I agree, get a digital cordless phone and then get a headset. This is my solution and it works brilliantly.
I would recommend a Platronics headset, they sound great with the added bonus of being able to plug into a mobile phone with the approriate adapter. The model I bought (M130) has great background noise cancellation, so good that I have answered the phone in my car doing 70Mph+ and they didn't realise I was in the car until I told them!
You can find pictures of the headsets here but don't go to www.platronics.com as it re-directs to a site not suitable for work viewing;)
For UPS and Power supply discussions you can find previous ask slashot article on UPS's
here and discussion on power drain from PC's here
As for network accses to storage etc. You need to
be careful. People claim that ATA66 drives can transfer at 66 MB/s put this isn't the case. You need to take into account the file system and OS overheads on the file transfers. This said harddisk
storage and access speed is the big bottle neck in servers. Having everything in memory would be great, if not then you need raid to ensure that you
can get a decent transfer rate.
On the network front, use CAT6 cables. That way if you find 100Mb is too slow as the cluster expands you can upgrade to gigabit easily.
I don't know about america, but here in the UK most universities are fairly tight on cash as the government doesn't have enough money to go around. Reciently there has been the introduction of tuition fees to UK universities in an attempt to increase the funding available.
Now Universities have a lot of one thing.. talent. Why shouldn't they use the inventions and intelectual property that they own to generate more money to improve facilities and teaching quality?
Yes, in the past universities have produced decent free products that have encouraged development and standards. But this doesn't mean that it won't happen any more. Each invention needs to be considered and dealt with appropriately. Some inventions will be best as open free code / standards, some will make the university in question money if sold.
So long as the money is re-invested to allow the university to grow then I think this is a great thing.
I hate to say it, but use lotus notes (if it's possible to get it to sync to a real mail server rather than a notes one). Notes allows you to store encrypted local copies of stuff on your machine, protected by your notes ID and password
I don't like encouraging people to use notes, but it seems like the answer in this case.
What you need is de-ionised(sp?) water, not just distilled. Distilled water should ensure that you don't have extra salts and crap, but you can still have water ions (H+ and OH-) which will conduct electricity.
If you fitted a de-ionising plant to your water filter / pump system then in theory you could be pretty safe with water leaks.. except for rusting of course.. but some people might that that was a little bit over the top:)
IA64 might be a good architecture, but good processors and real world applications are needed for it to suceed. Why would people buy Itanium if it is slow? They just won't. If nobody buys the processors then the application developers of the real world apps that IA64 needs to suceed will develop for x86-64 instead.
It is pure 64 bit and so is superior in a pure 64 bit environment... However if the most common applications run on x86-64, then x86-64 will suceed and IA64 will die because of a total lack of software. And x86-64 likely to be more prevelant due to it's ability to quickly execute "legacy" x86 code.
Firstly, it would appear that you have at least read some white papers on the web, but have you used a real Itanium?
I have, and let me say that the reason AMD will win is compatibility and making sure that the things don't sound like a jumbo jet taking off. These may seem like minor points but they are what will count.
The major point of the AMD solution is backward compatibility... Intel knows this, why do you think that all their previous chips have been sucessfull? Because they were the "best" solution for the job? NO, not by a long shot. They were, however, able to run the old software faster, and provide a route for new software to run even faster still.
AMD provides this solution, new software can take advantage of the 64 bit addressing and processing several integers in just one register. But at the same time old software can run on the system faster than it would on the same clock speed 32 bit processor.
Look at it from an IT purchasing point of view, you can pick machine A which will theoretically be faster in the future but to get anything even aproaching decent performance you need to buy a whole load of new software. Or you can pick machine B which will run all your current software faster than your current machines, and run future software even faster still. Which would you choose, people like a sure thing, not the promise of something good in the future.
AMD can then concentrate on moving towards a pure 64 bit machine once most of the applications have moved to 64 bit, this makes the most sense long term. You buy your 64 bit machine, run 32 and 64 bit mixed software quickly. Then once you are running mostly 64 bit you can move seamlessly to a 64 bit proven and tested environment.
