Simply because this will result in nothing but Microsoft's complete reversal of policy towards chips on line! If a significant proportion legitimate users are banned because of what amounts to a design flaw in the system, the system has to change.
I know the Kmart 'fiasco' is one clear example, but it was not a completly normal situation, I have transferred software licences of Microsoft Windows / Office many times, it does take time (the last transfer took like 4 months to get done!) but it is possible. UNLESS you sign up to a special deal directly with MS that prohibits you from doing this, I believe the kmart case was along those lines..
Companies sell assessts all the time, they also go bust, change ownership and everything else..
You always here such hype about "more natural imput", but that is a joke, keyboard's are so much more efficient than either handwriting or voice! Convinience factor is slightly different, and sure this helps there, it isnt so easy to type (or hand-write for that matter) while walking down the hallway..
But I recently read a study on the effectivness of voice imput, the fact is that speach and writing use completly different parts of the brain, so much so that writing (typing / etc) uses so much less brain power that it free's you completly to think! So not only is voice imput slower it is vastly more inefficient as it limits your thinking!
If you have heard some of the "sock CPU fan's and graphics card coolers" out there you may change your mind.. I recently read a round-up of Geforce 4600's, the loudest ones (MSI & Leadtek i think) were close to 50db!! Think about it, your average vacuum cleaner is somewhere in the 50's!:(
Could you seriously sleep with one of those things on? Personally I wont anymore, I have a similar rig to this one, although there are so many more things that can be done to reduce noise even further. Actually all his claims in the article about being a "silent pc" are rediculous, 40dBA is pretty noisy to me! I only wish I could measure mine, still it's too noisy for me but with only two 'silent-fans' in the whole thing it's pretty close to "silent".
Err, ever heard of a faulty product? You know when you take home that new TV/Toaster/VCR and it doesnt work? Take it back and get one that does work.. Same concept here.
btw, I purposly removed the heatsink from my gf4 mx, I like my computers quiet. It works perfectly with only a decent heatsink on it...
So basically your recieved a piece of *spam* saying that the previous spam that you recieved and ignored was a fraud, and now you should reply to this spam to report the perpetrators? What, are you going to give them your bank account details so that when they recover the money they can return it?!?
I think it's a bit of a leap from: "residents against 400foot windmills in there backyard's" too: "left-wing dogooders out to hijack any green idea for their own commie agenda!"
These protests are occuring all over the world, the simple fact is a few dozen 400 foot windmills is no prettier than your run of the mill nuclear power plant.:) What makes it worse is effective 'wind farms' generally need the highest most visible and valuable property.:(
There are disadvantages to everything, wind power is no exception!
If you're serious about your data's security don't for a second take that warranty into account! Quality is not measured by the length of the warranty, and quite frankly if the drive dies taking all of your data with it 6 months or 2 years into a 3 year warranty it's no different. (at least IMO) The data's gone, now the time spent retrieving from backup, that's the costly part..
Warranties have always been a tool for sales people, people put a lot of faith on the warranty, which is why you often see not-so-reliable brands with longer warranties. A good example is computer Monitors: Up until about three years ago Sony monitors had only 1 year warranty on them, then the market was flooded with every two dollar brand with a 3 year warranty! Now any Sony owner knows that their 3 year old monitor still beats the pants of most of the competition's new models, but Sony had to follow the market and increase their warranties to three years. Why? Competition.
Another good example can be seen in cars, at least here in Australia in recent years you have seen a flood of new cheap cars; Hyundai's, KIA's, etc all that come with 5 year 100,000k' warranties! But if you look at say VW's or Audi's they still have their 3 year / 40,000 k' warranty. Which one do you think is more reliable???
My point is, if you want confidence in your hard drive purchase, you're looking at the wrong thing!
I hate that old image of geeks, black shirt, long hair, whatever.
