the NVIDIA software is able to construct a stereo 3D image out of existing game content while the 120 Hz requirement gives each eye 60 frames of motion per second negating the physical detriments that were known to occur with previous 3D offerings.
Well, except that some of us can still see the 60Hz flicker. I want to gouge my eyes out looking at anything less than 75Hz, which would work out to 150Hz combined for this technology.
Then again, if the Obama administration turns NASA into the US Space Force, civil space pursuits at the national level may dry up entirely, leaving only military and private space efforts. Not sure I like the sound of that.
I always believed the reason for NASA being created as a civilian space program rather than a military one is that the latter would have looked too communist back in those days. Now that we're well on our way to a surveillance government, one that demands "papers please" at every other turn, a military space program doesn't sound nearly so bad.
I agree with you, but you misunderstand two things:
1) We live in a society where the mentality of security and safety greatly overrides that of efficiency and scientific endeavour.
2) If you've see a city from the air at night, you'd notice that the vast majority of the Orange Hue comes from city streetlights and businesses (large empty parking lots, mostly). Residential lighting is either too dim or too sparse to make nearly as much difference when it comes to lighting up the sky.
The best tact to counter light pollution in large cities is to penalize businesses for having parking lot lights on all night when the business isn't even open at night. That will help, but probably won't have a huge impact. You definitely won't get any politician onboard to kill the city streetlights, though.
I simply cannot fathom why Apple keeps making these things without a number pad. If I'm going to lug around the weight of a 17" I feel like a proper keyboard with keypad is a must, especially since almost all of the other brands have no trouble fitting one in.
The numeric keypad is exclusively designed to make numbers easier to enter into a computer. Dealing with numbers is (generally) work. When people see a numeric keypad on a keyboard, they think "oh no, work!"
Apple's strategy is to make their products appear hip and cool, a machine to play on and be creative with. Not something to do actual boring work on.
Crazy theories aside, lack of a numeric keypad was one of the main things holding me back from a 17" Powerbook years ago. As a sysadmin and geek, I tend to enter a lot of IPs via the numeric keypad.
I live in the ghetto and the skills required to sell drugs/weapons can be easily transferred to the business world rather easily and the income is higher.
Companies do this too. I don't really see the difference. Your fees cover very little of the R&D you do in graduate work, that money is not yours and there is always a deal to sign to get it. At the end you have what you came for, a PhD or whatever.
There is a major difference: Companies exist for the sole purpose of making money. Colleges are believed to exist to foster higher learning. The problem is that colleges and universities are looking less and less like educational institutions and more like local governments and for-profit corporations and this is not only hurting students and their education, it's holding back a lot of research and technological progress.
I firmly believe that any research and ideas generated at a publicly-funded educational institution should automatically be placed in the public domain so that everybody wins. The students get recognition for their work and can use their academic success to find a job (or start a company) in their chosen field. For-profit corporations can use the research freely to benefit their own bottom line without having to worry about stepping on the university's patents or trade secrets. Independent researchers and self-learners have unfettered access to the research to further their own goals. It's rather like the open source model applied to scientific research.
Two of the best open source projects that I first learned about and utilized for "real work" in 2008 (though I don't know that they count as "victories"):
Puppet, the system administration automation system. (Like cfengine, but way smarter and easier)
CodeIgniter, the PHP web application framework that doesn't box you into its idea of a web framework
I meant to say "high-priced computer gear". There are of course exceptions... when you're doing something requiring high performance or extreme reliability, then you need to get what you need regardless of cost. But the computer mouse is certainly something of a solved problem. All that the manufacturers can really "innovate" on is the number of buttons and the shape of the plastic. Although it would be nice if once in awhile they could figure in reliability and long-term use.
CS is no more about computers than astronomy is about Telescopes.
I absolutely hate it when slashdotters trot out this line every time a computer science post appears. Not only is it excruciatingly condescending, it's quite wrong, even if a computer scientist was the one who originally uttered it.
Computer science is very damn well about computers because there would be no computer science if you took away the computer. If there were no digital processors, data storage, or networks, there would be no reason to develop solutions to problems that are unique to information systems alone. No reason for someone to sit around all day dreaming up the optimal programming language for a given application. No reason for teams of graduate students to work tirelessly in search of the best human-computer interface.
