"The 855PM (Odem) is meant to be the link to a dedicated GPU via an AGP 4x port, while 855GM (Montata-GM) comes with Intel's own integrated 3D-decellerator."
Did Tom's Hardware slip up and accidentally let their opinion of the 855GM's graphics out, or did they intentionally say this?
I'm thinking they slippped up in letting their opinion out, since it's accelerator/decelerator. (One L, not two.)
Either way, I'm not surprised, as Intel's integrated graphics solutions always have (and probably always will) suck.
Utopia and web-based games
on
Sim-Dud?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm a veteran of Planetarion, another web-based strategy game. Like you, the advantage to me in college was that it was played in 5-10 minute chunks. Each hour I'd quickly "check planet" then go back to what I was doing. Such games are definately more appropriate for college students due to the way their time is structured.
Once you're in the working world, 9-5 is dedicated to work, after that is completely free. In this case, games that take your attention for an hour or so at a time are more practicable and appropriate. (Planetarion and to some degree Utopia, which I played for a little bit, required you to check your account pretty regularly to react to current events.)
Some MMORPGS are definately better than others... EQ was a pioneer, but it has since been eclipsed with much better and well-thought-out games. (Dark Age of Camelot has a lot of similarities to EQ, but differs from EQ drastically in the areas where EQ was weakest, such as economics. DAoC also provides a common goal for each realm, that of battling the other two realms on a given server, whereas EQ has no apparent common unifying goal that I can see.)
That said, coming from a DAoC player - STAY THE HELL AWAY until after you graduate! But it already (fortunately) looks like that was your plan.:)
From the opposite side of the fence.
on
Sim-Dud?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
One year ago, I probably would have posted something almost exactly identical to what you posted. I was a college student, and $10 a month to play a game was ridiculous. I couldn't afford it, and I didn't have the time to get my money's worth. I swore that I would never play an MMORPG.
Fast forward to 1-2 months after graduation. I was bored senseless in my after-work hours, and I remembered that an old friend had been trying to convince me to play Dark Age of Camelot.
I now own two DAoC accounts and find it worth every penny. Once you're in the working world, $10/month isn't that much. The cost of buying the game covers development costs, and the monthly fee covers the massive costs of big servers, lots of bandwidth, and (attempting) to provide customer service. It also pays for development of additional content. (Both EQ and DAoC have expansion packs, but they have plenty of content and cool things that have been added to the game even for non-expansion users.) In MMORPGs, patches aren't just bugfixes. They bring new monsters, new merchants, and changes in the gameplaye which are USUALLY neat improvements. (For example, the implementation of in-realm dueling in DAoC.) This is drastically different to most pay-once games where patches are merely for critical bugfixes and rarely add any new content.
A few years ago, Jon "Maddog" Hall was speaking at Cornell. The local LUG treated him to lunch before his presentation, and he told us about a phase-change convective heating attempt Digital once tried. It was to cool a CPU that was half CMOS half ECL. (ECL is VERY fast logic, but it's known for being a horrendous power hog, far worse than even TTL).
The problem was that the system would promptly stop working and the CPU would melt if it were tilted too far.
As to heat pipes - They are FAR more than a novelty. Look at Shuttle's small form factor systems. If you consider those to be a novelty, look at any recent Dell laptop. I know for a fact that the Inspiron 8x00 (8000,8100,8200) series use heatpipes for cooling the CPU. These use wicks and hence function even when the heat source is above the radiator.
Water (even distilled) is probably bad news if it comes in contact with active powered-on circuitry. Enough stuff will dissolve in the water on contact to make it conduct.
Powered-off circuitry is a different story. Salt water will corrode anything FAST. (This is why designing marine electronics is such a pain.) Tap water and distilled water won't corrode stuff nearly as fast - i.e. the occasional soaking followed by a good drying-off won't damage the equipment at all.
I've heard that this was used sometimes in the Navy - If a piece of equipment was accidentally splashed on by salt water, they'd take it into the showers (Not distilled, but much fresher than seawater) to rinse out the corrosive saltwater and then put it into a warm dry place to dry out.
Unless you're dealing with things in the kilovolt range, you won't be reaching the field strength needed for breakdown of the material. (I can't remember the exact term, it's not "hit-through", and it's not "breakdown voltage" either since what matters is the field strength (in volts/meter) rather than the pure voltage.
