I worked with a 20 inch Compaq CRT for a year or so, it sucked big time, if not for the sharpness, then for the inconvenient curvature of the screen. And it managed to be even larger than a Trinitron screen. I also know the SyncMaster line, it was indeed very ok from a screen quality point of view, but I remember from the 12 we had at the computer lab at university that some of them broke down pretty soon. Maybe inconsistent production quality. Actually, I even found This old Amazon review page on the SyncMaster, which doesn't look good at all.
As for color calibration, my Trinitron is probably not correctly calibrated, but I'm a bit colorblind anyway:) But at least black is really black, and with a lot of calibration work you can even get a lot of fine gray-scales correctly. Another point: if you are not watching HDTV on an LCD, but just normal TV, then the scaling of the resolutions creates a very crappy, blurry, pixelated image on the LCD. For some reason it looks much more natural and fluid on a CRT. This problem will probably solve itself as TV will be made in higher native resolutions, though.
I also found out why I don't see the infamous lines so much: my eyes are about 40 cm or more from the screen, the lines disappear at that distance.
Life is all about compromises, and for house and desk work the LCDs are a huge advantage, more space on your desk, better way to communicate with other people (there's not a huge lump inbetween you and the other) the screen can be further away from your eyes, and already for a few years the sharpness equals or exceeds that of a CRT. Also the monitor will fit on any desk, whereas I had to buy a separate rack to put my 25 KG CRT on:) So I understand you were not trolling, but I really do understand why people loved their Trinitrons, despite or maybe even because of its flaws.
Ah, maybe that was it! The first time I used a 'modern' LCD it was indeed a VGA-coupled one, and the letters in the middle seemed to have a horizontally shifted "shadow". I think the LCD screen has an option to fine tune the frequency, and that used to help sharpen at least the text at that part of the screen that I look at the most. I think I'm still not running via DVI (I actually forgot!), so I cannot check if I have the same effect on a DVI screen.
I did get used to the LCD screens faster than I could imagine, and find even the low-end LCDs totally agreeable by now.
No no, the moment that skull would have been found everything that was previously well described by evolutionary theories will instantly cease to exist. Most variations of fruit and vegetables that have been cross-bred by man ages ago will disappear, instead you will only get the god-fruit and god-vegetables. Sorry about that, but the apple you ate yesterday is just the result of a theory, not of experimenting using a successful methodology considering the mixing of genes.
I personally am still hoping for god to design the ability to think for themselves into the brains of these religious extremist zealots.
If they're not, or something contradictory is observed, the theory is adjusted.
Scientists are curious people, they might use a theory but also want to know when the theory doesn't work anymore, and why. This is what makes the thrills of science. Without awareness of the limits of your theories, you will get nowhere in science. This is why it's easy to find scientists who will talk about the failures of evolution theory. Now try to find an ID-proponent that can actually point out the fallacies and limits of ID.
Hmm I'd say you're a bit trolling here. The overall viewing quality compared to other CRTs is much higher, and compared to LCDs, text is more easily readable, it easily gets blurry on an lcd. Watching a movie with a lot of black in it on an LCD still sucks like hell, I could reason that I cannot understand why people pay for that, it's like going to the cinema where the screen is made out of aluminum foil.
I still use my IBM P200 (with 13w3 connector!) day in day out, I know about the wires, and I don't see them when I'm not looking for them. Easy as that.
It was the last in line, and I was amazed to see it in a normal computer store. I waited a long time, but eventually paid the 450 euros for it back in the day (1999 I guess) when there were no euros yet, and coupled it to my pentium I, which was worth about 50 euros at that time;) I am still using it, and carrying it around every time I move:) but at some point it will go and make place for something sleek, and a beamer for the movies. Sigh.
I moved to Germany 4 years ago and had to change banks. I searched for the online banking possibilities for several banks, and found that the bank that someone from work used to advice to all new foreign employees had an online banking system that required to install two plugins (!) for internet explorer. The other bank I checked had a full website-based banking system with even a test account to try out its functionality. That was an easy choice, maybe I should have made it clear to the bank with the stupid system. It's better now, though, the big banks have perfect browser-independent online banking systems and even the bank I didn't chose switched recently, I guess their current clients also got fed-up with their severely broken online banking.
