However, the GAO has now estimated the revised contract, now costing $647 million, could grow to $2 billion $2 billion sounds rather more than $250M and even that is not a gauranteed maximum here!
nitpick: most dot matrix printers could take bitmap input so with the right computer and drivers they could print in any font you wanted.And with the double striking tricks that people worked out the print quality was actually not too bad for black and white text.
Microsoft supplied such drivers with windows (at least 95 through to XP not sure about other versions)
ribbons could be re-inked at least on the epsons (the lid just unclipped and there was the ribbon inside) and were much cheaper and needed much less frequent replacement than the cartridges in modern printers.
Government departments often have regulations that require them to put contracts out to tender and give them to the lowest bidder to prevent people handing out government contracts to thier friends.
The problem is if they put them out for bidding as fixed price contracts they probablly wouldn't get any bids and if they did those bids would be very high. So the bids are only estimates. Of course this makes the bidding a farce as everyone tries to put in the lowest estimate they can and sponge more money later once the governement department is locked in.
the VLK version of XP does not require activation.
and even if somehow they suddenly stopped activation of all retail editions and stopped all VLK copies passing wga I am quite convinced those determined to do so would find a way to make new installs work
But say a game can't run well on the PS2 (or PS3 or whatever), what then? Then the game developer didn't do thier job properly. Thier job is to produce a good game using the resources they have availible.
a game with unacceptable performance or graphics quality below the norm for it's platform will get picked up on and scored low by review sites who are testing on the exact same hardware you are likely to have (unlike pc game review sites where the reviewers being hardcore gamers are probablly going to be using very recent high end hardware)
It is annoying when you are following a series and hit a shit title but quite frankly unacceptable performance and terrible graphics are pretty rare with other types of shittiness being far more common..
I've only made that screwup once so far. There were two big issues though.
There is no concise way to express graphics requirements for a game. Model numbers jump arround a lot and knowing which cards are faster than others and which cards have features that others don't is not trivial.
The game vendor printed the graphics memory requirement in huge print yet burried the other important graphics card requirements in a * section printed in almost unreadable print.
This stuff is bad enough for techies like me, imagine what it is like for less techical folks who probablly don't know exactly what hardware is in the machine and wouldn't even consider opening it up and replacing cards themselves (the card was only about £20 but a nontechnical person getting a graphics upgrade done by a computer shop would probablly have had to spend a LOT more).
Any generator that tries to turn faster than the grid frequency will find itself taking a greater share of the load bringing it's frequency and the grid frequency back in step. Of course the overall frequency of the grid needs to be kept under control and that means that overall input must be matched to overall output.
So some generators need to be throttleable and/or there needs to be a way to dump or store power (dumping power is obviously undesirable because power costs money) but that is a far cry from saying every generator needs to be throttleable.
the problem with that is without doing minor cleanup it is sometimes rather hard to work out what a peice of code is trying to do. I'm talking the kind of function that has a cryptic name, one or two letter parameter/variable names and no comments.
Yeah, i've heared of them. They help but the PC game industry still has major problems.
1: implementations are still far from perfect, they each have thier own bugs requiring a lot more testing than on a console where there is one implementaiton to deal with. 2: gaming is real-time. If the framerate drops below a certain level the game becomes essentially unplayable but equally you want your game to look as good as possible. That means testing loads of different hardware configurations to find the appropriate settings. 3: Many PC game developers have a nasty habbit of writing games for high end PCs not for the PCs typical users have. By the time normal PCs have sufficiant hardware to play a game well the buzz arround it has long since died off. 4: checking requirements is a pain. For example my brother bought command and conqueor 3 not long ago. From the big print on the box he was within the minimum requirements but on trying to install the game it wouldn't run and we discovered in the small print of the minimum requirements that he had a graphics card from too old a series. This is an annoyance to me (a computer geek) but to the non techincal user it would be a deal breaker. 5: most cheap PCs ship with crappy intel integrated graphics despite the fact that a £20 nvidia or ati card is far better and is a very small proportion of the price of the PC.
