Perhaps back in the day when Apple computers used PPC chips, but today many people run Windows XP and Vista on x86 Macintoshes. It would be no different from somebody unloading Dells or HPs.
There are drugs that cure diseases. If you have something like bacterial pneumonia, an antibiotic WILL cure the disease as it removes the cause of the disease.
Also, many diseases are genetic in nature and the only way to remove the cause of the disease is to remove and replace the offending stretch of DNA with a correct copy. We haven't been very lucky with gene therapy as of yet, so the next best step is to remove its manifestations in the body. Take for example chronic myelogenous leukemia. It is caused by a transposition of parts of chromosomes 9 and 22 that yields a stretch of DNA (BCR-ABL) that codes for a certain protein enzyme (a protein tyrosine kinase) that allows the myeloid cells to proliferate unchecked. Obviously, the cure would be to remove the BCR-ABL DNA portion. But you will get exactly the same effect if you inhibit the carcinogenic protein tyrosine kinase the mutant BCR-ABL gene codes for. This is able to be done with drugs (imatinib, dasatanib, nilotinib). The leukemia goes into remission because you cut out the biochemical processes causing it and you are healthy. It's not a 100% cure, but barring gene therapy working (and there is research on that, let me tell you) it's the best we can get. Merely treating symptoms would only entail treating the fatigue, nausea, confusion, and bruising that CML causes rather than attacking as close to the cause as you can get.
Another thing pharmaceutical companies do is make vaccines. If they were concerned with only "hooking" people by treating symptoms, vaccines would shoot their business in the foot. You can sell a boatload of drugs costing thousands of dollars to people that have meningitis rather than a $100 vaccine. Plus, if enough people are vaccinated, there are few enough susceptible hosts that the disease dies out in an area and unvaccinated people won't get it (herd immunity.) This means those people are getting protected for FREE! That would be an absolute no-no.
And one last thing: even if genetic diseases and cancer could be cured with a pill, there would still be a market. Almost all cancers require at least one de novo mutation, be it from a DNA polymerase making a mistake or UV light or whatnot. Thus, people would be born healthy and would develop the mutation later in life. They would need the curative pill. And since people will continue to be born, there would always be a market in the future. The same is true with some heritable diseases, especially recessive diseases. It's very likely that people never know they are a carrier as they are unaffected and if two carriers mate, there is a 1/4 chance that they could have an affected offspring. They would need the curative drugs, too.
And if you think that the market of selling only palliative drugs rather that curative drugs would keep the curative drugs off the market, you're dead wrong. The drug companies are always looking to get a leg up on the others as it's good for their shareholders. If Pfizer develops a curative drug for a disease, they sure as heck are going to try to stick it to GlaxoSmithKline and others that only have palliative drugs. You can sell a curative drug for much more than a palliative drug and that's very good for the bottom lines. You also forget that the shareholders don't give much of a shit about long-term revenue streams anymore anyway. A curative drug would provide a massive, quick boost to stock prices, making the shareholders a lot of money when they sell off. That is EXACTLY what they want- why wait ten years to double your money on slow, steady sales when you can push through a blockbuster and double your money in a year?
The rail system really hasn't been run down as much as consolidated as the number of places rail needed to go has dropped in the last 170 years. In the 1840s, rail was by far and away the fastest way to travel as the alternative was boat (slow, required rivers), horse, or foot. Today, it's faster or more convenient or both to fly or drive somewhere. And rail is FAR from dead in the U.S. Freight rail is experiencing a huge boom right now as trucking gets more expensive with higher labor, tax, and fuel costs. It's just that places that have little freight shipped to them no longer have rail spurs as a few trucks a month is a lot easier to accomplish than sending a train with one freight car to do the same job.
Put a bright-orange ID tag on your bag that looks as similar to the special-handling tags. Chances are that nobody will look twice at it and see that it's not the real deal.
