Damn you slashdot, for reminding me my order is now 7 days overdue:(
Still, looks like a quality drive:) The biggest gripe I had with a cheap NEC drive, was the hugeeeeee delay the drive has recognising the drive when a disc is put in.
A little birdie tells me that Hafnium by itself is not fissionable, and is incapable of carrying on a chain reaction.
However... the US are researching ways of using it with existing tech. hydrogen bombs to either expand the EMP effect, or the fallout of the bomb. It leans towards the first, as having a small bomb able to decimate electronics (and therefore communications) while doing little physical damage would be most desirable.
Gas Plasma antennas? The phrase "Gas Plasma" makes me think of a star trek episode where the enterprise accidentally destroys an ecosystem after venting warp plasma into a planets atmosphere:)
Anyway, this would be a cool technology. Someone spying on your WiFi network? Send some gas plasma in his direction and watch the fireworks:D
They just moderate them to -100 and no-one can ever see them (except the admins, who jack off nightly after reading where to bittorrent Triumph of the Geeks)
Me, if the starship is anything like as fragile as Enterprise. Useless bag of bolts. Falls apart at the merest wiff of 'photon' torpedos. And as for """ quantum """ torpedos, who was smoking what on that day?!
Besides, captaining is stressful. You have to make all those crummy morality choices whenever something harsh happens. Much rather be the weapons officer, who simply shoots stuff at people all day long.
Oh bullshit.
How do better graphics translate into better narratives, or immersive user experiences?
Quite simply, the developers won't have to spend time rendering 'specific' scenes due to lack of processing power - they will be able to render them on the fly. For example, assume person A interacts with person B. Instead of picking one of three choices and seeing a nice, pre-rendered cutscene play out this choice, you now have 20 choices, all rendered on-the-fly, looking as good (if not better) than those pre-rendered animations. You knock time off animation, you make it up with gameplay.
Why not format as usual one time, put all your favourite programs on, and then make an disk image and burn to CD/DVD ? Remembering exactly what I want installed and changing on a windows system is so easy to forget that I just gave up doing it, and spent a week after a format and reinstall getting everything right then putting an image onto a DVDR. Being so cheap, I can update the Ghost image every 3-4 months as necessary:)
Judging by the amount of delays this car is suffering, I'd say there were a -lot- of better cars out there right now!
One of my favourite and informative motoring magazines, Evo, points out the fact that a car designed to be stable and easy to handle at 240 miles per hour will probably be extremely stale and unrewarding to drive under 100. As a status symbol, this car will be absolutely monumental (assuming it ever comes out without being diluted too much), but for a drivers car there are many, many better choices.
Personally I'm unhappy some of the Fairlight gang have been busted, they've done some good releases in their time.
I warez games because sometimes the warez'd full game is available before the demo and I wanna know what its like.
If I like the game I buy it - after all, I have a job, and the cost of 2 or 3 (or more) games a month hardly registers on my statements.
I DON'T buy the games when they are shite, however, which is the main reason I continue to warez. Put simply, publishers such as Electronic Arts do not deserve my money. I have numerous problems with games I've purchased from them in the past and these bugs and glitches still aren't fixed at present. The only real reason I would buy something like Battlefield Vietnam, with all its bugs and issues, is if it was just about fun enough to justify playing it with a group of friends. Fuck playing on public servers where 85% of people are assholes.
Anyway, this operation gets the 'good guys' a bit of publicity, they get to spout off about how piracy benefits organised crime and terrorism, while at the same time nothing is done about a root cause - piss poor quality control and customer support.
Ahh well this is nice to see - a new generation of graphics card that will now allow me to play practically any of my games at up to 1600x1200 without gameplay-affecting slowdown. So far, so good.
I am genuinely happy that Nvidia have released a product that can perform 'significantly' better than their currently available flagship card. As ATi are going to retaliate with their own card, this can only be a good thing and I hope they do actually keep this large performance jump up for the next generation(s).