Current Itaniums are slow large and noisy, this makes a huge difference if you only have a small server room, or have to run a server under your desk - some people really have to do this in smaller comanies. You won't see them on the desktop market anytime soon, they are too slow, 32 bit performance is not great.
The Itanium might have a good archtecture, but I think that it's lack of speed and compatibility with 32 bit applications, coupled with noise and heat will cause it to lose the battle
Yes, definately Warcraft 2 or Starcraft (Starcraft is much better though and runs on win2k which is a bonus)
I have a small network of 4 PC's in my shared house, Starcraft is brilliant! It's pretty much all that gets played, plus it only cost £10 for a copy with broodwar as well. Serious good value for money.
You can spawn 3 copies from one CD and have them join in the game (provided it is hosted by the original CD). Seriously good fun, for a very cheap price. The other plus is that you can have co-op play. I've found that this is a deciding factor. In our house some people get their noses out of joint it there is too much DM conflict. Co-op allows you all to discuss the game afterwards and get the nice fuzzy team feeling;)
I know what you mean, but being able to jump 20ft into the air doesn't mean that you've "thrown the physics out of the door", all it means is that gravity is less in that particular world / game.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy games that don't stick to realistic simulations. But having objects in the game interact in a way that is based on a real physical environment, albeit with modified constants to keep the game "fun", makes the game much easier to play because the environment behaves in the way you expect, and is predictable.
Ah.. fair enough, I must have got the wrong impression from the wording of your post.
I would definately agree that we have a long way to go before the backbone structure can handle decent speed download to large numbers of users. Just imagine the bottle neck when people start getting 10Mbs connections to their houses! (at work I consider that a slow network connection)
"Internet2 plans to offer 10 gigabit capacity by 2003," says Marine Chartois of Dante. "By that time I think we will already be looking at 40 gigabits per second. That covers a larger area, more people and a much more difficult environment."
I think that this network is probably much faster than any backbone in the US, and by the time that the internet2 gets as fast as this the European network will be 4 times as fast.
This network is much faster than anything currently in use in America.
Sorry to ruin your day but America is behind on this one;)
I agree, you probably want a solution that allows you to simply write on real paper, but have a copy on your palm. To do this you can use something like the smartpad
This thing won't allow handwriting recognition, but will "draw" into your palm as you write on the paper. Combined with using the text entry on the palm this could be what you are looking for. Formulas and pictures can be sketched on the paper, and notes can be written on the palm.
Another bonus is that you can a decent size folder to protect your palm, and carry your mobile, pens, etc. etc.
Well, I started as a system programmer working for a UK university, if you are prepared to accept the lower pay in return for decent working conditions then it is a really good place to start.
The University encouraged me to learn and extend my abilities, while letting me be an effective sys-admin on a large number of unix workstations and several servers. Staight out of uni with a Computer Engineering degree but no "real world" experience of unix admin (other than playing with linux in the lab and at home).
If you have the basic unix skills and are prepared to learn then I would academia is the place to start. Once you have some proven time as a sys-admin you can then start moving into "industry" if you want to get paid more.
In my experience Universities generally find it difficult to fill sys-admin places because everyone wants to go for the big bucks, but you will find much more flexibility and a nicer working environment than most buisnesses.
Nothing wrong with 65 degrees, I have a new 1.2Ghz DDR Athlon and mine runs at 55-65 degree depending on room temp, and my machine makes so much fan noise it is insane
I know lots of people that run new athlons and they all run at about 55-65 degrees, I also know several people that build PC's for a living and they always set there motherboard kill temp to 70 degrees.
There has been a lot of talk about thermal death and an article I read talked about AMD tech guys shutting down an athlon when it hit 80 degress (I think it was 80, might have been 70, I can't find the article again) so whats wrong with 65 max? I think you are way too paranoid about CPU temp.
Ok so I had a typo in (at least) one point in my post. Thank you so much for pointing out my mistake so that people didn't get confused and think I meant a totally different game about red stuff.
One thing... Digital is no good for use in the middle of nowhere (as someone suggested earlier). It doesn't matter how much storage space you have when your batteries go flat. If you have a manual camera the only thing you need power for is the flash, and you don't have to use the flash for every shot.
