I just switched to Comcast to get away from Knology and take advantage of their new DOCSIS 3.0 rollout in my area. I'm currently getting around 35/9 (sustained over several gigabytes) on their 22/5 service. I know it's not going to last like that but for now I'm happy deluding myself.
Although I will say that Comcast will have to put in a serious effort to deliver worse service than Knology. With Knology I was paying for 6Mbit and getting 1.5 to 2.0 on a good day and enough packet loss to make bandwidth meaningless on a normal day. My leased modem had a manufacture date from last century. Service appointments were silently rescheduled to another day or canceled entirely. Issue tickets would randomly disappear from their system. And in order to pay my bill by phone I had to call them to give them my CC#, get the confirmation code, hang-up and call back with the confirmation code that I just received to inform them that I just called them 2 minutes ago to make a payment.
So as long as nobody from Comcast breaks into my house at night to violate my cats, I can't see them being any worse than the "competition" here in South Carolina.
The problem with developers and statistics isn't that we don't appreciate how complex statistics can be, it's that we don't know what to do with the pretty charts and graphs statisticians produce for us. Our primary concerns usually have nothing to do with the standard deviation of transaction times. We're concerned, first, with the correctness of the response and, second, whether or not it fails gracefully. There are, of course, exceptions in real time applications.
Most performance graphs are not going to have a nice bell curve to them anyway. They're going to bias heavily at the minimum time to follow the shortest logic path and work their way up. There will be spikes and plateaus where different paths are taken through the code logic. There will be outliers where something failed in the code. There will be outliers where something random happened between point A and point B ( a packet collision on the way to the database, a bad cache miss that will correct itself, garbage collection triggering, etc.). And there will be situations like what TFA's author is actually looking for, load based failures. Standard deviation is useless if you're not working with samples that have a normal distribution.
If the problem is that one out of 1000 queries is taking a minute to return instead of 0.1 seconds, then using the std deviation to describe the problem is nonsense. It is not a Gaussian distribution!
Outliers like that indicate to me that something broke for that sample. If possible, I'll investigate whatever request caused that outlier so that I know whether I'm facing a code/logic bug, a known low performance request, a load based failure or just some random influence outside of my control. Just to clarify, a known low performance request would be something like a database query calling a stored procedure to generate a large report.
Present day astronauts recycle their urine for drinking water. The space and plumbing requirements are less than if they were to stock the ISS with plenty of water to last between resupply runs. Star Trek, having the tech to break apart and rearrange matter on a molecular level, recycles all waste, solid and liquid, for materials to make fresh provisions. This doesn't mean that they crap on the kitchen counter, it just means that whatever you flush goes to a system to recycle it.
If you do not have the hardware to support Windows 7 then don't upgrade. If your graphics card is the only thing holding you back then take a stroll over to Newegg and start upgrading.
Complaining about hardware that was designed for Windows XP not working in Vista/Win7 is really akin to complaining about hardware that worked fine in Win95/98/ME not working or working well in XP. Eventually you have to upgrade hardware to run modern software. If you think ATI is choosing to end support for a legacy product too early, feel free to buy a nVidia card to replace it. Eventually though, nVidia will discontinue support for their DX9 products the same way they no longer support DX8 products in Vista/Win7. Some point after that, they'll discontinue support for the GT 285 for some future OS.
I never said electric cars were being marketed for Seattle only; I was simply pointing that it would, in fact, be practical for some people living in your particular urban jungle. Really though, climate is not as big of a factor for this as it seems to be since different people have a natural predisposition to different climates. I'm perfectly happy with temperatures in the low 60's and start to get uncomfortable at about 71; whereas I've also known people that prefer temperatures in the 90's and will start layering their clothes when it gets down to 80.
But I digress.
The reason I'm replying now is that after making three predictions about you, based on, as you put it, "unfounded assumptions", I hit the easy one dead on, came damned close on the second and, predictably, missed with the intellectual jab. You do recall, I'm assuming, that I said that you were not native to Seattle and went there for a job or education (true, since you moved for a job), you drive either a Chevy pickup or a 5.0 Mustang (you admitted to driving a Mustang but I guessed incorrectly on the trim level; this may be due, in part, to the fact that I was unaware of Ford producing a V-4 engine at all or placing anything smaller than a V-6 in the 4th gen Mustang line) and you didn't fully appreciate the size of the area prior to moving to Seattle (this was a cheap shot intended to insult your general level of ignorance).
