...Though I was impressed (read: quite nearly drooling) over Patrick Stewart as Emperor Uriel Septim VII. *That* was a well voiced intro. Sean Bean (Boromir in LotR) did an excellent Martin Septim, and Terence Stamp (various bad guys in Superman, Get Smart, Smalville, Phantom Menace) as Mankar Camoran was a great match, as well.
But yeah... having ~4 voice actors for the 500 generic characters in the game did hurt the immersion, especially when, say, two members of the same gender/race (therefore the same voice) would start up a conversation...
Or worse, when a Nord and an Orc (also the same voice) began fighting to the death out of my line of sight--it sounded rather schizophrenic.
I used to have a similar problem, except that I received a great many calls from little old ladies...... who only spoke Russian. Apparently, as I learned after the fact, my old land-line number was 1 digit away from a doctor who had many patients among the Russian immigrant population in my area.
You'd be surprised how angry some of these callers would get when I would try to tell them (in English) that they had a wrong number. I learned what certainly appeared to be a few Russian curse words during that time.
Be careful with the hair dryer. A hair dryer may put out temperatures beyond the tolerance of certain packages not built to withstand high heat, causing nVIDIA-like problems with your solder junctions and other bonds.
I mean, your CPU and such should be fine, as they're built to withstand high temperatures. On the other end of the spectrum, using a hair dryer on, say, a cell phone is certainly a gamble.
Instead, use fans and pressurized air (for those hard to reach places), but you may want to stay away from heated air.
The American tipping system is simply a clever tax-evasion system for restaurant owners.
Think of it this way: In a system without tips, and where the food price on the menu is given a 'service' markup of... say... 20%, the extra money passes through the hands of the restaurant owner on the way to the employees, and thus is taxed. However, in a tipping system where the customer pays for the food and then pays the 20% service markup directly to the waiter/waitress, the additional money is never 'seen' by the owner, thus reducing his taxes and making his life easier.
At least, that's the way that it has been explained to me by those in the restaurant business, anyone wish to clarify?
That's odd; do you know when that law was supposed to go into effect? I see the article is dated 2005, but I spent 1.5 weeks in Italy in the summer of 2006 and never ran into any of those issues. Internet Cafes only required a signature on a timer sheet so they'd know how long I spent at their computers; nobody ever asked for my ID. Also, the only time I was ever required to show my passport was at the airports--hotels were perfectly fine seeing a credit card, instead.
Maybe I just got lucky, but I stayed in five different hotels and visited at least 6-7 different internet-access locations, so I assume I would have run into *someone* obeying this law, if it's actually on the books.
When referring to CPU's like this, there are two different flavors of failure.
First, there is the failure that causes your computer to crash--an improperly processed command, a bad memory jump, failure of the clock to get to the right places at once, etc. You reboot the computer and it will work again (for a bit, at least). Secondly is the physical breakdown failure that results in a broken CPU that will never work properly again.
When you are looking at the risks/benefits from overclocking or underclocking, you need to be clear on the failure modes. Simply turning up the clock speed makes the first failure much more likely by reducing the leeway for a signal to get from point A to point B. So what do you do in this situation? Well, most users increase the CPU voltage to increase the driving strength of the signals. However, the heat generated on-chip is proportional to Vdd^2 as well as frequency^1. Operating in an increased heat environment, on the other hand, increases the odds of the second (catastrophic) failure [though it does slightly increase the odds of the first, as well].
To get back to your original question, if you want to save on cooling and power with a CPU, you really need to under-volt it. Unfortunately, dropping the headroom *significantly* increases the chances of the first kind of failure as the default voltage has already been pushed surprisingly low by the manufacturer. (And besides, most consumer motherboards don't allow undervolting, anyways).
Given that the divers components *within* the case seem to get along so well with each other (most of the time), and that most of the power consumed is dispersed as heat rather than controlled tones, I wouldn't think that this would be a problem.
My previous computer was mostly plastic (yeah, bad choice... the case broke at a LAN party but I kept using it for 4 more years) with only a plate of steel behind the motherboard. This should *increase* the EMI (read: ground plane) but I certainly never had a problem. A CRT monitor or even your cable box produces far more EMI (and in those cases, more "tonal" EMI) than your computer.
...just checked. The FCC compatibility requirement is basically a "free air" certification.
My favorite quote (from a Southwest Airlines safety briefing):
"If there is a loss in cabin pressure, those lovely yellow masks will drop from above. Once you stop screaming, cover your mouth with the mask and... (etc.)"
