But the truth of the matter is, the vast, VAST majority of the world's scientists overwhelmingly agree that Global Warming is very real and poses a significant threat to our ecosystem and our way of life.
The "vast, VAST majority" of the world's scientists apparently were pretty upset that somebody was speaking for them, which is probably a reason that a rather large number of them signed this petition. I suppose the thousands of PhD's listed there all work for oil companies?
Honestly, to me it sounds like the original question was a hypothetical one. If somebody actually did have a boss that laid out the "requirements" of a project in terms of what fancy buzzword features the development environment would support, then the project is doomed to fail.
The requirements need to be in terms of: what will the user interface look like? Is it client server, standalone, what kind of network communication is required, and basically everything else involving what is this application supposed to do? If you don't know any of that, it makes no sense to even pick a language.
This is like your boss saying he wants you to construct a bridge, and you have to pick ahead of time whether your bridge is going to be a suspension bridge, cantilever bridge, truss... well it's kind of hard to make that decision if you don't know how high or long the friggin' thing has to be, what kind of load will be travelling over it, and whether you're gonna be going over water. If you pick the wrong technology for the job, your project will go way over budget and the developers will hate every minute of it.
The government could help this along by promoting the idea of, and provideing incentives for, Internet access as a basic right on the level of shelter and food. It's a fascinating time to be alive....
Let me guess.... you haven't been alive for very long.
Humans, on average, can survive a few days without water, a few weeks without food, and around 70 years without internet access.
Death, Taxes, and nVidia releasing a new product line every 6 months.
Every spring (since the original GeForce) a new generation of video cards has come out of nVidia. Every fall, that technology is "tweaked" and is dubbed the "fall refresh" which usually has more memory and higher clock rates. The Ti500 was the fall refresh for the GeForce3. Previous generations just had an "Ultra" stuck on the name.
I have a GeForce3 from last spring. I will probably wait until at least the Fall Refresh of the GeForce4 before upgrading, because honestly my GF3 just doesn't seem that slow!
Some devices are easy to figure out because they have very limited purpose. Computers are harder because they do a nearly infinite number of tasks (if you don't mind "nearly infinite" as a concept).
So people have to learn how to use computers in the same way they have to learn how to drive a car.
Have you ever thought about how intuitive an automobile is?
Let's see... there are 3 pedals, but I only have two feet. I'm confused! I have to push the left one in while turning the key at the same time to start it. But then when it's running, in order to make it go, I have to push the right pedal down while slowly letting up on the left pedal? WTF?? Yet to stop again, I have to push the center pedal in this time, while at the same time pushing the left one back down again. Oh yeah and I have to move the little knob thingy back into the "1" position if I come to a complete stop, but only the "2" position if I'm at a rolling stop. But it makes a horrible grinding noise every time I move it.... oh wait, I have to push the left pedal down every time I move the knob thingy?? Who the hell designed this kludgy interface anyway? I just want to go to the friggin' grocery store, why do I have to do this crazy dancing shit with the 3 goofy foot pedals! And what's with the idiotic round wheel up near my chest? And the thing that says "Hi-Lo-Intermittent..." WTF is that supposed to mean. Set, coast, accel, resume.... Screw this, I'm hiring the neighbor's kid to drive me everywhere! He knows all this crap better than me.
So you see, we can't demand an "intuitive" interface for everything. There are some things in life that people should just be expected to learn how to do, like operate cars and computers (regardless of the computer's OS). That also requires learning traffic laws, and similar "laws of the net."
If we had a Fisher-Price any-idiot-can-drive interface in cars, imagine how dangerous the roads would be! Even more so than they already are, considering that most idiots already know how to drive today, despite the "complex" interface in automobiles (even with automatic transmissions!) Yet they can't copy files around on their own computer.
I think your salesman was clueless, although the Audigy does sound a bit better than the live due to better DAC's and better S/N ratio. The highs seem brighter on the Audigy than the Live.
But the Salesman didn't know all that... "It has more power?" How much more power do we need from a line-level output anyway? I think you should go back and smack him.
By the way, in case you ever wonder in the future, the Audigy Drive and Live Drive are interchangeable-- both drives will work on both soundcards.
The remote control is a really useful item too-- there's a WinAmp plugin available for it as well.
