The idea of Hardware T&L and texture compression are nice improvements but as has been repeated many times for many hardware additions (MMX, 3dNow, the new IBM crypo chip) software (read apps) has to be written to take advantage of these new features. I would much rather see a CPU with enough FPU power and cache to handle the software T&L as it exists now in games. If film runs at ~24FPS what makes it look as good as a game running at 40-60fps? In my opinion it comes from the frame rate drops and stutters that occure when rendering scenes or perspective changes. When in Half-Life and I walk out of a hall to an open area my TNT drops from about 20-25 fps to 12-17 fps. Throw in a couple of light sources in any rendering and your slowing the whole thing down more.
Why does this matter you ask, well, your eyes can definately see the frame rate jumping up and down, even if you see no major difference in the smoothness of the animation. I would rather have any type of T&L as well as buss and fill rates that allowed me to push a steady 25-35 FPS in what ever game/app was rendering in the resolution i wanted. If it pushed 70-80 and dropped to 30 on a tough scene it would not matter much as I would cap my frame rate at about 35-40. Then my fps stays a STEADY 25-40 and doesn't drop to an un acceptale rate, also the app code doesnt get bottenecked when the frames push super high. I dont want 300 fps at 1280x1024, i just want ROCK SOLID frames between 25-40 when rendering ANY scene. Of course Having hardware T&L and for pipelines is nice for being able to do more detailed goemetry and faster as long as the software offloads its T&L to the hardware. However I think that we are getting pretty damn close to the maximum detail level thats needed in games. We can use some more but not a whole lot. The most important thing is that we can dot it at a steady rate.
Same here, about 1.5 - 2 years ago. I spung and watched the flick in the theatre and was abhorred. It was s 2 hour episode with bad dialoge and cussing. Oz is great, the Sopranos kicks some serious tail and Stargate SG-1(showtime sci-friday) is sometimes good sometimes hokey but i loved the movie. Sex in the city is funny but i want to get liad like these women do and it just ain't happening:-). (points to above misspelling... maybe if i could just spell liad right!!)
What a stupid fscking comment. I have moderately low blood pressure (as well as many people in my family) and I smoke almost nightly. (so do a lot of people in my family). I think you just want to shove coffe grounds and salt in someones mouth to see what they would do. Anyway.. if you were at a party or a get together and sober and these other ppl were there i guess you just had a blood pressure cuff just in case. Dude she couldnt handle her shit and passed out. It happens from time to time. Stop trying to scare people with lies... its a pathetic way to be.
For some reason Pot also makes taking a shit much more enjoyable. Dunno why though. And while we are on that subject... why do we call it "TAKING a shit" when in reality we are LEAVEING it. Personally i would never take a shit that sounds pretty gross:)
I remember when i was in middle school (about 13 years old) we were givina drug sex and alcohol survey. It was anonomous and done on a scantron (the little #2 pencil dots). I thought it was cool as shit and lied my ass off. I smoked crack weekly. Was a smackhead.. loved speed and got laid 4 times a week. All of it was bullshit (except for the weed)
Part of the lies surronding Cannibus is that is worse for your lungs than smoking cigarettes. I will attempt to counter this completely false view.
War on drugs drones state that pot is three times worse for your lungs than tobacco. Where do they get this idea? From the fact that marijuana has 3 times the tars as tobacco. This is true but there are LESS Aromatic Hydrocarbons (known to be carcinoens). Also... being both a cigarette smoker AND a pot smoker i dont smoke 20 joints a day but i often smoke a pack or more of cigarettes a day. So... if the input level is lower then you can't claim that the 3x amount of tar makes it 3x worse for you. Another issue is that most tobacco is LOADED with chemicals from your friends at phillip morris or wherever. If you know where your weed came from then you should no exactly what is on it.. fertilizers, pesticides, additives. Do you know whats on that tobacco you just smoked? I sure dont.