I'll agree that there's a great (almost overwhelming) amount of math in studying the theory of computer science, but you can't honestly say that a computer science graduate is merely just some sort of specialized mathematician and leave it at that. It doesn't do justice to those in the field and it misinforms those who don't understand what the field is all about.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a computer scientist and don't care to be one.)
Wireless keyboards are a bit of a crock, but wireless mice do make sense. On many desks, the typical mouse cord is not long enough, too long, or just gets in the way. For example, my mouse cord is just a couple inches too short although I haven't yet made the plunge to a wireless mouse because I haven't found one yet that I liked better than my plain-Jane Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse.
According to what I've been able to find, there are wireless mice that run for months on two AA batteries. It wouldn't be a huge inconvenience to me to swap out a pair of rechargeable batteries once a month or so.
The Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse. (Not the Microsoft WheelMouse Optical.) Seriously, the only Microsoft product I'd ever recommend. Completely no-frills, reasonably well-built, fits my hand perfectly. Some have weights built in, others don't. My favorite feature is that the sides are straight rather than slanted so picking the mouse up to relocate it on the mouse pad (something I do often) is easy. Almost all mice designs get this wrong and have slanted sides, especially the more expensive ones.
I'm looking at the link you posted and just looks like a subsection of the kernel tree. Do you have a link to the actual bug description or changelog? Because I don't see anything in the link you posted to validate your assertion.
Mods: Check links before blindly modding posts up, please.
This is such a thinly-veiled farce it's not even funny.
First off, the premise that people are dropping their gas guzzlers for fuel-efficient vehicles is just plain wrong. Where I live, huge trucks and SUVs are still all the rage for highway commuters. Cars are still very much in the minority on the roads and I haven't seen any evidence that consumers are migrating to economy cars in any significant numbers, even with the insane gas prices we saw this year. The prices were high enough to be an inconvenience and give SUV owners something to complain about on their way to Starbucks, not enough to cause people to trade in their status symbols for something economical.
Second, I hate it that when one tax revenue stream starts to lower somewhat, the first thing politicians try to do is find something else to tax instead of looking at where they can reduce spending.
Third, as others have pointed out, there are much easier ways of tracking individual vehicle mileage that don't severely impinge on civil liberties. Mark my words, this is a surveillance program first and a taxation program second. Just like the purpose of OnStar isn't as much for life-or-death emergencies (as you hear on the commercials) as it is for tracking the car if/when the police become interested in it.
It's been about 8 years since I last immersed myself in the world of video cards and of course everything has changed since then. (Except that nVidia and AMD (was: ATI) are still on top.) Since then, whenever I've needed a video card, I've just gone to newegg and bought whichever nVidia card was priced around $50.
But pretend for a moment that I want to congratulate AMD on their open source stance and buy one of their cards. I don't need eye-blistering speed, but I want something that's going to be able to acceptably play a game released a year to six months ago. And obviously it has to work well on Linux. Would be nice if it was under $100 and dual-head, but I'll take any suggestions I can get. Is there such a card? If so, which drivers does it use?
Nintendo's release of old games to the Wii is absolute genius.
No, it's something the die-hard gamers have been begging Nintendo (or someone) to do for at least a decade. It's not a coincidence that every time a new console or handheld is hacked to run homebrew code, emulators are the first applications to be ported. Nintendo could have made a killing many times over by selling PC-based emulators and game ROMs online at something like $1 a pop, but instead they chose to sue and harass the emulation community. (I.e., their fans. Sound like a familiar story?)
But what irks me the most about the Wii thing is that the old games are pretty damned expensive. According to this page NES games average $5 and SNES games average $8. That's quite a lot of money just for a trip down memory lane.
Literally nothing to implement? Are you taking the piss, or are you actually that stupid?
From the article and Slashdot summary:
"The truth is that text messages are 'stowaways' inside the control channel -- bandwidth that is there whether it is used for texting or not -- and 160 bytes per message is a tiny amount of data to store-and-forward over tower-to-tower landlines. In essence it costs carriers practically nothing to transmit even trillions of text messages. When text usage goes up, the carriers don't even have to install new infrastructure as long as it is proportional to voice usage."
And every single one of them have those useless Windows keys.
Seems like nobody makes good, quality keyboards and mice. Literally every keyboard that I've tried in the last decade was horrible to type on. And they last maybe a year or two before breaking or getting so worn as to be unusable.
