You talk about helicopter-less chases. I just don't see how this works without a helicopter. If you don't have a helicopter, all you'll do is recover the car. The criminals will be gone. I guess that's better than nothing, but it's only slightly better than if you don't have this device at all (you don't get the car or the criminals).
As to the idea of holding a circle around the car, if the criminal drives fast, you have to move the circle fast. That means the cops are still driving the same speed as the speeding car, only now there is an area several blocks across with cars whizzing around in it.
And how big is this circle? I think the smallest circle you could hold without cars actually driving in reverse on the front side and without the criminal seeing you do it (and thus driving extra fast and dangerous, thus defeating the purpose) is probably a 3 block radius or so. That's gonna take a lot of cars and encompass a lot of houses and other places to hide. Criminals will just ditch the car in a neighborhood where they know some people or places to hide, and then disappear into a house. You won't find them.
Like the Vette, Malibu, etc. are all electric. Like hydraulic power steering there is a mechanical linkage in there too, but it doesn't work as well as the power steering. So if the power steering were to deactivate from the EMP you would lose much of your ability to steer. If the EMP instead cause it to malfunction, you might lose all your ability to steer.
Come to think of it, EMP a new Vette (C6) and you won't be able to unlock the doors from the outside. That'd provide an interesting situation once the car actually came to a stop.
Beyond this, if you are one moment doing 80 and suddenly lose power steering and power brakes due to your engine stalling, you're going to increase your chances of running over something you didn't intend to hit, at 80mph. Lawsuit time.
You may say "what? DVDs are 720x480". The horizontal resolution in NTSC isn't specified, since NTSC isn't digital, it's really a question of how much bandwidth is available in the system you are transmitting it through. Traditionally, TV channels had perhaps 320 lines of resolution horizontally over the air (6MHz channel). Satellite and digital cable have 480 lines. DVD of course has 720 lines. One format supported on ATSC (digital over-the-air TV) is 852x480, but that is for 16:9 use.
So really 640x480 is full res (480i). Good cameras have been able to capture 640x480x30fps (480i) until your memory card fills up (which isn't too long). The two most recent generations of pocket Canons (SD400, SD410, SD500, SD510, etc.) will capture 640x480x60fps (480p) until your memory card fills up if you'd like.
In the end, these made decent camcorders, some things like camera shake, low capacity storage, or that the lens system on camera isn't made to maintain focus during zooming make them less than ideal. These problem could probably be fixed and probably will be as digital camera/camcorder hybrids become more popular (perhaps it's already fixed on Sony's M series of cameras).
I've seen that ep of Cops a lot. That's the one where they end up recording him calling her from a pay phone to ask why she set him up.
But anyway, having a tip of drugs in a car is probable cause. If a cop doesn't have probable cause, they need a warrant. Just speeding or having a taillight out or something isn't probable cause to search your vehicle.
I thought most people actually knew all this stuff. I guess not.
I hate it when people romanticize unconstitutional action; happens in the movies all the time. "You can't do that!" "Oh? Are you going to make me get a warrant to search this place? Little Timmy could be dead by then!"
California may do a lot of things differently than the rest of the country, but the Constitution still applies in California, and the Constitution is the governing document that gives you an expectation that you cannot be searched unreasonably without a warrant (unless George W. Bush wants to search you and swears on the Bible that he's doing it for the right reasons).
I'll say Ken Mehlman is a complete embarassment on MtP. He does indeed blatantly repeat mantras (some true and some false) over and over in place of actual responses.
But before you rake Russert over the coals too much, he's still doing a much better job than most interviewers. Really, it's his general level of excellence that damn him most here.
I have noticed Ken Mehlman has been on MtP less often lately, and I hope it stays that way. It is disappointing to see a show that is normally known for actual journalism turn into an organ for the GOP when Mehlman makes an appearance.
Both houses have said they will have closed door hearings on this, not open hearings. Why? Because although they might be angry the President is usurping their authority, they are also in the same party as the President and wouldn't want to make him (and Repubs by reflection) look bad.
So if the hearing is closed door, how do we know that it'll be fair instead of similar to the administration's tactic of bringing in Enron to help solve the California energy gouging?
As to the President saying this is legal, and having research for it. Well, they researched whether torture was legal. They defined torture to cover nearly no acts so that they could continue to torture. Additionally, they researched whether Iraq had WMDs or not too and how did that turn out?
