if you institute environmental regulations that force each company to minimize their environmental impact--using scrubbers, wastewater treatment, dust collection, etc.--then the cost of producing the product (material costs, manufacturing costs, and environmental costs) will all be paid for by the manufacturer and product consumers.
but if you don't employ any such regulations, then most industrial corporations will simply ignore their environmental responsibilities to save money. and in this situation the environmental cost of producing the product is being paid for by everyone in terms of the environmental degradation caused by the industrial pollution.
yea, and that general-purpose CPU will also consume about 80x the power needed by a vector processor that is twice as fast at performing: 2D/3D rendering, scientific modeling, financial calculations, video transcoding, data compression, and all the other tasks that GPGPU/stream processors are used for.
a general-purpose scalar CPU will never replace specialized vector co-processors because it's the wrong tool for the job. most applications that vector coprocessors are used for involve processing very large data sets, a task that data parallelism was specifically invented for, so why would you use a scalar CPU to perform these tasks when an SIMD processor would not only be able to process the data in fewer clock cycles, but it'd also use far less power (and produce less heat)?
there's absolutely nothing silly about using GPUs/stream processors for applications out of 3D graphics. it's sillier to have the CPU perform calculations it really wasn't designed for while most people have a powerful vector processor far more suited to the task sitting on their video card. that's why companies like Adobe are interested in GPGPU and are writing their applications to take advantage of the vector processing power of modern GPUs. the gaming industry has been exploiting SIMD for nearly two decades, so have CAD & DSP software developers and embedded systems manufacturers.
any battery technology developed is released into the public domain. (if you want public funding, you need to make your research results public as well.)
there are government price controls to ensure the public isn't getting reamed on products they're subsidizing. and every 2-3 years the government and industry representatives get together to renegotiate the prices. (this is similar to how health care is run in Japan as a hybrid between privatized and socialized medicine.)
small companies/start-ups also have access to the plant, and it's not just a handful of major corporations that are benefiting from this federal aid.
we need improved/cheaper battery technology to boost the development & adoption of electric vehicles.
not quite. physics calculations are very well suited to vector processing, which is why most Physics Processing Units are vector processors, just like GPUs, array processors, DSPs, stream processors, etc.
a GPU may be more specialized to handle 2D/3D graphics rendering, but they can also perform physics calculations quite well because of their SIMD architecture. GPGPU stream processors in particular are of great interest to the scientific community because of their superb performance in scientific modeling applications which require crunching large sets of numbers.
of course, there are some vector processors that are better suited to physics calculations while others may have architectures & instruction sets specialized towards graphics or digital signal processing/video encoding, but sometimes the distinction is purely marketing-based. so if you had to choose between using a general-purpose scalar CPU or a vector GPU on a graphics card to perform physics calculations, it would be far wiser to use the GPU.
yea, that's not how a criminal investigation works. making the act of hiring spammers a crime doesn't mean you arrest anyone whose product happens to be advertised in a spam message. that might be a good lead to follow in your investigation, but you still have to prove that the person/business is actually guilty of breaking the law.
or did you think that just dumping a dead body on someone's lawn gets them thrown in a gas chamber?
it's not that simple. sure you can make up for a lack of per-CPU processing power through cluster computing, but at some point it becomes more practical or even cheaper to go with a smaller cluster using a better processor architecture.
you could use hundreds of P3s or even P4s and still not achieve the same real-world performance as a couple dozen cell processors or modern GPGPU stream processors. that's because P3s & P4s are general-purpose CPUs designed for SISD/scalar processing. they're great for the bulk of general-purpose commodity computing applications like running an OS, web browser, word processor, etc., but high-performance computing problems typically involve processing very large data sets that greatly benefit from data parallelism. so if you had two processors, one scalar and one vector, each with the same power consumption and clock rate, the vector processor would be an order of magnitude faster at performing HPC tasks than the processor with the scalar architecture.
and the combined use of parallelization at multiple levels will always be more efficient than relying solely on a single form of parallelism. blindly adding more cheap 32-bit scalar CPUs won't get you as good of results as building a smaller cluster comprised of 64-bit fully-pipelined stream processors with multithreaded superscalar cores that support VLIW. in the former case, you're only employing task-level parallelism, whereas in the later case you're taking advantage of bit-level, instruction-level (pipelining + superscalar + VLIW), data, and task-level (multiprocessing + multithreading) parallelism. you'd not only save power by using fewer (more power-efficient) processors, but you'd also reduce memory coherence & bandwidth problems, not to mention the space savings.
part of the problem is that the tax brackets do not reflect the distribution of wealth in our society. we have tax brackets all the way up to ~$350K a year, but then we stop distinguishing between people who make $350K/year and people who make $1M/year and up. this bracket system puts an effective tax cap on the super-rich who possess the bulk of the national wealth.