Forget that! I've been a geek since I was 8 years old programming my C64, I wear thousand dollar suits because I damn well want to! I keep my hair respectable just how I want it, I date girls often, I'm *able* to communicate effectively, and more than anything else I hate talking endlessly to geeks about the intricacies of Xyz protocol or Abc's new gizmo! Argh!?
Heck maybe I'm not a geek, and there is hope for me yet?:)
A vpn is great except for one thing; CPU use, software encryption with something like FreeSWAN will very quickly use up that 600Mhz pc/router you use for authentication. Think about five clients and that thing is hosed.:( (There is a nice formula for cpu requirements at the FreeSWAN page I think)
Yes VPN (say IPSEC / L2TP) in hardware would be great for this, but if your talking 50+ users the cost will skyrocket, and worse if like me you are talking about community wireless networking 500+ users, it's not an option.
Nit picking about ST:TOS is useless, I certainly hope they dont keep complete continuity. For example do you want the Klingons to look like humans with bad hair-do's, ala TOS??? Ergh...
To actually keep continuity with every single TOS episode, you would have to rewrite just about every single TNG / DS9 / VOY / ENT episode ever since!
A few months back I was setting up a Plasma screen for a client, connected to just a Geforce 4, the big problem I found immediatly was the connector! DVI is not just one plug!
It turned out the Plasma screen (Pioneer I think) has a DVI-D connector and the GeForce (and every other video card I checked) has a DVI-I connector, they are not compatible!:( What I had to do after talking to both an A/V suplier and Pioneer was use a DVI-I to VGA cable as no DVI-I -> DVI-D exists! Apparantly the quality loss is insignificant, but it just didnt feel right.:( Still it did look brilliant at 1024x resolution!
From what I was told by various sources is that DVI-D is purely digital, where as DVI-I is part analogue, I never had time to find out more, but if anyone can clarify this and why it would be something to take into consideration.
To grasp the 4D space idea, I always like the example of the unfolded cube.
If you were to be a two dimentional creature, you could not see a cube as anything more than a standard 2d square. But if I were to unfold that cube into two dimentions, you would see a cross like 2D shape like remember when in primary school you made those cubes from paper? With four squares up and to the left and right of the second square down another square on each side. (giving a t shape?)
Now just imaging in a 3D world, take a 4D cube and unfold it, now you have a simiar cross shape, but with 4 CUBES high, with a cube connected to each side of the second cube down!
The only other thing you have to accept is that it is not possible for you to percieve 4 dimentions, so only try to percieve it in 3 dimentions..
"5. Almost no matter what, a TV PC is going to be too loud to enjoy having in the living room. "
There is so much that can be done here, I can see you have put a little effort into reducing noise, (duct-tape case joints, etc) but you made some fatal mistakes.. I have just completed my quiet pc project, and i'll tell you it went from 6 months ago unbearable to silent today! Now I cannot hear the sound of my pc over the static from the dodgy speakers when idle.:)
Quick tips: Firstly get rid of that Athlon! Sorry it is a lost hope, I went through so many differnt fans and heatsinks before I realised my Athlon1.33 was a dead end. Thermaltake are very good fans but even the 'quite' ones will vary in noise, ie when it heats up it goes from 'quiet' 22db to jet engine 43db!:( Personally the best results I got was a Thermaltake Volcano7 with the 80cm fan replaced with a fan from www.quietpc.com. Of course this does not compare with the virtually-FANLESS operation of my new PentiumIV 2.26Ghz! That heatsink is big enough that with the fan removed and a nice 90cm quiet fan (Zalman fan less than 20db) mounted above it is enough! Only one case intake fan is required to keep the system temp average 30deg, and at most 48deg celcius.
Next the harddisk, get rid of them, go for a Seagate Barracuda IV, these things run almost silent and very cool. Only use one HD in the system aswell. With the DVD-ROM, I highly recommend SONY, next to replacing the CPU my best move was junking a Pioneer 16x (noisy bastard!) with a SONY 16x DVD, that thing is the quietest DVD/CD I have heard in many years!