Yes people can carry around large number of flash cards / harddisks just as people can carry large numbers of films, but if your not using digital you don't have to lug 4 car batteries around with you to ensure you don't run out of power when there is no power socket around:)
The only reason I can think of is that Delta Force is probably not quite what they are looking for. The article mentions the ability to command a squad of people, Delta Force doesn't have this ability. Yes you can play in a team but with no good system for orders. For that you need to look at games like Rouge Spear, or SWAT3. Both of these have floors but at least they try to include an element of planning and group work with the computer
Yes the ballistics and terrain in Delta Force are great, long range fire is effected by wind, and the bullets have fairly realistic flight paths but... People can run up stupidly steep hills, snipers can run for ages, drop to prone and instantly have a steady scope (hardly realistic). There is no team command and some things are sacrificed for playability, primarily the enemy AI. Those guys are sooooo easy to kill (unless you are playing on fog when they seem to be able to see about twice as far as you can which is very anoying), you can walk into a building and they just sit there watch you kill them, and they don't run away! I mean come on if you had killed all but one of a team of 8 people from a distance with a sniper's rife, would you really expect the 8th guy just to sit there and get killed?
If they want people to learn real world lessons from these games then they need serious AI, take a lesson from Shogun, in real life people can get scared, people can question orders that they don't think are reasonable.. and you can change those orders once the mission has started (unlike Rogue Spear). Enemy sqauds need to break and seek cover when they are attacked rather than just kneeling down.
Delta Force is a wonderfull game with a good balance between the real world and playability, it is great fun to play. But having said that it doesn't really fullfil the critiria of squad command etc. You can't perform any mission planning before starting the game, you can't plan your own attack, and you can't decide what time of day to attack. These are all things that need to be included in a game which teaches commanders not just foot soldiers
VMWare is brilliant, I used to run it at work under Windows 2000 on a 733Mhz PIII with 512Mb RAM. I ran redhat linux 7.1 and it managed everything perfectly, no re-formatting or re-partitioning and acceptable performace.
It can run a huge list of "Guest" Operating Systems (under windows):
Win 2k
Win NT
98, 95, 3.11, 3.1
MS-DOS 6
Linux (various)
FreeBSD 2.2.x 3.x
It shares your PC's hardware brilliantly allowing sound input and output, CD-Rom sharing, floppy access, and even it's own network interface piggy-backed onto your network card.
Yes it is fairly expensive but it will allow you great OS flexibility without and re-booting, and extra cool features such as VMWare journaling which allows you to "discard" changes made to the file system at the end of a VMWare session - Ideal for running those internet attachments without worrying about virus infection.
I run Win2K at home and I am seriously considering getting it to run some of my old games, the only thing I'm not sure on is how well it would handle any old games that used 3D graphics via DirectX or OpenGL. If anyone knows / has experience....
I dis-agree, the post speaks of self-destruct on the server and being able to run in pretty much any conduit possible. This doesn't sound like a low budget situation to me.
The post also is after physical security, not encryption, It sounds like he/she is trying to protect against some seriously determined people, who probably have lots of resources. If you can hack the connection and just sniff a copy of all the traffic, and happen to have a super-computer lying around, then you can probably decrypt the data eventually. Maybe that isn't aceptable.
As for hiring professionals, maybe he/she is going to get professionals in but wants some background suggestions so they don't get taken for a ride.
I can't comment on which sounds better, ogg or mp3, but what I can comment on the the "sufficient" quality of mp3's. I do some amateur PA work, and my brother is studying to become a sound engineer. Between us we have access to a wide range of playback options ranging from cheap headphones to professional studio gear.
I record all my mp3's at 192 and for just about every computer based situation this is just fine. You PC has so much noise, and in most cases quite cheap and nasty sound cards (not many people are lucky enough to have a turtle beach or better). That combined with cheap speakers or your average pair of headphones (say £25 sony lightweights) you just can't tell the difference without listening very carefully.