Sure, if you use crummy speakers
on
Testing the Audigy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If you don't notice a difference between the Audigy and a SB16 PCI, then you're probably using cheap $10 speakers that have the frequency range of a speakerphone. If you want good quality sound, you have to make sure all the components are good quality-- think of the "weakest component" rule here.
On my Klipsch speakers, the Audigy sounds better than my Live did.
There's an Awe64 PCI card sitting in one of my other boxes, and the S/N between that card and the Audigy is night and day. The Awe64 has a constant background HISSSSSSSSSS that you just can't get rid of.
Granted, I don't have a "typical" setup (external DAC and Mackie mixer), but with a reasonable setup the difference between various soundcards really becomes apparent. Hook up the SB16 to an A/V receiver, and good speakers, and you'll be appalled at the sound quality of the SB16, because the hisss and lack of high-frequency clarity will be readily apparent even over the whirring fans and hard drives in your computer.
The point is, the Audigy has the potential for much greater audio quality than creative's earlier soundcards, it just takes some effort on the consumer's part to minimize ambient noise and make sure all the other components are decent quality. Along the same lines, you can't run a GeForce3 Ti500 card through a 14" CTX monitor from 1991 and expect good image quality. You might even say the GeForce3 isn't any better than your S3 Trio64 card!
Well I guess the even more correct analogy is that a watch manufacturer is offering a free car with the purchase of an expensive watch (much more expensive than the car, mind you).
But you decide to just buy the car alone, for less money than the watch. After buying the car, you discover that all the cars are being shipped from the factory with the expensive watch included between the seats.
Is it legal to keep the watch then? Well I suppose so, as long as you never actually wear it or sell it. Or if you do wear it, you can't use it to tell time. This is starting to not make sense. Is it morally wrong to keep and wear the watch, even if it's only inside your own house?
Naturally these analogies fall flat on their face when we realize that material objects have much greater costs associated per unit than do copies of software, so maybe the whole "watch" analogy was silly to begin with.
Good idea in theory but that won't move heat quickly enough for powerful cpu's. Also, your case would get very warm and act like an oven around your hard drives and other components. You'd have to drastically increase airflow through the case in order to keep the rest of the system cool, which would defeat the noiseless aspect of the copper wire cooling method. With cpu heatsinks, the heated air is usually vented right out without circulating to the other components.
Without a real heatsink that has a large air-exposed surface area a relatively short distance from the chip, you'll wind up with an impressive heat gradient across the wire.
An Athlon chip will get up to roughly 600-700 degrees (F) within just a few seconds of power-on if no heatsink is attached. The copper cloth wire might bring it down a bit but you're still talking about having something exposed inside your case that's hot enough to melt wire insulation and probably catch dust on fire (after your system crashes of course).
That wasn't coherent. I hope some parts were slightly informative.
Not really, because the article refers to MS's.Net services, not the development environment. You can write applications with visual studio.Net that don't use the services (primarily distributed authentication). You're getting the two confused. You don't even have to use VS.Net since you can download the CLR and compiler for free. Blame Microsoft for creating the blurry line between their own services and their development environment-- there really is a distinction though.
I think most sets of $20+ headphones have Neodymium magnets and 20-20kHz frequency response. Next thing you know they'll be bragging that their circuits use "state of the art semiconductors etched by particle-waves travelling at 3 hundred million meters per second."
The GeForce3 Ti500 is just a Geforce3 running at higher clockspeed (core and memory) due to a smaller lithography process. Functionally, the new chip is identical to the old one. This is NOT a next-gen product, merely what's known as the "fall refresh" of an existing product line.
Same thing happened with TNT2, TNT2 Ultra, original Geforce, etc. They could've called this the Geforce3 Ultra but marketing decided otherwise. The performance difference compared to a regular GF3 is not that big, no sense in upgrading if you already have one.
There are no new features that the Titanium cards offer that can't be done on the older GF3's.
Just go to nVidia's site and download the DetonatorXP drivers (they picked up the XP moniker too... ugh) and you'll get all those fancy "new" features touted in the Titanium press releases. Those drivers are also considerably faster anyway, on older GF3's.
The next-gen product will be out next spring (assuming they don't break the 6-month cycle) and will probably have multiple geometry units like the XBox, even faster clock speeds, and some new hardware rendering features. Next spring's product will probably be nVidia's first hardware that uses some of 3dfx's tech, hopefully 3dfx's anti-aliasing which was the best around IMO.