My current keyboard is a Silitek SK-6000 (rebranded as PC Concepts). I bought it because I wanted a Microsoft Natural but was almost $50 cheaper and looked like almost the same thing. Not a great keyboard, but by far the best I've ever owned. After 12 years of daily use, the only thing wrong it it is that the keycaps are slightly worn (but far from completely smooth). They accidentally manufactured a quality product, I guess. I'd love to replace it when a normal "straight" keyboard, but in 10 years of searching I haven't found one with the same quality.
(Yes, I own a Model M but I don't have the finger strength to use it for more than a couple minutes at a time.)
I'm afraid I don't understand. Most broadband companies where I live offer tiered service already with slower speeds costing less and higher speeds costing more. Or is that not the case in the U.K.? If no, why are they treating this like it's some brand-new idea?
Why do companies and governments not see that cheap, plentiful broadband is the only way to grow Internet adoption and the online industry as a whole? Especially now that the worldwide economy is in the shitter, the information age is poised to drag us out of it, if only self-serving companies and conrgresscritters wouldn't stifle progress to make their own quick buck.
When the Internet was this shiny new thing, large companies didn't want anything to do with it. The first ISPs started out as ma-and-pop operations because big communications companies thought it was a silly idea to connect two consumer's computers together over some distance. Remember that? The telcos were the ones that fought the hardest because they hated having dialup modems on their voice network. Now that the Internet is clearly here to stay, everyone with a bit of power and/or money wants their own slice of the pie and in the process make it more costly, more inconvenient, less open, and overall less beneficial to the average individual.
Having said that, let's not forget other FLOSS MS-Office clones out there such as KOffice. It would be nice to compare the community participation.
Now that KDE is cross-platform, there's a very real possibility that some of the better KDE apps (K3b, KOffice, Amarok) will make inroads onto the proprietary desktops. Of course, right now portability isn't their primary concern as they're too busy fixing the blunder that was the KDE 4 desktop.
A-la-carte texts can be absurdly expensive, but packages (available with many hundreds of texts per month if you're a heavy user) will hardly break the bank.
This is always how heavy text users always rationalize paying the obscene prices for texting that the mobile carriers charge: "It's affordable if you get bulk/unlimited texting!"
Yeah, well that's what the cellphone salesman says too. $20/month for unlimited text messaging on the carriers I checked with. That's more than my landline phone bill and almost as much as my broadband bill. Hundreds of dollars a year for one person to have the ability to send/receive little packets of text. Back in my day, we called that email and it was free.
The pricing structure of texting is such that paying as you go is hideously expensive but to buy in bulk, you have to buy way more than you'll ever use. The prices range from 0.20 per message to well under a cent per message but either way you're handing the carriers gobs of cash for something that quite literally costs them nothing at all to implement. And to top it all off, they have the balls to charge you for incoming spam.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, except that some of us can still see the 60Hz flicker. I want to gouge my eyes out looking at anything less than 75Hz, which would work out to 150Hz combined for this technology.
Aw, the comment system dropped my </cynicism> tag.
I always believed the reason for NASA being created as a civilian space program rather than a military one is that the latter would have looked too communist back in those days. Now that we're well on our way to a surveillance government, one that demands "papers please" at every other turn, a military space program doesn't sound nearly so bad.
I agree with you, but you misunderstand two things:
1) We live in a society where the mentality of security and safety greatly overrides that of efficiency and scientific endeavour.
2) If you've see a city from the air at night, you'd notice that the vast majority of the Orange Hue comes from city streetlights and businesses (large empty parking lots, mostly). Residential lighting is either too dim or too sparse to make nearly as much difference when it comes to lighting up the sky.
The best tact to counter light pollution in large cities is to penalize businesses for having parking lot lights on all night when the business isn't even open at night. That will help, but probably won't have a huge impact. You definitely won't get any politician onboard to kill the city streetlights, though.
If you really and truly believe that, then you haven't worked for enough bosses.
The numeric keypad is exclusively designed to make numbers easier to enter into a computer. Dealing with numbers is (generally) work. When people see a numeric keypad on a keyboard, they think "oh no, work!"
Apple's strategy is to make their products appear hip and cool, a machine to play on and be creative with. Not something to do actual boring work on.
Crazy theories aside, lack of a numeric keypad was one of the main things holding me back from a 17" Powerbook years ago. As a sysadmin and geek, I tend to enter a lot of IPs via the numeric keypad.
But honestly, which is more fun?
