you need to take notes in class. Here's an example...
A friend of mine, who was a senior applied physics major last year (he has since graduated) had one of those very, very small laptops. He took the laptop to all of his classes where he needed to take notes that didn't include formulas (psych, for example). I asked him why he didn't use the notebook for his other classes, and he said, basically, that the notebook was incredibly impractical for taking down equations. Honestly, when you go to lecture and it consists of 1-2 hours of taking down, analyzing, and deriving equations, a notebook computer is worthless. If they could manage to have their handwriting recognition software so that it would recognize equations and convert them into a usable file format (LaTeX maybe? or mathematica?) then it would be an incredible boon to engineering and science students everywhere.
how does it compare to working for a dot com? I mean, which is more challenging? Did you find yourself being pushed to the limits more with the NSA or with what you're doing now?
I guess one benefit of working for the government is just that, the gov't's benefits package. I don't know that firsthand, I've just heard that the gov't has a great benefits package.
Every now and then at school (Caltech) we toss around the idea of going to work for the NSA, mainly because we feel it would be a fun, intellectually stimulating environment. (As opposed to a normal engineering job in a large company which can be boring as hell and not challenging in the least.) but I digress...
So what does it take to work for the NSA? Are all of the employees mathematical geniuses? What kind of people do you look for, and do you actively recruit?
On a side note, I'm assuming that a great deal of scientific discoveries are made in the NSA's labs. How many of these discoveries coincide with research being done in the public academic community? Have there been instances where academia has made a discovery, or published a paper, while the NSA has already known that information for years because they discovered it themselves? Is there any collaboration between the mathematicians at the NSA and those in academia? Or is the NSA research body a purely autonomous group?
Moller
ya know, I really don't like NVIDIA
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Nvidia Apologizes
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simply from my experiences with them at the career fair at Caltech. When I was able to talk to recruiters (when I wasn't dragging one of my friends away from the Microsoft booth he was trying to destroy), nearly all of the recruiters were like, "Let us have your resume, here's our business card, what do you do, we'd like to hire you" etc. All the company reps were great, very understanding that no one at Caltech has good grades, stuff like that.
The NVIDIA reps? They were like conducting interviews on the spot. The same friend I had to drag away from the MS booth was talking to the NVIDIA reps, and they were talking about internships, and the rep just like pulls out a notepad and starts asking him to solve all these programming problems. During this, I'm looking at the info sheets NVIDIA has on hand. The requirements they were holding new hires to seemed rather steep. For their engineers and coders they basically wanted a 4.0 GPA for any new hire. Maybe this is just their standard information sheet, but I honestly don't know anyone in the electrical engineering dept. or the computer science dept. who would have those kind of grades. And if they do, they don't go into industry, they go to grad school and get doctorates. The long and short of it is that the NVIDIA people came across as being incredibly arrogant and demanding, like they were doing us a favor by talking to us. Their attitude was far different than any of the other companies there.
and the infinity engine they created for Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale is a great piece of work. In a good portion of the gaming community, Bioware has quickly become a very respected game-maker, I've heard them compared to Blizzard by reviewers. (Personally I like Bioware more than I like Blizzard, but that's just me). The Dev teams at Bioware are also very responsive to their fans. The dev team for Baldur's Gate 2 maintains a strong presence on the Interplay message boards for that game, and they take a lot of feedback from the users of the board into account during the development cycle.
Neverwinter Nights is being developed by Bioware, and it will be very similar to a MMORPG, except that individuals will be able to run their own servers on which they can set up persistant worlds they have created. It's feasible that Bioware could be doing something like this (a MMORPG) with the Star Wars RPG.
On a side note, check out www.teambg.com to see some people who have done wonderful things hacking the Infinity Engine. They've managed to release their own expansion pack for Baldur's Gate, without access to any of the development tools that Bioware has. TeamBG created their tools using a lot of hex editting, and VB (don't laugh, their programs are very good). Go take a look at it, very cool.
and I thought that Caltech scientists came up with the method to allow high-speed sequencing of the genome. But hey, I could be unfairly biased in remembering facts there.
Seriously, the issues Katz is raising aren't new. 4 years ago I was at a summer program at UPENN and we discussed the moral and social impacts that this knowledge would have. We also got to talk to Dr. Kaplan, UPENN's resident Ethics dude who seems to be quoted more often than any other ethics dude by newspapers.
