.. but I downloaded the trailers for sky captain and chrome and REALLY disliked both of them, I was strongly reminded of the original buck rogers black and white telly series, and I guess they were trying to recreate that sort of feel, but I for one didn't like it in the least.... at least the original buck rogers producers didn't have a choice... this stuff strikes me as using a p4 3.2 extreme edition to emulate and old breakout game and say "but hey, it's UXGA now and the bricks are rendered in opengl to maintain that retro feel"... I guess it will appeal to some but I would rather wait for HL2
Modern car "horsepower" is actually BHP (as opposed to the old RAC horsepower, or european CV, or actual quadrupeds) equates to about 750 watts and is governed by the equation
Horsepower = ( ( Torque x RPM ) / 5252
Horsepower is a function of rpm more than anything else, which is why a 600 cc japanese motorcycle engine can generate more horsepower than a 10,000 cc Gardner diesel engine that will pull a 40 ton truck.
Smaller european / japanese engines tend to rev higher than yank motors, so that boosts their horsepower ratings, but yank motors have tons of torque, so that boosts their horsepower ratings, an 8 litre v8 @ 5500 rpm is going to show a bit more horsepower than a 2.5 litre v6 @ 7000 rpm, but it it going to wipe the floor with the smaller motor in torque terms.
You want economy with 0 to 60 mph performance in single seconds?
low kerb weight, the only solution.
but nobody wants to drive cars that weight 800 kilos and have steel panels that make a fucking biscuit tin look heavy duty.
if you give a fuck about the enviornment a 200 cc four stroke scooter is the answer, but people are way too concerned about penis size for it to take off.
my last american car (many years ago) was a breathed upon 500 big block, bhp wasn't *that* impressive, from memory about 420, but torque was fucking awesome... (big grin thinking about it now)
I had a project many years ago to design a computer for racing yachts, they were using laptops and breaking them on a VERY regular basis, thing is these guys are totally anal about weight, on a 40 foot boat they will chuck shit like 2 pint aluminium kettles over the side, so whatever I designed HAD to use fuck all power because they carried minimal traditional 12 volt lead acid and minimal diesel and in any case starting the motor meant a race penalty.
Ideally they were looking for something around 500 mhz, that weighed 2 ounces, was literally bulletproof and waterproof to 1000 feet, the size of a matchbox, and generated enough power to charge the main lead acid battery.
A smart engineer doesn't try to reinvent the wheel (especially for a *potential* customer that isn'y waving a blank cheque book at you) so I went out and bought a 3.5 inch biscuit PC from advantech (do a google) this is a single board PC, literally the size and form factor of a 3.5 inch hard drive, with onboard cyrix 233 mhz cpu, onboard sodimm slot (I used a 68 mb card), onboard gfx and sound, and pc104 expansion (I used 4 of these, one for four rs232/485 ports, one for a gps, one for pcmcia and one for ethernet) I also used a 2.5 inch laptop hard drive, and stuck the whole thing in a case that had an integrated inverter / PSU that would run off anything from 10 volts dc to about 36 volts dc. The whole thing was completely fanless.
Build quality of all these components, being industrial, was excellent, much better than home pc standards. It was also extremely tough and had a very wide enviornmental envelope. Best of all it was cheap, they make so many of these things for point of sale electronics etc that prices are comparable to cheap domestic kit.
For the demo unit (which was fully linux compatible) we ran winders98 to demo the nav software which was also winders based, performance was about what you'd expect from a equivalent mhz laptop, eg more than enough for 95% of uses.
Nearly forgot, being industrial it also had in hardware an automatic reboot thing (which you could disable) which would reboot the whole thing if the OS stopped responding to an internal irq for 15 seconds...
Power consumption of this box was typically 11 watts mean, this was measured by a pukka power meter on the supply line for several hours.
Apart from the 2.5 inch hard disk, it was zero moving parts and therefore near as dammit totally silent too.
My take on this is if a standard obsolete dektop box won't do it look at EPIA, and if EPIA won't do it then look at industrial biscuit PC's.
Because stage one of the design process is always going to be "what form factor we gonna go for?"
if it's ATX then 99% of the components can only go where they go, PCI slots have to go where they do, CPU has to go at the top cos pci slots extend to the bottom on cases, ide connects towards the "front" of the pc, psu cables near the top cos psu makers save money by shaving cable lengths, ram is an awkward shape so it can only go where it does, and all the i/o can also only go where it goes.
ok that leaves "some" slack for placing shit like fan headers, but bugger all for power devices like capacitors etc.
it's not like they can rats nest all the components and do auto routing AND auto placement to minimise pcb size or track length.
as another poster says, multi-layering as also inevitable unless you are going to use pc104 style stackable cards to get your extra routes on.
no, sadly too much of the design process is fixed by form factor, and too many mobo manufacturers are thus left with no real design decisions except..
"can we use six 20 cent capacitors instead of twelve 90 cent ones?"
stirlings are pretty puny by any standards, have moving parts that will wear out and therefore a limited mtbf, are bloody expensive and very prone to any condensation or icing.