The Japanese were just as fanatical-- the term "kamikaze" comes to mind.
As for the terrorists being considered martyrs by their people, well as far as I'm concerned, we will obliterate the very people that would consider these terrorists martyrs.
We're not just going to strike some military installations to limit their capabilities like we did in the Gulf War. This time, we are taking no prisoners. We are going to wipe them out. We are going to unleash hell upon the governments that have been giving terrorists safe haven as well. At least that's what I hope we do. Yes, there will be a few left since it's impossible to eradicate everybody who holds a particular belief and is scattered around several countries, and they'll naturally be plotting their vengeance, but they will no longer have the numbers, leadership, or capability to do their will.
They will no longer have governments harboring them-- because those governments will fear us. They won't fear us because of our threats; they will fear that we will do again in the future what we are about to do to them now.
The terrorists are about the learn the same lesson that Japan did 60 years ago, as expressed by Yamamoto:
"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." He was right.
Japan as a military power ceased to exist after our devastating blow.
Get ready... this is it, this is the real deal, we are about to experience something that only existed in the faded memories of our parents or grandparents. Many Americans don't believe we have the guts or the capability, but that's only because they weren't around the last time we did it and haven't seen it for themselves.
How about this (admittedly cheesy) analogy...
Say there's some bug that causes all Hondas on the road to stop running. It only infects Hondas though. But that sure would create a traffic mess for everybody, including those that don't drive Hondas.
Now if thousands of IIS servers are clogging your ISP's routers, your Apache server would seem really slow to anybody trying to access it, if they can get there at all.
It's just that the mainstream public (or the press for that matter) don't know terms like "ANSI X.12", "EDIFact", "Transaction sets..."
But big companies like Walmart have depended on EDI for many years. Smaller companies do as well. When implemented properly, it really streamlines the whole supply chain. EDI needs an overhaul (the costs of implementing it are getting higher due to increasing complexity and fewer "experts") but it's what you use if you want accountability and security in your critical electronic business transactions. What we need are point-of-sale systems for end users that interface traditional EDI systems with the internet. But they probably already exist.
Surely you're just a troll but I'll bite anyway...
If God went through the trouble of instantaneously creating the universe, evidently "with age" as many have said, in order to make it appear to be billions of years old and be consistent with scientific observations, then why did He gloss over such details like the radio halos in granite or whatever? If you're gonna create the universe With Age, do it right, and don't skimp on the details! Either 1) God isn't perfect, or 2) God intentionally "missed" certain things for some reason.
I have no doubt that they would still do well through tip jars and contributions by thankful individuals.
Try explaining that to a marketing department!
"Hello, Ubisoft Marketing please... yes, I was wondering, instead of selling your game, could you give it away for free and then beg for donations? Oh yeah, and we want to be able to use your code to make our own games too."
When software is the only product you make, and you don't sell any sort of subscription (like Everquest) or service to go along with it, what you wind up with is high expense and no revenue. Human nature is such that most people won't pay a dime if they can get something for free instead. As much fun as the developers had making the game (a full-time job by the way), they'll be pissed when they don't get paychecks and can't pay their mortgages.
I think some people must have the impression that money would grow on trees if only it were open sourced.
If you treat them right, they'll last years.
I had a battery pack for an R/C race car that lasted through hundreds of fully charged/fully discharged cycles, never developing a memory effect. And an R/C car puts a battery pack through hell.
Essentially it's a set of 6 C-cell NiCD's which are matched in terms of output curves (to summarize). To charge them, you basically dump about 10 times their rated output current into them. From complete discharge, they reach a full charge in about 10 or 15 minutes. NiCD's can take it, but you have to be real careful when charging-- modern chargers can detect when the current dropoff occurs during charging and immediately switch over to trickle. On mine, you have to watch the ammeter-- the charge current will rise slightly at the top and then fall off, which is when you should disconnect the battery. Any more "fast charge" beyond that and the cells heat up quickly and barf their internals through the vent holes.
Then you put it in your car and run it for 4 minutes at extremely high output. In fact if the pack isn't dead slightly after 4 minutes, you're not getting the most out of your batteries (for racing at least). That's the advantage of NiCD batteries: relatively constant output until WHAM it's dead, and the low internal resistance of NiCD means that you can almost short them out and they won't complain. Most other batteries just decline steadily from a full charge.