The genie is basically out of the bottle and we aren't prepared yet to deal with all of the information we are going to have at our disposal from the sequencing of the human genome. We could very quickly end up in a world akin to the one portrayed in Gattaca. I feel I should make a reference to Brave New World but I haven't read it, so I'll let someone else chime in with that.
We could very quickly be facing a host of problems, but like I said, it's nothing new. Anything from life insurance being denied because your genetic code signifies you are "high-risk" to an employer refusing to hire you due to something unfavorable they find in your genetic code. There has been legislation bandied about to possibly preserve the privacy of genetic testing, so that insurance companies and employers wouldn't have access to your genetic information, but at the same time insurance companies are lobbying so that they will be able to have said information once it becomes available.
I'm not even going to get into the whole Eugenics issue. That's a hideous mess and I simply refuse to go there.
The difference between GScube and some of its predecessors in this field of computer equipment seems to be that GScube is being created with real-time content generation in mind. The overall plan seems to involve generating content with this development system, which is then streamed from a powerful server to viewers downloading it via broadband Internet connections.
What do they mean by real time content generation? Is the article just throwing out buzzwords or do they think that someone is going to be creating something on one of these boxes and simultaneously uploading it so that it can be streamed from a "powerful server?" That would seem a little hard to swallow. Are they trying to say that these things can render so quickly that they will practically (or actually) be able to pull off real-time raytracing as a developer is creating something, so once he has finished he can send it to the server to be downloaded to everyone lucky enough to have a high-bandwidth connection?
mmm...real-time raytracing. that would be something.
Stephen King says he got the idea when a reader mailed him a check for $2.50 because the poor guy felt guilty about reading the last book King put up for pay-to-download without paying.
If you want to have a problem with the way performers like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilara, here's my beef: - They preach about their innocence and 'waiting for marriage' message (which I assume is to assume the role of a good role model), but at the same time, appear on magazine covers and music videos half naked and in very suggestive manner. Talk about mixed signals!
I'll agree with you there. But I'm also not impressed by their music. It all sounds the same to me, like they have some people locked up in a sweatshop somewhere churning out top 40 hits for britney, christina, and the boy bands. So maybe britney can sing, but I (personally) doubt that she could actually write good music, as opposed to the pre-washed approved music-for-the-masses she does now.
Comparing britney to madonna? My understanding was that Madonna was a dancer with a good voice. That Madonna went to college on a full dance scholarship. I would venture a guess as to say that Madonna came up with and choreographed her own dance moves and videos, while I sincerely doubt the same could be said of Ms. Spears.
the part about independent news sources or the part about having to make decisions for ourselves? I was trying to make a point about the majority of people simply taking what they're fed. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the nation does, as you say:
listen to only ABC radio, watch CBS's morning show, watch NBC for news in the evening and go to sleep with Fox's cable news channel.
If I'm wrong in my facts, oh well. Who am I to let facts stand in the way of my attempt at making a point?;-)
Now, with no basis in logic, my opinions. Time isn't bad per se? I can't stand time. It's mindless drivel. My roommate had a subscription to it. It was bad. Newsweek is better. Compared to Time, Newsweek is fantastic. I have honestly never read US News & World Report for news. I only know what they do for their college rankings, which are such a pile of...wait, I shouldn't complain, they ranked my school #1, didn't they?:-) Ok, then obviously they're a pillar of proper journalism.
I wasn't really being cynical. I don't recall implying that if the big networks went away that the web would. (maybe I did inadvertantly, and I missed it.)
Do I trust Slashdot? That's an interesting question. I find Slashdot thought-provoking. I don't treat slashdot as a source for mainstream news, I use slashdot as a source for technical information that I am not going to find elsewhere. I also appreciate the (often) candid discussions on topics that occurs on slashdot. As I was typing my post, it occurred to me to mention slashdot, in the context that if we did lost WB, CNN, et al that possibly slashdot's reader base would suddenly explode, since slashdot is already established and has a reliable infrastructure in place.
Why does this sound like an excerpt from an obviousman comic? Well...possibly because Wiley is pretty dead on in his penning of Obvious Man (I'll assume you caught to origins of Obvious man in the past 4 or 5 Sunday comics). I may be cynical, but from where I'm sitting I see the majority of the nation as unthinking media zombies, all clamoring to fit into a mold that has been defined for them instead of making their own mold. But my viewpoint is created from my life experiences, so it's understandable if others don't share this viewpoint with me. I'm certainly not losing any sleep over it.
