Uh oh. These solid state drives are not intended to be used in desktops, where things like swap files are very common - this device is flash based, and flash still has a lot of issues regarding limited write cycles (i recall the best current flash chips have a maximum of 1,000,000 write cycles per cell). You wouldn't be able to boot from them either, since this hardware is unknown to current BIOSes.
The way i see it is a very, very neat way of replacing hard disk arrays for enterprise use; the device itself it's surely very expensive, but way smaller, cooler, quieter, with less power consumption and near zero manteinance costs. A hd array with similar write/read performance would also be extremely expensive, if even feasible.
There's a lot of considerations using electromagnets in such an arrangement - i guess power wouldn't scale up well since you'd have electromagnets creating opposing fields, which reduces their efficiency. Magnetic coupling is a consideration too - unless you end up with a very good configuration you'd get a big transformer, with coils transferring energy mainly to each other.
Then again, if you buy a $500 phone without checking this kind of things beforehand, there's no one to blame but you. Thing is, the iPhone is more of a status symbol than a practical phone (expensive, very locked, big, low volume, no third party apps, etc...)
The problem with thief/sshock2 is that the 8800 series cards do not seem to do any dithering which leads to those ugly colors when using a 16bpp mode.
Thank you. The problem here seems to be an bug in the driver, not that (as the article suggested) that nVidia is dropping support for "legacy games". I was about to rant about this (slashdotted-frame of mind, one might say:), until i realized this is, once again, a poorly worded summary that suggests something without any merits. A forum entry reads..
"Nvidia probably made some significant hardware changes which limits 16 bit rendering. Sadly reduced backwards compatibility is inevitable when technology changes. Therefore I doubt this issue will ever be fixed."
This means either software rendering, or correctly reporting the feature as not present so the game engine can decide what to do. Anyway, SS2 uses (IIRC) DirectX 7. If someday card vendors decide to drop support for older DX versions (which is already a mess, with several verions during these years), you can bet even a reference software renderer will allow to play the game just fine on modern hardware.
Let's disentangle the issue here. First the screen crack obviously did not have anything to do with the OS. Second is it reasonable for a company to specify in their warantee that the OS shall be the installed OS and no-other than what they designate? I think there is a reasonable case for the latter.
Are you sure? I don't know what USA laws have to say on the issue, but can the manufacturer revoke a warranty (which includes, of course, hardware) because of software installed on it? The fact that it's an OS instead of a spreadsheet should have litte to do with it; that's like saying Ford wouldn't replace your car if a wheel comes off just because they don't like the kind of gas you use.
you might as well say, why should you have a drivers license, they can easily be falsified and/or duplicated.
With the little detail that your driver license is not lodged into yourself, nor carved with laser in your arm. There are very valid (and useful) applications for RFID, but human tagging is not one of them, IMHO. There's already a shitload of id that one carries with himself all the time - passports, driver licenses... retinas, thumbprints and even their teeth.
Oh for gods sake. Yeah, most pets don't have the skill to remove their nametags, atleast when properly placed. Anyway, i was discussing about RFID implants in human beings in the first place.
What's the point of RFID implants? RFIDs are simple devices which can be fairly easily falsified and/or duplicated. Never mind that the implant itself can be removed and swapped. It's an intrusive security layer which offers no security whatsoever. And on top of that, it introduces privacy concerns... we have ubiquitous cameras all over major cities, why not RFID scanners?
nVidia's hardware is great and they have very high quality linux drivers, but when you hit a problem with them you're in for a fun ride. I had it happening on me once or twice in the past. ATI's driver for Linux (hell, even for Windows) were always a joke.
No, it's a quest against the sneaking corporatism in our so called "free" market. Cartels only producing what benefits them, keeping others from producing what the customer would actually want by patents and legal red tape.
The problem with cellphones is that their price is heavily subsidized in order to sell them at reasonable prices. The lock-in ensures that you won't try to swicth carriers after paying a fraction of the real cost of the device. Then again, you can get a locked cellphone for cheap from a number of providers, you can have that same phone unlocked for a fee (or even free if you know what to do)... and you can even buy an unlocked phone directly from the manufacturer. It will cost you an extra though.
We can argue about prices, selection, QOS and even the legality of carrier locks. But cellphones are available for everyone, in a wide range of prices, and DRM has little to do with it. You might not get the exact phone you want, but well, such is life.
The big deal is that there are two companies that agreed to a mutually beneficial deal, ripping off their customer, and someone dared to muscle in and offer the customer what he wants.
Now, hold on a second. No one is ripping you off, nor is forcing you to get an iPhone; if you don't like the terms, don't buy the product - there's a shitload of good phones to choose as an alternative. Both AT&T and Apple did agree to a mutually beneficial deal which also benefits you, since the phone would cost much more than it does now without the AT&T subsidy. Don't like it? Don't buy it.
The big deal here is that it (finally) seems that the iPhone, a device a lot of geeks orgasm over, can be unlocked to be used with another carrier. Practically every single phone out there can be unlocked in such a fashion, and it was bound to happen sooner or later. But make no mistake, this is no righteous quest for the rights of the consumer.