by creating $1M/year, $2M/year, $4M/year, etc. brackets and introducing a wealth tax on billionaires we could reduce the tax rate among lower income brackets. and by removing the tax cap and introducing a progressive tax system for corporations, that would further decrease the tax burden on the middle and lower classes.
of course, we still won't see any benefit from our tax dollars so long as we keep allowing social programs to be cut and public infrastructure to be neglected. meanwhile, what tax funding is available gets poured into the MIC and corporate bailouts/subsidies. worst of all, Americans seem content to stand by and watch as all this happens, and even letting politicians buy their votes with promises of tax cuts.
except in this case the people profiting from (and are the driving force behind) the crime aren't considered criminals. it makes no sense to outlaw spam but not go after the companies that hire spammers, and whose product advertisements are filling everyone's inbox.
even though a lot of spam is bounced through other countries, most of the products/services being advertised are of U.S. companies who operate completely out in the open and have easily traceable bank accounts. by going after these scummy businesses, you would cut off the money supply the fuels the spam industry and eliminate any financial incentive to send spam.
otherwise, this is like making it illegal commit murder but still allowing people to hire hitmen to do the killing for them.
i'm not really a networking geek, but i've been wondering if an old 2.8 GHz P4 (with only one stick of 256MB PC133 SDRAM left working) we have sitting in the office might make a decent file server for a home office. it seems like a waste to toss the system out, but it also doesn't make sense to add more memory to the system to keep it as a workstation.
does anyone know if such a system would perform well as a file server without a memory upgrade? or would it be possible to set it up as a wireless router? i currently have a Netgear WTG624 v3 wireless G router, but every few days i'll just start being unable to resolve new addresses or establish new connections. the problem usually goes away once the router is reset, but it's rather annoying. would an old desktop make a better wireless router?
I understand the fun of fiddling around with a system and experimenting with something new.
no you don't, as demonstrated by the rest of your post.
not all processors/memory are made equal. some handle being overclocked better than others (certain models of high performance memory are designed by the manufacturer specifically to be overclocked). CPUs rated at different clock speeds within the same family are usually manufactured the same way, and often from the same wafer. manufacturers separate processors into different bins based on the standards each unit conforms to as determined through testing.
however, this bin assignment process is far from a perfect science. not every processor within the same bin will perform the same, and the actual performance differences between processors assigned to different bins are not always as significant as the vendor tries to project. in fact, processors may sometimes be relegated to a lower bin while conforming to the performance standards of a higher speed bin just because the manufacturer needs more units to sell at the lower price point.
well-informed overclockers understand these intricacies, and so do hardware manufacturers and system builders. that's why many modern motherboards have overclocking features/functionality integrated into their BIOS. by selecting an appropriate processor (taking into account the CPU family, stepping number, and manufacturing week) and method of overclocking (FSB/clock multiplier), there's no reason why a moderately intelligent user couldn't have a stable overclocked system. all it takes is some careful research and diligent testing.
it's not about pushing anything to "the edge." it's about pushing your system within safe limits to extract the optimal performance out of your hardware and saving money. obviously, if you're completely clueless about computers you shouldn't try to overclock anything. luckily, most overclockers know what they're doing and are able to improve the performance of their system without risking damage to their hardware.
sounds like a stereotypical trojan/adware/malware infection. at least all you're getting are pop-ups. the last one i had to deal with at work also used DNS-hijacking to redirect any webpage request to their spam (porn) site, preventing any web surfing. to make things worse, it wouldn't even allow the user to run certain programs, like notepad, Hijack This!, Internet Explorer (this malware targeted Firefox).
a fresh install is probably the easiest/quickest way to fix it, but it's not the only solution. with a little sleuthing (Windows Task Manager & Hijack This!) you can usually identify the file & process name(s) of the malware. all the times i've had to deal with that sort of thing, i found the solution in forum discussions on tech support sites (found by googling the file/process name of the trojan). if you're lucky, someone will have made a cleaner program for that particular malware program.
one of the more frequently encountered malware/adware programs is SmitFraud. that's one i've encountered several times. it cannot be removed by AV programs or spyware/malware removers (though it'll try to get you to purchase and install rogue AV/Anti-Spyware programs). if you do have SmitFraud, then your best shot is SmitFraudFix.
i wouldn't go that far. they just don't use sarcasm in their humor. i mean, we still shared some laughs during my stay there. even the older monks cracked the occasional joke. but i suppose their ascetic lifestyle requires a lot of self-discipline, thus they project a stoic demeanor most of the time.