I fail to see how guessing 2/3 correctly counts as being mostly wrong.
Roll down your windows and turn on the vent fan then. You're not going to get carjacked if you're in deadlock traffic. Seriously, if you can't move because of the traffic jam, neither will the carjacker.
If you're that paranoid though. Crack your windows. Car windows generally open at the top first and heat likes to escape through the top of the cabin.
Additionally. You live in Seattle. This year has been a freak year for temperatures, I'll give you that, but most of the time the outside temperature is pretty comfortable. If it's 70 outside and you roll the windows down, it might make it up to a blistering 71 in your car. If it's raining (BTW I've spent about a decade in the PacNW, I know you have rain) then roll up the windows, your car isn't going to heat up if there's no sunlight and the electric heat isn't going to have to work nearly as hard as an A/C compressor would be for someone stuck in a traffic jam in Arizona since once the cabin is up to temp, your body heat helps solve the problem rather than exacerbating it. (plus you can wear a jacket over a pullover, over a sweater whereas the person in Arizona can only get so naked)
Now if that's not enough thought in my rebuttal, maybe I can add some insight as well. Dude, we get it, you moved to Seattle because you were accepted to a university or received a good job offer. You don't want to identify yourself with the other "hippies" living there so you drive either a 4x4 Chevy pickup with oversized offroad mud tires and a lifted suspension or a 5.0 Mustang. You live 40 miles from school/work because you went there for an education/job in the Seattle Metro area and subsequently found an apartment in the Seattle Metro area; you didn't really take the time to realize that where you chose to live and where you have to commute to were on nearly opposite ends of a 50 mile diameter area.
Outlets are generally easy to install. Metered outlets with credit card swipes will pay for themselves quickly.
And please no arguments on the practicality of putting credit card swipes on parking meters since some cities (Portland, OR for example) already have this.
The Billions of dollars you're talking about isn't as bad as you make it sound. Sure if it was coming out of just one pocketbook, it would be brutal. But to put it in perspective, retrofitting a residential home would be in the hundreds of dollars for the houses that do not have a garage and do not have an outlet by the driveway. Commercial parking lots will be in the thousands to tens of thousands depending on the scale of deployment; a small carpark would probably be pretty cheap whereas a large mall might be more expensive. Filling stations would be hundreds of thousands to build from scratch or a couple thousand to retrofit existing petroleum stations to have a few paid outlets. Municipal projects will be the expensive ones at several million per city to wire up the parking meters.
In all those examples, with the exception of the residential retrofit, there would be money to make on the upgrade either directly by charging for the power or indirectly by making the business more appealing.
The US already has a strong power infrastructure. Adding that last 10 feet to meter and dispense is not huge compared to the overhead and underground networks that are already there. The real trick for electric vehicles will be range and standardizing high amperage outlets.
The LEAF is a bit weak on range, I'll give you that, but for many people 100 mi. per charge is enough to get to and from work for 2 or 3 days. They're not targeting the people that live in Bellevue and work in Tacoma, they're targeting the people that live in Bellevue and work in Bellevue. (other regions will have different examples such as Gresham and Hillsboro a bit south of you)
Now for the two vehicle part of this argument. Many households with two people (i.e. married couples, cohabitating boyfriend/girlfriend couples and other domestic partnerships) have more than one vehicle per person. Usually there's a his and hers daily driver plus a joint owned family or utility vehicle such as a SUV, minivan or light truck. This is not the case for most single people that do not have a flexible enough budget to justify owning more than one vehicle.
