (i.e. they have a bit that will allow standalone audio CD recorders to burn to them.) For PC usage, this flag is irrelevant.
Piracy taxes in other countries are irrelevant since the cause of the problem is a law in the United States.
From what I remember, last time I saw a can of it, it was spotted like a cow.
I'm sure that the vintner will also trust his own instincts and use the new datacollection system as an auxiliary tool and not rely on it 100%.
There are too many other factors.
It will probably reduce a lot of the variation, but there will still be quite a bit.
Good news is that the thing this is most likely to eliminate are the "really bad" years, like last year in upstate NY - Almost every wine from that region last year sucked due to rain patterns, even my personal favorites which were pretty consistent with mild variation from year to year in the past.
Mild variations OK - Total suck, BAD.
There are plenty of other variables that are essentially at the discretion of the vintner (I believe that's the correct word?), all of whom have different tastes/beliefs.
Plus there's quite a bit of influence on the wine's taste in the genetics of the grapes themselves. Many wines are named based on the variety of grape that they use, and there are MANY.
Even with precise control over the variables the vintner can control, there are simply too many other variables he/she cannot.
Overall, I think this is good quality control, since IIRC moisture levels and sun tend to contribute the most to seasonal variations in wine. Sun is not very controllable (unless the vintner adds lighting/shades), moisture is. It's a good way to avoid "bad years", which I consider a good thing. (As almost all of my favorite wines had a "bad year" due to rain patterns last year. Wagner Vineyards in Lodi, NY usually produces an excellent Niagara, this past year it was horrendous, as were most of my other favorites from the area.)
In Japan, there is a drink called Calpis. (As in, sounds like "cow piss")
It's semi-intentional...
Most cellular providers charge quite a bit for SMS on contract plans.
SMS is often *cheaper* on prepaid plans than contract plans. Unfortunately, almost no one except teenagers go for prepaid plans because the individual minutes are so expensive, and you don't get massive quantities of offpeak time. (I have virtually unlimited night/weekend calling.) The only reason teenagers go prepaid is because they legally are prohibited from getting a contract plan until they're 18.
As to the interface - I have a Kyocera 6035 Palm/phone combo. Graffiti is a wonderful way to write SMSes, but at 10 cents a message not included in my monthly bill, I usually call the person instead and use the minutes I've already paid for, unless I have reason to believe that they're in a situation where their phone ringing might be undesirable. (For example when my dad was on a business trip.)
I'm a perfect example of this.
My senior year of college, I had a desktop and a laptop. The desktop was always kept reasonably up-to-date for my entire college career. (That year it was a 1.1 GHz Athlon with DDR memory, etc etc.)
The laptop was an old cheap beat-up POS. Pentium 200MMX, 128M, 12" screen.
I used the laptop 95% of the time that year, for one reason: Even though the chair at my computer desk was pretty comfortable, the couch in my apartment's living room was ten times more comfortable. I pretty much did all my work that year either on the couch or sitting in a folding chair in the front lawn.
Thank God for 802.11
For quite a long time, SMS (text messaging) was rare in the US. It was also very expensive.
Over the past year or two, SMS prices have dropped considerably and providers have been pushing and marketing those features more.
It seems especially common to be marketed for prepaid phones - SMS on prepaid phones seems to be about the same cost as "contract" phones, while voice minutes are much more expensive. In addition, SMS is in addition to most contract plans, while it is taken from your prepaid allowance in prepaid plans. (I mentioned increased marketing of SMS - Almost ALL of Verizon's advertisements for SMS features are in conjunction with advertising for their prepaid FreeUP plans.)
So I don't see SMS becoming popular for older business users (who have monthly contract plans) anytime soon, but I think SMS is catching on with younger people (especially teens), who are more likely to get a prepaid phone. (In fact, teens under 18 can only get a prepaid phone unless the contract is in their parents' name.)
Most of these cards have internal restrictions (such as firmware) preventing out-of-band operation. At least Prisms do.
Even with wide-open drivers, I don't think you can force most Prism cards out-of-band because the firmware restricts it. (Which sucks, because all it takes is a 55-question multiple choice test and you can legally run 802.11 cards out of the ISM band and at much higher powers - The 2.4 GHz amateur (ham) band is adjacent to the ISM band, and many cards can be reclassified under Part 97 rules.)
What I would love to see is open specs for a cable modem chipset - it would make a perfect exciter for an amateur data network if combined with a transverter.
I'm surprised. The first time I heard of it was 3-4 years ago, when apparently my former high school started participating in the competition a year or two after I graduated. (Talk about bad timing... I wish they'd had something like FIRST when I was there.)
In the past 4-5 years, FIRST has gone from unheard of to every school in the area fielding a top-notch team. As sad is it may seem, you might have BattleBots and the like to thank for that.