Ubuntu and Gentoo are very different distributions aimed at different segments. Gentoo's strengths are that it's very customizable (down to the compile option level) and the suite of CLI tools is excellent. However, the system demands of GCC to compile the OS and software are pretty steep, especially on older hardware. I used to run Gentoo on a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4-M laptop and the computer spent at least 20% of its time compiling stuff. That's fine if you have a desktop and can leave it on 24/7 and it's well-cooled, but a hot, slow, laptop that has to be carried place to place and sometimes run on battery is a much bigger pain. Sure, I'd rather run Gentoo on my new laptop (12" unit with a C2D U7500 @ 1.067 GHz and an 80 GB HDD) but a binary distro like Ubuntu or SUSE is much easier on the hardware. Yes, I know you can use a bunch of binary packages on Gentoo but it's suboptimal compared to a binary distro and far inferior to actually compiling stuff yourself.
Bottom line is that there is no one tool that's perfect for all jobs, but there are multiple tools- that's what makes Linux and the other *nixes great. Otherwise we'd have "you get what Lord Steve thinks you should have" OS X and Windows. Windows does have several versions, but they only vary in the amount of stuff that's intentionally crippled rather than in a meaningful way like Ubuntu and Gentoo differ.
The Core 2 Duo U2000 series are 1.06-1.20 GHz single-core CPUs that are rated at 5.5 watts TDP. That's a little more than the Geode, but the C2D U2000 will absolutely run circles around the K7 Tbred-based Geode. I'd think that a U2000 with a low-power chipset like the 945GMS (yes I know, terrible graphics compared to the AMD unit's...) would do a tad better.
Your second statement is the most accurate. Sick days are paid-at-100%-of-salary days off, sometimes used if you are sick with the flu or something. If you have a serious condition, you go on disability leave, which pays something less than 100% of your salary. I'd say that roughly half the time somebody that uses a sick day is actually sick or has a sick kid. The other half are hangover days or "I have this free pass for a day off, I'd be dumb not to take it" days.
No, the U.S. isn't backwards, we just don't like to pay people for work they don't do (excepting of course, the government, they MAKE us pay them to do no work...)
This kind of thing *does* happen with certain computers- look at some of HP's business laptops. At the initial boot, you get a screen that prompts you to select whether you want to run the 32- or 64-bit version of Vista. You pick and then the unselected version is deleted. I don't see how this couldn't be extended to work with a setup like this:
Pick one of the following OSes to install on your computer: 1. FreeDOS 2. Microsoft Windows XP 3. Microsoft Windows Vista
FreeDOS is generally the OS that gets shipped on computers from companies that want to offer a computer without Windows but don't want to ruffle MS's feathers too much, but you could replace that with any Linux distribution or a simple "do not install any OSes and delete all installation files" option.
It's not surprising that a big pay package will fail to recruit people to work out in small towns and rural areas. I am currently a medical student and my classmates are almost all from urban areas. Ironically, even though my institution is a state one, about half of my classmates did their undergrad in out-of-state private schools (but applied here because they went to high school in-state and our med school is a good one.) They have about as high of an opinion of working or living in an area of less than 100,000 people ("the sticks") as the average/.er has of the RIAA or Steve Ballmer. So you could try to pay them five million a year to be a GP in a small town and they'd still not come- there are too many "rifle-toting, pickup-truck driving rednecks" (actual quote from one of my classmates) in those areas for them to even consider such a lucrative offer.
I don't know the best way to approach this other than to give greater preference in admissions to well-qualified applicants that come from small towns and rural areas over those who came from urban areas in hopes that they return. There have been small programs that do just this and they have been rather successful, so expanding it to the entire class should work as well. Some might cry foul over this- particularly the media in the two big urban areas- but minting physicians to care for the ENTIRE state is clearly stated in the mission of the medical school and I can't see how that policy would be anything but in accordance with the mission.
The social and political climate (here) has little to nothing to do with why many of the foreign students simply go to school here and go back, at least not from the reasons that the multitude of foreign students in my classes (engineering) said. The vast majority wanted to stay over there in the first place and came over here because it is easier and less expensive to go to a good school in the U.S. than in their home countries. If they'd been able to go to school back in their home countries, many never would have come over here in the first place. It sure sounded like the changes in the social and political climate where they came from are much, much more responsible for this behavior than anything with U.S. social and political climate- they aren't itching to escape their home country like their older compatriots were. This is good as it means that the country where the student was from has improved quite a bit and become much more livable between the time that most of the grads had stayed here and now.