It may make sense financially to ditch one of the daily driver cars for the electric and use either the other partner's car or the shared vehicle for road trips to out of town concerts. This, of course, depends on several factors that would have to be honestly calculated from real numbers and not pulled out of some slashdotter's ass based on conjecture and a marketing press release. These factors would include (but are certainly not limited to) distance and nature of commute, cost of the electric vehicle with or without a trade in of a prior vehicle and/or possible government subsidies, cost of maintenance in comparison to a traditional IC powered car (electric *should* be a lot cheaper to maintain), cost of the power to charge factoring in possible electric company discounts for using power during off peak hours and etc. Some people will weight their decision in favor of getting an electric vehicle due to a bias for a green image, others will weight their decision (as you appear to already have) against getting an electric for reasons of convenience or practicality.
Nissan is aiming for a targeted group of people that will benefit from this type of vehicle. Those that are in the group that could benefit from having this as a commuter vehicle might find this car to be enormously useful. Just because you're not in this group is no reason to knock the platform as generally useless.
Re:Hundred Millions or Hundred Thousands?
on
China Bans Gold Farming
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm sorry but all your talk of military formations and heavy weaponry suggest a level of open war that does not sit well with your talk of civilian apathy.
As for the distribution of civilian weaponry. The fact that not everyone is armed is made irrelevant by the fact that anyone could be. Hunting riffles are, with the right ammunition, capable of piercing body armor. Further, hunting riffles are often owned by people that hunt and can hit a moving target from a respectable distance. The civilian snipers will be defending and therefore have the terrain advantage. Given the wide variety of terrain types in this country, (compare Montana, Oregon, Nebraska, Florida, Virginia) local terrain knowledge will be enough of an advantage to nearly offset the disadvantage in training and equipment.
I have no doubt that civilian casualties will be higher than military casualties. But if the US military ever turned on the general population, the result would make the Vietnam War seem like a grade school shouting match.
And if you have other things in life that cost money, you might look at performance / dollar and buy something that performs at 80-90% of the best of the best flagship at 25% the price.
Yes an i7 975 will run circles around a Phenom II 955 in raw number crunching. But the i7 is $1k while the Phenom II is $250. Going with the Phenom, you have enough CPU to keep your GPU fed and $750 to keep yourself fed.
I believe removing one's offspring from the gene pool still qualifies for a Darwin award under some circumstances. Perhaps anyone following such advise to the point of actually attempting to plug a 3rd party module into their children should be left to the methods and devices of natural selection.
//Only use OEM modules and plugins on children under 8.
Overclocking is still a gamble. And given that we don't actually know how many chips are binned down artificially vs. the number that are binned down for a reason, there's no way to know the odds of taking that gamble. Getting your hopes up on buying a cheaper chip and overclocking it is just setting yourself up for disappointment.
That being said, why do I never see anyone reviewing an overclocked system report on the actual ambient temperatures during the test? I'm sure there's a difference in what speed you can hit depending on whether you're in a 70 or 100 degree environment. Unfortunately, I cannot finish this paragraph without leading into a rant filled with run-on sentences.
Let me just say, if you're trying to build a budget PC then there's a good chance you don't have the extra cash (or the inclination to spend it) to replace a burnt out system. However, if you have time and money to burn and a spare computer to get you on Newegg to replace the one you're screwing with, go for it.
If you look at Egosoft's X-Universe series you'll find 2 capitol ship classes, destroyers and carriers.
When you head into a big fight you'll usually ride in a destroyer with a handful of corvettes (light capitol class) as your escorts. Once you're in sector and a few km from the jump gate, you'll bring in your carriers with lots of heavy fighters (scouts and medium fighters go splat too quickly). All in all you can coordinate a fight with 60-80 ships under your control.
I would love to see something like this on an MMO. The player flying the destroyer could control a half dozen escort corvettes while the player flying the carrier could control whatever fits in the carrier. Something to make it a little more interesting would be if there was no way to know what enemy fighters are PC or NPC piloted until you see one break formation and lay waste to the AI ships on your side (Alternatively they could also break formation and fly into an asteroid, depending on the pilot).
Balancing the system would probably be a nightmare though.
Avast has a bootable offline scanning CD product called "Avast! BART CD".
Be warned, the price is a little steep if you're just looking to use it on one system. The licenses that they offer (administrator at $150 and serviceman at $300) are more intended to license people or business entities rather than systems. That is an administrator license allows you to use the software on any machine in the possession of the license holder (be it a person or business entity) so long as only one instance of the program per owned license is running concurrently. A serviceman license removes constraints regarding the ownership of the machines using the software while keeping the concurrency constraint intact.