Ever heard of independent film? That's were we typically don't see the above, it having been replaced with something interesting.
That's a very good point. Although, Indie films are usually too artsy for my taste (just a generalization, I know there are exceptions). I much prefer Indie music, which seems to have a much harder time making a go at it than Indie films. There are always a score of small artsy theatres that show independent and european films that would never make it on the big screen. There doesn't seem to be such a case for indie music, at least on the radio. But I may be biased, since I listen to wber (http://wber.monroe.edu), and they have a hard time going against the larger radio stations in my area who just play the same tired old songs over and over.
what if time-warner and the rest of the media conglomerates died? what would happen? how would we get our daily dose of standardized, nutritious, 100% USDRA of important information (all in a conveniently wrapped up package with a bow)? Wow, that was a horrible sentence, I'll try to be more coherent from here on out.
Anyways, what would happen if the massive media machines that puss Britney Spears and N'Sync on us went the way of the dinosaurs? Let's think about this for a moment. There wouldn't be any huge parent companies anymore (at least temporarily). We would all get our news from smaller, independent outlets. We would, of course, have to decide for ourselves on the credibility of said news outlets. That in and of itself is a scary thought, we would have to make an important decision with information that we would have to go out and gather ourselves. We wouldn't get everything served to us all nicely tied together on a silver platter with a certificate of authenticity from whatever conglomerate we went to for that information.
What effect would this have on the music industry specifically? Well, if we lost the conglomerates we would lose the massive marketing machines. And since there is no longer a massive conglomerate we could assume that we would no longer be bombarded with identical images of how everyone is supposed to be (from tv, movies and music). So, it's feasible that the massive appeal of teeny-bopper music and celebrities may decrease simply because there wouldn't be a concerted effort on the part of the media to inundate us with images of how we should want to look and act.
Of course, there is a frightening "other side" of that coin. What if, in the absence of any media conglomerates, in a world of thousands of independent media and news stations, companies and outlets, we were still bombarded with tv's and movies that basically amounted to watching people more attractive than us make out with other people more attractive that us, and complain about the difficulties of being attractive and popular? If that type of entertainment (and I use the term entertainment loosely) persisted with a myriad of independent stations...well I'd give up all hope on the human race right then and there and go live in a cave.
a cave with a generator and a computer to play games on of course. I'm only human.
as a disclaimer, what I heard was that Titan AE was a very good movie. It's kind of depressing that the studio was shut down because the movie didn't perform as well as the bigwigs up top wanted. You know that if it had done well those same bigwigs would have been fighting over who would have gotten credit for the idea.
Gene Siskel said that Titan AE was the movie that Battlefield: Earth wanted to be. And yet no one has (seriously) talked about John Travolta's career being finished. yet.
systems aren't you starting to hit major diminishing returns for the amount of money you're putting into the system?
When you get a system that's flying at specs that high, aren't you starting to hit framerates so fast that a noticeable jump in framerate doesn't produce a noticeable jump in performance?
I get 20-30 fps in Tribes, at 800x600 with a 300A celeron and a TNT card. A friend of mine with a 550 Athlon and a TNT2 gets...30 fps at 800x600. His bonus is he can run up to 1280x1024 and get 20-30 fps still. My video card won't support that resolution, so I can't say if my system would perform comprably with a TNT2 card.
The only difference I notice between our performance is when we both log onto a server his machine loads the game faster and he gets to play a few seconds before I do. However, that isn't impacting gameplay at all.
Back to framerate, when you are up at 80 fps, isn't any increase above that nearly wasted? I supposed if you insist on play quake III at 1600x1200 with 80 fps, you're going to need to ramp everything up (I'm not going to go into how much I hate quake III), but how much does it affect gameplay to run the game at 1600x1200 as opposed to a lower resolution? That is assuming your monitor can support 1600x1200 at a decent refresh rate (mine doesn't even support 1600x1200), so I guess whatever money you save by overclocking you'd drop on getting a monitor that can perform at those resolutions.
no, there's no order to the preceding thoughts, I was just rambling as I listened to a perfect circle.
