Well, just from personal experiance, I've got a pack of Verbatim CD-RWs bought back in the summer of 2000 and they're still alive and well. (They're just rated for 4x, so I don't use them much any more....)
I've known a few CD-Rs to go bad in the last 5 years, but they are the excpetion rather than the rule. My solution to that would be: discs are cheap and readily availible, for long term storage make 2 copies.
I know NIST did a study simulating aging of a DVD+R disc, and found that at 25C/50% humidity/low light levels the disc remained readable for about 30 (simulated) years. Given DVD writables use the same Cyanne based dyes many CD-Rs (actual some high end CDs use better materials yet with a polysomething or other dye on top of a gold reflective layer (gold won't decay like the silver that's used in most writable discs will)), I'd expect quality CD-Rs to last about as long.
had it right all along. Here i was, making fun of the 800 and 1000W PSUs we've started to see over the last 6 months, and now I get to eat crow.
But at least I know get to make fun of the people spending 6000-8000 dollars (general swag the article took based on the current Dell SLI setups) on a gaming computer.
The Nvidia version 80.0 and above drivers are multithreaded, so they take decent advantage of dual core / SMT chips. A couple of games, I know Quake4 for one, have been benchmarked with the dual core offerings edging out the fastest single core products. How much of that is related to the multithreaded Nvidia drivers and how much is from threading in the games themsleves I don't know. (The effect is not on all games when running the det 80s, so I'd assume Q4 has at least some usefull (beyond file I/O and netcode) threading).
Cmndr Taco can censor any comment, or ban you for any comment he so chooses. However, he can not sue you for comments made on slashdot (unless the violate excpetions to free speech like lible or defamation). Civil court is court non the less and it, along with the laws that govern it are bound by the constitution, including freedom of speech.
If Juniper had simply gone to the message board operators and asked them to deal with these posts, the posters would not have had any recourse but to accept the descision handed down by the board operators.
Juniper opted to make this a legal issue, and as such laws governing what is and is not protected speech apply. This is an issue of free speech, but only becuase of how Juniper choose to address it. There were avenues Juniper could have taken where free speech would not have been a deffense; but they didn't proceed that way so free speech is a defense here.
I'm reasonably sure the powers that be at Enron, Worldcomm, et al possed a danger to society; certainly to their employees, sharholders and ultimately custormers. Catagorizing 'white collar' crime as 'not a danger' is rather naive.
I would much rather see some one like Ken Lay in Federal Pound Me in the Ass Prision than some idiot who FedExed his buddy LSD.
That said, contempt of court is applicable to all colors of collars. The guys over at Kazzaa were order by a court in Austrailia to filter a whole bunch of keywords to minimize copyright violation. Instead they blocked all the IPs in Aust. from connecting.
I put the over under for some one to start distributing a version of Kazzaa that by default connects to a proxy server in say Thailand then to the Kazzaa servers at about 2 weeks.
and of course, if they actually bothered to filter those keywords, I'd think it might effect more than just the people in Aust., somewhere Kazzaa might block copy protected material where they're not legally bound to give a damn about infringment yet. That of course would decimate their buisness model
Create a premium service, charge people more to access your network at 'fast' speeds. Ok no problem. That's sort of been going on for a while with tiered speeds for broadband connections. Telco's provide content targeted at those premium accounts. Again, ok by me. Paying more generally entitles you to more.
So now other sites that provide streaming auido or video or just use lots of bandwidth are going to have to pay a premium or face serious degradation of quality of service. Welp, that's not good for those sites. Hmmm... so now I probably loose a lot of choices when it comes to where I get my streaming media from. The Telcos price the competeing web sites out of buisness or force them to a vastly inferior product. That's not good for me now.
I can understand and even support the telcos wanting to provide some form of quality of service garauntees for customers willing to pay for it. But a second tier internet controlled by the telcos is likely going to end badly for people on both ends of the fiber.
Samsung is currently manufactering flash memory in at least limited quantities (don't know if it's in full production yet) on a 50nm process.
To the best of my knoweledge that is smallest process in production, Intel and IBM are certainly producig 65nm chips that will be on the market in the next few months.
