No. Someone tell ATI to stop releasing drivers and start releasing specs instead. I've got an X1600 sitting on a shelf because there was no way to get it to work properly with ATI's fscked up driver. My solution to the problem was to spend my last money to upgrade to a Geforce 6200TC... Because having the power of a Geforce 4 is better than having any graphics card that needs drivers from ATI, at least if you want any kind of usable hardware acceleration outside of Windows. The ATI cards with community-written driers, however, work fine from what I've heard.
Compare the amount of Mexicans found in any given university and the amount of Chinese in the same place. Either the Chinesehave a lot of money and don't like their own unis or China is heavily investing in their next generation of researchers. Given the fact that a lot of those future researchers are being sent to places like the MIT I think it's safe to assume that in the next decades China is going to have a lot of very smart people as their disposal.
Also, solar power is not that green, either; the manufacturing process of photovoltaic cells generates toxic waste. It's better than burning coal but still not exactly perfect. Thus, it would be nonsense to treat solar power as the non plus ultra of power generation. It makes for a useful addition to our pool of power generation technologies, though (especially one that can be added everywhere for small increases in power generation - you just install solar panels on a building's rooftop).
While I don't put stuff on my desktop, it's still cluttered with detritus - apparently Firefox uses ~/Desktop instead of/tmp on the Mac. Thus the desktop is full of.torrent files, multiple copies of PDFs, the odd media file...
Under Windows it's just the traditional way to do things. where else would you save stuff but %USERHOME%\Desktop? Okay, except for C:\Downloads, D:\Downloads, E:\Media\MP3\temp and E:\Games\Morrowind\Oblivion\Downloads\maps\temp\Ne w Folder (2)?
Under Linux the Desktop is in some directory like ~/.kde and you don't usually put non-desktop-related stuff there.
My guess is that this was some Chinese general stroking his manhood[...]
I don't know which I find stranger: That the Chinese army has a general who ejaculates laser beams or that he can do so with enough precision to blind a satellite.
They received a carte blanche (sp?) from the Congress (yes, both Democrats and Republicans) and they have used it with reckless abandon.
Just to focus your perspective on history and how certain people have forgotten an important lesson from it, the first World War would not have happened the way it did if Germany hadn't given Austria-Hungary the promise to help them no matter who they attacked - essentially they said they'd go with whatever A-H would do. We know the result.
Giving anyone in politics a carte blanche is a dangerous action and should be considered well.
What I'd really like to see is more effort spent on coming up with a universal backplane that would be more future-proof, maybe something more passive where the glue that binds everything together was itself a module you could swap out. That way maybe the underlying frame could last much longer before becoming obsolete
Yup, that's a good idea. That way one could switch the mainboard and keep the old expansion daughterboard and thus the old cards. It's pretty frustrating when you just want to upgrade your CPU/mainboard and then learn that you have to upgrade one or more of your expansion cards as well because a certain slot fell out of style. Especially if that means that the whole upgrade becomes twice as expensive as expected.
The cartridge approach has some advantages but also some disadvantages - for example graphics cards would completely break the paradigm because they require that certain parts be exposed due to cooling concerns. Also, cards with internal interfaces (gaphics cards, sound cards, controllers) would require their own cartdridge designs, which would (slightly) raise the cost.
If you're talking about the European Union, which can hardly be considered to have 'put its markets together', the U.S. still consumes and produces more than all the countries in the Union combined.
Except of course for the whole common currency thing. And the removal of internal borders. And the part where we're making common trade laws. You're right, that's definitely no sign of becoming one market. Also, it's not like Germany alone has a higher export volume than the USA. At least you spend 23% more money on foreign goods than we do.
We are the sole superpower, period. There are no others.
Because surely China doesn't have an enormous economical growth and many more workers then you have. And the EU could never hope to have nearly as much trade volume.
Note that I did acknowledge your military strength. I'm merely pointing out that military strength isn't that useful when dealing with people you don't want to attack (for example because half of your economy depends on them as a market).
We have the most powerful economy in the world, by an enormous amount. I'd say that puts us in a better position than anyone else on the planet.
A 1.47 percent GDP difference is hardly enormous. You're still 40% ahead of China, but they have just started serious industrialization and they have a lot more workers than you. In fact, their GDP grows 2.8 times as fast as yours.