One thing to note in some benchmarks which I've seen so far, are that some of the results give the maximum framerate of a game. I'd be more happy reading either an average or Minimum framerate achievable, as in a frenetic multiplayer game you are going to be usually rendering a lot more stuff than in a single player. The minimum framerate is what I'll be watching out for as that is where the most frustration will come from - nothing quite so annoying as experiencing slowdown when something critical happens, or if you are in the middle of a hellishly large battle (which happens quite a bit in UT2004 Onslaught, for example).
Unfortunately I won't be able to use this card in my Shuttle. The card is too big and too power-hungry. As someone else says, noise isn't exactly a problem as you would generally get this card to play fancy loud games on anyway.
And recommending a 480w power supply? Hmm. Oh well, wish I was a hardware site journalist under NDA, I'd have had time to buy some shares in Enermax;)
For anyone that doesn't know the full story... Quoted from a good friend of mine posting on a forum about the URL mentioned in the headline:
From the start, I'd say that I would not go. But this is based on my assessment of the risk/benefit. You have to make your mind up based on your own judgement.
But to do that properly, you have to understand the risk properly. Sorry if this gets techie or boring, but this is basically the kind of stuff I do for a living so I'm entitled to mouth off (just this once)
The Accident
The accident was caused by a combination of bad design and manufacture, and operators not following procedures during an unusual experimental procedure. The electrical control system was being checked for function during conditions of power outage and the emergency safety interlocks had been removed. During the experiment there were significant variations in the temperature and coolant flow rate. The temperature fluctuations broke up the zirconium fuel channels in the core and allowed the fuel to mix with the pressurised cooling water. This intimate mixing allowed rapid heat exchange and a large increase in energy output because of the increased moderation. This process took six seconds to generate a shock wave in the water from the temperature increase which blew open the pressurised cooling system. The opening of the system allowed the release of the stored pressure and the coolant water immediately flashed into steam.
The force of this explosion of steam was enough to lift the entire reactor up. Thousands of tonnes of it. Hmm. Anyway, this explosion removed all the cooling water from the reactor, meaning that the fuel, which stayed, increased in reactivity and energy output again. This vapourised the fuel in the middle of the core, which again exploded about a minute later, destroying the core and most of the reactor hall building. A lot of the core, nuclear material and other ancilliary equipment was thrown up out of the reactor building and onto surrounding buildings. This was the first spread of contamination.
All this hot material flying around started multiple fires on the roofs of the buildings which were conveniently coated in highly flammable tar. Fun. Firemen struggled to control these fires and got most out and the main reactor fire under control within about four hours. Lots died.
About sixteen hours later the main reactor material had self-heated itself to the degree that it started to react with the water being used to control it, which generated hydrogen. Which also burns. This new fire burnt with a plume stretching about fifty metres above the roof.
Over the next ten days, thousands of tonnes of damping materials such as boron compounds, lead, sand and clay were dropped on the core to try and stop the fire. Remember that the smoke from these fires was transporting more material out into the environment. An attempt was also made to cool the fire by flooding it with liquid nitrogen.
Eventually the material burnt it's way out through the lower environmental shield and spread out across the lower levels under the reactor. In doing so it cooled and lost it's reactivity of it's own accord and quite quickly solidified and stopped.
The Consequences
It can only be estimated how much of the nuclear material was lost because of the dispersion around the remains of the facility, and the fact that a large amount is buried under the tonnes of control materials and in the too-hot-to-investigate lower halls. The best guess is that about a quarter of the original inventory went walkies, about twenty tonnes or so.
The spread of this material spans from particles thrown out by the initial blasts to the smoke produced by the various fires which was carried by the wind all across europe, being brought down as the wind died or changed and in rain. The two most important isotopes are 131-iodine (mainly decayed now) and 137-caesium (still around). The fall out of this material is arranged in patterns around the site d
Well I just emailed SCO UK telling them I run a couple of linux servers on my home network without licenses, and asked "what do you plan to do about it?".
My expectations are 99% no reply and 1% legalese gobble-de-gook.