But they're not as good for low-draw devices that need to run for a long time, like electronics. So far Lithium Ion seems to be the best for that.
On the surface the math looks correct, but there's one fundamental assumption that is not explicitly stated in the problem: Monty knows ahead of time which door hides the prize, and Monty will only open a door for you that does NOT contain the prize. So the door he opens depends on your initial pick.
If the prize is behind #1 and you initially choose #1, Monty can open up #2 or #3. In fact this is the only arrangement that will cause you to lose by switching. Pick door #2, and he must open up door #3 only. Pick door #3, and he must open up door #2. In the last two cases, the other door that was still closed hides the prize.
Think of it this way: when you first pick, there's a 1/3 chance that your door hides the prize. Play the game 3000 times, but stay with your first choice each time. You'll win in about 1000 cases. That means you'll lose the other 2000. Now if you switched every time, you'd win 2000 times and lose 1000 times, plus-or-minus a few in each case.
You certainly couldn't expect to win 1500 times by staying.
I was just transferred from Phoenix to Telocity a couple weeks back. My Telocity gateway arrived one day, and that night, my phoenixDSL connection no longer worked. Great timing. Fortunately the old 3com SDSL gateway works just fine with telocity, instead of using telocity's big ugly box-- all I had to do was set my linksys router for DHCP client and restart it. I'm having more connection hiccups than I had with Phoenix unfortunately, but when it works, the connection is actually better. Lower pings to more Q3 servers, and more consistent download rates. I'm on 416/416 SDSL.
Sigh... now Northpoint is going under. That means I either have to go with Covad or Bellsouth now and if NP pulls the plug beforehand, I'll be without DSL service in the meantime. If I have to fall back on my Mindspring/Earthlink dialup I'll be severely depressed.
MySQL is designed as a light-duty database engine.
Yeah it's faster than MS SQL Server when both are running on a 386 (not that MS will even run on a 386), but MySQL does not scale up to enterprise applications. Run both on a fast quad, dual or even single-chip server, with a large database being pounded by users, and MySQL will hit a brick wall. I saw this happen when an online forum with 14000 users (at the time) converted from UBB (using flatfiles) to another BBS system running a MySQL backend on a dedicated FreeBSD server. MySQL couldn't handle the load and just gave up. It's back on UBB now but there may be a Sybase back-end in the future. MS-SQL would handle it just fine also, if it were a Windows box. The point is that for that forum's particular application, even html flatfiles are faster than MySQL.
But then MS SQL would be overkill for a small application such as the one referred to in the original submission. A simple ODBC driver to MySQL would probably work, and it should work fine with a few dozen people using it. By comparison, the older versions of Jet (native Access) have been known to die with more than, oh, five people using it.
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But the truth of the matter is, the vast, VAST majority of the world's scientists overwhelmingly agree that Global Warming is very real and poses a significant threat to our ecosystem and our way of life.
The "vast, VAST majority" of the world's scientists apparently were pretty upset that somebody was speaking for them, which is probably a reason that a rather large number of them signed this petition. I suppose the thousands of PhD's listed there all work for oil companies?
Honestly, to me it sounds like the original question was a hypothetical one. If somebody actually did have a boss that laid out the "requirements" of a project in terms of what fancy buzzword features the development environment would support, then the project is doomed to fail.
The requirements need to be in terms of: what will the user interface look like? Is it client server, standalone, what kind of network communication is required, and basically everything else involving what is this application supposed to do? If you don't know any of that, it makes no sense to even pick a language.
This is like your boss saying he wants you to construct a bridge, and you have to pick ahead of time whether your bridge is going to be a suspension bridge, cantilever bridge, truss... well it's kind of hard to make that decision if you don't know how high or long the friggin' thing has to be, what kind of load will be travelling over it, and whether you're gonna be going over water. If you pick the wrong technology for the job, your project will go way over budget and the developers will hate every minute of it.
The government could help this along by promoting the idea of, and provideing incentives for, Internet access as a basic right on the level of shelter and food. It's a fascinating time to be alive....
Let me guess.... you haven't been alive for very long.
Humans, on average, can survive a few days without water, a few weeks without food, and around 70 years without internet access.
Death, Taxes, and nVidia releasing a new product line every 6 months.
