I would think that by the time the card dies, new 1 gig cards cost $5 and are as useful as 16MB cards today. I've never heard anyone say that their flash card died of old age. Those endurance numbers weren't discovered by throwing data at each card until they died. They were obtained by calculating the average amount of writes per allocation unit or something like that.
When taking pictures or storing music, you're not overwriting any allocation unit more than once. Considering any allocation unit in flash memory can endure hundreds of thousands of writes, you can, in theory anyway, fill the card with pictures at least 100k times before it fails. This means millions of pictures.
My semi-educated hunch is that flash endurance is a moot point when using the memory for storage. It only matters when using the drive as swap space where it's written to and read from constantly.
If there are flaws in my reasoning, please do point them out. This is just my current understanding regarding this issue.
I buy from Magnatune, Audio Lunchbox or one of the many other sites that sell open, non-DRM music in MP3, OGG Vorbis and FLAC formats.
Why should I buy things from people who don't have respect for me and my wishes as a customer?
No major label will ever again get a single penny from me until they say "screw DRM" and mean it too. If they don't, that's just fine with me. They can just wither and die for all I care.
This could be good in the sense that if Amazon gets sued, fights and wins, it'll set a precedent that'll help someone else try the same thing again with music.
Ok, they're neither desktops nor laptops and calling them desktop replacements implies laptop, so what should we call them to nod dilute the notion that a laptop is something you can *easily* carry with you in a bag?
Let's hear some ideas for new names. Perhaps we'll manage to come up with one that'll stick.
It's not a flight sim. It's an arcade shooter. I just tried the demo and even on the "professional" flight model, the game felt more like a WWII Rogue Squadron than Sturmovik. Hell, the default view is a chase view and you can down four zeros with a one second cannon burst in their general direction. Top Gun on NES felt more realistic. Anyway, while I personally didn't even bother to finish the demo mission, it could certainly appeal to teens with twitchy trigger fingers and no interest in physics.
By the way... how indie is a game that's published by Codemasters?
It is up to the artist and his or her representatives to decide which data to give away, and up to you to respect their wishes.
I think that is precisely what is or should be contested here. Copyrights were created for the purpose of giving artists incentive to create music. This was achieved by denying others the right to print copies and sell them without permission, thus allowing the author to earn money by selling his works. At the same time, however, also the public's right to freely convey cultural ideas and expressions of others was restricted for the first time ever.
Back in the day it would have required significant effort to duplicate a complete work, so this restriction wasn't considered a big sacrifice. Today, digital data can be copied so incredibly easily that the sacrifice is comparatively bigger. In essence, technology has brought so much more potential to the sharing of culture that it can be argued that giving authors the sole authority over how their work is distributed might no longer be worth the restrictions it imposes on the public.
After all, if music authors really do make most of their money from other things than actual distribution revenue of their music, is it worth it to have a gigantic copyright infrastructure, life-destroying copyright lawsuits, and immensely limited rights to share culture, just to protect the artists' rights that no longer serve any significant purpose?
I'm not saying you are wrong in saying artists' wishes shouldn't be respected or possibly enforced like they are now, but I'd like to raise a discussion on whether the system is in balance anymore. If the copyright law had to this day clearly permitted non-commercial sharing, and a proposition was made to forbid such sharing, would you support this proposition?
Re:What is your opinion...
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 1
You should try OpenTTD. Whereas the original maps are 256x256 squares, OpenTTD now supports up to 2048x2048 size maps. That's 64 times more space than before. Doesn't get too crowded too quick I must say.
Re:Mobile Computing
on
VW Goes USB
·
· Score: 2, Funny
> In the future, Americans will never leave our cars.
Look, I don't want to sound too critical of your premonition, but I think I speak for all of us europeans when I say that we don't really want americans in our cars, particularly so if they refuse to leave when asked nicely.
