One of the first things i do with a fresh Windows install is head to Services and disable a lot of things i don't need that tend to soak up cycles or dilute security on a game box, like print spooler, remote login, remote registry, superfetch, homegroup, shadow copy etc.
among the services i disable is Windows Update. i manually enable it a couple times a year and choose which updates to allow. i've had no trouble from this policy except that i get a resentful and incorrect desktop reminder that this is not a genooooine copy of Windows whenever the box wakes from sleep and can't call home. a quick trip to Windows Activation and that's sorted.
do i understand correctly that Win 10 has removed the ability to disable Win Update? if so, is this by tweaking the related dependencies, or have they f*d up the Services capability itself?
Google knows people dislike being nagged or guilt-tripped. this is an attempt simply to reduce the volume of comment idiocy by making it less convenient. my guess is, it'll not make the idiocy or hatefulness vanish entirely, but will reduce easy throwaway comments a fair bit.
check out "Walmart: the High Cost of Low Price", parts of which were filmed at such a Chinese factory. interviewed workers said they pay a utilities fee regardless, but if they choose other housing they don't get charged rent. wages identical either case.
apparently it's not so much the minimal labor wages that make China attractive to manufacturing, but the supply of trained engineers to manage the operation. Apple alone needs hundreds of engineers to supervise the thousands of workers.
i know a couple of people who use 3d printers. when they want to make parts that need to be stronger than the PLA/ABS raw material, they "simply" print the model, use it to make a mold and cast the mold with bronze or copper or what have you. it stops being an all-in-one solution but still allows detailed custom shapes with good strength and appearance.
The most likely solution for ejection of heat at these levels (100 megawatt?) would be by transfer to a freshwater source (as saltwater corrosion would make maintenance far more expensive) likely fluvial such as a stream or river as the water flow would ensure a constant supply of cool water.
I don't understand why saltwater corrosion is inevitable. A closed freshwater loop that conducts heat to the inside of a heat sink that has open, cold, saltwater on the outside might just need salt buildup periodically cleaned from the seawater side. This could probably be done mechanically and automatically. Not as efficient as direct injection, but not as damaging to local habitats either.
Now, whether there are good geothermal sources feasibly close to the ocean is another question...
I was wondering exactly that. Obviously, in space the speed of sound in air is irrelevant. It's also meaningless in a total vacuum. I know space is not a total vacuum, but I'm still surprised to hear you describe the solar wind as a plasma. I know its charged ions are the constituents of a plasma, but does the solar wind have anything like the density necessary to constitute a "medium" in which waves can form? I would think it'd be orders of magnitude too thin for anything to propagate at all.
Same question for the "interstellar medium". OK, not a total vacuum, but how does a few particles per cubic kilometer constitute a medium?
Wow, didn't know that; I thought it was only for the consoles.
So the PC (Vista) version of Halo 2 is going to be able to connect to non-local machines only through Live? No more hosting up your own custom game/map rotations and taking on the world, without paying a monthly subscription fee?
Truly, everything Microsoft touches turns to shit.
I think you have it exactly backwards. A PC version would have nothing to do with Xbox Live.
As soon as it comes out on PC, people will play over teh internets for no more than the cost of the game itself. That is of course as it should be, but not how Microsoft likes it, so they will delay the PC version of Halo 3 as long as possible.
And of course it is likely to be Vista-only, in an effort to make even the consolation prize drive revenue to Microsoft.
Good Lord, I hope you're not actually as gullible as that post makes you seem.
Oil companies like to be known as "energy" companies because it diffuses the appearance of their nearly-exclusive association with oil production. So, it's for PR purposes first off.
Much more important, investments in wind, solar, fuel cell and other alternative energy fields allow the oil companies some degree of control over the research in those areas (it happens fast, slowly, or not at all at their say-so).
Such investments give the oil companies control over people with extensive (and often unique) theoretical and applied knowledge in the field, and control of both developing processes and established patents.
