Sadly, I titled the first post really poorly. After playing around with the "beta" player on a couple machines for a little while longer I found a few other things worth noting.
The Silverlight player does not require nearly as much free space as the IE7/WMP player for the "high quality" video to play. I've checked and the library is the same as that availible for the PC as far as the 182 items in my instant queue go.
While that doesn't cover the thousands upon thousands of items they stream, it does cover a wide range of properties. So far as I can tell, the Starz! content, the CBS current series content, the NBC current series content, and all the showtime content is still there. Other than that, well who cares if "Santa Clause Conquers the Martians" isn't availible in Firefox. Oh wait, it looks like it is.
It doesn't seem to differ from the normal instant watch selection. Obviously that selection is limited in that it does not encompass the entire Netflix library- that would be infeasible regardless of the player being used.
As far as I can tell, the beta allows access to the full instant watch selection that IE users would see. The player loads and buffers much quicker than the player in IE7- allowing for much faster skipping forwards and backwards on the old P-IV in my living room. The performance difference is fairly pronounced on my relatively new laptop. Under Firefox it is consistently 15 seconds from clicking "play" while browsing instant-watch to the actual start of the video. In IE7 it will take between 30 seconds 45 seconds. Video quality is indistinguishable in terms of clarity, but I noticed much less stuttering in the silverlight player.
On the old pentium IV machine in my livingroom, the time to play drops from about 1 minute to 25 seconds. While this is half the time, it was never a big deal when compared to the convenience. What is a big deal is the impressive drop in stuttering compared to the player in IE7. On my dinosaur of a living room computer, the video for all netflix movies would stutter every few seconds or so until the movie was fully buffered. In the silverlight player, there is no noticeable stuttering.
I did this totally subjective, non-scientific, arbitrary, and slightly drunk comparison on the following two machines:
Older-than-dirt desktop-
-2.4 GHz Pentium IV
-1GB DDR 333 RAM
-Windows XP Home SP3
-Ati Radeon 9800 Pro (256MB VRAM)
Slightly Newer Laptop-
-2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo
-2GB DDR2 RAM
-Windows XP Pro SP3
-Ati Radeon Mobility x1400 (god awful)
Doesn't this mean that the guy who had his laptop stolen also didn't bother to set a login or boot password? One might argue that he deduced that a boot password or login password might just get his drive wiped by a clever thief. He may have even st up the remote access partly to act as a way to catch thieves and get it back if it was ever lost. He could have even used fairly strong encrpytion to protect most of his data. Of course anyone arguing for the assumption that his sercurity plans were a series of complex plans within plans must have missed the part where he left it on and in his unlocked car.
I'd love to see the computer-cluster this kid calculated the 100k+ iterations of the many-bodied system of time-retarded lagrangians required to solve something like this. His parents power bill has to be insane.
Considering uncertainties involved in orbital trajectories and timing for asteroids like this, 100k might even be a low number of runs for something like this. The number of satellites in orbit, their varying masses, uncertainty in the current un-colided trajectory, etc. can't possibly create a situation where you have improved odds of impact anyways. There is actually a greater solid angle of impact for collisions that would decrease the likelihood of eventual earth impact than increase it. Maybe these odds are after the most favorable possible satellite impact plus the help of magical space faries?
I was extremely skeptical about the usefulness of the EeePC until I got the change to use one for a day. I played around with the cheapest one, the 2G surf, and was surprised to find out that it was a lot more than some simple toy computer. If I were a more experienced Linux user, then this would not have been a surprise to me. While the EeePC performs its basic built in tasks acceptably and serves as a nicely-light email and web browsing machine (amazingly actually able to handle hulu streams), it was in playing with its command line that I began to realize its potential.
Using the command line I was able to SSH into our university's engineering servers and remotely run programs like maple, matlab, and the gimp. Our nearly-ubiquitous and extremely robust wireless network combined with having access to our campus's "virtual computing lab" made for better performance than I get on my $1500 laptop. While the performance won't be nearly as good for my home linux machine, the EeePC will be the computer I have on me at campus from now on. With the virtual computing lab here it's like having a remote controlled dual xeon work station for only 300 bucks.
I'm trying to figure out why this is news. It sounds like some minor tweaks to the x300, plus the OP seems ill-informed on what technologies have been used in thinkpads before.
This looks like a means for intelligence gathering. If you read the explanation on the FLAG company's website (owner of 2 of the cut cables) they say that traffic will be re-routed through US and UK lines. Sounds like an excellent opportunity to monitor pretty much all internet communication going in and out of Iran doesn't it? Someone asked "why do this in secret" earlier... well there you go.
