I was just reading in a science and nature magazine at work - don't remember which one {sheepish grin} so I'll find it on Monday - that what seemed to be Alzheimer's progressing faster, or doing more damage, was actually the well-educated and intelligent person's brain being more resistant to the early stages of Azlheimer's.
The example they gave was of a Chess Master who could calculate eight moves ahead, but started to worry a bit when that gradually fell to five.
He went to his doctor and talked about it, and the doctor admitted the man for various tests which all turned up nothing abnormal or wrong.
Chess Dude goes home puzzled but happy with his doctor's explanation.
When the man dies, a bit early as far as everyone's concerned, the autopsy revealed that Chess Dude's brain was absolutely riddled with Alzheimer's. He should have been a gibbering, drooling, vegetable months before his death, not wondering about his chess game.
The idea put forward was this - by having an active brain, we stave off the effects (but unfortunately not the result) of various calamities such as Alzheimer's, alcohol, drugs, brain injury, etc.
The harder and faster you push that grey matter, the better, more resilient parallel processor it becomes as the neural pathways are "upgraded" by simply working more. Thinking hard is like taking your brain to the gym, so bulk up all you geeks.:)
Educated people aren't dying from Alzheimer's Gone Wild, they're simply not showing the effects as much, if at all, as your average Joe Sixpack.
Ebola is a filovirus, one of the simplest and deadliest that we know of on earth.
If I remember correctly, it is a string of biological matter that consists of six proteins and looks under a microscope like a shepherd's crook.
It infects cells in the human body - both blood and tissue - and replicates quite rapidly utilizing the body's own RNA strands until the cell literally bursts and releases quite a large quantity of the newly formed virus, which then infects more cells and repeats the process.
Ebola's only purpose is to replicate inside the warm biological matter of humans and monkeys, destroying cellular tissue as it goes about its "life cycle".
Ebola Zaire kills about 9 out of 10 people it comes into direct contact with, and Marburg - another filovirus - kills about 8 out of 10.
Ebola Reston was first found in Washington state in a storage facility built to house monkeys. It infected two workers who came into contact with dead or infected monkeys, but it didn't kill them.
Ebola Reston and Ebola Zaire are 1 marker apart in their protein make-up, but Zaire kills humans while Reston doesn't seem to, yet.
However, Ebola Reston seems capable of moving through the air, hence monkeys in the storage warehouse getting sick without contact with each other but all breathing the same re-circulated air conditioned air inside.
Ebola Zaire, deadly, only contractable through contact with infected bodily fluids. Ebola Reston, one protein different and apparently able to be breathed out by an infected person and infect someone else, like a cold.
Think about that.
I hope that this anti-viral vaccine is able to be produced quickly and cheaply because we don't want an outbreak of mutated Reston.
I used to use Windows 2000 on my Athlon XP-based PC - and I mean just Windows; Firefox for Web, Thunderbird for Email, Notepad++ for editing, OpenOffice for word processing, Filezilla, Azureus, The GIMP...
I switched to Gentoo Linux when a Knoppix Live CD showed me that yes, there was sufficient driver support on my computer to do everything, aside from the soundstorm but I bought a new Audigy2 ZS.:)
I'd like to use a Mac more than just sometimes touching it on my Dad's iMac - which I pushed him to buy instead of a PC for the very reason that he doesn't know how to maintain a personal computer and I wasn't going to turn my full-time job into a 24/7 job because of my Dad's PC.
I like the look and feel of the hardware, specifically the Power Mac's and Powerbooks. I hope the MacBook Pro continues to have that simple, clean, "boxy" look. I hate the way PC laptops are all trying to look streamlined and aerodynamic. What's that for? More air when you hurl the bastard away because something else fucked up in Windows again?
I'd switch to Apple's hardware sooner, if it was just a smidge different - nVidia instead of ATI, 17" WUXGA instead of 17" WSXGA.
Can't really say I love OS X, but if I ignored my Linux experience for a moment, I'd say that Apple have certainly made an overall better OS with more bang for buck than Microsoft have.
I'd still cram Gentoo into my Apple notebook though.:)
Most ISP's in Australia that are of the "small" to "medium" size offer those sorts of residential plans at the moment.
I work at an ISP whose two most expensive plans are 139.95 (1500/256) and 149.95 (512/512) - static IP address, unlimited up/down, no ports blocked, no arbitrary "reasonable use" speed throttling, and no limit to the servers or services you can run through the connection.
For those/.'ers located in Australia who are doubting me, go to Broadband Choice at Whirlpool and check out the plans comparison part of the site.
Really, it's only the big guys in Australia who are offering "unlimited" plans loaded with caveats.
I would be surprised if it wasn't like that in the states too.
Available as single screens, but I don't know what the specifics are of the cards required to run them - probably something "huge".:)
Pick your poison - I don't work for Go-L, I just go to their web site and drool occasionally.:)
Seriously, I think either a two or four screen setup would be good for driving games. Driver sits in front of the right (2), or middle-right (4), screen - or left (2), middle-left (4), depending on which country you want to pretend to be driving in, and if you can get the game to position the steering wheel in that position.
Flight games should be an odd number, unless you're in aircraft/spacecraft sim that have the pilot and co-pilot sitting beside each other - is the F111 the only fighter-bomber military airplane that have the pilot and co-pilot sitting side-by-side in their cockpit escape pod? The F111 is an old f-b compared to others flying these days - still flying in Australia at least - but I reckon it has a certain charm. Then again, I live barely a metric click-and-a-half from the RAAF base at Amberley, so I see these birds cruising around a fair bit.:)
FPS? Odd number of screens, probably three being best - forwards, and left-right peripheral vision.
What I'd really like to see available though is a VR headset that can be focused properly. The last one I got a good chance to look at didn't have proper focusing and it made my eyes hurt after only ten minutes of play. Not good.
Actually, servicing a subway train would not require antenna's all along the tunnels.
You put a cell-receiver in the train, and run communication signals from the train through radio signals out the tracks, the same as you can control model trains on a DCC setup railway, or do IP over powerlines.
Here in Australia, and I'd have to guess that it's similar in New Zealand, there
is a certain mindset of most people that reflects the greater consumerism ideal
around the world of,
"Why should I know how to use this? It should just do what it's supposed to do."
This leads to several problems which are continuously and vigorously pounded
upon by anyone who both has a clue and is making money out of the current status
quo.
It's hard to put into precise words but basically, most people here are sheep -
no pun intended - or, if you wanted a slightly noisier example, cattle.
They want their television shows to watch, cars to work, dinner on the table at
a certain time, and computers to function enough so that email can be read and
letters written.