Every spring (since the original GeForce) a new generation of video cards has come out of nVidia. Every fall, that technology is "tweaked" and is dubbed the "fall refresh" which usually has more memory and higher clock rates. The Ti500 was the fall refresh for the GeForce3. Previous generations just had an "Ultra" stuck on the name.
I have a GeForce3 from last spring. I will probably wait until at least the Fall Refresh of the GeForce4 before upgrading, because honestly my GF3 just doesn't seem that slow!
Maybe we need to add "separation of corporation and state" to our "separation of church and state" in the constitution?
That would also prevent governments from breaking up monolopies, wouldn't it?
So people have to learn how to use computers in the same way they have to learn how to drive a car.
Have you ever thought about how intuitive an automobile is?
So you see, we can't demand an "intuitive" interface for everything. There are some things in life that people should just be expected to learn how to do, like operate cars and computers (regardless of the computer's OS). That also requires learning traffic laws, and similar "laws of the net."
If we had a Fisher-Price any-idiot-can-drive interface in cars, imagine how dangerous the roads would be! Even more so than they already are, considering that most idiots already know how to drive today, despite the "complex" interface in automobiles (even with automatic transmissions!) Yet they can't copy files around on their own computer.
I think your salesman was clueless, although the Audigy does sound a bit better than the live due to better DAC's and better S/N ratio. The highs seem brighter on the Audigy than the Live.
But the Salesman didn't know all that... "It has more power?" How much more power do we need from a line-level output anyway? I think you should go back and smack him.
By the way, in case you ever wonder in the future, the Audigy Drive and Live Drive are interchangeable-- both drives will work on both soundcards.
The remote control is a really useful item too-- there's a WinAmp plugin available for it as well.
If you don't notice a difference between the Audigy and a SB16 PCI, then you're probably using cheap $10 speakers that have the frequency range of a speakerphone. If you want good quality sound, you have to make sure all the components are good quality-- think of the "weakest component" rule here.
On my Klipsch speakers, the Audigy sounds better than my Live did.
There's an Awe64 PCI card sitting in one of my other boxes, and the S/N between that card and the Audigy is night and day. The Awe64 has a constant background HISSSSSSSSSS that you just can't get rid of.
Granted, I don't have a "typical" setup (external DAC and Mackie mixer), but with a reasonable setup the difference between various soundcards really becomes apparent. Hook up the SB16 to an A/V receiver, and good speakers, and you'll be appalled at the sound quality of the SB16, because the hisss and lack of high-frequency clarity will be readily apparent even over the whirring fans and hard drives in your computer.
The point is, the Audigy has the potential for much greater audio quality than creative's earlier soundcards, it just takes some effort on the consumer's part to minimize ambient noise and make sure all the other components are decent quality. Along the same lines, you can't run a GeForce3 Ti500 card through a 14" CTX monitor from 1991 and expect good image quality. You might even say the GeForce3 isn't any better than your S3 Trio64 card!
Well I guess the even more correct analogy is that a watch manufacturer is offering a free car with the purchase of an expensive watch (much more expensive than the car, mind you).
But you decide to just buy the car alone, for less money than the watch. After buying the car, you discover that all the cars are being shipped from the factory with the expensive watch included between the seats.
Is it legal to keep the watch then? Well I suppose so, as long as you never actually wear it or sell it. Or if you do wear it, you can't use it to tell time. This is starting to not make sense. Is it morally wrong to keep and wear the watch, even if it's only inside your own house?
Naturally these analogies fall flat on their face when we realize that material objects have much greater costs associated per unit than do copies of software, so maybe the whole "watch" analogy was silly to begin with.
They sounded like "ooooooooh" and "ahhhhhhhhh."
Good idea in theory but that won't move heat quickly enough for powerful cpu's. Also, your case would get very warm and act like an oven around your hard drives and other components. You'd have to drastically increase airflow through the case in order to keep the rest of the system cool, which would defeat the noiseless aspect of the copper wire cooling method. With cpu heatsinks, the heated air is usually vented right out without circulating to the other components.
Without a real heatsink that has a large air-exposed surface area a relatively short distance from the chip, you'll wind up with an impressive heat gradient across the wire.
An Athlon chip will get up to roughly 600-700 degrees (F) within just a few seconds of power-on if no heatsink is attached. The copper cloth wire might bring it down a bit but you're still talking about having something exposed inside your case that's hot enough to melt wire insulation and probably catch dust on fire (after your system crashes of course).