However, two things about this scenario are bad. One is that we're subsidizing the education of people who won't end up repaying our contribution to their education, let along contribute to our society above and beyond that. The second part is that it means that there is a greater demand for jobs over there and that doesn't give the brightest outlook on the U.S. economy.
The same thing (not looking at parents' finances) is true in all professional/graduate programs as well, at least as per the federal government. Whether the school and private donors will look at your parents' incomes or not varies, but you'll be pretty assured of getting $8500/year in subsidized no-payments, no-accruing-interest-until-you-graduate loans from the federal government. Of course that's beans compared to what some programs cost, especially medical or law school, even if you are going to a public one in your home state. But it's something.
Linux has support for almost every ATi and NVIDIA GPU, including the NV 8800 and ATi 2900 series. You can look at NVIDIA's website and AMD's ATi website for the drivers. The ATi R600 support is new, but Linux has supported high-end graphics cards for some time.
Intel makes the Core 2 Quads by putting two Core 2 Duos together under the heat spreader. They are separate dies- go buy a Q6600 and pop the IHS off and look at the two separate dies yourself if you need proof. Intel tests the dies before they are mounted on the substrate, so a die with a bad core never makes it into the C2Q. Another fully-functional die is used in its place. The die with one bad core is either sold as a Celeron 4x0 or thrown away as defective. Intel doesn't make a single die with four cores like AMD is doing. Once they do, then they will have to worry about what to do with a quad-core die with one bad core. They can either pitch it, sell it as a 3-core, or disable another core and sell it as a dual.
1. The core is there and locked off via microcode like the extra quads on a cut-down GPU (e.g. Radeon x1900GT vs. x1900XT) and can be enabled with a microcode flash. 2. The core is there but the fuses that connect it electrically to the rest of the die are blown, so it is there but not able to be enabled. 3. The core was never there as the die only has three cores in it in the first place- you have a fully-functional piece of silicon, so there is nothing extra to enable.
Either way, it's really long odds you'll get a free core enabled. Nobody has been able to even upward-unlock the K8's multiplier and I know for a fact that is set in microcode (some guys on ExtremeSystems got a JTAG and found that out but not how to change it.) They will probably use the same method they used to disable one core on a dual-core die and sell single-core Manchester and Toledo-die chips and AFAIK nobody has unlocked any of those. I bet they have a few of the X3s be X4s with a bad die, but the X4 is a darn big chip at nearly 300 mm^2 and the cost reduction by using a native 3-core die would be mighty attractive to them so I guess that most will be #3 then.
Volvo also makes a 2.0 L five-cylinder engine, as does GM (saws the last cylinder off the 4.2 L straight-six to make a 3.5 L five.) I doubt your OS will care whether you have 2, 3, or 4 cores as long as it supports SMP in the first place.
It's not all that hard to take notes in engineering classes on a standard laptop and it's easier to do with a tablet than in a paper notebook. Equations aren't that bad to type if you have a decent formula editor such as is in OpenOffice.org Writer, but yeah, it'd suck if you used MS Equation Editor.
Just giving the CPU speed is useless. A 1.4 GHz P4 is much different from an Athlon 1400 or a 1.4 PIII-S, a 1.4 Pentium M, and a 1.4 GHz Core or Core 2 Duo (there's no 1.4 C2D, but you see my point.) My laptop runs a 1.06 GHz chip- a brand-new Core 2 Duo U7500. It has a low clock speed but it works just fine with modern software as it is a modern piece of hardware. I am guessing the OP has a chip that's a tad newer than he's leading us to believe and is doing so for effect.