I'd have thought peltiers (which the russians used to generate power in space) would have been a much better solution. No moving parts, 200,000 hour mtbf, dirt cheap, compact, and will scale to any desired power out[ut.
Does anyone know why stirlings were used? Would be most interested to know for a fact.
yes it was expensive, 1,000 UK pounds back then for the complete screen (inc a resistive touchscreen) and bespoke casing, but then again ALL tft was insanely expensive back then.
we don't _have_ to use shit nowadays, it is just another way for laptop manufacturers to save money by using shitty screens.
Must be 5 years ago now for a project I was working on way back then, I got hold of a 12.1 inch 800 x 600 native Sharp industrial grade TFT (for those of you not in the know indusrial grade are the pick of the yield) which the had the standard sharp backlight, which was about 300 cd/m2 even way back then, removed and replaced with one from an american company called Landmark Technology which meant it was 1500 candela and true daylight readable even in direct sunlight... the screen was driven by an expensive (I forget the make for the moment) graphics engine which took the input RGB and converted it to the TFT native electronics signal format.
The image quality was absolutely astonishing, even blew away things like my current 21 inch sony 520, white WAS absolutely white, the most minute details such as the - - - - - - effects you get around selected dialogue buttons in windows were absolutely pin sharp, and when showing images such as some of the nature type pictures included in xp as default desktop backgrounds the effect can only be described as feeling like you were looking at a high quality photographic transparency backlit by a professional grade light-box.
The horizontal and vertical viewing angles were also pretty dramatic, with a very wide range over which brightness and contrast didn't appear to vary, response was also more than enough for multimedia playback.
So that was 5 years ago.
I haven't seen anything since that was actually better quality, except today I could get an 18 inch 1600 x 1200 panel, so these "new" ideas are cool and all, but I think their unique selling points must be anything other than true image quality, it must be something like very low power consumption, very much more robust, or perhaps extended operational temperature range.
Until one of those uses applies to me I'm quite happy to use the tft built into my dell laptop, but for desktop work it has to be CRT, for everything else such as the digital camera then the tft screens in built are no more use than thumbnail browaing in MHO.
OK, I am speaking from a UK centric point of view, nevertheless a lot of this will apply wherever you are.
BTW, that Bush asslicker Blair yesterday got on the global warming bandwagon and tree hugging energy.
1/ There are only two forms of NATURAL energy that work 24/7, they are geothermal, such as they use in Iceland, and hydro, such as Niagara, Kariba, etc. NO OTHER NATURAL METHOD WILL WORK CONTINUOUSLY AT FULL OUTPUT.
2/ wind power, wave power, solar power etc, NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO, simply will not work 24/7 at any meaningful continuous power rating.
So, even if wind power alone could generate 1000% of todays needs, you'd still need a VAST power storage system somewhere for those regular times when output was less than demand... the financial cost and the enviornmental impact of such energy storage systems will utterly blow away the entire wind farm installations impact and cost.
Next point.
99.99999% of people claiming they are experts in alternative energy etc etc etc have absolutely ZERO experience in one vital area, actual power generation and distribution.
You fuckers have absolutely no idea how wildly (and "wildly" really is not too strong a word) consumer power demand varies minute by minute on a daily basis... in the UK for example power guys watching meters can tell when there is a commercial break and everyone goes to the bathroom and turns the light on for a piss, or goes to the kitchen and turns the kettle on for a tea or coffee... these are really huge spikes in demand, and they may last for only a few minutes.
You also have to understand that YOU are not worthwhile data to base any assumptions about national usage or consumption upon.
Just over three years ago here in the UK there was a fucking massive spike in power use, and I mean fucking massive, not double or treble, or quadruple, when the world trade centre came tumpling down and everyone picked up a fucking telephone.... or do telephone and data networks not matter to you wind power types?
Another one you're going to have to deal with is industry, basically you're going to have to shut it down completely and send it offshore to other countries, complete with all the jobs and revenue, because you aren't going to run shit like bauxite smelting or electro-plating or indeed crack oil into petrol and diesel etc, without fucking massive amounts of power, I hope you all look forwards to driving around in your new for 2006 paper (and I mean literally paper) cars, or do you think the trabants were made because these countries had a surplus of power and resources.
Megacorp doesn't give a fuck, they'll go wherever there are terawatts available 24/7, like china, certainly not some tree hugging shithole with rolling brownouts.
Here in the UK by way of example, the FACTS as they are today.
The government has PLANNED green energy accounting for 20% of national output in 20 years time, it can never be higher than that proportion for the reasons stated above about fluctuating demand, and yet this 20%, IF IT HAPPENS, will be entirely used up as our remaining nuke plants die of old age, because there will only be ONE left working in 2025, these are hard fucking facts, and this is to maintain TODAYS output.
