My question is how can a 800Mhz C3 actually be faster than an 850Mhz AMD Duron.
From everything I've read, it's not faster. The 1ghz C3 is about the equivalent of the 800mhz Durons, at least for things like DVD playback. Could the reviewer be making this mistake because the newer Lindows/AOL software is faster?
Or rather, it's interesting for about 10 minutes, and then it's repetitious, and then it's tedious, and then it's just pedantic.
It's a SPECIAL EFFECT. It's a whole movie about ONE SPECIAL EFFECT.
Don't get me wrong, when it was made the imagery was fairly ground-breaking, so it's got artistic significance. On the other hand, you can see the same thing in beer commercials now.
It's like the musical Tomfoolery: any given five minutes of it would be fine, but sitting through all of it becomes very tedious. (IMHO the book Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer is a perfect example of something that has its true name.) Why? Because it's just more and more of the same, and it GETS OLD. There is no plot or characterization to carry the movie along.
So, if you want to watch it, watch it on TV sometime, maybe it'll crop up on the Independant Film Channel or something.
I had one of the first PalmPilots way back when, and there is hardly anything about the device that HASN'T been upgraded.
The screens are much better, supporting high resolution color, sometimes with virtual graffiti.
The amount of memory is, what, 32 times what the original palms had?
You have the option to go with rechargeable batteries, or not, or on some devices, either or.
SD expansion is now standard on all but the lowliest level Palms, and Sonys, which use a competing expansion card. Some devices do Compact Flash as well.
The new Palms' processors will go up to 175 mhz for this release, and the sky's the limit.
There are all kinds of different Palm devices coming out to fit different niches, with built-in cellphones, GPS, scanners, wireless, etc. There are also smaller elegant devices for executives. There is even a PalmOS ruggedized laptop for the educational market.
The base price has dropped to $100, while the top end has not shot out of sight.
Lastly, they continue to totally OWN their market, regardless of Microsoft's best efforts. And the number of licencees making Palm devices is growing, not shrinking like Microsoft's.
I see a fourth possiblity: tell the story of the birth of the Federation on a relatively small galactic stage, using new races that are "close to Earth," and not even bringing the Romulans into it for a season or two.
We have no idea what happened then: it's completely virgin territory, except for some of the paperbacks, and they're not canon. So you would have complete freedom, except you couldn't destroy the Earth, [big deal] and things would have to be moving towards the birth of the Federation.
A fifth possibility, that would have worked just as well, would be to tell the fanboys "We're restarting the Trek universe for this one. Continuity from the other series need not necessarily apply." For one thing, it gets rid of all the history that was already supposed to have happened and didn't, like Khan and the Eugenics Wars. It would also give you a good excuse to fire the writing staff and hire actual talent.
it was a great moral, unless you have rather simplistic moral views.
You must certainly be an innovator in the field of morality then.
I begrudgingly agreed with Phlox's assessment of the situation. I wanted them to save the dying population, but at the same time I had to agree that nature was taking its course.
If your mantra is "Let nature take its course," why be a doctor?
The "subservient" race of people were experiencing rapid evolution. to help the dying race would be to cut off that branch and deny it the chance to grow. This would be, beyond good and evil, morally wrong on an intensly universal level.
Except that in the actual episode, the ruling race was shown to be fairly benevolent, and in no way was preventing the subservient race from developing, becaue there they were and the development was going on.
In a thousand years or more, humans will return to the planet and find a thriving civilization which will greatly outstrip the previous dying civilization.
...that they killed.
And, how does it necessarily follow that the subservient race will thrive in the absence of the ruling race? If the ruling race dies off rapidly and civilization collapses, most of the subservient race will die in the ensuing dark ages. Possibly all of them.
Here in this episode we have the beginnings of the foundation of the Prime Directive. You cannot interfere in the internal self-determination of one species over another. I am shocked that you could not understand that.
And here we see why Kirk frequently defied the Prime Directive. And I'm not at all surprised you couldn't understand that.
It was definitely thought-provoking, but my enjoyment of it was muted by the fact that I disagreed with the conclusion.
This is a very nice way to put it. It doesn't quite capture my utter moral abhorrence of the episode's conclusion, though.