Check out Bart PE. Windows XP can turned into a live CD in much the same way that linux distros can.
But nobody in their right mind does that just to check their bank account. Anybody who knows what a live CD is off the top of their heads should be able to run a clean system with adequate protection. Assuming you have a clean system, the major threats that you'd have to worry about with online banking are pretty well confined to phishing attacks. A live CD isn't going to do you any favors on that front since (unless you loaded custom bookmarks into the on disc browser) you're going to have to type the bank's URL from memory or trust Google to give you the right address.
All the other threats that are easy to get worked up over are actually quite easy to mitigate. Man in the middle attacks, such as some random hacker wannabe sitting at the corner table at Starbucks sniffing wifi packets, is probably not going to break the Diffie-Hellman SSL handshake between you and your bank given that no cryptology experts have found an way to break it yet. A key logger will raise red flags with any modern antivirus/antimalware program provided that the key logger in question was not written for and deployed solely to your system.
The only reason I can think of for using a live CD for banking is if I'm using a system that isn't mine. Personally, though, I'd rather just call the number on the back of my bank card and use the telephone banker rather than explain to whoever owns the system I'm borrowing why I just booted their system off of a CD that (as far as they know) may contain any number of malicious programs and viruses.
... so that I can avoid all the noise below this post.
1. Coding (TFA marks this as a constant for this discussion) 2. Stimulants (Cigarettes, a 2L bottle of soda and another 2L that I know is waiting for me in the fridge) 3. Music (Indie/Alternative Rock on Pandora so that I know to stand up and stretch once an hour when it asks if I'm still listening)
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Some of them will dump if they're not careful with their pointers.
Must you ruin my optimism?
I just switched to Comcast to get away from Knology and take advantage of their new DOCSIS 3.0 rollout in my area. I'm currently getting around 35/9 (sustained over several gigabytes) on their 22/5 service. I know it's not going to last like that but for now I'm happy deluding myself.
Although I will say that Comcast will have to put in a serious effort to deliver worse service than Knology. With Knology I was paying for 6Mbit and getting 1.5 to 2.0 on a good day and enough packet loss to make bandwidth meaningless on a normal day. My leased modem had a manufacture date from last century. Service appointments were silently rescheduled to another day or canceled entirely. Issue tickets would randomly disappear from their system. And in order to pay my bill by phone I had to call them to give them my CC#, get the confirmation code, hang-up and call back with the confirmation code that I just received to inform them that I just called them 2 minutes ago to make a payment.
So as long as nobody from Comcast breaks into my house at night to violate my cats, I can't see them being any worse than the "competition" here in South Carolina.
If I had mod points, this would get a +Funny.
The problem with developers and statistics isn't that we don't appreciate how complex statistics can be, it's that we don't know what to do with the pretty charts and graphs statisticians produce for us. Our primary concerns usually have nothing to do with the standard deviation of transaction times. We're concerned, first, with the correctness of the response and, second, whether or not it fails gracefully. There are, of course, exceptions in real time applications.
Most performance graphs are not going to have a nice bell curve to them anyway. They're going to bias heavily at the minimum time to follow the shortest logic path and work their way up. There will be spikes and plateaus where different paths are taken through the code logic. There will be outliers where something failed in the code. There will be outliers where something random happened between point A and point B ( a packet collision on the way to the database, a bad cache miss that will correct itself, garbage collection triggering, etc.). And there will be situations like what TFA's author is actually looking for, load based failures. Standard deviation is useless if you're not working with samples that have a normal distribution.
If the problem is that one out of 1000 queries is taking a minute to return instead of 0.1 seconds, then using the std deviation to describe the problem is nonsense. It is not a Gaussian distribution!
Outliers like that indicate to me that something broke for that sample. If possible, I'll investigate whatever request caused that outlier so that I know whether I'm facing a code/logic bug, a known low performance request, a load based failure or just some random influence outside of my control. Just to clarify, a known low performance request would be something like a database query calling a stored procedure to generate a large report.