The word for your sport you were looking for is "orienteering." We do that over here in America also, however, it's still the person who finishes first that wins. That is, if schools even still have gym class or recess any more as those programs are being cut so that students can spend more time cramming for the standardized tests that determine the school's funding and also because the school doesn't want to deal with a lawsuit for millions of dollars for "mental anguish" if a kid trips over his own shoelaces and gets a boo-boo on his knee during gym.
I think the reason why geeks would be libertarians (if this is in fact true) stems from the Internet pervading our culture as well as having the skills to be independent using it and other computing equipment. The older geeks among us remember when the Net was an almost completely underground system and resent the meddling that governments and other people have tried to do for political or other gain, and want to stop it. It doesn't take a big leap to go from wanting the government to leave the Net pretty much alone to wanting the government to leave *everything* pretty much alone. Ditto for the "Tivo-isation" of hardware and DRM- many want to be able to use it how *they* want to and leave the decision of breaking the law or EULAs to them, not to be prevented by the maker in the first place. That decision and personal responsibility overall is a characteristic of a libertarian approach, whereas the Democrats and Republicans have some areas where they want free choice but others that they want to legislate what you should and should not do. I would suppose that another reason would be that geeks sometimes pride themselves on being different and will sometimes do things just to be different. But there are more "third-parties" than just the Libertarians, the Green Party, Independent Party, Socialist Party, Constitution Party and a few other really fringe ones like the Pirate Party are some others, so it wouldn't necessarily be sufficient in itself to explain why geeks would choose the Libertarians.
However, I'd say that from my several years of reading/., the predominant viewpoint is first and foremost social liberalism, whether that is part of a left-wing ideology or libertarianism or even anarchy (as they all share the belief that the government shouldn't control behavior.) Beyond that, it's all scattershot. I see libertarian, left-wing, right-wing, completely-fed-up-with-all-of-them, and everywhere in between.
That's better than a hardware dongle as they are much harder to share (soldering a pin-edge chip to a motherboard does that) and most everybody with an Intel computer newer than about 2005 and even some AMD-powered ones will have the chips onboard already, particularly in enterprise/corporate machines. The TPM itself isn't bad as you can use it to store your passwords and do encryption, but it can be used against you as much or more than it can for you, which IS bad.
Like any DRM measure, WGA is a pain in the butt and something to avoid if all possible. But if you want to see how bad DRM can get, try looking at what's in many low-volume technical/engineering programs. I'll use one I am familiar with as an example- it is the control program for a thermal stress testing machine.
1. Buy the machine for about $100k and the control software comes with it. 2. Install the software on your computer. 3. Plug the computer into an Internet connection with a fixed IP address that's permanently publicly available. 4. Call the company and give them your computer's NIC's MAC address and IP address. 5. They will activate the software remotely and continually log and validate the program whenever it is running. 6. The program is unusable if your NIC dies or your IP address changes. You call up the company and give them the new numbers and they will activate it later. 7. When an updated version of the control program ships, you have to upgrade or they will no longer validate your existing version. The price is about $40k for the program. The program itself is pretty simple and looks like an X program from about 1990 and isn't very stable. Oh, and it's Windows-only. 8. If your computer breaks, you have to beg and plead with the mfr. to let you transfer the license to a new computer. Same things for reinstalls, which is why the computer that runs the program is a W2K install on a PII-400. I hope that the guy who installed it has an image somewhere, but I am thinking not as the computer acts like it's never been reimaged since it was new.
Dongles and every-time-you-reinstall-you-have-to-buy-a-new-lic ense programs suck too, but this is about the worst I've seen. WGA absolutely pales in comparison, even though it's still a pain in the butt. I just hope that MS doesn't get any ideas from those guys, but I think that Chair(-throwing)man Ballmer and the rest of the BSA affiliates are smart enough to know that people aren't going to buy anything with that onerous of DRM (yet.) I wouldn't be surprised to see the TPMs get used more and more in the coming days, and that is much less obvious but just as big of a pain in the butt as the terrible software I described above.
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Perhaps back in the day when Apple computers used PPC chips, but today many people run Windows XP and Vista on x86 Macintoshes. It would be no different from somebody unloading Dells or HPs.