Didn't you read it? The exacting standards don't work without changing the kernel. And how would YOU write investment firm software without exacting standards, I ask you that. Or the ability to defrag ext2 (which, according to a quick google search, is possible (if it would ever be needed) with the appropriately called program 'defrag'). Or the ability to use token ring (the mini-how-to of token-ring for linux had version 4.1 in 1998). I guess this is one of those straight-out-of-college consultants? Damn waste of money (actually everyone's money, you pay for it indirectly, e.g. by higher inflation, when big investment companies don't have their things at order and are on their way to a collapse)
Then again, maybe the guy just needed to do these things now and just trolled to get the answers from slashdot posters that are stupid enough to respond;)
I have been thinking about a ~ 300 euro second hand X31 and was checking e-bay for that when in the mean time the EEE arrived. First of all: power management and other driver issues. I want to use linux, I actually need it for my job (lucky me). I know no single person who has managed to get correctly working power management on a laptop. Whereas the EEE just bloody works! The power button activates a nice simple menu with several options that all work. (Note: going to sleep mode while on an external screen resets the screen resolution when waking up, bugger). Also: sound works out of the box, video works out of the box, the web camera works, and the skype 2.0 beta you can get from the eee repository enables skype video chat. I've spent enough time hopelessly configuring files, searching the web, reading man pages, to just want a machine that requires no work for its basic functioning. If I want, I can search around and tweak it to my needs, but I don't have to. That, and the fact that you don't know what a second hand laptop has been through (how long until it breaks, scratches on the screen, etc). And second hand laptops are ridicilously expensive, especially if you want a desired one like the X31 or an exclusive one like the panasonic toughbook.
A personal point is that I believed already for a long time that something like the eee should be made, simple hardware, low computing power, but full computer capabilities, especially video out (not a PDA with a keyboard). I just had to have one. Typing from it now!
if you had a relationship where you don't talk to each other by any other means than e-mail for a whole month, then maybe you had some problems already;)
I think the closest I came to lost e-mail are the various cases where the mail ends up automatically in the spam box of the receiver. Didn't this happen a few years ago to college admission mails to prospective students using hotmail?
Then again, good old snail mail within a company I know has a much worse efficiency than e-mail. Every time I forgot to make a copy of my outgoing mail, I could be sure that it would get lost:(
hmm, if I compare how carbon fibre (with considerable lower mass needed for similar strength) has remained a premium product whereas in the same time aluminium has become more of a commodity in e.g. the automotive field, I wonder if this small difference in density will be worth the effort. Maybe when it will become possible to create complete parts made out of correctly aligned tubes in one go it will see an application. Or in special situations, how good can it resist sheering/grinding? Still, you need a manufacturing process with reproducible quality to be able to test these things, so we'll find out soon enough.
In any case, expect this stuff to become a hit in the premium bike/automotive/sailing/fishing market, any of those hobbies were materials are often chosen mostly because you can brag about it to your fellow hobbyists.
Indeed, or the scheme to do the steering of such microamp fields through your body would be so damned complicated that developing this system would be either impossible or overly expensive. And at that point you still haven't thought of a decent take-up mechanism. As I said before, I am ok with Roland Piquepaille giving a shot on popular science articles, but please add some well-thought-through criticism to the PR shit that comes from universities. "Submarine" in-body medicine has been a dream since Asimov wrote about it, but please stop the unreasonable extrapolations from any nano-particle to a submarine that can save us from cancer LOL OMG!
In the mean time that these people are looking for a problem that fits their solution, a lot of REAL scientific innovation has been going on, e.g. microsensorics and subcutaneous pumps to help diabetes patients in a life-improving way.
Well, I was talking out of personal experience;) Not at TACC, though. Debugging such issues on these systems is always very difficult. There are a lot of users, all have different programs and it might be just a bug in the user's program. And then there are a lot of incompatibilities between several compilers and network systems (infiniband, etc).
I guess the field is just too fast-moving to force some hardware/software standards on it, but its bugginess does cost a lot of money and computing time, and since parallel computing is the way to go, something has to be done.