Scheuer added that parents must be responsible for what their children play, but that the German government could help less media-savvy parents by introducing a 'complete ban' on violent games. Along with movies, games are already subject to a rating process."
Wait, they want parents to 'be responsible' for the games they buy their children or let their children play, but in an effort to make sure parents don't make the wrong descision (ie disagree with this wack-job), we'll ban violent video games entirely? How is that letting parents be resonsible for what their children play again? Or right, it's not about responsiblity, it's about you not likeing violent video games - so no one should.
I'm just glad to see once in a while the US doif other governmentsesn't have a monopoly on dumb politicians forcing their idealogical views on the rest of the country. Sometimes I do worry.
Actually, 'reasonable expectation of privacy' is used more to determine the types of restrictions on interference with your rights - usualy search and seziure. If you throw something away in a public place there is no 'expectation of privacy' and there is broad athuority for the police to do what they will with it.
The right to privacy also exists in this day as clearly as the right to free practice of religon, or the right to free speech does. There's a post a few rows up that lists a few of the Supreme court descisions that established the "Right to privacy." The most famous of course being Roe v Wade. It's an inferred right, but it is a right none the less.
Considering the rootkit is installed without owners realistically being aware, doesn't that make it equivalent to a form of worm, virus, or other type of nasty?
No, it makes it a pieces of spyware or malware, which may or may not yet be illegal. The state of New York (and a few others) have filed civil suits against spyware companies based on existing tresspass and privacy laws. The 'I-SPY' act ( a Federal anti-spyware law) as far as I know is still waiting to be passed by the Senate. In fact it's been sitting in the senate judiciary committie since the end of May, so don't hold your breath.
I'm not interested in jail time so much as making sony pay. The New York state spy-ware law suits were something like a $500 fine per instance of infection - consider the millions of infected CDs Sony sold over the last 18 months, and you can bankrupt Sony pretty quickly. A $50 billion dollar class action law suit - that's a Ford Pinto type situation. I don't think they'll forget the lesson when they're still paying into a settelment fund 25 years from now.
Typical misrepresentation of the facts by the submitter. No where in the linked article was there any impliation that Dr. Hwang used any form of pressure, coersion, or other unscrupulous means to obtain the eggs.
The reasons given by Mr. Schatten is pretty clearly stated:
Under U.S. rules, collecting eggs from women working on a cloning project would be considered unethical. In the original paper, published by the journal Science last year, the scientists said the eggs all came from anonymous donors.
Hwang lied about where the eggs came from, and used (from the standpoint of the US) and inappropriate donor. I know this is just user submitted stuff here, but could we at leat pretend like accurately representing the article is important. Or do we just assume no one will bother to read a 1/2 summary without some creative spin in the summary.
Having taken an online univeristy class (or two) (From the University of Missouri system), i can that assesment is probably accurate of most of the students in our class. We had 2, 1 hour online lectures a week - two or three students out of about 20 in the class attended with any regularity, the professor also commented many didn't even take the time to listen to the playbacks later (they were avialible for download or listening through basically a browser plugin). A signifigant part of the final grade was from particiaption, just listening to the lectures and commenting in an online discussion group - the class average for those 'easy money' points was about 60%.
That's not to say online classes are better or worse than on campus classes, but the percpetion from the students, and I gather your experiance would agree with that, that these aren't 'real' classes. I'd be concerned that an online degree might be seen by employers in the same light, at least an online university might be. Online coursework from 'established' universities might be more accpeted.
I'd assume the robots would require a large number of fairly small steps (such as posistioning the camera and instrument could take many many movement instructions), where as communicating with a human can be done on a more conceptual scale - make a cut here - tie of that blood vessel ect. Not to mention being able to communicate a series of critical instructions at the same time. "Make a cut there - but for the love of god don't cut " can be sent in one message to another person, but a surgeon on the ground would have to take a series of baby steps making sure to wait for the result of each before continueing.
A little local software shop has about 3 or 4 computers on the floor each with a different new release title up and running on it, open for custormers to try out - they started that at least 8 years ago.