Point is... everything is fraught with dangers... red meat increases cholestorol and fat.. more heart attacks... but I don't go around screaming DONT EAT THAT STEAK. You can get in a car and die 5 minuets later from a drunk driver. You wouldn't say.. DONT RIDE IN A CAR!! If it is something that you enjoy or need (and there are legitimate medical uses for pot) you should be able to do it regardless. there is an excellent reference on many more myths and facts about pot here: http://www.norml.org/canorml/myths/mythidx.shtml
When I was about 11-12 I went night fishoing on a 20-30 acre lake near my house. It was kindof down between 2 hills with a road running on one side of it. I was fishing near the road (which had VERY little traffic). You could see headlights coming through the trees on the other side of the lake when a car was coming towards you and you could see lights ON the trees on the other side as cars came down the hill behind you. cars coming from behind thelight woud start at the top of the trees and move down as the cars came down the hill. The speed limit was 25MPh so you could see them coming for about 15-30 secs. I saw light ligiting up the tips of the trees demly in the distance and my mind said another car. After about 10 secs without the light moving a figured someone near the top of the hil was parked or a house had their flood lights on. Then the light started moving and brightening. Slowly at first and taking on a greenish hue. Then it sped way up and got REALLY bright.. bright enough to cast light where I was in the pitch dark middle of the night in a rural area during a new moon (I normally went catfishing during a new moon or overcast night had better luck). A BRIGHT round object flew over head extremely fast. Too fast to tell exact altitude or shape but it couldn't have been MORE that 200-400 ft if not lower. it dissapeared behind the tree line and then I heard a loud bang and saw a bright flash through the trees. This all hapened in about the space of 60-120 secs. Scared the living bejesus outta me. Another wierd thing was that all night for about 2 hours I had been catching TONS of catfish they all stopped biting. Right then. Not even a nibble. Wierd Huh?
I agree fully. There are going to be similarities in vision statements and their ilk amoing companies with similar goals. But this goes a little to far. I mean micro$oft has a tendency to come up with sexy little marketing slogans so instead od connect anwher, anytime with any device or whatever it was how about "What do you want to connect Today?" I mean if you ran a company making intimate lubricant... how many ways could you say "We Make It Glide"???
It says its directly connected to a router thru a 115k serial line. I really think this as more vaporware crap. Probably put out by micro$oft.
Bill Gates: "look at those geeks.. they'll believe anything. Hmm my next lie will be that I will open source windows and do a code merge with linux.. that'll turn some heads"
Ugh... vaporware smells worse than my underwear...
I have seen this before.... neve rlistened to it thought it was a hoax. Never could get the demonstration link to work. well it was slow an 8088 with 512k ram but my browser finally got in.. I kept getting hung after the name resolution then i finally got the "host contacted waiting for reply" took about 3 minutes after that to give me a text only page of more garbage.... wow... when can I get some Nike's with embedded webservers that allow me to tie the laces remotely???
CiXeL... For trying to incite panic and defaming your national government, the Federal U.S. Internet Tribunal revokes all net priveleges for a term not less than 4 years and not more than 20.
Seriously........ It IS possible. I know I will have copies of all my bills and most of my funds out of the bank. Got a stocked pantry already ready already. I just know that if something like that were to happen I would fight it. Wouludn't you??
Being rather technically inclined, when I want a machine regardless of the OS I generally do my research and build it. Thats for personal stuff of course. When it comes to handling purchasing influence/decisions at work I rank Dell, Micron, and Gateway as the better ones to get good solidly built boxes from. This definately ups Dell in my opinion. Now to turn the Microsoft Srockholders in the boardroom... Finally got our Webserver back on Solaris/Apache and off of the IIS shit they had us on. Would like to see a corporate wide shift from Win95 to Linux instead of the almost inevitable Win95 to Win2k(bulid 666).
Blah... Just whish the fighting was over and the wold saw each os for what it is. BTW Heres a funny snippit.... (OFF TOPIC)
IF OPERATING SYSTEMS RAN THE AIRLINES - Submitted by J. Hovind (BeOS and Amiga added by yours truly) _______________________________________
UNIX Airways
Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.
Air DOS
Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then they push again, jump on again, and so on...
Mac Airlines
All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look and act exactly the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are gently but firmly told that you don't need to know, don't want to know, and everything will be done for you without your ever having to know, so just shut up.