well, i remember the monk we were talking to telling me that he didn't join the monastery until his senior year of high school. and none of my relatives (aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.) really ever use sarcasm in their speech. i know that one of my older cousins picked up on my sarcasm, but that may have been because we hung out a lot while i was in Taiwan, or it could just be that she's more laid back than most of my relatives.
i don't know. maybe their sarcasm is more subtle or nuanced. but my experience is that sarcasm isn't a part of mainstream Taiwanese culture.
while i agree it's a niche genre, so are some of the more complex SRPGs like Spectral Souls or Generation of Chaos, which i think have a steeper learning curve than AT-Robots. even World of Warcraft has more parameters, stats & complex game mechanics to learn/memorize than AT-Robots.
really all the robot AI algorithms simply break down into a few basic directives: scan, attack and chase/evade.
Scan for enemies - just specify the scan arc and search pattern of your robot. the wider your scan arc, the less range/accuracy you have. the narrower the scan arc, the harder it is to locate the enemy. a simple strategy is to start with a medium-arc scan and then gradually narrow it down to determine the precise angle of the enemy. but there are weaknesses to this strategy.
attack - the attack algorithm works in parallel with the scan algorithm. but you can fine-tune the accuracy (strength) of the shots and rate of fire. a major consideration when programming the attack algorithm is heat, as each shot fired increases your bot's body temperature, and if your bot overheats it can burn off armor, temporarily shut down, or explode. it's also a bad idea to shoot an enemy point-blank as your projectiles have a large blast radius.
chase/evade - this directive is pretty self-explanatory, but there is also a lot of depth to programming your robot's movement. obviously how your robot maneuvers should depend on where enemies are located, and you also have an overburn feature available to use, though you run the risk of overheating. AT-Robots don't start/stop/turn on a dime, and if you collide with another object at high speeds you can take damage.
aside from those three points, there's just the allotment of base stats:
i think AT-Robots would appeal to any child who's ever wanted to build their own robot. but unlike building a robot in real life, this is much cheaper and easier to pick up. besides, just because a child comes from a poor background doesn't mean he's dumb/has a short attention span. likewise, a game doesn't have to involve mindless action to be fun/entertaining. a lot of people enjoy empire-building strategy games, chess, and puzzle games like Sudoku.
plus, kids around that age are still pretty mentally malleable and inquisitive. kids aren't born nerds or intellectuals/geniuses. you can cultivate a healthy interest for intellectual pursuits in just about any child, and educational games are the perfect means of doing just that. it's important not to sell a child short and withhold intellectual challenges from them because you think it's beyond their mental capacity--especially underprivileged children.
heh, i hope they've tightened up their client-server model. i remember back in high school i wrote a proxy server to monitor the traffic between my TetriNET client and the server. at first it was just a stream of jumbled characters to me, punctuated by the occasional chat message that was displayed in plain text. but after studying the traffic for a few hours and with a little experimentation, i was able to decipher pretty much all of the traffic flowing between the client and server and document their entire communication protocol.
yea, it's just a game so security naturally won't be a major priority, but there were some pretty major design flaws. for instance, even though the networking architecture technically followed a client-server model, nearly all of the game intelligence/mechanics was entrusted to the clients. all the server did was give everyone a single host to connect to and serve as a broadcast address. the actual instructions to update each player's screen came from their own clients. and to make things worse, the server (and therefore also the clients) made no attempt to distinguish where a message originated from and whether that host had any business issuing that message/instruction.
so by the next day i had hacked together a proxy/cheat program that let me manipulate anyone's screen at will--including adding/removing rows, dropping power-ups, clearing/filling a screen completely, and even drawing words/flowers/smiley faces on the screen using blocks/power-ups. oh, and i could also spoof chat messages or boot everyone off the server. the game lost its fun after that, but reverse-engineering their communication protocol was funner than playing the game anyway.
one of the funner games i remember playing as a child was AT-Robots. i'm not sure if it was free back then (i might have gotten it at a swap meet or something), but it's certainly free now.
basically, it's a robot battle simulation. you use a text editor to write the AI for your bot(s) in ATRA (Advanced T-Robot Assembly), a simplified assembly-like language used in the game, and then you load your custom-made bots up in the game and run battle simulations against other types of robots.
even if you don't assembly or don't have any programming experience, it's relatively easy to open up one of the pre-written robots that come with the game and figure out what different instructions do by altering different program parameters and then seeing how this changes the robot's behavior.
it's a great way to get kids interested in programming (and perhaps robotics/AI) while having lots of fun. one of the game's best qualities is that it encourages experimentation and creativity. once you get into the game you're always trying to tweak your robots and experiment with new techniques to improve their battle performance. it's largely a process of trial-and-error when you first start, but it also encourages deductive reasoning and other analytical skills.