Lastly the powersupply again many quiet alternatives are available, www.quietpc.com is a good place, Just Cooler make a very quiet PSU which I love (sorry no link:( )..
It is so possible to make a quite pc, you would quickly learn this like I did when I started working on some Dell and Compaq corporate desktop's Optiplex's, etc.. Those things run silent, like all pc's should be!;)
Well I hate to be anal about a joke, but the CNN article actually mentioned that the researchers hired Drama Students to help teach the 'social skills'..
That is interesting in itself. I guess these geeks see their weaknesses quite well?
In regards to the Torino scale, the fact that 1 is the highest risk assesment ever given on a Torino scale to an object makes this quite concerning. On the Palermo scale anything above 0 is a sure hit, what really determines the threat is the size, that's where the Torino scale comes in better, basically a 10 on the Torino scale would likely be something big enough to knock the Earth off it's orbit!;)
You may be joking but there is some truth to what you say, I think we may need something like this to open our eyes a little. A lot of evidence points to asteroid impact likely being the biggest actual threat to mankind, but despite this far to many short sighted politicians wont give it a second thought! Specifically I'm talking about the Australian govt who a while back cut all funds to asteroid search programs, virtually leaving the entire southern hemisphere unchecked for such potential threats.
Hope you don't feel too safe with the fact that NASA and many European astronomers are searching the skies daily for these threats... Someone's letting us down. (nb yep im an aussie..)
I would agree more so with your first point, even here on Earth it is thought that life has been all but wiped out not just once 65million years ago, but at least five times in the past 500million years! Not to mention the ten's of more minor, but still hugely distruptive events over the same time.. (link: http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/tps-seti/crater.html)
Your second point well maybe i'm a hopeless optimist, but i think it's a rediculous idea. The thought that we would go against everything we know, ie the fundamental instinct of survival, and just blow ourselves up for some petty war or whatever, doesnt seem so likely to me. Sure we'll commit mass genocide, use chemical weapons, and firebomb/nuke hundreds of thousands of civilians, but we wont bring it apon ourselves, many of us will continue to survive despite our worst efforts...
Here in Australia our often favourite Cable ISP, Optus@Home, has a nice descrete policiy of capping P2P bandwidth. That practice combined with their recent data caps put them definatly out of the good isp category.:(
Any Optus@home users wondering why they cant get more than 2k/sec on average in kazzaa? Now you know...
ps. This is not confirmed, i have a friend in the network centre that is what he claims...
When i was in Germany in September 2000, i had a ride in one of those VW Polo's (the baby two door), yes the engine did shut off at lights, and as soon as you let go of the break it would start again.. The delay was unnoticable in city driving, but i must say it freaked me out every time i pulled up at a set of lights!:)
First up in regards to the Afgan wedding bombing (side note; that's twice isnt it?), i dont know how much coverage it got in the states, i dont really care, if i want to read news about America and or the war in Afghanistan, the LAST place i would go is cnn.com or msnbc.com! You may as well be looking for news on Israel at islamicjihad.com!:)
If you're upset about not seeing the real news, look around, the Internet makes this so much easier, goto bbc.co.uk, smh.com.au or anywhere else. Just dont rely on one company (often person, ie editor / owner) to get your news.
And even more importantly if you want International news, DONT rely on one country's media. Case example, you want afgan war news, you wont get it from America.
It would depend heavily on the building, particulary the wall's and floors, as 2.4ghz will be completly blocked by metal and significantly degraded by multiple levels of different objects / materials..
Also remember that most AP's claim a usable maximum of 64 users, for any real use (fast use) less than 30. Best bet of course would be an AP + omni on each level (or maybe every second), but some buildings you *may* be able to get away with a few AP's spread around the building..
This isnt a science, a site survey is _required_ in any potential building, there is no 'standard'.:(
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Simply because this will result in nothing but Microsoft's complete reversal of policy towards chips on line! If a significant proportion legitimate users are banned because of what amounts to a design flaw in the system, the system has to change.