That wasn't coherent. I hope some parts were slightly informative.
.Net services, not the development environment. You can write applications with visual studio .Net that don't use the services (primarily distributed authentication). You're getting the two confused. You don't even have to use VS .Net since you can download the CLR and compiler for free. Blame Microsoft for creating the blurry line between their own services and their development environment-- there really is a distinction though.
Not really, because the article refers to MS's
I think most sets of $20+ headphones have Neodymium magnets and 20-20kHz frequency response. Next thing you know they'll be bragging that their circuits use "state of the art semiconductors etched by particle-waves travelling at 3 hundred million meters per second."
The GeForce3 Ti500 is just a Geforce3 running at higher clockspeed (core and memory) due to a smaller lithography process. Functionally, the new chip is identical to the old one. This is NOT a next-gen product, merely what's known as the "fall refresh" of an existing product line.
Same thing happened with TNT2, TNT2 Ultra, original Geforce, etc. They could've called this the Geforce3 Ultra but marketing decided otherwise. The performance difference compared to a regular GF3 is not that big, no sense in upgrading if you already have one.
There are no new features that the Titanium cards offer that can't be done on the older GF3's.
Just go to nVidia's site and download the DetonatorXP drivers (they picked up the XP moniker too... ugh) and you'll get all those fancy "new" features touted in the Titanium press releases. Those drivers are also considerably faster anyway, on older GF3's.
The next-gen product will be out next spring (assuming they don't break the 6-month cycle) and will probably have multiple geometry units like the XBox, even faster clock speeds, and some new hardware rendering features. Next spring's product will probably be nVidia's first hardware that uses some of 3dfx's tech, hopefully 3dfx's anti-aliasing which was the best around IMO.
Remember Pearl Harbor?
The Japanese were just as fanatical-- the term "kamikaze" comes to mind.
As for the terrorists being considered martyrs by their people, well as far as I'm concerned, we will obliterate the very people that would consider these terrorists martyrs.
We're not just going to strike some military installations to limit their capabilities like we did in the Gulf War. This time, we are taking no prisoners. We are going to wipe them out. We are going to unleash hell upon the governments that have been giving terrorists safe haven as well. At least that's what I hope we do. Yes, there will be a few left since it's impossible to eradicate everybody who holds a particular belief and is scattered around several countries, and they'll naturally be plotting their vengeance, but they will no longer have the numbers, leadership, or capability to do their will.
They will no longer have governments harboring them-- because those governments will fear us. They won't fear us because of our threats; they will fear that we will do again in the future what we are about to do to them now.
The terrorists are about the learn the same lesson that Japan did 60 years ago, as expressed by Yamamoto:
"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." He was right.
Japan as a military power ceased to exist after our devastating blow.
Get ready... this is it, this is the real deal, we are about to experience something that only existed in the faded memories of our parents or grandparents. Many Americans don't believe we have the guts or the capability, but that's only because they weren't around the last time we did it and haven't seen it for themselves.
So how much is it costing your employer for you to be on /. during working hours?
How about this (admittedly cheesy) analogy...
Say there's some bug that causes all Hondas on the road to stop running. It only infects Hondas though. But that sure would create a traffic mess for everybody, including those that don't drive Hondas.
Now if thousands of IIS servers are clogging your ISP's routers, your Apache server would seem really slow to anybody trying to access it, if they can get there at all.
It's just that the mainstream public (or the press for that matter) don't know terms like "ANSI X.12", "EDIFact", "Transaction sets..." But big companies like Walmart have depended on EDI for many years. Smaller companies do as well. When implemented properly, it really streamlines the whole supply chain. EDI needs an overhaul (the costs of implementing it are getting higher due to increasing complexity and fewer "experts") but it's what you use if you want accountability and security in your critical electronic business transactions. What we need are point-of-sale systems for end users that interface traditional EDI systems with the internet. But they probably already exist.
Surely you're just a troll but I'll bite anyway...
If God went through the trouble of instantaneously creating the universe, evidently "with age" as many have said, in order to make it appear to be billions of years old and be consistent with scientific observations, then why did He gloss over such details like the radio halos in granite or whatever? If you're gonna create the universe With Age, do it right, and don't skimp on the details! Either 1) God isn't perfect, or 2) God intentionally "missed" certain things for some reason.
Try explaining that to a marketing department!