Yeah, sure, if you playback on a really nice sound card linked up to studio gear, then yes the differences between an MP3 and a CD are glareingly obvious even to my not very well trained ears. But unless you are sitting down to do nothing but listen to your music then I don't think it's worth much better quality that 192 MP3. Having said that, if you really care and are "listening" to your music not just having it in the background, then rip WAV files, get a high end sound card, decent interconnect etc. Or (much cheaper and easier) just use the CD.
For most PC speaker systems and cheap headphones, I would recommend using MP3 at 160 or 192, but check for yourself. MP3 an album with various bit rates of MP3 (with the same encoder) and compare for yourself - it all depends on what your ears find acceptable, if you are happy with your 160 MP3's then I would stick with that, if you are only listening casually it really isn't worth the effort.
Quite frankly I don't care about smelling pistakes, you know what I meant, so did I, so did probably just about everyone else that can read english. Also this is only slashdot, if I was publishing a paper or writing documentation for software that was sold then it would be another matter
As for being sorry, yeah right, why don't you worry about things that actually matter - like solving peoples problems, not wineing because the people who provide the solutions can't spell. I suppose you'd complain about being saved by mountain rescue if someone had misspelt mountain on the side of the helicopter
I wouldn't let DAT tapes anywhere near backup of stuff I actually care about for several reasons, but mostly, capacity and speed
Firstly size, how much storage are you considering trying to backup? The biggest DAT tape you can get is 20-40Gb compressed. Now your post was talking about 8 Drives, 40Gb each, raid5 would mean 280Gb of data yep? so that would mean 9 DAT tapes to back the whole lot up (with an average of 30Gb per tape) that doesn't sound good to me
Secondly speed, how long will it take to backup 280Gb onto DAT? DDS4 is usually about 300Mb per minute (max), so that is 955 minutes - 15 Hours!
Now for a serious backup solution, even though it's expensive, you proabably want to consider DLT. You can get 40-80Gb on a single DLT tape meaning you only need 5. There are even DLT like solutions that will provide 100-200Gb on a single tape. Also consider speed, a good DAT drive can give you 300Mb per minute, a 80Gb DLT drive can do 720Mb per minute meaning only 6 Hours (one night backup run). Also you must consider reliability, DLT tapes are much more robust and are considered a decent archive media, I know you said cheap but you need to make sure you don't loose your data - that would be expensive.
"First, you'll usually have a transformer. They are notoriously inefficient because of how they work. They are basically two coils with differing numbers of turns next to each other. The input/output ratio is related to the ratio of turns. Basically, power is applied to the primary coil, which has a resistance. The secondary coil actually generates power from the EM field emitted by the primary. It doesn't take a genius to realise that most of the power applied to the primary is lost in the air. "
In a word - no, I'm afraid your wrong on this one, your basic coil transformer is incredibly efficient, they have been around for years and have been refined to a point of near perfect efficiency... I found the following on a website about transformers:
"But the transformer is a passive device -- it cannot add power. Power is equal to the product of the voltage and the current. If the voltage increases the current drops. A high voltage and low current exits the transformer carrying almost the same amount of power along the transmission lines that the initial low voltage and high current did. Most transformers operate at high efficiency, under normal conditions, transmitting about 99% of the power that enters them. (About 1% of the power is lost in heating the transformer.) "
Smoothing and regulating the power can produce a lot of extra heat / inefficieny but but the coil section of the transformer is just great:)
Although I do agree that the best way to find power consumption is to find the things that emmit the most heat though...
Also, looking at a link from another post, it appears that ADSL is spec'd up to 1Mhz. A standard sound card just couldn't produce sound at those kind of frequencies, and it couldn't record / decode them either.
The standard range for human hearing is around 20Hz to 20 kHz, so sound cards are optimised for sound close to this frequency range. The sound generator and sampler just wouldn't work at frequencies much above 20kHz, making any effort to use a standard sound card as part of an ADSL modem completely useless.