Yes, this is really hard and takes A TON of time, at LEAST 2 seconds. Yeah it is when they say graphics minimum ???MB in big print, you have a graphics card with that much memory so you assume it will be ok.
Then when you install it the game won't run and you discover in the small print that your card is from too old a series.
The big thing a console brings to game devolopers and customers is a known platform.
If I buy a playstation 2 game and the reviewer found it stable and run at acceptable speeds I can be pretty damn sure it will also be stable and run at acceptable speeds on my playstation 2. This is NOT the case with windows games on generic PC hardware and I doubt it will be with any other OS on generic PC hardware.
The known platform extends to other areas as well. A console has a known controller pattern so the game developer can design thier game to fit that controllers strengths and limitations well.
ISO doesn't matter anymore. They didn't matter because they were "The ISO", they mattered because they were a place where politics could be set aside and everyone could work together to make standards that work. That was a unique and precious thing. Now they're not these things anymore, and therefore, they are defunct. I call BS, while this fisaco will certainly cost them some reputation they are a huge organisation and you need to keep in perspective that this working group is only a tiny part of ISO.
thing is at least here in the UK breaking is generally indicated by an increase in brightness inthe rear headlamps (sometimes there are extra break lights as well) which you don't want to be overly distracting.
don't try soldering directly to the leads without a heat-sink I don't think I have ever used a heat sink while soldering. Generally when soldering the aim is to get the joint up to temperature as quickly as possible to minimise the spread of heat so sinking the heat away seems counterproductive to me. If you cant make a solder joint in a few seconds then then either you are trying to make a really awkward joint, there is a problem with your equipment or your technique sucks really badly.
The only time I have cooked the leads of LEDS out of the casing was when trying to do some particularlly awkward desoldering.
they don't like 700degree(F) temps for any period time. 700 degrees faranheight is about 370 degrees celcius, that seems rather hot to me, even with lead free solder 350 degrees celcius seems fine to me.
Well the LED industry has made it fine up to this point despite only very recently starting to make products aimed at lighting rooms.
Also however long the LEDs themselves last based on the general reliablity of consumer electronics I would be surprised if the average lifespan of the bulbs was more than 5-10 years. Considering the huge ammount of lighting in the world new build demand and once a decade replacement demand is still a pretty damn large market.
So yes, it is distracting, and its meant to be. IMO this is an area where the regulations need to be updated to match recent developments. Some lights are meant to be more distracting than others, e.g. that is why turn indicator lights flash while most other lights don't.
If car manufacturers are deliberately making lights that are supposed to be steady on subconsiously more distracting by manipulating the PWM frequencies that is IMO a very bad thing.
Road lighting is regulated for a reason, if everyone had lights similar to those on emergency vehircles and used them all the time then drivers would find it very difficult to pay attention to what was really important.
A bit of googling seems to show that while MS doesn't officially support slipstreaming it yourself people have found methods that work.
Also afaict there are official images with it built in though if you don't have MSDN, aren't using volume licensing and don't plan to buy any new copies you may have to resort to pirate sources to get your hands on it.
I searched with apt for "compiler", and one of the first ones I looked at had a gcc-4.3 bug: gcl While the cause of that bug hasn't been tracked down yet it doesn't look like the bug this article is about to me.
Yes, at breakneck Debian speed. 2 weeks ago today they had patches for SBCL and Linux 2.6.24, and fixing gcc (revert) or libc6 (build with gcc-4.2) are trivial -- and yet none of these fixes has appeared in sid yet. Yeah, debian can be a bit slow at times, especially when it isn't an immediate problem for debian testing ().
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However, the GAO has now estimated the revised contract, now costing $647 million, could grow to $2 billion
$2 billion sounds rather more than $250M and even that is not a gauranteed maximum here!
nitpick: most dot matrix printers could take bitmap input so with the right computer and drivers they could print in any font you wanted.And with the double striking tricks that people worked out the print quality was actually not too bad for black and white text.