To me, the moral of the episode was "Because I disagree with these people's politics, they all deserve to die." And in particular, Phlox's dialogue about how the ruling race being genetically predisposed towards the disease that was killing them amounted to some kind of genetic destiny was utterly chilling. To me, it's the secular humanist equivalent of "God told me you have to die."
If I were Archer, I would have suspended Phlox's medical licence immediately, ordered him to give over the cure, and launched a court-martial inquiry back home to determine his ongoing fitness to practice medicine. (Practice it somewhere else, that is, because he would never practice medicine on my crew again.)
On the other hand, this is from the same franchise that put nurseries on warships, so expecting any kind of moral consciousness from them is probably an exercise in futility.
One of the major problems with Enterprise is that TIME TRAVEL SUCKS. It's been completely overdone, BADLY, particularly on Trek, and I for one am not going to watch any more time travel eps.
Because they're ALL THE SAME EPISODE: crew encounters time wedgie. Crew solves time wedgie puzzle. Time returns to normal. Teenage son lies to a cute girl at school to impress her, but gets found out and learns an important lesson about honesty. Roll credits.
Plus, the "Dear Doctor" episode really really pissed me off. Leave an entire race to die, get laid! What a great moral...
Frankly, I only really watched Enterprise because Special Unit 2 was on afterwards, and after they took SU2 off the air, there was no reason to watch Enterprise any more.
I'm looking forward to Firefly on Friday. Joss Whedon writing, and Ben Edlund to keep the show going after Joss loses interest.
Uh......Michael Keaton was the best for the part of batman, i thought.
IMHO, Keaton was very much miscast, in that Batman/Bruce Wayne is supposed to be tall, athletic and leading-man handsome, and Keaton really isn't any of the above. While Keaton turned in a professional performance (and I've never seen him be really bad in anything), he was a bad fit for the part. To make him look imposing, they had to put him in a ridiculous cumbersome bat-suit that practically turns him into an animatronic special effect, and it kills the movie. He can't even WALK RIGHT in the suit! He can't even move his head!
The best Batman was the animated Batman in Mask of the Phantasm, voiced by Kevin Conroy. He has the physical presence, can do all the action, and he even has a character and emotions. (Mask of the Phantasm also had Mark Hamill turning in a GREAT performance as the Joker.)
AFAIK, the name is derived from the term "wardialing" which refers to the old-school hacker trick of getting a compuer with a modem to dial up every number in your area code looking for other modems, which at the time were probably unsecured computer systems.
No idea where war figures into "wardialing" either, though, except that it probably sounded cool at the time.
You admit that microevolution takes place over short periods of time, so what's to stop macroevolution from occuring over long periods of time? We plainly observe the fact that species change over time. If you think there is some limit on the amount they can change, please explain why.
Because he is arguing, correctly IMHO, that these are two completely different phenomemons: the inheriting of certain genetic traits from one generation to the nest, and the evolving of a new species from an existing one. Breeding dogs, you can change the breed, but it's still a dog. You can't breed dogs into sheep, or even wolves.
Thus, calling one "microevolution" and the other "macroevolution" and implying they are the same phenomenon is simply cheating, a cheap parlor trick.
As an aside, do you believe that genetic paternity tresting is valid? If so, how do you feel about the same test showing that you are related to the monkey in the zoo down the street?
If the test says that monkey is my kid, then yes, I'd say it's invalid. And, genetically, I'm as close to some plants as I am to that monkey. Some call the similarity of DNA signs of evolution. Some call it the fingerprints of their Creator. Scientifically speaking, neither side is anywhere close to being able to offer conclusive proof, and sadly, both sides are guilty of intellectual dishonesty.
Me? I'm really vaguely Creationist, as in I believe in God, but have no idea how species come to be. And I don't think anyone else knows, either. The Bible doesn't say, and we don't have nearly enough evidence for a scientific verdict.
Beta is irrelevant, pro TV is all digital now.
on
Sony Kills Betamax
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· Score: 2
They're discontinuing due to lack of demand. Pro TV hardly ever used VHS.
Professional level TV production and distribution went digital back in the 90's. It used to be you'd see racks of beta decks in production studios and control rooms. Now they're racks of servers.
Those people that still need beta decks are probably buying them used from people who don't need them any more.
As Groucho Marx once said, "time wounds all heels."
Anarchy is a situation where NO rules apply, that's the definition of the word.