Honestly, this President owes his entire political career to Karl Rove, who is an adviser and sits in the White House. Karl Rove doesn't have much truck with what's legal and definitely with what's moral. He's more concentrated on what he can get away with.
And that's why when this President basically gets up there and says "trust me, I'd never do wrong" up there and completely ignores the Constitutional separation of powers, I get nervous. When he says that laws passed in 1978 don't mean anything anymore, I get nervous. If the President openly says he doesn't feel reigned in by laws, how is his power controlled? Aren't we supposed to have checks and balances of some sort, just to be sure?
I find it most astounding that this President make a big deal that he feels judges should interpret the law (esp. Constitution) strictly according to what it says, instead of the changing of society. And yet he seems to feel that in the Executive Branch, they can say that 1978 laws on the books don't mean the same thing they did when they were written.
It's a hypocrite, he doesn't seem to believe the law applies to all equally (Presidents, Presidential buddies and in general war/government profiteers get special treatment), and he doesn't hold anyone near him to a high standard, probably because he failed his way to the top.
I spent the $30 thinking it would work. That it was some kind of portable base station, that it might even allow playing from places that have firewalls. Turns out it does neither.
Yeah, you're right, now that I know the N adapter sucks I could spend another $50 on a base station, set it up with MAC filtering and only turn it on when I'm going to use it. But that doesn't change that alternately N could just support the wireless protocols that are in common use (Sony does). It would have saved me $30 so far and $50 and the hassle of swtching an additional base station on and off in the future.
I was one of the first to get the N adapter in the US. So I couldn't know it didn't work nearly as well as it might have been made out. It was sold as for people who want to play in areas where there is no wireless (you say similar things). I guess it's good for that, if you can add software to a nearby PC. But I didn't expect it would be necessary for those who have wireless but cannot use it due to N's boneheadedness. I additionally didn't expect that it would be useless for getting around corporate firewalls.
If I made it (including the SW), it would communicate to DSes over the air, take the data and tunnel it over a port that is rarely blocked. Heck, make it search ports. And it do it all automatically.
So maybe I'm just angry because I have wireless at work and at home and I can use my DS to play wirelessly in neither place. I know 802.11g is causing lots of problems for companies that want to implement it, by not being a static standard. But that doesn't change the fact that N could have done a better job nor the fact that Sony did.
Your #1 supposes that if Google were to stop operations in China, Chinese would lose access to information. How is that again? Google indexes information, they don't make a ton of it. Additionally, it isn't like Google is the only useable internet search engine or even the first.
If Google were to stop operations in China, then people in China would have to use someone else to search. They wouldn't lose access to any data they had access to before. But Google would lose the ability to sell ads to Chinese customers...
Come on, this company keeps huge caches of a large percentage of the web page on the internet. You think they throw away the data that is generated within their own company?
I'm certain they don't.
So I think that without lying, they did what they could on this issue.
I should spend $50 up front and my time installing a base station? I should crowd the already crowded 2.4GHz space full time for a single device? I should spend money in electricty every day just so I can play games on my DS over the net?
How about N just does WPA instead? That'd do all that wihout all this effort and cost.
You are correct that it would work, assuming I have a bridging access point (aren't they all?) my critical data from my wired net wouldn't go out over the air.
As to your snide comments about "if all my sensitive traffic goes over wires, where's the problem..."
I never said my sensitive traffic never goes over the air. I said I use wires whenever possible. I use wires for my TiVos, my consoles and my stationary PCs/Macs. I cannot reasonably use wires for my laptops, can I? Nor can I use it for my DS or PSPS. Some things I move to the computer room to do, some things just aren't convenient to do that way.
Your comment was that I was just making work and risk for myself by using wireless when I could use wires. But I am not using wireless when I could use wires, I am using wires when I can use wires. But other times I simply must use wireless. Am I wrong to want to protect myself as much as possible then?
I can't play DS on NiWiFi at work because of our work firewall. It should be able to pierce that. I know lots of ways to do it with openSSH and stuff, they just need to write the SW to do it for the PC and for the NiWiFi host.
In the US, we still have sulfur in our gas (except in California) until next year.
But my question is what happened to the California drought? It went for 8 years, and all the scientists said it was due to global warming. When it finally broke, now we get quite a bit of rain in the winters. The scientists say we get all this rain because of global warming.