Hmmm, there are records from the court in Amsterdam, I guess from the 15-16th century, where the punishment for repeatedly disturbing the rest at night was to go on a pilgrimage to Santiago de compostella. Why was this a punishment then, if you could stay for free at those monasteries? Well, because in between the monasteries you had quite the chance to get robbed/killed. Today it is probably more safe, and at least in Europe it is still possible to walk to Santiago de Compostella, most of the places to stay within a day's walking distance are still there. It was quite popular in the holy year, I guess 2004, someone I know walked the part starting at the Spanish border. Even one of the Bush' daughters walked there (be it only the last mile or so). To go from here to Jerusalem might be a bit more difficult nowadays, but at least in the 60's there were still people doing it in a 2CV:)
I can recommend quite a nice book on the topic of medieval pre-book-printing literature: "Der Parzival des Wolfram von Eschenbach / Dieter Kühn". It gives a very lively image of the spreading of worldly literature in the middle ages, the nice thing is that he tries to use the latest scientific knowledge of medieval society, but puts in in a fictional context to make it easier to understand* from today's point of view. For example, it becomes clear that most "knights" were just middle class administrative employers, spending most of their time doing the book-keeping of their lord. I think it even hits on the rather dubious politics behind the crusades, especially the Fourth crusade reminds a lot of modern politics, where despite the actual goal of 'freeing the holy land' the crusaders end up fighting a Christian trade town because of a sponsoring deal with Venice. Will no-one ever learn?:)
* If you know German, that is. There is even an audio-book version, released in 2007.
It goes up even further, I use 1152x862 or something of that kind on my CRT, it should even be able to up to anything lower than 2048x2048, but there seem to be sme issues with the intel driver that makes some resolutions impossible, especially for widescreen lcds. I am truly impressed with Xandros, even though Xandros can be considered evil due to their business practices ("patent" deal with MS, activation schemes for Linux...).
And it truly is a "lap"top, "knee"top even, as I'm typing this on my eee in my garden now, enjoying the early spring:)
Within four years the Performance/Watt ratio will have dropped compared to state of the art, so it would make very little sense to keep the thing taking valuable computer room space and working hours of the technical staff. It happens with all supercomputing machines, just Moore's law in practice. What I think is still a big problem is that there are still many problems getting the hardware work correctly in parallel. Often half a year or longer is lost debugging file system/network issues, which is a considerable time compared to the total effective lifespan. With all the multicores in the making, a sturdy parallel computing implementation is very much needed!
Sorry, but I don't understand you. Why do you financially support an institution of which you know that it is actively trying to limit the functionality of the goods you buy. You already have to use an external program of apparently unclear legality to be able to use the iTunes songs in the way you like. You are not obliged at all to use iTunes, there are DRM-free alternatives out there, use your money to support your rights to get DRM-free music.
I think Apple had the right idea when they made OS X. Redo the whole OS, and then include the old OS in a compatibility VM.
The idea might be right, but creating an implementation where you use your media player as a fundamental layer of your graphical engine is not completely right I would say;)
Ulysses is a joint ESA/NASA mission. ESA manages the mission operations and provided the spacecraft, built by Dornier Systems, Germany (now Astrium). NASA provided the Space Shuttle Discovery for launch and the inertial upper stage and payload-assist module to put Ulysses in its correct orbit. NASA also provided the radioisotope thermoelectric generator which powers the spacecraft and payload.
A combined international effort combining the work from different cultures with their different approaches is no easy task and indeed something to be proud of.
Besides: if I were an american, I should be ashamed about the recent buget cuts for the NSF and the sickening costs of the Iraq war. Pride is not about putting images of your flag on everything and shooting innocent civilians in foreign countries, but about taking care of your people and their rights and education and making sure you are a leading civilization who is able to use diplomacy to create a good network with the rest of the world, instead of muscle-rolling. Just noting.
Ho ho ho, in effect, books were in the hands of the elite, the monasteries also being part of the elite in that time, but also some noblemen had their own libraries . The value of the books was immense, as only up to a hundred copies were available and these books would not be given in the hands of some lower-class person (if that person could read at all). In practice, if you wanted to get a copy of a book, you would have to be able to afford a servant who could read and write, and send this servant all the way to the place the book was located, pay for travelling expenses, and/or a weaponed guard if you wanted to loan the book over to your place. Also understand that copying the book would take a long long time, which means a very costly and slow way of knowledge movement. Gutenberg's invention did help bringing books out of the elitist circle, if not for my arguments above, then just for the sake of the economy of bulk products.
This is good news for a whole lot of theoretical physicists/chemists who could finally put some good income to the many painful years trying to work with fortran:) Maybe I'm just not enough of a Fortran wizard but I get gray hairs just thinking about the idea of writing more than a 100 output files in fortran. At least I think that was the limit of fort.xx files you could have, I did my very best to forget all about it.
