Mod parent up. If there's propietary code, i bet the OSS developers will be happy to settle for specifications. You're in the hardware buissness, for god's sake.
My bet is that both nVidia an ATI are reluctant to release OSS drivers/specs because of endless "tweakings" (AKA, "cheats") and software cripplings of their hardware. I wish i was paranoid, but just look at how many times both companies have been found doing these kind of things either to squeeze an extra FPS off the competition or to sell a new model which is basically identical to a previous one.
Love/hate relationship here. I would *LOVE* to see nVidia open-source their drivers (or atleast the specs, with no nasty NDAs), but their binary drivers just work. Better than their Windows counterparts, in some areas.
My latest card purchase was nVidia, just because of that.
This distribution method is quite cool (if it works as expected, we'll see), but does Steam has any way of providing the user some way to burn a hard copy of the game?
XFCE 4 has struck a very nice balance between usabilty and feautres in this release, and most things missing (session manager and desktop icons for the whiners) are scheduled for the next release and already available on CVS.
The last Gnome version i've really played with was 2.6; XFCE gives me all the nice things i liked about Gnome and removes the annoying ones. I'm not moving back anytime soon.
The exact explanation escapes me, but the fact that Hydrogen absorbs energy at that frequency also makes it the quietest part of the radio spectrum; background noise becomes a problem when you're trying to detect such low signal levels as radio signals from lightyears away.
"Contact" (the book, and to a degree, the movie) dealt with this ideas. It's still a great read after all these years in case you haven't checked it out. Highly reccomended.
Why not bother? As you said, the chances are quite slim, but it's not like scientists went way out of line to add the famous plaque to the Voyager; in fact i bet that the price and effort invested in them are nothing next to the rest of the probe.
They are still made by a few companies and quite a few hobbyists aswell; ion flame speakers work quite well for tweeters, where relatively low power is needed.
They're reputed to sound fairly nice aswell, but ozone is a byproduct of the air ionization... i wouldn't like to stay for long with a couple of those in a closed room (ozone becomes toxic at high concentrations).
10 bucks for a tiny magnet disc cutted from an extrusion is not cheap - and it's not something you can use in, say, a motor. Those are used in speakers and headphones through.
Well, like i said, i couldn't find it, so fair enough, don't take my word for it (yet atleast:) ) - the closest i could found online was a company that makes conductive polymers and elastomers for RF shielding (), but they have figures of resistivity an order of magnitude above cooper.
I remember not so long ago a news about some researchers that managed to create a conductive plastic; it was a remarkably better conductor than cooper. They were working into making it cheaper for mass production (can't find a link, anyone?).
If these people manage to create powerful magnets for cheap, expect a lot of magnet-based devices (motors, hard disks, generators) to drop prices in the future; powerful ceramic magnets are still very expensive.
What makes a speaker good is it's mainly the cone itself: it has to be very rigid but also very thin; if it's too heavy the amplifier needs to be more powerful (which reduces it's efficiency), and if it's too elastic it will vibrate and bend when moved back and forth, creating a nasty distortion. Not only that, the cone material has to be sonically "dead" (won't resonate at audible frequencies).
Paper is the preffered choice; there's also kevlar laminate for some high end speakers. Some high frequency speakers ("tweeters") are made of aluminium.
In fact, one of the latest "advancements" in speaker construction was not long ago when a japanese fella discovered how to shape thin wood sheets into cones... after soaking them with sake - apparently it's good for more than drinking, and makes one hell of a cone material. Not cheap though.
I build my audio gear, and you wouldn't beleive the ammount of variables that goes into speaker designing (number of speakers, enclosure volume and shape, variable impedances, type and implementation of crossover network, etc). I think this technology could improve the magnets used in speakers if nothing else, making them cheaper, or stronger, but plastic cones (unless VERY rigid), it's not a good idea overall.
As for Akira and Ghost in the Shell? Incomprehensible and pretentious are two of the least confrontational words I can find.
Akira suffered from this ("i had to read a website to understand the film - it's SO cooooool!"), but Ghost in the Shell it's not so hard to follow and an excellent story aswell. Not to mention the gorgeous drawings and animation.
Akira is very good, don't get me wrong, but for me GITS is the best anime film ever; Akira gets the extra points to be one of the very first.
This is the so called "bouncing" problem, and it's specially noticeable on earlier, lower DPI optical mouses. Gamers particularly bitched on this - i know quite a few who brought the new Microsft Intellimouse just because it fixed the problem (or so they say).
In my mouse (Genius Powerscroll EYE optical) it happens when you do an extreme move to one direction; the pointer jumps and "jitters" to the oposite for a second; i use high sensitivity so it never bothered me. Newer optical mouses have to be moved very, very (and i do mean very) fast in order for this to happen.