Windows Air
The terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.
Windows NT Air
Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.
BeOS Air
Pretty Colors in the planes and terminals but no one know about them and they can't find any engines to fit their planes.
Amiga Air
Damn good airline considering when it came out and its compitition. However they have suffered several buyouts and are way behind technologically. their customers don't care and in fact are quite fanatic about the Amiga experience.
Linux Air
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do what with the seat?"
Reading at the end of the Tom's article there have been heat buildup problems and the related stability problems on the P3-600. Suprising? Not to me.. Intel is worried... the pushed the core of the 600 up.05v (from 2.00v to 2.05v) isn't that the trick i did to my old 586's and ppro's when i upped the core clock? Wow.. intel using overclocker tricks. Have they run out of stuff from R&D to get their cpu's running faster? This is tight... I have a P3-500 running freeBSD as my main e-mail/dns server and it has occaisional hiccups. Hope to see better form the athalon when I get one in production. WOOHOO
Seems that Tom's Hardware's ad server is down.. and of course in IE that when the ad fails to load after the page it flips to a stupid IE error message instead of just not displaying the ad. The only fix is to be quick on the stop button.. FUN...
Anyway... I am going to build a machine this month with a athalon 500... wish me luck... I cant wait...!!!!
Remember the Press Conference blue screen of death fiasco? Bill demonstrating 98 BETA's plug n pray usb support and it crashes. What did he say? "I guess thats why its still a beta"... DOH then W98 released and has had to be patched and re released like 95 did. The same shit will happen with W2k. What NOONE here seems to grasp is that any OS robust enough to handle all the various hardware and tasks we can throw at it is going to have problems here and there. The question becomes do you want an OS that you have to BUY the fixes for or do you just want to be able to scan the newsgroups and the dist's ftp to patch it up or add support for some new hardware? Do you want an OS that says well it should work with your equipment but if it doesn't your SOL untill we feel like developing/releasing a fix? Or, do you want an OS that outline right out.. this is what it works well with.. this is iffy... and this well.. good luck but check back later and it'll probably work... Geez....
Now all I need to do is get ahold of about 100 of those power4 IBM chips when they are released build 25 Quad Processor 1GHZ machines with 500mhz bus and 1gb mem and throw em all in a cluster. Add 2-10 Terabytes of secondary storage, multiple OC-3 or faster connections and start leasing space on the fastest machine in the world. Handles 156E+10^8 hits/sec while doing recursive database lookups.
Much of this will change when things like retinal scanners, thumbprint scanners and infared face scanners come out. My I am waiting for voice print access that can filter out good copies of my voice. (possible even programmed to ask questions only I can answer such as what happened the night of June 28 1992?)(Answer: I lost "ScRaMbLeD ThE ReSt" )
There ought to be some regulations that specify that all sattelites going into orbit have a small seperate booster for reentry and burn up. If the sattelite fails or has gone past its usable life this could be activated removing it from our debris field. We also ought to develop a "clamp on" solution that the shuttle could take up and send a couple old pieces of junk back to earth with. Just light fuse and get away. I'm sure for larger stuff this would be unfeasable but all the small dead sattelites and junk up there... there has to be a solution.
Man this Chineese food is good today. However Yesterday's Microsoft FUD gave me indigestion.
It's that new online weather checking modules written into the logon and authentication routines. If you attempt to log on locally it checks MSN Weather for your location and if you guess wrong it assumes you are a hacker trying to access the machine remotely. They dont know how to do source address checks over in redmond and Radius is out of the question.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea of Hardware T&L and texture compression are nice improvements but as has been repeated many times for many hardware additions (MMX, 3dNow, the new IBM crypo chip) software (read apps) has to be written to take advantage of these new features. I would much rather see a CPU with enough FPU power and cache to handle the software T&L as it exists now in games. If film runs at ~24FPS what makes it look as good as a game running at 40-60fps? In my opinion it comes from the frame rate drops and stutters that occure when rendering scenes or perspective changes. When in Half-Life and I walk out of a hall to an open area my TNT drops from about 20-25 fps to 12-17 fps. Throw in a couple of light sources in any rendering and your slowing the whole thing down more.