It's a nice touch, and one certianly welcome in a national chain. I know the - go download the demo - line has been used more than a couple times in this thread, but really there are a number of games (mostly big name titles) that opt to not release a demo, or at least wait till well after the product launch to release a demo. And even then, many demos weight in at over 500 mb these days, try downloading that on dialup, even low end broadband it can take several hours (of course not a big deal since you don't tie up the phone...)
Realistically, I won't buy a game without being able to play it these days. If EBGames can provide me a way to paly Quake 4 without the $50 fee, they may earn themselves some buisness.
Possibly a performance thing, but other games use scripting languages for their AI just fine. My question was prompted in part by how much we've been able to do with LUA scripts for the Age of Mythology and Homeworld 2 AIs (amoung other titles). AoM allows you pretty complete control over the AI from LUA scripts, including the ability to edit the single player scenario scripts, I was hoping for the same from Civ IV.
I would think (though haven't anything to back it up) LUA and Python would be similar in speed, both are compiled to a bytecode type of intermediate language and run on a virtual machine. Plus in a turn based game like Civ, the game should have tons of time to run AI planning and whatnot during the human player's turn. I hope the choice doesn't turn out to hinder modders - and given all we need to build the AI library, and hopefully lots of good documentation to go with it, I don't think it should too much.
Since DirectX 8 (I think), the color values have been floating point numbers, this is to avoid loosing a lot of possible values through all blending with multi-texturing and effects (fog, lighting ect) which are of course much slower than very simple integer calculations. Even on the Athlon64's FP add and muls are 4 cycles, you'd have to make the top end A64 about 700mhz if you make them single cycle execution. (multi-cycle instructions aren't as bad a thing on the CPU as there are plenty of other things to do while you wait, not so in GPUs).
GPUs have also tended to focus on parallel execution - at least over the last few years - increasing the number of pixels done at the same time, to compensate for not being able to hit multi-ghz speeds, so yes they have many more transistors than typical CPUs (the 7800GTX might break 300 million, well over 250 million) - and of course heat is an issue if you push the voltage and / or clock speeds to far. The last few generations of GPUs have been up around 65-80W real world draw, more than most CPUs out there. And of course GPUs have very little room for cooling in those expansion slots.
Well, on that scale, the wire acts as a capacitor. You have to put x amount of charge into the wire before you get to your desired voltage on the far end. 10 years ago, the delay associated with charging a global wire (something on the order a few milimeters long) was insignifigant compared to the delay from charing a single logic gate. Today, the dealy of that same wire is several times that of a single logic gate. In a 45nm process it might be greater than an entire stage of logic (15-20 gate delays). Obviously, light has no such pre-charge requirement.
Using light - at least on the longer wires in a chip - could mean going back to a time when transmitting signals 'long' distances in a chip has an insignifigant cost.
Now, that's just one of several problems that exist with wires - particularly copper wires - in modern processes, but it is a big one.
well, mini-ITX doesn't specificy the power converter to be on the board, Nano-ITX will bundle the 12V DC->computer power converter and the mainboard into one board. The reason I think we see cables and not direct connections for the PSU is simply flexibility. If you wanted to mount the hard disk or slim line CD drive as close to the motherboard as possible (to reduce height) a 2-3 inch high PSU sticking up out of the motherboard would be an obsticle. A cable potentially gives you the flexibility to mount the power converter in a more convenient spot.
Also I've noticed most mini-ITX cases have a 40mm fan, the mac mini does not. I don't know if that's because the mac minis are lower power, or their cases are designed to work as a heastsink more so than the ITX cases, or if the ITX cases just have to allow for more powerful stuff since they don't build the whole system, but take does take up space as well.
I think Nano-ITX will look a whole lot more like the mac minis in terms of over all size, but we're not quite there yet.
The biggest thing holding back similar sized devices is probably the lack of a similarly sized CASE.
The mini-ITX boards are only ~6.5 inches square while the Mac mini has a 6 inch square footprint. A small DC->DC converter attached to the side, and a laptop style hard disk and CD/DVD drive could probably fit in not much more space than the Mac mini takes up. Most of the very small cases still lay the power converter parallel with the motherboard, and right behind it. So instead of the 7x7-8 or so footprint you could get with mini ITX, you get 7x10 or so. Instead of just being a little bit larger all around, you've got almost double the footprint of a mac mini.