that reminds of the summer i spent at a Buddhist temple/monastery in Taiwan. i was in junior high or just entering high school, i think, and I went there with a couple other Asian-American teenagers as part of a Buddhist/animal rights summer camp program that our parents enrolled us in.
despite being pulled out of bed at 4 in the morning, not being able to eat meat, being made to do farm work (the monks grew most of their own food), and having to recite stupid mantras every morning, and even being locked in a urine-soaked livestock trailer in the baking sun for half an hour (yes, i'm serious.), it was a really interesting experience.
but one of the more unexpected things to happen was learning that Taiwanese people aren't familiar with sarcasm. while we were socializing with a few of the younger monks (their ages ranged from mid-teens to early-20's) one of the American teenagers responded to a question from one of the monks with a sarcastic reply. and while it was pretty obvious to all of us Americans that he was being facetious, the monks were rather perplexed. we tried to explain it to them, but the culture gap was too big. to them there was no difference between being sarcastic and lying.
Kramer and his colleagues wanted to know whether a more integrated training approach could go beyond the training environment to enhance the cognitive skills used in everyday life. Specifically, the researchers wondered whether interactive video games might benefit those cognitive functions that decline most with age.
"Older people tend to fare less well on things that are called executive control processes," Kramer said. "These include things like scheduling, planning, working memory, multitasking and dealing with ambiguity."
the focus is on old people because they're the ones who are worried about mental/cognitive deterioration. it's not ageism, it's biology. no one is calling old people "dumbasses" any more than research into neurodegenerative diseases is calling Alzheimer's patients retards.
your groundless claims of older people being smarter than younger people is more akin to ageism than the researchers doing this study. so you can stop feigning your righteous indignation whenever you feel like.
tactics is what S.W.A.T. teams and Special Forces (as well as normal front line soldiers) are trained in. it concerns the maneuvering of individual units on the battlefield--things like enfilade/defilade, spec fire, suppressive fire, leapfrogging, flanking, squad formation/movement/positioning, etc.
strategy is the planning and execution of a war/contest between entire armies/nations. it's the decision-making handled by the Generals and Pentagon officials rather than the direct combatants on the battlefield. military strategy involves the use of diplomatic, economic, military, and informational resources to achieve strategic goals and obtain the desired end-state of a conflict.
logistics is the maintenance of an active army and the movement/acquisition/distribution of resources this entails. logistics is used to accompany/enable strategy, but it's generally considered a separate discipline.
it's funny how Americans get all up in arms about true socialism that actually serves public interest, like socialized medicine/higher-education/sciences/internet access/etc., but you never hear a peep out of them about tax dollars being funneled into companies like Halliburton/KBR, GE, Carlyle Group, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc. that serves only the MIC. likewise, no one made a fuss about Harley Davidson receiving, essentially, a government bailout from the Reagan Administration in the form of overt protectionism during the 1980's while Reagan was simultaneously espousing the virtues of free market capitalism. and now we're outright giving government subsidies to the Big Three automakers to bail them out, and again there is practically no opposition to this either.
frankly, the recent corporate bailouts are more akin to Reaganomics than socialism. after all, nothing is being socialized. the Big Three automakers aren't being nationalized. American citizens aren't getting free cars or anything else out of this. it's just taking from the poor to give to the rich. that's been going on ever since monetary economies were created. today we're just corporate sharecroppers rather than feudal serfs.
(note: the above link is from a History Channel program about the Mt. Hood rescue chopper crash. here is a slightly higher quality (but shorter) version from a live news broadcast of the incident.)
hrmm... while the Wikipedia article on cerebral edema supports your statement that HACE (high altitude cerebral edema) is caused by hypoxia, the actual HACE article suggests that HACE is a severe form of altitude sickness, for which the only cure is to descend to a lower altitude (an oxygen supply can help to stabilize a patient, but it isn't a cure). from the Wiki article on altitude sickness:
The cause of altitude sickness is still not understood. It occurs in low atmospheric pressure conditions but not necessarily in low oxygen conditions at sea level pressure. Although treatable to some extent by the administration of oxygen, most of the symptoms do not appear to be caused by low oxygen, but rather by the low CO2 levels causing a rise in blood pH, alkalosis. The percentage of oxygen in air remains essentially constant with altitude at 21 percent, but the air pressure (and therefore the number of oxygen molecules) drops as altitude increases. Altitude sickness usually does not affect persons traveling in aircraft because modern aircraft passenger compartments are pressurized.