Sound card manufacturers won't start making new sound cards that can generate and sample sound at those kind of frequencies because it's really expensive, difficult, and just plain pointless as it isn't sound and nobody can hear it. That doesn't even start taking into account the amount of CPU time needed to process the information and the amount of hassle wiring in hardware voltage / current level protectors and converters. I really think that this is a complete non-starter.
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I agree, get a digital cordless phone and then get a headset. This is my solution and it works brilliantly.
I would recommend a Platronics headset, they sound great with the added bonus of being able to plug into a mobile phone with the approriate adapter. The model I bought (M130) has great background noise cancellation, so good that I have answered the phone in my car doing 70Mph+ and they didn't realise I was in the car until I told them!
You can find pictures of the headsets here but don't go to www.platronics.com as it re-directs to a site not suitable for work viewing ;)
For UPS and Power supply discussions you can find previous ask slashot article on UPS's here and discussion on power drain from PC's here
As for network accses to storage etc. You need to be careful. People claim that ATA66 drives can transfer at 66 MB/s put this isn't the case. You need to take into account the file system and OS overheads on the file transfers. This said harddisk storage and access speed is the big bottle neck in servers. Having everything in memory would be great, if not then you need raid to ensure that you can get a decent transfer rate.
On the network front, use CAT6 cables. That way if you find 100Mb is too slow as the cluster expands you can upgrade to gigabit easily.
I don't know about america, but here in the UK most universities are fairly tight on cash as the government doesn't have enough money to go around. Reciently there has been the introduction of tuition fees to UK universities in an attempt to increase the funding available.
Now Universities have a lot of one thing.. talent. Why shouldn't they use the inventions and intelectual property that they own to generate more money to improve facilities and teaching quality?
Yes, in the past universities have produced decent free products that have encouraged development and standards. But this doesn't mean that it won't happen any more. Each invention needs to be considered and dealt with appropriately. Some inventions will be best as open free code / standards, some will make the university in question money if sold.
So long as the money is re-invested to allow the university to grow then I think this is a great thing.
I hate to say it, but use lotus notes (if it's possible to get it to sync to a real mail server rather than a notes one). Notes allows you to store encrypted local copies of stuff on your machine, protected by your notes ID and password
I don't like encouraging people to use notes, but it seems like the answer in this case.
What you need is de-ionised(sp?) water, not just distilled. Distilled water should ensure that you don't have extra salts and crap, but you can still have water ions (H+ and OH-) which will conduct electricity.
If you fitted a de-ionising plant to your water filter / pump system then in theory you could be pretty safe with water leaks.. except for rusting of course.. but some people might that that was a little bit over the top :)
IA64 might be a good architecture, but good processors and real world applications are needed for it to suceed. Why would people buy Itanium if it is slow? They just won't. If nobody buys the processors then the application developers of the real world apps that IA64 needs to suceed will develop for x86-64 instead.
It is pure 64 bit and so is superior in a pure 64 bit environment... However if the most common applications run on x86-64, then x86-64 will suceed and IA64 will die because of a total lack of software. And x86-64 likely to be more prevelant due to it's ability to quickly execute "legacy" x86 code.
Firstly, it would appear that you have at least read some white papers on the web, but have you used a real Itanium?
I have, and let me say that the reason AMD will win is compatibility and making sure that the things don't sound like a jumbo jet taking off. These may seem like minor points but they are what will count.
The major point of the AMD solution is backward compatibility... Intel knows this, why do you think that all their previous chips have been sucessfull? Because they were the "best" solution for the job? NO, not by a long shot. They were, however, able to run the old software faster, and provide a route for new software to run even faster still.
AMD provides this solution, new software can take advantage of the 64 bit addressing and processing several integers in just one register. But at the same time old software can run on the system faster than it would on the same clock speed 32 bit processor.
Look at it from an IT purchasing point of view, you can pick machine A which will theoretically be faster in the future but to get anything even aproaching decent performance you need to buy a whole load of new software. Or you can pick machine B which will run all your current software faster than your current machines, and run future software even faster still. Which would you choose, people like a sure thing, not the promise of something good in the future.