"I hate Jack Thompson" T-shirts are a form of harassment?
Does that mean 'F*** GW', 'Nuke the whales,' 'don't blame me I voted for Kodos,' and 'Winbloze' are also forms of harassment of our president, the whales, kang, and wndows users repsectively? Oh god, if Jack Thompson wins this I'll have nothing to wear....
fortunately for my 'Guns don't kill people, I kill people' shirt JT is just a raving lunatic with nothing better to do than make an ass out of himself on a regular basis.
>>For a lawyer, Thompson seems to have missed that one little maxim: "any press is good press."
You operate here under the assumption JT's goal with this is to defeat the violent video game makers. I'd give better than even money that his 'crusade' is aimed more at benifiting himself rather than society.
Some on earlier in this thread posted JTs media appearances over the last some odd years, it was quite a list for a blowhard wackjob. Seems to me he's siezed on the idea that any press is good press and has sought out as much press as he can get himself, the sanity or rational of his position be damned. He's either setting himself up as the ambulance chaser of choice for those allegedly wronged by violent video games, or for a political run. Either way, he's a lunatic (deffamation law suit now pending) of a lawyer who's garnered national media attention time and again.
Perhaps. But if you view this as a replacement for 'Standby' or similar low power / no wait modes it makes some sense. Where you can leave the computer for 10 minutes or 8 hours and no worry about drawing power, producing heat (or being vulnerable to power failures, ect).
I know standby isn't exactly a power hog - probably less than 30W for most systems and 'off' is in the range of 5W maybe more if you do wake on lan or similar - but if you're a coperation with thousands of computers in the building, quick boot from off might make more sense than standby or similar.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, just from personal experiance, I've got a pack of Verbatim CD-RWs bought back in the summer of 2000 and they're still alive and well. (They're just rated for 4x, so I don't use them much any more....)
I've known a few CD-Rs to go bad in the last 5 years, but they are the excpetion rather than the rule.
My solution to that would be: discs are cheap and readily availible, for long term storage make 2 copies.
I know NIST did a study simulating aging of a DVD+R disc, and found that at 25C/50% humidity/low light levels the disc remained readable for about 30 (simulated) years.
Given DVD writables use the same Cyanne based dyes many CD-Rs (actual some high end CDs use better materials yet with a polysomething or other dye on top of a gold reflective layer (gold won't decay like the silver that's used in most writable discs will)), I'd expect quality CD-Rs to last about as long.
had it right all along. Here i was, making fun of the 800 and 1000W PSUs we've started to see over the last 6 months, and now I get to eat crow.
But at least I know get to make fun of the people spending 6000-8000 dollars (general swag the article took based on the current Dell SLI setups) on a gaming computer.
The Nvidia version 80.0 and above drivers are multithreaded, so they take decent advantage of dual core / SMT chips.
A couple of games, I know Quake4 for one, have been benchmarked with the dual core offerings edging out the fastest single core products. How much of that is related to the multithreaded Nvidia drivers and how much is from threading in the games themsleves I don't know. (The effect is not on all games when running the det 80s, so I'd assume Q4 has at least some usefull (beyond file I/O and netcode) threading).
Cmndr Taco can censor any comment, or ban you for any comment he so chooses.
However, he can not sue you for comments made on slashdot (unless the violate excpetions to free speech like lible or defamation).
Civil court is court non the less and it, along with the laws that govern it are bound by the constitution, including freedom of speech.
If Juniper had simply gone to the message board operators and asked them to deal with these posts, the posters would not have had any recourse but to accept the descision handed down by the board operators.
Juniper opted to make this a legal issue, and as such laws governing what is and is not protected speech apply. This is an issue of free speech, but only becuase of how Juniper choose to address it. There were avenues Juniper could have taken where free speech would not have been a deffense; but they didn't proceed that way so free speech is a defense here.