Microsoft supplied such drivers with windows (at least 95 through to XP not sure about other versions)
ribbons could be re-inked at least on the epsons (the lid just unclipped and there was the ribbon inside) and were much cheaper and needed much less frequent replacement than the cartridges in modern printers.
Of course there is the rackfulls of "PC servers" (which are a bit more reliable than desktops individually) approach used by the likes of google etc.
Sure the odd machine will die but with good design the service as a whole can keep going.
Government departments often have regulations that require them to put contracts out to tender and give them to the lowest bidder to prevent people handing out government contracts to thier friends.
The problem is if they put them out for bidding as fixed price contracts they probablly wouldn't get any bids and if they did those bids would be very high. So the bids are only estimates. Of course this makes the bidding a farce as everyone tries to put in the lowest estimate they can and sponge more money later once the governement department is locked in.
the VLK version of XP does not require activation.
and even if somehow they suddenly stopped activation of all retail editions and stopped all VLK copies passing wga I am quite convinced those determined to do so would find a way to make new installs work
In fact neither of them will work on Win2k either.
KMDF (the kernel mode variant of WDF) is availible for windows 2000 now.
But say a game can't run well on the PS2 (or PS3 or whatever), what then?
Then the game developer didn't do thier job properly. Thier job is to produce a good game using the resources they have availible.
a game with unacceptable performance or graphics quality below the norm for it's platform will get picked up on and scored low by review sites who are testing on the exact same hardware you are likely to have (unlike pc game review sites where the reviewers being hardcore gamers are probablly going to be using very recent high end hardware)
It is annoying when you are following a series and hit a shit title but quite frankly unacceptable performance and terrible graphics are pretty rare with other types of shittiness being far more common..
I've only made that screwup once so far. There were two big issues though.
There is no concise way to express graphics requirements for a game. Model numbers jump arround a lot and knowing which cards are faster than others and which cards have features that others don't is not trivial.
The game vendor printed the graphics memory requirement in huge print yet burried the other important graphics card requirements in a * section printed in almost unreadable print.
This stuff is bad enough for techies like me, imagine what it is like for less techical folks who probablly don't know exactly what hardware is in the machine and wouldn't even consider opening it up and replacing cards themselves (the card was only about £20 but a nontechnical person getting a graphics upgrade done by a computer shop would probablly have had to spend a LOT more).
Any generator that tries to turn faster than the grid frequency will find itself taking a greater share of the load bringing it's frequency and the grid frequency back in step. Of course the overall frequency of the grid needs to be kept under control and that means that overall input must be matched to overall output.
So some generators need to be throttleable and/or there needs to be a way to dump or store power (dumping power is obviously undesirable because power costs money) but that is a far cry from saying every generator needs to be throttleable.
Varying the output is fairly easy with coal plants (it's just not done much because coal plants are expensive to build but cheap to run),
the problem with that is without doing minor cleanup it is sometimes rather hard to work out what a peice of code is trying to do. I'm talking the kind of function that has a cryptic name, one or two letter parameter/variable names and no comments.
IIRC sony deliberately stopped PS3 linux from doing 3D graphics to prevent exactly that
Yeah, i've heared of them. They help but the PC game industry still has major problems.
1: implementations are still far from perfect, they each have thier own bugs requiring a lot more testing than on a console where there is one implementaiton to deal with.
2: gaming is real-time. If the framerate drops below a certain level the game becomes essentially unplayable but equally you want your game to look as good as possible. That means testing loads of different hardware configurations to find the appropriate settings.
3: Many PC game developers have a nasty habbit of writing games for high end PCs not for the PCs typical users have. By the time normal PCs have sufficiant hardware to play a game well the buzz arround it has long since died off.
4: checking requirements is a pain. For example my brother bought command and conqueor 3 not long ago. From the big print on the box he was within the minimum requirements but on trying to install the game it wouldn't run and we discovered in the small print of the minimum requirements that he had a graphics card from too old a series. This is an annoyance to me (a computer geek) but to the non techincal user it would be a deal breaker.