When it comes to how a computer works, some people will become almost violent in
their protests of "I don't need to know that!", despite the fact that they want
to know why they just paid money for someone to clean up their spyware encrusted
hard drive, and heaven help the poor soul who suggests that the ignorant user
try something else.
"This is how I've always done it", "I can't learn something new", "Free
is crap", "Well how come Microsoft is so popular", "I'm sure that the government
would say something about that", "What's the catch", "Why does hosting cost so
much here then if it's so easy", "I'd never use that", "Why is my computer so
slow", "How come you can't make this go faster? It's better than the old one
right?"
IT in Australia is in a fucked up state because the majority of people who don't
use computers don't know, or care, how computers indirectly influence their
lives, and the majority of those that do use computers don't want to know
anything more than what they need to do to send an email, play a game, or
balance their taxes.
If a virus hits, "Oh well, the salesman said this virus program thing would keep
me safe there" - an unpatched copy of Norton's Anti-Virus from 2001.
If their dial-up is dropping out - while trying to send or recieve a
multi-megabyte email that you've told isn't going to work - because they've got
a shitty internal windows driver-run modem then it's the ISP's fault because, "I
only just bought this last week. Why are you kicking me off-line all the time? I
want to talk to your manager. You guaranteed unlimited internet."
If they've got DSL - which is 256/64 "for the kids and their games" and the
little snot's bitchin' to them and ultimately to me because it's "laggy" - and
there's a problem at the exchange, it's the job of the guy in the call centre to
physically go out and hand wire them back into the net because "it's really
critical I get this email to my friend!"
Some of these examples may sound familiar to some of you. I deal with this crap
often, working in IT as a tech support guy and having family and relatives that own various
sorts of computers. My Dad got a computer fairly recently. I forced him to get
an iMac, predominantly because he knows absolutely fuck-all about how a computer
works and I am fed up supporting every little fucking glitch on everyone else's
Windows-running PC.
I use Linux. I have it set up to be simple for someone who's used a computer to
simply load a browser and surf the net, while I'm fixing their piece of crap.
"This is nice." they say.
"I can show you how to use this on your computer if you like. I'll set it up,
and it can be almost exactly like what you used before. There's none of those
viruses to worry about that you hear on the news, and look, it's got that card
game you like." I reply.
"Oh, uh, no, I don't know how to use this."
"You don't know how to use Windows either."
"Yeah but, Bob gives me a hand sometimes, and a reboot sometimes fixes things,
and I can take this to the shop to get fixed too."
Fucking cattle. If there isn't money involved then they don't have a yard stick
to measure what's happening. I hear so many peopl
Face it, there is no longer any such thing as privacy. The internet is just the telescreen of 1984, where the powers that be watch you while you watch their programs. [Obigatory quote left out here.] With datamining, cell phone call available from web sites, personal records, etc. for sale, Big Brother Dubya scaning calls, usw. we are all living in houses with open curtains. I guess the only way out of this is to become a Zen monk and live in a cave without internet, phone, or credit cards, but even then the government would probably hire some badger to spy on you.
And that Badger's name was... Lunch.:)
Seriously, I thought I a cynic, but maybe that was just cynical here in Aus. Seems rather relaxed compared to your doom and gloom post.
I work for a local community telco here in Ipswich - Internet, mobiles, landlines - and I have to ask customers to disable, or even uninstall, Nortons "something or other" sometimes.
Those poor bastards. For years we've - a general we've, not specifically you and I - been telling people have a virus checker, firewall, so on and so forth, and often recommending Symantec software because it used to be good, and now I gotta tell them that Nortons Security or Nortons Whatever is causing half their bloody problems, and the customer doesn't know why, or even understand.
As a simple solution to this whole problem, I've been waiting for a virulent strain of code to take out all the world's Window's-based machines so I can start telling people to get a Linux, BSD, or Mac system. Kind of a pisser of a solution but I think it would work, to a certain extent.
I'd just like it if they used "open" hardware in their systems so I could buy a 17" Apple Powerbook - with a higher resolution screen having its graphics pushed by an nVidia graphics chip - and dump a copy of Gentoo on it.
I've been trying to find the right laptop for me for ages now, and Apple's stuff comes pretty close but I've read a lot of accounts where by the hardware in their laptops doesn't have very good open support, e.g. the wireless chipset.
I also think that 1600x1050 isn't a high enough resolution for a wide-screen, especially with high definition stuff coming around soon, and anyone who thinks that 1920x1200 is no good because they can't read the text should get a clue. There is no reason why you can't up-size the default display size of the fonts on a high res desktop.
That's what I'm going to do when they finally standardise, kids are playing on their XBOX 360 and PS3, Vista comes out, everyone's using either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, and a new standard is created that outstrips Blu-ray and HD-DVD in terms of cost, capacity, and convenience.
Time rolls on, tech evolves with aid from semi-intelligent mistake making, something new is always coming right round the corner...
"I don't get very sick these days, but when I do - even if it's a really bad cold or flu that's knocking people about here and there, and there's warnings about it on the news, fairly common around here during the winter months - I tend to get better within fourty-eight hours."
That's the thing; how do you know that you're even catching whatever these people have gotten that's kept them in bed for days? It could be that all your apparent efforts for your health have nothing to do with your lack of extended illness.
This is probably a bit late to reply but I will anyway.
I know I have the same, or at least very similar thing as those around me, because our symptoms are all the same, mine just last for a lot less time.
I will go to the doctor and get a second opinion from him when I get sick, just so I can be sure that my own prognosis is correct, and it usually is, but I don't get a prescription if it's for something I can simply deal with without drugs, and my doctor agrees with me on this because over the years he's seen me heal quicker than most of his other patients who are taking drugs to get through a cold, flu, or other viral or bacterial infection.
And the key part to this healing quicker is not the speed of my recovery but the fact that, other than good Cold or plain old Flu with their ability to change by themselves, I don't catch other stuff again. I have not been to the doctor with the same repeated illnesses since I was about eighteen and looking after my own diet, whereas friends of mine have gotten the same ailments repeatedly for years, and always taken the same drugs for them.
Sure, there are times when I have taken drugs to try and relieve an ailment, but only when I'd exhausted the "natural" remedies - and I say natural like that because drugs are natural too, just manufactured from natural ingredients.
The biggest problem with most people when it comes to health is that they don't think about it until they get sick, and then they desperately want to find a quick fix, or fear they're going to "die" when they're being more melodramatic.
That's just silly. If they thought about it now, and took steps now, then they wouldn't have to worry about the "quick fix" later.
I would not be surprised to find out that pretty much all the virus and infectious bacterial agents in nature tend to build up resistance to the various drugs that are used to combat them.
I haven't read through all the comments, so someone's likely to have already said this but,
The best thing for people to do with regards to their health is build up their immune system without drugs. Eat more foods with anti-viral, and anti-bacterial properties.