As it is TODAY the UK is terribly dependent on a SINGLE huge natural gas pipeline that runs from russia through the low countries across the channel to the UK, we NEED it for domestic heating and power generation, it doesn't even take a terrosist incident, just an accident, to create what will amount to a state of national emergency.
The under channel power cables from france, importing french nuclear generated electricity, are already maxed out.
The mothballed coal stations have been systematically stripped for spares for years now, they are scrap.
We simply DO NOT HAVE ANY POSSIBILTY of increasing generating capacity in any short to medium term.
Even if we started spending 1 billion pounds per day, which is approxim
eg the very first time I installed their bug ridden spyware ridden take-over-every-fucking-thing piece of shit software. And this was way back...
___NONE___ of those features got there by accident, every last one of them got there because the coders were told to include them.
Ever since then real software has been real banned on my boxes and on my network, and every site that features.rm ONLY gets added to the shit list too.
Real are cocksucking whore, *maybe* a rung above professional spammers, and they can go and fuck themselves.
The UK government is not alone Europe in being really keen on such ideas for some years now.
Not a few weeks, not six months, several years, long before world trade centre stuff, well before osama was front page news.
Note well, anyone who thinks "government" = bush or blair or labour or democrat of whatever is doomed before they start, government in the UK is the many tens of thousands of unelected civil servants who remain in office year after year after year.
These are the corporate pen-pushers trying to carve out a piece of personal power and influence that are really behind all these schemes, and the ballot box will NEVER touch these people.
Not that the citizenry as a whole will ever unite on anything like this, forget it, it won't ever happen.
It is also a straw man argument to claim that such aims are impossible as there just ain't enough disk space on the planet, bullshit, it can be done pretty easy.
Spool all smtp and pop traffic, being text based it will compress real well anyway.
Spool all nntp traffic, when data gets to 80 days out strip out everything except the headers.
Spool all http traffic, you only need to keep the apache server logs on a per individual basis anyway, except where keyword matches allow you to elect to store the entire page.
Doesn't matter if this adds 50% to the costs for an ISP, because it will be added to ALL providers it will be in effect a tax where the cost is passed down to the consumer. Google and others offering FREE gigabytes of storage will also make a very strong weapon in the armoury for these people claiming that it is quite possible and economical to do.
Scott Nealy said many years ago that the idea of anonymity on the internet was no more than a fiction anyway, so get used to it, little has changed.
OK, so back in the real world, and speaking as someone who was once described on the front pages of the business section of the (London) Times newpaper as an "Electronic Guerilla" and as a self proclaimed anarchist and libertarian, it is cloud cuckoo land to thing that some popular peoples movement is going to stop this happening.
I will offer you a simple proof of why this is so.
Take slashdot itself for an example, a techies website if ever there was one, all the slashdot owners have to do is move from http://www.slashdot.org/ to https://www.slashdot.org/ and lo and behold all those records on government computers for that bit of the internet now hold encrypted data.
Chances of this ever happening? Zero.
Ok, so it is futile to talk about motivating the masses to move to pgp / blowfish / whatever encrypted communications... it will never happen, 95% of users can't even decide whether running bonzi-buddy is a good idea or not, and just click yes anyway.
No, if you really want to break a system you must push WITH the flow instead of against it, you efforts will then be far more effective if you try to steer it towards self destruction, than if you just stand in it's path and try to stop it, whete it will simply crush you.
No, EVERYONE should come out and start harping on about moores law and data storage densities and pence per terabyte etc etc, and push for ALL data, and I mean ALL data, not just TCP/IP of today, but emerging data such as TCP/IP telephony when BT and ma bell switch from switched networks, I mean ALL television programming, and of course I mean ALL CCTV or indeed any other form of surveilance "footage", yes ALL data, should be stored, IN PERPETUITY, and IN COMPLETE STREAMS, not every tenth frame, and not just headers.
I also want ALL vehicles to be tracked 24/7 via, GPS / GPRS, and ALL CITIZENS TOO.
We need to push for EVERY LAST BYTE to be stored in perpetuity, and we need to push for this by stating (correctly) that ONLY a full data stream tells the whole story.
Once people start to get behind this idea as a meme and take it on board we then need to push the photos
This is like the two guys from the nature film crew, one cameraman and one soundman, filming the lions... one of the lions gets all menacing and starts to make a run towards them...
The sound guy kneels down and starts taking of his boots, the camera guy starts laughing and says "you won't outrun a lion like that."
The sound guy says "I'm not trying to, I'm only going to outrun you."
OK, same principle applies, and I'm being 100% serious here.
You do NOT need to make yourself 100% impregnable, you only need to make sure you aren't the most attractive to the thieves etc
Backing up data is easy and cheap, as cheap as anti-virus measures for windows boxen... the fact is people cannot get either to work because they are LAZY and STUPID and most of all DETERMINED TO STAY THAT WAY.
There is an old saying about fools and their money being soon parted, I think there is also a modern corollary, "Fools and their data are soon parted."
With my work hat on, when asked to help a user with PC problems, I have long evolved a simple tactic, I ask one question.