I'm broke, and I have CHOSEN to not get a job, so my only alternative is to steal? Rubbish
Seriously. You can download it (i bet a lot of people will) or not, but justifying it because NBC won't sell it to you in a format you don't like is bullshit. It's a damn TV show, not food on your plate every day.
I always thought the flying cars thing in BTTF 2 were a bit tongue in cheek; in fact, the whole representation of the future was meant to be humorous. I still laugh when i hear Doc Brown's comparison of the meteorological and postal services in the future;)
"Furthermore traditionally operating systems have split the memory available between kernel mode memory and user-mode memory. This enables calls into the kernel which don't have to flip page tables. Some operating systems offer a 4GB/4GB split which requires this flipping of page tables but it results in much worse performance. Therefore you're actually limited to 2GB or 3GB of memory on Windows depending on how you have things configured."
This is all fine and dandy, but it's still a massive amount of resources (memory). Hell, you could have a whole kernel image on every 32-bit addressed segment and you'd still wouldn't come close to 1GB. I'm asking because i never heard about this before - and i know how poorly Windows performs when it comes memory management.
Not really - the key to compression is removing redunadancy (loseless, as in FLAC) and unneeded information (lossy, as in MP3). If i give you a 100MB.wav of a 1khz sinewave, do you lose 99% if i describe the waveform to you in a paragraph?
After reading the Wikipedia article, I saw they mentioned that Superunknown, so I pulled it up. Keep in mind I haven't listened to it in several years. Wow! I'd forgotten music could sound this good
Well, it also helps that Superunknown is one of the best albums of the past decade...
But still, i agree with the notion that newer music is overly compressed. I mentioned in a similar story how i've recently bought Army of Anyone's debut album and can't stand to listen in for long periods, even when i find myself loving the songs. The mix is utterly loud and "mushy".
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Uh oh. These solid state drives are not intended to be used in desktops, where things like swap files are very common - this device is flash based, and flash still has a lot of issues regarding limited write cycles (i recall the best current flash chips have a maximum of 1,000,000 write cycles per cell). You wouldn't be able to boot from them either, since this hardware is unknown to current BIOSes.
The way i see it is a very, very neat way of replacing hard disk arrays for enterprise use; the device itself it's surely very expensive, but way smaller, cooler, quieter, with less power consumption and near zero manteinance costs. A hd array with similar write/read performance would also be extremely expensive, if even feasible.
There's a lot of considerations using electromagnets in such an arrangement - i guess power wouldn't scale up well since you'd have electromagnets creating opposing fields, which reduces their efficiency. Magnetic coupling is a consideration too - unless you end up with a very good configuration you'd get a big transformer, with coils transferring energy mainly to each other.
Halbach arrays are very neat, but permanent magnets with superimposed opposing magnetic fields tend to weaken each other rather quickly.
Then again, if you buy a $500 phone without checking this kind of things beforehand, there's no one to blame but you. Thing is, the iPhone is more of a status symbol than a practical phone (expensive, very locked, big, low volume, no third party apps, etc...)
Well, nothing's turning out the way he planned, you Pig!
The problem with thief/sshock2 is that the 8800 series cards do not seem to do any dithering which leads to those ugly colors when using a 16bpp mode.
:), until i realized this is, once again, a poorly worded summary that suggests something without any merits. A forum entry reads..
Thank you. The problem here seems to be an bug in the driver, not that (as the article suggested) that nVidia is dropping support for "legacy games". I was about to rant about this (slashdotted-frame of mind, one might say
"Nvidia probably made some significant hardware changes which limits 16 bit rendering. Sadly reduced backwards compatibility is inevitable when technology changes. Therefore I doubt this issue will ever be fixed."
This means either software rendering, or correctly reporting the feature as not present so the game engine can decide what to do. Anyway, SS2 uses (IIRC) DirectX 7. If someday card vendors decide to drop support for older DX versions (which is already a mess, with several verions during these years), you can bet even a reference software renderer will allow to play the game just fine on modern hardware.
HD porn would make the purchase completely justified in my view
It depends, you know. It's all nice and dandy until you start noticing zits in an ass closeup!
Let's disentangle the issue here. First the screen crack obviously did not have anything to do with the OS. Second is it reasonable for a company to specify in their warantee that the OS shall be the installed OS and no-other than what they designate? I think there is a reasonable case for the latter.
Are you sure? I don't know what USA laws have to say on the issue, but can the manufacturer revoke a warranty (which includes, of course, hardware) because of software installed on it? The fact that it's an OS instead of a spreadsheet should have litte to do with it; that's like saying Ford wouldn't replace your car if a wheel comes off just because they don't like the kind of gas you use.
...i liked it better when it was called System Shock 2 :)
(If you liked Bioshock, SS2 is well worth the try. Still an amazing game after all these years)
you might as well say, why should you have a drivers license, they can easily be falsified and/or duplicated.
