It's good to see Oracle still working on NCs. This kind of specialized device really is the way of the future. When the American consumer culture grows up and starts thinking, Oracle will be there waiting.
Think NCs are too limited to be useful? How come your TV doesn't also cut your grass? Exactly.
Haven't the carbon nanotubes of this article been around for a while? I seem to remember the exact same things being called Bucky Balls (Buckminsterfullerene).
Buckminsterfullerene came in two flavors: ball shape and tube shape. The balls were carbon-60, so they were "big". However, they rolled with nearly zero friction because they were shaped like soccer balls. One idea for using them was nanopills, made putting a medicine into the center of the ball. PIlls would be somewhat less unpleasant to swallow.
The other form of Buckminsterfullerene was a tube. Short tubes could be used as nanobearings, and longer ones could be used for nano-pipes. Can you imagine how cool microprocessors would run if they had a system of nanotubes running through them carrying water? Your chip would have a builtin intercooler.
Of course, I don't think much of this (any?) made it past the theory stage. Perhaps this is just the next step?
it shows in the software as well, as their are generally buttons on screen for every concievable operation
Exactly! Apple speeds access to operations by making them more intuitive, while everyone else seems to just add them to the button bar. I saw a perfect example of this today on a Windows keyboard: next to the "Sleep" button was the button to wake it. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the sleep button becomes useless once the machine is asleep, and the wake button is useless when it is awake. Why not have the button do both? DUH!
Rather than building better interfaces, people seem to just be building bigger ones.
According to Microsoft, this is one hell of a machine. According to the spec sheets, this is (almost) available today. What Microsoft is doing is building a console from what appear to be off the shelf components. P3 for CPU, ordinary RAM, A graphics chipset that I'm certain will be availble in AGP flavor when the X-Box is released, and possibly even SoundBlaster for sound. Heck, it even uses USB, although Micro$oft changed the shape of the plug so they can get money from periphs.
With all of the use of standard parts, it isn't inconceivable that someone could make an X-Box clone. With clones come upgrades. Perhaps we will start to see hopped-up X-Box clones? At the very least, I would expect to see plug adapters so we can use our PC parts with the non-standard X-Box plugs.
Oh come now, changing batteries in a remote control takes as much effort. Knowing when to is the same: "Hmmm, not working... I haven't changed batteries in a year... There, it works again."
A user calls tech support, claims the mouse isn't working. Possible causes? Batteries, frequency conflict, distance, dead hardware, drivers, etc......much harder for a techie to troubleshoot with an idiot on the phone. If it were corded, what could go wrong? It isn't plugged in?
The article seems to think that a corded mouse would be inferior to a cordless one. I myself prefer a corded one - it helps me keep the mouse oriented correctly, and I don't need to change batteries, ever. Remember who the target audience is here: complete non-geeks. Knowing when to change batteries, or even HOW to change batteries is often well outside their abilities.
About this whole buttonless thing: how does it work? Did Apple simply take an optical mouse and turn it inside out?
a whole series about how great the kid who grew up to be Darth Vader, killer of the innocent, is - what the fuck is that about? What's next, Charles Manson - The Childhood Adventures?
You give Lucas too much credit. What essential element was missing from Darth's character in the original trilogy? Why he was the enemy. Also missing was why the empire was bad. The audience has no reason to dislike the "bad guys," and therefore Charles Manson wouldn't fit. He is bad for reasons other than the fact that he dresses in black.
Read the article. A product mentioned in it seems like a good idea - instead of blocking certain things, it just gives them a lower priority. PacketShaper seems to act like a smart filter: instead of banning Napster, it allows admins to simply limit the amount of bandwidth given to it. This seems to be the wave of the future.
Of course, for colleges with bandwidth problems, the only real solution is to get more. As time goes by, files keep getting larger, and people keep getting less patient. If they have bandwidth problems now, how about 5 years from now? By then, a sizable portion of their students will have had broadband connections at home.
It seems that you are missing the point completely. We are not worried about the performance of our RAM - we are worried about the prices. These lawsuits and patent crap have nothing to do with performance, just price. Rambus does not intend to lower the price of RDRAM to be competitive. Rather, they intend to raise the price of SDRAM so as to kill the market.
When the price/performance ratio of your RAM is the same as your hard drive, you've been Rambussed.
What about the Baye-Dole act of 1980(?)? It gives the government the right to seize a patent for certain reasons. Could this be one of them?
A jump in RAM prices of the magnitiude which this story says could quite possibly happen, would potentially ruin the industry. The resultant jump in machine prices would keep internet appliances and other specialized machines from heppening. Dell and others would need to redesign motherboards (yes, every single one of them) because SDRAM just wouldn't be worth it. Of course, video card prices would rise, etc etc.