"Is the data on this computer very important?"
the answer is usually "Oh yes!"
to which I reply "Good!"
(this usually puzzles the user in question)
I then proceed with a full format and virgin reinstall, this being usually the quickest way to fix a windows pc full of cruft, never defragmented, with a corrupt registry full of badly uninstalled software and magazine cover disk trialware, and of course littered with spyware malware and viruses...
Some time later when the user realises ALL their data has gone forever and queries it, I remind them that they were asked if their data was very important, and they answered affirmatively, and therefore they obviously had complete backups of this important data so I was free to fix the problem rapidly.....
1/ original video signal is sent using FIF (Fractal Image Format) compression, high qaulity zoom possible, by definition much of the original signal is dropped during "normal" playback.
2/ original video signal is sent using much higher resolution, high quality zoom for a couple of steps possible, by definition much of the original signal is dropped during normal playback
3/ original video signal is send using display resolution, iterpolation of several frames used to generate extra data, modest zoom possible but should be noted that unlike the previous two zoom techniques this one is fake and picture displayed will NOT be based solely upon the data stream.
4/ original video signal is sent using display resolution, single frame of data used, modest zoom possible and using something like GPU anti-aliasing to smooth out the jaggies, this again unlike items 1 and 2 is a fake zoom.
Basically that's it, unless the broadcast signal is transmitting something like 24 x the amount of data that the display is using in standard mode (so wasteful no commercial enterprise will go for it, juts look at the dynamic compression satellite broadcasters use to squeeze more channels into limited satellite bandwidth) then this "zoom" is about as factual as the 9600 d.p.i. 25 dollar A4 scanners that are really 300x600 d.p.i.
SO in reality this is the same tech that already exists in my 50 dollar standalone dvd player, or indeed dvd playback software for the pc.
What it most certainly is NOT is a Blade Runner style photographic zoom and enhance where 4 pixels end up generating an image showing a reflection of the cameraman thus proving the photo was a fake and the chick was a construct.
How this sort of shit can get posted to a self proclaimed "news for nerds" site beggars belief.
All this talk of various new(?) protocols and tags is pure FUD and bullshit.
spam can be eradicated (99%) in 48 hours, this was true years ago when I used to hang out on nanae and it is still true today, because 99% of spam originates from companies with "pink" (no AUP) connectivity / IP block contracts that typically pay the provider several times the market rate per IP / Gb of bandwidth.
I could go out today and buy a block of 255 IP addresses on an OC3 and stick 72U of servers behind it sending out spam 24/7, and NOT lose my connectivity....
Sure, it might suck if you have a close IP to mine and SPEWS lists the company that is providing connectivity to both you and me, but at the end of the day money talks.
And at the end of the day there is more money in marketing (globally) than even bill g can dream of.
_NOTHING_ short of an equivalent to the usenet death penalty (which is different because fuck all providers make 1 cent out of usenet, for 95% of them it is a loss making service bundled with http / smtp etc) SPEWS style will ever stop spam.
As far as OSS goes as far as I can see there is only one way to make this work, and that is to use an electronic analogy of what I do at home.
I get junk (snail) mail every day, lots of it comes with pre-paid return envelopes, most of it doesn't.
The stuff advertising local firms tends not to have pre-paid envelopes, that national stuff tends to have pre-paid envelopes. So I sort my junk mail into local and national, takes about 3 seconds.
The local stuff I just throw out into the street to blow around and litter the place, the residents get pissed off, the council gets pissed off, clear plastic bags containing samples of the litter get placed on council meeting tables and the companies whose names are on said bits of paper get a hard time from the council and everything from business rates increases to bills to clean up litter.
The national stuff I just stuff into the prepaid return envelopes, just not the right envelopes, so each company gets an envelope full of some other companies junk mail, and pays for the postage.
Result, I now get about 4 pieces of junk mail per week, it DOES work IF you work at it for a year or two.
I see a similar thing in the OSS community as being the only solution, it takes a little bit of care to eliminate the joe-jobbed return addresses, but all you need is a spam filter that directs spam back to other spammers addresses, and if they have no smtp ports open then try to send it to them on port 80 every second for 24 hours.
Yes I ___AM___ advocating DDoSing the cunts off the net, because when spam starts costing spammers money and denial of THEIR services they will stop, not before.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes, Queen Victoria, affectionately known as "The Snow Queen"
(druggies will get this)
for the rest of you she was a heavy user of ether John Snow, opiates and cannabis, cannabis incidentally was legal in britain until 1929...
http://www.skunk.co.uk/skunk/overview/history.a
destroys autofocus?
surely the effective focal length for ALL aerial shots will be infinity anyway?
hmm?