I design IC's for a major electronics design company, and we run every chip through myriad tests and analyses to make sure that electromigration is one of the least of a chip's concerns. Aside from the one-in-ten-million chance, any properly designed chip will fail long before electromigration comes into play due to some other method such as ESD or even (seriously) gamma ray bombardment.
Yes, electromigration does happen, but the glass in your windows is slowly migrating with gravity, as well. However you should be much more worried about a baseball coming through the window rather than it slowly melting away.
Overclocking is a different issue. (For the record, I'm referring to overboard user overclocking rather than factory overclocking). MOSFETs are square-law devices and BJTs are exponential-law, so turning up the voltage to 150% of default on a chip that is not at all designed to handle it (and these chips are designed to handle somewhat more than their specced voltage) can cause certain current loads to increase by 150% ^2, ^4, ^8, or worse, taking your electromigration death from 50 years down the road to a year or less of this overdriven action.
But hey, if you hold a blow torch to your patio window, it might migrate away before a baseball hits it, too.
You jest, but the first code I saw at my new job looked that way.
The previous programmer went ahead and unrolled a bunch of loops, cleared the code of comments (supposedly, it had some at one point), and scattered his magic numbers everywhere (down to lines that simply read "X = Y * 200 / 100 + 12 - C - 1;").
The variable names were the most amusing. They fell into three categories--the hopelessly obfuscated, the pointlessly simple, and the... well, just look:
Hopelessly obfuscated
Ca_calun8_infil_o3 (something to do with capacitor calibration unit,.. input,.. file?
xcssc32 (it multiplied some stuff)
C_C_R_S_T_1 (I think it's "Capacitor Calibration Register... I give up)
Group 2
list1 (reused a number of times)
variabel2 [sic]
x (This one's okay as a for loop counter or the like, but here it stored a value that was not used again for hundreds of lines)
Group 3
Uh... The programmer abbreviated Capacitor Unit --> CUnit --> A very mean thing to call a woman.
The last time I used edit, it felt more like playing a text-based RPG, and just getting to the point where the command interpreter gives up on you:
edit file1.txt "file1.txt" 5 lines, 74 characters : help help: Not an editor command :? No previous regular expression :1 This is V1.2 :This is V1.5 This: Not an editor command :1: This is V1.5 What? :*headdesk*
Yes, but what I am saying is that if the information had time to get from B to A and then from A to us, so does light/information from B, and therefore we should see B. It's the principle of the Light cone, which also applies to information in general.
I have to agree with 49152 in that, for the information to have traveled from the "affecting" object to the "affected" object and then to have made its way to us from the "affected" object in the form of light means (to me) that the original impetus either: A) Had to have occurred "before" the start of the universe, B) involved some FTL transmission or other warped space shortcut, or C) Is not observable to us currently simply because we do not know how to observe it (other dimensions, string theory [*gasp*], etc.).
I've got an honest question, though, left over from my woefully incomplete days of relativity and such:
Let's say we are able to observe an object 'A' right at the edge of our directly observable universe (say, 13GLY). Object 'B' is another 1GLY further away along the same line, and influences the behavior of B. Since information cannot travel faster than the speed of light, how could we be seeing the actions of B? It would take at least 1G years for information to travel from B to A, and then another 13G years for light to travel from A to us. For us to be observing something now, we would need to fall in the light cone of B, which is impossible as that would put the actions of B on A before the beginning of our universe.
Okay, I'm a born and raised American, and -453 Fahrenheit means nothing to me. Even us Americans use Celsius for science. If I read a temperature outside of what the weatherman could report, then a Fahrenheit measurement is just another number that I have to convert before it will mean something. (Let's see... being a former Clevelander, the weatherman range would be from about -30 to 110 F.)
What I find most interesting, however, is their mention of an asymmetric dual-core processor, with one core optimized for specific phone functionality and the other designed as a general-purpose processor. If this works, it will be an interesting new trend and a big step forwards for phones, Linux, and Qualcomm, I believe. (Apparently, though, it still has a few issues... I wish luck to those design teams!)
I dunno... I've been trying to get enjoyment out of Idle for quite some time, and I have to say this is the first time I've laughed out lout (at the office) at what I've read. That Google-man amazes me.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed.
...Though I was impressed (read: quite nearly drooling) over Patrick Stewart as Emperor Uriel Septim VII. *That* was a well voiced intro. Sean Bean (Boromir in LotR) did an excellent Martin Septim, and Terence Stamp (various bad guys in Superman, Get Smart, Smalville, Phantom Menace) as Mankar Camoran was a great match, as well.