""It may take sometime to fix the cut but we are rerouting the traffic to another cable in the U.K. and U.S., the bandwidth utilization will go down," the official said."
Yep.
How is a truck load of rice better than an OLPC?
Just giving food aid to the starving is like giving heroine to an addict. You satisfy the immediate need- but you just continue the dependence. While it's valid to argue that hunger and crushing poverty are more immediate problems than the lack of computers for school children; Dvorak doesn't offer any better ideas. Hey let's just give more money to the often abused aid agencies rather than work towards solving the problems.
At least the OLPC project is an attempt at addressing some of the root causes of poverty by giving people access to information and education- people who otherwise would not have it. Does anyone seriously think that it's THE solution to the problem? Of course it's not; but it's in better spirit than simply giving food aid. Were Dvorak calling for a program like this to be accompanied by works projects, farming-education, economic developement programs, anti-corruption efforts, etc. then he'd come across as more of a humanitarian. Instead, he comes across as the kind of ass who complains when someone discusses treating mental illness among homeless people because you could feed a dozen homeless on the money you'd pay to treat and counsel one.
Before I get flamed, I know that not all homeless people are homeless because of mental illness- but many are and treatment is often unavailable.
Anyways, screw Dvorak and his "give a man a fish" attitude.
In some states the driver can reject the portable test for some test in the station, but that's usually just a more expensive breathalizer test, although some larger stations have nurses on hand or at least people qualified to take blood for testing. In these states it is indeed a tactic some people use to buy time for their BAC to drop, however it doesn't happen often as drunk and clever are many times mutually exclusive states.
Hah, I love the amusing hippie consipiracy theories. It seems as though some people really beleive that environmentalists are making all this stuff up.
That myopic view wasn't chosen, it's all we have. Try not to see motives where you should be seeing circumstances.
I'm a nuclear engineer and physicist and I can tell you we're quite a long way from developing profitable and useful fusion power. We've made amazing leaps in the last few years, but getting the technology anywhere will take decades.
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Sadly, I titled the first post really poorly. After playing around with the "beta" player on a couple machines for a little while longer I found a few other things worth noting.
The Silverlight player does not require nearly as much free space as the IE7/WMP player for the "high quality" video to play. I've checked and the library is the same as that availible for the PC as far as the 182 items in my instant queue go.
While that doesn't cover the thousands upon thousands of items they stream, it does cover a wide range of properties. So far as I can tell, the Starz! content, the CBS current series content, the NBC current series content, and all the showtime content is still there. Other than that, well who cares if "Santa Clause Conquers the Martians" isn't availible in Firefox. Oh wait, it looks like it is.
Not just theoretical. I'm doing it on Firefox 3 right now.
It doesn't seem to differ from the normal instant watch selection. Obviously that selection is limited in that it does not encompass the entire Netflix library- that would be infeasible regardless of the player being used.
As far as I can tell, the beta allows access to the full instant watch selection that IE users would see. The player loads and buffers much quicker than the player in IE7- allowing for much faster skipping forwards and backwards on the old P-IV in my living room. The performance difference is fairly pronounced on my relatively new laptop. Under Firefox it is consistently 15 seconds from clicking "play" while browsing instant-watch to the actual start of the video. In IE7 it will take between 30 seconds 45 seconds. Video quality is indistinguishable in terms of clarity, but I noticed much less stuttering in the silverlight player.
On the old pentium IV machine in my livingroom, the time to play drops from about 1 minute to 25 seconds. While this is half the time, it was never a big deal when compared to the convenience. What is a big deal is the impressive drop in stuttering compared to the player in IE7. On my dinosaur of a living room computer, the video for all netflix movies would stutter every few seconds or so until the movie was fully buffered. In the silverlight player, there is no noticeable stuttering.
I did this totally subjective, non-scientific, arbitrary, and slightly drunk comparison on the following two machines:
Older-than-dirt desktop-
-2.4 GHz Pentium IV
-1GB DDR 333 RAM
-Windows XP Home SP3
-Ati Radeon 9800 Pro (256MB VRAM)
Slightly Newer Laptop-
-2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo
-2GB DDR2 RAM
-Windows XP Pro SP3
-Ati Radeon Mobility x1400 (god awful)
Doesn't this mean that the guy who had his laptop stolen also didn't bother to set a login or boot password? One might argue that he deduced that a boot password or login password might just get his drive wiped by a clever thief. He may have even st up the remote access partly to act as a way to catch thieves and get it back if it was ever lost. He could have even used fairly strong encrpytion to protect most of his data. Of course anyone arguing for the assumption that his sercurity plans were a series of complex plans within plans must have missed the part where he left it on and in his unlocked car.