There are drugs that cure diseases. If you have something like bacterial pneumonia, an antibiotic WILL cure the disease as it removes the cause of the disease.
Also, many diseases are genetic in nature and the only way to remove the cause of the disease is to remove and replace the offending stretch of DNA with a correct copy. We haven't been very lucky with gene therapy as of yet, so the next best step is to remove its manifestations in the body. Take for example chronic myelogenous leukemia. It is caused by a transposition of parts of chromosomes 9 and 22 that yields a stretch of DNA (BCR-ABL) that codes for a certain protein enzyme (a protein tyrosine kinase) that allows the myeloid cells to proliferate unchecked. Obviously, the cure would be to remove the BCR-ABL DNA portion. But you will get exactly the same effect if you inhibit the carcinogenic protein tyrosine kinase the mutant BCR-ABL gene codes for. This is able to be done with drugs (imatinib, dasatanib, nilotinib). The leukemia goes into remission because you cut out the biochemical processes causing it and you are healthy. It's not a 100% cure, but barring gene therapy working (and there is research on that, let me tell you) it's the best we can get. Merely treating symptoms would only entail treating the fatigue, nausea, confusion, and bruising that CML causes rather than attacking as close to the cause as you can get.
Another thing pharmaceutical companies do is make vaccines. If they were concerned with only "hooking" people by treating symptoms, vaccines would shoot their business in the foot. You can sell a boatload of drugs costing thousands of dollars to people that have meningitis rather than a $100 vaccine. Plus, if enough people are vaccinated, there are few enough susceptible hosts that the disease dies out in an area and unvaccinated people won't get it (herd immunity.) This means those people are getting protected for FREE! That would be an absolute no-no.
And one last thing: even if genetic diseases and cancer could be cured with a pill, there would still be a market. Almost all cancers require at least one de novo mutation, be it from a DNA polymerase making a mistake or UV light or whatnot. Thus, people would be born healthy and would develop the mutation later in life. They would need the curative pill. And since people will continue to be born, there would always be a market in the future. The same is true with some heritable diseases, especially recessive diseases. It's very likely that people never know they are a carrier as they are unaffected and if two carriers mate, there is a 1/4 chance that they could have an affected offspring. They would need the curative drugs, too.
And if you think that the market of selling only palliative drugs rather that curative drugs would keep the curative drugs off the market, you're dead wrong. The drug companies are always looking to get a leg up on the others as it's good for their shareholders. If Pfizer develops a curative drug for a disease, they sure as heck are going to try to stick it to GlaxoSmithKline and others that only have palliative drugs. You can sell a curative drug for much more than a palliative drug and that's very good for the bottom lines. You also forget that the shareholders don't give much of a shit about long-term revenue streams anymore anyway. A curative drug would provide a massive, quick boost to stock prices, making the shareholders a lot of money when they sell off. That is EXACTLY what they want- why wait ten years to double your money on slow, steady sales when you can push through a blockbuster and double your money in a year?
They are not rubbing their hands maniacally,, they're printing off carbon credits, selling them, and raking in the money.
The rail system really hasn't been run down as much as consolidated as the number of places rail needed to go has dropped in the last 170 years. In the 1840s, rail was by far and away the fastest way to travel as the alternative was boat (slow, required rivers), horse, or foot. Today, it's faster or more convenient or both to fly or drive somewhere. And rail is FAR from dead in the U.S. Freight rail is experiencing a huge boom right now as trucking gets more expensive with higher labor, tax, and fuel costs. It's just that places that have little freight shipped to them no longer have rail spurs as a few trucks a month is a lot easier to accomplish than sending a train with one freight car to do the same job.
Put a bright-orange ID tag on your bag that looks as similar to the special-handling tags. Chances are that nobody will look twice at it and see that it's not the real deal.