Garlic's a good one, all round. Peppers - capsicum, chili - are good too, and can add a nice little kick to an otherwise mild tasting meal. Having fish? Add lemon juice, or orange for a slightly sweeter taste. Salad? Add some shallots or onions.
I think the biggest problem though with the enhanced diet approach is that too many people cook their food too much.
I will happily nibble on raw onion, raw garlic, shallots, a capsicum, chili. I may not be very approachable if I'm breathing in your direction, but I wouldn't be approachable if I was sick either.
Boost your immune system, don't rely on the drugs. What happens when you catch a new strain of something that there is no drug to combat it with? Don't just eat healthy, eat health-enhancing foods, and your body will still catch things, but it'll be a lot more ready to fight them.
I don't get very sick these days, but when I do - even if it's a really bad cold or flu that's knocking people about here and there, and there's warnings about it on the news, fairly common around here during the winter months - I tend to get better within fourty-eight hours.
I've caught things that have had friends and family in bed for days, taking drugs prescribed by a doctor and complaining about how crap they feel, and while they do that, I'm seriously chowing down on various strong foods, making myself sweat and do a lot of physical exertion, and keeping myself hot and active, flushing myself through with lots of water and hot soups.
It's simple, but it tends to work. The strongest drugs I take these days are aspirin if I get a migraine, and no, I'm not one of these anti-drug guys. I smoke, which I know doesn't help normally, and I like to drink alcohol, I just don't like to try and combat every little ailment I have with drugs, and my body tends to resist communicable illnesses that people around me have got.
Eat healthy, and you'll be healthy. Eat health-boosting foods, and you'll tend to gain resistance to little nasties.
Disclaimer: I am currently drunk, so the following comments may seem a little more disjointed than usual.
I remember when I was playing Shadowrun, and delved into Cyberpunk 2020, and loving the idea of having a character who could directly interface to a computer - in Shadowrun it was via a "datajack", located directly behind the ear and mounted in the hard skull tissue for maximum anchorage.
The idea is not new. I remember reading about a guy called "Jerry" who'd had a special series of wires - I think fibre optic - running into his head and connected into his brain, set up some time around the mid seventies.
With these systems running to a, relatively, small computer on his belt, he was able to discern largish, monochrome coloured objects from a certain distance and within a post card field of view. In the seventies.
Jerry's problem was not that the computer had power supply problems, or its actual size, but the software running the system was not very sophisticated and couldn't create very accurate distinctions between, say, a man and the hat on his head.
Fortunately, Jerry had been born with sight, so he could distinguish between certain shapes that he'd seen before.
Expand the idea. Give direct neural input to the parts of the brain that receive sound and touch. You now have the "Matrix" of Shadowrun - shapes, sounds, rudimentary touch, and sight.
I saw that someone else in this forum mentioned Windows, probably as joke. The key thing is that if you write the input controls in just the right way, you don't need an OS to run it. The brain is an extraordinary parallel processing computer. Before you pick up that cup of coffee/soft drink/alcohol, think about all the various thoughts that just went through your brain for the simple task of picking up the cup.
Look for $object. $object located $here. $closest appendage ==...
There is so much happening in your brain, even just reading this post, that it would be difficult to write down every step you do even when you're simply pressing a button on the keyboard.
The key to creating a DNI is not thinking about the real-time OS to use - because no computer runs like our brain -, or what protocol to use - because the protocols are all dependent on OS's we use on computers -, but to think of the optimal way to get the information about here, to here, inside your head.
Once you do that, you can create input from anywhere, which is both a scary and exciting thought.
We could have movies that literally immerse us in the action/drama/comedy/what ever, computer games that simulate the game creator's idea of a gaming universe and lets us run wild, or security systems that let us roam like wild viruses or worms through a system...
Do you know what I think is the only real problem standing in the way of expanding this tech to the point where we can watch movies, program, play games, or surf the web with our brains?
The interface? Our brains are meat and chemicals, and can be mapped. The input? I say "that's a red ball", and immediately you see it as a red ball, and then - when you're actually looking at the object - you decide for yourself whether or not it looks red or not. The connections? Optic fibre or copper? We'll sort out a simple, clean way to hook up without hurting ourselves.
The big problem I see is bandwidth. Let's go back to the idea before of how much parallel processing goes on in the brain. Try opening up ten applications on your computer - separate ones - and then telling them to perform CPU intensive tasks. Notice the slow down?
This is the same as someone doing one task, and you come along and ask them to do another. They may be able to do it, but it'll be a little harder to do that as well as the other ten, twenty, or even thirty, things they're already doing, both conciously and sub-conciously.
Motor actions, input-output actions and reactions - touch/taste/feel/smell/sight actio
That there will be active volcanos on Venus, if only for the simple fact that it's apparently close enough to the Sun to be "as hot as hell", but not quite close enough to be baked to a cinder like Mercury, plus there was some interesting things observed when we last sent a probe - even with lens-cap problem.
teewurstmann does raise an interesting question - "Why are we looking for active volcanos on Venus?"
The answers "Because we can." or "It'll lead to great jumps in science." would not suffice with your average Joe Bloggs though, and if we wish to increase our ventures into space, or even just continue with space exploration altogether, then we're going to need a "hook", or a goal that we can present to the public in a unified answer that satisfies their curiosity and is not an outright lie - although a little white lie like, for example "We hope to discover a significant mineral deposit on the moon which will facilitate longer journeys into space." or "By studying the metals and minerals on Mercury we can discover how to create stronger, more tolerable materials on Earth which will create better housing, stronger and lighter cars..." etc.
Come up with a Grand Idea if you like - "We're going to save mankind."
Now seriously, who wouldn't think that saving our species is a noble goal? We don't have to tell the public "from ourselves", we'll just keep'em guessing - the continual doses of paranoia we're getting from our governments aren't doing too much harm, so we'll use a little "poetic licence".
Why are we looking for volcanos on Venus? Why not? Why not start at Mercury, or Venus, or Mars, or anywhere else in our solar system and look at it like one of those colour tests a few of us must have done in chemistry in high school.
Oh look, Mercury is mainly this colour, which means it's made mostly of this mineral... Venus is very acidic, and has all sorts of interesting liquid metals at venusian "room" temperature... Mars seems to have water, or the evidence of water...
We study, and learn, and find out how our solar system is constructed, and then one day, maybe if we don't destroy ourselves beforehand, we use the models we've made from this gathering of knowledge and we create plans.
We plan which solar systems nearby would be likely to have a sufficiently earth-like blue-green planet. We plan where we could find in our galaxy various minerals, fuels, and other resources needed to build, maintain, and power our ships as we go searching for other life, and other worlds. We plan to spread out, to colonise the most idyllic locations, and make sure that our species survives through sheer weight of numbers. We plan to live, to explore, to discover, to learn, to expand our minds and evolve.