Perhaps this is the time for the Baye-Dole act to be tested?
There are two things that make the Apple machines quiet: Efficiency and quality cases.
The iMac is silent because it has no fan. The CPU daintily sips power, whereas an Athlon or P3 guzzles it. This leads to very little heat, and thus eliminates several things: noisy CPU fans, case fans, and noisy power supplies.
The quality plastic cases on the iMac, G3, and G4 also do a fair amount of silencing noise. These cases are made of thick plastic that absorbs noise from fans and hard drives. One of the more frustrating things about my G3 is that it lacks not only drive lights (helpful when seeing if the machine is frozen), but also the sounds the hard drive makes.
How effective is the case? Try pulling open the cover that hides the CDROM, and notice the difference. The machine goes from just about inaudible to definitly there, but still quiet.
Compare this to a PC with a cheapo metal case that has a plastic front. Every sound is clear - you don't need drive lights, because the HD makes different noises for reads and writes.
The funny thing about quiet computers is that generally, you end paying more to get less (noise, of course).
Have you any idea what a NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT is? it is a legally binding agreement you sign, which revokes your right to disclose any information regarding the product. It is against the ideas of open-source, but then again, Adobe is trying to make money, not graduate from college.
Why would Adobe sue? Because someone clearly violated an NDA, and MacNN clearly knew it. What's the point of an NDA if nobody tries to hold people to it?
As exciting as this is, has anyone read any of the fine print regarding the drives? From my memory of the Maxtor drive I just bought:
"Capable of 66Mb/s transfers for a max duration of 3ms, as per the ATA/66 standard."
Wow, 66megabit/sec for a whole 3ms. It's no wonder why there is zero noticeable difference between ATA/33 and ATA/66 drives.
--Jeff
Re:Chemicals Unrelated to Death
on
Silicon Hell
·
· Score: 1
More from the article: After logging 30 years in a dried-fruit cannery, Alicia, now 69, started washing hard-drive disks for IBM in 1977.
Sadly, this shows horrible research on both parts: the article and the woman. If you read any respectable health journals, you will see something they warn you about: dried fruits. The chemicals which end up in the fruit are known carcinogens, especially the nitrates. Gary Null and Dr Weil tell readers to stay away at all costs, because the levels consumers are exposed to are dangerous. How about the workers?
--Jeff
Chemicals Unrelated to Death
on
Silicon Hell
·
· Score: 1
From the Article: But after two operations to remove malignant tissue the size of a grapefruit, the tumors grew back, leaving him numb and barely mobile.
The size of a grapefruit?! Why do I think it was the surgery which left him immobile? Or did he just have a really big head?
Introducing the AC game! The object of the game is to claim "First Post!" as often as possible. Players visit the game's website, and continuously hit reload until a new article appears. When one is spotted, quickly click "Read More" and post a reply. Only the quick will get the honor of 1st Post.
Those FM transmitters come in two varieties:good and versatile. The good ones work by having you run your car's antenna through it, and then it just modulates the signal directly onto the antenna. Because there is no real transmission, these are wide band (don't need to tune them).
The other kind is the versatile but cheap kind. These either run on AAs or plug into a cig lighter. PLug it into the headphone jack on your discman, and viola! A low power FM transmitter. Just tune your radio to the right frequency, and then fine tune the transmitter. These are very narrow band, so changes in air density will affect your transmission enough for you to need to retune every time you use it.
The Good kind is $50 from PartsExpress (don't remember the exact url for the item). The other kind is about $15 from lots of places (Fry's Radioshack, Best Buy, etc).
The "aircraft" you are referring to do not rely on any sort of anti-gravity device. They work quite simply: A high intensity laser beam is reflected off of the craft's more or less parabolic bottom in quick pulses. The beam focuses to a point and rapidly heats the air. The following explosion is what propels the craft.
Of course, these are really just spinning discs about the size of a frisbee. Even with a full megawatt laser, they only go a hundred feet or so into the air. Hardly practical.
Slashdot Mirror
It's good to see Oracle still working on NCs. This kind of specialized device really is the way of the future. When the American consumer culture grows up and starts thinking, Oracle will be there waiting.
Think NCs are too limited to be useful? How come your TV doesn't also cut your grass? Exactly.
--Jeff
Haven't the carbon nanotubes of this article been around for a while? I seem to remember the exact same things being called Bucky Balls (Buckminsterfullerene).