I have an SMP motherboard. And I'm aware that 98 doesn't support SMP, although it will still boot on a dual-processor system. (never mind that 98 sucks.) I'm running NT. It works fine. I'd like to see how much better it runs with SMP. I know that linux has much better SMP that NT, but I'm not running linux at the moment because I'm not doing any coding yet.
I'm also aware that under NT 2*550 MHz ~ 600-650 MHz, and on Linux 2*550 ~ 900 MHz (from what I've been told).
Still, I don't see what would require more power than even one 550 MHz processor. The machine I'm typing at right now runs Labview, Visual Studios, and a host of CAD tools very well, and it's only a PII 350. The main problem is Labview is a memory hog and eats up RAM, which slows me down.
that for a great deal of online FPS games the video card was more important than the processor. I'm a college student (as the e-mail should show) and I play tribes all the time. I set up my roommates computer to play tribes, and he can actually play it on his machine, which is a Pentium Pro 200 with only like 32 MB of RAM. Why can he play it? Because I slapped a Voodoo 2 in his machine. The graphics actually look better than on my Viper V550 (mainly because tribes is native glide).
Truthfully, the main difference I have noticed in FPS games is from video cards. Save for the process of actually loading the games (my friends with 500 Athlons get onto servers much faster than my 300 celeron does), The actual gameplay itself seems to be much more video-card dependant, especially if the game is completely 3d based. This is even more true now with cards like the GEForce that do some of the processor's graphics processing work for it.
And on a final note, why does anyone need 900 MHz? Especially for games? It seems like it would be more useful to get a top of the line video card rather than a superfast processor, but either way you eventually hit the limit at which you can perceive the game. On Tribes forums, people say they've hit 130 fps in Tribes. I mean, is the difference between 80 fps and 130 fps really worth the effort and the money it takes to get there?
I have a celeron 300A in a Tyan Tiger S1832 MB. I can overclock the celeron to 450, but my system is incredibly unstable. yes, it gives me a performance increase of 50% on benchmarking programs, but everything else I run works fine with just the 300.
I still think that more RAM speeds up a system more than a faster processor would. Aside from that, is it really necessary to have a 900 MHz chip? Or is this just some insane pissing contest? No, really, I can buy a 550 PIII for cheaper than a 450 PII (check pricewatch). So I can have dual 550's running for under $300. I simply can't fathom what would programs would require more processing power than that! Isn't the bottleneck for most games the graphics cards? Isn't the bottleneck for most desktop apps RAM? (when you have 8 windows open and you start spilling into virtual memory).
I just really don't see the point to overclocking, it seems to be an inordinate amount of work for a small gain.
There is a good deal of shortsightedness in the asking of this questions. It's comparable to asking why more people don't get laser eye surgery done, because then they wouldn't need glasses or contacts anymore.
New (or alternate) fuel sources can be treated as new technologies. With any new technology, you have phases of acceptance:
Phase 1: Early Adopters these are the people who are always on the bleeding edge of and industry/technology. These are the people who were online in the 80's (how many slashdotters fall into this crowd?). This is typically a very small segment of a population. Phase 2: I forget the name of this phase...but it doesn't represent a huge increase in the user base of a product/technology. These are people who aren't as "courageous" as the early-adopters in trying bleeding edge items, they normally wait until other people have cut themselves first so they know what to look out for. Phase 3: Mainstream (or Widespread Use). This is the majority of the populace. Important Note: There is a huge "chasm" between Phase 2 and Phase 3. Getting from Phase 2 to Phase 3 could require many things, be it massive amounts of advertising, huge investments to develop a comprehensive deployment infrastructure, etc.
Phase 4 and Phase 5 are stragglers, and not particulary important to the argument. If you were to show a graph charting these phases, It would look like a bell curve (with phase 3 in the middle, the high portion) and a large break between phase 2 and phase 3.
At the moment, alternate fuel sources to gasoline are still in Phase 1 or Phase 2. Oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
you need to take notes in class. Here's an example...
A friend of mine, who was a senior applied physics major last year (he has since graduated) had one of those very, very small laptops. He took the laptop to all of his classes where he needed to take notes that didn't include formulas (psych, for example). I asked him why he didn't use the notebook for his other classes, and he said, basically, that the notebook was incredibly impractical for taking down equations. Honestly, when you go to lecture and it consists of 1-2 hours of taking down, analyzing, and deriving equations, a notebook computer is worthless. If they could manage to have their handwriting recognition software so that it would recognize equations and convert them into a usable file format (LaTeX maybe? or mathematica?) then it would be an incredible boon to engineering and science students everywhere.