Re: replies - Your comments about new socket / slot types coming out soon is, of course, entirely relevant. However it's also redundant. A small range of chip speeds are available for a motherboard type, at which point something changes and you need a new motherboard. Hands up who bought a Pentium 4 2.0ghz thinking you would be able to put any future model into your motherboard, only to find Intel went and upped the front side bus speed, making your MB incompatible with a 3.2ghz HyperThreading chip?.
This is my point exactly - this may be the end of the line of chips you can buy for this socket type, but few people upgrade their CPU every couple of iterations. I went from a P4 1.8 to a P4 3.0 - I did not get a 2.0,2.4,2.533,2.8 along the way as there was just no need. I don't plan on upgrading from a 3.0 to anything under 4.0ghz because -it just wont be worth it-
I don't get it. Why bother saying "you'd be best off waiting" for the next chip ? The Athlon FX-53 is a flagship chip. It's the currently fastest chip they do. If you want the highest performance, you would obviously buy it now. If you wait a couple of months then you don't want the highest performance. This is what this chip is for, here and now - the fastest available performance. Yes there will be a faster one in a few months but that just continues ad infinitum. If you lived by the rule of waiting for something faster to come out, you'd die of old age before you actually purchased the damn thing.
Slashdot Mirror
"'d have read the whole thing, but I was morally repelled by the salon.com ad policy"
Because you'd like to be able to read anything you want for free, no matter what effort might have gone into it ?
"did you know that in the Metric paper system ..."
What is this ? Did Slashdot run out of geeky unix articles to waffle about ?
By the way, welcome to 2004.
"This is 2004, you should know by now not to open a file from an untrusted source."
that SHOULD read...
"This is 2004. All slashdot readers know not to open files from an untrusted source, but the rest of the world is still as dumb as ever."
Damn you slashdot, for reminding me my order is now 7 days overdue :(
:) The biggest gripe I had with a cheap NEC drive, was the hugeeeeee delay the drive has recognising the drive when a disc is put in.
Still, looks like a quality drive
A little birdie tells me that Hafnium by itself is not fissionable, and is incapable of carrying on a chain reaction.
However... the US are researching ways of using it with existing tech. hydrogen bombs to either expand the EMP effect, or the fallout of the bomb. It leans towards the first, as having a small bomb able to decimate electronics (and therefore communications) while doing little physical damage would be most desirable.
I always knew timothy was a dolt.
Clearly he must be a friend of an admin - why else would he be allowed to post crap like this
Gas Plasma antennas? The phrase "Gas Plasma" makes me think of a star trek episode where the enterprise accidentally destroys an ecosystem after venting warp plasma into a planets atmosphere :)
:D
Anyway, this would be a cool technology. Someone spying on your WiFi network? Send some gas plasma in his direction and watch the fireworks
Don't believe you, sorry.
Don't worry dude, slashdot don't remove posts.
They just moderate them to -100 and no-one can ever see them (except the admins, who jack off nightly after reading where to bittorrent Triumph of the Geeks)
shut up, you fucking retard.
Hi, nice post.
Unfortunately the article said, "How many google machines, really?"
Perhaps try reading next time rather than seeing the word "GOOGLE" and instantly hitting POST REPLYLYLYYYY "!!!1111
"Who doesn't want to captain a starship?"
Me, if the starship is anything like as fragile as Enterprise. Useless bag of bolts. Falls apart at the merest wiff of 'photon' torpedos. And as for """ quantum """ torpedos, who was smoking what on that day?!
Besides, captaining is stressful. You have to make all those crummy morality choices whenever something harsh happens. Much rather be the weapons officer, who simply shoots stuff at people all day long.
Oh bullshit. How do better graphics translate into better narratives, or immersive user experiences?
Quite simply, the developers won't have to spend time rendering 'specific' scenes due to lack of processing power - they will be able to render them on the fly. For example, assume person A interacts with person B. Instead of picking one of three choices and seeing a nice, pre-rendered cutscene play out this choice, you now have 20 choices, all rendered on-the-fly, looking as good (if not better) than those pre-rendered animations. You knock time off animation, you make it up with gameplay.