I'm reasonably sure the powers that be at Enron, Worldcomm, et al possed a danger to society; certainly to their employees, sharholders and ultimately custormers. Catagorizing 'white collar' crime as 'not a danger' is rather naive. I would much rather see some one like Ken Lay in Federal Pound Me in the Ass Prision than some idiot who FedExed his buddy LSD.
That said, contempt of court is applicable to all colors of collars. The guys over at Kazzaa were order by a court in Austrailia to filter a whole bunch of keywords to minimize copyright violation. Instead they blocked all the IPs in Aust. from connecting.
I put the over under for some one to start distributing a version of Kazzaa that by default connects to a proxy server in say Thailand then to the Kazzaa servers at about 2 weeks.
and of course, if they actually bothered to filter those keywords, I'd think it might effect more than just the people in Aust., somewhere Kazzaa might block copy protected material where they're not legally bound to give a damn about infringment yet. That of course would decimate their buisness model
Create a premium service,
charge people more to access your network at 'fast' speeds. Ok no problem. That's sort of been going on for a while with tiered speeds for broadband connections.
Telco's provide content targeted at those premium accounts. Again, ok by me. Paying more generally entitles you to more.
So now other sites that provide streaming auido or video or just use lots of bandwidth are going to have to pay a premium or face serious degradation of quality of service. Welp, that's not good for those sites.
Hmmm... so now I probably loose a lot of choices when it comes to where I get my streaming media from. The Telcos price the competeing web sites out of buisness or force them to a vastly inferior product. That's not good for me now.
I can understand and even support the telcos wanting to provide some form of quality of service garauntees for customers willing to pay for it. But a second tier internet controlled by the telcos is likely going to end badly for people on both ends of the fiber.
Samsung is currently manufactering flash memory in at least limited quantities (don't know if it's in full production yet) on a 50nm process.
To the best of my knoweledge that is smallest process in production, Intel and IBM are certainly producig 65nm chips that will be on the market in the next few months.
and was Microsoft's involvement comperable to what is usually seen in these types of studies?
Scheuer added that parents must be responsible for what their children play, but that the German government could help less media-savvy parents by introducing a 'complete ban' on violent games. Along with movies, games are already subject to a rating process."
Wait, they want parents to 'be responsible' for the games they buy their children or let their children play,
but in an effort to make sure parents don't make the wrong descision (ie disagree with this wack-job), we'll ban violent video games entirely?
How is that letting parents be resonsible for what their children play again?
Or right, it's not about responsiblity, it's about you not likeing violent video games - so no one should.
I'm just glad to see once in a while the US doif other governmentsesn't have a monopoly on dumb politicians forcing their idealogical views on the rest of the country. Sometimes I do worry.
Actually, 'reasonable expectation of privacy' is used more to determine the types of restrictions on interference with your rights - usualy search and seziure. If you throw something away in a public place there is no 'expectation of privacy' and there is broad athuority for the police to do what they will with it.
The right to privacy also exists in this day as clearly as the right to free practice of religon, or the right to free speech does. There's a post a few rows up that lists a few of the Supreme court descisions that established the "Right to privacy." The most famous of course being Roe v Wade.
It's an inferred right, but it is a right none the less.
Considering the rootkit is installed without owners realistically being aware, doesn't that make it equivalent to a form of worm, virus, or other type of nasty?
No, it makes it a pieces of spyware or malware, which may or may not yet be illegal. The state of New York (and a few others) have filed civil suits against spyware companies based on existing tresspass and privacy laws.
The 'I-SPY' act ( a Federal anti-spyware law) as far as I know is still waiting to be passed by the Senate. In fact it's been sitting in the senate judiciary committie since the end of May, so don't hold your breath.
I'm not interested in jail time so much as making sony pay. The New York state spy-ware law suits were something like a $500 fine per instance of infection - consider the millions of infected CDs Sony sold over the last 18 months, and you can bankrupt Sony pretty quickly. A $50 billion dollar class action law suit - that's a Ford Pinto type situation. I don't think they'll forget the lesson when they're still paying into a settelment fund 25 years from now.
didn't stop prolific copyright violations...
So myabe putting them in jail will, that'll be sure to make everyone buy more CDs!