The problem with water is that even small amounts of impurities cause it to conduct. Pure water has a pretty low conductivity and a high breakdown field strength, but even a tiny amount of impurities will change that.
MOST if not all oils you're likely to use in a computer are going to have much higher breakdown potentials than air. What matters is whether they're conductive or not (Most aren't)
If you use motor oil, two things: a) Get the lowest weight possible. b) Don't get a multigrade oil. (Denoted in the form nW-m, for example 10W-40) These oils are designed to increase their viscosity as temperature increases. (To provide good protection at high temperatures while not being total sludge that prevents an engine from moving at low temps)
Note that these will all likely be capped to 35-40 MB/sec if you have IDE drives, maybe a little bit more for 7200 RPM SCSI.
So far I've found the 1394 networking support for Linux to be pretty slow... For some reason it seems to put the interface into 100 mbit/sec mode.
USB2 can't even come CLOSE to theoretical max throughput. I have a combo USB2/1394 drive enclosure. In 1394 mode, hdparm -t gives a result of approx. 23 MB/sec. In USB2 mode, the same benchmark gives a result of 12 MB/sec. (For a 64MB sustained read)
Times a 64MB read from the drive. Most Firewire drives will cap out around 23 MB/sec (Megabytes, not megabits) The same drive/enclosure using USB 2.0 capped out at 12 MB/sec for me.
In my case: 7200 RPM 120GB Maxtor HD in a comboe 1394/USB2 enclosure fron www.newegg.com - Part number is ME720UF.
I've tried three different webmail solutions (NOCC, IMP, Squirrelmail) on my home machine, as my company firewall blocks everything but proxied HTTP.
Note: Even after mail filtering, I have some VERY large mailboxes. Many of my mailing list boxes have 1-2k or more messages, my main Inbox has over 6000 messages.
NOCC - Doesn't even split mailboxes into multiple pages. Utterly useless Squirrelmail - Splits mailboxes into multiple pages but still barfs on large mailboxes on 50% of page loads. (To the point that apache must be killed and restarted.) IMP - The only IMAP webmail system I've used that doesn't trip and fall flat on its face when dealing with large mailboxes.
Note: If anyone could point me to a webmail system that: a) Uses very lightweight HTML. Preferably 3.2 or lower, for viewing on mobile devices. b) Handles large IMAP mailboxes gracefully
I would really appreciate it. NOCC was the closest to a solution in category a), IMP is the only solution I've found in b) but it can't be viewed from my Kyocera 6035.
There are two main reasons I'm holding off on RH8:
a) No Ximian available b) The GNOME it comes with doesn't do viewports. I can't live without my 3x2 workspace. Keyboard shortcuts are no replacement for moving the mouse to the edge of the screen to go to the next one. It just feels more natural.
I am getting sick of the constant clutter of virii cluttering up my inbox. It's amazing how much less I would get if people had a goddamned clue.
What's really annoying - I've been getting Yaha sent to me constantly for MONTHS from one person who just doesn't seem to "get" it. What really pisses me off is that when sending them an email asking them to please clean their machine, they ignored me. (Note: I'm not using the from: address. They're an AOL user, and AOL appends an X-Apparently-From: header to all emails that go through their mail servers which Yaha is not known to forge. While the from: addresses are from many different people, the X-Apparently-From: field has the same AOL user, every single time.)
It sounds like these have gone from "geek hobby" to "mainstream danger"
Good thing most of these kids are probably too stupid to make a pneumatic spudgun. Far safer for the operator, but FAR more dangerous for people at the wrong end of the cannon. (Pneumatic spudguns use a constant pressure for most of the firing cycle, rather than the quick spike of pressure from combustion. As a result, pneumatics can pack a LOT more power into a gun while stressing the components less.)
Back when this incident happened, it (of course) made Slashdot.
A number of articles I read indicated that an untrapped divide by zero error caused the entire machine to crash, OS and all. Under any real OS, such an error would only cause the OS to terminate the offending application. This particular machine crashing started a chain reaction that led to almost every single machine on the network crashing.
IIRC from another article, the offending app/error wasn't even REMOTELY connected to the propulsion system. It just happened that bad design allowed one error in one system to cascade into a total failure of all systems.
I believe that proper operation in this case is to trap the error and kill the application in question.