Moller
how does it compare to working for a dot com? I mean, which is more challenging? Did you find yourself being pushed to the limits more with the NSA or with what you're doing now?
I guess one benefit of working for the government is just that, the gov't's benefits package. I don't know that firsthand, I've just heard that the gov't has a great benefits package.
Moller
my lazy ass and go look at the page before posting questions like that then. ah well. :-)
Every now and then at school (Caltech) we toss around the idea of going to work for the NSA, mainly because we feel it would be a fun, intellectually stimulating environment. (As opposed to a normal engineering job in a large company which can be boring as hell and not challenging in the least.) but I digress...
So what does it take to work for the NSA? Are all of the employees mathematical geniuses? What kind of people do you look for, and do you actively recruit?
On a side note, I'm assuming that a great deal of scientific discoveries are made in the NSA's labs. How many of these discoveries coincide with research being done in the public academic community? Have there been instances where academia has made a discovery, or published a paper, while the NSA has already known that information for years because they discovered it themselves? Is there any collaboration between the mathematicians at the NSA and those in academia? Or is the NSA research body a purely autonomous group?
Moller
simply from my experiences with them at the career fair at Caltech. When I was able to talk to recruiters (when I wasn't dragging one of my friends away from the Microsoft booth he was trying to destroy), nearly all of the recruiters were like, "Let us have your resume, here's our business card, what do you do, we'd like to hire you" etc. All the company reps were great, very understanding that no one at Caltech has good grades, stuff like that.
The NVIDIA reps? They were like conducting interviews on the spot. The same friend I had to drag away from the MS booth was talking to the NVIDIA reps, and they were talking about internships, and the rep just like pulls out a notepad and starts asking him to solve all these programming problems. During this, I'm looking at the info sheets NVIDIA has on hand. The requirements they were holding new hires to seemed rather steep. For their engineers and coders they basically wanted a 4.0 GPA for any new hire. Maybe this is just their standard information sheet, but I honestly don't know anyone in the electrical engineering dept. or the computer science dept. who would have those kind of grades. And if they do, they don't go into industry, they go to grad school and get doctorates. The long and short of it is that the NVIDIA people came across as being incredibly arrogant and demanding, like they were doing us a favor by talking to us. Their attitude was far different than any of the other companies there.
Moller
and the infinity engine they created for Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale is a great piece of work. In a good portion of the gaming community, Bioware has quickly become a very respected game-maker, I've heard them compared to Blizzard by reviewers. (Personally I like Bioware more than I like Blizzard, but that's just me). The Dev teams at Bioware are also very responsive to their fans. The dev team for Baldur's Gate 2 maintains a strong presence on the Interplay message boards for that game, and they take a lot of feedback from the users of the board into account during the development cycle.
Neverwinter Nights is being developed by Bioware, and it will be very similar to a MMORPG, except that individuals will be able to run their own servers on which they can set up persistant worlds they have created. It's feasible that Bioware could be doing something like this (a MMORPG) with the Star Wars RPG.
On a side note, check out www.teambg.com to see some people who have done wonderful things hacking the Infinity Engine. They've managed to release their own expansion pack for Baldur's Gate, without access to any of the development tools that Bioware has. TeamBG created their tools using a lot of hex editting, and VB (don't laugh, their programs are very good). Go take a look at it, very cool.
Moller
i was playing tribes one day and a guy named "celera genomics" hopped on the server, and made me his bitch. is that foreshadowing?
and I thought that Caltech scientists came up with the method to allow high-speed sequencing of the genome. But hey, I could be unfairly biased in remembering facts there.
Seriously, the issues Katz is raising aren't new. 4 years ago I was at a summer program at UPENN and we discussed the moral and social impacts that this knowledge would have. We also got to talk to Dr. Kaplan, UPENN's resident Ethics dude who seems to be quoted more often than any other ethics dude by newspapers.