America has been busy integrating Asia into its own economy since 1945, something that Europe still hasn't caught on to. Europe is a *customer* of Asia for the most part and doesn't have anything like the mixing of economies that the U.S. and Asia has. And Asia seems perfectly content with that situation - more than content as they eagerly take any American business they can get.
Considering how China is becoming more and more important for us, Asia doesn't seem to be very picky about who's business they take. And who's maglev train they badly copy.
Perhaps you haven't been following the news, but EU IP laws are pretty much the same as U.S. IP laws. And if you knew a bit about Asia, you'd realize that none of the countries here (where I'm at, this very moment) give a flying fuck about I.P. laws made in the U.S. or Europe. They pay lip service to those laws and nothing more. Really, they don't care what whitey has to say on the topic, whether whitey is from the U.S. or Europe.
Yeah, you forced the DMCA upon us, but software patents are void over here. We don't have laws explicitly banning them, but they already are covered under the current ones. Plus, we have a rather successful anti-software-patent lobby (as several foiled attempts to sneak them in show). Also, once the market over there matures IP and its enforcement will become increasingly important for them - and then they might reconsider dealing too muc with an economy where the progress bar is patented.
Also, our political system allows the upcoming Pirate parties to have a say in how things work (if they get more than N% (usually about 4 or 5) votes they get as many seats). I the USA they'd have to get at least 1/3 of all votes to be significant. We also have the Greens opposing some of the things the Pirats are opposing (like software patents) - and they already are an established political power.
Given the difficulties the European Union is having politically and economically, there's no guarantee it'll even be around in ten years. But as for three big players in the next few decades, you're right: the U.S. (with Canada, as always); Japan; and China. Brazil is coming up fast too, but it'll probably be another fif
Europe is the past; America is the present; Asia is the future. Thinking that Europe (as if there were a single entity by that name, which there sure as hell isn't) is somehow going to take center stage again is nothing more than the batshit ramblings of rabid Unionists longing for the glory days of colonial imperialism. Only Asia has any potential to challenge U.S. hegemony and who cares? We don't have to compete with them; just tag along for the ride. They're too intertwined with us to ever be separated economically. What's good for them is, for the most part, good for us too.
As for Europe - we are the world's largest market ever since we put our markets together. We are bossing Microsoft around. Maybe we won't be the top dog anymore, but one of the top dogs is feasible. While we can't stand up to Asia, we might take the second place with America coming in third. It's certainly possible since after spending the last couple centuries treading water we are finally getting our act (and our resources) together.
So what? In case you somehow missed the clue train the U.S. is still the only superpower in the entire world, which is a good sight better than being one of two superpowers. And any way you slice it we're still going to be the most powerful player around for decades to come. No one will be taking our place any time in the foreseeable future, and even when they do (and someone always does - that's just history for you) odds are that our economy will be so intermixed with theirs that they'll have no choice but to take us up the ladder with them. Intermixing economies is, after all, something that we Americans absolutely excel at.
You are the sole military superpower. However, economic strength is also important (cf. the downfall of the USSR) and concerning that you're not in too great a position. Looking at how tangled up in lawsuits your economy is the rest of the world might develop an edge over you by avoiding that situation. You're not all-important to the EU as Asia is becoming an increasingly important business partner and Asia might decide that they want less of your business than of ours (for example due to harsh IP laws).
In the end it can't really be predicted who holds what kind of power in the end. One thing is certain, there will be three big players - it's just not decided how big each of them will be.
Please stop giving such advice. If you rerouted all +48V lines through the main deflector the resulting tachyon emissions would cause interference in the PSU containment field. I think you know what happens when a PSU loses containment and the datacenter doesn't manage to dump it in time. If you don't, here's a hint: It ain't pretty.
Obviously the right way would be to properly reconfigure the phaser banks and route the energy through them - but don't forget to constantly run a level five diagnosis on them; phasers aren't built for that voltage. You also void your warranty when doing this so make double-sure that you don't accidentally blow them.
Combining that with the WOPR joke I really regret not bringing my camera when a friend of mine went into a BK and ordered a Double Whopper whith six layers of meat. They delivered it to our table. With a knife and a fork. We spent the next half hour bugging the other customers with questions on whether they have a digicam with them.