What you are describing is a situation where different, more minimal rules apply. And the highway is a good example, by the way.
Anarchy is a bad term to use for that, because a) it's incorrect, and b) it has connotations of mob violence and the worst excesses of licence. The marketing potential sucks. : )
I don't know what term you would use instead, "open radio," maybe?
What you're proposing is a different way of ordering the radio spectrum, not anarchy.
How well would Ethernet work if competing signals are going over the same wires? If someone is trying to run token ring on the same bandwidth at the same time?
Obviously, for all those nodes to intermesh properly, there would have to be rules in place and clear specs of how a node operates.
Moreover, it doesn't eliminate the need for regulation. How well would your digital radio work when people are driving unshielded electric hotrods past your house, for instance?
Jon Acheson
So THAT's what those were in Appleseed!
on
Funky Robotic Hand
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· Score: 2
Masamune Shirow, the Japanese artist, uses Air Muscles in some of his mecha designs in works like Appleseed. I could never figure out what they were supposed to be, I just thought they were some kind of unobtanium "artificial muscle."
I am all for anarchy in the airwaves. That would preclude broadcast TV and radio, which is good. Satellite, wired, fiber, all that would still be around minus the broadcast waves.
I sure as hell am not. This would lead to a classic "tragedy of the commons" situation, where everyone would stamp all over everyone else's transmissions, so that noone would get any use out of radio transmission. Kiss your cellphone goodbye. Kiss the radios in your police cars and ambulances and airplanes goodbye.
Secondly, regulation of transmission keeps devices from interfering with each other. It's quite possible to broadcast a signal that will prevent your cable TV from working properly, for instance. It's quite possible to broadcast a signal that will kill someone with a pacemaker. But the current regulations prevent this.
Why should some corporation be able to send signals through my body all the time, without my permission?
And if you deregulate everything, they'll somehow be less able to do that?
Anarchy on the airwaves would be about as bad as real anarchy in real life, i.e. get ready for someone to kick the shit out of you.
We ran into a number of stability issues that could be attributed to the FS51; including a strange problem where a Word document became corrupt while it was open on the system.
What's strange about that? Every version of Word after 95 spontaneously corrupts documents in a number of ways! Too bad OpenOffice isn't quite there yet...
Slashdot Mirror
From everything I've read, it's not faster. The 1ghz C3 is about the equivalent of the 800mhz Durons, at least for things like DVD playback. Could the reviewer be making this mistake because the newer Lindows/AOL software is faster?
Jon Acheson
Or rather, it's interesting for about 10 minutes, and then it's repetitious, and then it's tedious, and then it's just pedantic.
It's a SPECIAL EFFECT. It's a whole movie about ONE SPECIAL EFFECT.
Don't get me wrong, when it was made the imagery was fairly ground-breaking, so it's got artistic significance. On the other hand, you can see the same thing in beer commercials now.
It's like the musical Tomfoolery: any given five minutes of it would be fine, but sitting through all of it becomes very tedious. (IMHO the book Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer is a perfect example of something that has its true name.) Why? Because it's just more and more of the same, and it GETS OLD. There is no plot or characterization to carry the movie along.
So, if you want to watch it, watch it on TV sometime, maybe it'll crop up on the Independant Film Channel or something.
Jon Acheson
I had one of the first PalmPilots way back when, and there is hardly anything about the device that HASN'T been upgraded.
The screens are much better, supporting high resolution color, sometimes with virtual graffiti.
The amount of memory is, what, 32 times what the original palms had?
You have the option to go with rechargeable batteries, or not, or on some devices, either or.
SD expansion is now standard on all but the lowliest level Palms, and Sonys, which use a competing expansion card. Some devices do Compact Flash as well.
The new Palms' processors will go up to 175 mhz for this release, and the sky's the limit.
There are all kinds of different Palm devices coming out to fit different niches, with built-in cellphones, GPS, scanners, wireless, etc. There are also smaller elegant devices for executives. There is even a PalmOS ruggedized laptop for the educational market.
The base price has dropped to $100, while the top end has not shot out of sight.
Lastly, they continue to totally OWN their market, regardless of Microsoft's best efforts. And the number of licencees making Palm devices is growing, not shrinking like Microsoft's.
Step away from the crack pipe!
