I just logged into oracles OTN site at 09:30 CET today, it was in english, then I went into their DBA link and got the chinese site. Now, im in europe using an english language OS and i went to oracle.com. Why would I get a chinese site, unless...(tin foil at the ready) THEY THOUGHT I WAS FROM CHINA!! and my traffic was going through a chinese router!!!
Is this still happening silently? Was that 15 minute incident the only incident?
And let's face it: All this talk of efficiency, mpg etc etc etc. Who gives a shit how efficient it is or how far we can travel on one "tank" as long as the fuel source is in (near) unlimited supply, relatively cheap to produce, and gives us roundabout the same mpg as we have already with petrol!
Everyones ranting on about battery this and 1000-miles-between-re-charge that, and you're all missing the bigger picture which is that car manufacturers are backing the wrong horse (again), just like governments did with Ethanol. And n years down the line, we'll be in the same position we are in now with fossil fuels.
Going electric is just as short sighted as fossil fuels. the minerals needed to make batteries are in relative short supply and as they get harder to mine, prices will skyrocket. Does no-one think about this effect as the world goes over to producing car batteries? And we still need to generate power from somewhere to charge those batteries, which leads us back to "what do we currently burn at our power plants?" Yepp: Fossil fuels! The entire eco-system of battery recharging will use up even more natural resources, as charging stations need to be built worldwide.
Whatever happened to hydrogen fuel? You can re-fit standard gas pump stations to pump out liquid hydrogen, the entire infrastructure for delivery of the fuel is *already in place* worldwide, and hydrogen is in unlimited supply!! Has no-one seen the TopGear episode with the prototype hydrogen car!!?? It may not be the most efficient fuel out there with regards to mpg, I think that accolade belongs to grass algae according to NatGeos 3-yr old article on alternative fuels where algae won hands down on efficiency.
Seriously, who the thinks batteries are better in the long-term than fossil fuels?
At least choose an option that uses fuel, whatever it's source, that is near 100% renewable, or unlimited supply!
I have a 24Mbit connection and surfing feels like i'm in the early 90's again. It's become worse over the last several years or so.
I now use noscript to stop all the goddamn redirects. If I turn noscript off, I notice a substantial increase in wait time until pages load due to the latency of all the redirects.
Apparently, Some people who have converted their diesel engine cars to use sunflower oil, claim that you can correlate the price of diesel quite accurately to the price of sunflower oil. Don't know if this is true or not, just what i've heard.
Not to be unkind, but you don't understand what you are wishing for. It isn't all roses moving to another country.
Speaking from personal experience, after having moved to Sweden, which is #2 on your list, I miss my home country, I miss my culture, I don't feel like I fit in here, and sometimes feel unwelcome simply because i'm not a native Swede. Usually, being coloured, or non-christian, would create responses of "yeah, I can understand why, even if I don't agree with racism", but i'm white and from Britain and feel like an outsider anyway.
Am I alone? I think not. I think it is a perfectly natural Darwinian-like response to liking your own herd/culture and mistrusting others. I strongly suspect you probably get this no matter who you are or where you move to, and it is not specific to Sweden, although it might be more pronounced here due to the Swedes tendency towards xenophobia (more so than other cultures).
Plus, I no longer feel like a Brit either, due to having broadened my experience a bit, and I now live in cultural limbo.
Trust me, stay at home, and do yourself and your eventual children a favour by letting them visit their grandparents every week instead of every 4-6 months.
I recently became interested in hiking/orientiering, and i tried to find maps geographical maps online that could be used for this purpose. Couldn't find any apart from the government (Sweden). I will have to pay for the maps.
I was quite surprise to tell the truth. I have no involvment with the mapping industry, but I would have thought by now after Google came out with Google Earth and satellite images became so prevalent that it was simply a matter of time before all mapping was free? I can go onto the local yellow pages equivalent and see photos of my car in the driveway! And there are overlays for sat images to show POIs.
Isn't it just a matter of time before there are mapping solutions for everything, free, online, and won't this basically kill the current mapping industry (from he who knows nothing about this)?
Seriously; I'm interested. It's not enough to just convert the figure, you need to take into account cost of living in that area to get the equivalent, and that is hard to work out.
I'd be happy if the movie industry lived up to the hype of FullHD from several years ago!