The genie is basically out of the bottle and we aren't prepared yet to deal with all of the information we are going to have at our disposal from the sequencing of the human genome. We could very quickly end up in a world akin to the one portrayed in Gattaca. I feel I should make a reference to Brave New World but I haven't read it, so I'll let someone else chime in with that.
We could very quickly be facing a host of problems, but like I said, it's nothing new. Anything from life insurance being denied because your genetic code signifies you are "high-risk" to an employer refusing to hire you due to something unfavorable they find in your genetic code. There has been legislation bandied about to possibly preserve the privacy of genetic testing, so that insurance companies and employers wouldn't have access to your genetic information, but at the same time insurance companies are lobbying so that they will be able to have said information once it becomes available.
I'm not even going to get into the whole Eugenics issue. That's a hideous mess and I simply refuse to go there.
Moller
The difference between GScube and some of its predecessors in this field of computer equipment seems to be that GScube is being created with real-time content generation in mind. The overall plan seems to involve generating content with this development system, which is then streamed from a powerful server to viewers downloading it via broadband Internet connections.
What do they mean by real time content generation? Is the article just throwing out buzzwords or do they think that someone is going to be creating something on one of these boxes and simultaneously uploading it so that it can be streamed from a "powerful server?" That would seem a little hard to swallow. Are they trying to say that these things can render so quickly that they will practically (or actually) be able to pull off real-time raytracing as a developer is creating something, so once he has finished he can send it to the server to be downloaded to everyone lucky enough to have a high-bandwidth connection?
mmm...real-time raytracing. that would be something.
Moller
Stephen King says he got the idea when a reader mailed him a check for $2.50 because the poor guy felt guilty about reading the last book King put up for pay-to-download without paying.
If you want to have a problem with the way performers like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilara, here's my beef:
- They preach about their innocence and 'waiting for marriage' message (which I assume is to assume the role of a good role model), but at the same time, appear on magazine covers and music videos half naked and in very suggestive manner. Talk about mixed signals!
I'll agree with you there. But I'm also not impressed by their music. It all sounds the same to me, like they have some people locked up in a sweatshop somewhere churning out top 40 hits for britney, christina, and the boy bands. So maybe britney can sing, but I (personally) doubt that she could actually write good music, as opposed to the pre-washed approved music-for-the-masses she does now.
Comparing britney to madonna? My understanding was that Madonna was a dancer with a good voice. That Madonna went to college on a full dance scholarship. I would venture a guess as to say that Madonna came up with and choreographed her own dance moves and videos, while I sincerely doubt the same could be said of Ms. Spears.
Moller
it wasn't really a flame, as your information is correct.
that's why I like slashdot. open discussion, and I always end up learning something new.
Moller
oh well is right. I'm just thankful that so far all the engineers I have met have been able to think for themselves.
whoops. anyways, thanks for pointing it out.
the part about independent news sources or the part about having to make decisions for ourselves? I was trying to make a point about the majority of people simply taking what they're fed. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the nation does, as you say:
;-)
:-) Ok, then obviously they're a pillar of proper journalism.
listen to only ABC radio, watch CBS's morning show, watch NBC for news in the evening and go to sleep with Fox's cable news channel.
If I'm wrong in my facts, oh well. Who am I to let facts stand in the way of my attempt at making a point?
Now, with no basis in logic, my opinions. Time isn't bad per se? I can't stand time. It's mindless drivel. My roommate had a subscription to it. It was bad. Newsweek is better. Compared to Time, Newsweek is fantastic. I have honestly never read US News & World Report for news. I only know what they do for their college rankings, which are such a pile of...wait, I shouldn't complain, they ranked my school #1, didn't they?
Moller
I wasn't really being cynical. I don't recall implying that if the big networks went away that the web would. (maybe I did inadvertantly, and I missed it.)
Do I trust Slashdot? That's an interesting question. I find Slashdot thought-provoking. I don't treat slashdot as a source for mainstream news, I use slashdot as a source for technical information that I am not going to find elsewhere. I also appreciate the (often) candid discussions on topics that occurs on slashdot. As I was typing my post, it occurred to me to mention slashdot, in the context that if we did lost WB, CNN, et al that possibly slashdot's reader base would suddenly explode, since slashdot is already established and has a reliable infrastructure in place.