I think I belive in global warming. But I'm pretty sure I also know it is used as a catch-all and scapegoat. I'm not sure we really understand the actual effects of it.
It may not be perfect, but WPA is more secure than WEP. More importantly, the hash for turning WPA passwords into keys is standardized. WEP has several different ways to do it. The upshot of this is that if you have both Macs and PCs, you have to use a hex number as a password if you use WEP. If you use WPA, you can use a real password and when your friends ask how to get on your network you don't have to ask what platform they are using or write down some difficult to remember hex string for them to type in.
I'm using an off the shelf from Best-Buy router, and it works fine with WPA. DS doesn't.
As to just filtering by MAC, I know some people who do that. But that's dumb because although it stops people from using your network, it doesn't make it at all difficult for them to sniff your packets. WPA makes that non-trivial (but not impossible).
Finally, I have the $30 Nintendo USB adapter. It sucks. See other post.
Finally finally, I use wired connections wherever possible. I have my house wired for GigE, including to my consoles. However, I don't see an ethernet jack on my DS. Does yours have one?
1. It just plugs into a PC and turns on connection sharing. 2. It does nothing to pierce firewalls. It should have had custom software that tunnels all the clients (it only supports 4 at once I think) over a unblocked port (like 80).
I believe the primary reason Apple went with EFI is because if you want a BIOS for your machine you have to pay AMI, Award or Phoenix a couple bucks per machine you ship. EFI is free.
It's a cost measure as far as I can tell.
As an added bonus, EFI allows added flexibility over BIOS. BIOS is really crappy now, it's far beyond its actual usefulness.
If Apple used BIOS, you'd have to go to your BIOS to select your boot device (like on a PC), instead of doing it in the Preferences app under the OS. Does that seem like the Apple way?
You can have Democracy with one party in power by choice. Japan had the same party in power from 1955-1993.
But you can't have Democracy with only one party ALLOWED to be in power. It means a lack of real choice, which means no Democracy. And from a practical standpoint, the party who is the only one allowed to be in power won't bother following the people's will much because they don't have to. You've heard all the stories about how in Russia or China you can't get ahead unless you join the party. If the government will not let you succeed unless you join their party, it's not a Democracy.
Cuba is also in no way a Democracy. That's not to say Castro doesn't like the people and try to do things for them. But again, the people have no way to effect change at the top, so it's not a closed loop, it's not a Democracy. I personally despise that our (US) government won't deal with Castro. To me it seems like it is due to a combination of pigheadedness and a want to buddy-up to the anti-Castro forces in Miami, as they represent a powerful voting block and a large source of campaign money in a state that is critical in presidential elections.
Additionally, I don't see Castro as much of a Communist, either. He really only turned to the Soviets because we refused to deal with him in the beginning. Our government wouldn't deal with him because he nationalized the assets of large American companies, and they were lobbying the government hard. So he turned to the Soviets, who were glad to put a thorn in our side, only 60 miles away (or whatever it is). In return, Castro got access to essential trade and subsidized energy costs.
No, in my mind, Castro is a good old fashioned dictator. One who seems to want to do good for his people, but not at the expense of his power as he jailed people for life for the same things he did in school to oppose Batista. Additionally, he micromanaged his country into the ground badly with various hairbrained schemes to develop new industries and milk self-sufficence.
I don't know how you can say that Communism is representative unless a central structure forms. A central structure ALWAYS forms. Think of the "five year plans" from the central government. In all examples of Communism, both the economy and political power are centrally controlled.
Nowhere does it say it is a Democracy. But it does say right up top:
I. Major stipulations in the Constitution in regard to China's political system
1. Major political principles in China
(1) The Communist Party of China is the country's sole political party in power.
(these are subpoints, the bottom one could be called I.1.(1) if you'd like).
One political party in power is not Democracy. So I think that China doesn't claim to be a Democracy.
There are multiple parties in Germany and France, so that makes them a heck of a lot more of a Democracy than China where other parties are not allowed.
It's a serious issue, one that actually should have been addressed a long time ago.
Since people don't pay attention to standby power (except those few of use with Kill-A-Watt measuring devices), there is no incentive for companies to spend even an extra $0.25 reducing the standby power consumption of a device. So they don't, and much power is wasted as a result.