That really is the most pointless, useless video ever. Even worse for it being on some kind of computing website.
Sorry Tom's but copying Arstechnica articles without adding anything worthwhile doesn't cut it these days.
Why not format as usual one time, put all your favourite programs on, and then make an disk image and burn to CD/DVD ? Remembering exactly what I want installed and changing on a windows system is so easy to forget that I just gave up doing it, and spent a week after a format and reinstall getting everything right then putting an image onto a DVDR. Being so cheap, I can update the Ghost image every 3-4 months as necessary :)
"Are there any cars out there better than this"
Judging by the amount of delays this car is suffering, I'd say there were a -lot- of better cars out there right now!
One of my favourite and informative motoring magazines, Evo, points out the fact that a car designed to be stable and easy to handle at 240 miles per hour will probably be extremely stale and unrewarding to drive under 100. As a status symbol, this car will be absolutely monumental (assuming it ever comes out without being diluted too much), but for a drivers car there are many, many better choices.
Personally I'm unhappy some of the Fairlight gang have been busted, they've done some good releases in their time.
I warez games because sometimes the warez'd full game is available before the demo and I wanna know what its like.
If I like the game I buy it - after all, I have a job, and the cost of 2 or 3 (or more) games a month hardly registers on my statements.
I DON'T buy the games when they are shite, however, which is the main reason I continue to warez. Put simply, publishers such as Electronic Arts do not deserve my money. I have numerous problems with games I've purchased from them in the past and these bugs and glitches still aren't fixed at present. The only real reason I would buy something like Battlefield Vietnam, with all its bugs and issues, is if it was just about fun enough to justify playing it with a group of friends. Fuck playing on public servers where 85% of people are assholes.
Anyway, this operation gets the 'good guys' a bit of publicity, they get to spout off about how piracy benefits organised crime and terrorism, while at the same time nothing is done about a root cause - piss poor quality control and customer support.
Who cares about getting school work done if you are well-off enough to be able to afford a laptop at school!
Ahh well this is nice to see - a new generation of graphics card that will now allow me to play practically any of my games at up to 1600x1200 without gameplay-affecting slowdown. So far, so good.
;)
I am genuinely happy that Nvidia have released a product that can perform 'significantly' better than their currently available flagship card. As ATi are going to retaliate with their own card, this can only be a good thing and I hope they do actually keep this large performance jump up for the next generation(s).
One thing to note in some benchmarks which I've seen so far, are that some of the results give the maximum framerate of a game. I'd be more happy reading either an average or Minimum framerate achievable, as in a frenetic multiplayer game you are going to be usually rendering a lot more stuff than in a single player. The minimum framerate is what I'll be watching out for as that is where the most frustration will come from - nothing quite so annoying as experiencing slowdown when something critical happens, or if you are in the middle of a hellishly large battle (which happens quite a bit in UT2004 Onslaught, for example).
Unfortunately I won't be able to use this card in my Shuttle. The card is too big and too power-hungry. As someone else says, noise isn't exactly a problem as you would generally get this card to play fancy loud games on anyway.
And recommending a 480w power supply? Hmm. Oh well, wish I was a hardware site journalist under NDA, I'd have had time to buy some shares in Enermax
"Raises some serious privacy questions"
wah wah wah wah wah.
no it doesn't.
shut up.
For anyone that doesn't know the full story... Quoted from a good friend of mine posting on a forum about the URL mentioned in the headline:
From the start, I'd say that I would not go. But this is based on my assessment of the risk/benefit. You have to make your mind up based on your own judgement.