They started with HD WorldCup, just like they did now with certain matches being filmed in 3D, but I'm still sat here at home with 350 satellite channels of SD and 13 channels of HD 720p. Don't even get me started on the fact that of those 10 HD channels, only 3 do proper 5.1 digital sound, most dolby 2.0 and some only do digital mono!! For christs sake!
TV Channels are so hyped up about the next thing to get consumers interested that they can't even fulfill the last project they started 6 years earlier.
I'd be happy if all my channels were in 720p with 2.0 digital sound and 5.1 where the content was filmed in 5.1, and then the premium channels being in FullHD.
I used to play Quake2 CTF obsessively (by my standards at least) in my early 20's; 3 hours a day for a couple of years. I loved being able to hide in wait at a strategic point in the map, and then grapple away just as I heard an intruder running towards me, and railing him half way through the grapple fall. If you were proficient at grapple, you basically owned the game. I had a custom binding script to map grapple to right mouse, and it was so easy to use! If you didn't master the key mappings, you couldn't play on the same level as most players: walking around was a sure fire way of getting fragged quickly.
But my absolute favourite for feeling of sheer power, was quad with double shotgun: I felt truly invincible with this. I've never seen another game that gave the same feeling as that weapon combo.
Since the servers started going quiet when Q3 was released I stopped playing FPS online completely. Nothing since Quake2 has given the same sense of agility that was easy to pick up but hard to master. The same sense of power if you managed to get the right powerups and weapons, and, besides, from a purely online FPS point of view, there are only so many ways you can design an intersting map, that reveals more tactical opportunities the more you play it. Unreal's maps were, in my opinion, not half as good for tactics as Quake2: You just had to run around fragging, and it was more about speed out in the open, but with Quake2, there were more tactical methods to beat an opposing team.
One of the 'benefits' of Quake2 was that you were constantly fighting against the physics limitations of the game; how fast you could move, how fast you weapon switched, etc, and this was actually one of the things that made the game great. Q3 was too fast... too easy to manouver... Q2 in comparison was slow, and you had to master the physics to become great, and that sense of acheivement of 'beating' the engine physics was very addictive.
I realise that current FPS, the story driven ones, are light years ahead of Q2: I played Modern warfare on my dads xbox and it was like a movie even during play! But online fragging is still determined by map design and game play and weapon balance, and not great graphics.
Matrix fanboy references aside, what, you don't think they had crazies in 20 BC? Some guy goes up a mountain and comes down again and says God spoke to him? Give me a break. The bible in it's entirety is written by man, not god, and has been used through the ages to assert some form of control over the populace (generally no longer effective). "yeah, I think the church is a bit phoney... But I still believe in god". Errm. Yeah, but your entire belief has been heavily affected but what religion has brainwashed you with since childhood. You cannot quite let go of the self-image that contains so much religious propaganda from your childhood. This question is as old as the human species: Man wonders where he originated from and looks to the mysterious stars above and starts contemplating his own existence. It's only a matter of time until some geezer decides there _must_ be an ultimate being, lets call him god. Even secluded tribes in the rainforest who have yet to meet more than a handful of outsiders probably believe in some form of ultimate being due to pyscological needs.
But hey, im not ruling out the fact of an ultimate being. No current evidence doesn't mean no evidence at all. But until _someone_ can show me _any_ evidence (no books allowed), then i'm holding out.
"If a german asks the way, I point them in the wrong direction. It is how I was raised. I might be silly after so many decades, but it is better then forgetting."
You are so utterly wrong to do this. You cannot put the blame on people generations younger than those who commited the crimes. Even at the time, it wasn't even all Germans who committed crimes, and suggesting that is just plain wrong.
My grandad was in the British SAS and my Nana in the army in WWII and im damn proud of that, and the fact that my British ancesters stood up to Hitler when very few others did. I was also raised to mock the Germans, which is understandable having grandparents who were in the war and obviosly biased against Germans, but I have a brain, and I use it to make my own judgements as I go through life, and that mocking period ended when I reached teenage years. I would never consider treating present day Germans as if they had comitted the crimes! Or even painting all early 40's era Germans with the same brush (look at Schindler). We are all descended from bloody Africa anyway, and national bouderies, in the sense of using them to dictate whether a nation is "good" or "bad" is ridiculous. Having myself emmigrated to a non-English speaking country later in life, I can attest firsthand to the fact that underneath our 'national identities' we are generally all the same.