Jon Acheson
I see a fourth possiblity: tell the story of the birth of the Federation on a relatively small galactic stage, using new races that are "close to Earth," and not even bringing the Romulans into it for a season or two.
We have no idea what happened then: it's completely virgin territory, except for some of the paperbacks, and they're not canon. So you would have complete freedom, except you couldn't destroy the Earth, [big deal] and things would have to be moving towards the birth of the Federation.
A fifth possibility, that would have worked just as well, would be to tell the fanboys "We're restarting the Trek universe for this one. Continuity from the other series need not necessarily apply." For one thing, it gets rid of all the history that was already supposed to have happened and didn't, like Khan and the Eugenics Wars. It would also give you a good excuse to fire the writing staff and hire actual talent.
Jon Acheson
You must certainly be an innovator in the field of morality then.
If your mantra is "Let nature take its course," why be a doctor?
Except that in the actual episode, the ruling race was shown to be fairly benevolent, and in no way was preventing the subservient race from developing, becaue there they were and the development was going on.
...that they killed.
And, how does it necessarily follow that the subservient race will thrive in the absence of the ruling race? If the ruling race dies off rapidly and civilization collapses, most of the subservient race will die in the ensuing dark ages. Possibly all of them.
And here we see why Kirk frequently defied the Prime Directive. And I'm not at all surprised you couldn't understand that.
Jon Acheson
That is a pretty amusing thought, in a dark sort of way. Never happen on Trek, or course.
Jon Acheson
This is a very nice way to put it. It doesn't quite capture my utter moral abhorrence of the episode's conclusion, though.
To me, the moral of the episode was "Because I disagree with these people's politics, they all deserve to die." And in particular, Phlox's dialogue about how the ruling race being genetically predisposed towards the disease that was killing them amounted to some kind of genetic destiny was utterly chilling. To me, it's the secular humanist equivalent of "God told me you have to die."
If I were Archer, I would have suspended Phlox's medical licence immediately, ordered him to give over the cure, and launched a court-martial inquiry back home to determine his ongoing fitness to practice medicine. (Practice it somewhere else, that is, because he would never practice medicine on my crew again.)
On the other hand, this is from the same franchise that put nurseries on warships, so expecting any kind of moral consciousness from them is probably an exercise in futility.
Jon Acheson
One of the major problems with Enterprise is that TIME TRAVEL SUCKS. It's been completely overdone, BADLY, particularly on Trek, and I for one am not going to watch any more time travel eps.
Because they're ALL THE SAME EPISODE: crew encounters time wedgie. Crew solves time wedgie puzzle. Time returns to normal. Teenage son lies to a cute girl at school to impress her, but gets found out and learns an important lesson about honesty. Roll credits.
Jon Acheson
Enterprise IS boring.
Plus, the "Dear Doctor" episode really really pissed me off. Leave an entire race to die, get laid! What a great moral...
Frankly, I only really watched Enterprise because Special Unit 2 was on afterwards, and after they took SU2 off the air, there was no reason to watch Enterprise any more.
I'm looking forward to Firefly on Friday. Joss Whedon writing, and Ben Edlund to keep the show going after Joss loses interest.
Jon Acheson
IMHO, Keaton was very much miscast, in that Batman/Bruce Wayne is supposed to be tall, athletic and leading-man handsome, and Keaton really isn't any of the above. While Keaton turned in a professional performance (and I've never seen him be really bad in anything), he was a bad fit for the part. To make him look imposing, they had to put him in a ridiculous cumbersome bat-suit that practically turns him into an animatronic special effect, and it kills the movie. He can't even WALK RIGHT in the suit! He can't even move his head!
The best Batman was the animated Batman in Mask of the Phantasm, voiced by Kevin Conroy. He has the physical presence, can do all the action, and he even has a character and emotions. (Mask of the Phantasm also had Mark Hamill turning in a GREAT performance as the Joker.)
Jon Acheson
I have a Panasonic CF01 tablet pc, which has a docking station that sets it up pretty much exactly like a picture frame.
It set me back about $300 a year ago.
Best of all, no work needed at all.
Jon Acheson
AFAIK, the name is derived from the term "wardialing" which refers to the old-school hacker trick of getting a compuer with a modem to dial up every number in your area code looking for other modems, which at the time were probably unsecured computer systems.
No idea where war figures into "wardialing" either, though, except that it probably sounded cool at the time.