Just as Microsoft "innovates" by buying up new entrants into the fields Microsoft considers its own, the oil giants' purchases and investments in alternative energy are their means to influence, if not dictate, the rate of "innovation" in global energy use patterns.
Finally, when oil eventually does become uneconomic as fuel, the oil companies will have long ago bought a lock on the now-essential alternative sources of energy, and will be able to maintain their revenue streams right on past the end of the Oil Age.
Slightly offtopic in that it's more about electricity than oil, but I think one can gauge oil companies' commitment to the public good WRT alternative energy by the degree to which they support decentralization of energy production (so far, little to not at all). Synfuels and wind and solar farms are being developed in an industrial mode that cements the importance of heavily-capitalized players, despite the greatest economic gains to the public being available in widely-distributed small-scale wind, solar and biomass production.
Neutrons are definitely ionizing! However, it's not their (lack of) electrical charge that does it, but the high speed at which they smack into other atoms that knocks electrons off the target atoms' shells, thus ionizing them. 'Strooth.
QuickTime /does/ play fullscreen, actually
on
Running Mac OS X Panther
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· Score: 2, Informative
The free version of QT that comes with the box does not play fullscreen, but the full version ($35US, quicktime.apple.com) plays fullscreen very well, as well as allows you to edit QT content in many ways that the free version doesn't: add/remove tracks, adjust a plethora of attributes (size, aspect ratio, graphics mode, sound levels etc.) For example, I do a fair amount of basic video editing with iMovie, but iMovie won't let you swap the video track left to right, ie. car entering frame left now entering from the right. Full QuickTime does that in two or three clicks, without re-encoding.
obligatory pedantic correction
on
Inside Wal-Mart IT
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· Score: 3, Funny
Building on clay is fine, as long as you have good drainage and ventilation between the house and the ground.
It's building on *sand* that proverbially leads to danger.
Perhaps you were thinking of "feet of clay", which is a metaphor about virtue, not prudence.
Caps Lock ought to be another Enter key
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
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· Score: 1
Not being a screenwriter or lawyer, I rarely need all caps for an extended period. (and I agree with a previous poster that Scroll Lock is the truly useless one...)
But to have an Enter key on the left side as well as the right would be more efficient: it would allow better control when using both keyboard and other input devices such as mice, tablets or scanners. It also would reduce repetitive-stress potential.
Of course, it's likely that the most widely-appreciated benefit would be easier one-handed typing. =D
It's been a while since chem class, but IIRC anhydrous ammonia is a very different critter from regular cleaning fluid.
Anhydrous means it's absolutely dry and is thus/violently/ reactive with anything containing water such as skin or mucous membranes. Get a big whiff and you're dead, or wish you were.
I'm also not sure about its being lighter than air. Any chemists around? Anyone?
Starting in the early 90's as CD-ROMs were becoming more widespread, Voyager produced a series of educational and entertainment disks that is exceptional in quality, scope and content. Examples:
Bingo. I've been a Mac-enthusiast since 1984, and I say "Go Linux"!
And not because I want Redmond torn down and washed away, either, though that might be good too. I want there to be more tools for more people to do more cool and useful stuff with. Not everybody likes working on Macs and right now their options (besides Linux) are unreliable Windows, expensive Solaris or IRIX, or hyperexpensive custom setups like discreet's or Quantel's. So, go Tux!
You're absolutely right. I still play MORIA occasionally, for cryin' out loud. (I was so psyched when I got an 8-bit screen so the walls could be ASCIIfied solid instead of | or - )
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Terminus yet. There's a scifi sim that looks really good AND has non-twitch gameplay elements in it. Real 3D space maneuvering is probably too difficult for the casual gamers though.
