Because people are stupid and don't read item descriptions properly? A fool and his money are soon parted. I'd hate to see the face of the guy who's paying $215 for this coupon when he gets it in the mail!
I wouldn't have thought a £20 radio alarm clock would include such a facility, although I'd be pleasantly surprised if it did. I'm not knocking them though, I have one myself (albeit a different model), and it keeps very good time!
The light speed lag between you and the transmitter probably accounts for far greater "inaccuracy" than the actual atomic clock itself. Of course, we all know there's no such thing as "absolute time" (thanks, Albert), but it's interesting, nonetheless.
Yes, but Apollo 8 didn't accelerate all the way, and couldn't accelerate all the way from here to halfway to Alpha Centauri. You'd get there a lot faster on ion drive.
Actually that's incorrect. Most motherboards connect to their SuperIO chips using LPC (Low Pin Count Bus) which is similar to ISA in some ways, but only requires about 6 traces on the motherboard, IIRC.
Also, PCIe isn't change for the sake of change. It's an attempt to provide us with a cross-industry (servers, workstations, home PCs) expansion bus that will handle devices that PCI simply cannot (e.g. gigabit ethernet) and unify the graphics and expansion busses once more.
I certainly don't want honking great 16-bit expansion cards taking up valuable space on my next motherboard when instead I could have tiny 1x PCI-e slots that provide hundreds of times the bandwidth.
I have had some very positive experiences with Ubuntu Linux recently. It seems powerful, configurable, yet easy to install for newer users. They also have a billionaire backing them, so their future seems fairly assured.
I have had some very positive experiences with Ubuntu Linux recently. It seems powerful, configurable, yet easy to install for newer users. They also have a billionaire backing them, so their future seems fairly assured.
Re:Best form of wireless communication ever
on
WiFi Bridging?
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· Score: 1
That adds a whole new meaning to the term "signal pollution".
... that young people are statistically less likely to vote than middle aged and older people, even if turnout compared to last time was up. There must be ways to get the MTV generation interested in politics, after all, it's rather important - but so far, attracting them seems to have eluded most of the Western World's democracies.
A lot of people come out with comments like "I want a phone that's just a phone" or "I don't need/want these features when I can get better separate units that do the same thing". This is really silly.
I don't know what the American market is like, but here in the UK, I got a Nokia 7610 for 50GBP (that's less than $90) on a very reasonable contract (500 free minutes per month and other goodies for 25GBP / $40 pm).
Although I have a much better PDA (Palm Tungsten T3), and a much better digicam (Canon Powershot A80) and a much better MP3 player (iPod Mini), guess how much of the time I'm carrying all of these around with me? Practically ziltch. But, I do almost always have my phone with me, 24/7.
So, the times I've forgotten my camera, the megapixel camera on the phone is great for a quick and dirty picture of something interesting or important. When I don't have room for my PDA, the phone is great for recording a memo or checking my diary (I sync both with the same desktop PIM, and it mostly works). It's also cool that when I don't have time to pack the iPod, I can take a short journey and still listen to almost a whole album at 128kbps from the 64MB SD card.
The phone is a great phone by itself, with excellent contact management, call management, logging and other features. Since it was so cheap, these extras are essentially bonuses. It's also hardly bigger or heavier than a "normal" cellphone. It also has the trademark Nokia battery life of several days. This is quite sufficient even when on the road, especially since every third person you meet seems to have a universal Nokia charger stowed away somewhere.
I look forward to the day when I can put my PDA, iPod and camera in the drawer forever, and I think we might only be a few years shy of it. Until then, I will enjoy my phone and its extras, using the additional separate devices when I want better quality.
And thanks to my contract, I get a brand new smartphone every year.
My favourites as a sci/tech geek & newshound
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Cool RSS Feeds?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Legally, doing this is a grey area (it breaks the EULA). If mplayer ever become popular enough to threaten WMP, maybe Microsoft would take action, but until then, they can always resort to making their codec API so incredibly complex, DirectX, kernel and x86-tethered it would be impossible to reimplement or reverse engineer.