Why does this matter you ask, well, your eyes can definately see the frame rate jumping up and down, even if you see no major difference in the smoothness of the animation. I would rather have any type of T&L as well as buss and fill rates that allowed me to push a steady 25-35 FPS in what ever game/app was rendering in the resolution i wanted. If it pushed 70-80 and dropped to 30 on a tough scene it would not matter much as I would cap my frame rate at about 35-40. Then my fps stays a STEADY 25-40 and doesn't drop to an un acceptale rate, also the app code doesnt get bottenecked when the frames push super high. I dont want 300 fps at 1280x1024, i just want ROCK SOLID frames between 25-40 when rendering ANY scene. Of course Having hardware T&L and for pipelines is nice for being able to do more detailed goemetry and faster as long as the software offloads its T&L to the hardware. However I think that we are getting pretty damn close to the maximum detail level thats needed in games. We can use some more but not a whole lot. The most important thing is that we can dot it at a steady rate.
Flame Away!!
To save without an extension in notepad use quotes:
save as
"c:\windows\hosts."
forces no extension... if you dont use quotes it will tack an etension on for you... or just use edlin....
Later
Same here, about 1.5 - 2 years ago. I spung and watched the flick in the theatre and was abhorred. It was s 2 hour episode with bad dialoge and cussing. Oz is great, the Sopranos kicks some serious tail and Stargate SG-1(showtime sci-friday) is sometimes good sometimes hokey but i loved the movie. Sex in the city is funny but i want to get liad like these women do and it just ain't happening :-). (points to above misspelling... maybe if i could just spell liad right!!)
It looks up to here:
Server: ns.cfw.com
Address: 216.12.0.20
Name: wya-pop.hotmail.com
Address: 207.82.250.251
What a stupid fscking comment. I have moderately low blood pressure (as well as many people in my family) and I smoke almost nightly. (so do a lot of people in my family). I think you just want to shove coffe grounds and salt in someones mouth to see what they would do. Anyway.. if you were at a party or a get together and sober and these other ppl were there i guess you just had a blood pressure cuff just in case. Dude she couldnt handle her shit and passed out. It happens from time to time.
Stop trying to scare people with lies... its a pathetic way to be.
For some reason Pot also makes taking a shit much more enjoyable. Dunno why though. And while we are on that subject... why do we call it "TAKING a shit" when in reality we are LEAVEING it. Personally i would never take a shit that sounds pretty gross :)
:)
Flame Away
I remember when i was in middle school (about 13 years old) we were givina drug sex and alcohol survey. It was anonomous and done on a scantron (the little #2 pencil dots). I thought it was cool as shit and lied my ass off. I smoked crack weekly. Was a smackhead.. loved speed and got laid 4 times a week. All of it was bullshit (except for the weed)
Bottom Line? Surverys Don't Mean Shit
Part of the lies surronding Cannibus is that is worse for your lungs than smoking cigarettes. I will attempt to counter this completely false view.
/mythidx.shtml
War on drugs drones state that pot is three times worse for your lungs than tobacco. Where do they get this idea? From the fact that marijuana has 3 times the tars as tobacco. This is true but there are LESS Aromatic Hydrocarbons (known to be carcinoens). Also... being both a cigarette smoker AND a pot smoker i dont smoke 20 joints a day but i often smoke a pack or more of cigarettes a day. So... if the input level is lower then you can't claim that the 3x amount of tar makes it 3x worse for you. Another issue is that most tobacco is LOADED with chemicals from your friends at phillip morris or wherever. If you know where your weed came from then you should no exactly what is on it.. fertilizers, pesticides, additives. Do you know whats on that tobacco you just smoked? I sure dont.
Point is... everything is fraught with dangers... red meat increases cholestorol and fat.. more heart attacks... but I don't go around screaming DONT EAT THAT STEAK. You can get in a car and die 5 minuets later from a drunk driver. You wouldn't say.. DONT RIDE IN A CAR!! If it is something that you enjoy or need (and there are legitimate medical uses for pot) you should be able to do it regardless. there is an excellent reference on many more myths and facts about pot here: http://www.norml.org/canorml/myths
Use Your Head
Enjoy your stone...