But in that SmartShip debacle, the OS trapped the error and killed itself instead of the errant application... Starting a chain reaction that caused EVERY MACHINE on the control network to crash. Not just one small routine, but the ENTIRE NETWORK.
It's all about damage compartmentalization. Something the Navy knows quite a lot about in the mechanical world...
You don't mention which brand of WiFi card you use.
While there doesn't seem to be TOO much difference between APs. (Or at least, even cheap APs like those from Linksys, D-Link, etc. perform far better than even high-end client cards), some client cards are MUCH better than others. While Lucent Orinoco cards are not specced as having much higher transmit power than your run-of-the-mill Prism2 (Linksys, D-Link, Belkin, etc etc.), their receiver is much more sensitive. As a result, with the same AP, an Orinoco gets much better range. I have both D-Link DWL-650s, a Belkin Prism2 card, and an Orinoco Silver. The Orinoco beats the other cards, hands-down.
If you want the best range possible at all costs, most Cisco cards have 100 mW transmit (as opposed to 20-25 for most others) and the highest receive sensitivity of the mainstream cards. The only better card I've seen is the Demarctech Reliawave (One of the few good Prism-based cards - Best receive sensitivity AND the highest transmit power I've seen.) Ciscos are also the most likely to work in an office environment if you want to bring it to work, since many corporations only trust LEAP and none of the other 802.1x solutions so far.
Orinocos are now $50-60 if you search hard enough. Get one. You won't regret it. If that doesn't work, THEN look into boosting the AP signal with a Linksys booster, but the most important is to have a good client first.
As pointed out earlier, EV-DO/DV can't really be compared to 802.11. It's more of a complimentary technology - 802.11 has the speed, EV-DO/DV has the coverage and range.
Best comparisons for EV-DO/DV are GPRS,1xRTT, and W-CDMA.
GPRS and 1xRTT are its slower speed predecessors. Both are in wide usage now. These are essentially 2.5G technologies. (Interim leading up to 3G)
W-CDMA and 1xEV-DO/DV are 3G. So far, 1xEV-DO/DV has been far more successful than W-CDMA. All W-CDMA has behind it is a legal mandate to use it, but in terms of actual service rollouts, 1xEV-DO/DV is far ahead. It's already in use in Korea and Japan, whereas W-CDMA was tried in Japan and turned DoCoMo's name into mud. (Mainly due to the fact that W-CDMA handsets are having the same battery life problems that the mainstream CDMA manufacturers solved many years ago.) 1xEV-DO/DV is also much easier for a carrier to roll out - cdmaOne phones will happily talk with 1xEV-DV towers, and in the case of DO towers, the same base station can handle voice traffic on a different carrier in the same frequency band. In modern base station designs, these carriers can go through the same RF path from baseband upwards. (As opposed to requiring a new frequency band and RF paths/antennas for UMTS W-CDMA at 2.11-2.17 GHz)
True. It's 2.5G. It's on par with GPRS, a little bit better.
Express Network is 1xRTT data - Just like 1xEV-DO/DV, it's part of the CDMA2000 suite.
It will not drop back down to a 14.4k AMPS connection when CDMA2000 isn't available. There is no such thing as AMPS data (Well, sort of. There IS CDPD, but the fallback modes for 1xRTT phones is not CDPD but circuit-switched CDMA data). It will fall back on 14.4 cdmaOne data. Just like GPRS will fall back to classic GSM data.
"In fact, Verizon isn't touching any of the 3G/GSM stuff for quite a while." a) You have no idea what plans Verizon has. They tend not to preannounce things (a la Apple).
b) But I can tell you they will not be touching GSM or any of its brethren. CDMA2000 1xEV-DO/DV is a much cheaper upgrade for them, since a CDMA2000 phone will work with a cdmaOne network and vice versa. The same is not true for W-CDMA phones unless the phone is essentially two phones in one. (W-CDMA uses a different modulation scheme AND a different frequency band than W-CDMA. Not only do you need different baseband processors, but you need different RF frontends. GSM phones already need to do two bands in many areas, UMTS ups that to three.)
* How is your PDA functionality - limited, annoying because of size, etc? PDA functionality is excellent. With a belt clip, the size is a non-issue. Yes, it's big for a phone. It's still far better than my former Palm III/Kyocera 2035a combo by many orders of magnitude.