When software is the only product you make, and you don't sell any sort of subscription (like Everquest) or service to go along with it, what you wind up with is high expense and no revenue. Human nature is such that most people won't pay a dime if they can get something for free instead. As much fun as the developers had making the game (a full-time job by the way), they'll be pissed when they don't get paychecks and can't pay their mortgages.
I think some people must have the impression that money would grow on trees if only it were open sourced.
If Wozniak created his machines purely for self-actualising joy, then I guess he really didn't need these patents after all.
If you treat them right, they'll last years.
I had a battery pack for an R/C race car that lasted through hundreds of fully charged/fully discharged cycles, never developing a memory effect. And an R/C car puts a battery pack through hell.
Essentially it's a set of 6 C-cell NiCD's which are matched in terms of output curves (to summarize). To charge them, you basically dump about 10 times their rated output current into them. From complete discharge, they reach a full charge in about 10 or 15 minutes. NiCD's can take it, but you have to be real careful when charging-- modern chargers can detect when the current dropoff occurs during charging and immediately switch over to trickle. On mine, you have to watch the ammeter-- the charge current will rise slightly at the top and then fall off, which is when you should disconnect the battery. Any more "fast charge" beyond that and the cells heat up quickly and barf their internals through the vent holes.
Then you put it in your car and run it for 4 minutes at extremely high output. In fact if the pack isn't dead slightly after 4 minutes, you're not getting the most out of your batteries (for racing at least). That's the advantage of NiCD batteries: relatively constant output until WHAM it's dead, and the low internal resistance of NiCD means that you can almost short them out and they won't complain. Most other batteries just decline steadily from a full charge.
But they're not as good for low-draw devices that need to run for a long time, like electronics. So far Lithium Ion seems to be the best for that.
On the surface the math looks correct, but there's one fundamental assumption that is not explicitly stated in the problem: Monty knows ahead of time which door hides the prize, and Monty will only open a door for you that does NOT contain the prize. So the door he opens depends on your initial pick. If the prize is behind #1 and you initially choose #1, Monty can open up #2 or #3. In fact this is the only arrangement that will cause you to lose by switching. Pick door #2, and he must open up door #3 only. Pick door #3, and he must open up door #2. In the last two cases, the other door that was still closed hides the prize. Think of it this way: when you first pick, there's a 1/3 chance that your door hides the prize. Play the game 3000 times, but stay with your first choice each time. You'll win in about 1000 cases. That means you'll lose the other 2000. Now if you switched every time, you'd win 2000 times and lose 1000 times, plus-or-minus a few in each case. You certainly couldn't expect to win 1500 times by staying.
I was just transferred from Phoenix to Telocity a couple weeks back. My Telocity gateway arrived one day, and that night, my phoenixDSL connection no longer worked. Great timing. Fortunately the old 3com SDSL gateway works just fine with telocity, instead of using telocity's big ugly box-- all I had to do was set my linksys router for DHCP client and restart it. I'm having more connection hiccups than I had with Phoenix unfortunately, but when it works, the connection is actually better. Lower pings to more Q3 servers, and more consistent download rates. I'm on 416/416 SDSL.
Sigh... now Northpoint is going under. That means I either have to go with Covad or Bellsouth now and if NP pulls the plug beforehand, I'll be without DSL service in the meantime. If I have to fall back on my Mindspring/Earthlink dialup I'll be severely depressed.
It's really an apples to oranges comparison.
MySQL is designed as a light-duty database engine.
Yeah it's faster than MS SQL Server when both are running on a 386 (not that MS will even run on a 386), but MySQL does not scale up to enterprise applications. Run both on a fast quad, dual or even single-chip server, with a large database being pounded by users, and MySQL will hit a brick wall. I saw this happen when an online forum with 14000 users (at the time) converted from UBB (using flatfiles) to another BBS system running a MySQL backend on a dedicated FreeBSD server. MySQL couldn't handle the load and just gave up. It's back on UBB now but there may be a Sybase back-end in the future. MS-SQL would handle it just fine also, if it were a Windows box. The point is that for that forum's particular application, even html flatfiles are faster than MySQL.
But then MS SQL would be overkill for a small application such as the one referred to in the original submission. A simple ODBC driver to MySQL would probably work, and it should work fine with a few dozen people using it. By comparison, the older versions of Jet (native Access) have been known to die with more than, oh, five people using it.