We've been sitting on this little blue-green marble for a long time now, long enough to nurture the maths, physics, chemistry, and biological sciences enough to show us how to get up and explore the rest of our solar system. Now we need to use that knowledge and help ourselves before a meteor, asteroid, or sheer stupidity kills us.
Why explore the solar system? Why pick over rocks on Venus?
Because these are our baby steps, our first tentative journeys into space, the beginning of what I, and I'd hope many of you too, would dearly wish to be the start of our much greater journey into the galaxy.
Mistakes will be made, and lives will, as they have, be lost, but those people, our first space explorers, did not die in vain. We already have gained much knowledge, and it may not be used to any large extent now, but it will prove to be invaluable in the future.
I only hope that politics, greed, apathy, and stupidity don't condemn us to live our final days here, stuck on a world we could so easily leave if we simply worked at it.
With the two different projects using two different core interface libraries like they are, I can't see them combining at any time.
I currently use KDE. I like the Mac OS style menu-bar being up the top, adjusting to which ever program I'm currently using, as well as having my KMenu, "System Tray", clock, and search function link all neatly arranged at the top of my screen.
Right at the moment I'm running a compile of KDE 3.5.0 Beta 2 - Hard Masked.
There are several Gnome apps I like, but that menu-bar thing is annoying - the fact that GTK doesn't seem to have any way of copying the Mac OS style of screen top menu.
That's the first thing that put me on KDE instead of Gnome, it's ability to be configured to look like damn near anything resembling Windows XP or Mac OS X, and although I have had my desktop look like Mac OS X for a little while - care of Baghira - I've only kept a few noticeable interface influences on it while customising the desktop to really be mine.
Gnome was not so easy to make it look the way I wanted, so it didn't stay for long on my desktop.
The important thing is, I have the choice. We all have this choice, and that's actually more important than how any one of these individual desktop environments is built because if there's one we don't like, we can move on to another one.
All of our apps will work - gnome apps just need a few gnome libraries installed, as do kde apps - so we can pick and choose on a whim.
I'd like some aspects of Gnome put into KDE, and some aspects of KDE copied into Gnome, but I don't expect that to happen for a while.
They're still free though - free to use, sell, and screw with under the hood - so maybe someone one day will fork both into this drooling monstrous hybrid of whiz-bang eye-candy and god-awful tastelessness some of us desire.:)
I had to buy a soundcard to replace the soundstorm chip on my motherboard, simply because I hated the one-sound-at-a-time/software-mixing crap when I dropped Windows as my working OS - I still boot into it every once in a while to play a game or two, but it's running on an older PATA drive and I never installed the drivers for my SATA's, where Linux lives.:)
After much dicking around with salespeople who couldn't believe I wanted an older soundcard - "Why do you want a Live man? They're old." - and finding out from all the guys in back rooms of computer shops - I get on well with grunts, working as a grunt myself - and finding out there were no more old Creative Lives to be had, I bought a lower model, i.e. no 5.25" front panel, Audigy2 ZS.
Physical install took a few minutes, driver install required recompile to create kernel emu10k module - yeah, yeah, ALSA, I know - and soon I was listening to a swede saying in his native tongue from a 5.1 channel wave file that all my speakers were working.
Happy? Yes.
Why am I replying to the fellow above?
I bought a decent soundcard, and before when I was using Windows the soundstorm seemed decent enough too, so I'd bought myself a set of moderately cheap, floor-standing surround sound speakers.
4 60W satellite speakers (1 large cone, 1 small), a 60W (three cone) centre, and a 100W 12" sub with a front air vent almost big enough to fit my fist in, all providing rich RMS sound to a space barely 2x2x2 metres. Cheap, but niiice, and because I don't need to turn the volume up loud to hear anything, everything sounds good.
So I agree with the parent post, and I hope that someone from Creative is reading this forum. I don't need equalizing, and I don't need Bass-boost, or whatever it's called. Make it easy, or easier, to turn off all the little extras. If someone's buying a decent soundcard, there's a good chance they're buying, or have already bought, a nice set of speakers too - or at least fairly good ones.
I'm using Linux, so I'm not worried about driver bloat. My driver is the Emu module in the kernel. My biggest bloat is the KDE sound mixer - 1280 horizontal resolution and that bugger is still 1.5 times the width of my screen - but I don't really mind. I touch it once, and that's it.
One more thing to any Creative people in the audience. Let's have Linux support for the X-Fi series, please. My Audigy is gonna last a while, but I'd like to think that when I do replace it, I don't have to go through the whole "finding a linux friendly company" crap again.
You don't even have to actively support Linux, just open up the chips and let us know how they work - not how they're built, but at least what the drivers are supposed to talk to in order to work.
It's a small effort, and there's an potential revenue stream there of Linux users, not just playing games, but doing film and television editing, music editing, mixing, experimenting with 3D OpenAL audio programming, and more.
Let us use the good stuff you make. Don't drive us away because you're worried that the driver api's will magically allow your competitors to create clone chips - it doesn't work that way.
Which I'd love to tell the music company executives, and all those that might admire them. It's a simple word, at first inoffensive if you don't know the meaning, and can be shouted in anger without losing the basic sound of the word.
The word is "Garn".
It means "Go and get fucked.", from "go and" being said shortly to "go'an", then altered via the australian accent into the word "garn".
The long of it is "garn get fucked", and the shorthand "garn" can used when you just need to say something snappy without being misheard, or offending little old ladies.
So, to the RIAA, and all those affiliated,
"I'm never paying you fuckers a single cent from now on. Those two Ministry albums - Animositisomina, and Houses of the Mole' - I just bought were IT, the end of the line. I am going to download any music I want to listen to, and I'm going to send the purchase price, or import price, directly to the artist via a money order."
Sigh. I can't think of a better lesson on how NOT to manage than the one I'm subjected to every day. Micro doesn't even begin to describe my manager's management style.
Perhaps it could be labeled Nano Management?
Perhaps if you go into work one day and see that everywhere, all at once, your manager is supervising everyone through their tasks then he's descended into into Quantum Management.
Be careful. Once he hits sub-space there'll be no stopping him.
But I'm having a bit of trouble finding the parts of the articles where they say just how little, if any, Digital Rights Management are built into these televisions.
That would be one of the key factors to which HDTV to buy, for any geek, I would think.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just reading in a science and nature magazine at work - don't remember which one {sheepish grin} so I'll find it on Monday - that what seemed to be Alzheimer's progressing faster, or doing more damage, was actually the well-educated and intelligent person's brain being more resistant to the early stages of Azlheimer's.
The example they gave was of a Chess Master who could calculate eight moves ahead, but started to worry a bit when that gradually fell to five.