- Undo: Press ctrl-z if you accidentally close a tab you didn't want to close and it pops right back up. - Unconditional back/fwd. Opera never refreshes a page you go back to with the 'back' function. Have the connection time out when submitting some big form? Just click back and you have the form there just like you filled it out. - Can be used as one fullscreen window only. All links are opened as new tabs regardless of where they come from, making sure you never have to wonder what browser window it was that had that particular tab open. Also closing the last tab doesn't close Opera. - The F12 -menu that allows changing proxy/popup/browserID/pluginblock/soundblock/etc settings without a single dialog. - Infinitely configurable to make it feel just like you want it.
I'm not sure how long it's going to take, but I do see a day when you'll have a decent Internet connection in your car, at which point in time your argument goes away.
Interestingly enough, the technology is already here. Any EDGE or UMTS connection should be capable of streaming your everyday 128kbps shoutcasts. Even plain old GPRS should suffice for lower bitrates.
All you need is a smartphone (symbian, MS, palm, whatever, many exist already) with headphone out and an mp3 player that can play streams.
I think the only two problems are high costs for GPRS/UMTS data transfer and blotchy reception. You don't want your radio to cut out every time there's a hiccup in the data stream. This could be fixed by making buffering players and then servers that send out data faster than realtime, giving the player time to reaquire the stream.
So the technology is here, all it needs is somebody who'll put it to good use.
There seems to be a great variety in opinions regarding the Trackpoint.
I used to use an IBM Thinkpad 365XD which had Trackpoint only. It was great and responsive in every way. The same characteristics applied to another IBM, a TP560.
Later I bought a Dell Latitude CPt S that had both, the Trackpoint and a touchpad. I initially used the Trackpoint, but it was nowhere near as responsive as the ones I had used on the IBMs. It was slower in that there was a noticeable lag between physical input and cursor response. Now I use the touchpad almost exclusively. Had the Trackpoint been as good on the dell as it was on the IBMs, I have no doubt I would still be using it.
So you people who love Trackpoints, be wary that your next Trackpoint could be horrible compared to the current IBM goodness, whereas those of you who hate Trackpoints, please go out and try a good one before damning them all to hell.
"1:07pm OK, Microsoft has provided its explanation. What it boils down to is that there may be certain technologies in the Longhorn Developer Preview build for which Microsoft has not filed patent applications, and the confidentiality provisions protect or mitigate the company's filing rights. One of the focus areas of IP protection has been user interface, hence Microsoft cannot permit screenshots of the UI. I was told that Microsoft had left its Media Center user interface unprotected, and that UI has been stolen and replicated in numerous other places. They don't want that to happen to Longhorn."
I'll have to correct you there. The cells they use are NOT rechargeable. Hence the $3000 "refueling" cost.
They do seem to have a higher energy density though since they claim to get 13 MJ from 12 kg worth of cells. According to my calculations, you would have to have over 20 kg of Lithium-Ion-Polymer cells to achieve the same amount of capacity. They would cost about 2-3 times as much as the cells they currently use, but recharging them wouldn't cost much at all.
If half the capacity was enough for them along with 10C current output, it could in the long run be much more cost effective to use LiPolys. Then again, I wouldn't want to be the one who recharges those cells after each run, considering that it isn't exactly safe to charge a bunch of LiPoly cells in series. Not to mention a couple of cells would probably fail during each run, thus making it necessary to find and replace those. Not fun.
I suppose you are right about the danger of turning the robot wars into "the tuning wars". It would indeed raise the difficulty level for entry a bit, but then again it could inspire more capable engineers to show what they've got.
I don't agree with you on the matter of high speed and lots of traction though. What I'm suggesting is precisely the opposite of dune buggies crashing into each other. I would wager that it would in fact reduce the whole destruction derby who-gets-under-who-first crashfest aspect that currently dominates the robot wars and would shift weight towards using actual weapons, now that sheer mass wouldn't be the biggest weapon available.