* How is the phone service? I have Verizon, so it is stellar. Yes, VZW plans are more expensive. You get what you pay for. People on other carriers constantly bitch about their service quality/coverage, Verizon (And its predecessors, I started with Frontier Cellular in upstate NY, which BAM bought out and then later merged into Verizon) has served me very well for 3-4 years.
* What do you wish your PDA/Phone could do that it can't? Not much. Packet-switched high-speed data would be nice, if it weren't for the fact that Verizon hasn't yet matched Sprint's Vision pricing for Express Network. (Rumor has it that this may change in the next month or so.)
* Is it worth buying a combo unit or should I consider elements that interact properly? YES. The Palm/phone interaction in the Kyocera is *EXCELLENT*. It is one of the only PDA/phone combos that was designed as a phone first and not a PDA. (The Treos are decent, too, although I think the Kyos are better.)
http://www.smartphonesource.com/ has lots of info on the Kyo 6035 and the semi-available (Alltel has it, VZW and Sprint don't yet) 7135. BTW, it's possible to activate an Alltel 7135 on Verizon quite easily.
The 7135 takes all of the best things about the 6035 and adds: 16M ram (6035 has 8) SDIO slot MP3 capability Color screen Clamshell flip-phone design. (This may be a turnoff to some, though. I prefer the old 6035's design.) 1xRTT high-speed capability
Since getting my 6035, I've used my Palm a lot more, for one of the reasons Tye Informer mentioned - I put my phone in my pocket/on my belt clip by habit, and since my Palm is not in my phone I no longer forget it all the time.:)
If this were volatile, it would be almost useless. Volatile memory storage is defined as storage that doesn't retain data between power cycles. (i.e. all RAM , whether static or dynamic. NVRAM is a misnomer - It's just volatile RAM with a battery backup)
It is a known fact that the 486SX was just a 486DX with the math coprocessor portion disabled. Most people believe that this is for the same reasons - The FPU portion was defective, so Intel salvaged the CPU by disabling it and making it a 486SX.
I think the same thing occurred in some Celeron vs. PIII and Duron vs. Athlon incarnations - In some cases, the dies and design were different, but I think in others, Intel/AMD salvaged CPUs with defective caches by disabling the defective portion and releasing a "budget" CPU with half the cache.
a) There's no reason to use someone's email address when signing up for Netflix... It essentially gives that someone access to an account paid for with YOUR credit card.
b) How the hell did this guy order DVDs if he didn't have access to your email (and hence the account password).
c) You would have had nothing to worry about - Whoever was at that address is a different story though. More importantly, whoever's CC# was used to sign up would've had something to worry about.
Most people define the beginning of the "microwave" region as somewhere between 1 GHz and 2 GHz. This doesn't mean that they are no longer radio waves.
Microwave ovens operate at 2.4 GHz. (Note: This is the main reason that 2.4 GHz is an unlicensed band, which is where 802.11b/g hardware operates, as do 2.4 GHz cordless phones.)
The band allocation for UMTS (3G GSM cellular) is approximately 2110-2170 MHz. (2.11-2.17 GHz). This is only 10% lower in frequency than microwave ovens. The PCS band, which is where MANY cell phones operate, is 1.9 GHz. And even 900 MHz is absorbed by the body reasonably well. Not quite as well as at 2.4 GHz, but still enough that I would not want to be closer than a foot to any transmitter over 20 watts.
The reason cell phones aren't dangerous has nothing to do with frequency - And has everything to do with their power. Analog phones (except for portable/car units) are 600 mW, digital CDMA is 200 mW.
Note: 200 mW of UV/gamma/X-ray CAN be dangerous, since instead of general heating, it essentially causes "bit flipping" in your DNA. 99.999999% of the time, that flipped "bit" does nothing or kills the cell, but every once in a while the right part of the DNA is corrupted and the cell becomes cancerous.
Also, the field strengh is more critical than the total power. Being in front of a directional antenna is far worse than being near an omni, and the inverse square law is your friend. But even 5 watts at 144 MHz can give you an RF burn if you get too close to the antenna. (At that power level, it's basically physical contact, but even a thin insulator won't help you, unlike with DC or low-frequency AC.)
Slashdot Mirror
"The 855PM (Odem) is meant to be the link to a dedicated GPU via an AGP 4x port, while 855GM (Montata-GM) comes with Intel's own integrated 3D-decellerator."