AMD can then concentrate on moving towards a pure 64 bit machine once most of the applications have moved to 64 bit, this makes the most sense long term. You buy your 64 bit machine, run 32 and 64 bit mixed software quickly. Then once you are running mostly 64 bit you can move seamlessly to a 64 bit proven and tested environment.
Current Itaniums are slow large and noisy, this makes a huge difference if you only have a small server room, or have to run a server under your desk - some people really have to do this in smaller comanies. You won't see them on the desktop market anytime soon, they are too slow, 32 bit performance is not great.
The Itanium might have a good archtecture, but I think that it's lack of speed and compatibility with 32 bit applications, coupled with noise and heat will cause it to lose the battle
Yes, definately Warcraft 2 or Starcraft (Starcraft is much better though and runs on win2k which is a bonus)
I have a small network of 4 PC's in my shared house, Starcraft is brilliant! It's pretty much all that gets played, plus it only cost £10 for a copy with broodwar as well. Serious good value for money.
You can spawn 3 copies from one CD and have them join in the game (provided it is hosted by the original CD). Seriously good fun, for a very cheap price. The other plus is that you can have co-op play. I've found that this is a deciding factor. In our house some people get their noses out of joint it there is too much DM conflict. Co-op allows you all to discuss the game afterwards and get the nice fuzzy team feeling ;)
I know what you mean, but being able to jump 20ft into the air doesn't mean that you've "thrown the physics out of the door", all it means is that gravity is less in that particular world / game.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy games that don't stick to realistic simulations. But having objects in the game interact in a way that is based on a real physical environment, albeit with modified constants to keep the game "fun", makes the game much easier to play because the environment behaves in the way you expect, and is predictable.
Isn't this just the same as this story from a short while ago?
Or am I missing something? :)
Ah.. fair enough, I must have got the wrong impression from the wording of your post.
I would definately agree that we have a long way to go before the backbone structure can handle decent speed download to large numbers of users. Just imagine the bottle neck when people start getting 10Mbs connections to their houses! (at work I consider that a slow network connection)
From the Guardian Article...:
"Internet2 plans to offer 10 gigabit capacity by 2003," says Marine Chartois of Dante. "By that time I think we will already be looking at 40 gigabits per second. That covers a larger area, more people and a much more difficult environment."
I think that this network is probably much faster than any backbone in the US, and by the time that the internet2 gets as fast as this the European network will be 4 times as fast.
This network is much faster than anything currently in use in America.
Sorry to ruin your day but America is behind on this one ;)
I agree, you probably want a solution that allows you to simply write on real paper, but have a copy on your palm. To do this you can use something like the smartpad
or from the seiko web site: here
This thing won't allow handwriting recognition, but will "draw" into your palm as you write on the paper. Combined with using the text entry on the palm this could be what you are looking for. Formulas and pictures can be sketched on the paper, and notes can be written on the palm.
Another bonus is that you can a decent size folder to protect your palm, and carry your mobile, pens, etc. etc.
Well, I started as a system programmer working for a UK university, if you are prepared to accept the lower pay in return for decent working conditions then it is a really good place to start.
The University encouraged me to learn and extend my abilities, while letting me be an effective sys-admin on a large number of unix workstations and several servers. Staight out of uni with a Computer Engineering degree but no "real world" experience of unix admin (other than playing with linux in the lab and at home).
If you have the basic unix skills and are prepared to learn then I would academia is the place to start. Once you have some proven time as a sys-admin you can then start moving into "industry" if you want to get paid more.
In my experience Universities generally find it difficult to fill sys-admin places because everyone wants to go for the big bucks, but you will find much more flexibility and a nicer working environment than most buisnesses.
Nothing wrong with 65 degrees, I have a new 1.2Ghz DDR Athlon and mine runs at 55-65 degree depending on room temp, and my machine makes so much fan noise it is insane
I know lots of people that run new athlons and they all run at about 55-65 degrees, I also know several people that build PC's for a living and they always set there motherboard kill temp to 70 degrees.
There has been a lot of talk about thermal death and an article I read talked about AMD tech guys shutting down an athlon when it hit 80 degress (I think it was 80, might have been 70, I can't find the article again) so whats wrong with 65 max? I think you are way too paranoid about CPU temp.