The Energy Star program has been very effective for refrigerators, it should be extended to standby power consumption.
See how the card slot is no longer a CardBus slot, but an ExpressCard slot? CardBus was PCI-based, ExpressCard is PCIe-based. The old laptops used PCI, and the new ones use PCIe.
It is my belief that there just isn't a PCIe-based FW800 interface chip available yet.
When big corporations say similar things, they are laughed it. There's some kind of quote relevant to it, and I don't have it. But the point is that just because you made money on it before doesn't mean you have a right to make money on it forever.
Times change. Cobblers had to find new jobs once upon a time, now there's a new set of people who need to retrain themselves.
Due to digital cameras, amateur shutter bugs take 1,000 pictures on a 7-day vacation instead of 72 or 108. And the quality (technically, not necessarily artistically) of even a good P&S is of the level that low-end pro cameras took 20 years ago.
Putting 2 and 2 together, it looks like the life of photographers is going to change.
Here's a point by point refutation of your arguments.
"One of the major advantages of Z-RAM is that it doesn't require changes in the process (providing you're already using SOI, obviously). It doesn't seem to tighten the requirements on process control compared to a more conventional design either."
That's untrue. You may not have to change the process, but you definitely have to tighten it. The amount of charge that you can hold on the gate becomes critical. The "leakiness" of transistors isn't nearly as important when you don't have 1T cells on the die, as no transistor has to hold its voltage for more than a few cycles times (perhaps a nanosecond). With the 1T cell, it has to last orders of magnitude longer. Thus you will need to control the leakiness more. That's a new parameter to optimize, and this means you have to by definition tighten your process to get it to the right value and hold it. If the leakiness changes, your yield drops. This will affect yield.
I don't feel this is a storage charge device like a DRAM. Either way, a DRAM is storing the charge in a different way, on a capacitor instead of in the body of a transistor.
"It's certainly challenging, but you haven't mentioned what I understand is really one of the biggest challenges. From a memory viewpoint, this is a bit like a DRAM cell but it stores a much smaller charge than a conventional DRAM. the small charge means you have to design extremely quiet sense amps to keep the signal from being lost in the noise. If memory serves, however, they can/do use the transistor that makes up the cell as the first sense amp."
If you think this system is using the standard "precharge/connect/dump/sense amp" type system of reading cells, I think you're way off. This kind of system just isn't useful for the very fast RAMs that are needed for caches. SRAMs are traditionally readable without precharging and without the need for refilling the cell after you read it (as the read wipes out the contents). Adding these things would make the cache RAM not quick in true random accesses (instead reducing it to a page-mode device like DRAM) and make the processor cache have about 50 cycles of latency unless it was in the middle of a refresh, in which case it would be even higher!
"SOI gives you a performance advantage roughly equivalent to one step smaller geometry, so AMD's 90 nm is roughly equivalent to Intel's 65 nm. IOW, AMD's process technology is almost a full generation ahead of Intel's right now. I'd also note that while SOI improves performance about as much as one step smaller of geometry, it does so without the increase in leakage that comes with the smaller geometry. As has already been mentioned elsethread, designing for it is more difficult, but the end result certainly seems to justify the extra work."
You're just plain nutty. Even if SOI gave you advantages of 1-gen in process, AMD would only be tied with Intel for the moment (until AMD hits 65nm this summer). As to to leakage, why don't you ask around the industry and see how the leakage is on the new Intel chips. It is far lower than 90nm chips, both AMD's or Intel's. Your argument is that Intel is losing out a lot due to not having SOI, and it just isn't holding.
Intel's chips are currently faster and use less power (core Duo T2500 versus AMD X2 3800 or 4200+), with less leakage and with a smaller die. In what way is AMD ahead here? Oh, and Intel hasn't even released the desktop (performance) versions of their chips yet.
AMD's architectural superiority for years is what has given them better performance, not process technology. Intel has kept pace (well, close to it) with superior process technology. Now they have dumped NetBurst and adopted a good architecture they stand a good chance of passing AMD up. It'll be an interesting race.
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I do not think it means what you think it does.
You talk about helicopter-less chases. I just don't see how this works without a helicopter. If you don't have a helicopter, all you'll do is recover the car. The criminals will be gone. I guess that's better than nothing, but it's only slightly better than if you don't have this device at all (you don't get the car or the criminals).