also, don't most Everest climbers use oxygen when they try to summit? i'd be interested in seeing how many deaths were caused by inadequate oxygen supplies, or whether oxygen tanks actually have any effect on one's chances of contracting cerebral edema. and if the Wikipedia HACE article is indeed correct about high altitude cerebral edema usually occurring after a week or more at high altitude, then it would seem that acclimatization does not help prevent HACE.
however, the altitude sickness article seems to give a different take on the etiology of high altitude cerebral edema:
It is currently believed, however, that HACE is caused by local vasodilation of cerebral blood vessels in response to hypoxia, resulting in greater blood flow and, consequently, greater capillary pressures. On the other hand, HAPE may be due to general vasoconstriction in the pulmonary circulation (normally a response to regional ventilation-perfusion mismatches) which, with constant or increased cardiac output, also leads to increases in capillary pressures. For those suffering HACE, dexamethasone may provide temporary relief from symptoms in order to keep descending under their own power.
though i'm not sure why a hypertensive like dexamethasone would be prescribed if HACE were the result of increased capillary pressure and vasoconstriction. seems like it would make more sense to prescribe a hypotensive like clonidine. lowering your blood pressure would help to alleviate capillary pressure and slow the spread of edema, though it would probably make you more tired & reduce your strength, so this would only be appropriate for stabilizing a patient if they're going to be carried down.
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it's pretty simple:
if you institute environmental regulations that force each company to minimize their environmental impact--using scrubbers, wastewater treatment, dust collection, etc.--then the cost of producing the product (material costs, manufacturing costs, and environmental costs) will all be paid for by the manufacturer and product consumers.
but if you don't employ any such regulations, then most industrial corporations will simply ignore their environmental responsibilities to save money. and in this situation the environmental cost of producing the product is being paid for by everyone in terms of the environmental degradation caused by the industrial pollution.
yea, and that general-purpose CPU will also consume about 80x the power needed by a vector processor that is twice as fast at performing: 2D/3D rendering, scientific modeling, financial calculations, video transcoding, data compression, and all the other tasks that GPGPU/stream processors are used for.
a general-purpose scalar CPU will never replace specialized vector co-processors because it's the wrong tool for the job. most applications that vector coprocessors are used for involve processing very large data sets, a task that data parallelism was specifically invented for, so why would you use a scalar CPU to perform these tasks when an SIMD processor would not only be able to process the data in fewer clock cycles, but it'd also use far less power (and produce less heat)?
there's absolutely nothing silly about using GPUs/stream processors for applications out of 3D graphics. it's sillier to have the CPU perform calculations it really wasn't designed for while most people have a powerful vector processor far more suited to the task sitting on their video card. that's why companies like Adobe are interested in GPGPU and are writing their applications to take advantage of the vector processing power of modern GPUs. the gaming industry has been exploiting SIMD for nearly two decades, so have CAD & DSP software developers and embedded systems manufacturers.
i say give it to them. it's a wise investment.
that is, of course, so long as:
we need improved/cheaper battery technology to boost the development & adoption of electric vehicles.
not quite. physics calculations are very well suited to vector processing, which is why most Physics Processing Units are vector processors, just like GPUs, array processors, DSPs, stream processors, etc.
a GPU may be more specialized to handle 2D/3D graphics rendering, but they can also perform physics calculations quite well because of their SIMD architecture. GPGPU stream processors in particular are of great interest to the scientific community because of their superb performance in scientific modeling applications which require crunching large sets of numbers.
of course, there are some vector processors that are better suited to physics calculations while others may have architectures & instruction sets specialized towards graphics or digital signal processing/video encoding, but sometimes the distinction is purely marketing-based. so if you had to choose between using a general-purpose scalar CPU or a vector GPU on a graphics card to perform physics calculations, it would be far wiser to use the GPU.
yea, that's not how a criminal investigation works. making the act of hiring spammers a crime doesn't mean you arrest anyone whose product happens to be advertised in a spam message. that might be a good lead to follow in your investigation, but you still have to prove that the person/business is actually guilty of breaking the law.
or did you think that just dumping a dead body on someone's lawn gets them thrown in a gas chamber?
it's not that simple. sure you can make up for a lack of per-CPU processing power through cluster computing, but at some point it becomes more practical or even cheaper to go with a smaller cluster using a better processor architecture.
you could use hundreds of P3s or even P4s and still not achieve the same real-world performance as a couple dozen cell processors or modern GPGPU stream processors. that's because P3s & P4s are general-purpose CPUs designed for SISD/scalar processing. they're great for the bulk of general-purpose commodity computing applications like running an OS, web browser, word processor, etc., but high-performance computing problems typically involve processing very large data sets that greatly benefit from data parallelism. so if you had two processors, one scalar and one vector, each with the same power consumption and clock rate, the vector processor would be an order of magnitude faster at performing HPC tasks than the processor with the scalar architecture.