Flippers would have to be smaller to accommodate bigger wheels, thus making them less effective. Then again saws and axes could become deadly tools in competent hands.
A problem with the legislated armor reducing approach would be that bots like hypnodisc that are basically one big weapon with no extra armor would become invincible. What, pray tell, could you legislate to make hypnodisc more vulnerable without crippling yet another area for innovation in the show?
And about that last comment regarding walking bots... I might be dreaming, but isn't that how the greatest ideas are born? Show me military battle machines with circular saws, hammers, axes and flippers and I'll consider your argument valid. In a difficult environment, a walking bot could be fast and extremely deadly since it could be higher and thus attack from above. With less ability for high-speed leg-ramming on the part of the opposing bots, its legs would have to be cut or damaged by other means. Of course it would be incredibly difficult to build a good walking bot, but if the incentive is there, I'm sure somebody would come up with a good design.
Flat arena -> no ground clearance + fat armor + small wheels + high-speed erratic driving + hasty maneuvering.
Fill the arena with small obstacles, uneven surfaces and high/low ground. -> Big wheels, more ground clearance, importance of good suspension and handling characteristics, more weight spend on power systems, thus less dead weight in armor.
This makes even most current weapons such as circular saws and spikes more effective since there are more exposed wheels and less armor. This also brings a whole bunch of new tactics in play.
They could even make it a sand arena with small hills. This could actually give a fighting chance to walking robots and other unconventional designs.
Slashdot Mirror
And I actually feared they had bought Massive Entertainment, the makers of (now freely available) Ground Control and its sequel(s).
It's not unheard of you know...
I would think that by the time the card dies, new 1 gig cards cost $5 and are as useful as 16MB cards today. I've never heard anyone say that their flash card died of old age. Those endurance numbers weren't discovered by throwing data at each card until they died. They were obtained by calculating the average amount of writes per allocation unit or something like that.
When taking pictures or storing music, you're not overwriting any allocation unit more than once. Considering any allocation unit in flash memory can endure hundreds of thousands of writes, you can, in theory anyway, fill the card with pictures at least 100k times before it fails. This means millions of pictures.
My semi-educated hunch is that flash endurance is a moot point when using the memory for storage. It only matters when using the drive as swap space where it's written to and read from constantly.
If there are flaws in my reasoning, please do point them out. This is just my current understanding regarding this issue.
Check out The Wreck Store. They now officially sell the DVD to USA too!
You might want to check out B5: I've Found Her for a really hardcore space combat sim project set in the Babylon 5 universe.
From what I've heard, there's also quite a community around the Freespace 2 engine. Why not see if you can google up something interesting.
I buy from Magnatune, Audio Lunchbox or one of the many other sites that sell open, non-DRM music in MP3, OGG Vorbis and FLAC formats.
Why should I buy things from people who don't have respect for me and my wishes as a customer?
No major label will ever again get a single penny from me until they say "screw DRM" and mean it too. If they don't, that's just fine with me. They can just wither and die for all I care.
Solution provided.
This could be good in the sense that if Amazon gets sued, fights and wins, it'll set a precedent that'll help someone else try the same thing again with music.
Ok, they're neither desktops nor laptops and calling them desktop replacements implies laptop, so what should we call them to nod dilute the notion that a laptop is something you can *easily* carry with you in a bag?
Let's hear some ideas for new names. Perhaps we'll manage to come up with one that'll stick.
Fattop? Hugetop? Lugtop?
It's not a flight sim. It's an arcade shooter. I just tried the demo and even on the "professional" flight model, the game felt more like a WWII Rogue Squadron than Sturmovik. Hell, the default view is a chase view and you can down four zeros with a one second cannon burst in their general direction.
Top Gun on NES felt more realistic.
Anyway, while I personally didn't even bother to finish the demo mission, it could certainly appeal to teens with twitchy trigger fingers and no interest in physics.
By the way... how indie is a game that's published by Codemasters?