Ubuntu and Gentoo are very different distributions aimed at different segments. Gentoo's strengths are that it's very customizable (down to the compile option level) and the suite of CLI tools is excellent. However, the system demands of GCC to compile the OS and software are pretty steep, especially on older hardware. I used to run Gentoo on a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4-M laptop and the computer spent at least 20% of its time compiling stuff. That's fine if you have a desktop and can leave it on 24/7 and it's well-cooled, but a hot, slow, laptop that has to be carried place to place and sometimes run on battery is a much bigger pain. Sure, I'd rather run Gentoo on my new laptop (12" unit with a C2D U7500 @ 1.067 GHz and an 80 GB HDD) but a binary distro like Ubuntu or SUSE is much easier on the hardware. Yes, I know you can use a bunch of binary packages on Gentoo but it's suboptimal compared to a binary distro and far inferior to actually compiling stuff yourself.
Bottom line is that there is no one tool that's perfect for all jobs, but there are multiple tools- that's what makes Linux and the other *nixes great. Otherwise we'd have "you get what Lord Steve thinks you should have" OS X and Windows. Windows does have several versions, but they only vary in the amount of stuff that's intentionally crippled rather than in a meaningful way like Ubuntu and Gentoo differ.
The Core 2 Duo U2000 series are 1.06-1.20 GHz single-core CPUs that are rated at 5.5 watts TDP. That's a little more than the Geode, but the C2D U2000 will absolutely run circles around the K7 Tbred-based Geode. I'd think that a U2000 with a low-power chipset like the 945GMS (yes I know, terrible graphics compared to the AMD unit's...) would do a tad better.
Your second statement is the most accurate. Sick days are paid-at-100%-of-salary days off, sometimes used if you are sick with the flu or something. If you have a serious condition, you go on disability leave, which pays something less than 100% of your salary. I'd say that roughly half the time somebody that uses a sick day is actually sick or has a sick kid. The other half are hangover days or "I have this free pass for a day off, I'd be dumb not to take it" days.
No, the U.S. isn't backwards, we just don't like to pay people for work they don't do (excepting of course, the government, they MAKE us pay them to do no work...)
You're that guy that bought Windows ME, weren't you?
The guy said "Linuzzz." There must be a mod that runs a bot that does a "grep linuzzz" and automatically mods as troll.
This kind of thing *does* happen with certain computers- look at some of HP's business laptops. At the initial boot, you get a screen that prompts you to select whether you want to run the 32- or 64-bit version of Vista. You pick and then the unselected version is deleted. I don't see how this couldn't be extended to work with a setup like this:
Pick one of the following OSes to install on your computer:
1. FreeDOS
2. Microsoft Windows XP
3. Microsoft Windows Vista
FreeDOS is generally the OS that gets shipped on computers from companies that want to offer a computer without Windows but don't want to ruffle MS's feathers too much, but you could replace that with any Linux distribution or a simple "do not install any OSes and delete all installation files" option.
It's not surprising that a big pay package will fail to recruit people to work out in small towns and rural areas. I am currently a medical student and my classmates are almost all from urban areas. Ironically, even though my institution is a state one, about half of my classmates did their undergrad in out-of-state private schools (but applied here because they went to high school in-state and our med school is a good one.) They have about as high of an opinion of working or living in an area of less than 100,000 people ("the sticks") as the average /.er has of the RIAA or Steve Ballmer. So you could try to pay them five million a year to be a GP in a small town and they'd still not come- there are too many "rifle-toting, pickup-truck driving rednecks" (actual quote from one of my classmates) in those areas for them to even consider such a lucrative offer.
I don't know the best way to approach this other than to give greater preference in admissions to well-qualified applicants that come from small towns and rural areas over those who came from urban areas in hopes that they return. There have been small programs that do just this and they have been rather successful, so expanding it to the entire class should work as well. Some might cry foul over this- particularly the media in the two big urban areas- but minting physicians to care for the ENTIRE state is clearly stated in the mission of the medical school and I can't see how that policy would be anything but in accordance with the mission.