The problem with that is erosion. Surfaces that people often touch tend to erode slowly from people rubbing their extremities on them. While that erosion is negligible as far as the integrity of the whole thing is concerned, how about the nano surface? I think that after a while the nanostructures on the surface would get smoothed out, causing the surface to lose its antibecterial properties.
Nonetheless it does sound like a good idea. For non-mouse environments.
The problem is that reading the documentation to a command that you rarely use (let's say a ImageMagick command) takes much more of your attention than selecting a rarely-used tool in Gimpshop Pro and examining the resulting dialog. Of course you don't need that attention when you have learned the command, but nobody knows every command and option of every program he will ever use in his life.
CLIs are great for working with text or with things easily represented as text. They are also great for batch processing. However, the are less than ideal for working with things you don't need often enough to memorise them or with things that just can't reasonably be fit into a textual representation.
Deciding on whether to use a GUI or a CLI is a matter of choosing the right tool for the right job (and the decision is also depenent on who's using the thing in the end; what goes best with a CLI on Linux might not go with a CLI at all on Windows).
Now take any of the biggest Flash players and tell me which of the following they natively support: The AVI, MPEG and ASF container formats; DivX, Windows Media Video, H.264 and other popular video codecs; audio codecs like MP3, Windows Media Audio, Vorbis, RealAudio... What, none? It seems that there is a difference between a program that plays media provided in a single format (the FLV container) and one that supports most major media formats through use of an OS-provided plugin interface.
Yeah, and when you get hit by a shotgun blast it's so painful that you not only fall over but fly right into the next wall. That's an aspect of Hollywod shotguns that most people don't realize.
Slashdot Mirror
Chinese hackers installing root kits? Are you sure they weren't Japanese (aka Sony)?
They were clearly $sys$not Chinese.
No. Someone tell ATI to stop releasing drivers and start releasing specs instead. I've got an X1600 sitting on a shelf because there was no way to get it to work properly with ATI's fscked up driver. My solution to the problem was to spend my last money to upgrade to a Geforce 6200TC... Because having the power of a Geforce 4 is better than having any graphics card that needs drivers from ATI, at least if you want any kind of usable hardware acceleration outside of Windows. The ATI cards with community-written driers, however, work fine from what I've heard.
It's about damn time Germany gets access to the silt strider network. Hopefully that'll make the route Berlin-Vivec a bit faster to travel.
2 million man STANDING army?
2 million man fusion powered standing army.
Compare the amount of Mexicans found in any given university and the amount of Chinese in the same place. Either the Chinesehave a lot of money and don't like their own unis or China is heavily investing in their next generation of researchers. Given the fact that a lot of those future researchers are being sent to places like the MIT I think it's safe to assume that in the next decades China is going to have a lot of very smart people as their disposal.
Also, solar power is not that green, either; the manufacturing process of photovoltaic cells generates toxic waste. It's better than burning coal but still not exactly perfect. Thus, it would be nonsense to treat solar power as the non plus ultra of power generation. It makes for a useful addition to our pool of power generation technologies, though (especially one that can be added everywhere for small increases in power generation - you just install solar panels on a building's rooftop).
Clean desktops are a Mac thing.
/tmp on the Mac. Thus the desktop is full of .torrent files, multiple copies of PDFs, the odd media file...e w Folder (2)?
s/Mac/Linux/
While I don't put stuff on my desktop, it's still cluttered with detritus - apparently Firefox uses ~/Desktop instead of
Under Windows it's just the traditional way to do things. where else would you save stuff but %USERHOME%\Desktop? Okay, except for C:\Downloads, D:\Downloads, E:\Media\MP3\temp and E:\Games\Morrowind\Oblivion\Downloads\maps\temp\N
Under Linux the Desktop is in some directory like ~/.kde and you don't usually put non-desktop-related stuff there.
My guess is that this was some Chinese general stroking his manhood[...]
I don't know which I find stranger: That the Chinese army has a general who ejaculates laser beams or that he can do so with enough precision to blind a satellite.
They received a carte blanche (sp?) from the Congress (yes, both Democrats and Republicans) and they have used it with reckless abandon.
Just to focus your perspective on history and how certain people have forgotten an important lesson from it, the first World War would not have happened the way it did if Germany hadn't given Austria-Hungary the promise to help them no matter who they attacked - essentially they said they'd go with whatever A-H would do. We know the result.