Well, one of the main reasons people use Solaris or HP-UX is because it'll run on boxes with huge numbers of processors (I'm not talking about clusters). Can OS X scale this well? Additionally, does OS X include the kind of high-end virtualisation, monitoring and enterprise volume management that AIX includes? Thought not. OS X is a good desktop operating system, and might work in clusters okay too, but I can't see that it "rivals" AIX or HP-UX. This simply isn't Apple's focus.
Actually, it's a Virtual Linux Host, not a Virtual Hosting account. Although this might well be blatant advertising, there is an important difference between the two ideas.
Virtual Linux hosting is something new that uses UML (I think) to run several completely separate operating system partitions on the same machine. This means that rather than that horrid CPANEL thing you get with most virtual hosting accounts, you get a full Linux install that you can pretty much use however you want, installing new programs and running background processes and cron, using SSH, and so on. You can even have IP addresses assigned to your particular Linux if required.
This is much better than the standard HTTP/1.1 vhost package that most small-medium sized website hosts have been offering for the last few years.
I'm begining to face facts. I still think that GNOME looks better, and is, in many ways, easier to use. But KDE has even made huge progress in these areas in the last year (especially with Konqueror and new skins that finally *don't* look horrible, at least to my eye).
GNOME still has nominally better applications in certain key areas compared to KDE, for example, Ximian Evolution. However, again, KDE has made enourmous progress in this area, all in the last year. It boggles my mind to see how quickly this gap has dissapeared in one area - compare Instant Messaging in KDE and GNOME two years ago (nothing vs Gaim) to now, Kopete has developed so quickly it's just amazing.
One thing I did miss in KDE was Mozilla. But now, we can even use Gecko as a rendering engine in Konqueror, so even, like me, if you considered that KHTML was inferior to Gecko, this "advantage" for GNOME has now dissapeared (also thanks to Apple and Safari).
I still think KDE needs some work, especially in the ease-of-use department (too many settings presented to the user, some intelligent hiding would be appreciated) - but this is improving. And, even as a GNOME user, I have to admit that C++ as a basis is a much superior choice to C, especially considering the kludge that seems to underly GNOME, separate libraries for GTK and GNOME applications with surprisingly few applications taking advantage of the GNOME-only libraries.
If you look at the distributions on the shelves, SuSE is KDE, Mandrake is KDE, Linsipre is KDE (with modifications). You can't buy Fedora at PC World. Any new user getting interested in Linux would probably go here first, and by consequence they're going to get KDE.
So whilst I will keep GNOME around for a while yet, and I think the "race" is far from over (who says there has to be a winner anyway? The whole concept of a "war" is just completely silly), if KDE goes on to become the defacto Linux desktop, then I won't shed that many tears. Of course, GNOME, I'm sure, will be around for a long while yet.
Ironically, alchemy is now possible, if difficult. You just need a particle accelerator to do proton bombardment or a nuclear reactor to do neutron bombardment.
So what happens when Longhorn switches to a brand new file system that your LiveCD can't access? The point I'm making is that PC hardware is too unpredictable for liveCDs. They're only appropriate when you can go and download an updated version from the Internet at any time you want.
I am not connected directly to my ISP, and I'm not using DHCP. Thousands of people around the world aren't either, but they still want to play games. Also, what happens when my ISP releases super-dooper broadband that requires a brand new modem that connects via USB and has some super-weird chipset in it that needs all new drivers? I'm sure the millions of people who have bought a particular liveCD game are going to be real pleased when the multiplayer option suddenly stops working. Same goes for new graphics cards, new sound cards, everything.
LiveCDs can typically only boot on a particular hardware platform. You may see LiveCDs, but they'll still be x86-LiveCDs, not Power-LiveCDs.
Seriously, though, I'd take this rumor with a pinch of salt. It seems fairly silly to create live-CDs that would need to contain all the drivers for every possible gamepad, graphics card, network adapter (for MP) and audio hardware, especially considering there'd be no possible way to upgrade or update these drivers, so when you go out and replace your GeForce 6800 with a GeForce 8000, all your games would suddenly stop working...
Not to mention the fact it would be almost impossible to provide patches for games, and the serious usability dent of having to enter network settings every single time the CD boots to do multiplayer.
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You forgot about the even younger race who view exploding comets as a sign to reproduce, you insensitive clod!