.. but I downloaded the trailers for sky captain and chrome and REALLY disliked both of them, I was strongly reminded of the original buck rogers black and white telly series, and I guess they were trying to recreate that sort of feel, but I for one didn't like it in the least.... at least the original buck rogers producers didn't have a choice ... this stuff strikes me as using a p4 3.2 extreme edition to emulate and old breakout game and say "but hey, it's UXGA now and the bricks are rendered in opengl to maintain that retro feel"... I guess it will appeal to some but I would rather wait for HL2
Modern car "horsepower" is actually BHP (as opposed to the old RAC horsepower, or european CV, or actual quadrupeds) equates to about 750 watts and is governed by the equation
Horsepower = ( ( Torque x RPM ) / 5252
Horsepower is a function of rpm more than anything else, which is why a 600 cc japanese motorcycle engine can generate more horsepower than a 10,000 cc Gardner diesel engine that will pull a 40 ton truck.
Smaller european / japanese engines tend to rev higher than yank motors, so that boosts their horsepower ratings, but yank motors have tons of torque, so that boosts their horsepower ratings, an 8 litre v8 @ 5500 rpm is going to show a bit more horsepower than a 2.5 litre v6 @ 7000 rpm, but it it going to wipe the floor with the smaller motor in torque terms.
You want economy with 0 to 60 mph performance in single seconds?
low kerb weight, the only solution.
but nobody wants to drive cars that weight 800 kilos and have steel panels that make a fucking biscuit tin look heavy duty.
if you give a fuck about the enviornment a 200 cc four stroke scooter is the answer, but people are way too concerned about penis size for it to take off.
my last american car (many years ago) was a breathed upon 500 big block, bhp wasn't *that* impressive, from memory about 420, but torque was fucking awesome... (big grin thinking about it now)
I had a project many years ago to design a computer for racing yachts, they were using laptops and breaking them on a VERY regular basis, thing is these guys are totally anal about weight, on a 40 foot boat they will chuck shit like 2 pint aluminium kettles over the side, so whatever I designed HAD to use fuck all power because they carried minimal traditional 12 volt lead acid and minimal diesel and in any case starting the motor meant a race penalty.
Ideally they were looking for something around 500 mhz, that weighed 2 ounces, was literally bulletproof and waterproof to 1000 feet, the size of a matchbox, and generated enough power to charge the main lead acid battery.
A smart engineer doesn't try to reinvent the wheel (especially for a *potential* customer that isn'y waving a blank cheque book at you) so I went out and bought a 3.5 inch biscuit PC from advantech (do a google) this is a single board PC, literally the size and form factor of a 3.5 inch hard drive, with onboard cyrix 233 mhz cpu, onboard sodimm slot (I used a 68 mb card), onboard gfx and sound, and pc104 expansion (I used 4 of these, one for four rs232/485 ports, one for a gps, one for pcmcia and one for ethernet) I also used a 2.5 inch laptop hard drive, and stuck the whole thing in a case that had an integrated inverter / PSU that would run off anything from 10 volts dc to about 36 volts dc. The whole thing was completely fanless.
Build quality of all these components, being industrial, was excellent, much better than home pc standards. It was also extremely tough and had a very wide enviornmental envelope. Best of all it was cheap, they make so many of these things for point of sale electronics etc that prices are comparable to cheap domestic kit.
For the demo unit (which was fully linux compatible) we ran winders98 to demo the nav software which was also winders based, performance was about what you'd expect from a equivalent mhz laptop, eg more than enough for 95% of uses.
Nearly forgot, being industrial it also had in hardware an automatic reboot thing (which you could disable) which would reboot the whole thing if the OS stopped responding to an internal irq for 15 seconds...
Power consumption of this box was typically 11 watts mean, this was measured by a pukka power meter on the supply line for several hours.
Apart from the 2.5 inch hard disk, it was zero moving parts and therefore near as dammit totally silent too.
My take on this is if a standard obsolete dektop box won't do it look at EPIA, and if EPIA won't do it then look at industrial biscuit PC's.
HTH etc
Top Ten?
from memory there's about 4 and even those will only work in deliberately loaded lab conditions and not in the wild.
You're better off opening up the root shell and typing "chkrootkit"
http://www.chkrootkit.org/
Religion and Science are BY DEFINITION mustually exclusive.
Religion = belief in something that cannot be proven empirically.
Science = belief only in that which can be proven empirically.
Because stage one of the design process is always going to be "what form factor we gonna go for?"
if it's ATX then 99% of the components can only go where they go, PCI slots have to go where they do, CPU has to go at the top cos pci slots extend to the bottom on cases, ide connects towards the "front" of the pc, psu cables near the top cos psu makers save money by shaving cable lengths, ram is an awkward shape so it can only go where it does, and all the i/o can also only go where it goes.
ok that leaves "some" slack for placing shit like fan headers, but bugger all for power devices like capacitors etc.
it's not like they can rats nest all the components and do auto routing AND auto placement to minimise pcb size or track length.
as another poster says, multi-layering as also inevitable unless you are going to use pc104 style stackable cards to get your extra routes on.
no, sadly too much of the design process is fixed by form factor, and too many mobo manufacturers are thus left with no real design decisions except..