I have a shitload of VERY accurate stepper motors from old harddisks and floppy controllers - those would cost a fortune if i ever intended to buy them. Also high voltage capacitors and fans from old power supplies, led displays from old cases, assorted electronic parts from old motherboards and hardware.
I haven't played it, but the "beta" in CS:S beta refers, if i'm not mistaken, to the game itself rather than the engine. The game has everything the Source engine it's suposed to offer; you gotta wonder how unfinished it can be then.
I felt the same way; WinFS is a neat idea on paper and something i'd like to see working, but it's not something i'm desperate to try / need in a hurry.
On the other hand, consumers don't know what they want until they see what's being sold to them:) WinFS, Avalon, are all nice marketing buzzwords. From that perspective, i expect Longhorn to sell like hotcakes.
Actually, the fact that there's a CS:Source beta floating arround makes me feel that the engine is done and over, and what's keeping the game from being released is the game data itself.
Then again, if the game can be "predownloaded", you gotta wonder if the game is done already.
Laptops are not as simple to get running under Linux as, say, desktop systems. Historically people always had some issues with Linux laptops - from hardware not supported to non-working consumption management. The fact that a high profile manufacturer is releasing a Linux oriented laptop is the news here; and it should be noted that it works just as expected, unlike most of the times before.
They get it home, and then they realize that they have to jump through hoops to play this game or open this document from work.
It only takes a bit of education. I mean, i rememeber when i switched my mother's PC to Windows 95 from Windows 3.11, she constantly complained because of the new setup ("Icons are out of place!", "What is this taskbar thing?"). People are lazy, and PC users are the laziest of them all - i don't expect users to become software engenieers, but you can't treat you new laptop like a toaster.
In any case, a well thought desktop distro like SuSE or Mandrake is as easy to use as Windows, if not easier. As long as people isn't expecting a "cheaper Windows" (and i think HP would be smart enough not to publicite it as such), things will work out with time.
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Mod parent up. If there's propietary code, i bet the OSS developers will be happy to settle for specifications. You're in the hardware buissness, for god's sake.
My bet is that both nVidia an ATI are reluctant to release OSS drivers/specs because of endless "tweakings" (AKA, "cheats") and software cripplings of their hardware. I wish i was paranoid, but just look at how many times both companies have been found doing these kind of things either to squeeze an extra FPS off the competition or to sell a new model which is basically identical to a previous one.
Love/hate relationship here. I would *LOVE* to see nVidia open-source their drivers (or atleast the specs, with no nasty NDAs), but their binary drivers just work. Better than their Windows counterparts, in some areas.
My latest card purchase was nVidia, just because of that.
This distribution method is quite cool (if it works as expected, we'll see), but does Steam has any way of providing the user some way to burn a hard copy of the game?
Yeah - i need more caffeine late at night ;) I meant latest XFCE release.
XFCE 4 has struck a very nice balance between usabilty and feautres in this release, and most things missing (session manager and desktop icons for the whiners) are scheduled for the next release and already available on CVS.
The last Gnome version i've really played with was 2.6; XFCE gives me all the nice things i liked about Gnome and removes the annoying ones. I'm not moving back anytime soon.
The exact explanation escapes me, but the fact that Hydrogen absorbs energy at that frequency also makes it the quietest part of the radio spectrum; background noise becomes a problem when you're trying to detect such low signal levels as radio signals from lightyears away.
"Contact" (the book, and to a degree, the movie) dealt with this ideas. It's still a great read after all these years in case you haven't checked it out. Highly reccomended.
Why not bother? As you said, the chances are quite slim, but it's not like scientists went way out of line to add the famous plaque to the Voyager; in fact i bet that the price and effort invested in them are nothing next to the rest of the probe.
They are still made by a few companies and quite a few hobbyists aswell; ion flame speakers work quite well for tweeters, where relatively low power is needed.
They're reputed to sound fairly nice aswell, but ozone is a byproduct of the air ionization... i wouldn't like to stay for long with a couple of those in a closed room (ozone becomes toxic at high concentrations).
Powerful ceramic magnets are insanely cheap nowadays. I'm not sure why you think these plastic ones will be cheaper?
p x?CategoryID=21&KeyWords=Disc&All=True
Not so cheap, check http://www.rare-earth-magnets.com/SearchResult.as
10 bucks for a tiny magnet disc cutted from an extrusion is not cheap - and it's not something you can use in, say, a motor. Those are used in speakers and headphones through.
Sorry, link didn't got through. I got the resistivity figures from the specifications in the .PDFs.
http://www.chomerics.com/products/premier.htm
Well, like i said, i couldn't find it, so fair enough, don't take my word for it (yet atleast :) ) - the closest i could found online was a company that makes conductive polymers and elastomers for RF shielding (), but they have figures of resistivity an order of magnitude above cooper.
