Point taken. I meant to put emphasis on "that" in "that many", but I was being lazy. I'm sure quite a few people will buy it for the cool factor if nothing else, but I'm also sure that quite a few people will pass it up due to certain features it's missing, like an optical drive.
Even the Anandtech reviewer made a complaint about it: http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3220 "Despite the lack of an internal optical drive (I've never been so tempted to use the f-bomb in a review before)..."
It's hard to believe that many people would buy a laptop without an optical drive. One of the primary uses for my laptop is letting the kids play games and watch DVD's in the back seat during long drives. (I see no point in spending hundreds on a separate device that's just for playing movies in the car.) When I use it, it's usually for work, but I've watched a few movies on it myself, and I wouldn't consider buying a laptop that didn't have that feature. The Asus EEE PC would be awesome for the kids if it had a DVD-ROM drive.
It would also be nice if 4+ GB USB drives were cheap enough to use them for movies instead of optical disks, but we're not quite there yet. I wonder if they would be significantly cheaper using ROM instead of flash RAM. They would be like those game cartridges for the old Atari and Commodore systems, but smaller. Anyway, it would be nice.
You're forgetting that there are a lot of storms out on the open ocean, and during a storm, this baby does 30-40 knots.;-)
In all seriousness, it would be interesting to see if this system could increase the speed of a ship running under some other form of power, all while increasing the smoothness of the ride. It would also be interesting to see if the power it generates can scale up with the weight of the ship.
Hmm, maybe it appeals more to people in certain areas. I still think Narbonic (starts here: http://www.webcomicsnation.com/shaenongarrity/narbonic/series.php?view=archive&chapter=9763) is the perfect comic for any "true geek" programmer. The artist is a woman and not a programmer, so I have no idea how she got Dave's lines so perfect. She must've had a really close friend or significant other to get a lot of that material from.
That argument is not a very good one for a number of reasons: 1) Most homes need several lamps, not just one, so you're talking about a few hundred pounds per house-hold. 2) Presumably you may want something like this to power other things in the home, which would make the footprint even larger. 3) Most women won't accept ugly lamps, and a lamp with a bucket you can fill with dirt would count as "ugly" to them. (Yes, I know a lot of us could be a lot more "green" without our significant others, but that's part of the whole "can't live with them, can't live without them" saying.) 4) Depending on the design of the mechanism (which wasn't shown), it may require a specific shape with specific properties. TFA didn't mention anything about a bucket (though I concede that they could give you empty shapes to fill with dirt, or something like that). 5) Even if you can simply dig up your yard to get the mass, the base of the lamp must be made a lot more sturdy than most lamps to support the weight (and even more so to keep it from tipping with that much weight at the top). None of the lamps I own would support 50lb. weights. This issue is more difficult to get around than the others.
I didn't say it was definitely a bad idea, just saying that there would be issues with it.
The idea sounds good to me too, but 50lbs. sounds like too much to put at the top of a lamp. I have young kids, and I don't want them getting crushed when they knock this thing over (as they almost certainly will). In addition, a lamp that requires 50lbs. of anything doesn't sound green on the construction side.
With this, hopefully no one would slip and throw their controller into the TV. It would be a tad bit uncomfortable with it being strapped to their head.
I'm a bit surprised they don't offer the option of a head-mounted display. They've already got the head-tracking, but that kinda sucks if your display doesn't move with you.
At least 10 years passed between episodes 2 and 3. He could've had a Padawan that died just before episode 3 started. If you look at the deleted scenes on the episode 3 DVD, they show Grievous killing a young female Jedi in front of Anakin and Obi-Wan. She could've been his apprentice.
No, it doesn't. It means that AMD is down and Intel is going in for the kill. If AMD is killed, competition in that market will be completely dead. CPU prices will soar, Intel won't need to spend so much on research, and everyone else will be so far behind Intel that no one will be able to catch up. In short, the consumers will get screwed.
That's why it's so amusing. After reading about the enormous sums of money they're suing regular people for, and the piddling amount the Pirate Bay founders are being fined, it's like adding insult to injury.