Because people are stupid and don't read item descriptions properly? A fool and his money are soon parted. I'd hate to see the face of the guy who's paying $215 for this coupon when he gets it in the mail!
I wouldn't have thought a £20 radio alarm clock would include such a facility, although I'd be pleasantly surprised if it did. I'm not knocking them though, I have one myself (albeit a different model), and it keeps very good time!
The light speed lag between you and the transmitter probably accounts for far greater "inaccuracy" than the actual atomic clock itself. Of course, we all know there's no such thing as "absolute time" (thanks, Albert), but it's interesting, nonetheless.
Yes, but Apollo 8 didn't accelerate all the way, and couldn't accelerate all the way from here to halfway to Alpha Centauri. You'd get there a lot faster on ion drive.
Actually that's incorrect. Most motherboards connect to their SuperIO chips using LPC (Low Pin Count Bus) which is similar to ISA in some ways, but only requires about 6 traces on the motherboard, IIRC.
Also, PCIe isn't change for the sake of change. It's an attempt to provide us with a cross-industry (servers, workstations, home PCs) expansion bus that will handle devices that PCI simply cannot (e.g. gigabit ethernet) and unify the graphics and expansion busses once more.
I certainly don't want honking great 16-bit expansion cards taking up valuable space on my next motherboard when instead I could have tiny 1x PCI-e slots that provide hundreds of times the bandwidth.
So, it's not free then?
I have had some very positive experiences with Ubuntu Linux recently. It seems powerful, configurable, yet easy to install for newer users. They also have a billionaire backing them, so their future seems fairly assured.
I have had some very positive experiences with Ubuntu Linux recently. It seems powerful, configurable, yet easy to install for newer users. They also have a billionaire backing them, so their future seems fairly assured.
That adds a whole new meaning to the term "signal pollution".
... that young people are statistically less likely to vote than middle aged and older people, even if turnout compared to last time was up. There must be ways to get the MTV generation interested in politics, after all, it's rather important - but so far, attracting them seems to have eluded most of the Western World's democracies.
A lot of people come out with comments like "I want a phone that's just a phone" or "I don't need/want these features when I can get better separate units that do the same thing". This is really silly.
I don't know what the American market is like, but here in the UK, I got a Nokia 7610 for 50GBP (that's less than $90) on a very reasonable contract (500 free minutes per month and other goodies for 25GBP / $40 pm).
Although I have a much better PDA (Palm Tungsten T3), and a much better digicam (Canon Powershot A80) and a much better MP3 player (iPod Mini), guess how much of the time I'm carrying all of these around with me? Practically ziltch. But, I do almost always have my phone with me, 24/7.
So, the times I've forgotten my camera, the megapixel camera on the phone is great for a quick and dirty picture of something interesting or important. When I don't have room for my PDA, the phone is great for recording a memo or checking my diary (I sync both with the same desktop PIM, and it mostly works). It's also cool that when I don't have time to pack the iPod, I can take a short journey and still listen to almost a whole album at 128kbps from the 64MB SD card.
The phone is a great phone by itself, with excellent contact management, call management, logging and other features. Since it was so cheap, these extras are essentially bonuses. It's also hardly bigger or heavier than a "normal" cellphone. It also has the trademark Nokia battery life of several days. This is quite sufficient even when on the road, especially since every third person you meet seems to have a universal Nokia charger stowed away somewhere.
I look forward to the day when I can put my PDA, iPod and camera in the drawer forever, and I think we might only be a few years shy of it. Until then, I will enjoy my phone and its extras, using the additional separate devices when I want better quality.
And thanks to my contract, I get a brand new smartphone every year.
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Legally, doing this is a grey area (it breaks the EULA). If mplayer ever become popular enough to threaten WMP, maybe Microsoft would take action, but until then, they can always resort to making their codec API so incredibly complex, DirectX, kernel and x86-tethered it would be impossible to reimplement or reverse engineer.
Best. Post. Ever!
Well, one of the main reasons people use Solaris or HP-UX is because it'll run on boxes with huge numbers of processors (I'm not talking about clusters). Can OS X scale this well? Additionally, does OS X include the kind of high-end virtualisation, monitoring and enterprise volume management that AIX includes? Thought not. OS X is a good desktop operating system, and might work in clusters okay too, but I can't see that it "rivals" AIX or HP-UX. This simply isn't Apple's focus.