But yeah... having ~4 voice actors for the 500 generic characters in the game did hurt the immersion, especially when, say, two members of the same gender/race (therefore the same voice) would start up a conversation...
Or worse, when a Nord and an Orc (also the same voice) began fighting to the death out of my line of sight--it sounded rather schizophrenic.
Are you going to vote for Ron Paul or are you sane?
The Google AI flying an airplane...
Now... would that be Daedalus or Icarus?
Woo hoo! Simultaneous Greek Mythology and Deus Ex references! If Slashdot comments had an achievement system, I would certainly have just earned one.
*leaves*
I used to have a similar problem, except that I received a great many calls from little old ladies... ... who only spoke Russian. Apparently, as I learned after the fact, my old land-line number was 1 digit away from a doctor who had many patients among the Russian immigrant population in my area.
You'd be surprised how angry some of these callers would get when I would try to tell them (in English) that they had a wrong number. I learned what certainly appeared to be a few Russian curse words during that time.
Be careful with the hair dryer. A hair dryer may put out temperatures beyond the tolerance of certain packages not built to withstand high heat, causing nVIDIA-like problems with your solder junctions and other bonds.
I mean, your CPU and such should be fine, as they're built to withstand high temperatures. On the other end of the spectrum, using a hair dryer on, say, a cell phone is certainly a gamble.
Instead, use fans and pressurized air (for those hard to reach places), but you may want to stay away from heated air.
The American tipping system is simply a clever tax-evasion system for restaurant owners.
Think of it this way: In a system without tips, and where the food price on the menu is given a 'service' markup of... say... 20%, the extra money passes through the hands of the restaurant owner on the way to the employees, and thus is taxed. However, in a tipping system where the customer pays for the food and then pays the 20% service markup directly to the waiter/waitress, the additional money is never 'seen' by the owner, thus reducing his taxes and making his life easier.
At least, that's the way that it has been explained to me by those in the restaurant business, anyone wish to clarify?
That's odd; do you know when that law was supposed to go into effect? I see the article is dated 2005, but I spent 1.5 weeks in Italy in the summer of 2006 and never ran into any of those issues. Internet Cafes only required a signature on a timer sheet so they'd know how long I spent at their computers; nobody ever asked for my ID. Also, the only time I was ever required to show my passport was at the airports--hotels were perfectly fine seeing a credit card, instead.
Maybe I just got lucky, but I stayed in five different hotels and visited at least 6-7 different internet-access locations, so I assume I would have run into *someone* obeying this law, if it's actually on the books.
Hey, as long as you're taking requests, please don't follow me at night, either. It kind of creeps me out.
It's like Bill Cosby always said. First you say it, then you do it.
When referring to CPU's like this, there are two different flavors of failure.
First, there is the failure that causes your computer to crash--an improperly processed command, a bad memory jump, failure of the clock to get to the right places at once, etc. You reboot the computer and it will work again (for a bit, at least). Secondly is the physical breakdown failure that results in a broken CPU that will never work properly again.
When you are looking at the risks/benefits from overclocking or underclocking, you need to be clear on the failure modes. Simply turning up the clock speed makes the first failure much more likely by reducing the leeway for a signal to get from point A to point B. So what do you do in this situation? Well, most users increase the CPU voltage to increase the driving strength of the signals. However, the heat generated on-chip is proportional to Vdd^2 as well as frequency^1. Operating in an increased heat environment, on the other hand, increases the odds of the second (catastrophic) failure [though it does slightly increase the odds of the first, as well].
To get back to your original question, if you want to save on cooling and power with a CPU, you really need to under-volt it. Unfortunately, dropping the headroom *significantly* increases the chances of the first kind of failure as the default voltage has already been pushed surprisingly low by the manufacturer. (And besides, most consumer motherboards don't allow undervolting, anyways).
Given that the divers components *within* the case seem to get along so well with each other (most of the time), and that most of the power consumed is dispersed as heat rather than controlled tones, I wouldn't think that this would be a problem.
My previous computer was mostly plastic (yeah, bad choice... the case broke at a LAN party but I kept using it for 4 more years) with only a plate of steel behind the motherboard. This should *increase* the EMI (read: ground plane) but I certainly never had a problem. A CRT monitor or even your cable box produces far more EMI (and in those cases, more "tonal" EMI) than your computer.
...just checked. The FCC compatibility requirement is basically a "free air" certification.
*applause* Perhaps(?): "One key to certify, and in the darkness, bind them."