Present day astronauts recycle their urine for drinking water. The space and plumbing requirements are less than if they were to stock the ISS with plenty of water to last between resupply runs. Star Trek, having the tech to break apart and rearrange matter on a molecular level, recycles all waste, solid and liquid, for materials to make fresh provisions. This doesn't mean that they crap on the kitchen counter, it just means that whatever you flush goes to a system to recycle it.
Maybe if you were trying to tie them together on the same mainboard. But over TCP/IP not an issue.
If you do not have the hardware to support Windows 7 then don't upgrade. If your graphics card is the only thing holding you back then take a stroll over to Newegg and start upgrading.
Complaining about hardware that was designed for Windows XP not working in Vista/Win7 is really akin to complaining about hardware that worked fine in Win95/98/ME not working or working well in XP. Eventually you have to upgrade hardware to run modern software. If you think ATI is choosing to end support for a legacy product too early, feel free to buy a nVidia card to replace it. Eventually though, nVidia will discontinue support for their DX9 products the same way they no longer support DX8 products in Vista/Win7. Some point after that, they'll discontinue support for the GT 285 for some future OS.
I never said electric cars were being marketed for Seattle only; I was simply pointing that it would, in fact, be practical for some people living in your particular urban jungle. Really though, climate is not as big of a factor for this as it seems to be since different people have a natural predisposition to different climates. I'm perfectly happy with temperatures in the low 60's and start to get uncomfortable at about 71; whereas I've also known people that prefer temperatures in the 90's and will start layering their clothes when it gets down to 80.
But I digress.
The reason I'm replying now is that after making three predictions about you, based on, as you put it, "unfounded assumptions", I hit the easy one dead on, came damned close on the second and, predictably, missed with the intellectual jab. You do recall, I'm assuming, that I said that you were not native to Seattle and went there for a job or education (true, since you moved for a job), you drive either a Chevy pickup or a 5.0 Mustang (you admitted to driving a Mustang but I guessed incorrectly on the trim level; this may be due, in part, to the fact that I was unaware of Ford producing a V-4 engine at all or placing anything smaller than a V-6 in the 4th gen Mustang line) and you didn't fully appreciate the size of the area prior to moving to Seattle (this was a cheap shot intended to insult your general level of ignorance).
I fail to see how guessing 2/3 correctly counts as being mostly wrong.
Roll down your windows and turn on the vent fan then. You're not going to get carjacked if you're in deadlock traffic. Seriously, if you can't move because of the traffic jam, neither will the carjacker.
If you're that paranoid though. Crack your windows. Car windows generally open at the top first and heat likes to escape through the top of the cabin.
Additionally. You live in Seattle. This year has been a freak year for temperatures, I'll give you that, but most of the time the outside temperature is pretty comfortable. If it's 70 outside and you roll the windows down, it might make it up to a blistering 71 in your car. If it's raining (BTW I've spent about a decade in the PacNW, I know you have rain) then roll up the windows, your car isn't going to heat up if there's no sunlight and the electric heat isn't going to have to work nearly as hard as an A/C compressor would be for someone stuck in a traffic jam in Arizona since once the cabin is up to temp, your body heat helps solve the problem rather than exacerbating it. (plus you can wear a jacket over a pullover, over a sweater whereas the person in Arizona can only get so naked)
Now if that's not enough thought in my rebuttal, maybe I can add some insight as well.
Dude, we get it, you moved to Seattle because you were accepted to a university or received a good job offer. You don't want to identify yourself with the other "hippies" living there so you drive either a 4x4 Chevy pickup with oversized offroad mud tires and a lifted suspension or a 5.0 Mustang. You live 40 miles from school/work because you went there for an education/job in the Seattle Metro area and subsequently found an apartment in the Seattle Metro area; you didn't really take the time to realize that where you chose to live and where you have to commute to were on nearly opposite ends of a 50 mile diameter area.
Outlets are generally easy to install. Metered outlets with credit card swipes will pay for themselves quickly.
And please no arguments on the practicality of putting credit card swipes on parking meters since some cities (Portland, OR for example) already have this.