Ok so I had a typo in (at least) one point in my post. Thank you so much for pointing out my mistake so that people didn't get confused and think I meant a totally different game about red stuff.
One thing... Digital is no good for use in the middle of nowhere (as someone suggested earlier). It doesn't matter how much storage space you have when your batteries go flat. If you have a manual camera the only thing you need power for is the flash, and you don't have to use the flash for every shot.
Yes people can carry around large number of flash cards / harddisks just as people can carry large numbers of films, but if your not using digital you don't have to lug 4 car batteries around with you to ensure you don't run out of power when there is no power socket around :)
Why not use Delta Force Landwarrior?
The only reason I can think of is that Delta Force is probably not quite what they are looking for. The article mentions the ability to command a squad of people, Delta Force doesn't have this ability. Yes you can play in a team but with no good system for orders. For that you need to look at games like Rouge Spear, or SWAT3. Both of these have floors but at least they try to include an element of planning and group work with the computer
Yes the ballistics and terrain in Delta Force are great, long range fire is effected by wind, and the bullets have fairly realistic flight paths but... People can run up stupidly steep hills, snipers can run for ages, drop to prone and instantly have a steady scope (hardly realistic). There is no team command and some things are sacrificed for playability, primarily the enemy AI. Those guys are sooooo easy to kill (unless you are playing on fog when they seem to be able to see about twice as far as you can which is very anoying), you can walk into a building and they just sit there watch you kill them, and they don't run away! I mean come on if you had killed all but one of a team of 8 people from a distance with a sniper's rife, would you really expect the 8th guy just to sit there and get killed?
If they want people to learn real world lessons from these games then they need serious AI, take a lesson from Shogun, in real life people can get scared, people can question orders that they don't think are reasonable.. and you can change those orders once the mission has started (unlike Rogue Spear). Enemy sqauds need to break and seek cover when they are attacked rather than just kneeling down.
Delta Force is a wonderfull game with a good balance between the real world and playability, it is great fun to play. But having said that it doesn't really fullfil the critiria of squad command etc. You can't perform any mission planning before starting the game, you can't plan your own attack, and you can't decide what time of day to attack. These are all things that need to be included in a game which teaches commanders not just foot soldiers
VMWare is brilliant, I used to run it at work under Windows 2000 on a 733Mhz PIII with 512Mb RAM. I ran redhat linux 7.1 and it managed everything perfectly, no re-formatting or re-partitioning and acceptable performace.
It can run a huge list of "Guest" Operating Systems (under windows):
It shares your PC's hardware brilliantly allowing sound input and output, CD-Rom sharing, floppy access, and even it's own network interface piggy-backed onto your network card.
Yes it is fairly expensive but it will allow you great OS flexibility without and re-booting, and extra cool features such as VMWare journaling which allows you to "discard" changes made to the file system at the end of a VMWare session - Ideal for running those internet attachments without worrying about virus infection.
I run Win2K at home and I am seriously considering getting it to run some of my old games, the only thing I'm not sure on is how well it would handle any old games that used 3D graphics via DirectX or OpenGL. If anyone knows / has experience....
I dis-agree, the post speaks of self-destruct on the server and being able to run in pretty much any conduit possible. This doesn't sound like a low budget situation to me.
The post also is after physical security, not encryption, It sounds like he/she is trying to protect against some seriously determined people, who probably have lots of resources. If you can hack the connection and just sniff a copy of all the traffic, and happen to have a super-computer lying around, then you can probably decrypt the data eventually. Maybe that isn't aceptable.
As for hiring professionals, maybe he/she is going to get professionals in but wants some background suggestions so they don't get taken for a ride.
I can't comment on which sounds better, ogg or mp3, but what I can comment on the the "sufficient" quality of mp3's. I do some amateur PA work, and my brother is studying to become a sound engineer. Between us we have access to a wide range of playback options ranging from cheap headphones to professional studio gear.