There is a major difference: Companies exist for the sole purpose of making money. Colleges are believed to exist to foster higher learning. The problem is that colleges and universities are looking less and less like educational institutions and more like local governments and for-profit corporations and this is not only hurting students and their education, it's holding back a lot of research and technological progress.
I firmly believe that any research and ideas generated at a publicly-funded educational institution should automatically be placed in the public domain so that everybody wins. The students get recognition for their work and can use their academic success to find a job (or start a company) in their chosen field. For-profit corporations can use the research freely to benefit their own bottom line without having to worry about stepping on the university's patents or trade secrets. Independent researchers and self-learners have unfettered access to the research to further their own goals. It's rather like the open source model applied to scientific research.
Two of the best open source projects that I first learned about and utilized for "real work" in 2008 (though I don't know that they count as "victories"):
Puppet, the system administration automation system. (Like cfengine, but way smarter and easier)
CodeIgniter, the PHP web application framework that doesn't box you into its idea of a web framework
I meant to say "high-priced computer gear". There are of course exceptions... when you're doing something requiring high performance or extreme reliability, then you need to get what you need regardless of cost. But the computer mouse is certainly something of a solved problem. All that the manufacturers can really "innovate" on is the number of buttons and the shape of the plastic. Although it would be nice if once in awhile they could figure in reliability and long-term use.
I absolutely hate it when slashdotters trot out this line every time a computer science post appears. Not only is it excruciatingly condescending, it's quite wrong, even if a computer scientist was the one who originally uttered it.
Computer science is very damn well about computers because there would be no computer science if you took away the computer. If there were no digital processors, data storage, or networks, there would be no reason to develop solutions to problems that are unique to information systems alone. No reason for someone to sit around all day dreaming up the optimal programming language for a given application. No reason for teams of graduate students to work tirelessly in search of the best human-computer interface.
I'll agree that there's a great (almost overwhelming) amount of math in studying the theory of computer science, but you can't honestly say that a computer science graduate is merely just some sort of specialized mathematician and leave it at that. It doesn't do justice to those in the field and it misinforms those who don't understand what the field is all about.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a computer scientist and don't care to be one.)
Geeks are generally not the target market for high-end consumer-level computer gear.
Wireless keyboards are a bit of a crock, but wireless mice do make sense. On many desks, the typical mouse cord is not long enough, too long, or just gets in the way. For example, my mouse cord is just a couple inches too short although I haven't yet made the plunge to a wireless mouse because I haven't found one yet that I liked better than my plain-Jane Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse.
According to what I've been able to find, there are wireless mice that run for months on two AA batteries. It wouldn't be a huge inconvenience to me to swap out a pair of rechargeable batteries once a month or so.
The Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse. (Not the Microsoft WheelMouse Optical.) Seriously, the only Microsoft product I'd ever recommend. Completely no-frills, reasonably well-built, fits my hand perfectly. Some have weights built in, others don't. My favorite feature is that the sides are straight rather than slanted so picking the mouse up to relocate it on the mouse pad (something I do often) is easy. Almost all mice designs get this wrong and have slanted sides, especially the more expensive ones.
You can get one for under $10 if you shop right.
I'm looking at the link you posted and just looks like a subsection of the kernel tree. Do you have a link to the actual bug description or changelog? Because I don't see anything in the link you posted to validate your assertion.
Mods: Check links before blindly modding posts up, please.
This is such a thinly-veiled farce it's not even funny.
First off, the premise that people are dropping their gas guzzlers for fuel-efficient vehicles is just plain wrong. Where I live, huge trucks and SUVs are still all the rage for highway commuters. Cars are still very much in the minority on the roads and I haven't seen any evidence that consumers are migrating to economy cars in any significant numbers, even with the insane gas prices we saw this year. The prices were high enough to be an inconvenience and give SUV owners something to complain about on their way to Starbucks, not enough to cause people to trade in their status symbols for something economical.
Second, I hate it that when one tax revenue stream starts to lower somewhat, the first thing politicians try to do is find something else to tax instead of looking at where they can reduce spending.
Third, as others have pointed out, there are much easier ways of tracking individual vehicle mileage that don't severely impinge on civil liberties. Mark my words, this is a surveillance program first and a taxation program second. Just like the purpose of OnStar isn't as much for life-or-death emergencies (as you hear on the commercials) as it is for tracking the car if/when the police become interested in it.
It's been about 8 years since I last immersed myself in the world of video cards and of course everything has changed since then. (Except that nVidia and AMD (was: ATI) are still on top.) Since then, whenever I've needed a video card, I've just gone to newegg and bought whichever nVidia card was priced around $50.