The Billions of dollars you're talking about isn't as bad as you make it sound. Sure if it was coming out of just one pocketbook, it would be brutal. But to put it in perspective, retrofitting a residential home would be in the hundreds of dollars for the houses that do not have a garage and do not have an outlet by the driveway. Commercial parking lots will be in the thousands to tens of thousands depending on the scale of deployment; a small carpark would probably be pretty cheap whereas a large mall might be more expensive. Filling stations would be hundreds of thousands to build from scratch or a couple thousand to retrofit existing petroleum stations to have a few paid outlets. Municipal projects will be the expensive ones at several million per city to wire up the parking meters.
In all those examples, with the exception of the residential retrofit, there would be money to make on the upgrade either directly by charging for the power or indirectly by making the business more appealing.
The US already has a strong power infrastructure. Adding that last 10 feet to meter and dispense is not huge compared to the overhead and underground networks that are already there. The real trick for electric vehicles will be range and standardizing high amperage outlets.
The LEAF is a bit weak on range, I'll give you that, but for many people 100 mi. per charge is enough to get to and from work for 2 or 3 days. They're not targeting the people that live in Bellevue and work in Tacoma, they're targeting the people that live in Bellevue and work in Bellevue. (other regions will have different examples such as Gresham and Hillsboro a bit south of you)
Now for the two vehicle part of this argument. Many households with two people (i.e. married couples, cohabitating boyfriend/girlfriend couples and other domestic partnerships) have more than one vehicle per person. Usually there's a his and hers daily driver plus a joint owned family or utility vehicle such as a SUV, minivan or light truck. This is not the case for most single people that do not have a flexible enough budget to justify owning more than one vehicle.
It may make sense financially to ditch one of the daily driver cars for the electric and use either the other partner's car or the shared vehicle for road trips to out of town concerts. This, of course, depends on several factors that would have to be honestly calculated from real numbers and not pulled out of some slashdotter's ass based on conjecture and a marketing press release. These factors would include (but are certainly not limited to) distance and nature of commute, cost of the electric vehicle with or without a trade in of a prior vehicle and/or possible government subsidies, cost of maintenance in comparison to a traditional IC powered car (electric *should* be a lot cheaper to maintain), cost of the power to charge factoring in possible electric company discounts for using power during off peak hours and etc. Some people will weight their decision in favor of getting an electric vehicle due to a bias for a green image, others will weight their decision (as you appear to already have) against getting an electric for reasons of convenience or practicality.
Nissan is aiming for a targeted group of people that will benefit from this type of vehicle. Those that are in the group that could benefit from having this as a commuter vehicle might find this car to be enormously useful. Just because you're not in this group is no reason to knock the platform as generally useless.
I'm sorry but all your talk of military formations and heavy weaponry suggest a level of open war that does not sit well with your talk of civilian apathy.
As for the distribution of civilian weaponry. The fact that not everyone is armed is made irrelevant by the fact that anyone could be. Hunting riffles are, with the right ammunition, capable of piercing body armor. Further, hunting riffles are often owned by people that hunt and can hit a moving target from a respectable distance. The civilian snipers will be defending and therefore have the terrain advantage. Given the wide variety of terrain types in this country, (compare Montana, Oregon, Nebraska, Florida, Virginia) local terrain knowledge will be enough of an advantage to nearly offset the disadvantage in training and equipment.
I have no doubt that civilian casualties will be higher than military casualties. But if the US military ever turned on the general population, the result would make the Vietnam War seem like a grade school shouting match.
Hey! I'm one of those genetic freaks you insensitive clod.
Seriously 5'11" @ 275Lb. I can push a mid 70's Cadillac uphill and my normal level of physical activity is categorized as "Computer Programmer".
I started doing that ages ago. Currently I have an Athlon 700 emulating an i7 at 4Ghz.
And if you have other things in life that cost money, you might look at performance / dollar and buy something that performs at 80-90% of the best of the best flagship at 25% the price.
Yes an i7 975 will run circles around a Phenom II 955 in raw number crunching. But the i7 is $1k while the Phenom II is $250. Going with the Phenom, you have enough CPU to keep your GPU fed and $750 to keep yourself fed.
Are they putting this on just the busiest stoplights or all three of them?