Giving anyone in politics a carte blanche is a dangerous action and should be considered well.
What I'd really like to see is more effort spent on coming up with a universal backplane that would be more future-proof, maybe something more passive where the glue that binds everything together was itself a module you could swap out. That way maybe the underlying frame could last much longer before becoming obsolete
Yup, that's a good idea. That way one could switch the mainboard and keep the old expansion daughterboard and thus the old cards. It's pretty frustrating when you just want to upgrade your CPU/mainboard and then learn that you have to upgrade one or more of your expansion cards as well because a certain slot fell out of style. Especially if that means that the whole upgrade becomes twice as expensive as expected.
The cartridge approach has some advantages but also some disadvantages - for example graphics cards would completely break the paradigm because they require that certain parts be exposed due to cooling concerns. Also, cards with internal interfaces (gaphics cards, sound cards, controllers) would require their own cartdridge designs, which would (slightly) raise the cost.
If you're talking about the European Union, which can hardly be considered to have 'put its markets together', the U.S. still consumes and produces more than all the countries in the Union combined.
Except of course for the whole common currency thing. And the removal of internal borders. And the part where we're making common trade laws. You're right, that's definitely no sign of becoming one market. Also, it's not like Germany alone has a higher export volume than the USA. At least you spend 23% more money on foreign goods than we do.
We are the sole superpower, period. There are no others.
Because surely China doesn't have an enormous economical growth and many more workers then you have. And the EU could never hope to have nearly as much trade volume.
Note that I did acknowledge your military strength. I'm merely pointing out that military strength isn't that useful when dealing with people you don't want to attack (for example because half of your economy depends on them as a market).
We have the most powerful economy in the world, by an enormous amount. I'd say that puts us in a better position than anyone else on the planet.
A 1.47 percent GDP difference is hardly enormous. You're still 40% ahead of China, but they have just started serious industrialization and they have a lot more workers than you. In fact, their GDP grows 2.8 times as fast as yours.
America has been busy integrating Asia into its own economy since 1945, something that Europe still hasn't caught on to. Europe is a *customer* of Asia for the most part and doesn't have anything like the mixing of economies that the U.S. and Asia has. And Asia seems perfectly content with that situation - more than content as they eagerly take any American business they can get.
Considering how China is becoming more and more important for us, Asia doesn't seem to be very picky about who's business they take. And who's maglev train they badly copy.
Perhaps you haven't been following the news, but EU IP laws are pretty much the same as U.S. IP laws. And if you knew a bit about Asia, you'd realize that none of the countries here (where I'm at, this very moment) give a flying fuck about I.P. laws made in the U.S. or Europe. They pay lip service to those laws and nothing more. Really, they don't care what whitey has to say on the topic, whether whitey is from the U.S. or Europe.
Yeah, you forced the DMCA upon us, but software patents are void over here. We don't have laws explicitly banning them, but they already are covered under the current ones. Plus, we have a rather successful anti-software-patent lobby (as several foiled attempts to sneak them in show). Also, once the market over there matures IP and its enforcement will become increasingly important for them - and then they might reconsider dealing too muc with an economy where the progress bar is patented.
Also, our political system allows the upcoming Pirate parties to have a say in how things work (if they get more than N% (usually about 4 or 5) votes they get as many seats). I the USA they'd have to get at least 1/3 of all votes to be significant. We also have the Greens opposing some of the things the Pirats are opposing (like software patents) - and they already are an established political power.
Given the difficulties the European Union is having politically and economically, there's no guarantee it'll even be around in ten years. But as for three big players in the next few decades, you're right: the U.S. (with Canada, as always); Japan; and China. Brazil is coming up fast too, but it'll probably be another fif
Europe is the past; America is the present; Asia is the future. Thinking that Europe (as if there were a single entity by that name, which there sure as hell isn't) is somehow going to take center stage again is nothing more than the batshit ramblings of rabid Unionists longing for the glory days of colonial imperialism. Only Asia has any potential to challenge U.S. hegemony and who cares? We don't have to compete with them; just tag along for the ride. They're too intertwined with us to ever be separated economically. What's good for them is, for the most part, good for us too.
As for Europe - we are the world's largest market ever since we put our markets together. We are bossing Microsoft around. Maybe we won't be the top dog anymore, but one of the top dogs is feasible. While we can't stand up to Asia, we might take the second place with America coming in third. It's certainly possible since after spending the last couple centuries treading water we are finally getting our act (and our resources) together.