As to the idea of holding a circle around the car, if the criminal drives fast, you have to move the circle fast. That means the cops are still driving the same speed as the speeding car, only now there is an area several blocks across with cars whizzing around in it.
And how big is this circle? I think the smallest circle you could hold without cars actually driving in reverse on the front side and without the criminal seeing you do it (and thus driving extra fast and dangerous, thus defeating the purpose) is probably a 3 block radius or so. That's gonna take a lot of cars and encompass a lot of houses and other places to hide. Criminals will just ditch the car in a neighborhood where they know some people or places to hide, and then disappear into a house. You won't find them.
Really, the chopper with IR sensing is key.
Like the Vette, Malibu, etc. are all electric. Like hydraulic power steering there is a mechanical linkage in there too, but it doesn't work as well as the power steering. So if the power steering were to deactivate from the EMP you would lose much of your ability to steer. If the EMP instead cause it to malfunction, you might lose all your ability to steer.
Come to think of it, EMP a new Vette (C6) and you won't be able to unlock the doors from the outside. That'd provide an interesting situation once the car actually came to a stop.
Beyond this, if you are one moment doing 80 and suddenly lose power steering and power brakes due to your engine stalling, you're going to increase your chances of running over something you didn't intend to hit, at 80mph. Lawsuit time.
You may say "what? DVDs are 720x480". The horizontal resolution in NTSC isn't specified, since NTSC isn't digital, it's really a question of how much bandwidth is available in the system you are transmitting it through. Traditionally, TV channels had perhaps 320 lines of resolution horizontally over the air (6MHz channel). Satellite and digital cable have 480 lines. DVD of course has 720 lines. One format supported on ATSC (digital over-the-air TV) is 852x480, but that is for 16:9 use.
So really 640x480 is full res (480i). Good cameras have been able to capture 640x480x30fps (480i) until your memory card fills up (which isn't too long). The two most recent generations of pocket Canons (SD400, SD410, SD500, SD510, etc.) will capture 640x480x60fps (480p) until your memory card fills up if you'd like.
In the end, these made decent camcorders, some things like camera shake, low capacity storage, or that the lens system on camera isn't made to maintain focus during zooming make them less than ideal. These problem could probably be fixed and probably will be as digital camera/camcorder hybrids become more popular (perhaps it's already fixed on Sony's M series of cameras).
I've seen that ep of Cops a lot. That's the one where they end up recording him calling her from a pay phone to ask why she set him up.
But anyway, having a tip of drugs in a car is probable cause. If a cop doesn't have probable cause, they need a warrant. Just speeding or having a taillight out or something isn't probable cause to search your vehicle.
I thought most people actually knew all this stuff. I guess not.
The truth? You can't handle the truth!
California may do a lot of things differently than the rest of the country, but the Constitution still applies in California, and the Constitution is the governing document that gives you an expectation that you cannot be searched unreasonably without a warrant (unless George W. Bush wants to search you and swears on the Bible that he's doing it for the right reasons).
Turning him into a potato...
I'll say Ken Mehlman is a complete embarassment on MtP. He does indeed blatantly repeat mantras (some true and some false) over and over in place of actual responses.
But before you rake Russert over the coals too much, he's still doing a much better job than most interviewers. Really, it's his general level of excellence that damn him most here.
I have noticed Ken Mehlman has been on MtP less often lately, and I hope it stays that way. It is disappointing to see a show that is normally known for actual journalism turn into an organ for the GOP when Mehlman makes an appearance.
Both houses have said they will have closed door hearings on this, not open hearings. Why? Because although they might be angry the President is usurping their authority, they are also in the same party as the President and wouldn't want to make him (and Repubs by reflection) look bad.
So if the hearing is closed door, how do we know that it'll be fair instead of similar to the administration's tactic of bringing in Enron to help solve the California energy gouging?
As to the President saying this is legal, and having research for it. Well, they researched whether torture was legal. They defined torture to cover nearly no acts so that they could continue to torture. Additionally, they researched whether Iraq had WMDs or not too and how did that turn out?
Honestly, this President owes his entire political career to Karl Rove, who is an adviser and sits in the White House. Karl Rove doesn't have much truck with what's legal and definitely with what's moral. He's more concentrated on what he can get away with.