I think it's in the Action Sack along with the Marathon series. I'm not a huge sidescroller fan but I thought it was pretty good, especially that you can move and shoot in different directions. And it also had some sort of LAN play that I never had a chance to try.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the first things i do with a fresh Windows install is head to Services and disable a lot of things i don't need that tend to soak up cycles or dilute security on a game box, like print spooler, remote login, remote registry, superfetch, homegroup, shadow copy etc.
among the services i disable is Windows Update. i manually enable it a couple times a year and choose which updates to allow. i've had no trouble from this policy except that i get a resentful and incorrect desktop reminder that this is not a genooooine copy of Windows whenever the box wakes from sleep and can't call home. a quick trip to Windows Activation and that's sorted.
do i understand correctly that Win 10 has removed the ability to disable Win Update? if so, is this by tweaking the related dependencies, or have they f*d up the Services capability itself?
1:54, wet.
Google knows people dislike being nagged or guilt-tripped. this is an attempt simply to reduce the volume of comment idiocy by making it less convenient. my guess is, it'll not make the idiocy or hatefulness vanish entirely, but will reduce easy throwaway comments a fair bit.
check out "Walmart: the High Cost of Low Price", parts of which were filmed at such a Chinese factory. interviewed workers said they pay a utilities fee regardless, but if they choose other housing they don't get charged rent. wages identical either case.
apparently it's not so much the minimal labor wages that make China attractive to manufacturing, but the supply of trained engineers to manage the operation. Apple alone needs hundreds of engineers to supervise the thousands of workers.
http://www.tuaw.com/2012/01/22/why-apples-products-are-designed-in-california-but-assembled/
i know a couple of people who use 3d printers. when they want to make parts that need to be stronger than the PLA/ABS raw material, they "simply" print the model, use it to make a mold and cast the mold with bronze or copper or what have you.
it stops being an all-in-one solution but still allows detailed custom shapes with good strength and appearance.
same here. since OTA died it's just Netflix. no significant loss.
...and the wine! Don't forget the wine!
The most likely solution for ejection of heat at these levels (100 megawatt?) would be by transfer to a freshwater source (as saltwater corrosion would make maintenance far more expensive) likely fluvial such as a stream or river as the water flow would ensure a constant supply of cool water.
I don't understand why saltwater corrosion is inevitable. A closed freshwater loop that conducts heat to the inside of a heat sink that has open, cold, saltwater on the outside might just need salt buildup periodically cleaned from the seawater side. This could probably be done mechanically and automatically. Not as efficient as direct injection, but not as damaging to local habitats either.
Now, whether there are good geothermal sources feasibly close to the ocean is another question...
not really... replace all instances of ".__" with "._", then look for further instances of "__".
bonus points if you can do so without thinking of emoticons.
I was wondering exactly that. Obviously, in space the speed of sound in air is irrelevant. It's also meaningless in a total vacuum. I know space is not a total vacuum, but I'm still surprised to hear you describe the solar wind as a plasma. I know its charged ions are the constituents of a plasma, but does the solar wind have anything like the density necessary to constitute a "medium" in which waves can form? I would think it'd be orders of magnitude too thin for anything to propagate at all.
Same question for the "interstellar medium". OK, not a total vacuum, but how does a few particles per cubic kilometer constitute a medium?
Wow, didn't know that; I thought it was only for the consoles.
So the PC (Vista) version of Halo 2 is going to be able to connect to non-local machines only through Live? No more hosting up your own custom game/map rotations and taking on the world, without paying a monthly subscription fee?
Truly, everything Microsoft touches turns to shit.
I think you have it exactly backwards. A PC version would have nothing to do with Xbox Live.
As soon as it comes out on PC, people will play over teh internets for no more than the cost of the game itself. That is of course as it should be, but not how Microsoft likes it, so they will delay the PC version of Halo 3 as long as possible.
And of course it is likely to be Vista-only, in an effort to make even the consolation prize drive revenue to Microsoft.
How did you finally do it?
I haven't figured out how to format the whole stick, apparently, because the U3 crap keeps coming back.
I thought 911 was the joke...
(ducks)
Good Lord, I hope you're not actually as gullible as that post makes you seem.
Oil companies like to be known as "energy" companies because it diffuses the appearance of their nearly-exclusive association with oil production. So, it's for PR purposes first off.