I know the Kmart 'fiasco' is one clear example, but it was not a completly normal situation, I have transferred software licences of Microsoft Windows / Office many times, it does take time (the last transfer took like 4 months to get done!) but it is possible. UNLESS you sign up to a special deal directly with MS that prohibits you from doing this, I believe the kmart case was along those lines..
Companies sell assessts all the time, they also go bust, change ownership and everything else..
You always here such hype about "more natural imput", but that is a joke, keyboard's are so much more efficient than either handwriting or voice! Convinience factor is slightly different, and sure this helps there, it isnt so easy to type (or hand-write for that matter) while walking down the hallway..
But I recently read a study on the effectivness of voice imput, the fact is that speach and writing use completly different parts of the brain, so much so that writing (typing / etc) uses so much less brain power that it free's you completly to think! So not only is voice imput slower it is vastly more inefficient as it limits your thinking!
If you have heard some of the "sock CPU fan's and graphics card coolers" out there you may change your mind.. I recently read a round-up of Geforce 4600's, the loudest ones (MSI & Leadtek i think) were close to 50db!! Think about it, your average vacuum cleaner is somewhere in the 50's! :(
Could you seriously sleep with one of those things on? Personally I wont anymore, I have a similar rig to this one, although there are so many more things that can be done to reduce noise even further. Actually all his claims in the article about being a "silent pc" are rediculous, 40dBA is pretty noisy to me! I only wish I could measure mine, still it's too noisy for me but with only two 'silent-fans' in the whole thing it's pretty close to "silent".
Err, ever heard of a faulty product? You know when you take home that new TV/Toaster/VCR and it doesnt work? Take it back and get one that does work.. Same concept here.
btw, I purposly removed the heatsink from my gf4 mx, I like my computers quiet. It works perfectly with only a decent heatsink on it...
You're kidding me right?
So basically your recieved a piece of *spam* saying that the previous spam that you recieved and ignored was a fraud, and now you should reply to this spam to report the perpetrators? What, are you going to give them your bank account details so that when they recover the money they can return it?!?
Hang on, let me go back one more step..
You actually read your "spam"?
Spacetimeis changeless from the infinite past to the infinite future. Chew on that for a while.
Two words: Prove it.
I think it's a bit of a leap from: "residents against 400foot windmills in there backyard's" too: "left-wing dogooders out to hijack any green idea for their own commie agenda!"
:) What makes it worse is effective 'wind farms' generally need the highest most visible and valuable property. :(
These protests are occuring all over the world, the simple fact is a few dozen 400 foot windmills is no prettier than your run of the mill nuclear power plant.
There are disadvantages to everything, wind power is no exception!
If you're serious about your data's security don't for a second take that warranty into account! Quality is not measured by the length of the warranty, and quite frankly if the drive dies taking all of your data with it 6 months or 2 years into a 3 year warranty it's no different. (at least IMO) The data's gone, now the time spent retrieving from backup, that's the costly part..
Warranties have always been a tool for sales people, people put a lot of faith on the warranty, which is why you often see not-so-reliable brands with longer warranties. A good example is computer Monitors: Up until about three years ago Sony monitors had only 1 year warranty on them, then the market was flooded with every two dollar brand with a 3 year warranty! Now any Sony owner knows that their 3 year old monitor still beats the pants of most of the competition's new models, but Sony had to follow the market and increase their warranties to three years. Why? Competition.
Another good example can be seen in cars, at least here in Australia in recent years you have seen a flood of new cheap cars; Hyundai's, KIA's, etc all that come with 5 year 100,000k' warranties! But if you look at say VW's or Audi's they still have their 3 year / 40,000 k' warranty. Which one do you think is more reliable???
My point is, if you want confidence in your hard drive purchase, you're looking at the wrong thing!
I hate that old image of geeks, black shirt, long hair, whatever.