and the combined use of parallelization at multiple levels will always be more efficient than relying solely on a single form of parallelism. blindly adding more cheap 32-bit scalar CPUs won't get you as good of results as building a smaller cluster comprised of 64-bit fully-pipelined stream processors with multithreaded superscalar cores that support VLIW. in the former case, you're only employing task-level parallelism, whereas in the later case you're taking advantage of bit-level, instruction-level (pipelining + superscalar + VLIW), data, and task-level (multiprocessing + multithreading) parallelism. you'd not only save power by using fewer (more power-efficient) processors, but you'd also reduce memory coherence & bandwidth problems, not to mention the space savings.
yea, and you can also frame people for murder, theft, rape, child abuse, etc. but that's not a reason to make all those crimes legal.
that's why we have trials and due process.
part of the problem is that the tax brackets do not reflect the distribution of wealth in our society. we have tax brackets all the way up to ~$350K a year, but then we stop distinguishing between people who make $350K/year and people who make $1M/year and up. this bracket system puts an effective tax cap on the super-rich who possess the bulk of the national wealth.
by creating $1M/year, $2M/year, $4M/year, etc. brackets and introducing a wealth tax on billionaires we could reduce the tax rate among lower income brackets. and by removing the tax cap and introducing a progressive tax system for corporations, that would further decrease the tax burden on the middle and lower classes.
of course, we still won't see any benefit from our tax dollars so long as we keep allowing social programs to be cut and public infrastructure to be neglected. meanwhile, what tax funding is available gets poured into the MIC and corporate bailouts/subsidies. worst of all, Americans seem content to stand by and watch as all this happens, and even letting politicians buy their votes with promises of tax cuts.
except in this case the people profiting from (and are the driving force behind) the crime aren't considered criminals. it makes no sense to outlaw spam but not go after the companies that hire spammers, and whose product advertisements are filling everyone's inbox.
even though a lot of spam is bounced through other countries, most of the products/services being advertised are of U.S. companies who operate completely out in the open and have easily traceable bank accounts. by going after these scummy businesses, you would cut off the money supply the fuels the spam industry and eliminate any financial incentive to send spam.
otherwise, this is like making it illegal commit murder but still allowing people to hire hitmen to do the killing for them.
i'm not really a networking geek, but i've been wondering if an old 2.8 GHz P4 (with only one stick of 256MB PC133 SDRAM left working) we have sitting in the office might make a decent file server for a home office. it seems like a waste to toss the system out, but it also doesn't make sense to add more memory to the system to keep it as a workstation.
does anyone know if such a system would perform well as a file server without a memory upgrade? or would it be possible to set it up as a wireless router? i currently have a Netgear WTG624 v3 wireless G router, but every few days i'll just start being unable to resolve new addresses or establish new connections. the problem usually goes away once the router is reset, but it's rather annoying. would an old desktop make a better wireless router?
no you don't, as demonstrated by the rest of your post.
not all processors/memory are made equal. some handle being overclocked better than others (certain models of high performance memory are designed by the manufacturer specifically to be overclocked). CPUs rated at different clock speeds within the same family are usually manufactured the same way, and often from the same wafer. manufacturers separate processors into different bins based on the standards each unit conforms to as determined through testing.
however, this bin assignment process is far from a perfect science. not every processor within the same bin will perform the same, and the actual performance differences between processors assigned to different bins are not always as significant as the vendor tries to project. in fact, processors may sometimes be relegated to a lower bin while conforming to the performance standards of a higher speed bin just because the manufacturer needs more units to sell at the lower price point.
well-informed overclockers understand these intricacies, and so do hardware manufacturers and system builders. that's why many modern motherboards have overclocking features/functionality integrated into their BIOS. by selecting an appropriate processor (taking into account the CPU family, stepping number, and manufacturing week) and method of overclocking (FSB/clock multiplier), there's no reason why a moderately intelligent user couldn't have a stable overclocked system. all it takes is some careful research and diligent testing.
it's not about pushing anything to "the edge." it's about pushing your system within safe limits to extract the optimal performance out of your hardware and saving money. obviously, if you're completely clueless about computers you shouldn't try to overclock anything. luckily, most overclockers know what they're doing and are able to improve the performance of their system without risking damage to their hardware.
sounds like a stereotypical trojan/adware/malware infection. at least all you're getting are pop-ups. the last one i had to deal with at work also used DNS-hijacking to redirect any webpage request to their spam (porn) site, preventing any web surfing. to make things worse, it wouldn't even allow the user to run certain programs, like notepad, Hijack This!, Internet Explorer (this malware targeted Firefox).