It is up to the artist and his or her representatives to decide which data to give away, and up to you to respect their wishes.
I think that is precisely what is or should be contested here. Copyrights were created for the purpose of giving artists incentive to create music. This was achieved by denying others the right to print copies and sell them without permission, thus allowing the author to earn money by selling his works. At the same time, however, also the public's right to freely convey cultural ideas and expressions of others was restricted for the first time ever.
Back in the day it would have required significant effort to duplicate a complete work, so this restriction wasn't considered a big sacrifice. Today, digital data can be copied so incredibly easily that the sacrifice is comparatively bigger. In essence, technology has brought so much more potential to the sharing of culture that it can be argued that giving authors the sole authority over how their work is distributed might no longer be worth the restrictions it imposes on the public.
After all, if music authors really do make most of their money from other things than actual distribution revenue of their music, is it worth it to have a gigantic copyright infrastructure, life-destroying copyright lawsuits, and immensely limited rights to share culture, just to protect the artists' rights that no longer serve any significant purpose?
I'm not saying you are wrong in saying artists' wishes shouldn't be respected or possibly enforced like they are now, but I'd like to raise a discussion on whether the system is in balance anymore. If the copyright law had to this day clearly permitted non-commercial sharing, and a proposition was made to forbid such sharing, would you support this proposition?
Now also mirrored at ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/culture/tv+film/StarWreck/
You should try OpenTTD. Whereas the original maps are 256x256 squares, OpenTTD now supports up to 2048x2048 size maps. That's 64 times more space than before. Doesn't get too crowded too quick I must say.
> In the future, Americans will never leave our cars.
Look, I don't want to sound too critical of your premonition, but I think I speak for all of us europeans when I say that we don't really want americans in our cars, particularly so if they refuse to leave when asked nicely.
What bothers me more is that apparently now random bloggers / webmasters are classified as celebrities by someone...
I'll add a couple:
- Undo: Press ctrl-z if you accidentally close a tab you didn't want to close and it pops right back up.
- Unconditional back/fwd. Opera never refreshes a page you go back to with the 'back' function. Have the connection time out when submitting some big form? Just click back and you have the form there just like you filled it out.
- Can be used as one fullscreen window only. All links are opened as new tabs regardless of where they come from, making sure you never have to wonder what browser window it was that had that particular tab open. Also closing the last tab doesn't close Opera.
- The F12 -menu that allows changing proxy/popup/browserID/pluginblock/soundblock/etc settings without a single dialog.
- Infinitely configurable to make it feel just like you want it.
- And more! -- See 30 Days to Becoming an Opera8 Lover (seems to be up to day 21 so far)
I'm not sure how long it's going to take, but I do see a day when you'll have a decent Internet connection in your car, at which point in time your argument goes away.
Interestingly enough, the technology is already here. Any EDGE or UMTS connection should be capable of streaming your everyday 128kbps shoutcasts. Even plain old GPRS should suffice for lower bitrates.
All you need is a smartphone (symbian, MS, palm, whatever, many exist already) with headphone out and an mp3 player that can play streams.
I think the only two problems are high costs for GPRS/UMTS data transfer and blotchy reception. You don't want your radio to cut out every time there's a hiccup in the data stream. This could be fixed by making buffering players and then servers that send out data faster than realtime, giving the player time to reaquire the stream.
So the technology is here, all it needs is somebody who'll put it to good use.
Think that's bad? Try comparing those scenes in the aerial/satellite views ;)
There seems to be a great variety in opinions regarding the Trackpoint.
I used to use an IBM Thinkpad 365XD which had Trackpoint only. It was great and responsive in every way. The same characteristics applied to another IBM, a TP560.
Later I bought a Dell Latitude CPt S that had both, the Trackpoint and a touchpad. I initially used the Trackpoint, but it was nowhere near as responsive as the ones I had used on the IBMs. It was slower in that there was a noticeable lag between physical input and cursor response. Now I use the touchpad almost exclusively. Had the Trackpoint been as good on the dell as it was on the IBMs, I have no doubt I would still be using it.