Stupid Dweeb.... use your time for something more productive than wastying a few mor bytes of space on /.'s Hard drives.
:-0
You probably just read here cause you still cant figure out what this whole 'Linux" thing is.
When I was about 11-12 I went night fishoing on a 20-30 acre lake near my house. It was kindof down between 2 hills with a road running on one side of it. I was fishing near the road (which had VERY little traffic). You could see headlights coming through the trees on the other side of the lake when a car was coming towards you and you could see lights ON the trees on the other side as cars came down the hill behind you. cars coming from behind thelight woud start at the top of the trees and move down as the cars came down the hill. The speed limit was 25MPh so you could see them coming for about 15-30 secs. I saw light ligiting up the tips of the trees demly in the distance and my mind said another car. After about 10 secs without the light moving a figured someone near the top of the hil was parked or a house had their flood lights on. Then the light started moving and brightening. Slowly at first and taking on a greenish hue. Then it sped way up and got REALLY bright.. bright enough to cast light where I was in the pitch dark middle of the night in a rural area during a new moon (I normally went catfishing during a new moon or overcast night had better luck). A BRIGHT round object flew over head extremely fast. Too fast to tell exact altitude or shape but it couldn't have been MORE that 200-400 ft if not lower. it dissapeared behind the tree line and then I heard a loud bang and saw a bright flash through the trees. This all hapened in about the space of 60-120 secs. Scared the living bejesus outta me. Another wierd thing was that all night for about 2 hours I had been catching TONS of catfish they all stopped biting. Right then. Not even a nibble. Wierd Huh?
I agree fully. There are going to be similarities in vision statements and their ilk amoing companies with similar goals. But this goes a little to far. I mean micro$oft has a tendency to come up with sexy little marketing slogans so instead od connect anwher, anytime with any device or whatever it was how about "What do you want to connect Today?" I mean if you ran a company making intimate lubricant... how many ways could you say "We Make It Glide"???
It says its directly connected to a router thru a 115k serial line. I really think this as more vaporware crap. Probably put out by micro$oft.
Bill Gates: "look at those geeks.. they'll believe anything. Hmm my next lie will be that I will open source windows and do a code merge with linux.. that'll turn some heads"
Ugh... vaporware smells worse than my underwear...
I have seen this before.... neve rlistened to it thought it was a hoax. Never could get the demonstration link to work. well it was slow an 8088 with 512k ram but my browser finally got in.. I kept getting hung after the name resolution then i finally got the "host contacted waiting for reply" took about 3 minutes after that to give me a text only page of more garbage.... wow... when can I get some Nike's with embedded webservers that allow me to tie the laces remotely???
iTs funny all the things you can do with ASCII...
WOW
¦¥£Yzoes(TM)---ÈÉËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝßàáâãäåæçèé
êëì
WHEE!!
CiXeL... For trying to incite panic and defaming your national government, the Federal U.S. Internet Tribunal revokes all net priveleges for a term not less than 4 years and not more than 20.
Seriously........ It IS possible. I know I will have copies of all my bills and most of my funds out of the bank. Got a stocked pantry already ready already. I just know that if something like that were to happen I would fight it. Wouludn't you??
Being rather technically inclined, when I want a machine regardless of the OS I generally do my research and build it. Thats for personal stuff of course. When it comes to handling purchasing influence/decisions at work I rank Dell, Micron, and Gateway as the better ones to get good solidly built boxes from. This definately ups Dell in my opinion. Now to turn the Microsoft Srockholders in the boardroom... Finally got our Webserver back on Solaris/Apache and off of the IIS shit they had us on. Would like to see a corporate wide shift from Win95 to Linux instead of the almost inevitable Win95 to Win2k(bulid 666).
...
Blah... Just whish the fighting was over and the wold saw each os for what it is. BTW Heres a funny snippit.... (OFF TOPIC)
IF OPERATING SYSTEMS RAN THE AIRLINES - Submitted by J. Hovind (BeOS and Amiga added by yours truly)
_______________________________________
UNIX Airways
Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.