He went to his doctor and talked about it, and the doctor admitted the man for various tests which all turned up nothing abnormal or wrong.
Chess Dude goes home puzzled but happy with his doctor's explanation.
When the man dies, a bit early as far as everyone's concerned, the autopsy revealed that Chess Dude's brain was absolutely riddled with Alzheimer's. He should have been a gibbering, drooling, vegetable months before his death, not wondering about his chess game.
The idea put forward was this - by having an active brain, we stave off the effects (but unfortunately not the result) of various calamities such as Alzheimer's, alcohol, drugs, brain injury, etc.
The harder and faster you push that grey matter, the better, more resilient parallel processor it becomes as the neural pathways are "upgraded" by simply working more. Thinking hard is like taking your brain to the gym, so bulk up all you geeks. :)
Educated people aren't dying from Alzheimer's Gone Wild, they're simply not showing the effects as much, if at all, as your average Joe Sixpack.
Khyber, Ebola is a virus, not a bacteria.
Ebola is a filovirus, one of the simplest and deadliest that we know of on earth.
If I remember correctly, it is a string of biological matter that consists of six proteins and looks under a microscope like a shepherd's crook.
It infects cells in the human body - both blood and tissue - and replicates quite rapidly utilizing the body's own RNA strands until the cell literally bursts and releases quite a large quantity of the newly formed virus, which then infects more cells and repeats the process.
Ebola's only purpose is to replicate inside the warm biological matter of humans and monkeys, destroying cellular tissue as it goes about its "life cycle".
Ebola Zaire kills about 9 out of 10 people it comes into direct contact with, and Marburg - another filovirus - kills about 8 out of 10.
Ebola Reston was first found in Washington state in a storage facility built to house monkeys. It infected two workers who came into contact with dead or infected monkeys, but it didn't kill them.
Ebola Reston and Ebola Zaire are 1 marker apart in their protein make-up, but Zaire kills humans while Reston doesn't seem to, yet.
However, Ebola Reston seems capable of moving through the air, hence monkeys in the storage warehouse getting sick without contact with each other but all breathing the same re-circulated air conditioned air inside.
Ebola Zaire, deadly, only contractable through contact with infected bodily fluids. Ebola Reston, one protein different and apparently able to be breathed out by an infected person and infect someone else, like a cold.
Think about that.
I hope that this anti-viral vaccine is able to be produced quickly and cheaply because we don't want an outbreak of mutated Reston.
I used to use Windows 2000 on my Athlon XP-based PC - and I mean just Windows; Firefox for Web, Thunderbird for Email, Notepad++ for editing, OpenOffice for word processing, Filezilla, Azureus, The GIMP...
I switched to Gentoo Linux when a Knoppix Live CD showed me that yes, there was sufficient driver support on my computer to do everything, aside from the soundstorm but I bought a new Audigy2 ZS. :)
I'd like to use a Mac more than just sometimes touching it on my Dad's iMac - which I pushed him to buy instead of a PC for the very reason that he doesn't know how to maintain a personal computer and I wasn't going to turn my full-time job into a 24/7 job because of my Dad's PC.
I like the look and feel of the hardware, specifically the Power Mac's and Powerbooks. I hope the MacBook Pro continues to have that simple, clean, "boxy" look. I hate the way PC laptops are all trying to look streamlined and aerodynamic. What's that for? More air when you hurl the bastard away because something else fucked up in Windows again?
I'd switch to Apple's hardware sooner, if it was just a smidge different - nVidia instead of ATI, 17" WUXGA instead of 17" WSXGA.
Can't really say I love OS X, but if I ignored my Linux experience for a moment, I'd say that Apple have certainly made an overall better OS with more bang for buck than Microsoft have.
I'd still cram Gentoo into my Apple notebook though. :)
Most ISP's in Australia that are of the "small" to "medium" size offer those sorts of residential plans at the moment.
I work at an ISP whose two most expensive plans are 139.95 (1500/256) and 149.95 (512/512) - static IP address, unlimited up/down, no ports blocked, no arbitrary "reasonable use" speed throttling, and no limit to the servers or services you can run through the connection.
For those /.'ers located in Australia who are doubting me, go to Broadband Choice at Whirlpool and check out the plans comparison part of the site.
Really, it's only the big guys in Australia who are offering "unlimited" plans loaded with caveats.
I would be surprised if it wasn't like that in the states too.
Available as single screens, but I don't know what the specifics are of the cards required to run them - probably something "huge". :)
Pick your poison - I don't work for Go-L, I just go to their web site and drool occasionally. :)
Seriously, I think either a two or four screen setup would be good for driving games. Driver sits in front of the right (2), or middle-right (4), screen - or left (2), middle-left (4), depending on which country you want to pretend to be driving in, and if you can get the game to position the steering wheel in that position.
Flight games should be an odd number, unless you're in aircraft/spacecraft sim that have the pilot and co-pilot sitting beside each other - is the F111 the only fighter-bomber military airplane that have the pilot and co-pilot sitting side-by-side in their cockpit escape pod? The F111 is an old f-b compared to others flying these days - still flying in Australia at least - but I reckon it has a certain charm. Then again, I live barely a metric click-and-a-half from the RAAF base at Amberley, so I see these birds cruising around a fair bit. :)
FPS? Odd number of screens, probably three being best - forwards, and left-right peripheral vision.
What I'd really like to see available though is a VR headset that can be focused properly. The last one I got a good chance to look at didn't have proper focusing and it made my eyes hurt after only ten minutes of play. Not good.
Makes you wonder what nVidia is going to come out with in this continual game of one-up-manship. :)
Actually, servicing a subway train would not require antenna's all along the tunnels.
You put a cell-receiver in the train, and run communication signals from the train through radio signals out the tracks, the same as you can control model trains on a DCC setup railway, or do IP over powerlines.
Here in Australia, and I'd have to guess that it's similar in New Zealand, there is a certain mindset of most people that reflects the greater consumerism ideal around the world of,
"Why should I know how to use this? It should just do what it's supposed to do."
This leads to several problems which are continuously and vigorously pounded upon by anyone who both has a clue and is making money out of the current status quo.
It's hard to put into precise words but basically, most people here are sheep - no pun intended - or, if you wanted a slightly noisier example, cattle.
They want their television shows to watch, cars to work, dinner on the table at a certain time, and computers to function enough so that email can be read and letters written.
When it comes to how a computer works, some people will become almost violent in their protests of "I don't need to know that!", despite the fact that they want to know why they just paid money for someone to clean up their spyware encrusted hard drive, and heaven help the poor soul who suggests that the ignorant user try something else.