a fresh install is probably the easiest/quickest way to fix it, but it's not the only solution. with a little sleuthing (Windows Task Manager & Hijack This!) you can usually identify the file & process name(s) of the malware. all the times i've had to deal with that sort of thing, i found the solution in forum discussions on tech support sites (found by googling the file/process name of the trojan). if you're lucky, someone will have made a cleaner program for that particular malware program.
one of the more frequently encountered malware/adware programs is SmitFraud. that's one i've encountered several times. it cannot be removed by AV programs or spyware/malware removers (though it'll try to get you to purchase and install rogue AV/Anti-Spyware programs). if you do have SmitFraud, then your best shot is SmitFraudFix.
i wouldn't go that far. they just don't use sarcasm in their humor. i mean, we still shared some laughs during my stay there. even the older monks cracked the occasional joke. but i suppose their ascetic lifestyle requires a lot of self-discipline, thus they project a stoic demeanor most of the time.
well, i remember the monk we were talking to telling me that he didn't join the monastery until his senior year of high school. and none of my relatives (aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.) really ever use sarcasm in their speech. i know that one of my older cousins picked up on my sarcasm, but that may have been because we hung out a lot while i was in Taiwan, or it could just be that she's more laid back than most of my relatives.
i don't know. maybe their sarcasm is more subtle or nuanced. but my experience is that sarcasm isn't a part of mainstream Taiwanese culture.
while i agree it's a niche genre, so are some of the more complex SRPGs like Spectral Souls or Generation of Chaos, which i think have a steeper learning curve than AT-Robots. even World of Warcraft has more parameters, stats & complex game mechanics to learn/memorize than AT-Robots.
really all the robot AI algorithms simply break down into a few basic directives: scan, attack and chase/evade.
aside from those three points, there's just the allotment of base stats:
scanner
weapon
armor
engine
heatsinks
mines
shields
i think AT-Robots would appeal to any child who's ever wanted to build their own robot. but unlike building a robot in real life, this is much cheaper and easier to pick up. besides, just because a child comes from a poor background doesn't mean he's dumb/has a short attention span. likewise, a game doesn't have to involve mindless action to be fun/entertaining. a lot of people enjoy empire-building strategy games, chess, and puzzle games like Sudoku.
plus, kids around that age are still pretty mentally malleable and inquisitive. kids aren't born nerds or intellectuals/geniuses. you can cultivate a healthy interest for intellectual pursuits in just about any child, and educational games are the perfect means of doing just that. it's important not to sell a child short and withhold intellectual challenges from them because you think it's beyond their mental capacity--especially underprivileged children.
heh, i hope they've tightened up their client-server model. i remember back in high school i wrote a proxy server to monitor the traffic between my TetriNET client and the server. at first it was just a stream of jumbled characters to me, punctuated by the occasional chat message that was displayed in plain text. but after studying the traffic for a few hours and with a little experimentation, i was able to decipher pretty much all of the traffic flowing between the client and server and document their entire communication protocol.
yea, it's just a game so security naturally won't be a major priority, but there were some pretty major design flaws. for instance, even though the networking architecture technically followed a client-server model, nearly all of the game intelligence/mechanics was entrusted to the clients. all the server did was give everyone a single host to connect to and serve as a broadcast address. the actual instructions to update each player's screen came from their own clients. and to make things worse, the server (and therefore also the clients) made no attempt to distinguish where a message originated from and whether that host had any business issuing that message/instruction.
so by the next day i had hacked together a proxy/cheat program that let me manipulate anyone's screen at will--including adding/removing rows, dropping power-ups, clearing/filling a screen completely, and even drawing words/flowers/smiley faces on the screen using blocks/power-ups. oh, and i could also spoof chat messages or boot everyone off the server. the game lost its fun after that, but reverse-engineering their communication protocol was funner than playing the game anyway.
one of the funner games i remember playing as a child was AT-Robots. i'm not sure if it was free back then (i might have gotten it at a swap meet or something), but it's certainly free now.
basically, it's a robot battle simulation. you use a text editor to write the AI for your bot(s) in ATRA (Advanced T-Robot Assembly), a simplified assembly-like language used in the game, and then you load your custom-made bots up in the game and run battle simulations against other types of robots.
even if you don't assembly or don't have any programming experience, it's relatively easy to open up one of the pre-written robots that come with the game and figure out what different instructions do by altering different program parameters and then seeing how this changes the robot's behavior.
it's a great way to get kids interested in programming (and perhaps robotics/AI) while having lots of fun. one of the game's best qualities is that it encourages experimentation and creativity. once you get into the game you're always trying to tweak your robots and experiment with new techniques to improve their battle performance. it's largely a process of trial-and-error when you first start, but it also encourages deductive reasoning and other analytical skills.