But pretend for a moment that I want to congratulate AMD on their open source stance and buy one of their cards. I don't need eye-blistering speed, but I want something that's going to be able to acceptably play a game released a year to six months ago. And obviously it has to work well on Linux. Would be nice if it was under $100 and dual-head, but I'll take any suggestions I can get. Is there such a card? If so, which drivers does it use?
No, it's something the die-hard gamers have been begging Nintendo (or someone) to do for at least a decade. It's not a coincidence that every time a new console or handheld is hacked to run homebrew code, emulators are the first applications to be ported. Nintendo could have made a killing many times over by selling PC-based emulators and game ROMs online at something like $1 a pop, but instead they chose to sue and harass the emulation community. (I.e., their fans. Sound like a familiar story?)
But what irks me the most about the Wii thing is that the old games are pretty damned expensive. According to this page NES games average $5 and SNES games average $8. That's quite a lot of money just for a trip down memory lane.
From the article and Slashdot summary:
"The truth is that text messages are 'stowaways' inside the control channel -- bandwidth that is there whether it is used for texting or not -- and 160 bytes per message is a tiny amount of data to store-and-forward over tower-to-tower landlines. In essence it costs carriers practically nothing to transmit even trillions of text messages. When text usage goes up, the carriers don't even have to install new infrastructure as long as it is proportional to voice usage."
Quite ironic, you calling me stupid.
And every single one of them have those useless Windows keys.
Seems like nobody makes good, quality keyboards and mice. Literally every keyboard that I've tried in the last decade was horrible to type on. And they last maybe a year or two before breaking or getting so worn as to be unusable.
My current keyboard is a Silitek SK-6000 (rebranded as PC Concepts). I bought it because I wanted a Microsoft Natural but was almost $50 cheaper and looked like almost the same thing. Not a great keyboard, but by far the best I've ever owned. After 12 years of daily use, the only thing wrong it it is that the keycaps are slightly worn (but far from completely smooth). They accidentally manufactured a quality product, I guess. I'd love to replace it when a normal "straight" keyboard, but in 10 years of searching I haven't found one with the same quality.
(Yes, I own a Model M but I don't have the finger strength to use it for more than a couple minutes at a time.)
Case in point.
</grammar nazi>
I'm afraid I don't understand. Most broadband companies where I live offer tiered service already with slower speeds costing less and higher speeds costing more. Or is that not the case in the U.K.? If no, why are they treating this like it's some brand-new idea?
Why do companies and governments not see that cheap, plentiful broadband is the only way to grow Internet adoption and the online industry as a whole? Especially now that the worldwide economy is in the shitter, the information age is poised to drag us out of it, if only self-serving companies and conrgresscritters wouldn't stifle progress to make their own quick buck.
When the Internet was this shiny new thing, large companies didn't want anything to do with it. The first ISPs started out as ma-and-pop operations because big communications companies thought it was a silly idea to connect two consumer's computers together over some distance. Remember that? The telcos were the ones that fought the hardest because they hated having dialup modems on their voice network. Now that the Internet is clearly here to stay, everyone with a bit of power and/or money wants their own slice of the pie and in the process make it more costly, more inconvenient, less open, and overall less beneficial to the average individual.
Now that KDE is cross-platform, there's a very real possibility that some of the better KDE apps (K3b, KOffice, Amarok) will make inroads onto the proprietary desktops. Of course, right now portability isn't their primary concern as they're too busy fixing the blunder that was the KDE 4 desktop.
This is always how heavy text users always rationalize paying the obscene prices for texting that the mobile carriers charge: "It's affordable if you get bulk/unlimited texting!"
Yeah, well that's what the cellphone salesman says too. $20/month for unlimited text messaging on the carriers I checked with. That's more than my landline phone bill and almost as much as my broadband bill. Hundreds of dollars a year for one person to have the ability to send/receive little packets of text. Back in my day, we called that email and it was free.
The pricing structure of texting is such that paying as you go is hideously expensive but to buy in bulk, you have to buy way more than you'll ever use. The prices range from 0.20 per message to well under a cent per message but either way you're handing the carriers gobs of cash for something that quite literally costs them nothing at all to implement. And to top it all off, they have the balls to charge you for incoming spam.
It's the very definition of a racket.
When's the last time you saw a vertical industry go horizontal without being forced to by the government?