My favorite quote (from a Southwest Airlines safety briefing):
"If there is a loss in cabin pressure, those lovely yellow masks will drop from above. Once you stop screaming, cover your mouth with the mask and... (etc.)"
vision balls that are in my thought box.
Above line stolen shamelessly from Jon Stewart, referring to his take on CNN's "perception analyzer" graph in the Presidential/VP Debates.
:D
Not that I disapprove, or anything.
I design IC's for a major electronics design company, and we run every chip through myriad tests and analyses to make sure that electromigration is one of the least of a chip's concerns. Aside from the one-in-ten-million chance, any properly designed chip will fail long before electromigration comes into play due to some other method such as ESD or even (seriously) gamma ray bombardment.
Yes, electromigration does happen, but the glass in your windows is slowly migrating with gravity, as well. However you should be much more worried about a baseball coming through the window rather than it slowly melting away.
Overclocking is a different issue. (For the record, I'm referring to overboard user overclocking rather than factory overclocking). MOSFETs are square-law devices and BJTs are exponential-law, so turning up the voltage to 150% of default on a chip that is not at all designed to handle it (and these chips are designed to handle somewhat more than their specced voltage) can cause certain current loads to increase by 150% ^2, ^4, ^8, or worse, taking your electromigration death from 50 years down the road to a year or less of this overdriven action.
But hey, if you hold a blow torch to your patio window, it might migrate away before a baseball hits it, too.
If you're building chips where electromigration is an issue within any half-reasonable time span, you're doing it wrong.
The previous programmer went ahead and unrolled a bunch of loops, cleared the code of comments (supposedly, it had some at one point), and scattered his magic numbers everywhere (down to lines that simply read "X = Y * 200 / 100 + 12 - C - 1;").
The variable names were the most amusing. They fell into three categories--the hopelessly obfuscated, the pointlessly simple, and the... well, just look:
I'm not sure about A - if it's even meaningful to speculate about before the big bang
Yeah, that's why I put "before" in quotes. It's the throwaway answer. ... but it is astrophysics... you never know, I guess. :-p
The last time I used edit, it felt more like playing a text-based RPG, and just getting to the point where the command interpreter gives up on you:
edit file1.txt
"file1.txt" 5 lines, 74 characters
: help
help: Not an editor command
:?
No previous regular expression
:1
This is V1.2
:This is V1.5
This: Not an editor command
:1: This is V1.5
What?
:*headdesk*
Yes, but what I am saying is that if the information had time to get from B to A and then from A to us, so does light/information from B, and therefore we should see B. It's the principle of the Light cone, which also applies to information in general.
I have to agree with 49152 in that, for the information to have traveled from the "affecting" object to the "affected" object and then to have made its way to us from the "affected" object in the form of light means (to me) that the original impetus either:
A) Had to have occurred "before" the start of the universe,
B) involved some FTL transmission or other warped space shortcut, or
C) Is not observable to us currently simply because we do not know how to observe it (other dimensions, string theory [*gasp*], etc.).
I've got an honest question, though, left over from my woefully incomplete days of relativity and such:
Let's say we are able to observe an object 'A' right at the edge of our directly observable universe (say, 13GLY). Object 'B' is another 1GLY further away along the same line, and influences the behavior of B. Since information cannot travel faster than the speed of light, how could we be seeing the actions of B? It would take at least 1G years for information to travel from B to A, and then another 13G years for light to travel from A to us. For us to be observing something now, we would need to fall in the light cone of B, which is impossible as that would put the actions of B on A before the beginning of our universe.
Any thoughts on that?
Okay, I'm a born and raised American, and -453 Fahrenheit means nothing to me. Even us Americans use Celsius for science. If I read a temperature outside of what the weatherman could report, then a Fahrenheit measurement is just another number that I have to convert before it will mean something. (Let's see... being a former Clevelander, the weatherman range would be from about -30 to 110 F.)
Please. If it's science, give us our 'degrees C'.
There's also an announcement from the Android Community (and confirmed by Qualcomm) that the device will be running off of a new Linux-based and Linux-optimized Qualcomm chipset.
What I find most interesting, however, is their mention of an asymmetric dual-core processor, with one core optimized for specific phone functionality and the other designed as a general-purpose processor. If this works, it will be an interesting new trend and a big step forwards for phones, Linux, and Qualcomm, I believe. (Apparently, though, it still has a few issues... I wish luck to those design teams!)
I dunno... I've been trying to get enjoyment out of Idle for quite some time, and I have to say this is the first time I've laughed out lout (at the office) at what I've read. That Google-man amazes me.
The duck is quack. Quack good.