Buckminsterfullerene came in two flavors: ball shape and tube shape. The balls were carbon-60, so they were "big". However, they rolled with nearly zero friction because they were shaped like soccer balls. One idea for using them was nanopills, made putting a medicine into the center of the ball. PIlls would be somewhat less unpleasant to swallow.
The other form of Buckminsterfullerene was a tube. Short tubes could be used as nanobearings, and longer ones could be used for nano-pipes. Can you imagine how cool microprocessors would run if they had a system of nanotubes running through them carrying water? Your chip would have a builtin intercooler.
Of course, I don't think much of this (any?) made it past the theory stage. Perhaps this is just the next step?
--Jeff
Maybe I'm crazy, but wouldn't it make more sense for it to actually tell you about the problem?
--Jeff
Exactly! Apple speeds access to operations by making them more intuitive, while everyone else seems to just add them to the button bar. I saw a perfect example of this today on a Windows keyboard: next to the "Sleep" button was the button to wake it. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the sleep button becomes useless once the machine is asleep, and the wake button is useless when it is awake. Why not have the button do both? DUH!
Rather than building better interfaces, people seem to just be building bigger ones.
--Jeff
According to Microsoft, this is one hell of a machine. According to the spec sheets, this is (almost) available today. What Microsoft is doing is building a console from what appear to be off the shelf components. P3 for CPU, ordinary RAM, A graphics chipset that I'm certain will be availble in AGP flavor when the X-Box is released, and possibly even SoundBlaster for sound. Heck, it even uses USB, although Micro$oft changed the shape of the plug so they can get money from periphs.
With all of the use of standard parts, it isn't inconceivable that someone could make an X-Box clone. With clones come upgrades. Perhaps we will start to see hopped-up X-Box clones? At the very least, I would expect to see plug adapters so we can use our PC parts with the non-standard X-Box plugs.
--Jeff
Oh come now, changing batteries in a remote control takes as much effort. Knowing when to is the same: "Hmmm, not working... I haven't changed batteries in a year... There, it works again."
A user calls tech support, claims the mouse isn't working. Possible causes? Batteries, frequency conflict, distance, dead hardware, drivers, etc......much harder for a techie to troubleshoot with an idiot on the phone. If it were corded, what could go wrong? It isn't plugged in?
--Jeff
The article seems to think that a corded mouse would be inferior to a cordless one. I myself prefer a corded one - it helps me keep the mouse oriented correctly, and I don't need to change batteries, ever. Remember who the target audience is here: complete non-geeks. Knowing when to change batteries, or even HOW to change batteries is often well outside their abilities.
About this whole buttonless thing: how does it work? Did Apple simply take an optical mouse and turn it inside out?
--Jeff
a whole series about how great the kid who grew up to be Darth Vader, killer of the innocent, is - what the fuck is that about? What's next, Charles Manson - The Childhood Adventures?
You give Lucas too much credit. What essential element was missing from Darth's character in the original trilogy? Why he was the enemy. Also missing was why the empire was bad. The audience has no reason to dislike the "bad guys," and therefore Charles Manson wouldn't fit. He is bad for reasons other than the fact that he dresses in black.
--Jeff
16 cell phones, at $.37/minute (the rate I pay) would cost $5.92/minute. Wouldn't a long cat5 cable be cheaper?
Of course, this does have a side effect: Using this setup, the internet really does cause your mind to rot.
--Jeff
Read the article. A product mentioned in it seems like a good idea - instead of blocking certain things, it just gives them a lower priority. PacketShaper seems to act like a smart filter: instead of banning Napster, it allows admins to simply limit the amount of bandwidth given to it. This seems to be the wave of the future.
Of course, for colleges with bandwidth problems, the only real solution is to get more. As time goes by, files keep getting larger, and people keep getting less patient. If they have bandwidth problems now, how about 5 years from now? By then, a sizable portion of their students will have had broadband connections at home.
--Jeff
how would I get even with these idiots, to punish them for this stupid groundless lawsuit?
Give them lifetime subscriptions to my own service.
--Jeff
It seems that you are missing the point completely. We are not worried about the performance of our RAM - we are worried about the prices. These lawsuits and patent crap have nothing to do with performance, just price. Rambus does not intend to lower the price of RDRAM to be competitive. Rather, they intend to raise the price of SDRAM so as to kill the market.
When the price/performance ratio of your RAM is the same as your hard drive, you've been Rambussed.
--Jeff
What about the Baye-Dole act of 1980(?)? It gives the government the right to seize a patent for certain reasons. Could this be one of them?
A jump in RAM prices of the magnitiude which this story says could quite possibly happen, would potentially ruin the industry. The resultant jump in machine prices would keep internet appliances and other specialized machines from heppening. Dell and others would need to redesign motherboards (yes, every single one of them) because SDRAM just wouldn't be worth it. Of course, video card prices would rise, etc etc.