Why does this sound like an excerpt from an obviousman comic? Well...possibly because Wiley is pretty dead on in his penning of Obvious Man (I'll assume you caught to origins of Obvious man in the past 4 or 5 Sunday comics). I may be cynical, but from where I'm sitting I see the majority of the nation as unthinking media zombies, all clamoring to fit into a mold that has been defined for them instead of making their own mold. But my viewpoint is created from my life experiences, so it's understandable if others don't share this viewpoint with me. I'm certainly not losing any sleep over it.
Moller
Ever heard of independent film? That's were we typically don't see the above, it having been replaced with something interesting.
That's a very good point. Although, Indie films are usually too artsy for my taste (just a generalization, I know there are exceptions). I much prefer Indie music, which seems to have a much harder time making a go at it than Indie films. There are always a score of small artsy theatres that show independent and european films that would never make it on the big screen. There doesn't seem to be such a case for indie music, at least on the radio. But I may be biased, since I listen to wber (http://wber.monroe.edu), and they have a hard time going against the larger radio stations in my area who just play the same tired old songs over and over.
Moller
what if time-warner and the rest of the media conglomerates died? what would happen? how would we get our daily dose of standardized, nutritious, 100% USDRA of important information (all in a conveniently wrapped up package with a bow)? Wow, that was a horrible sentence, I'll try to be more coherent from here on out.
Anyways, what would happen if the massive media machines that puss Britney Spears and N'Sync on us went the way of the dinosaurs? Let's think about this for a moment. There wouldn't be any huge parent companies anymore (at least temporarily). We would all get our news from smaller, independent outlets. We would, of course, have to decide for ourselves on the credibility of said news outlets. That in and of itself is a scary thought, we would have to make an important decision with information that we would have to go out and gather ourselves. We wouldn't get everything served to us all nicely tied together on a silver platter with a certificate of authenticity from whatever conglomerate we went to for that information.
What effect would this have on the music industry specifically? Well, if we lost the conglomerates we would lose the massive marketing machines. And since there is no longer a massive conglomerate we could assume that we would no longer be bombarded with identical images of how everyone is supposed to be (from tv, movies and music). So, it's feasible that the massive appeal of teeny-bopper music and celebrities may decrease simply because there wouldn't be a concerted effort on the part of the media to inundate us with images of how we should want to look and act.
Of course, there is a frightening "other side" of that coin. What if, in the absence of any media conglomerates, in a world of thousands of independent media and news stations, companies and outlets, we were still bombarded with tv's and movies that basically amounted to watching people more attractive than us make out with other people more attractive that us, and complain about the difficulties of being attractive and popular? If that type of entertainment (and I use the term entertainment loosely) persisted with a myriad of independent stations...well I'd give up all hope on the human race right then and there and go live in a cave.
a cave with a generator and a computer to play games on of course. I'm only human.
Moller
as a disclaimer, what I heard was that Titan AE was a very good movie. It's kind of depressing that the studio was shut down because the movie didn't perform as well as the bigwigs up top wanted. You know that if it had done well those same bigwigs would have been fighting over who would have gotten credit for the idea.
Gene Siskel said that Titan AE was the movie that Battlefield: Earth wanted to be. And yet no one has (seriously) talked about John Travolta's career being finished. yet.
Moller
systems aren't you starting to hit major diminishing returns for the amount of money you're putting into the system?
When you get a system that's flying at specs that high, aren't you starting to hit framerates so fast that a noticeable jump in framerate doesn't produce a noticeable jump in performance?
I get 20-30 fps in Tribes, at 800x600 with a 300A celeron and a TNT card.
A friend of mine with a 550 Athlon and a TNT2 gets...30 fps at 800x600. His bonus is he can run up to 1280x1024 and get 20-30 fps still. My video card won't support that resolution, so I can't say if my system would perform comprably with a TNT2 card.
The only difference I notice between our performance is when we both log onto a server his machine loads the game faster and he gets to play a few seconds before I do. However, that isn't impacting gameplay at all.
Back to framerate, when you are up at 80 fps, isn't any increase above that nearly wasted? I supposed if you insist on play quake III at 1600x1200 with 80 fps, you're going to need to ramp everything up (I'm not going to go into how much I hate quake III), but how much does it affect gameplay to run the game at 1600x1200 as opposed to a lower resolution? That is assuming your monitor can support 1600x1200 at a decent refresh rate (mine doesn't even support 1600x1200), so I guess whatever money you save by overclocking you'd drop on getting a monitor that can perform at those resolutions.
no, there's no order to the preceding thoughts, I was just rambling as I listened to a perfect circle.