It's true that we should never forget what happened so that it never gets repeated, and that we should always be on our guard for leaders of nations who want to wage war or surpress ethnic groups, but you don't have to "remember" by treating people with disrespect.
There are a lot of references to how brutal armies and wars used to be and that Afghanistan is nothing in comparison. Maybe the difference is that our expectations of how we should treat people and conduct ourselves in other areas of life have increased dramatically: Despite the advances in Rules of Engagement, we simply expect better treatment, and more humane tactics, even in war. This statement does not judge nor support either side of the argument. I'm just saying...
Re:Res tantum valet quantum vendi potest
on
The Amiga Turns 25
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· Score: 1
hehe, I recount a tale from my teen years and you question my motives/thought processes from that time??? Well, I wanted a quick sale, and sold it really cheap with the intention of getting rid of it as fast as possible. He was the first guy to contact me.
I sold an Amiga 1200 with a 4MB upgrade unit (total 6MB) and an 80MB internal hard drive, plus a great 14" monitor, thousands of pirated games and 20-30 originals, plus lots of other things I can't remember, to some old guy for literally a fifth of what it was actually worth on the second hand market at the time. The guy was so overjoyed, I could quite honestly see the greed in his eyes! My dog tried to bite him, which has never happened either before or since that incident. Could probably smell the bad intentions:) The reason for the sale? Because I became interested in girls in a big way, and a geeky computer setup was not part of that image. Ahh, the follies of adolescence. My brother in law still has his C64 w/ tape drive working! But I really really wish I still had my Amiga 1200 so my boy could experience it (he's currently playing on one of those C64 emulators in-built in a joystick, but it's a crap joystick and the games aren't exactly the best picks from the C64).
Too true. You hit the nail on the head. It's simply human nature, and globalisation may have given us the opportunity to hear about disasters on the other side of the planet, but we're just not programmed as human beings to care about things outside of our immediate circle of effect.
Well, the earth has had plentiful resources for at _least_ the last 10,000 years;) and we haven't been invaded yet. At our current rate of technological development, we will most likely be able to 'hold our own' within the next 1,000 years, so I wouldn't worry too much about it... Unless of course, they are waiting on the far side of Mars at this very moment just waiting for the right time to attack!
Anyway, we've already shit on our resources, so if they did attack now, thet'd be too late!
going back to the original title, i.e. the affect hdtv has had: the trend to make laptop screens the same native resolution as HD ready TVs or Full HD tvs is a bit annoying: 1280x800 resolution was more usable vertically than 1376x768, because the extra width of 1376 adds very little in practical terms but the loss of 34 pixels vertically is quite a lot in practical terms, so in that respect we have gone backwards! Why is every manufacturer so obsessed with this resolution on a netbook or CULV based laptop!? People aren't buying these laptops to connect to their TVs and watch HD films because moer often than not, the CPU isn't up to it.
Sorry, which DB other than Oracle has a serious competitor to RAC or Real Application Testing? Yeah, support standards have dropped since the good old days of Metalink, now the standard of knowledge seems to have dropped overall with regards to 1st line metalink, but log as SR and it can get quite deep. Your example of the Oracle/Veritas problem is at present just rumour/heresay, because you don't provide info if it really was Veritas, or Oracle or if it even got resolved. Maybe you were doing something stupid and the support people couldn't figure it out becuase you failed to tell them? Yeah, sounds like flame-bait, but you just threw out a half baked example that gives a bad impression without providing a real example that was Oracles fault.
say what you will about Oracles licensing. Yeah it cuts out small businesses due to overly steep pricing, but it's simply best of breed in the DB market for non-web services/social net. sites (where it's more likely that mysql or equiv. will be more appropriate). When you have the best DB going, you can sort of dictate your prices. Only thing that will change this is if another DB can match them on features and performance. I dont mean DB2/MSSQL: they want a slice of the pie as well and are not going to go rock bottom to try to steal business from Oracle. It will take an OSS project to try to meet them on technical merit, and that is very very unlikely to ever happen, but I wish it would, for the sake of competition.
I was comparing nvidia's open source driver (nv) to the ati (radeon) open source driver. No-one on the planet is going to say that the radeon driver does not rule over the nv driver!
nv driver has no 3d whatsoever and even 2d is a crap-out with visible gradients due to low colour count. I think it's like 16-bit max or perhaps lower but correct me if im wrong. Also, nvidia has just ceased support for the nv driver and suspend is a non-feature when using nv.