Did Tom's Hardware slip up and accidentally let their opinion of the 855GM's graphics out, or did they intentionally say this?
I'm thinking they slippped up in letting their opinion out, since it's accelerator/decelerator. (One L, not two.)
Either way, I'm not surprised, as Intel's integrated graphics solutions always have (and probably always will) suck.
I'm a veteran of Planetarion, another web-based strategy game. Like you, the advantage to me in college was that it was played in 5-10 minute chunks. Each hour I'd quickly "check planet" then go back to what I was doing. Such games are definately more appropriate for college students due to the way their time is structured.
:)
Once you're in the working world, 9-5 is dedicated to work, after that is completely free. In this case, games that take your attention for an hour or so at a time are more practicable and appropriate. (Planetarion and to some degree Utopia, which I played for a little bit, required you to check your account pretty regularly to react to current events.)
Some MMORPGS are definately better than others... EQ was a pioneer, but it has since been eclipsed with much better and well-thought-out games. (Dark Age of Camelot has a lot of similarities to EQ, but differs from EQ drastically in the areas where EQ was weakest, such as economics. DAoC also provides a common goal for each realm, that of battling the other two realms on a given server, whereas EQ has no apparent common unifying goal that I can see.)
That said, coming from a DAoC player - STAY THE HELL AWAY until after you graduate! But it already (fortunately) looks like that was your plan.
One year ago, I probably would have posted something almost exactly identical to what you posted. I was a college student, and $10 a month to play a game was ridiculous. I couldn't afford it, and I didn't have the time to get my money's worth. I swore that I would never play an MMORPG.
Fast forward to 1-2 months after graduation. I was bored senseless in my after-work hours, and I remembered that an old friend had been trying to convince me to play Dark Age of Camelot.
I now own two DAoC accounts and find it worth every penny. Once you're in the working world, $10/month isn't that much. The cost of buying the game covers development costs, and the monthly fee covers the massive costs of big servers, lots of bandwidth, and (attempting) to provide customer service. It also pays for development of additional content. (Both EQ and DAoC have expansion packs, but they have plenty of content and cool things that have been added to the game even for non-expansion users.) In MMORPGs, patches aren't just bugfixes. They bring new monsters, new merchants, and changes in the gameplaye which are USUALLY neat improvements. (For example, the implementation of in-realm dueling in DAoC.) This is drastically different to most pay-once games where patches are merely for critical bugfixes and rarely add any new content.
A few years ago, Jon "Maddog" Hall was speaking at Cornell. The local LUG treated him to lunch before his presentation, and he told us about a phase-change convective heating attempt Digital once tried. It was to cool a CPU that was half CMOS half ECL. (ECL is VERY fast logic, but it's known for being a horrendous power hog, far worse than even TTL).
The problem was that the system would promptly stop working and the CPU would melt if it were tilted too far.
As to heat pipes - They are FAR more than a novelty. Look at Shuttle's small form factor systems. If you consider those to be a novelty, look at any recent Dell laptop. I know for a fact that the Inspiron 8x00 (8000,8100,8200) series use heatpipes for cooling the CPU. These use wicks and hence function even when the heat source is above the radiator.
Water (even distilled) is probably bad news if it comes in contact with active powered-on circuitry. Enough stuff will dissolve in the water on contact to make it conduct.
Powered-off circuitry is a different story. Salt water will corrode anything FAST. (This is why designing marine electronics is such a pain.) Tap water and distilled water won't corrode stuff nearly as fast - i.e. the occasional soaking followed by a good drying-off won't damage the equipment at all.
I've heard that this was used sometimes in the Navy - If a piece of equipment was accidentally splashed on by salt water, they'd take it into the showers (Not distilled, but much fresher than seawater) to rinse out the corrosive saltwater and then put it into a warm dry place to dry out.
Unless you're dealing with things in the kilovolt range, you won't be reaching the field strength needed for breakdown of the material. (I can't remember the exact term, it's not "hit-through", and it's not "breakdown voltage" either since what matters is the field strength (in volts/meter) rather than the pure voltage.
The problem with water is that even small amounts of impurities cause it to conduct. Pure water has a pretty low conductivity and a high breakdown field strength, but even a tiny amount of impurities will change that.