Note: I live in Central Jersey. Not exactly the boonies.
Single-cell replacement - BAD
Charge/discharge "reconditioning" - REALLY BAD
Replacement of all cells - You should be fine. The pack will be nearly as good as the OEM pack, sometimes better.
An example of a good pack reconditioner is Raymond Sarrio's business (www.batteriesamerica.com) - Although his selection of laptop batteries is limited, his specialty is in amateur (ham) radio batteries. Sarrio is well known as an excellent dealer in ham circles. Many of Sarrio's repacks are regarded as BETTER than the original packs. (The NiCd ones are only slightly better, but Sarrio offers NiMH repacks for equipment that was originally NiCd and never had a NiMH option.)
I did a NiMH repack myself in my Alinco DJ-580T's pack, with excellent results. I now have close to twice the battery life I had before, and that's using dirt-cheap super-low-capacity (1200 mAh) NiMHs.
"calibration" of charging circuitry is BS. Look at the datasheets of any of the charge controller ICs from TI, National Semiconductor, etc. None of these have any "calibration", they are pretty generic. Li-Ion is actually not as hard to charge as many make it out to be, it is simply VERY different in its needs than NiCd or NiMH. In fact, proper charging of a LiIon is easier than proper charging of NiMH, although NiMH is much more resilient to improper charging.
Li-Ion charge cycle: Constant current, up to a maximum charging voltage. Constant-voltage at either 4.1 or 4.2 volts/cell depending on cell chemistry. (There are two different classes of Li-Ion cell, depending on the makeup of one of the electrodes.) It's not that hard. NiCd and NiMH need fancy charging schemes such as reverse slope detection. (Once fully charged, a NiCd or NiMH battery will actually REDUCE its voltage as it accepts more charge - "smart" NiMH chargers detect this.)
Battery meters (gas gauges) do need recalibration, and I admit that cell matching is reasonably important. Replacing a single cell in a pack is a no-no. Replacing all cells at once with new ones should be fine.
As to refurb printer cartridges: It's not the contacts on the HPs that are the issue, it's the method that HP uses to drive the ink droplets out. HP's inkjets are "thermal inkjets" - Each nozzle in the head has a small resistor in it. When the printer wants to shoot an ink droplet out, current is run through this resistor, and it vaporizes some of the ink. Needless to say, these resistors start burning out soon after the design life of the cart.
Canon and Epson printers are different - They use piezoelectric drivers which have near-infinite life. As a result, both Canon and Epson don't have nozzles and drivers in the cartridge, the cartridges are merely tanks of ink and nothing more. These can be refilled safely many times. (One just has to be careful about residual dried ink.) Some companies sell kits that allow you to do away with the cartridge and draw ink directly from a bulk ink bottle.
Almost all laptops made for the past 5-6 years use Lithium-Ion batteries.
Charging circuity designed for Li-Ion is totally unsuitable for laptops.
Putting out a battery pack that accepted arbitrary Li-Ion cells is currently illegal - In order to purchase bare Li-Ion sells you apparently have to have some sort of a license. (If you look for bare Li-Ion cells online, they are ALWAYS sold in packs, even if they might be advertised as a "pair of cells", reading the fine print often reveals that they're in a pack with overcharge/overdischarge protection circuitry.) This is because Li-Ion cells w/o protection circuitry can be extremely hazardous. (Think of the incredible exploding Powerbooks in the past.)
If any laptop manufacturer still used NiCd or NiMH, we might see such packs. But they don't.
Interesting note: Most amateur (ham) radio equipment manufacturers sell "dry cell holder" battery packs for their handhelds that are exactly what you're asking for, although almost all hams will still use their main (expensive) pack.
A lot of patents are filed for the simple reason of increasing the patent count of a company for threat/marketing purposes.
It also depends on who invented it - Some inventors are given special treatment because they're so valuable to the company, even though they might be a bit eccentric.
Back when my dad was in IP for a major company, some of them would rate patents on a scale of 1 to 5. 1 was "really important, use our best lawyers to draft and file", 4 was essentially "get some wino off the street to draft it up and file it", 5 was "patently stupid".
Most 5s were thrown away, but said company had a few Nobel Prize winners that had some REALLY crazy ideas patented because Lucent wanted to treat them well, and also so they could say, "Person Y works for us and has filed N patents"
I guess it depends on what sort of benchmark you were doing, but I find it very odd that an SDR system beat a DDR system unless something was done to stack the competition in favor of the SDRAM system. (Small loop that fits in CPU cache combined with a faster CPU for example.)