The social and political climate (here) has little to nothing to do with why many of the foreign students simply go to school here and go back, at least not from the reasons that the multitude of foreign students in my classes (engineering) said. The vast majority wanted to stay over there in the first place and came over here because it is easier and less expensive to go to a good school in the U.S. than in their home countries. If they'd been able to go to school back in their home countries, many never would have come over here in the first place. It sure sounded like the changes in the social and political climate where they came from are much, much more responsible for this behavior than anything with U.S. social and political climate- they aren't itching to escape their home country like their older compatriots were. This is good as it means that the country where the student was from has improved quite a bit and become much more livable between the time that most of the grads had stayed here and now.
However, two things about this scenario are bad. One is that we're subsidizing the education of people who won't end up repaying our contribution to their education, let along contribute to our society above and beyond that. The second part is that it means that there is a greater demand for jobs over there and that doesn't give the brightest outlook on the U.S. economy.
The same thing (not looking at parents' finances) is true in all professional/graduate programs as well, at least as per the federal government. Whether the school and private donors will look at your parents' incomes or not varies, but you'll be pretty assured of getting $8500/year in subsidized no-payments, no-accruing-interest-until-you-graduate loans from the federal government. Of course that's beans compared to what some programs cost, especially medical or law school, even if you are going to a public one in your home state. But it's something.
Linux has support for almost every ATi and NVIDIA GPU, including the NV 8800 and ATi 2900 series. You can look at NVIDIA's website and AMD's ATi website for the drivers. The ATi R600 support is new, but Linux has supported high-end graphics cards for some time.
Intel makes the Core 2 Quads by putting two Core 2 Duos together under the heat spreader. They are separate dies- go buy a Q6600 and pop the IHS off and look at the two separate dies yourself if you need proof. Intel tests the dies before they are mounted on the substrate, so a die with a bad core never makes it into the C2Q. Another fully-functional die is used in its place. The die with one bad core is either sold as a Celeron 4x0 or thrown away as defective. Intel doesn't make a single die with four cores like AMD is doing. Once they do, then they will have to worry about what to do with a quad-core die with one bad core. They can either pitch it, sell it as a 3-core, or disable another core and sell it as a dual.
There are a few possibilities:
1. The core is there and locked off via microcode like the extra quads on a cut-down GPU (e.g. Radeon x1900GT vs. x1900XT) and can be enabled with a microcode flash.
2. The core is there but the fuses that connect it electrically to the rest of the die are blown, so it is there but not able to be enabled.
3. The core was never there as the die only has three cores in it in the first place- you have a fully-functional piece of silicon, so there is nothing extra to enable.
Either way, it's really long odds you'll get a free core enabled. Nobody has been able to even upward-unlock the K8's multiplier and I know for a fact that is set in microcode (some guys on ExtremeSystems got a JTAG and found that out but not how to change it.) They will probably use the same method they used to disable one core on a dual-core die and sell single-core Manchester and Toledo-die chips and AFAIK nobody has unlocked any of those. I bet they have a few of the X3s be X4s with a bad die, but the X4 is a darn big chip at nearly 300 mm^2 and the cost reduction by using a native 3-core die would be mighty attractive to them so I guess that most will be #3 then.
Volvo also makes a 2.0 L five-cylinder engine, as does GM (saws the last cylinder off the 4.2 L straight-six to make a 3.5 L five.) I doubt your OS will care whether you have 2, 3, or 4 cores as long as it supports SMP in the first place.
It's not all that hard to take notes in engineering classes on a standard laptop and it's easier to do with a tablet than in a paper notebook. Equations aren't that bad to type if you have a decent formula editor such as is in OpenOffice.org Writer, but yeah, it'd suck if you used MS Equation Editor.
Just giving the CPU speed is useless. A 1.4 GHz P4 is much different from an Athlon 1400 or a 1.4 PIII-S, a 1.4 Pentium M, and a 1.4 GHz Core or Core 2 Duo (there's no 1.4 C2D, but you see my point.) My laptop runs a 1.06 GHz chip- a brand-new Core 2 Duo U7500. It has a low clock speed but it works just fine with modern software as it is a modern piece of hardware. I am guessing the OP has a chip that's a tad newer than he's leading us to believe and is doing so for effect.