Jon Acheson
Oh, grow up.
Because he is arguing, correctly IMHO, that these are two completely different phenomemons: the inheriting of certain genetic traits from one generation to the nest, and the evolving of a new species from an existing one. Breeding dogs, you can change the breed, but it's still a dog. You can't breed dogs into sheep, or even wolves.
Thus, calling one "microevolution" and the other "macroevolution" and implying they are the same phenomenon is simply cheating, a cheap parlor trick.
If the test says that monkey is my kid, then yes, I'd say it's invalid. And, genetically, I'm as close to some plants as I am to that monkey. Some call the similarity of DNA signs of evolution. Some call it the fingerprints of their Creator. Scientifically speaking, neither side is anywhere close to being able to offer conclusive proof, and sadly, both sides are guilty of intellectual dishonesty.
Me? I'm really vaguely Creationist, as in I believe in God, but have no idea how species come to be. And I don't think anyone else knows, either. The Bible doesn't say, and we don't have nearly enough evidence for a scientific verdict.
Jon Acheson
It might have been a great game, if it had ever run properly on my computer.
As it was, the action scenes flat out didn't work, and eventually I got to a spot where I couldn't go any further.
LucasArts' games were not exactly the most reliable, or maybe it was just the state of the OS they were running on.
Jon Acheson
Half-inch or 3/4 inch Beta? : )
Jon Acheson
They're discontinuing due to lack of demand. Pro TV hardly ever used VHS.
Professional level TV production and distribution went digital back in the 90's. It used to be you'd see racks of beta decks in production studios and control rooms. Now they're racks of servers.
Those people that still need beta decks are probably buying them used from people who don't need them any more.
As Groucho Marx once said, "time wounds all heels."
Jon Acheson
Anarchy is a situation where NO rules apply, that's the definition of the word.
What you are describing is a situation where different, more minimal rules apply. And the highway is a good example, by the way.
Anarchy is a bad term to use for that, because a) it's incorrect, and b) it has connotations of mob violence and the worst excesses of licence. The marketing potential sucks. : )
I don't know what term you would use instead, "open radio," maybe?
Jon Acheson
What you're proposing is a different way of ordering the radio spectrum, not anarchy.
How well would Ethernet work if competing signals are going over the same wires? If someone is trying to run token ring on the same bandwidth at the same time?
Obviously, for all those nodes to intermesh properly, there would have to be rules in place and clear specs of how a node operates.
Moreover, it doesn't eliminate the need for regulation. How well would your digital radio work when people are driving unshielded electric hotrods past your house, for instance?
Jon Acheson
Masamune Shirow, the Japanese artist, uses Air Muscles in some of his mecha designs in works like Appleseed. I could never figure out what they were supposed to be, I just thought they were some kind of unobtanium "artificial muscle."
I'd post links if I could, but I'm at work.
Jon Acheson
Your dad seems like he was a great guy! My condolences on his passing.
And, the design is pretty elegant, all things considered. It still looks impressive today.
Jon Acheson
I sure as hell am not. This would lead to a classic "tragedy of the commons" situation, where everyone would stamp all over everyone else's transmissions, so that noone would get any use out of radio transmission. Kiss your cellphone goodbye. Kiss the radios in your police cars and ambulances and airplanes goodbye.
Secondly, regulation of transmission keeps devices from interfering with each other. It's quite possible to broadcast a signal that will prevent your cable TV from working properly, for instance. It's quite possible to broadcast a signal that will kill someone with a pacemaker. But the current regulations prevent this.
And if you deregulate everything, they'll somehow be less able to do that?
Anarchy on the airwaves would be about as bad as real anarchy in real life, i.e. get ready for someone to kick the shit out of you.
Jon Acheson
I've been looking for a video card that doesn't put out more heat than the rest of the computer.
At 0.13 micron and with the low transistor count they advertise, maybe this will be it.
If it's 90% as fast as a GeForce4, and puts out a lot less heat, I'm there.
I'll wait for reviews and drivers to see.
Jon Acheson
My home firewall uses one of the floppy-based firewall solutions, running off a $99 surplus office PC I originally bought for parts.
The CD-ROM and hard drive go unused.
So there! : )
Jon Acheson
Hardware keys are available in USB flavors too.
Jon Acheson
Jon Acheson