The radeon open source driver is constantly making headway. You are perhaps correct in that some features are not supported on the latest cards, but even an R700 has pretty good support at the moment *in recent releases of the driver, not neccessarily in the driver included in your distribution*, and it is improving every month. Just take a look at Phoronix's website articles on the redeon driver enhancements too see how much activity there is in this driver.
When it comes to feature set, the radeon supports a hell of a lot of hardware from ATI, and if you've not got the latest ATI cards (I have an R600), you are pretty much going to get a great feature set with the radeon OSS driver. When it comes to performance, this is another matter. The radeon driver may or may not have as good performance as the ATI proprietary driver and probably is not as good as the nVidia proprietary driver. As I said in my post, if it is performance you want with the latest cards, then you probably do still need to go with nVidia and their proprietary driver, but for 90% of the population who have a netbook, or laptop or desktop they use to surf/check mail run some light 3d apps ie google earth, the radeon driver is perfectly capable, and a good reason to buy an ATI card/laptop. If you are a heavy games player and you need max fps, then why are you running Linux? The number of commercial blockbusters that can run well natively on Linux or through steam/wine can be counted on two hands. Any serious gamer is going to be running Windows. Perhaps you are serious about Alien Arena or Nexuiz, but then you are part of the 2% demographic of the total linux community which is 2% of the total worldwide gaming market (figures blatantly dragged out of thin air). If you want raw power on Linux for graphical 3d applications, then yes: Go with nVidia.
The difference with ATI is that they provide the spec of their cards, and it's then up to the community to create the driver. nVidia has never released any spec and thats why Nouveau is taking so long to catch up. If I were to choose a gfx card now, I would choose underpowered Intel on notebooks for best oss support and lowest power requirements and ati on desktop for great oss driver support if I was not a heavy gamer.
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I just logged into oracles OTN site at 09:30 CET today, it was in english, then I went into their DBA link and got the chinese site. Now, im in europe using an english language OS and i went to oracle.com. Why would I get a chinese site, unless...(tin foil at the ready) THEY THOUGHT I WAS FROM CHINA!! and my traffic was going through a chinese router!!!
Is this still happening silently? Was that 15 minute incident the only incident?
anyone know how many years you can keep embryos in the freezer for??
that was the most concise argument ive ever read against bt. I've always sort of guessed that the protocol was not scalable and now I know why!
And let's face it: All this talk of efficiency, mpg etc etc etc. Who gives a shit how efficient it is or how far we can travel on one "tank" as long as the fuel source is in (near) unlimited supply, relatively cheap to produce, and gives us roundabout the same mpg as we have already with petrol!
Everyones ranting on about battery this and 1000-miles-between-re-charge that, and you're all missing the bigger picture which is that car manufacturers are backing the wrong horse (again), just like governments did with Ethanol. And n years down the line, we'll be in the same position we are in now with fossil fuels.
I honestly do not get the hype with electric.
Going electric is just as short sighted as fossil fuels. the minerals needed to make batteries are in relative short supply and as they get harder to mine, prices will skyrocket. Does no-one think about this effect as the world goes over to producing car batteries? And we still need to generate power from somewhere to charge those batteries, which leads us back to "what do we currently burn at our power plants?" Yepp: Fossil fuels! The entire eco-system of battery recharging will use up even more natural resources, as charging stations need to be built worldwide.
Whatever happened to hydrogen fuel? You can re-fit standard gas pump stations to pump out liquid hydrogen, the entire infrastructure for delivery of the fuel is *already in place* worldwide, and hydrogen is in unlimited supply!! Has no-one seen the TopGear episode with the prototype hydrogen car!!?? It may not be the most efficient fuel out there with regards to mpg, I think that accolade belongs to grass algae according to NatGeos 3-yr old article on alternative fuels where algae won hands down on efficiency.
Seriously, who the thinks batteries are better in the long-term than fossil fuels?
At least choose an option that uses fuel, whatever it's source, that is near 100% renewable, or unlimited supply!
I have a 24Mbit connection and surfing feels like i'm in the early 90's again. It's become worse over the last several years or so.