"This is how I've always done it", "I can't learn something new", "Free is crap", "Well how come Microsoft is so popular", "I'm sure that the government would say something about that", "What's the catch", "Why does hosting cost so much here then if it's so easy", "I'd never use that", "Why is my computer so slow", "How come you can't make this go faster? It's better than the old one right?"
IT in Australia is in a fucked up state because the majority of people who don't use computers don't know, or care, how computers indirectly influence their lives, and the majority of those that do use computers don't want to know anything more than what they need to do to send an email, play a game, or balance their taxes.
If a virus hits, "Oh well, the salesman said this virus program thing would keep me safe there" - an unpatched copy of Norton's Anti-Virus from 2001.
If their dial-up is dropping out - while trying to send or recieve a multi-megabyte email that you've told isn't going to work - because they've got a shitty internal windows driver-run modem then it's the ISP's fault because, "I only just bought this last week. Why are you kicking me off-line all the time? I want to talk to your manager. You guaranteed unlimited internet."
If they've got DSL - which is 256/64 "for the kids and their games" and the little snot's bitchin' to them and ultimately to me because it's "laggy" - and there's a problem at the exchange, it's the job of the guy in the call centre to physically go out and hand wire them back into the net because "it's really critical I get this email to my friend!"
Some of these examples may sound familiar to some of you. I deal with this crap often, working in IT as a tech support guy and having family and relatives that own various sorts of computers. My Dad got a computer fairly recently. I forced him to get an iMac, predominantly because he knows absolutely fuck-all about how a computer works and I am fed up supporting every little fucking glitch on everyone else's Windows-running PC.
I use Linux. I have it set up to be simple for someone who's used a computer to simply load a browser and surf the net, while I'm fixing their piece of crap.
"This is nice." they say.
"I can show you how to use this on your computer if you like. I'll set it up, and it can be almost exactly like what you used before. There's none of those viruses to worry about that you hear on the news, and look, it's got that card game you like." I reply.
"Oh, uh, no, I don't know how to use this."
"You don't know how to use Windows either."
"Yeah but, Bob gives me a hand sometimes, and a reboot sometimes fixes things, and I can take this to the shop to get fixed too."
Fucking cattle. If there isn't money involved then they don't have a yard stick to measure what's happening. I hear so many peopl
Face it, there is no longer any such thing as privacy. The internet is just the telescreen of 1984, where the powers that be watch you while you watch their programs. [Obigatory quote left out here.] With datamining, cell phone call available from web sites, personal records, etc. for sale, Big Brother Dubya scaning calls, usw. we are all living in houses with open curtains. I guess the only way out of this is to become a Zen monk and live in a cave without internet, phone, or credit cards, but even then the government would probably hire some badger to spy on you.
And that Badger's name was... Lunch. :)
Seriously, I thought I a cynic, but maybe that was just cynical here in Aus. Seems rather relaxed compared to your doom and gloom post.
I work for a local community telco here in Ipswich - Internet, mobiles, landlines - and I have to ask customers to disable, or even uninstall, Nortons "something or other" sometimes.
Those poor bastards. For years we've - a general we've, not specifically you and I - been telling people have a virus checker, firewall, so on and so forth, and often recommending Symantec software because it used to be good, and now I gotta tell them that Nortons Security or Nortons Whatever is causing half their bloody problems, and the customer doesn't know why, or even understand.
As a simple solution to this whole problem, I've been waiting for a virulent strain of code to take out all the world's Window's-based machines so I can start telling people to get a Linux, BSD, or Mac system. Kind of a pisser of a solution but I think it would work, to a certain extent.
I'd just like it if they used "open" hardware in their systems so I could buy a 17" Apple Powerbook - with a higher resolution screen having its graphics pushed by an nVidia graphics chip - and dump a copy of Gentoo on it.
I've been trying to find the right laptop for me for ages now, and Apple's stuff comes pretty close but I've read a lot of accounts where by the hardware in their laptops doesn't have very good open support, e.g. the wireless chipset.
I also think that 1600x1050 isn't a high enough resolution for a wide-screen, especially with high definition stuff coming around soon, and anyone who thinks that 1920x1200 is no good because they can't read the text should get a clue. There is no reason why you can't up-size the default display size of the fonts on a high res desktop.
Like never before.
That's what I'm going to do when they finally standardise, kids are playing on their XBOX 360 and PS3, Vista comes out, everyone's using either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, and a new standard is created that outstrips Blu-ray and HD-DVD in terms of cost, capacity, and convenience.
Time rolls on, tech evolves with aid from semi-intelligent mistake making, something new is always coming right round the corner...
That's the thing; how do you know that you're even catching whatever these people have gotten that's kept them in bed for days? It could be that all your apparent efforts for your health have nothing to do with your lack of extended illness.
This is probably a bit late to reply but I will anyway.
I know I have the same, or at least very similar thing as those around me, because our symptoms are all the same, mine just last for a lot less time.
I will go to the doctor and get a second opinion from him when I get sick, just so I can be sure that my own prognosis is correct, and it usually is, but I don't get a prescription if it's for something I can simply deal with without drugs, and my doctor agrees with me on this because over the years he's seen me heal quicker than most of his other patients who are taking drugs to get through a cold, flu, or other viral or bacterial infection.
And the key part to this healing quicker is not the speed of my recovery but the fact that, other than good Cold or plain old Flu with their ability to change by themselves, I don't catch other stuff again. I have not been to the doctor with the same repeated illnesses since I was about eighteen and looking after my own diet, whereas friends of mine have gotten the same ailments repeatedly for years, and always taken the same drugs for them.
Sure, there are times when I have taken drugs to try and relieve an ailment, but only when I'd exhausted the "natural" remedies - and I say natural like that because drugs are natural too, just manufactured from natural ingredients.
The biggest problem with most people when it comes to health is that they don't think about it until they get sick, and then they desperately want to find a quick fix, or fear they're going to "die" when they're being more melodramatic.
That's just silly. If they thought about it now, and took steps now, then they wouldn't have to worry about the "quick fix" later.
I would not be surprised to find out that pretty much all the virus and infectious bacterial agents in nature tend to build up resistance to the various drugs that are used to combat them.
I haven't read through all the comments, so someone's likely to have already said this but,
The best thing for people to do with regards to their health is build up their immune system without drugs. Eat more foods with anti-viral, and anti-bacterial properties.
Garlic's a good one, all round. Peppers - capsicum, chili - are good too, and can add a nice little kick to an otherwise mild tasting meal. Having fish? Add lemon juice, or orange for a slightly sweeter taste. Salad? Add some shallots or onions.
I think the biggest problem though with the enhanced diet approach is that too many people cook their food too much.
I will happily nibble on raw onion, raw garlic, shallots, a capsicum, chili. I may not be very approachable if I'm breathing in your direction, but I wouldn't be approachable if I was sick either.