Not just the hacking, imagine getting the equipment! Say, they will need a bunch of routers, this should first be applied for, form so and so, an offer should be received from several firms, accounting has to accept it, etc., by the time the ordering processed is finished, the material will be either outdated or far from the technically optimal solution.
In any way this all will have taken much longer than it takes some Russian 18 year old to update his hardware. The point is, for fast cyber attacks you don't need certification and rigourous testing of your material. The army (I'm not from the US but it's all the same everywhere) seems to cannot do without.
Implement a slightly buggy ODF reader in MSOffice, just like internet explorer has a slightly buggy html reader. People using MSOffice (because the firm already has a few thousand contracts of MSOffice, and so has it suppliers/partners) will complain that the ODF files from **Office don't work correctly in MSOffice. Expected line of tought: MS is a respectable company, right, so the fault must be with the free program of those stinkin hippies from **Office, better stick to MS. How can a free program be good anyway.
MS biggest asset is that there are a lot of brainwashed (or brainless?) minds in the budget and management departments to be converted to use free software.
Slashdot Mirror
As for color calibration, my Trinitron is probably not correctly calibrated, but I'm a bit colorblind anyway :) But at least black is really black, and with a lot of calibration work you can even get a lot of fine gray-scales correctly. Another point: if you are not watching HDTV on an LCD, but just normal TV, then the scaling of the resolutions creates a very crappy, blurry, pixelated image on the LCD. For some reason it looks much more natural and fluid on a CRT. This problem will probably solve itself as TV will be made in higher native resolutions, though.
I also found out why I don't see the infamous lines so much: my eyes are about 40 cm or more from the screen, the lines disappear at that distance.
Life is all about compromises, and for house and desk work the LCDs are a huge advantage, more space on your desk, better way to communicate with other people (there's not a huge lump inbetween you and the other) the screen can be further away from your eyes, and already for a few years the sharpness equals or exceeds that of a CRT. Also the monitor will fit on any desk, whereas I had to buy a separate rack to put my 25 KG CRT on :) So I understand you were not trolling, but I really do understand why people loved their Trinitrons, despite or maybe even because of its flaws.
I did get used to the LCD screens faster than I could imagine, and find even the low-end LCDs totally agreeable by now.
I personally am still hoping for god to design the ability to think for themselves into the brains of these religious extremist zealots.
If they're not, or something contradictory is observed, the theory is adjusted.
Scientists are curious people, they might use a theory but also want to know when the theory doesn't work anymore, and why. This is what makes the thrills of science. Without awareness of the limits of your theories, you will get nowhere in science. This is why it's easy to find scientists who will talk about the failures of evolution theory. Now try to find an ID-proponent that can actually point out the fallacies and limits of ID.
I still use my IBM P200 (with 13w3 connector!) day in day out, I know about the wires, and I don't see them when I'm not looking for them. Easy as that. It was the last in line, and I was amazed to see it in a normal computer store. I waited a long time, but eventually paid the 450 euros for it back in the day (1999 I guess) when there were no euros yet, and coupled it to my pentium I, which was worth about 50 euros at that time ;) I am still using it, and carrying it around every time I move :) but at some point it will go and make place for something sleek, and a beamer for the movies. Sigh.
I moved to Germany 4 years ago and had to change banks. I searched for the online banking possibilities for several banks, and found that the bank that someone from work used to advice to all new foreign employees had an online banking system that required to install two plugins (!) for internet explorer. The other bank I checked had a full website-based banking system with even a test account to try out its functionality. That was an easy choice, maybe I should have made it clear to the bank with the stupid system. It's better now, though, the big banks have perfect browser-independent online banking systems and even the bank I didn't chose switched recently, I guess their current clients also got fed-up with their severely broken online banking.
Then again, maybe the guy just needed to do these things now and just trolled to get the answers from slashdot posters that are stupid enough to respond ;)
A personal point is that I believed already for a long time that something like the eee should be made, simple hardware, low computing power, but full computer capabilities, especially video out (not a PDA with a keyboard). I just had to have one. Typing from it now!
I think the closest I came to lost e-mail are the various cases where the mail ends up automatically in the spam box of the receiver. Didn't this happen a few years ago to college admission mails to prospective students using hotmail? Then again, good old snail mail within a company I know has a much worse efficiency than e-mail. Every time I forgot to make a copy of my outgoing mail, I could be sure that it would get lost :(
In any case, expect this stuff to become a hit in the premium bike/automotive/sailing/fishing market, any of those hobbies were materials are often chosen mostly because you can brag about it to your fellow hobbyists.