MOST if not all oils you're likely to use in a computer are going to have much higher breakdown potentials than air. What matters is whether they're conductive or not (Most aren't)
If you use motor oil, two things:
a) Get the lowest weight possible.
b) Don't get a multigrade oil. (Denoted in the form nW-m, for example 10W-40) These oils are designed to increase their viscosity as temperature increases. (To provide good protection at high temperatures while not being total sludge that prevents an engine from moving at low temps)
If my IMAP server was the problem, then IMP would be having problems too. But IMP runs perfectly and was quite easy to install on my RedHat system.
Note that these will all likely be capped to 35-40 MB/sec if you have IDE drives, maybe a little bit more for 7200 RPM SCSI.
So far I've found the 1394 networking support for Linux to be pretty slow... For some reason it seems to put the interface into 100 mbit/sec mode.
USB2 can't even come CLOSE to theoretical max throughput. I have a combo USB2/1394 drive enclosure. In 1394 mode, hdparm -t gives a result of approx. 23 MB/sec. In USB2 mode, the same benchmark gives a result of 12 MB/sec. (For a 64MB sustained read)
IMP is the only PHP-based IMAP-capable webmail solution that I've used that can handle large (2000+ message) mailboxes gracefully.
hdparm -t /dev/sdX
Times a 64MB read from the drive. Most Firewire drives will cap out around 23 MB/sec (Megabytes, not megabits) The same drive/enclosure using USB 2.0 capped out at 12 MB/sec for me.
In my case: 7200 RPM 120GB Maxtor HD in a comboe 1394/USB2 enclosure fron www.newegg.com - Part number is ME720UF.
IMP is also an easy install on RedHat systems. It used to be a nightmare, but more recent releases are much easier to install.
I've tried three different webmail solutions (NOCC, IMP, Squirrelmail) on my home machine, as my company firewall blocks everything but proxied HTTP.
Note: Even after mail filtering, I have some VERY large mailboxes. Many of my mailing list boxes have 1-2k or more messages, my main Inbox has over 6000 messages.
NOCC - Doesn't even split mailboxes into multiple pages. Utterly useless
Squirrelmail - Splits mailboxes into multiple pages but still barfs on large mailboxes on 50% of page loads. (To the point that apache must be killed and restarted.)
IMP - The only IMAP webmail system I've used that doesn't trip and fall flat on its face when dealing with large mailboxes.
Note: If anyone could point me to a webmail system that:
a) Uses very lightweight HTML. Preferably 3.2 or lower, for viewing on mobile devices.
b) Handles large IMAP mailboxes gracefully
I would really appreciate it. NOCC was the closest to a solution in category a), IMP is the only solution I've found in b) but it can't be viewed from my Kyocera 6035.
There are two main reasons I'm holding off on RH8:
a) No Ximian available
b) The GNOME it comes with doesn't do viewports. I can't live without my 3x2 workspace. Keyboard shortcuts are no replacement for moving the mouse to the edge of the screen to go to the next one. It just feels more natural.
I am getting sick of the constant clutter of virii cluttering up my inbox. It's amazing how much less I would get if people had a goddamned clue.
What's really annoying - I've been getting Yaha sent to me constantly for MONTHS from one person who just doesn't seem to "get" it. What really pisses me off is that when sending them an email asking them to please clean their machine, they ignored me. (Note: I'm not using the from: address. They're an AOL user, and AOL appends an X-Apparently-From: header to all emails that go through their mail servers which Yaha is not known to forge. While the from: addresses are from many different people, the X-Apparently-From: field has the same AOL user, every single time.)
It sounds like these have gone from "geek hobby" to "mainstream danger"
Good thing most of these kids are probably too stupid to make a pneumatic spudgun. Far safer for the operator, but FAR more dangerous for people at the wrong end of the cannon. (Pneumatic spudguns use a constant pressure for most of the firing cycle, rather than the quick spike of pressure from combustion. As a result, pneumatics can pack a LOT more power into a gun while stressing the components less.)
Back when this incident happened, it (of course) made Slashdot.
A number of articles I read indicated that an untrapped divide by zero error caused the entire machine to crash, OS and all. Under any real OS, such an error would only cause the OS to terminate the offending application. This particular machine crashing started a chain reaction that led to almost every single machine on the network crashing.
IIRC from another article, the offending app/error wasn't even REMOTELY connected to the propulsion system. It just happened that bad design allowed one error in one system to cascade into a total failure of all systems.