Why did you buy an entirely new PC and not just a new motherboard?
Actually, it's a Virtual Linux Host, not a Virtual Hosting account. Although this might well be blatant advertising, there is an important difference between the two ideas.
Virtual Linux hosting is something new that uses UML (I think) to run several completely separate operating system partitions on the same machine. This means that rather than that horrid CPANEL thing you get with most virtual hosting accounts, you get a full Linux install that you can pretty much use however you want, installing new programs and running background processes and cron, using SSH, and so on. You can even have IP addresses assigned to your particular Linux if required.
This is much better than the standard HTTP/1.1 vhost package that most small-medium sized website hosts have been offering for the last few years.
Yes, but it's not exactly the "integrated desktop experience" you come to expect with Konqueror or Epiphany (Gecko/GNOME).
I'm begining to face facts. I still think that GNOME looks better, and is, in many ways, easier to use. But KDE has even made huge progress in these areas in the last year (especially with Konqueror and new skins that finally *don't* look horrible, at least to my eye).
GNOME still has nominally better applications in certain key areas compared to KDE, for example, Ximian Evolution. However, again, KDE has made enourmous progress in this area, all in the last year. It boggles my mind to see how quickly this gap has dissapeared in one area - compare Instant Messaging in KDE and GNOME two years ago (nothing vs Gaim) to now, Kopete has developed so quickly it's just amazing.
One thing I did miss in KDE was Mozilla. But now, we can even use Gecko as a rendering engine in Konqueror, so even, like me, if you considered that KHTML was inferior to Gecko, this "advantage" for GNOME has now dissapeared (also thanks to Apple and Safari).
I still think KDE needs some work, especially in the ease-of-use department (too many settings presented to the user, some intelligent hiding would be appreciated) - but this is improving. And, even as a GNOME user, I have to admit that C++ as a basis is a much superior choice to C, especially considering the kludge that seems to underly GNOME, separate libraries for GTK and GNOME applications with surprisingly few applications taking advantage of the GNOME-only libraries.
If you look at the distributions on the shelves, SuSE is KDE, Mandrake is KDE, Linsipre is KDE (with modifications). You can't buy Fedora at PC World. Any new user getting interested in Linux would probably go here first, and by consequence they're going to get KDE.
So whilst I will keep GNOME around for a while yet, and I think the "race" is far from over (who says there has to be a winner anyway? The whole concept of a "war" is just completely silly), if KDE goes on to become the defacto Linux desktop, then I won't shed that many tears. Of course, GNOME, I'm sure, will be around for a long while yet.
Ironically, alchemy is now possible, if difficult. You just need a particle accelerator to do proton bombardment or a nuclear reactor to do neutron bombardment.
So what happens when Longhorn switches to a brand new file system that your LiveCD can't access? The point I'm making is that PC hardware is too unpredictable for liveCDs. They're only appropriate when you can go and download an updated version from the Internet at any time you want.
With all the recent billion dollar patent lawsuits going through the courts, I'd hardly call it paranoia. More like justifiable fear.
I am not connected directly to my ISP, and I'm not using DHCP. Thousands of people around the world aren't either, but they still want to play games. Also, what happens when my ISP releases super-dooper broadband that requires a brand new modem that connects via USB and has some super-weird chipset in it that needs all new drivers? I'm sure the millions of people who have bought a particular liveCD game are going to be real pleased when the multiplayer option suddenly stops working. Same goes for new graphics cards, new sound cards, everything.
LiveCDs can typically only boot on a particular hardware platform. You may see LiveCDs, but they'll still be x86-LiveCDs, not Power-LiveCDs.
Seriously, though, I'd take this rumor with a pinch of salt. It seems fairly silly to create live-CDs that would need to contain all the drivers for every possible gamepad, graphics card, network adapter (for MP) and audio hardware, especially considering there'd be no possible way to upgrade or update these drivers, so when you go out and replace your GeForce 6800 with a GeForce 8000, all your games would suddenly stop working...
Not to mention the fact it would be almost impossible to provide patches for games, and the serious usability dent of having to enter network settings every single time the CD boots to do multiplayer.