"can we use six 20 cent capacitors instead of twelve 90 cent ones?"
and
"should we dye this one red? or black? or blue?"
end
stirlings are pretty puny by any standards, have moving parts that will wear out and therefore a limited mtbf, are bloody expensive and very prone to any condensation or icing.
I'd have thought peltiers (which the russians used to generate power in space) would have been a much better solution. No moving parts, 200,000 hour mtbf, dirt cheap, compact, and will scale to any desired power out[ut.
Does anyone know why stirlings were used?
Would be most interested to know for a fact.
cheers
"..some of the nature TYPE pictures included.."
not the nature picture included, just that type.
yes it was expensive, 1,000 UK pounds back then for the complete screen (inc a resistive touchscreen) and bespoke casing, but then again ALL tft was insanely expensive back then.
we don't _have_ to use shit nowadays, it is just another way for laptop manufacturers to save money by using shitty screens.
naturally I tried that TOO..
kiss my ass, chickenshit AC pompous asshole.
now THAT is flamebait.
Must be 5 years ago now for a project I was working on way back then, I got hold of a 12.1 inch 800 x 600 native Sharp industrial grade TFT (for those of you not in the know indusrial grade are the pick of the yield) which the had the standard sharp backlight, which was about 300 cd/m2 even way back then, removed and replaced with one from an american company called Landmark Technology which meant it was 1500 candela and true daylight readable even in direct sunlight... the screen was driven by an expensive (I forget the make for the moment) graphics engine which took the input RGB and converted it to the TFT native electronics signal format.
The image quality was absolutely astonishing, even blew away things like my current 21 inch sony 520, white WAS absolutely white, the most minute details such as the - - - - - - effects you get around selected dialogue buttons in windows were absolutely pin sharp, and when showing images such as some of the nature type pictures included in xp as default desktop backgrounds the effect can only be described as feeling like you were looking at a high quality photographic transparency backlit by a professional grade light-box.
The horizontal and vertical viewing angles were also pretty dramatic, with a very wide range over which brightness and contrast didn't appear to vary, response was also more than enough for multimedia playback.
So that was 5 years ago.
I haven't seen anything since that was actually better quality, except today I could get an 18 inch 1600 x 1200 panel, so these "new" ideas are cool and all, but I think their unique selling points must be anything other than true image quality, it must be something like very low power consumption, very much more robust, or perhaps extended operational temperature range.
Until one of those uses applies to me I'm quite happy to use the tft built into my dell laptop, but for desktop work it has to be CRT, for everything else such as the digital camera then the tft screens in built are no more use than thumbnail browaing in MHO.
OK, I am speaking from a UK centric point of view, nevertheless a lot of this will apply wherever you are.
BTW, that Bush asslicker Blair yesterday got on the global warming bandwagon and tree hugging energy.
1/ There are only two forms of NATURAL energy that work 24/7, they are geothermal, such as they use in Iceland, and hydro, such as Niagara, Kariba, etc. NO OTHER NATURAL METHOD WILL WORK CONTINUOUSLY AT FULL OUTPUT.
2/ wind power, wave power, solar power etc, NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO, simply will not work 24/7 at any meaningful continuous power rating.
So, even if wind power alone could generate 1000% of todays needs, you'd still need a VAST power storage system somewhere for those regular times when output was less than demand... the financial cost and the enviornmental impact of such energy storage systems will utterly blow away the entire wind farm installations impact and cost.
Next point.
99.99999% of people claiming they are experts in alternative energy etc etc etc have absolutely ZERO experience in one vital area, actual power generation and distribution.
You fuckers have absolutely no idea how wildly (and "wildly" really is not too strong a word) consumer power demand varies minute by minute on a daily basis... in the UK for example power guys watching meters can tell when there is a commercial break and everyone goes to the bathroom and turns the light on for a piss, or goes to the kitchen and turns the kettle on for a tea or coffee... these are really huge spikes in demand, and they may last for only a few minutes.
You also have to understand that YOU are not worthwhile data to base any assumptions about national usage or consumption upon.
Just over three years ago here in the UK there was a fucking massive spike in power use, and I mean fucking massive, not double or treble, or quadruple, when the world trade centre came tumpling down and everyone picked up a fucking telephone.... or do telephone and data networks not matter to you wind power types?
Another one you're going to have to deal with is industry, basically you're going to have to shut it down completely and send it offshore to other countries, complete with all the jobs and revenue, because you aren't going to run shit like bauxite smelting or electro-plating or indeed crack oil into petrol and diesel etc, without fucking massive amounts of power, I hope you all look forwards to driving around in your new for 2006 paper (and I mean literally paper) cars, or do you think the trabants were made because these countries had a surplus of power and resources.
Megacorp doesn't give a fuck, they'll go wherever there are terawatts available 24/7, like china, certainly not some tree hugging shithole with rolling brownouts.
Here in the UK by way of example, the FACTS as they are today.
The government has PLANNED green energy accounting for 20% of national output in 20 years time, it can never be higher than that proportion for the reasons stated above about fluctuating demand, and yet this 20%, IF IT HAPPENS, will be entirely used up as our remaining nuke plants die of old age, because there will only be ONE left working in 2025, these are hard fucking facts, and this is to maintain TODAYS output.