I believe that proper operation in this case is to trap the error and kill the application in question.
But in that SmartShip debacle, the OS trapped the error and killed itself instead of the errant application... Starting a chain reaction that caused EVERY MACHINE on the control network to crash. Not just one small routine, but the ENTIRE NETWORK.
It's all about damage compartmentalization. Something the Navy knows quite a lot about in the mechanical world...
You don't mention which brand of WiFi card you use.
While there doesn't seem to be TOO much difference between APs. (Or at least, even cheap APs like those from Linksys, D-Link, etc. perform far better than even high-end client cards), some client cards are MUCH better than others. While Lucent Orinoco cards are not specced as having much higher transmit power than your run-of-the-mill Prism2 (Linksys, D-Link, Belkin, etc etc.), their receiver is much more sensitive. As a result, with the same AP, an Orinoco gets much better range. I have both D-Link DWL-650s, a Belkin Prism2 card, and an Orinoco Silver. The Orinoco beats the other cards, hands-down.
If you want the best range possible at all costs, most Cisco cards have 100 mW transmit (as opposed to 20-25 for most others) and the highest receive sensitivity of the mainstream cards. The only better card I've seen is the Demarctech Reliawave (One of the few good Prism-based cards - Best receive sensitivity AND the highest transmit power I've seen.) Ciscos are also the most likely to work in an office environment if you want to bring it to work, since many corporations only trust LEAP and none of the other 802.1x solutions so far.
Orinocos are now $50-60 if you search hard enough. Get one. You won't regret it. If that doesn't work, THEN look into boosting the AP signal with a Linksys booster, but the most important is to have a good client first.
As pointed out earlier, EV-DO/DV can't really be compared to 802.11. It's more of a complimentary technology - 802.11 has the speed, EV-DO/DV has the coverage and range.
Best comparisons for EV-DO/DV are GPRS,1xRTT, and W-CDMA.
GPRS and 1xRTT are its slower speed predecessors. Both are in wide usage now. These are essentially 2.5G technologies. (Interim leading up to 3G)
W-CDMA and 1xEV-DO/DV are 3G. So far, 1xEV-DO/DV has been far more successful than W-CDMA. All W-CDMA has behind it is a legal mandate to use it, but in terms of actual service rollouts, 1xEV-DO/DV is far ahead. It's already in use in Korea and Japan, whereas W-CDMA was tried in Japan and turned DoCoMo's name into mud. (Mainly due to the fact that W-CDMA handsets are having the same battery life problems that the mainstream CDMA manufacturers solved many years ago.) 1xEV-DO/DV is also much easier for a carrier to roll out - cdmaOne phones will happily talk with 1xEV-DV towers, and in the case of DO towers, the same base station can handle voice traffic on a different carrier in the same frequency band. In modern base station designs, these carriers can go through the same RF path from baseband upwards. (As opposed to requiring a new frequency band and RF paths/antennas for UMTS W-CDMA at 2.11-2.17 GHz)
"Express Network isn't 3G."
True. It's 2.5G. It's on par with GPRS, a little bit better.
Express Network is 1xRTT data - Just like 1xEV-DO/DV, it's part of the CDMA2000 suite.
It will not drop back down to a 14.4k AMPS connection when CDMA2000 isn't available. There is no such thing as AMPS data (Well, sort of. There IS CDPD, but the fallback modes for 1xRTT phones is not CDPD but circuit-switched CDMA data). It will fall back on 14.4 cdmaOne data. Just like GPRS will fall back to classic GSM data.
"In fact, Verizon isn't touching any of the 3G/GSM stuff for quite a while."
a) You have no idea what plans Verizon has. They tend not to preannounce things (a la Apple).
b) But I can tell you they will not be touching GSM or any of its brethren. CDMA2000 1xEV-DO/DV is a much cheaper upgrade for them, since a CDMA2000 phone will work with a cdmaOne network and vice versa. The same is not true for W-CDMA phones unless the phone is essentially two phones in one. (W-CDMA uses a different modulation scheme AND a different frequency band than W-CDMA. Not only do you need different baseband processors, but you need different RF frontends. GSM phones already need to do two bands in many areas, UMTS ups that to three.)
* How is your PDA functionality - limited, annoying because of size, etc?
:)
PDA functionality is excellent. With a belt clip, the size is a non-issue. Yes, it's big for a phone. It's still far better than my former Palm III/Kyocera 2035a combo by many orders of magnitude.