I'd love to see the computer-cluster this kid calculated the 100k+ iterations of the many-bodied system of time-retarded lagrangians required to solve something like this. His parents power bill has to be insane. Considering uncertainties involved in orbital trajectories and timing for asteroids like this, 100k might even be a low number of runs for something like this. The number of satellites in orbit, their varying masses, uncertainty in the current un-colided trajectory, etc. can't possibly create a situation where you have improved odds of impact anyways. There is actually a greater solid angle of impact for collisions that would decrease the likelihood of eventual earth impact than increase it. Maybe these odds are after the most favorable possible satellite impact plus the help of magical space faries?
I was extremely skeptical about the usefulness of the EeePC until I got the change to use one for a day. I played around with the cheapest one, the 2G surf, and was surprised to find out that it was a lot more than some simple toy computer. If I were a more experienced Linux user, then this would not have been a surprise to me. While the EeePC performs its basic built in tasks acceptably and serves as a nicely-light email and web browsing machine (amazingly actually able to handle hulu streams), it was in playing with its command line that I began to realize its potential. Using the command line I was able to SSH into our university's engineering servers and remotely run programs like maple, matlab, and the gimp. Our nearly-ubiquitous and extremely robust wireless network combined with having access to our campus's "virtual computing lab" made for better performance than I get on my $1500 laptop. While the performance won't be nearly as good for my home linux machine, the EeePC will be the computer I have on me at campus from now on. With the virtual computing lab here it's like having a remote controlled dual xeon work station for only 300 bucks.
I'm trying to figure out why this is news. It sounds like some minor tweaks to the x300, plus the OP seems ill-informed on what technologies have been used in thinkpads before.
Yeah, people should click through before posting summaries like this... Extremely misleading and already 2 days old.
This looks like a means for intelligence gathering. If you read the explanation on the FLAG company's website (owner of 2 of the cut cables) they say that traffic will be re-routed through US and UK lines. Sounds like an excellent opportunity to monitor pretty much all internet communication going in and out of Iran doesn't it? Someone asked "why do this in secret" earlier... well there you go. ""It may take sometime to fix the cut but we are rerouting the traffic to another cable in the U.K. and U.S., the bandwidth utilization will go down," the official said." Yep.
How is a truck load of rice better than an OLPC? Just giving food aid to the starving is like giving heroine to an addict. You satisfy the immediate need- but you just continue the dependence. While it's valid to argue that hunger and crushing poverty are more immediate problems than the lack of computers for school children; Dvorak doesn't offer any better ideas. Hey let's just give more money to the often abused aid agencies rather than work towards solving the problems. At least the OLPC project is an attempt at addressing some of the root causes of poverty by giving people access to information and education- people who otherwise would not have it. Does anyone seriously think that it's THE solution to the problem? Of course it's not; but it's in better spirit than simply giving food aid. Were Dvorak calling for a program like this to be accompanied by works projects, farming-education, economic developement programs, anti-corruption efforts, etc. then he'd come across as more of a humanitarian. Instead, he comes across as the kind of ass who complains when someone discusses treating mental illness among homeless people because you could feed a dozen homeless on the money you'd pay to treat and counsel one. Before I get flamed, I know that not all homeless people are homeless because of mental illness- but many are and treatment is often unavailable. Anyways, screw Dvorak and his "give a man a fish" attitude.
he's not a real troll, just clueless.
hmm?
In some states the driver can reject the portable test for some test in the station, but that's usually just a more expensive breathalizer test, although some larger stations have nurses on hand or at least people qualified to take blood for testing. In these states it is indeed a tactic some people use to buy time for their BAC to drop, however it doesn't happen often as drunk and clever are many times mutually exclusive states.
Hah, I love the amusing hippie consipiracy theories. It seems as though some people really beleive that environmentalists are making all this stuff up. That myopic view wasn't chosen, it's all we have. Try not to see motives where you should be seeing circumstances.
I'm a nuclear engineer and physicist and I can tell you we're quite a long way from developing profitable and useful fusion power. We've made amazing leaps in the last few years, but getting the technology anywhere will take decades.
"I want to see this happening on a global scale"
This shows a fundamental lack of understanding.