As it is TODAY the UK is terribly dependent on a SINGLE huge natural gas pipeline that runs from russia through the low countries across the channel to the UK, we NEED it for domestic heating and power generation, it doesn't even take a terrosist incident, just an accident, to create what will amount to a state of national emergency.
The under channel power cables from france, importing french nuclear generated electricity, are already maxed out.
The mothballed coal stations have been systematically stripped for spares for years now, they are scrap.
We simply DO NOT HAVE ANY POSSIBILTY of increasing generating capacity in any short to medium term.
Even if we started spending 1 billion pounds per day, which is approxim
I honestly cannot think of any commercial "legitimate" software (eg not spyware or viruses) that I loathe more than real....
that's honest, if you don't like it, shove it, but don't lie and label it flamebait when it isn't.
it is NOT said to start a flame war.
it IS said because it is my honest opinion.
eg the very first time I installed their bug ridden spyware ridden take-over-every-fucking-thing piece of shit software. And this was way back...
___NONE___ of those features got there by accident, every last one of them got there because the coders were told to include them.
Ever since then real software has been real banned on my boxes and on my network, and every site that features
Real are cocksucking whore, *maybe* a rung above professional spammers, and they can go and fuck themselves.
Facts are these...
The UK government is not alone Europe in being really keen on such ideas for some years now.
Not a few weeks, not six months, several years, long before world trade centre stuff, well before osama was front page news.
Note well, anyone who thinks "government" = bush or blair or labour or democrat of whatever is doomed before they start, government in the UK is the many tens of thousands of unelected civil servants who remain in office year after year after year.
These are the corporate pen-pushers trying to carve out a piece of personal power and influence that are really behind all these schemes, and the ballot box will NEVER touch these people.
Not that the citizenry as a whole will ever unite on anything like this, forget it, it won't ever happen.
It is also a straw man argument to claim that such aims are impossible as there just ain't enough disk space on the planet, bullshit, it can be done pretty easy.
Spool all smtp and pop traffic, being text based it will compress real well anyway.
Spool all nntp traffic, when data gets to 80 days out strip out everything except the headers.
Spool all http traffic, you only need to keep the apache server logs on a per individual basis anyway, except where keyword matches allow you to elect to store the entire page.
Doesn't matter if this adds 50% to the costs for an ISP, because it will be added to ALL providers it will be in effect a tax where the cost is passed down to the consumer.
Google and others offering FREE gigabytes of storage will also make a very strong weapon in the armoury for these people claiming that it is quite possible and economical to do.
Scott Nealy said many years ago that the idea of anonymity on the internet was no more than a fiction anyway, so get used to it, little has changed.
OK, so back in the real world, and speaking as someone who was once described on the front pages of the business section of the (London) Times newpaper as an "Electronic Guerilla" and as a self proclaimed anarchist and libertarian, it is cloud cuckoo land to thing that some popular peoples movement is going to stop this happening.
I will offer you a simple proof of why this is so.
Take slashdot itself for an example, a techies website if ever there was one, all the slashdot owners have to do is move from http://www.slashdot.org/ to https://www.slashdot.org/ and lo and behold all those records on government computers for that bit of the internet now hold encrypted data.
Chances of this ever happening?
Zero.
Ok, so it is futile to talk about motivating the masses to move to pgp / blowfish / whatever encrypted communications... it will never happen, 95% of users can't even decide whether running bonzi-buddy is a good idea or not, and just click yes anyway.
No, if you really want to break a system you must push WITH the flow instead of against it, you efforts will then be far more effective if you try to steer it towards self destruction, than if you just stand in it's path and try to stop it, whete it will simply crush you.
No, EVERYONE should come out and start harping on about moores law and data storage densities and pence per terabyte etc etc, and push for ALL data, and I mean ALL data, not just TCP/IP of today, but emerging data such as TCP/IP telephony when BT and ma bell switch from switched networks, I mean ALL television programming, and of course I mean ALL CCTV or indeed any other form of surveilance "footage", yes ALL data, should be stored, IN PERPETUITY, and IN COMPLETE STREAMS, not every tenth frame, and not just headers.
I also want ALL vehicles to be tracked 24/7 via, GPS / GPRS, and ALL CITIZENS TOO.
We need to push for EVERY LAST BYTE to be stored in perpetuity, and we need to push for this by stating (correctly) that ONLY a full data stream tells the whole story.
Once people start to get behind this idea as a meme and take it on board we then need to push the photos
This is like the two guys from the nature film crew, one cameraman and one soundman, filming the lions... one of the lions gets all menacing and starts to make a run towards them...
The sound guy kneels down and starts taking of his boots, the camera guy starts laughing and says "you won't outrun a lion like that."
The sound guy says "I'm not trying to, I'm only going to outrun you."
OK, same principle applies, and I'm being 100% serious here.