I record all my mp3's at 192 and for just about every computer based situation this is just fine. You PC has so much noise, and in most cases quite cheap and nasty sound cards (not many people are lucky enough to have a turtle beach or better). That combined with cheap speakers or your average pair of headphones (say £25 sony lightweights) you just can't tell the difference without listening very carefully.
Yeah, sure, if you playback on a really nice sound card linked up to studio gear, then yes the differences between an MP3 and a CD are glareingly obvious even to my not very well trained ears. But unless you are sitting down to do nothing but listen to your music then I don't think it's worth much better quality that 192 MP3. Having said that, if you really care and are "listening" to your music not just having it in the background, then rip WAV files, get a high end sound card, decent interconnect etc. Or (much cheaper and easier) just use the CD.
For most PC speaker systems and cheap headphones, I would recommend using MP3 at 160 or 192, but check for yourself. MP3 an album with various bit rates of MP3 (with the same encoder) and compare for yourself - it all depends on what your ears find acceptable, if you are happy with your 160 MP3's then I would stick with that, if you are only listening casually it really isn't worth the effort.
Quite frankly I don't care about smelling pistakes, you know what I meant, so did I, so did probably just about everyone else that can read english. Also this is only slashdot, if I was publishing a paper or writing documentation for software that was sold then it would be another matter
As for being sorry, yeah right, why don't you worry about things that actually matter - like solving peoples problems, not wineing because the people who provide the solutions can't spell. I suppose you'd complain about being saved by mountain rescue if someone had misspelt mountain on the side of the helicopter
I wouldn't let DAT tapes anywhere near backup of stuff I actually care about for several reasons, but mostly, capacity and speed
Firstly size, how much storage are you considering trying to backup? The biggest DAT tape you can get is 20-40Gb compressed. Now your post was talking about 8 Drives, 40Gb each, raid5 would mean 280Gb of data yep? so that would mean 9 DAT tapes to back the whole lot up (with an average of 30Gb per tape) that doesn't sound good to me
Secondly speed, how long will it take to backup 280Gb onto DAT? DDS4 is usually about 300Mb per minute (max), so that is 955 minutes - 15 Hours!
Now for a serious backup solution, even though it's expensive, you proabably want to consider DLT. You can get 40-80Gb on a single DLT tape meaning you only need 5. There are even DLT like solutions that will provide 100-200Gb on a single tape. Also consider speed, a good DAT drive can give you 300Mb per minute, a 80Gb DLT drive can do 720Mb per minute meaning only 6 Hours (one night backup run). Also you must consider reliability, DLT tapes are much more robust and are considered a decent archive media, I know you said cheap but you need to make sure you don't loose your data - that would be expensive.
In a word - no, I'm afraid your wrong on this one, your basic coil transformer is incredibly efficient, they have been around for years and have been refined to a point of near perfect efficiency... I found the following on a website about transformers:
"But the transformer is a passive device -- it cannot add power. Power is equal to the product of the voltage and the current. If the voltage increases the current drops. A high voltage and low current exits the transformer carrying almost the same amount of power along the transmission lines that the initial low voltage and high current did. Most transformers operate at high efficiency, under normal conditions, transmitting about 99% of the power that enters them. (About 1% of the power is lost in heating the transformer.) "Smoothing and regulating the power can produce a lot of extra heat / inefficieny but but the coil section of the transformer is just great :)
Although I do agree that the best way to find power consumption is to find the things that emmit the most heat though...
Also, looking at a link from another post, it appears that ADSL is spec'd up to 1Mhz. A standard sound card just couldn't produce sound at those kind of frequencies, and it couldn't record / decode them either.
The standard range for human hearing is around 20Hz to 20 kHz, so sound cards are optimised for sound close to this frequency range. The sound generator and sampler just wouldn't work at frequencies much above 20kHz, making any effort to use a standard sound card as part of an ADSL modem completely useless.
Sound card manufacturers won't start making new sound cards that can generate and sample sound at those kind of frequencies because it's really expensive, difficult, and just plain pointless as it isn't sound and nobody can hear it. That doesn't even start taking into account the amount of CPU time needed to process the information and the amount of hassle wiring in hardware voltage / current level protectors and converters. I really think that this is a complete non-starter.