FYI, if I want to watch an NBC show, I watch it on nbc.com. That company really seems to get it. Their service isn't perfect, but it's the best I've seen so far that's perfectly legal. People don't even have to pay for it, and the commercial breaks are much shorter than if you'd watched it on TV. They're so short I can't even take a leak during one.
I didn't say it was wrong. I just said it heavily contradicted the "there's nothing wrong with Vista" statement. If you're recommending they start from scratch, you're not really saying there's nothing wrong with the existing code.
My thoughts exactly. The "like starting with new code" comment was so blatantly over the top, it makes it clear that the comment that "There's nothing wrong with Vista" was only tossed in there in an attempt to avoid losing income from Microsoft ads.
That makes it even funnier. I apologize for not taking the time to RTFA, but I'm at work.;-) And to everyone else who applied to me, I understand that they're not civil damages. It doesn't make it less amusing.
...that the damages being sought are less than the RIAA demanded from that woman who downloaded a few songs. I mean, $200K apiece for 4 people? I'll bet if they asked people to make Paypal donations to help them pay their legal fees and/or fines (while keeping the site up), they'd get millions pretty quickly. A lot of people would pay to keep a service like that up.
I'm sure that the authorities have known who was behind it for a while now. It's not that hard to figure out. I mean, it takes time to reverse engineer it and/or gather the data at the various points needed to trace it back to the source, but this botnet has been around for quite a while. It would've been news if they still had no clue who was behind it. Heck, it would've been big enough news to prompt me to try to reverse engineer it myself.
I only said it was unusable on the laptop. It was usable on the desktops, but it was noticeably slower than XP. The laptop has a really slow hard drive, and as Vista is a memory hog, 1GB of memory forced it to hit the hard drive an awful lot.
Also keep in mind that as a developer, I tend to push the machines a lot harder than most people. Trust me, it was really painful compared to XP on the laptop.
And you can say this because you're a graphics/games developer? My web site is http://sponeil.net/, and I know for a fact you're wrong. I've even written an article in a book published by nVidia. How do you think nVidia demos their new features when a new version of their video card comes out? Do you think they shipped the GeForce 8800 and said "Sorry folks, but you'll have to wait a year before you can even see it run a demo showing off any of the new features"?
When you see a game that supports both DirectX and OpenGL, they run at the same frame rate. OpenGL might be 1FPS slower on Windows because Microsoft won't allow OpenGL to use full-screen exclusive mode. They made that choice because they were going out of their way to sink OpenGL.
The only real reason NOT to use OpenGL is that ATI has crappy OpenGL drivers. They've been working to fix them, but I'm not sure where they are right now.
You are incorrect. Microsoft stopped at OpenGL 1.1 way back in the NT days. But if the drivers support OpenGL 2.x, you can use it (in any OS). Microsoft fears OpenGL so they tried to cripple it in Vista, but they got shouted down and reluctantly fixed it. You do have to use OpenGL extensions in Windows (which load the DLL and get pointers to the functions manually), but that's been true since really old versions of NT, and there are wrapper libraries that make it completely painless.
As someone who has tried Vista on 3 different systems (64-bit desktop, 32-bit desktop, and 32-bit laptop), I can honestly say the complaints about it are not FUD. It was completely unusable on the laptop and noticeably slower than XP on both desktops.
I may try it again when SP1 comes out. As for the DX10 features, they can be given to XP and Linux users via OpenGL, which always gets new graphics card features before DirectX. Back when hardware T&L was introduced, it was available on OpenGL as soon as the video cards shipped, but it required a new major version of DirectX. The same is true with features like geometry/streaming shaders. It will be years before any game developer using DX can drop support for DX9. As a game developer myself, this problem will ensure that I continue using OpenGL for a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
Point taken. I meant to put emphasis on "that" in "that many", but I was being lazy. I'm sure quite a few people will buy it for the cool factor if nothing else, but I'm also sure that quite a few people will pass it up due to certain features it's missing, like an optical drive.