Perhaps this is the time for the Baye-Dole act to be tested?
--Jeff
Think she shares his love of Eunichs? For his sake, I hope not.
--Jeff
Isn't this old news? The sites were posted in an earlier thread.
The link is posted in this comment.
Does this mean we can all be karma whores and submit user posts as news?
--Jeff
There are two things that make the Apple machines quiet: Efficiency and quality cases.
The iMac is silent because it has no fan. The CPU daintily sips power, whereas an Athlon or P3 guzzles it. This leads to very little heat, and thus eliminates several things: noisy CPU fans, case fans, and noisy power supplies.
The quality plastic cases on the iMac, G3, and G4 also do a fair amount of silencing noise. These cases are made of thick plastic that absorbs noise from fans and hard drives. One of the more frustrating things about my G3 is that it lacks not only drive lights (helpful when seeing if the machine is frozen), but also the sounds the hard drive makes.
How effective is the case? Try pulling open the cover that hides the CDROM, and notice the difference. The machine goes from just about inaudible to definitly there, but still quiet.
Compare this to a PC with a cheapo metal case that has a plastic front. Every sound is clear - you don't need drive lights, because the HD makes different noises for reads and writes.
The funny thing about quiet computers is that generally, you end paying more to get less (noise, of course).
--Jeff
I'm confused now.....
Have you any idea what a NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT is? it is a legally binding agreement you sign, which revokes your right to disclose any information regarding the product. It is against the ideas of open-source, but then again, Adobe is trying to make money, not graduate from college.
Why would Adobe sue? Because someone clearly violated an NDA, and MacNN clearly knew it. What's the point of an NDA if nobody tries to hold people to it?
Duh.
--Jeff
As exciting as this is, has anyone read any of the fine print regarding the drives? From my memory of the Maxtor drive I just bought:
"Capable of 66Mb/s transfers for a max duration of 3ms, as per the ATA/66 standard."
Wow, 66megabit/sec for a whole 3ms. It's no wonder why there is zero noticeable difference between ATA/33 and ATA/66 drives.
--Jeff
After logging 30 years in a dried-fruit cannery, Alicia, now 69, started washing hard-drive disks for IBM in 1977.
Sadly, this shows horrible research on both parts: the article and the woman. If you read any respectable health journals, you will see something they warn you about: dried fruits. The chemicals which end up in the fruit are known carcinogens, especially the nitrates. Gary Null and Dr Weil tell readers to stay away at all costs, because the levels consumers are exposed to are dangerous. How about the workers?
--Jeff
But after two operations to remove malignant tissue the size of a grapefruit, the tumors grew back, leaving him numb and barely mobile.
The size of a grapefruit?! Why do I think it was the surgery which left him immobile? Or did he just have a really big head?
--Jeff
Introducing the AC game! The object of the game is to claim "First Post!" as often as possible. Players visit the game's website, and continuously hit reload until a new article appears. When one is spotted, quickly click "Read More" and post a reply. Only the quick will get the honor of 1st Post.
--Jeff
>I always thought it was a stupid thing to do
>anyway... deliberately engineer something to
>be less accurate than it could be.
You have no future at Microsoft.
--Jeff
Those FM transmitters come in two varieties:good and versatile. The good ones work by having you run your car's antenna through it, and then it just modulates the signal directly onto the antenna. Because there is no real transmission, these are wide band (don't need to tune them).
The other kind is the versatile but cheap kind. These either run on AAs or plug into a cig lighter. PLug it into the headphone jack on your discman, and viola! A low power FM transmitter. Just tune your radio to the right frequency, and then fine tune the transmitter. These are very narrow band, so changes in air density will affect your transmission enough for you to need to retune every time you use it.
The Good kind is $50 from PartsExpress (don't remember the exact url for the item). The other kind is about $15 from lots of places (Fry's Radioshack, Best Buy, etc).
--Jeff
The "aircraft" you are referring to do not rely on any sort of anti-gravity device. They work quite simply: A high intensity laser beam is reflected off of the craft's more or less parabolic bottom in quick pulses. The beam focuses to a point and rapidly heats the air. The following explosion is what propels the craft.
Of course, these are really just spinning discs about the size of a frisbee. Even with a full megawatt laser, they only go a hundred feet or so into the air. Hardly practical.
--Jeff
E tu,Sextus?
I hope to graduate manga cum laude.
Seems more like a fatuus mons stercoris, if I remember my Latin correctly (and I probably don't).
--Jeff