Boost your immune system, don't rely on the drugs. What happens when you catch a new strain of something that there is no drug to combat it with? Don't just eat healthy, eat health-enhancing foods, and your body will still catch things, but it'll be a lot more ready to fight them.
I don't get very sick these days, but when I do - even if it's a really bad cold or flu that's knocking people about here and there, and there's warnings about it on the news, fairly common around here during the winter months - I tend to get better within fourty-eight hours.
I've caught things that have had friends and family in bed for days, taking drugs prescribed by a doctor and complaining about how crap they feel, and while they do that, I'm seriously chowing down on various strong foods, making myself sweat and do a lot of physical exertion, and keeping myself hot and active, flushing myself through with lots of water and hot soups.
It's simple, but it tends to work. The strongest drugs I take these days are aspirin if I get a migraine, and no, I'm not one of these anti-drug guys. I smoke, which I know doesn't help normally, and I like to drink alcohol, I just don't like to try and combat every little ailment I have with drugs, and my body tends to resist communicable illnesses that people around me have got.
Eat healthy, and you'll be healthy. Eat health-boosting foods, and you'll tend to gain resistance to little nasties.
"I feel the Urge, the urge to Purge*."
* I.e. Vomit.
Seriously, the world's biggest commercial software vendor getting it together with, possibly, the world's biggest icon of commercial music?!
It's a match made in marketing heaven, and consumer hell.
Disclaimer: I am currently drunk, so the following comments may seem a little more disjointed than usual.
I remember when I was playing Shadowrun, and delved into Cyberpunk 2020, and loving the idea of having a character who could directly interface to a computer - in Shadowrun it was via a "datajack", located directly behind the ear and mounted in the hard skull tissue for maximum anchorage.
The idea is not new. I remember reading about a guy called "Jerry" who'd had a special series of wires - I think fibre optic - running into his head and connected into his brain, set up some time around the mid seventies.
With these systems running to a, relatively, small computer on his belt, he was able to discern largish, monochrome coloured objects from a certain distance and within a post card field of view. In the seventies.
Jerry's problem was not that the computer had power supply problems, or its actual size, but the software running the system was not very sophisticated and couldn't create very accurate distinctions between, say, a man and the hat on his head.
Fortunately, Jerry had been born with sight, so he could distinguish between certain shapes that he'd seen before.
Expand the idea. Give direct neural input to the parts of the brain that receive sound and touch. You now have the "Matrix" of Shadowrun - shapes, sounds, rudimentary touch, and sight.
I saw that someone else in this forum mentioned Windows, probably as joke. The key thing is that if you write the input controls in just the right way, you don't need an OS to run it. The brain is an extraordinary parallel processing computer. Before you pick up that cup of coffee/soft drink/alcohol, think about all the various thoughts that just went through your brain for the simple task of picking up the cup.
Look for $object. $object located $here. $closest appendage ==...
There is so much happening in your brain, even just reading this post, that it would be difficult to write down every step you do even when you're simply pressing a button on the keyboard.
The key to creating a DNI is not thinking about the real-time OS to use - because no computer runs like our brain -, or what protocol to use - because the protocols are all dependent on OS's we use on computers -, but to think of the optimal way to get the information about here, to here, inside your head.
Once you do that, you can create input from anywhere, which is both a scary and exciting thought.
We could have movies that literally immerse us in the action/drama/comedy/what ever, computer games that simulate the game creator's idea of a gaming universe and lets us run wild, or security systems that let us roam like wild viruses or worms through a system...
Do you know what I think is the only real problem standing in the way of expanding this tech to the point where we can watch movies, program, play games, or surf the web with our brains?
The interface? Our brains are meat and chemicals, and can be mapped. The input? I say "that's a red ball", and immediately you see it as a red ball, and then - when you're actually looking at the object - you decide for yourself whether or not it looks red or not. The connections? Optic fibre or copper? We'll sort out a simple, clean way to hook up without hurting ourselves.
The big problem I see is bandwidth. Let's go back to the idea before of how much parallel processing goes on in the brain. Try opening up ten applications on your computer - separate ones - and then telling them to perform CPU intensive tasks. Notice the slow down?
This is the same as someone doing one task, and you come along and ask them to do another. They may be able to do it, but it'll be a little harder to do that as well as the other ten, twenty, or even thirty, things they're already doing, both conciously and sub-conciously.
Motor actions, input-output actions and reactions - touch/taste/feel/smell/sight actio
That there will be active volcanos on Venus, if only for the simple fact that it's apparently close enough to the Sun to be "as hot as hell", but not quite close enough to be baked to a cinder like Mercury, plus there was some interesting things observed when we last sent a probe - even with lens-cap problem.
teewurstmann does raise an interesting question - "Why are we looking for active volcanos on Venus?"
The answers "Because we can." or "It'll lead to great jumps in science." would not suffice with your average Joe Bloggs though, and if we wish to increase our ventures into space, or even just continue with space exploration altogether, then we're going to need a "hook", or a goal that we can present to the public in a unified answer that satisfies their curiosity and is not an outright lie - although a little white lie like, for example "We hope to discover a significant mineral deposit on the moon which will facilitate longer journeys into space." or "By studying the metals and minerals on Mercury we can discover how to create stronger, more tolerable materials on Earth which will create better housing, stronger and lighter cars..." etc.
Come up with a Grand Idea if you like - "We're going to save mankind."
Now seriously, who wouldn't think that saving our species is a noble goal? We don't have to tell the public "from ourselves", we'll just keep'em guessing - the continual doses of paranoia we're getting from our governments aren't doing too much harm, so we'll use a little "poetic licence".
Why are we looking for volcanos on Venus? Why not? Why not start at Mercury, or Venus, or Mars, or anywhere else in our solar system and look at it like one of those colour tests a few of us must have done in chemistry in high school.
Oh look, Mercury is mainly this colour, which means it's made mostly of this mineral... Venus is very acidic, and has all sorts of interesting liquid metals at venusian "room" temperature... Mars seems to have water, or the evidence of water...
We study, and learn, and find out how our solar system is constructed, and then one day, maybe if we don't destroy ourselves beforehand, we use the models we've made from this gathering of knowledge and we create plans.
We plan which solar systems nearby would be likely to have a sufficiently earth-like blue-green planet. We plan where we could find in our galaxy various minerals, fuels, and other resources needed to build, maintain, and power our ships as we go searching for other life, and other worlds. We plan to spread out, to colonise the most idyllic locations, and make sure that our species survives through sheer weight of numbers. We plan to live, to explore, to discover, to learn, to expand our minds and evolve.
We've been sitting on this little blue-green marble for a long time now, long enough to nurture the maths, physics, chemistry, and biological sciences enough to show us how to get up and explore the rest of our solar system. Now we need to use that knowledge and help ourselves before a meteor, asteroid, or sheer stupidity kills us.