Will keep on searching though.
I remember not so long ago a news about some researchers that managed to create a conductive plastic; it was a remarkably better conductor than cooper. They were working into making it cheaper for mass production (can't find a link, anyone?).
If these people manage to create powerful magnets for cheap, expect a lot of magnet-based devices (motors, hard disks, generators) to drop prices in the future; powerful ceramic magnets are still very expensive.
What makes a speaker good is it's mainly the cone itself: it has to be very rigid but also very thin; if it's too heavy the amplifier needs to be more powerful (which reduces it's efficiency), and if it's too elastic it will vibrate and bend when moved back and forth, creating a nasty distortion. Not only that, the cone material has to be sonically "dead" (won't resonate at audible frequencies).
Paper is the preffered choice; there's also kevlar laminate for some high end speakers. Some high frequency speakers ("tweeters") are made of aluminium.
In fact, one of the latest "advancements" in speaker construction was not long ago when a japanese fella discovered how to shape thin wood sheets into cones... after soaking them with sake - apparently it's good for more than drinking, and makes one hell of a cone material. Not cheap though.
I build my audio gear, and you wouldn't beleive the ammount of variables that goes into speaker designing (number of speakers, enclosure volume and shape, variable impedances, type and implementation of crossover network, etc). I think this technology could improve the magnets used in speakers if nothing else, making them cheaper, or stronger, but plastic cones (unless VERY rigid), it's not a good idea overall.
As for Akira and Ghost in the Shell? Incomprehensible and pretentious are two of the least confrontational words I can find.
Akira suffered from this ("i had to read a website to understand the film - it's SO cooooool!"), but Ghost in the Shell it's not so hard to follow and an excellent story aswell. Not to mention the gorgeous drawings and animation.
Akira is very good, don't get me wrong, but for me GITS is the best anime film ever; Akira gets the extra points to be one of the very first.
This is the so called "bouncing" problem, and it's specially noticeable on earlier, lower DPI optical mouses. Gamers particularly bitched on this - i know quite a few who brought the new Microsft Intellimouse just because it fixed the problem (or so they say).
In my mouse (Genius Powerscroll EYE optical) it happens when you do an extreme move to one direction; the pointer jumps and "jitters" to the oposite for a second; i use high sensitivity so it never bothered me. Newer optical mouses have to be moved very, very (and i do mean very) fast in order for this to happen.
I have a shitload of VERY accurate stepper motors from old harddisks and floppy controllers - those would cost a fortune if i ever intended to buy them. Also high voltage capacitors and fans from old power supplies, led displays from old cases, assorted electronic parts from old motherboards and hardware.
One man's junk it's another man's treasure!
I haven't played it, but the "beta" in CS:S beta refers, if i'm not mistaken, to the game itself rather than the engine. The game has everything the Source engine it's suposed to offer; you gotta wonder how unfinished it can be then.
I felt the same way; WinFS is a neat idea on paper and something i'd like to see working, but it's not something i'm desperate to try / need in a hurry.
:) WinFS, Avalon, are all nice marketing buzzwords. From that perspective, i expect Longhorn to sell like hotcakes.
On the other hand, consumers don't know what they want until they see what's being sold to them
Actually, the fact that there's a CS:Source beta floating arround makes me feel that the engine is done and over, and what's keeping the game from being released is the game data itself. Then again, if the game can be "predownloaded", you gotta wonder if the game is done already.
a) Remove ear from speaker when loud annoying noise kicks in.
Glad i could be helpful.
Longhorn has been pushed back THAT far, eh?
Laptops are not as simple to get running under Linux as, say, desktop systems. Historically people always had some issues with Linux laptops - from hardware not supported to non-working consumption management. The fact that a high profile manufacturer is releasing a Linux oriented laptop is the news here; and it should be noted that it works just as expected, unlike most of the times before.
They get it home, and then they realize that they have to jump through hoops to play this game or open this document from work.
It only takes a bit of education. I mean, i rememeber when i switched my mother's PC to Windows 95 from Windows 3.11, she constantly complained because of the new setup ("Icons are out of place!", "What is this taskbar thing?"). People are lazy, and PC users are the laziest of them all - i don't expect users to become software engenieers, but you can't treat you new laptop like a toaster.
In any case, a well thought desktop distro like SuSE or Mandrake is as easy to use as Windows, if not easier. As long as people isn't expecting a "cheaper Windows" (and i think HP would be smart enough not to publicite it as such), things will work out with time.
Cheaters? Find a server using CD (Cheating Death) and play on those...or just switch
Agreed. Cheating Death eats VAC for lunch. Not only that, it also works much more smoothly, and i haven't seen a cheater in months.