I now use noscript to stop all the goddamn redirects. If I turn noscript off, I notice a substantial increase in wait time until pages load due to the latency of all the redirects.
Apparently, Some people who have converted their diesel engine cars to use sunflower oil, claim that you can correlate the price of diesel quite accurately to the price of sunflower oil. Don't know if this is true or not, just what i've heard.
Not to be unkind, but you don't understand what you are wishing for. It isn't all roses moving to another country.
Speaking from personal experience, after having moved to Sweden, which is #2 on your list, I miss my home country, I miss my culture, I don't feel like I fit in here, and sometimes feel unwelcome simply because i'm not a native Swede. Usually, being coloured, or non-christian, would create responses of "yeah, I can understand why, even if I don't agree with racism", but i'm white and from Britain and feel like an outsider anyway.
Am I alone? I think not. I think it is a perfectly natural Darwinian-like response to liking your own herd/culture and mistrusting others. I strongly suspect you probably get this no matter who you are or where you move to, and it is not specific to Sweden, although it might be more pronounced here due to the Swedes tendency towards xenophobia (more so than other cultures).
Plus, I no longer feel like a Brit either, due to having broadened my experience a bit, and I now live in cultural limbo.
Trust me, stay at home, and do yourself and your eventual children a favour by letting them visit their grandparents every week instead of every 4-6 months.
I recently became interested in hiking/orientiering, and i tried to find maps geographical maps online that could be used for this purpose. Couldn't find any apart from the government (Sweden). I will have to pay for the maps.
I was quite surprise to tell the truth. I have no involvment with the mapping industry, but I would have thought by now after Google came out with Google Earth and satellite images became so prevalent that it was simply a matter of time before all mapping was free? I can go onto the local yellow pages equivalent and see photos of my car in the driveway! And there are overlays for sat images to show POIs.
Isn't it just a matter of time before there are mapping solutions for everything, free, online, and won't this basically kill the current mapping industry (from he who knows nothing about this)?
Anybody know? Either in Euros or preferably SEK?
Seriously; I'm interested. It's not enough to just convert the figure, you need to take into account cost of living in that area to get the equivalent, and that is hard to work out.
I'd be happy if the movie industry lived up to the hype of FullHD from several years ago!
They started with HD WorldCup, just like they did now with certain matches being filmed in 3D, but I'm still sat here at home with 350 satellite channels of SD and 13 channels of HD 720p. Don't even get me started on the fact that of those 10 HD channels, only 3 do proper 5.1 digital sound, most dolby 2.0 and some only do digital mono!! For christs sake!
TV Channels are so hyped up about the next thing to get consumers interested that they can't even fulfill the last project they started 6 years earlier.
I'd be happy if all my channels were in 720p with 2.0 digital sound and 5.1 where the content was filmed in 5.1, and then the premium channels being in FullHD.
Woohoo! Great confirmation.
I used to play Quake2 CTF obsessively (by my standards at least) in my early 20's; 3 hours a day for a couple of years. I loved being able to hide in wait at a strategic point in the map, and then grapple away just as I heard an intruder running towards me, and railing him half way through the grapple fall. If you were proficient at grapple, you basically owned the game. I had a custom binding script to map grapple to right mouse, and it was so easy to use! If you didn't master the key mappings, you couldn't play on the same level as most players: walking around was a sure fire way of getting fragged quickly.
But my absolute favourite for feeling of sheer power, was quad with double shotgun: I felt truly invincible with this. I've never seen another game that gave the same feeling as that weapon combo.
Since the servers started going quiet when Q3 was released I stopped playing FPS online completely. Nothing since Quake2 has given the same sense of agility that was easy to pick up but hard to master. The same sense of power if you managed to get the right powerups and weapons, and, besides, from a purely online FPS point of view, there are only so many ways you can design an intersting map, that reveals more tactical opportunities the more you play it. Unreal's maps were, in my opinion, not half as good for tactics as Quake2: You just had to run around fragging, and it was more about speed out in the open, but with Quake2, there were more tactical methods to beat an opposing team.
One of the 'benefits' of Quake2 was that you were constantly fighting against the physics limitations of the game; how fast you could move, how fast you weapon switched, etc, and this was actually one of the things that made the game great. Q3 was too fast... too easy to manouver... Q2 in comparison was slow, and you had to master the physics to become great, and that sense of acheivement of 'beating' the engine physics was very addictive.