I'd expect this from The Onion or the Daily Show, not the US Atorney General's office... *sigh*
Typical misrepresentation of the facts by the submitter.
No where in the linked article was there any impliation that Dr. Hwang used any form of pressure, coersion, or other unscrupulous means to obtain the eggs.
The reasons given by Mr. Schatten is pretty clearly stated:
Under U.S. rules, collecting eggs from women working on a cloning project would be considered unethical. In the original paper, published by the journal Science last year, the scientists said the eggs all came from anonymous donors.
Hwang lied about where the eggs came from, and used (from the standpoint of the US) and inappropriate donor.
I know this is just user submitted stuff here, but could we at leat pretend like accurately representing the article is important. Or do we just assume no one will bother to read a 1/2 summary without some creative spin in the summary.
Having taken an online univeristy class (or two) (From the University of Missouri system), i can that assesment is probably accurate of most of the students in our class.
We had 2, 1 hour online lectures a week - two or three students out of about 20 in the class attended with any regularity, the professor also commented many didn't even take the time to listen to the playbacks later (they were avialible for download or listening through basically a browser plugin).
A signifigant part of the final grade was from particiaption, just listening to the lectures and commenting in an online discussion group - the class average for those 'easy money' points was about 60%.
That's not to say online classes are better or worse than on campus classes, but the percpetion from the students, and I gather your experiance would agree with that, that these aren't 'real' classes. I'd be concerned that an online degree might be seen by employers in the same light, at least an online university might be. Online coursework from 'established' universities might be more accpeted.
ExtremeTech Article
I'd assume the robots would require a large number of fairly small steps (such as posistioning the camera and instrument could take many many movement instructions), where as communicating with a human can be done on a more conceptual scale - make a cut here - tie of that blood vessel ect.
Not to mention being able to communicate a series of critical instructions at the same time. "Make a cut there - but for the love of god don't cut " can be sent in one message to another person, but a surgeon on the ground would have to take a series of baby steps making sure to wait for the result of each before continueing.
A little local software shop has about 3 or 4 computers on the floor each with a different new release title up and running on it, open for custormers to try out - they started that at least 8 years ago.
It's a nice touch, and one certianly welcome in a national chain.
I know the - go download the demo - line has been used more than a couple times in this thread, but really there are a number of games (mostly big name titles) that opt to not release a demo, or at least wait till well after the product launch to release a demo. And even then, many demos weight in at over 500 mb these days, try downloading that on dialup, even low end broadband it can take several hours (of course not a big deal since you don't tie up the phone...)
Realistically, I won't buy a game without being able to play it these days. If EBGames can provide me a way to paly Quake 4 without the $50 fee, they may earn themselves some buisness.
Possibly a performance thing, but other games use scripting languages for their AI just fine.
My question was prompted in part by how much we've been able to do with LUA scripts for the Age of Mythology and Homeworld 2 AIs (amoung other titles).
AoM allows you pretty complete control over the AI from LUA scripts, including the ability to edit the single player scenario scripts, I was hoping for the same from Civ IV.
I would think (though haven't anything to back it up) LUA and Python would be similar in speed, both are compiled to a bytecode type of intermediate language and run on a virtual machine.
Plus in a turn based game like Civ, the game should have tons of time to run AI planning and whatnot during the human player's turn.
I hope the choice doesn't turn out to hinder modders - and given all we need to build the AI library, and hopefully lots of good documentation to go with it, I don't think it should too much.
Since DirectX 8 (I think), the color values have been floating point numbers, this is to avoid loosing a lot of possible values through all blending with multi-texturing and effects (fog, lighting ect) which are of course much slower than very simple integer calculations. Even on the Athlon64's FP add and muls are 4 cycles, you'd have to make the top end A64 about 700mhz if you make them single cycle execution. (multi-cycle instructions aren't as bad a thing on the CPU as there are plenty of other things to do while you wait, not so in GPUs).