5: most cheap PCs ship with crappy intel integrated graphics despite the fact that a £20 nvidia or ati card is far better and is a very small proportion of the price of the PC.
Yes, this is really hard and takes A TON of time, at LEAST 2 seconds.
Yeah it is when they say graphics minimum ???MB in big print, you have a graphics card with that much memory so you assume it will be ok.
Then when you install it the game won't run and you discover in the small print that your card is from too old a series.
The big thing a console brings to game devolopers and customers is a known platform.
If I buy a playstation 2 game and the reviewer found it stable and run at acceptable speeds I can be pretty damn sure it will also be stable and run at acceptable speeds on my playstation 2. This is NOT the case with windows games on generic PC hardware and I doubt it will be with any other OS on generic PC hardware.
The known platform extends to other areas as well. A console has a known controller pattern so the game developer can design thier game to fit that controllers strengths and limitations well.
windows has it's own system for resolving names to IPs on the lan.
maybe this varies by region, here in the UK the vast majority of them seem to come in cardboard boxes.
ISO doesn't matter anymore. They didn't matter because they were "The ISO", they mattered because they were a place where politics could be set aside and everyone could work together to make standards that work. That was a unique and precious thing. Now they're not these things anymore, and therefore, they are defunct.
I call BS, while this fisaco will certainly cost them some reputation they are a huge organisation and you need to keep in perspective that this working group is only a tiny part of ISO.
thing is at least here in the UK breaking is generally indicated by an increase in brightness inthe rear headlamps (sometimes there are extra break lights as well) which you don't want to be overly distracting.
don't try soldering directly to the leads without a heat-sink
I don't think I have ever used a heat sink while soldering. Generally when soldering the aim is to get the joint up to temperature as quickly as possible to minimise the spread of heat so sinking the heat away seems counterproductive to me. If you cant make a solder joint in a few seconds then then either you are trying to make a really awkward joint, there is a problem with your equipment or your technique sucks really badly.
The only time I have cooked the leads of LEDS out of the casing was when trying to do some particularlly awkward desoldering.
they don't like 700degree(F) temps for any period time.
700 degrees faranheight is about 370 degrees celcius, that seems rather hot to me, even with lead free solder 350 degrees celcius seems fine to me.
Well the LED industry has made it fine up to this point despite only very recently starting to make products aimed at lighting rooms.
Also however long the LEDs themselves last based on the general reliablity of consumer electronics I would be surprised if the average lifespan of the bulbs was more than 5-10 years. Considering the huge ammount of lighting in the world new build demand and once a decade replacement demand is still a pretty damn large market.
So yes, it is distracting, and its meant to be.
IMO this is an area where the regulations need to be updated to match recent developments. Some lights are meant to be more distracting than others, e.g. that is why turn indicator lights flash while most other lights don't.
If car manufacturers are deliberately making lights that are supposed to be steady on subconsiously more distracting by manipulating the PWM frequencies that is IMO a very bad thing.
Road lighting is regulated for a reason, if everyone had lights similar to those on emergency vehircles and used them all the time then drivers would find it very difficult to pay attention to what was really important.
A bit of googling seems to show that while MS doesn't officially support slipstreaming it yourself people have found methods that work.
Also afaict there are official images with it built in though if you don't have MSDN, aren't using volume licensing and don't plan to buy any new copies you may have to resort to pirate sources to get your hands on it.
yeah, on the other hand it is only because some people do use sid that bugs get spotted before they get a chance to make it into testing.
I searched with apt for "compiler", and one of the first ones I looked at had a gcc-4.3 bug: gcl
While the cause of that bug hasn't been tracked down yet it doesn't look like the bug this article is about to me.
Yes, at breakneck Debian speed. 2 weeks ago today they had patches for SBCL and Linux 2.6.24, and fixing gcc (revert) or libc6 (build with gcc-4.2) are trivial -- and yet none of these fixes has appeared in sid yet.
Yeah, debian can be a bit slow at times, especially when it isn't an immediate problem for debian testing ().