But to do that properly, you have to understand the risk properly. Sorry if this gets techie or boring, but this is basically the kind of stuff I do for a living so I'm entitled to mouth off (just this once)
The Accident
The accident was caused by a combination of bad design and manufacture, and operators not following procedures during an unusual experimental procedure. The electrical control system was being checked for function during conditions of power outage and the emergency safety interlocks had been removed. During the experiment there were significant variations in the temperature and coolant flow rate. The temperature fluctuations broke up the zirconium fuel channels in the core and allowed the fuel to mix with the pressurised cooling water. This intimate mixing allowed rapid heat exchange and a large increase in energy output because of the increased moderation. This process took six seconds to generate a shock wave in the water from the temperature increase which blew open the pressurised cooling system. The opening of the system allowed the release of the stored pressure and the coolant water immediately flashed into steam.
The force of this explosion of steam was enough to lift the entire reactor up. Thousands of tonnes of it. Hmm. Anyway, this explosion removed all the cooling water from the reactor, meaning that the fuel, which stayed, increased in reactivity and energy output again. This vapourised the fuel in the middle of the core, which again exploded about a minute later, destroying the core and most of the reactor hall building. A lot of the core, nuclear material and other ancilliary equipment was thrown up out of the reactor building and onto surrounding buildings. This was the first spread of contamination.
All this hot material flying around started multiple fires on the roofs of the buildings which were conveniently coated in highly flammable tar. Fun. Firemen struggled to control these fires and got most out and the main reactor fire under control within about four hours. Lots died.
About sixteen hours later the main reactor material had self-heated itself to the degree that it started to react with the water being used to control it, which generated hydrogen. Which also burns. This new fire burnt with a plume stretching about fifty metres above the roof.
Over the next ten days, thousands of tonnes of damping materials such as boron compounds, lead, sand and clay were dropped on the core to try and stop the fire. Remember that the smoke from these fires was transporting more material out into the environment. An attempt was also made to cool the fire by flooding it with liquid nitrogen.
Eventually the material burnt it's way out through the lower environmental shield and spread out across the lower levels under the reactor. In doing so it cooled and lost it's reactivity of it's own accord and quite quickly solidified and stopped.
The Consequences
It can only be estimated how much of the nuclear material was lost because of the dispersion around the remains of the facility, and the fact that a large amount is buried under the tonnes of control materials and in the too-hot-to-investigate lower halls. The best guess is that about a quarter of the original inventory went walkies, about twenty tonnes or so.
The spread of this material spans from particles thrown out by the initial blasts to the smoke produced by the various fires which was carried by the wind all across europe, being brought down as the wind died or changed and in rain. The two most important isotopes are 131-iodine (mainly decayed now) and 137-caesium
(still around). The fall out of this material is arranged in patterns around the site d
You must all be reading a different article to me.
I'm reading how OPEN SOURCE will boom in 5-10 years, not linux.
Do story submitters not read the articles either ?!
Well I just emailed SCO UK telling them I run a couple of linux servers on my home network without licenses, and asked "what do you plan to do about it?".
My expectations are 99% no reply and 1% legalese gobble-de-gook.
Re: replies - Your comments about new socket / slot types coming out soon is, of course, entirely relevant. However it's also redundant. A small range of chip speeds are available for a motherboard type, at which point something changes and you need a new motherboard. Hands up who bought a Pentium 4 2.0ghz thinking you would be able to put any future model into your motherboard, only to find Intel went and upped the front side bus speed, making your MB incompatible with a 3.2ghz HyperThreading chip?.
This is my point exactly - this may be the end of the line of chips you can buy for this socket type, but few people upgrade their CPU every couple of iterations. I went from a P4 1.8 to a P4 3.0 - I did not get a 2.0,2.4,2.533,2.8 along the way as there was just no need. I don't plan on upgrading from a 3.0 to anything under 4.0ghz because -it just wont be worth it-
I don't get it. Why bother saying "you'd be best off waiting" for the next chip ? The Athlon FX-53 is a flagship chip. It's the currently fastest chip they do. If you want the highest performance, you would obviously buy it now. If you wait a couple of months then you don't want the highest performance. This is what this chip is for, here and now - the fastest available performance. Yes there will be a faster one in a few months but that just continues ad infinitum. If you lived by the rule of waiting for something faster to come out, you'd die of old age before you actually purchased the damn thing.