Moller
I have an SMP motherboard. And I'm aware that 98 doesn't support SMP, although it will still boot on a dual-processor system. (never mind that 98 sucks.) I'm running NT. It works fine. I'd like to see how much better it runs with SMP. I know that linux has much better SMP that NT, but I'm not running linux at the moment because I'm not doing any coding yet.
I'm also aware that under NT 2*550 MHz ~ 600-650 MHz, and on Linux 2*550 ~ 900 MHz (from what I've been told).
Still, I don't see what would require more power than even one 550 MHz processor. The machine I'm typing at right now runs Labview, Visual Studios, and a host of CAD tools very well, and it's only a PII 350. The main problem is Labview is a memory hog and eats up RAM, which slows me down.
Moller
that for a great deal of online FPS games the video card was more important than the processor. I'm a college student (as the e-mail should show) and I play tribes all the time. I set up my roommates computer to play tribes, and he can actually play it on his machine, which is a Pentium Pro 200 with only like 32 MB of RAM. Why can he play it? Because I slapped a Voodoo 2 in his machine. The graphics actually look better than on my Viper V550 (mainly because tribes is native glide).
Truthfully, the main difference I have noticed in FPS games is from video cards. Save for the process of actually loading the games (my friends with 500 Athlons get onto servers much faster than my 300 celeron does), The actual gameplay itself seems to be much more video-card dependant, especially if the game is completely 3d based. This is even more true now with cards like the GEForce that do some of the processor's graphics processing work for it.
And on a final note, why does anyone need 900 MHz? Especially for games? It seems like it would be more useful to get a top of the line video card rather than a superfast processor, but either way you eventually hit the limit at which you can perceive the game. On Tribes forums, people say they've hit 130 fps in Tribes. I mean, is the difference between 80 fps and 130 fps really worth the effort and the money it takes to get there?
Moller
solid for overclocking, but getting them to run in a dual MB takes a bit of fiddling, yes?
And right now, when PIII 550's can be had for $140, why not just grab two of them?
I have a celeron 300A in a Tyan Tiger S1832 MB. I can overclock the celeron to 450, but my system is incredibly unstable. yes, it gives me a performance increase of 50% on benchmarking programs, but everything else I run works fine with just the 300.
I still think that more RAM speeds up a system more than a faster processor would. Aside from that, is it really necessary to have a 900 MHz chip? Or is this just some insane pissing contest? No, really, I can buy a 550 PIII for cheaper than a 450 PII (check pricewatch). So I can have dual 550's running for under $300. I simply can't fathom what would programs would require more processing power than that! Isn't the bottleneck for most games the graphics cards? Isn't the bottleneck for most desktop apps RAM? (when you have 8 windows open and you start spilling into virtual memory).
I just really don't see the point to overclocking, it seems to be an inordinate amount of work for a small gain.
Moller
There is a good deal of shortsightedness in the asking of this questions. It's comparable to asking why more people don't get laser eye surgery done, because then they wouldn't need glasses or contacts anymore.
New (or alternate) fuel sources can be treated as new technologies. With any new technology, you have phases of acceptance:
Phase 1: Early Adopters
these are the people who are always on the bleeding edge of and industry/technology. These are the people who were online in the 80's (how many slashdotters fall into this crowd?). This is typically a very small segment of a population.
Phase 2: I forget the name of this phase...but it doesn't represent a huge increase in the user base of a product/technology. These are people who aren't as "courageous" as the early-adopters in trying bleeding edge items, they normally wait until other people have cut themselves first so they know what to look out for.
Phase 3: Mainstream (or Widespread Use). This is the majority of the populace. Important Note: There is a huge "chasm" between Phase 2 and Phase 3. Getting from Phase 2 to Phase 3 could require many things, be it massive amounts of advertising, huge investments to develop a comprehensive deployment infrastructure, etc.
Phase 4 and Phase 5 are stragglers, and not particulary important to the argument. If you were to show a graph charting these phases, It would look like a bell curve (with phase 3 in the middle, the high portion) and a large break between phase 2 and phase 3.
At the moment, alternate fuel sources to gasoline are still in Phase 1 or Phase 2. Oh well.