For programs that fit in CPU cache, or spend a lot of time on the cache contents before moving on to a new dataset, DDR vs. SDR doesn't matter as much as programs that are not cache-efficient. (FYI, older FPS games, esp. Quake I/II and maybe III, were known for being very cache-efficient, where 128kb cache was "enough" and having 128kb of corespeed cache was better than 256k of halfspeed cache. This and it inherent overclockability are why the Celeron was so popular with gamers. But the moment you needed more than 128k of cache the Celeron sucked and the fact that the PII had double the cache made it win despite the cache being half the speed.)
If you perform operations on datasets larger than the CPU cache (Large matrix multiplications for example, which are common in scientific computing), memory bandwidth makes a HUGE difference. A few years ago I worked in a scientific research facility. We had a benchmark that performed incresingly large matrix operations. When I benchmarked it on my 800 MHz Athlon at home, I tried both 100 and 133 MHz memory speeds. For small matrix operations, they were even. For larger operations, the extra memory BW made a huge difference. Later I benchmarked my 1.1 GHz Athlon with DDR memory against it - It was only a bit faster for small matrices, but for large matrices it was significantly faster thanks to the DDR memory.
The neat thing about the benchmark was that you could clearly see the effects of various caches, as performance would drop like a rock when you exceeded a cache size. The exception was one of the SGI Origins or an old Cray at work, which had INSANE memory bandwidth and only had a gradual dropoff.
When suing someone else in the corporate world, you must be very careful of one thing:
Make sure they can't countersue you on something else.
If IBM were smart, they'd go looking through their patents and technology and countersue SCO into the stone age.
Chances are EXTREMELY good that a company as large as IBM has something to fire back at SCO. Patents are as useful for defending oneself against extortion as they are for extorting money from people in the corporate world. (Many companies file patents solely for defensive purposes - If someone goes after them for patent infringement, they hope that they can strike back with their own patent infringement claim.)
Chances are that you could make a pretty decent ultrasonic repeller for a fraction of the price of commercial ones. Look around at some electronics sites, but the basics would be:
555 timer - Set it to free-run somewhere in the 26-30 kHz range. You might have to experiment a bit. It will probably be most effective 1-2 kHz over the highest frequency that causes you discomfort.
Audio amplifier - LM386 audio amps are cheap and easy to use. They're a high-power op-amp for all practical purposes.
The silicon and additional passives would cost you under $10 most likely, which leaves you $20-30 for a speaker with good ultrasonic response and still be a fraction of the price of these $80-120 commerical units people talk about.
Bonus is that you can retune it down a few kHz if you want to intentionally piss someone off. This is more effective if you add circuitry that sweeps the frequency over a few kHz. (This might hold true for animals too.)
It's a known fact that some animals (especially smaller ones) can hear a much wider frequency range than humans can.
"genetically similar" means nothing - A few kilohertz can make a lot of difference.
But one has to be careful not to get TOO close to the human hearing range, as within 3-4 kHz of the human hearing range, it causes US discomfort. A bit above that and it won't cause pain for humans at all, but will sound like an unholy shriek to a small animal.
Note: I'm talking about the ultrasonic-only ones. And having multiple small units scattered around is probably better for our ears than one large super-loud unit, as one superloud unit might still have enough SPL to damage someone's ears even though we can't hear it. (Although it helps that the ear won't have any resonances at those frequencies - This is why smaller animals can hear higher freqs, smaller ear canals = higher resonant freqs.)
Simple. Properly designed hotswap hardware should have current limiting circuitry built in.
:)
Similar to a fuse/circuit breaker (Good to have those in there too!), but they don't permanently shut down.
I work in an RF power amplifier development lab - Trust me, current limiting power supplies are a reality and they are a truly wonderful thing. (Yeah, we short out a lot of stuff here.
It seems like an integral part of this standard is current limiting circuitry that will prevent shorts from doing damage.
At least the Maxim ICs there appear to have a number of safety features.
X10 the protocol was developed by X10 the company, which still owns a number of patents on it.
So sadly, www.x10.com is the official site for the x10 protocol (although you can't find any details on the exact protocol these days.)
If they can quickly "get in on the ground floor", Roxio stands to make a killing if they rearchitecture Pressplay into a system modeled after Apple's music store but PC-accessible.
Essentially, Roxio has 6 months or so to enter the market with a comparable product. If they're late, Apple's planned PC port will enter and become entrenched. If Roxio enters first with a decent product, they will become entrenched in the PC market and Apple will be forced into a niche market of Mac users.
In short, Apple was incredibly stupid not to make their store web-based or have plans for PC availability in the very short term, as it leaves the PC market wide open for someone to copy Apple's service and take over the market. I'd love for Apple to win this, but now they had better move quickly or they'll be forced to stay in their niche.
But it takes extra CPU on the spammer's end, and *MUCH* more importantly, it takes a lot more bandwidth.
As another poster said, any mail server program will already provide the functionality you describe. But it moves the CPU usage and the bulk of the bandwidth to the spammer and not the open relay he/she is abusing.