Even the Anandtech reviewer made a complaint about it:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3220
"Despite the lack of an internal optical drive (I've never been so tempted to use the f-bomb in a review before)..."
It's hard to believe that many people would buy a laptop without an optical drive. One of the primary uses for my laptop is letting the kids play games and watch DVD's in the back seat during long drives. (I see no point in spending hundreds on a separate device that's just for playing movies in the car.) When I use it, it's usually for work, but I've watched a few movies on it myself, and I wouldn't consider buying a laptop that didn't have that feature. The Asus EEE PC would be awesome for the kids if it had a DVD-ROM drive.
It would also be nice if 4+ GB USB drives were cheap enough to use them for movies instead of optical disks, but we're not quite there yet. I wonder if they would be significantly cheaper using ROM instead of flash RAM. They would be like those game cartridges for the old Atari and Commodore systems, but smaller. Anyway, it would be nice.
That's what it sounds like to me.
You're forgetting that there are a lot of storms out on the open ocean, and during a storm, this baby does 30-40 knots. ;-)
In all seriousness, it would be interesting to see if this system could increase the speed of a ship running under some other form of power, all while increasing the smoothness of the ride. It would also be interesting to see if the power it generates can scale up with the weight of the ship.
Hmm, maybe it appeals more to people in certain areas. I still think Narbonic (starts here: http://www.webcomicsnation.com/shaenongarrity/narbonic/series.php?view=archive&chapter=9763) is the perfect comic for any "true geek" programmer. The artist is a woman and not a programmer, so I have no idea how she got Dave's lines so perfect. She must've had a really close friend or significant other to get a lot of that material from.
That argument is not a very good one for a number of reasons:
1) Most homes need several lamps, not just one, so you're talking about a few hundred pounds per house-hold.
2) Presumably you may want something like this to power other things in the home, which would make the footprint even larger.
3) Most women won't accept ugly lamps, and a lamp with a bucket you can fill with dirt would count as "ugly" to them. (Yes, I know a lot of us could be a lot more "green" without our significant others, but that's part of the whole "can't live with them, can't live without them" saying.)
4) Depending on the design of the mechanism (which wasn't shown), it may require a specific shape with specific properties. TFA didn't mention anything about a bucket (though I concede that they could give you empty shapes to fill with dirt, or something like that).
5) Even if you can simply dig up your yard to get the mass, the base of the lamp must be made a lot more sturdy than most lamps to support the weight (and even more so to keep it from tipping with that much weight at the top). None of the lamps I own would support 50lb. weights. This issue is more difficult to get around than the others.
I didn't say it was definitely a bad idea, just saying that there would be issues with it.
No, you're right. That one sucks. The best comics for programmers would probably be xkcd (on the serious side) and Narbonic (on the silly side).
The idea sounds good to me too, but 50lbs. sounds like too much to put at the top of a lamp. I have young kids, and I don't want them getting crushed when they knock this thing over (as they almost certainly will). In addition, a lamp that requires 50lbs. of anything doesn't sound green on the construction side.
With this, hopefully no one would slip and throw their controller into the TV. It would be a tad bit uncomfortable with it being strapped to their head.
I'm a bit surprised they don't offer the option of a head-mounted display. They've already got the head-tracking, but that kinda sucks if your display doesn't move with you.
At least 10 years passed between episodes 2 and 3. He could've had a Padawan that died just before episode 3 started. If you look at the deleted scenes on the episode 3 DVD, they show Grievous killing a young female Jedi in front of Anakin and Obi-Wan. She could've been his apprentice.
No, it doesn't. It means that AMD is down and Intel is going in for the kill. If AMD is killed, competition in that market will be completely dead. CPU prices will soar, Intel won't need to spend so much on research, and everyone else will be so far behind Intel that no one will be able to catch up. In short, the consumers will get screwed.
Does anyone use RealPlayer? I mean, it's worse than QuickTime (and I HATE QuickTime).
I'm still waiting for the Shipstone batteries RAH promised us.