Much more important, investments in wind, solar, fuel cell and other alternative energy fields allow the oil companies some degree of control over the research in those areas (it happens fast, slowly, or not at all at their say-so).
Such investments give the oil companies control over people with extensive (and often unique) theoretical and applied knowledge in the field, and control of both developing processes and established patents.
Just as Microsoft "innovates" by buying up new entrants into the fields Microsoft considers its own, the oil giants' purchases and investments in alternative energy are their means to influence, if not dictate, the rate of "innovation" in global energy use patterns.
Finally, when oil eventually does become uneconomic as fuel, the oil companies will have long ago bought a lock on the now-essential alternative sources of energy, and will be able to maintain their revenue streams right on past the end of the Oil Age.
Slightly offtopic in that it's more about electricity than oil, but I think one can gauge oil companies' commitment to the public good WRT alternative energy by the degree to which they support decentralization of energy production (so far, little to not at all). Synfuels and wind and solar farms are being developed in an industrial mode that cements the importance of heavily-capitalized players, despite the greatest economic gains to the public being available in widely-distributed small-scale wind, solar and biomass production.
Neutrons are definitely ionizing! However, it's not their (lack of) electrical charge that does it, but the high speed at which they smack into other atoms that knocks electrons off the target atoms' shells, thus ionizing them. 'Strooth.
The free version of QT that comes with the box does not play fullscreen, but the full version ($35US, quicktime.apple.com) plays fullscreen very well, as well as allows you to edit QT content in many ways that the free version doesn't: add/remove tracks, adjust a plethora of attributes (size, aspect ratio, graphics mode, sound levels etc.) For example, I do a fair amount of basic video editing with iMovie, but iMovie won't let you swap the video track left to right, ie. car entering frame left now entering from the right. Full QuickTime does that in two or three clicks, without re-encoding.
Building on clay is fine, as long as you have good drainage and ventilation between the house and the ground.
It's building on *sand* that proverbially leads to danger.
Perhaps you were thinking of "feet of clay", which is a metaphor about virtue, not prudence.
Not being a screenwriter or lawyer, I rarely need all caps for an extended period. (and I agree with a previous poster that Scroll Lock is the truly useless one...)
But to have an Enter key on the left side as well as the right would be more efficient: it would allow better control when using both keyboard and other input devices such as mice, tablets or scanners. It also would reduce repetitive-stress potential.
Of course, it's likely that the most widely-appreciated benefit would be easier one-handed typing. =D
It's been a while since chem class, but IIRC anhydrous ammonia is a very different critter from regular cleaning fluid.
/violently/ reactive with anything containing water such as skin or mucous membranes. Get a big whiff and you're dead, or wish you were.
Anhydrous means it's absolutely dry and is thus
I'm also not sure about its being lighter than air. Any chemists around? Anyone?
Who Built America?
Puppet Motel
The Residents Freak Show
The Day After Trinity
http://voyager.learntech.com/cdrom/
Bingo. I've been a Mac-enthusiast since 1984, and I say "Go Linux"!
And not because I want Redmond torn down and washed away, either, though that might be good too. I want there to be more tools for more people to do more cool and useful stuff with. Not everybody likes working on Macs and right now their options (besides Linux) are unreliable Windows, expensive Solaris or IRIX, or hyperexpensive custom setups like discreet's or Quantel's. So, go Tux!
You're absolutely right. I still play MORIA occasionally, for cryin' out loud. (I was so psyched when I got an 8-bit screen so the walls could be ASCIIfied solid instead of | or - )
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Terminus yet. There's a scifi sim that looks really good AND has non-twitch gameplay elements in it. Real 3D space maneuvering is probably too difficult for the casual gamers though.
Abuse by Bungie.
I think it's in the Action Sack along with the Marathon series. I'm not a huge sidescroller fan but I thought it was pretty good, especially that you can move and shoot in different directions. And it also had some sort of LAN play that I never had a chance to try.