I realise that current FPS, the story driven ones, are light years ahead of Q2: I played Modern warfare on my dads xbox and it was like a movie even during play! But online fragging is still determined by map design and game play and weapon balance, and not great graphics.
For me, Q2 will always be The King of FPS.
Matrix fanboy references aside, what, you don't think they had crazies in 20 BC? Some guy goes up a mountain and comes down again and says God spoke to him? Give me a break. The bible in it's entirety is written by man, not god, and has been used through the ages to assert some form of control over the populace (generally no longer effective). "yeah, I think the church is a bit phoney... But I still believe in god". Errm. Yeah, but your entire belief has been heavily affected but what religion has brainwashed you with since childhood. You cannot quite let go of the self-image that contains so much religious propaganda from your childhood. This question is as old as the human species: Man wonders where he originated from and looks to the mysterious stars above and starts contemplating his own existence. It's only a matter of time until some geezer decides there _must_ be an ultimate being, lets call him god. Even secluded tribes in the rainforest who have yet to meet more than a handful of outsiders probably believe in some form of ultimate being due to pyscological needs.
But hey, im not ruling out the fact of an ultimate being. No current evidence doesn't mean no evidence at all. But until _someone_ can show me _any_ evidence (no books allowed), then i'm holding out.
"If a german asks the way, I point them in the wrong direction. It is how I was raised. I might be silly after so many decades, but it is better then forgetting."
You are so utterly wrong to do this. You cannot put the blame on people generations younger than those who commited the crimes. Even at the time, it wasn't even all Germans who committed crimes, and suggesting that is just plain wrong.
My grandad was in the British SAS and my Nana in the army in WWII and im damn proud of that, and the fact that my British ancesters stood up to Hitler when very few others did. I was also raised to mock the Germans, which is understandable having grandparents who were in the war and obviosly biased against Germans, but I have a brain, and I use it to make my own judgements as I go through life, and that mocking period ended when I reached teenage years. I would never consider treating present day Germans as if they had comitted the crimes! Or even painting all early 40's era Germans with the same brush (look at Schindler). We are all descended from bloody Africa anyway, and national bouderies, in the sense of using them to dictate whether a nation is "good" or "bad" is ridiculous. Having myself emmigrated to a non-English speaking country later in life, I can attest firsthand to the fact that underneath our 'national identities' we are generally all the same.
It's true that we should never forget what happened so that it never gets repeated, and that we should always be on our guard for leaders of nations who want to wage war or surpress ethnic groups, but you don't have to "remember" by treating people with disrespect.
There are a lot of references to how brutal armies and wars used to be and that Afghanistan is nothing in comparison. Maybe the difference is that our expectations of how we should treat people and conduct ourselves in other areas of life have increased dramatically: Despite the advances in Rules of Engagement, we simply expect better treatment, and more humane tactics, even in war. This statement does not judge nor support either side of the argument. I'm just saying...
hehe, I recount a tale from my teen years and you question my motives/thought processes from that time??? Well, I wanted a quick sale, and sold it really cheap with the intention of getting rid of it as fast as possible. He was the first guy to contact me.
I sold an Amiga 1200 with a 4MB upgrade unit (total 6MB) and an 80MB internal hard drive, plus a great 14" monitor, thousands of pirated games and 20-30 originals, plus lots of other things I can't remember, to some old guy for literally a fifth of what it was actually worth on the second hand market at the time. The guy was so overjoyed, I could quite honestly see the greed in his eyes! My dog tried to bite him, which has never happened either before or since that incident. Could probably smell the bad intentions :) The reason for the sale? Because I became interested in girls in a big way, and a geeky computer setup was not part of that image. Ahh, the follies of adolescence. My brother in law still has his C64 w/ tape drive working! But I really really wish I still had my Amiga 1200 so my boy could experience it (he's currently playing on one of those C64 emulators in-built in a joystick, but it's a crap joystick and the games aren't exactly the best picks from the C64).
Too true. You hit the nail on the head. It's simply human nature, and globalisation may have given us the opportunity to hear about disasters on the other side of the planet, but we're just not programmed as human beings to care about things outside of our immediate circle of effect.