I believe removing one's offspring from the gene pool still qualifies for a Darwin award under some circumstances. Perhaps anyone following such advise to the point of actually attempting to plug a 3rd party module into their children should be left to the methods and devices of natural selection.
$30 and a $5 Little Caesars pizza if you find the right geek.
Overclocking is still a gamble. And given that we don't actually know how many chips are binned down artificially vs. the number that are binned down for a reason, there's no way to know the odds of taking that gamble. Getting your hopes up on buying a cheaper chip and overclocking it is just setting yourself up for disappointment.
That being said, why do I never see anyone reviewing an overclocked system report on the actual ambient temperatures during the test? I'm sure there's a difference in what speed you can hit depending on whether you're in a 70 or 100 degree environment. Unfortunately, I cannot finish this paragraph without leading into a rant filled with run-on sentences.
Let me just say, if you're trying to build a budget PC then there's a good chance you don't have the extra cash (or the inclination to spend it) to replace a burnt out system. However, if you have time and money to burn and a spare computer to get you on Newegg to replace the one you're screwing with, go for it.
Yeah, there really needs to be a wooden table involved in there somewhere.
If you look at Egosoft's X-Universe series you'll find 2 capitol ship classes, destroyers and carriers.
When you head into a big fight you'll usually ride in a destroyer with a handful of corvettes (light capitol class) as your escorts. Once you're in sector and a few km from the jump gate, you'll bring in your carriers with lots of heavy fighters (scouts and medium fighters go splat too quickly). All in all you can coordinate a fight with 60-80 ships under your control.
I would love to see something like this on an MMO. The player flying the destroyer could control a half dozen escort corvettes while the player flying the carrier could control whatever fits in the carrier. Something to make it a little more interesting would be if there was no way to know what enemy fighters are PC or NPC piloted until you see one break formation and lay waste to the AI ships on your side (Alternatively they could also break formation and fly into an asteroid, depending on the pilot).
Balancing the system would probably be a nightmare though.
Avast has a bootable offline scanning CD product called "Avast! BART CD".
Be warned, the price is a little steep if you're just looking to use it on one system. The licenses that they offer (administrator at $150 and serviceman at $300) are more intended to license people or business entities rather than systems. That is an administrator license allows you to use the software on any machine in the possession of the license holder (be it a person or business entity) so long as only one instance of the program per owned license is running concurrently. A serviceman license removes constraints regarding the ownership of the machines using the software while keeping the concurrency constraint intact.
Check out Bart PE. Windows XP can turned into a live CD in much the same way that linux distros can.
But nobody in their right mind does that just to check their bank account. Anybody who knows what a live CD is off the top of their heads should be able to run a clean system with adequate protection. Assuming you have a clean system, the major threats that you'd have to worry about with online banking are pretty well confined to phishing attacks. A live CD isn't going to do you any favors on that front since (unless you loaded custom bookmarks into the on disc browser) you're going to have to type the bank's URL from memory or trust Google to give you the right address.
All the other threats that are easy to get worked up over are actually quite easy to mitigate. Man in the middle attacks, such as some random hacker wannabe sitting at the corner table at Starbucks sniffing wifi packets, is probably not going to break the Diffie-Hellman SSL handshake between you and your bank given that no cryptology experts have found an way to break it yet. A key logger will raise red flags with any modern antivirus/antimalware program provided that the key logger in question was not written for and deployed solely to your system.
The only reason I can think of for using a live CD for banking is if I'm using a system that isn't mine. Personally, though, I'd rather just call the number on the back of my bank card and use the telephone banker rather than explain to whoever owns the system I'm borrowing why I just booted their system off of a CD that (as far as they know) may contain any number of malicious programs and viruses.
What card couldn't play BioShock for you?
I enjoyed it with my 7900GT on an Athlon64 X2 4600 (939 Socket)
... so that I can avoid all the noise below this post.
1. Coding (TFA marks this as a constant for this discussion)
2. Stimulants (Cigarettes, a 2L bottle of soda and another 2L that I know is waiting for me in the fridge)
3. Music (Indie/Alternative Rock on Pandora so that I know to stand up and stretch once an hour when it asks if I'm still listening)