Air DOS
Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then they push again, jump on again, and so on
Mac Airlines
All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look and act exactly the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are gently but firmly told that you don't need to
know, don't want to know, and everything will be done for you without your ever having to know, so just shut up.
Windows Air
The terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.
Windows NT Air
Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.
BeOS Air
Pretty Colors in the planes and terminals but no one know about them and they can't find any engines to fit their planes.
Amiga Air
Damn good airline considering when it came out and its compitition. However they have suffered several buyouts and are way behind technologically. their customers don't care and in fact are quite fanatic about the Amiga experience.
Linux Air
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the
seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do what with the seat?"
Reading at the end of the Tom's article there have been heat buildup problems and the related stability problems on the P3-600. Suprising? Not to me.. Intel is worried... the pushed the core of the 600 up .05v (from 2.00v to 2.05v) isn't that the trick i did to my old 586's and ppro's when i upped the core clock? Wow.. intel using overclocker tricks. Have they run out of stuff from R&D to get their cpu's running faster? This is tight... I have a P3-500 running freeBSD as my main e-mail/dns server and it has occaisional hiccups. Hope to see better form the athalon when I get one in production. WOOHOO
Seems that Tom's Hardware's ad server is down.. and of course in IE that when the ad fails to load after the page it flips to a stupid IE error message instead of just not displaying the ad. The only fix is to be quick on the stop button.. FUN...
... wish me luck... I cant wait...!!!!
Anyway... I am going to build a machine this month with a athalon 500
I am assuming BFD meand Big Fscking Deal
Could be Bitch Forgot Diaphragm though.. you never know
maybe even Booger Flicking Debian users
KILLIANS!!!
Wish I could be there
Remember the Press Conference blue screen of death fiasco? Bill demonstrating 98 BETA's plug n pray usb support and it crashes. What did he say? "I guess thats why its still a beta"... DOH then W98 released and has had to be patched and re released like 95 did. The same shit will happen with W2k. What NOONE here seems to grasp is that any OS robust enough to handle all the various hardware and tasks we can throw at it is going to have problems here and there. The question becomes do you want an OS that you have to BUY the fixes for or do you just want to be able to scan the newsgroups and the dist's ftp to patch it up or add support for some new hardware? Do you want an OS that says well it should work with your equipment but if it doesn't your SOL untill we feel like developing/releasing a fix? Or, do you want an OS that outline right out.. this is what it works well with.. this is iffy... and this well.. good luck but check back later and it'll probably work... Geez....
Now all I need to do is get ahold of about 100 of those power4 IBM chips when they are released build 25 Quad Processor 1GHZ machines with 500mhz bus and 1gb mem and throw em all in a cluster. Add 2-10 Terabytes of secondary storage, multiple OC-3 or faster connections and start leasing space on the fastest machine in the world. Handles 156E+10^8 hits/sec while doing recursive database lookups.
heh... If Only...
Much of this will change when things like retinal scanners, thumbprint scanners and infared face scanners come out. My I am waiting for voice print access that can filter out good copies of my voice. (possible even programmed to ask questions only I can answer such as what happened the night of June 28 1992?)(Answer: I lost "ScRaMbLeD ThE ReSt" )
There ought to be some regulations that specify that all sattelites going into orbit have a small seperate booster for reentry and burn up. If the sattelite fails or has gone past its usable life this could be activated removing it from our debris field. We also ought to develop a "clamp on" solution that the shuttle could take up and send a couple old pieces of junk back to earth with. Just light fuse and get away. I'm sure for larger stuff this would be unfeasable but all the small dead sattelites and junk up there... there has to be a solution.
Man this Chineese food is good today.
However Yesterday's Microsoft FUD gave me indigestion.
It's that new online weather checking modules written into the logon and authentication routines. If you attempt to log on locally it checks MSN Weather for your location and if you guess wrong it assumes you are a hacker trying to access the machine remotely. They dont know how to do source address checks over in redmond and Radius is out of the question.
Blah Blah