In the mean time that these people are looking for a problem that fits their solution, a lot of REAL scientific innovation has been going on, e.g. microsensorics and subcutaneous pumps to help diabetes patients in a life-improving way.
count me in as well
And what when you're off-duty? And your employer happens to be your ISP as well, using the same filter?
That and the 5-blade gilette. I think there were even more.
I guess the field is just too fast-moving to force some hardware/software standards on it, but its bugginess does cost a lot of money and computing time, and since parallel computing is the way to go, something has to be done.
I can recommend quite a nice book on the topic of medieval pre-book-printing literature: "Der Parzival des Wolfram von Eschenbach / Dieter Kühn". It gives a very lively image of the spreading of worldly literature in the middle ages, the nice thing is that he tries to use the latest scientific knowledge of medieval society, but puts in in a fictional context to make it easier to understand* from today's point of view. For example, it becomes clear that most "knights" were just middle class administrative employers, spending most of their time doing the book-keeping of their lord. I think it even hits on the rather dubious politics behind the crusades, especially the Fourth crusade reminds a lot of modern politics, where despite the actual goal of 'freeing the holy land' the crusaders end up fighting a Christian trade town because of a sponsoring deal with Venice. Will no-one ever learn? :)
* If you know German, that is. There is even an audio-book version, released in 2007.
Except for the fact that the ultrasonic sound generated by such a device will also break down structures in the human bodies. No thanks.
And it truly is a "lap"top, "knee"top even, as I'm typing this on my eee in my garden now, enjoying the early spring :)
Within four years the Performance/Watt ratio will have dropped compared to state of the art, so it would make very little sense to keep the thing taking valuable computer room space and working hours of the technical staff. It happens with all supercomputing machines, just Moore's law in practice. What I think is still a big problem is that there are still many problems getting the hardware work correctly in parallel. Often half a year or longer is lost debugging file system/network issues, which is a considerable time compared to the total effective lifespan. With all the multicores in the making, a sturdy parallel computing implementation is very much needed!
Sorry, but I don't understand you. Why do you financially support an institution of which you know that it is actively trying to limit the functionality of the goods you buy. You already have to use an external program of apparently unclear legality to be able to use the iTunes songs in the way you like. You are not obliged at all to use iTunes, there are DRM-free alternatives out there, use your money to support your rights to get DRM-free music.
The idea might be right, but creating an implementation where you use your media player as a fundamental layer of your graphical engine is not completely right I would say ;)
A combined international effort combining the work from different cultures with their different approaches is no easy task and indeed something to be proud of.
Besides: if I were an american, I should be ashamed about the recent buget cuts for the NSF and the sickening costs of the Iraq war. Pride is not about putting images of your flag on everything and shooting innocent civilians in foreign countries, but about taking care of your people and their rights and education and making sure you are a leading civilization who is able to use diplomacy to create a good network with the rest of the world, instead of muscle-rolling. Just noting.
Ho ho ho, in effect, books were in the hands of the elite, the monasteries also being part of the elite in that time, but also some noblemen had their own libraries . The value of the books was immense, as only up to a hundred copies were available and these books would not be given in the hands of some lower-class person (if that person could read at all). In practice, if you wanted to get a copy of a book, you would have to be able to afford a servant who could read and write, and send this servant all the way to the place the book was located, pay for travelling expenses, and/or a weaponed guard if you wanted to loan the book over to your place. Also understand that copying the book would take a long long time, which means a very costly and slow way of knowledge movement. Gutenberg's invention did help bringing books out of the elitist circle, if not for my arguments above, then just for the sake of the economy of bulk products.
This is good news for a whole lot of theoretical physicists/chemists who could finally put some good income to the many painful years trying to work with fortran :) Maybe I'm just not enough of a Fortran wizard but I get gray hairs just thinking about the idea of writing more than a 100 output files in fortran. At least I think that was the limit of fort.xx files you could have, I did my very best to forget all about it.
In any way this all will have taken much longer than it takes some Russian 18 year old to update his hardware. The point is, for fast cyber attacks you don't need certification and rigourous testing of your material. The army (I'm not from the US but it's all the same everywhere) seems to cannot do without.
MS biggest asset is that there are a lot of brainwashed (or brainless?) minds in the budget and management departments to be converted to use free software.