The word for your sport you were looking for is "orienteering." We do that over here in America also, however, it's still the person who finishes first that wins. That is, if schools even still have gym class or recess any more as those programs are being cut so that students can spend more time cramming for the standardized tests that determine the school's funding and also because the school doesn't want to deal with a lawsuit for millions of dollars for "mental anguish" if a kid trips over his own shoelaces and gets a boo-boo on his knee during gym.
I think the reason why geeks would be libertarians (if this is in fact true) stems from the Internet pervading our culture as well as having the skills to be independent using it and other computing equipment. The older geeks among us remember when the Net was an almost completely underground system and resent the meddling that governments and other people have tried to do for political or other gain, and want to stop it. It doesn't take a big leap to go from wanting the government to leave the Net pretty much alone to wanting the government to leave *everything* pretty much alone. Ditto for the "Tivo-isation" of hardware and DRM- many want to be able to use it how *they* want to and leave the decision of breaking the law or EULAs to them, not to be prevented by the maker in the first place. That decision and personal responsibility overall is a characteristic of a libertarian approach, whereas the Democrats and Republicans have some areas where they want free choice but others that they want to legislate what you should and should not do. I would suppose that another reason would be that geeks sometimes pride themselves on being different and will sometimes do things just to be different. But there are more "third-parties" than just the Libertarians, the Green Party, Independent Party, Socialist Party, Constitution Party and a few other really fringe ones like the Pirate Party are some others, so it wouldn't necessarily be sufficient in itself to explain why geeks would choose the Libertarians.
/., the predominant viewpoint is first and foremost social liberalism, whether that is part of a left-wing ideology or libertarianism or even anarchy (as they all share the belief that the government shouldn't control behavior.) Beyond that, it's all scattershot. I see libertarian, left-wing, right-wing, completely-fed-up-with-all-of-them, and everywhere in between.
However, I'd say that from my several years of reading
Three letters: T-P-M.
That's better than a hardware dongle as they are much harder to share (soldering a pin-edge chip to a motherboard does that) and most everybody with an Intel computer newer than about 2005 and even some AMD-powered ones will have the chips onboard already, particularly in enterprise/corporate machines. The TPM itself isn't bad as you can use it to store your passwords and do encryption, but it can be used against you as much or more than it can for you, which IS bad.
Like any DRM measure, WGA is a pain in the butt and something to avoid if all possible. But if you want to see how bad DRM can get, try looking at what's in many low-volume technical/engineering programs. I'll use one I am familiar with as an example- it is the control program for a thermal stress testing machine.
c ense programs suck too, but this is about the worst I've seen. WGA absolutely pales in comparison, even though it's still a pain in the butt. I just hope that MS doesn't get any ideas from those guys, but I think that Chair(-throwing)man Ballmer and the rest of the BSA affiliates are smart enough to know that people aren't going to buy anything with that onerous of DRM (yet.) I wouldn't be surprised to see the TPMs get used more and more in the coming days, and that is much less obvious but just as big of a pain in the butt as the terrible software I described above.
1. Buy the machine for about $100k and the control software comes with it.
2. Install the software on your computer.
3. Plug the computer into an Internet connection with a fixed IP address that's permanently publicly available.
4. Call the company and give them your computer's NIC's MAC address and IP address.
5. They will activate the software remotely and continually log and validate the program whenever it is running.
6. The program is unusable if your NIC dies or your IP address changes. You call up the company and give them the new numbers and they will activate it later.
7. When an updated version of the control program ships, you have to upgrade or they will no longer validate your existing version. The price is about $40k for the program. The program itself is pretty simple and looks like an X program from about 1990 and isn't very stable. Oh, and it's Windows-only.
8. If your computer breaks, you have to beg and plead with the mfr. to let you transfer the license to a new computer. Same things for reinstalls, which is why the computer that runs the program is a W2K install on a PII-400. I hope that the guy who installed it has an image somewhere, but I am thinking not as the computer acts like it's never been reimaged since it was new.
Dongles and every-time-you-reinstall-you-have-to-buy-a-new-li
Anecdotal evidence might lie, but the number of anhydrous tanks that get up and walk away don't.