So what? In case you somehow missed the clue train the U.S. is still the only superpower in the entire world, which is a good sight better than being one of two superpowers. And any way you slice it we're still going to be the most powerful player around for decades to come. No one will be taking our place any time in the foreseeable future, and even when they do (and someone always does - that's just history for you) odds are that our economy will be so intermixed with theirs that they'll have no choice but to take us up the ladder with them. Intermixing economies is, after all, something that we Americans absolutely excel at.
You are the sole military superpower. However, economic strength is also important (cf. the downfall of the USSR) and concerning that you're not in too great a position. Looking at how tangled up in lawsuits your economy is the rest of the world might develop an edge over you by avoiding that situation. You're not all-important to the EU as Asia is becoming an increasingly important business partner and Asia might decide that they want less of your business than of ours (for example due to harsh IP laws).
In the end it can't really be predicted who holds what kind of power in the end. One thing is certain, there will be three big players - it's just not decided how big each of them will be.
Please stop giving such advice. If you rerouted all +48V lines through the main deflector the resulting tachyon emissions would cause interference in the PSU containment field. I think you know what happens when a PSU loses containment and the datacenter doesn't manage to dump it in time. If you don't, here's a hint: It ain't pretty.
Obviously the right way would be to properly reconfigure the phaser banks and route the energy through them - but don't forget to constantly run a level five diagnosis on them; phasers aren't built for that voltage. You also void your warranty when doing this so make double-sure that you don't accidentally blow them.
Combining that with the WOPR joke I really regret not bringing my camera when a friend of mine went into a BK and ordered a Double Whopper whith six layers of meat. They delivered it to our table. With a knife and a fork. We spent the next half hour bugging the other customers with questions on whether they have a digicam with them.
The body is sent to every IP address. The receiver is bound to be somewhere in there.
Much easier: User DRM to ensure that the software only runs on systems without any kind of user I/O. No I/O present, no I/O can be captured.
The problem with that is erosion. Surfaces that people often touch tend to erode slowly from people rubbing their extremities on them. While that erosion is negligible as far as the integrity of the whole thing is concerned, how about the nano surface? I think that after a while the nanostructures on the surface would get smoothed out, causing the surface to lose its antibecterial properties.
Nonetheless it does sound like a good idea. For non-mouse environments.
Quoth the poster, "the standard configuration will be Debian GNU/Linux 3.1, KDE 3.5 and OpenOffice 2."
Heh. Misread that summary as "Linux urinals". I was wondering what sort of benefit Linux could bring to the porcelain pots.
The current Windows-based urinals are susceptible to the Piss of Death attack.
The problem is that reading the documentation to a command that you rarely use (let's say a ImageMagick command) takes much more of your attention than selecting a rarely-used tool in Gimpshop Pro and examining the resulting dialog. Of course you don't need that attention when you have learned the command, but nobody knows every command and option of every program he will ever use in his life.
CLIs are great for working with text or with things easily represented as text. They are also great for batch processing. However, the are less than ideal for working with things you don't need often enough to memorise them or with things that just can't reasonably be fit into a textual representation.
Deciding on whether to use a GUI or a CLI is a matter of choosing the right tool for the right job (and the decision is also depenent on who's using the thing in the end; what goes best with a CLI on Linux might not go with a CLI at all on Windows).
I'm still waiting for Nike to release their new collection of epic shoes. They give you a +5 to trendiness.
If they publish a paper on their findings in a peer-reviewed magazine they'll be sure to win the Nobel Prize!
Now take any of the biggest Flash players and tell me which of the following they natively support: The AVI, MPEG and ASF container formats; DivX, Windows Media Video, H.264 and other popular video codecs; audio codecs like MP3, Windows Media Audio, Vorbis, RealAudio... What, none? It seems that there is a difference between a program that plays media provided in a single format (the FLV container) and one that supports most major media formats through use of an OS-provided plugin interface.
Yeah, and when you get hit by a shotgun blast it's so painful that you not only fall over but fly right into the next wall. That's an aspect of Hollywod shotguns that most people don't realize.
Jeeze, I hate how people are always trying to be PC.
...okay, okay, bad pun.
Don't look at me, I'm Mac.