:)
Forget that! I've been a geek since I was 8 years old programming my C64, I wear thousand dollar suits because I damn well want to! I keep my hair respectable just how I want it, I date girls often, I'm *able* to communicate effectively, and more than anything else I hate talking endlessly to geeks about the intricacies of Xyz protocol or Abc's new gizmo! Argh!?
Heck maybe I'm not a geek, and there is hope for me yet?
A vpn is great except for one thing; CPU use, software encryption with something like FreeSWAN will very quickly use up that 600Mhz pc/router you use for authentication. Think about five clients and that thing is hosed. :( (There is a nice formula for cpu requirements at the FreeSWAN page I think)
Yes VPN (say IPSEC / L2TP) in hardware would be great for this, but if your talking 50+ users the cost will skyrocket, and worse if like me you are talking about community wireless networking 500+ users, it's not an option.
Nit picking about ST:TOS is useless, I certainly hope they dont keep complete continuity. For example do you want the Klingons to look like humans with bad hair-do's, ala TOS??? Ergh...
To actually keep continuity with every single TOS episode, you would have to rewrite just about every single TNG / DS9 / VOY / ENT episode ever since!
Just found this info on DVI connectors: All About DVI
Hope this helps..
A few months back I was setting up a Plasma screen for a client, connected to just a Geforce 4, the big problem I found immediatly was the connector! DVI is not just one plug!
:( What I had to do after talking to both an A/V suplier and Pioneer was use a DVI-I to VGA cable as no DVI-I -> DVI-D exists! Apparantly the quality loss is insignificant, but it just didnt feel right. :( Still it did look brilliant at 1024x resolution!
It turned out the Plasma screen (Pioneer I think) has a DVI-D connector and the GeForce (and every other video card I checked) has a DVI-I connector, they are not compatible!
From what I was told by various sources is that DVI-D is purely digital, where as DVI-I is part analogue, I never had time to find out more, but if anyone can clarify this and why it would be something to take into consideration.
To grasp the 4D space idea, I always like the example of the unfolded cube.
If you were to be a two dimentional creature, you could not see a cube as anything more than a standard 2d square. But if I were to unfold that cube into two dimentions, you would see a cross like 2D shape like remember when in primary school you made those cubes from paper? With four squares up and to the left and right of the second square down another square on each side. (giving a t shape?)
Now just imaging in a 3D world, take a 4D cube and unfold it, now you have a simiar cross shape, but with 4 CUBES high, with a cube connected to each side of the second cube down!
The only other thing you have to accept is that it is not possible for you to percieve 4 dimentions, so only try to percieve it in 3 dimentions..
"5. Almost no matter what, a TV PC is going to be too loud to enjoy having in the living room. "
:)
:( Personally the best results I got was a Thermaltake Volcano7 with the 80cm fan replaced with a fan from www.quietpc.com. Of course this does not compare with the virtually-FANLESS operation of my new PentiumIV 2.26Ghz! That heatsink is big enough that with the fan removed and a nice 90cm quiet fan (Zalman fan less than 20db) mounted above it is enough! Only one case intake fan is required to keep the system temp average 30deg, and at most 48deg celcius.
:( )..
;)
There is so much that can be done here, I can see you have put a little effort into reducing noise, (duct-tape case joints, etc) but you made some fatal mistakes.. I have just completed my quiet pc project, and i'll tell you it went from 6 months ago unbearable to silent today! Now I cannot hear the sound of my pc over the static from the dodgy speakers when idle.
Quick tips:
Firstly get rid of that Athlon! Sorry it is a lost hope, I went through so many differnt fans and heatsinks before I realised my Athlon1.33 was a dead end. Thermaltake are very good fans but even the 'quite' ones will vary in noise, ie when it heats up it goes from 'quiet' 22db to jet engine 43db!
Next the harddisk, get rid of them, go for a Seagate Barracuda IV, these things run almost silent and very cool. Only use one HD in the system aswell. With the DVD-ROM, I highly recommend SONY, next to replacing the CPU my best move was junking a Pioneer 16x (noisy bastard!) with a SONY 16x DVD, that thing is the quietest DVD/CD I have heard in many years!