With the little detail that your driver license is not lodged into yourself, nor carved with laser in your arm. There are very valid (and useful) applications for RFID, but human tagging is not one of them, IMHO. There's already a shitload of id that one carries with himself all the time - passports, driver licenses... retinas, thumbprints and even their teeth.
Oh for gods sake. Yeah, most pets don't have the skill to remove their nametags, atleast when properly placed. Anyway, i was discussing about RFID implants in human beings in the first place.
Most pets don't have the skill to remove or swap-out their own RFID implants.
Neither they have the skill to remove or swap their nametags.
What's the point of RFID implants? RFIDs are simple devices which can be fairly easily falsified and/or duplicated. Never mind that the implant itself can be removed and swapped. It's an intrusive security layer which offers no security whatsoever. And on top of that, it introduces privacy concerns... we have ubiquitous cameras all over major cities, why not RFID scanners?
BTW, here's an interesting Wired article on the subject.
Even if that doesn't happen, they're promising open specifications. This should be a boon for every single open source OS out there.
...for Linux, they're getting my money soon.
nVidia's hardware is great and they have very high quality linux drivers, but when you hit a problem with them you're in for a fun ride. I had it happening on me once or twice in the past. ATI's driver for Linux (hell, even for Windows) were always a joke.
I've got five 70's, and I got to webcam in on my wedding You sure know your way to a lady's heart!
No, it's a quest against the sneaking corporatism in our so called "free" market. Cartels only producing what benefits them, keeping others from producing what the customer would actually want by patents and legal red tape.
The problem with cellphones is that their price is heavily subsidized in order to sell them at reasonable prices. The lock-in ensures that you won't try to swicth carriers after paying a fraction of the real cost of the device. Then again, you can get a locked cellphone for cheap from a number of providers, you can have that same phone unlocked for a fee (or even free if you know what to do)... and you can even buy an unlocked phone directly from the manufacturer. It will cost you an extra though.
We can argue about prices, selection, QOS and even the legality of carrier locks. But cellphones are available for everyone, in a wide range of prices, and DRM has little to do with it. You might not get the exact phone you want, but well, such is life.
The big deal is that there are two companies that agreed to a mutually beneficial deal, ripping off their customer, and someone dared to muscle in and offer the customer what he wants.
Now, hold on a second. No one is ripping you off, nor is forcing you to get an iPhone; if you don't like the terms, don't buy the product - there's a shitload of good phones to choose as an alternative. Both AT&T and Apple did agree to a mutually beneficial deal which also benefits you, since the phone would cost much more than it does now without the AT&T subsidy. Don't like it? Don't buy it.
The big deal here is that it (finally) seems that the iPhone, a device a lot of geeks orgasm over, can be unlocked to be used with another carrier. Practically every single phone out there can be unlocked in such a fashion, and it was bound to happen sooner or later. But make no mistake, this is no righteous quest for the rights of the consumer.
Isn't seven blades on a propeller a bit overdone? I think three or four should be the most efficient
:)
I'd like to think that the naval engenieers who designed that thing didn't add blades just for the sake of it
Anyway, the propeller looks surprisingly like... a propeller. I was kinda expecting to see something completely weird with all that secrecy.
I'm broke, and I have CHOSEN to not get a job, so my only alternative is to steal? Rubbish
Seriously. You can download it (i bet a lot of people will) or not, but justifying it because NBC won't sell it to you in a format you don't like is bullshit. It's a damn TV show, not food on your plate every day.
I always thought the flying cars thing in BTTF 2 were a bit tongue in cheek; in fact, the whole representation of the future was meant to be humorous. I still laugh when i hear Doc Brown's comparison of the meteorological and postal services in the future ;)
"Furthermore traditionally operating systems have split the memory available between kernel mode memory and user-mode memory. This enables calls into the kernel which don't have to flip page tables. Some operating systems offer a 4GB/4GB split which requires this flipping of page tables but it results in much worse performance. Therefore you're actually limited to 2GB or 3GB of memory on Windows depending on how you have things configured."
This is all fine and dandy, but it's still a massive amount of resources (memory). Hell, you could have a whole kernel image on every 32-bit addressed segment and you'd still wouldn't come close to 1GB. I'm asking because i never heard about this before - and i know how poorly Windows performs when it comes memory management.
Running around and blamming Windows when you're using software that can't support more than 2GB of RAM is just lame. Meet the clue stick.
The system can address 4GB. Where're the other two? The kernel takes half of a 4GB system?
Not really - the key to compression is removing redunadancy (loseless, as in FLAC) and unneeded information (lossy, as in MP3). If i give you a 100MB .wav of a 1khz sinewave, do you lose 99% if i describe the waveform to you in a paragraph?
After reading the Wikipedia article, I saw they mentioned that Superunknown, so I pulled it up. Keep in mind I haven't listened to it in several years. Wow! I'd forgotten music could sound this good
Well, it also helps that Superunknown is one of the best albums of the past decade...
But still, i agree with the notion that newer music is overly compressed. I mentioned in a similar story how i've recently bought Army of Anyone's debut album and can't stand to listen in for long periods, even when i find myself loving the songs. The mix is utterly loud and "mushy".