Well, the earth has had plentiful resources for at _least_ the last 10,000 years ;) and we haven't been invaded yet. At our current rate of technological development, we will most likely be able to 'hold our own' within the next 1,000 years, so I wouldn't worry too much about it... Unless of course, they are waiting on the far side of Mars at this very moment just waiting for the right time to attack!
Anyway, we've already shit on our resources, so if they did attack now, thet'd be too late!
going back to the original title, i.e. the affect hdtv has had: the trend to make laptop screens the same native resolution as HD ready TVs or Full HD tvs is a bit annoying: 1280x800 resolution was more usable vertically than 1376x768, because the extra width of 1376 adds very little in practical terms but the loss of 34 pixels vertically is quite a lot in practical terms, so in that respect we have gone backwards! Why is every manufacturer so obsessed with this resolution on a netbook or CULV based laptop!? People aren't buying these laptops to connect to their TVs and watch HD films because moer often than not, the CPU isn't up to it.
Sorry, which DB other than Oracle has a serious competitor to RAC or Real Application Testing? Yeah, support standards have dropped since the good old days of Metalink, now the standard of knowledge seems to have dropped overall with regards to 1st line metalink, but log as SR and it can get quite deep. Your example of the Oracle/Veritas problem is at present just rumour/heresay, because you don't provide info if it really was Veritas, or Oracle or if it even got resolved. Maybe you were doing something stupid and the support people couldn't figure it out becuase you failed to tell them? Yeah, sounds like flame-bait, but you just threw out a half baked example that gives a bad impression without providing a real example that was Oracles fault.
besides, you've gotta love-to-hate Larry. He's such a cut-throat bastard, but it's obviosly working!
say what you will about Oracles licensing. Yeah it cuts out small businesses due to overly steep pricing, but it's simply best of breed in the DB market for non-web services/social net. sites (where it's more likely that mysql or equiv. will be more appropriate). When you have the best DB going, you can sort of dictate your prices. Only thing that will change this is if another DB can match them on features and performance. I dont mean DB2/MSSQL: they want a slice of the pie as well and are not going to go rock bottom to try to steal business from Oracle. It will take an OSS project to try to meet them on technical merit, and that is very very unlikely to ever happen, but I wish it would, for the sake of competition.
I beg to differ.
I was comparing nvidia's open source driver (nv) to the ati (radeon) open source driver. No-one on the planet is going to say that the radeon driver does not rule over the nv driver!
nv driver has no 3d whatsoever and even 2d is a crap-out with visible gradients due to low colour count. I think it's like 16-bit max or perhaps lower but correct me if im wrong. Also, nvidia has just ceased support for the nv driver and suspend is a non-feature when using nv.
The radeon open source driver is constantly making headway. You are perhaps correct in that some features are not supported on the latest cards, but even an R700 has pretty good support at the moment *in recent releases of the driver, not neccessarily in the driver included in your distribution*, and it is improving every month. Just take a look at Phoronix's website articles on the redeon driver enhancements too see how much activity there is in this driver.
When it comes to feature set, the radeon supports a hell of a lot of hardware from ATI, and if you've not got the latest ATI cards (I have an R600), you are pretty much going to get a great feature set with the radeon OSS driver. When it comes to performance, this is another matter. The radeon driver may or may not have as good performance as the ATI proprietary driver and probably is not as good as the nVidia proprietary driver. As I said in my post, if it is performance you want with the latest cards, then you probably do still need to go with nVidia and their proprietary driver, but for 90% of the population who have a netbook, or laptop or desktop they use to surf/check mail run some light 3d apps ie google earth, the radeon driver is perfectly capable, and a good reason to buy an ATI card/laptop. If you are a heavy games player and you need max fps, then why are you running Linux? The number of commercial blockbusters that can run well natively on Linux or through steam/wine can be counted on two hands. Any serious gamer is going to be running Windows. Perhaps you are serious about Alien Arena or Nexuiz, but then you are part of the 2% demographic of the total linux community which is 2% of the total worldwide gaming market (figures blatantly dragged out of thin air). If you want raw power on Linux for graphical 3d applications, then yes: Go with nVidia.
The difference with ATI is that they provide the spec of their cards, and it's then up to the community to create the driver. nVidia has never released any spec and thats why Nouveau is taking so long to catch up. If I were to choose a gfx card now, I would choose underpowered Intel on notebooks for best oss support and lowest power requirements and ati on desktop for great oss driver support if I was not a heavy gamer.