That's why it's so amusing. After reading about the enormous sums of money they're suing regular people for, and the piddling amount the Pirate Bay founders are being fined, it's like adding insult to injury.
FYI, if I want to watch an NBC show, I watch it on nbc.com. That company really seems to get it. Their service isn't perfect, but it's the best I've seen so far that's perfectly legal. People don't even have to pay for it, and the commercial breaks are much shorter than if you'd watched it on TV. They're so short I can't even take a leak during one.
I didn't say it was wrong. I just said it heavily contradicted the "there's nothing wrong with Vista" statement. If you're recommending they start from scratch, you're not really saying there's nothing wrong with the existing code.
But how could we possibly live without trojans, spam, and Nigerian millionaire scams?
My thoughts exactly. The "like starting with new code" comment was so blatantly over the top, it makes it clear that the comment that "There's nothing wrong with Vista" was only tossed in there in an attempt to avoid losing income from Microsoft ads.
That makes it even funnier. I apologize for not taking the time to RTFA, but I'm at work. ;-) And to everyone else who applied to me, I understand that they're not civil damages. It doesn't make it less amusing.
...that the damages being sought are less than the RIAA demanded from that woman who downloaded a few songs. I mean, $200K apiece for 4 people? I'll bet if they asked people to make Paypal donations to help them pay their legal fees and/or fines (while keeping the site up), they'd get millions pretty quickly. A lot of people would pay to keep a service like that up.
I'm sure that the authorities have known who was behind it for a while now. It's not that hard to figure out. I mean, it takes time to reverse engineer it and/or gather the data at the various points needed to trace it back to the source, but this botnet has been around for quite a while. It would've been news if they still had no clue who was behind it. Heck, it would've been big enough news to prompt me to try to reverse engineer it myself.
"There's a sucker born every minute."
Sorry, but that's a much more accurate reason than "It's all about what the market will bear".
I only said it was unusable on the laptop. It was usable on the desktops, but it was noticeably slower than XP. The laptop has a really slow hard drive, and as Vista is a memory hog, 1GB of memory forced it to hit the hard drive an awful lot.
Also keep in mind that as a developer, I tend to push the machines a lot harder than most people. Trust me, it was really painful compared to XP on the laptop.
And you can say this because you're a graphics/games developer? My web site is http://sponeil.net/, and I know for a fact you're wrong. I've even written an article in a book published by nVidia. How do you think nVidia demos their new features when a new version of their video card comes out? Do you think they shipped the GeForce 8800 and said "Sorry folks, but you'll have to wait a year before you can even see it run a demo showing off any of the new features"?
When you see a game that supports both DirectX and OpenGL, they run at the same frame rate. OpenGL might be 1FPS slower on Windows because Microsoft won't allow OpenGL to use full-screen exclusive mode. They made that choice because they were going out of their way to sink OpenGL.
The only real reason NOT to use OpenGL is that ATI has crappy OpenGL drivers. They've been working to fix them, but I'm not sure where they are right now.
You are incorrect. Microsoft stopped at OpenGL 1.1 way back in the NT days. But if the drivers support OpenGL 2.x, you can use it (in any OS). Microsoft fears OpenGL so they tried to cripple it in Vista, but they got shouted down and reluctantly fixed it. You do have to use OpenGL extensions in Windows (which load the DLL and get pointers to the functions manually), but that's been true since really old versions of NT, and there are wrapper libraries that make it completely painless.
As someone who has tried Vista on 3 different systems (64-bit desktop, 32-bit desktop, and 32-bit laptop), I can honestly say the complaints about it are not FUD. It was completely unusable on the laptop and noticeably slower than XP on both desktops.
I may try it again when SP1 comes out. As for the DX10 features, they can be given to XP and Linux users via OpenGL, which always gets new graphics card features before DirectX. Back when hardware T&L was introduced, it was available on OpenGL as soon as the video cards shipped, but it required a new major version of DirectX. The same is true with features like geometry/streaming shaders. It will be years before any game developer using DX can drop support for DX9. As a game developer myself, this problem will ensure that I continue using OpenGL for a long time.