So you people who love Trackpoints, be wary that your next Trackpoint could be horrible compared to the current IBM goodness, whereas those of you who hate Trackpoints, please go out and try a good one before damning them all to hell.
You do realize that there is no mention of puncturing the cells after putting them in the water?
The salt water is there just to conduct electricity and discharge the cells fully.
Looks like it was #1 that was the correct answer:
"1:07pm
OK, Microsoft has provided its explanation. What it boils down to is that there may be certain technologies in the Longhorn Developer Preview build for which Microsoft has not filed patent applications, and the confidentiality provisions protect or mitigate the company's filing rights. One of the focus areas of IP protection has been user interface, hence Microsoft cannot permit screenshots of the UI. I was told that Microsoft had left its Media Center user interface unprotected, and that UI has been stolen and replicated in numerous other places. They don't want that to happen to Longhorn."
From the Thurrott link.
*sigh*
Perhaps you can just turn the projector around and it will project everything to the windshield...
I'll have to correct you there. The cells they use are NOT rechargeable. Hence the $3000 "refueling" cost.
They do seem to have a higher energy density though since they claim to get 13 MJ from 12 kg worth of cells. According to my calculations, you would have to have over 20 kg of Lithium-Ion-Polymer cells to achieve the same amount of capacity. They would cost about 2-3 times as much as the cells they currently use, but recharging them wouldn't cost much at all.
If half the capacity was enough for them along with 10C current output, it could in the long run be much more cost effective to use LiPolys. Then again, I wouldn't want to be the one who recharges those cells after each run, considering that it isn't exactly safe to charge a bunch of LiPoly cells in series. Not to mention a couple of cells would probably fail during each run, thus making it necessary to find and replace those. Not fun.
I suppose you are right about the danger of turning the robot wars into "the tuning wars".
It would indeed raise the difficulty level for entry a bit, but then again it could inspire more capable engineers to show what they've got.
I don't agree with you on the matter of high speed and lots of traction though. What I'm suggesting is precisely the opposite of dune buggies crashing into each other. I would wager that it would in fact reduce the whole destruction derby who-gets-under-who-first crashfest aspect that currently dominates the robot wars and would shift weight towards using actual weapons, now that sheer mass wouldn't be the biggest weapon available.
Flippers would have to be smaller to accommodate bigger wheels, thus making them less effective. Then again saws and axes could become deadly tools in competent hands.
A problem with the legislated armor reducing approach would be that bots like hypnodisc that are basically one big weapon with no extra armor would become invincible. What, pray tell, could you legislate to make hypnodisc more vulnerable without crippling yet another area for innovation in the show?
And about that last comment regarding walking bots... I might be dreaming, but isn't that how the greatest ideas are born? Show me military battle machines with circular saws, hammers, axes and flippers and I'll consider your argument valid.
In a difficult environment, a walking bot could be fast and extremely deadly since it could be higher and thus attack from above. With less ability for high-speed leg-ramming on the part of the opposing bots, its legs would have to be cut or damaged by other means. Of course it would be incredibly difficult to build a good walking bot, but if the incentive is there, I'm sure somebody would come up with a good design.
Flat arena -> no ground clearance + fat armor + small wheels + high-speed erratic driving + hasty maneuvering.
Fill the arena with small obstacles, uneven surfaces and high/low ground. -> Big wheels, more ground clearance, importance of good suspension and handling characteristics, more weight spend on power systems, thus less dead weight in armor.
This makes even most current weapons such as circular saws and spikes more effective since there are more exposed wheels and less armor. This also brings a whole bunch of new tactics in play.
They could even make it a sand arena with small hills. This could actually give a fighting chance to walking robots and other unconventional designs.
Allow me to rephrase that for you:
Modern AMERICAN helicopters are just too small...
How big is a T-Rex thighbone exactly?