that reminds of the summer i spent at a Buddhist temple/monastery in Taiwan. i was in junior high or just entering high school, i think, and I went there with a couple other Asian-American teenagers as part of a Buddhist/animal rights summer camp program that our parents enrolled us in.
despite being pulled out of bed at 4 in the morning, not being able to eat meat, being made to do farm work (the monks grew most of their own food), and having to recite stupid mantras every morning, and even being locked in a urine-soaked livestock trailer in the baking sun for half an hour (yes, i'm serious.), it was a really interesting experience.
but one of the more unexpected things to happen was learning that Taiwanese people aren't familiar with sarcasm. while we were socializing with a few of the younger monks (their ages ranged from mid-teens to early-20's) one of the American teenagers responded to a question from one of the monks with a sarcastic reply. and while it was pretty obvious to all of us Americans that he was being facetious, the monks were rather perplexed. we tried to explain it to them, but the culture gap was too big. to them there was no difference between being sarcastic and lying.
RTFA:
the focus is on old people because they're the ones who are worried about mental/cognitive deterioration. it's not ageism, it's biology. no one is calling old people "dumbasses" any more than research into neurodegenerative diseases is calling Alzheimer's patients retards.
your groundless claims of older people being smarter than younger people is more akin to ageism than the researchers doing this study. so you can stop feigning your righteous indignation whenever you feel like.
tactics is what S.W.A.T. teams and Special Forces (as well as normal front line soldiers) are trained in. it concerns the maneuvering of individual units on the battlefield--things like enfilade/defilade, spec fire, suppressive fire, leapfrogging, flanking, squad formation/movement/positioning, etc.
strategy is the planning and execution of a war/contest between entire armies/nations. it's the decision-making handled by the Generals and Pentagon officials rather than the direct combatants on the battlefield. military strategy involves the use of diplomatic, economic, military, and informational resources to achieve strategic goals and obtain the desired end-state of a conflict.
logistics is the maintenance of an active army and the movement/acquisition/distribution of resources this entails. logistics is used to accompany/enable strategy, but it's generally considered a separate discipline.
it's funny how Americans get all up in arms about true socialism that actually serves public interest, like socialized medicine/higher-education/sciences/internet access/etc., but you never hear a peep out of them about tax dollars being funneled into companies like Halliburton/KBR, GE, Carlyle Group, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc. that serves only the MIC. likewise, no one made a fuss about Harley Davidson receiving, essentially, a government bailout from the Reagan Administration in the form of overt protectionism during the 1980's while Reagan was simultaneously espousing the virtues of free market capitalism. and now we're outright giving government subsidies to the Big Three automakers to bail them out, and again there is practically no opposition to this either.
frankly, the recent corporate bailouts are more akin to Reaganomics than socialism. after all, nothing is being socialized. the Big Three automakers aren't being nationalized. American citizens aren't getting free cars or anything else out of this. it's just taking from the poor to give to the rich. that's been going on ever since monetary economies were created. today we're just corporate sharecroppers rather than feudal serfs.
some kind of rebreather system might be more efficient, though that might be a little heavy to carry up an 8km mountain.
that doesn't always work.
(note: the above link is from a History Channel program about the Mt. Hood rescue chopper crash. here is a slightly higher quality (but shorter) version from a live news broadcast of the incident.)
hrmm... while the Wikipedia article on cerebral edema supports your statement that HACE (high altitude cerebral edema) is caused by hypoxia, the actual HACE article suggests that HACE is a severe form of altitude sickness, for which the only cure is to descend to a lower altitude (an oxygen supply can help to stabilize a patient, but it isn't a cure). from the Wiki article on altitude sickness:
also, don't most Everest climbers use oxygen when they try to summit? i'd be interested in seeing how many deaths were caused by inadequate oxygen supplies, or whether oxygen tanks actually have any effect on one's chances of contracting cerebral edema. and if the Wikipedia HACE article is indeed correct about high altitude cerebral edema usually occurring after a week or more at high altitude, then it would seem that acclimatization does not help prevent HACE.
however, the altitude sickness article seems to give a different take on the etiology of high altitude cerebral edema:
though i'm not sure why a hypertensive like dexamethasone would be prescribed if HACE were the result of increased capillary pressure and vasoconstriction. seems like it would make more sense to prescribe a hypotensive like clonidine. lowering your blood pressure would help to alleviate capillary pressure and slow the spread of edema, though it would probably make you more tired & reduce your strength, so this would only be appropriate for stabilizing a patient if they're going to be carried down.
Marinara Trench? that sounds more delicious than deadly. or are the deaths caused by contracting food-poisoning at Sizzler?
perhaps you meant Mariana?