Lastly the powersupply again many quiet alternatives are available, www.quietpc.com is a good place, Just Cooler make a very quiet PSU which I love (sorry no link
It is so possible to make a quite pc, you would quickly learn this like I did when I started working on some Dell and Compaq corporate desktop's Optiplex's, etc.. Those things run silent, like all pc's should be!
Well I hate to be anal about a joke, but the CNN article actually mentioned that the researchers hired Drama Students to help teach the 'social skills'..
That is interesting in itself. I guess these geeks see their weaknesses quite well?
In regards to the Torino scale, the fact that 1 is the highest risk assesment ever given on a Torino scale to an object makes this quite concerning. On the Palermo scale anything above 0 is a sure hit, what really determines the threat is the size, that's where the Torino scale comes in better, basically a 10 on the Torino scale would likely be something big enough to knock the Earth off it's orbit! ;)
You may be joking but there is some truth to what you say, I think we may need something like this to open our eyes a little. A lot of evidence points to asteroid impact likely being the biggest actual threat to mankind, but despite this far to many short sighted politicians wont give it a second thought! Specifically I'm talking about the Australian govt who a while back cut all funds to asteroid search programs, virtually leaving the entire southern hemisphere unchecked for such potential threats.
Hope you don't feel too safe with the fact that NASA and many European astronomers are searching the skies daily for these threats... Someone's letting us down.
(nb yep im an aussie..)
Oh please let it land on Vegas!
;)
Not for your sake, but for all of us!
I would agree more so with your first point, even here on Earth it is thought that life has been all but wiped out not just once 65million years ago, but at least five times in the past 500million years! Not to mention the ten's of more minor, but still hugely distruptive events over the same time.. (link: http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/tps-seti/crater.html)
Your second point well maybe i'm a hopeless optimist, but i think it's a rediculous idea. The thought that we would go against everything we know, ie the fundamental instinct of survival, and just blow ourselves up for some petty war or whatever, doesnt seem so likely to me. Sure we'll commit mass genocide, use chemical weapons, and firebomb/nuke hundreds of thousands of civilians, but we wont bring it apon ourselves, many of us will continue to survive despite our worst efforts...
Here in Australia our often favourite Cable ISP, Optus@Home, has a nice descrete policiy of capping P2P bandwidth. That practice combined with their recent data caps put them definatly out of the good isp category. :(
Any Optus@home users wondering why they cant get more than 2k/sec on average in kazzaa? Now you know...
ps. This is not confirmed, i have a friend in the network centre that is what he claims...
When i was in Germany in September 2000, i had a ride in one of those VW Polo's (the baby two door), yes the engine did shut off at lights, and as soon as you let go of the break it would start again.. The delay was unnoticable in city driving, but i must say it freaked me out every time i pulled up at a set of lights! :)
First up in regards to the Afgan wedding bombing (side note; that's twice isnt it?), i dont know how much coverage it got in the states, i dont really care, if i want to read news about America and or the war in Afghanistan, the LAST place i would go is cnn.com or msnbc.com! You may as well be looking for news on Israel at islamicjihad.com! :)
If you're upset about not seeing the real news, look around, the Internet makes this so much easier, goto bbc.co.uk, smh.com.au or anywhere else. Just dont rely on one company (often person, ie editor / owner) to get your news.
And even more importantly if you want International news, DONT rely on one country's media. Case example, you want afgan war news, you wont get it from America.
It would depend heavily on the building, particulary the wall's and floors, as 2.4ghz will be completly blocked by metal and significantly degraded by multiple levels of different objects / materials..
:(
Also remember that most AP's claim a usable maximum of 64 users, for any real use (fast use) less than 30. Best bet of course would be an AP + omni on each level (or maybe every second), but some buildings you *may* be able to get away with a few AP's spread around the building..
This isnt a science, a site survey is _required_ in any potential building, there is no 'standard'.