Why explore the solar system? Why pick over rocks on Venus?
Because these are our baby steps, our first tentative journeys into space, the beginning of what I, and I'd hope many of you too, would dearly wish to be the start of our much greater journey into the galaxy.
Mistakes will be made, and lives will, as they have, be lost, but those people, our first space explorers, did not die in vain. We already have gained much knowledge, and it may not be used to any large extent now, but it will prove to be invaluable in the future.
I only hope that politics, greed, apathy, and stupidity don't condemn us to live our final days here, stuck on a world we could so easily leave if we simply worked at it.
You can find "gold" in anything if you look hard enough, or think about it the right way.
Just look at the King of the Golden River, Harry King. ;)
"Taking the piss since 1961."
With the two different projects using two different core interface libraries like they are, I can't see them combining at any time.
I currently use KDE. I like the Mac OS style menu-bar being up the top, adjusting to which ever program I'm currently using, as well as having my KMenu, "System Tray", clock, and search function link all neatly arranged at the top of my screen.
Right at the moment I'm running a compile of KDE 3.5.0 Beta 2 - Hard Masked.
There are several Gnome apps I like, but that menu-bar thing is annoying - the fact that GTK doesn't seem to have any way of copying the Mac OS style of screen top menu.
That's the first thing that put me on KDE instead of Gnome, it's ability to be configured to look like damn near anything resembling Windows XP or Mac OS X, and although I have had my desktop look like Mac OS X for a little while - care of Baghira - I've only kept a few noticeable interface influences on it while customising the desktop to really be mine.
Gnome was not so easy to make it look the way I wanted, so it didn't stay for long on my desktop.
The important thing is, I have the choice. We all have this choice, and that's actually more important than how any one of these individual desktop environments is built because if there's one we don't like, we can move on to another one.
All of our apps will work - gnome apps just need a few gnome libraries installed, as do kde apps - so we can pick and choose on a whim.
I'd like some aspects of Gnome put into KDE, and some aspects of KDE copied into Gnome, but I don't expect that to happen for a while.
They're still free though - free to use, sell, and screw with under the hood - so maybe someone one day will fork both into this drooling monstrous hybrid of whiz-bang eye-candy and god-awful tastelessness some of us desire. :)
I had to buy a soundcard to replace the soundstorm chip on my motherboard, simply because I hated the one-sound-at-a-time/software-mixing crap when I dropped Windows as my working OS - I still boot into it every once in a while to play a game or two, but it's running on an older PATA drive and I never installed the drivers for my SATA's, where Linux lives. :)
After much dicking around with salespeople who couldn't believe I wanted an older soundcard - "Why do you want a Live man? They're old." - and finding out from all the guys in back rooms of computer shops - I get on well with grunts, working as a grunt myself - and finding out there were no more old Creative Lives to be had, I bought a lower model, i.e. no 5.25" front panel, Audigy2 ZS.
Physical install took a few minutes, driver install required recompile to create kernel emu10k module - yeah, yeah, ALSA, I know - and soon I was listening to a swede saying in his native tongue from a 5.1 channel wave file that all my speakers were working.
Happy? Yes.
Why am I replying to the fellow above?
I bought a decent soundcard, and before when I was using Windows the soundstorm seemed decent enough too, so I'd bought myself a set of moderately cheap, floor-standing surround sound speakers.
4 60W satellite speakers (1 large cone, 1 small), a 60W (three cone) centre, and a 100W 12" sub with a front air vent almost big enough to fit my fist in, all providing rich RMS sound to a space barely 2x2x2 metres. Cheap, but niiice, and because I don't need to turn the volume up loud to hear anything, everything sounds good.
So I agree with the parent post, and I hope that someone from Creative is reading this forum. I don't need equalizing, and I don't need Bass-boost, or whatever it's called. Make it easy, or easier, to turn off all the little extras. If someone's buying a decent soundcard, there's a good chance they're buying, or have already bought, a nice set of speakers too - or at least fairly good ones.
I'm using Linux, so I'm not worried about driver bloat. My driver is the Emu module in the kernel. My biggest bloat is the KDE sound mixer - 1280 horizontal resolution and that bugger is still 1.5 times the width of my screen - but I don't really mind. I touch it once, and that's it.
One more thing to any Creative people in the audience. Let's have Linux support for the X-Fi series, please. My Audigy is gonna last a while, but I'd like to think that when I do replace it, I don't have to go through the whole "finding a linux friendly company" crap again.
You don't even have to actively support Linux, just open up the chips and let us know how they work - not how they're built, but at least what the drivers are supposed to talk to in order to work.
It's a small effort, and there's an potential revenue stream there of Linux users, not just playing games, but doing film and television editing, music editing, mixing, experimenting with 3D OpenAL audio programming, and more.
Let us use the good stuff you make. Don't drive us away because you're worried that the driver api's will magically allow your competitors to create clone chips - it doesn't work that way.
Which I'd love to tell the music company executives, and all those that might admire them. It's a simple word, at first inoffensive if you don't know the meaning, and can be shouted in anger without losing the basic sound of the word.
The word is "Garn".
It means "Go and get fucked.", from "go and" being said shortly to "go'an", then altered via the australian accent into the word "garn".
The long of it is "garn get fucked", and the shorthand "garn" can used when you just need to say something snappy without being misheard, or offending little old ladies.
So, to the RIAA, and all those affiliated,
"I'm never paying you fuckers a single cent from now on. Those two Ministry albums - Animositisomina, and Houses of the Mole' - I just bought were IT, the end of the line. I am going to download any music I want to listen to, and I'm going to send the purchase price, or import price, directly to the artist via a money order."
"Garn. Garn! GARN! Sideways! With walnuts!"
I know this is a bit late but I found a link to this while looking for "motorized bar stool" (minus the quotes) on google.
Oh wait. That's what MY manager does.
Sigh. I can't think of a better lesson on how NOT to manage than the one I'm subjected to every day. Micro doesn't even begin to describe my manager's management style.
Perhaps it could be labeled Nano Management?
Perhaps if you go into work one day and see that everywhere, all at once, your manager is supervising everyone through their tasks then he's descended into into Quantum Management.
Be careful. Once he hits sub-space there'll be no stopping him.
But I'm having a bit of trouble finding the parts of the articles where they say just how little, if any, Digital Rights Management are built into these televisions.
That would be one of the key factors to which HDTV to buy, for any geek, I would think.
The Nokia 9500 - the phone I'd like to get to replace my 7650 - has WiFi, and EDGE 384Kbps dial-up. :)
It's kind of more of a palm-top clam-shell computer with a phone attached then a phone in itself.