And that's why when this President basically gets up there and says "trust me, I'd never do wrong" up there and completely ignores the Constitutional separation of powers, I get nervous. When he says that laws passed in 1978 don't mean anything anymore, I get nervous. If the President openly says he doesn't feel reigned in by laws, how is his power controlled? Aren't we supposed to have checks and balances of some sort, just to be sure?
I find it most astounding that this President make a big deal that he feels judges should interpret the law (esp. Constitution) strictly according to what it says, instead of the changing of society. And yet he seems to feel that in the Executive Branch, they can say that 1978 laws on the books don't mean the same thing they did when they were written.
It's a hypocrite, he doesn't seem to believe the law applies to all equally (Presidents, Presidential buddies and in general war/government profiteers get special treatment), and he doesn't hold anyone near him to a high standard, probably because he failed his way to the top.
Before I spent it.
I spent the $30 thinking it would work. That it was some kind of portable base station, that it might even allow playing from places that have firewalls. Turns out it does neither.
Yeah, you're right, now that I know the N adapter sucks I could spend another $50 on a base station, set it up with MAC filtering and only turn it on when I'm going to use it. But that doesn't change that alternately N could just support the wireless protocols that are in common use (Sony does). It would have saved me $30 so far and $50 and the hassle of swtching an additional base station on and off in the future.
I was one of the first to get the N adapter in the US. So I couldn't know it didn't work nearly as well as it might have been made out. It was sold as for people who want to play in areas where there is no wireless (you say similar things). I guess it's good for that, if you can add software to a nearby PC. But I didn't expect it would be necessary for those who have wireless but cannot use it due to N's boneheadedness. I additionally didn't expect that it would be useless for getting around corporate firewalls.
If I made it (including the SW), it would communicate to DSes over the air, take the data and tunnel it over a port that is rarely blocked. Heck, make it search ports. And it do it all automatically.
So maybe I'm just angry because I have wireless at work and at home and I can use my DS to play wirelessly in neither place. I know 802.11g is causing lots of problems for companies that want to implement it, by not being a static standard. But that doesn't change the fact that N could have done a better job nor the fact that Sony did.
Your #1 supposes that if Google were to stop operations in China, Chinese would lose access to information. How is that again? Google indexes information, they don't make a ton of it. Additionally, it isn't like Google is the only useable internet search engine or even the first.
If Google were to stop operations in China, then people in China would have to use someone else to search. They wouldn't lose access to any data they had access to before. But Google would lose the ability to sell ads to Chinese customers...
Did you consider that possibility?
Come on, this company keeps huge caches of a large percentage of the web page on the internet. You think they throw away the data that is generated within their own company?
I'm certain they don't.
So I think that without lying, they did what they could on this issue.
I should spend $50 up front and my time installing a base station? I should crowd the already crowded 2.4GHz space full time for a single device? I should spend money in electricty every day just so I can play games on my DS over the net?
How about N just does WPA instead? That'd do all that wihout all this effort and cost.
You are correct that it would work, assuming I have a bridging access point (aren't they all?) my critical data from my wired net wouldn't go out over the air.
As to your snide comments about "if all my sensitive traffic goes over wires, where's the problem..."
I never said my sensitive traffic never goes over the air. I said I use wires whenever possible. I use wires for my TiVos, my consoles and my stationary PCs/Macs. I cannot reasonably use wires for my laptops, can I? Nor can I use it for my DS or PSPS. Some things I move to the computer room to do, some things just aren't convenient to do that way.
Your comment was that I was just making work and risk for myself by using wireless when I could use wires. But I am not using wireless when I could use wires, I am using wires when I can use wires. But other times I simply must use wireless. Am I wrong to want to protect myself as much as possible then?
I know how to open ports on my PC.
No, I mean piercing firewall, not opening ports.
I can't play DS on NiWiFi at work because of our work firewall. It should be able to pierce that. I know lots of ways to do it with openSSH and stuff, they just need to write the SW to do it for the PC and for the NiWiFi host.
In the US, we still have sulfur in our gas (except in California) until next year.
But my question is what happened to the California drought? It went for 8 years, and all the scientists said it was due to global warming. When it finally broke, now we get quite a bit of rain in the winters. The scientists say we get all this rain because of global warming.
I think I belive in global warming. But I'm pretty sure I also know it is used as a catch-all and scapegoat. I'm not sure we really understand the actual effects of it.