GPUs have also tended to focus on parallel execution - at least over the last few years - increasing the number of pixels done at the same time, to compensate for not being able to hit multi-ghz speeds, so yes they have many more transistors than typical CPUs (the 7800GTX might break 300 million, well over 250 million) - and of course heat is an issue if you push the voltage and / or clock speeds to far. The last few generations of GPUs have been up around 65-80W real world draw, more than most CPUs out there. And of course GPUs have very little room for cooling in those expansion slots.
Well, on that scale, the wire acts as a capacitor. You have to put x amount of charge into the wire before you get to your desired voltage on the far end. 10 years ago, the delay associated with charging a global wire (something on the order a few milimeters long) was insignifigant compared to the delay from charing a single logic gate. Today, the dealy of that same wire is several times that of a single logic gate. In a 45nm process it might be greater than an entire stage of logic (15-20 gate delays).
Obviously, light has no such pre-charge requirement.
Using light - at least on the longer wires in a chip - could mean going back to a time when transmitting signals 'long' distances in a chip has an insignifigant cost.
Now, that's just one of several problems that exist with wires - particularly copper wires - in modern processes, but it is a big one.
well, mini-ITX doesn't specificy the power converter to be on the board, Nano-ITX will bundle the 12V DC->computer power converter and the mainboard into one board.
The reason I think we see cables and not direct connections for the PSU is simply flexibility. If you wanted to mount the hard disk or slim line CD drive as close to the motherboard as possible (to reduce height) a 2-3 inch high PSU sticking up out of the motherboard would be an obsticle. A cable potentially gives you the flexibility to mount the power converter in a more convenient spot.
Also I've noticed most mini-ITX cases have a 40mm fan, the mac mini does not. I don't know if that's because the mac minis are lower power, or their cases are designed to work as a heastsink more so than the ITX cases, or if the ITX cases just have to allow for more powerful stuff since they don't build the whole system, but take does take up space as well.
I think Nano-ITX will look a whole lot more like the mac minis in terms of over all size, but we're not quite there yet.
The biggest thing holding back similar sized devices is probably the lack of a similarly sized CASE.
The mini-ITX boards are only ~6.5 inches square while the Mac mini has a 6 inch square footprint.
A small DC->DC converter attached to the side, and a laptop style hard disk and CD/DVD drive could probably fit in not much more space than the Mac mini takes up.
Most of the very small cases still lay the power converter parallel with the motherboard, and right behind it. So instead of the 7x7-8 or so footprint you could get with mini ITX, you get 7x10 or so. Instead of just being a little bit larger all around, you've got almost double the footprint of a mac mini.
"I hate Jack Thompson" T-shirts are a form of harassment?
Does that mean 'F*** GW', 'Nuke the whales,' 'don't blame me I voted for Kodos,' and 'Winbloze' are also forms of harassment of our president, the whales, kang, and wndows users repsectively?
Oh god, if Jack Thompson wins this I'll have nothing to wear....
fortunately for my 'Guns don't kill people, I kill people' shirt JT is just a raving lunatic with nothing better to do than make an ass out of himself on a regular basis.
>>For a lawyer, Thompson seems to have missed that one little maxim: "any press is good press."
You operate here under the assumption JT's goal with this is to defeat the violent video game makers.
I'd give better than even money that his 'crusade' is aimed more at benifiting himself rather than society.
Some on earlier in this thread posted JTs media appearances over the last some odd years, it was quite a list for a blowhard wackjob. Seems to me he's siezed on the idea that any press is good press and has sought out as much press as he can get himself, the sanity or rational of his position be damned.
He's either setting himself up as the ambulance chaser of choice for those allegedly wronged by violent video games, or for a political run.
Either way, he's a lunatic (deffamation law suit now pending) of a lawyer who's garnered national media attention time and again.
Perhaps.
But if you view this as a replacement for 'Standby' or similar low power / no wait modes it makes some sense. Where you can leave the computer for 10 minutes or 8 hours and no worry about drawing power, producing heat (or being vulnerable to power failures, ect).
I know standby isn't exactly a power hog - probably less than 30W for most systems and 'off' is in the range of 5W maybe more if you do wake on lan or similar - but if you're a coperation with thousands of computers in the building, quick boot from off might make more sense than standby or similar.