* How is the phone service?
I have Verizon, so it is stellar. Yes, VZW plans are more expensive. You get what you pay for. People on other carriers constantly bitch about their service quality/coverage, Verizon (And its predecessors, I started with Frontier Cellular in upstate NY, which BAM bought out and then later merged into Verizon) has served me very well for 3-4 years.
* What do you wish your PDA/Phone could do that it can't?
Not much. Packet-switched high-speed data would be nice, if it weren't for the fact that Verizon hasn't yet matched Sprint's Vision pricing for Express Network. (Rumor has it that this may change in the next month or so.)
* Is it worth buying a combo unit or should I consider elements that interact properly?
YES. The Palm/phone interaction in the Kyocera is *EXCELLENT*. It is one of the only PDA/phone combos that was designed as a phone first and not a PDA. (The Treos are decent, too, although I think the Kyos are better.)
http://www.smartphonesource.com/ has lots of info on the Kyo 6035 and the semi-available (Alltel has it, VZW and Sprint don't yet) 7135. BTW, it's possible to activate an Alltel 7135 on Verizon quite easily.
The 7135 takes all of the best things about the 6035 and adds:
16M ram (6035 has 8)
SDIO slot
MP3 capability
Color screen
Clamshell flip-phone design. (This may be a turnoff to some, though. I prefer the old 6035's design.)
1xRTT high-speed capability
Since getting my 6035, I've used my Palm a lot more, for one of the reasons Tye Informer mentioned - I put my phone in my pocket/on my belt clip by habit, and since my Palm is not in my phone I no longer forget it all the time.
Volatile is not the word you want to use here.
If this were volatile, it would be almost useless. Volatile memory storage is defined as storage that doesn't retain data between power cycles. (i.e. all RAM , whether static or dynamic. NVRAM is a misnomer - It's just volatile RAM with a battery backup)
It is a known fact that the 486SX was just a 486DX with the math coprocessor portion disabled. Most people believe that this is for the same reasons - The FPU portion was defective, so Intel salvaged the CPU by disabling it and making it a 486SX.
I think the same thing occurred in some Celeron vs. PIII and Duron vs. Athlon incarnations - In some cases, the dies and design were different, but I think in others, Intel/AMD salvaged CPUs with defective caches by disabling the defective portion and releasing a "budget" CPU with half the cache.
a) There's no reason to use someone's email address when signing up for Netflix... It essentially gives that someone access to an account paid for with YOUR credit card.
b) How the hell did this guy order DVDs if he didn't have access to your email (and hence the account password).
c) You would have had nothing to worry about - Whoever was at that address is a different story though. More importantly, whoever's CC# was used to sign up would've had something to worry about.
Microwaves ARE radio waves.
Most people define the beginning of the "microwave" region as somewhere between 1 GHz and 2 GHz. This doesn't mean that they are no longer radio waves.
Microwave ovens operate at 2.4 GHz. (Note: This is the main reason that 2.4 GHz is an unlicensed band, which is where 802.11b/g hardware operates, as do 2.4 GHz cordless phones.)
The band allocation for UMTS (3G GSM cellular) is approximately 2110-2170 MHz. (2.11-2.17 GHz). This is only 10% lower in frequency than microwave ovens. The PCS band, which is where MANY cell phones operate, is 1.9 GHz. And even 900 MHz is absorbed by the body reasonably well. Not quite as well as at 2.4 GHz, but still enough that I would not want to be closer than a foot to any transmitter over 20 watts.
The reason cell phones aren't dangerous has nothing to do with frequency - And has everything to do with their power. Analog phones (except for portable/car units) are 600 mW, digital CDMA is 200 mW.
Note: 200 mW of UV/gamma/X-ray CAN be dangerous, since instead of general heating, it essentially causes "bit flipping" in your DNA. 99.999999% of the time, that flipped "bit" does nothing or kills the cell, but every once in a while the right part of the DNA is corrupted and the cell becomes cancerous.
Also, the field strengh is more critical than the total power. Being in front of a directional antenna is far worse than being near an omni, and the inverse square law is your friend. But even 5 watts at 144 MHz can give you an RF burn if you get too close to the antenna. (At that power level, it's basically physical contact, but even a thin insulator won't help you, unlike with DC or low-frequency AC.)