It may not be perfect, but WPA is more secure than WEP. More importantly, the hash for turning WPA passwords into keys is standardized. WEP has several different ways to do it. The upshot of this is that if you have both Macs and PCs, you have to use a hex number as a password if you use WEP. If you use WPA, you can use a real password and when your friends ask how to get on your network you don't have to ask what platform they are using or write down some difficult to remember hex string for them to type in.
I'm using an off the shelf from Best-Buy router, and it works fine with WPA. DS doesn't.
As to just filtering by MAC, I know some people who do that. But that's dumb because although it stops people from using your network, it doesn't make it at all difficult for them to sniff your packets. WPA makes that non-trivial (but not impossible).
Finally, I have the $30 Nintendo USB adapter. It sucks. See other post.
Finally finally, I use wired connections wherever possible. I have my house wired for GigE, including to my consoles. However, I don't see an ethernet jack on my DS. Does yours have one?
Two problems with it:
1. It just plugs into a PC and turns on connection sharing.
2. It does nothing to pierce firewalls. It should have had custom software that tunnels all the clients (it only supports 4 at once I think) over a unblocked port (like 80).
I believe the primary reason Apple went with EFI is because if you want a BIOS for your machine you have to pay AMI, Award or Phoenix a couple bucks per machine you ship. EFI is free.
It's a cost measure as far as I can tell.
As an added bonus, EFI allows added flexibility over BIOS. BIOS is really crappy now, it's far beyond its actual usefulness.
If Apple used BIOS, you'd have to go to your BIOS to select your boot device (like on a PC), instead of doing it in the Preferences app under the OS. Does that seem like the Apple way?
You can have Democracy with one party in power by choice. Japan had the same party in power from 1955-1993.
But you can't have Democracy with only one party ALLOWED to be in power. It means a lack of real choice, which means no Democracy. And from a practical standpoint, the party who is the only one allowed to be in power won't bother following the people's will much because they don't have to. You've heard all the stories about how in Russia or China you can't get ahead unless you join the party. If the government will not let you succeed unless you join their party, it's not a Democracy.
Cuba is also in no way a Democracy. That's not to say Castro doesn't like the people and try to do things for them. But again, the people have no way to effect change at the top, so it's not a closed loop, it's not a Democracy. I personally despise that our (US) government won't deal with Castro. To me it seems like it is due to a combination of pigheadedness and a want to buddy-up to the anti-Castro forces in Miami, as they represent a powerful voting block and a large source of campaign money in a state that is critical in presidential elections.
Additionally, I don't see Castro as much of a Communist, either. He really only turned to the Soviets because we refused to deal with him in the beginning. Our government wouldn't deal with him because he nationalized the assets of large American companies, and they were lobbying the government hard. So he turned to the Soviets, who were glad to put a thorn in our side, only 60 miles away (or whatever it is). In return, Castro got access to essential trade and subsidized energy costs.
No, in my mind, Castro is a good old fashioned dictator. One who seems to want to do good for his people, but not at the expense of his power as he jailed people for life for the same things he did in school to oppose Batista. Additionally, he micromanaged his country into the ground badly with various hairbrained schemes to develop new industries and milk self-sufficence.
I don't know how you can say that Communism is representative unless a central structure forms. A central structure ALWAYS forms. Think of the "five year plans" from the central government. In all examples of Communism, both the economy and political power are centrally controlled.
If they do, it's only for one sentence...
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http://www.china.org.cn/english/Political/26143.h
Nowhere does it say it is a Democracy. But it does say right up top:
I. Major stipulations in the Constitution in regard to China's political system
1. Major political principles in China
(1) The Communist Party of China is the country's sole political party in power.
(these are subpoints, the bottom one could be called I.1.(1) if you'd like).
One political party in power is not Democracy. So I think that China doesn't claim to be a Democracy.
There are multiple parties in Germany and France, so that makes them a heck of a lot more of a Democracy than China where other parties are not allowed.
Even George Bush was on to it before them (4 years ago!).
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http://www.nrdc.org/bushrecord/articles/br_295.as
It's a serious issue, one that actually should have been addressed a long time ago.
Since people don't pay attention to standby power (except those few of use with Kill-A-Watt measuring devices), there is no incentive for companies to spend even an extra $0.25 reducing the standby power consumption of a device. So they don't, and much power is wasted as a result.