You do NOT need to make yourself 100% impregnable, you only need to make sure you aren't the most attractive to the thieves etc
You sound like one of my asshole customers... lol
it would appear so.....
...the more I am struck by how stupid he is.
Backing up data is easy and cheap, as cheap as anti-virus measures for windows boxen... the fact is people cannot get either to work because they are LAZY and STUPID and most of all DETERMINED TO STAY THAT WAY.
There is an old saying about fools and their money being soon parted, I think there is also a modern corollary, "Fools and their data are soon parted."
With my work hat on, when asked to help a user with PC problems, I have long evolved a simple tactic, I ask one question.
"Is the data on this computer very important?"
the answer is usually "Oh yes!"
to which I reply "Good!"
(this usually puzzles the user in question)
I then proceed with a full format and virgin reinstall, this being usually the quickest way to fix a windows pc full of cruft, never defragmented, with a corrupt registry full of badly uninstalled software and magazine cover disk trialware, and of course littered with spyware malware and viruses...
Some time later when the user realises ALL their data has gone forever and queries it, I remind them that they were asked if their data was very important, and they answered affirmatively, and therefore they obviously had complete backups of this important data so I was free to fix the problem rapidly.....
I never have the same problem twice...
1/ original video signal is sent using FIF (Fractal Image Format) compression, high qaulity zoom possible, by definition much of the original signal is dropped during "normal" playback.
2/ original video signal is sent using much higher resolution, high quality zoom for a couple of steps possible, by definition much of the original signal is dropped during normal playback
3/ original video signal is send using display resolution, iterpolation of several frames used to generate extra data, modest zoom possible but should be noted that unlike the previous two zoom techniques this one is fake and picture displayed will NOT be based solely upon the data stream.
4/ original video signal is sent using display resolution, single frame of data used, modest zoom possible and using something like GPU anti-aliasing to smooth out the jaggies, this again unlike items 1 and 2 is a fake zoom.
Basically that's it, unless the broadcast signal is transmitting something like 24 x the amount of data that the display is using in standard mode (so wasteful no commercial enterprise will go for it, juts look at the dynamic compression satellite broadcasters use to squeeze more channels into limited satellite bandwidth) then this "zoom" is about as factual as the 9600 d.p.i. 25 dollar A4 scanners that are really 300x600 d.p.i.
SO in reality this is the same tech that already exists in my 50 dollar standalone dvd player, or indeed dvd playback software for the pc.
What it most certainly is NOT is a Blade Runner style photographic zoom and enhance where 4 pixels end up generating an image showing a reflection of the cameraman thus proving the photo was a fake and the chick was a construct.
How this sort of shit can get posted to a self proclaimed "news for nerds" site beggars belief.
Did IQ's suddenly drop by about 50 around here?
tell that to wallace et al
All this talk of various new(?) protocols and tags is pure FUD and bullshit.
spam can be eradicated (99%) in 48 hours, this was true years ago when I used to hang out on nanae and it is still true today, because 99% of spam originates from companies with "pink" (no AUP) connectivity / IP block contracts that typically pay the provider several times the market rate per IP / Gb of bandwidth.
I could go out today and buy a block of 255 IP addresses on an OC3 and stick 72U of servers behind it sending out spam 24/7, and NOT lose my connectivity....
Sure, it might suck if you have a close IP to mine and SPEWS lists the company that is providing connectivity to both you and me, but at the end of the day money talks.
And at the end of the day there is more money in marketing (globally) than even bill g can dream of.
_NOTHING_ short of an equivalent to the usenet death penalty (which is different because fuck all providers make 1 cent out of usenet, for 95% of them it is a loss making service bundled with http / smtp etc) SPEWS style will ever stop spam.
As far as OSS goes as far as I can see there is only one way to make this work, and that is to use an electronic analogy of what I do at home.
I get junk (snail) mail every day, lots of it comes with pre-paid return envelopes, most of it doesn't.
The stuff advertising local firms tends not to have pre-paid envelopes, that national stuff tends to have pre-paid envelopes. So I sort my junk mail into local and national, takes about 3 seconds.
The local stuff I just throw out into the street to blow around and litter the place, the residents get pissed off, the council gets pissed off, clear plastic bags containing samples of the litter get placed on council meeting tables and the companies whose names are on said bits of paper get a hard time from the council and everything from business rates increases to bills to clean up litter.
The national stuff I just stuff into the prepaid return envelopes, just not the right envelopes, so each company gets an envelope full of some other companies junk mail, and pays for the postage.
Result, I now get about 4 pieces of junk mail per week, it DOES work IF you work at it for a year or two.
I see a similar thing in the OSS community as being the only solution, it takes a little bit of care to eliminate the joe-jobbed return addresses, but all you need is a spam filter that directs spam back to other spammers addresses, and if they have no smtp ports open then try to send it to them on port 80 every second for 24 hours.
Yes I ___AM___ advocating DDoSing the cunts off the net, because when spam starts costing spammers money and denial of THEIR services they will stop, not before.