The Energy Star program has been very effective for refrigerators, it should be extended to standby power consumption.
See how the card slot is no longer a CardBus slot, but an ExpressCard slot? CardBus was PCI-based, ExpressCard is PCIe-based. The old laptops used PCI, and the new ones use PCIe.
It is my belief that there just isn't a PCIe-based FW800 interface chip available yet.
When big corporations say similar things, they are laughed it. There's some kind of quote relevant to it, and I don't have it. But the point is that just because you made money on it before doesn't mean you have a right to make money on it forever.
Times change. Cobblers had to find new jobs once upon a time, now there's a new set of people who need to retrain themselves.
Due to digital cameras, amateur shutter bugs take 1,000 pictures on a 7-day vacation instead of 72 or 108. And the quality (technically, not necessarily artistically) of even a good P&S is of the level that low-end pro cameras took 20 years ago.
Putting 2 and 2 together, it looks like the life of photographers is going to change.
Here's a point by point refutation of your arguments.
"One of the major advantages of Z-RAM is that it doesn't require changes in the process (providing you're already using SOI, obviously). It doesn't seem to tighten the requirements on process control compared to a more conventional design either."
That's untrue. You may not have to change the process, but you definitely have to tighten it. The amount of charge that you can hold on the gate becomes critical. The "leakiness" of transistors isn't nearly as important when you don't have 1T cells on the die, as no transistor has to hold its voltage for more than a few cycles times (perhaps a nanosecond). With the 1T cell, it has to last orders of magnitude longer. Thus you will need to control the leakiness more. That's a new parameter to optimize, and this means you have to by definition tighten your process to get it to the right value and hold it. If the leakiness changes, your yield drops. This will affect yield.
I don't feel this is a storage charge device like a DRAM. Either way, a DRAM is storing the charge in a different way, on a capacitor instead of in the body of a transistor.
"It's certainly challenging, but you haven't mentioned what I understand is really one of the biggest challenges. From a memory viewpoint, this is a bit like a DRAM cell but it stores a much smaller charge than a conventional DRAM. the small charge means you have to design extremely quiet sense amps to keep the signal from being lost in the noise. If memory serves, however, they can/do use the transistor that makes up the cell as the first sense amp."
If you think this system is using the standard "precharge/connect/dump/sense amp" type system of reading cells, I think you're way off. This kind of system just isn't useful for the very fast RAMs that are needed for caches. SRAMs are traditionally readable without precharging and without the need for refilling the cell after you read it (as the read wipes out the contents). Adding these things would make the cache RAM not quick in true random accesses (instead reducing it to a page-mode device like DRAM) and make the processor cache have about 50 cycles of latency unless it was in the middle of a refresh, in which case it would be even higher!
"SOI gives you a performance advantage roughly equivalent to one step smaller geometry, so AMD's 90 nm is roughly equivalent to Intel's 65 nm. IOW, AMD's process technology is almost a full generation ahead of Intel's right now. I'd also note that while SOI improves performance about as much as one step smaller of geometry, it does so without the increase in leakage that comes with the smaller geometry. As has already been mentioned elsethread, designing for it is more difficult, but the end result certainly seems to justify the extra work."
You're just plain nutty. Even if SOI gave you advantages of 1-gen in process, AMD would only be tied with Intel for the moment (until AMD hits 65nm this summer). As to to leakage, why don't you ask around the industry and see how the leakage is on the new Intel chips. It is far lower than 90nm chips, both AMD's or Intel's. Your argument is that Intel is losing out a lot due to not having SOI, and it just isn't holding.
Intel's chips are currently faster and use less power (core Duo T2500 versus AMD X2 3800 or 4200+), with less leakage and with a smaller die. In what way is AMD ahead here? Oh, and Intel hasn't even released the desktop (performance) versions of their chips yet.
AMD's architectural superiority for years is what has given them better performance, not process technology. Intel has kept pace (well, close to it) with superior process technology. Now they have dumped NetBurst and adopted a good architecture they stand a good chance of passing AMD up. It'll be an interesting race.
I dunno about insanely great. They're great.
But the movies came out, that usually expands the markets (thus undoing the market saturation), and sells more books.
Like I said, I'm a bit surprised Pratchett outsold Tolkien in the last 3 years. Before that, I'm not much surprised.
I know he's done some good stuff of course.