Some companies are very accepting of student usage. Autodesk (i.e. AutoCAD) offers their software for free for personal or educational use. Microsoft offers Express Edition versions of their Visual Studio applications for free for personal or educational use. VMWare offers their products for free to educational institutions, though students do still need to purchase a license for use on their personal systems.
As a note on the MS Express Edition products. Yes they are stripped down versions of the full professional versions but someone who uses VS C# Express can still learn the language well enough to not make an ass of themselves when they go out to interview. Someone who bought Photoshop Elements because they couldn't afford the academic price for just Photoshop ($299) isn't going to be able to say the same.
Adobe products are a poor example of academic discounts because the academic price for their products is still steep even if it does look good compared to the insane retail price. And while it's all well and good that when your son lands a job as a graphic artist (or whatever he's going for) his company might pay for his tools, he still needs to be able to pass an interview process where he'll be competing with other people that do have this software installed at home (legitimately or otherwise).
Your situation is slightly different from what I was talking about (and had to go through myself) where the student is no longer living at home and has to be able to budget rent, utilities, food, transportation, tuition, books and tools on a part-time income while only qualifying for enough financial aid to pay for most of their tuition. I have faith that since your son is still living at home and that you are claiming him as a dependent in lieu of charging him rent he was able to afford the $449 to $999 (after educational discount) to pick up a CS4 suite package that contains the software he needs.
Not counting FOSS offerings, many of the cheaper alternatives are of such low quality that they're not worth installing at any price. I'm talking about application crashes, unnecessary drivers that won't install on x64 operating systems, hijacking system functions like auto-insert detection, etc. And some software such as Windows just simply doesn't have cheap alternatives that will function appropriately for consumers. And before you say that Linux is a viable alternative to Windows, I want you to drive to Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy and tell me how many software boxes there mention Linux on the back.
This is why I wrote the last paragraph in my above post. People that can't afford a Cadillac will usually either buy a Chevy or ride the bus, they won't risk life and limb in a Tata or Yugo. Unfortunately, software vendors seem to not understand how to strip a Caddy down to a Chevy. The stripped down versions are missing the left headlight, the windows are made of plastic tarp and the passenger door is welded shut.
Maybe I should turn ads back on to get a laugh or two. Out of curiosity, was it just a karma threshold that I crossed to get the option to turn ads off or is it some sort of seniority thing?
That and Zimbabwe has a per-capita income of about $200 USD per year. By the time someone there saves up for Vista, the Duke Nukem trademarks will have entered the public domain and DNF will go gold as an open source project.
A pirated copy is not necessarily a lost sale. If you look at the highest rate list compared to the lowest rate list for countries you'll see that the countries with the highest rates of piracy generally have the lowest per capita GDP. This shows a link between ability to pay for software and actually paying for it.
To put a face on this, the recent college grad with a job at 7-11 and $50k in student loan debt is going to need tools to make the money needed to buy tools.
Another factor is the fact that the BSA still counts an install of Adobe's $2500 Master Suite on Mom's computer as being a lost sale. Trust me when I say that Mom only has that because she thought it was neat to paste pictures of her and Dad standing on top of the Eiffel tower. She does not use it commercially and therefore cannot justify spending $2500 on an idle amusement. If Adobe managed to make a DRM scheme that couldn't be cracked they still wouldn't get a sale from her. Instead she'd just go back to scissors and rubber cement.
In fact according to the BSA PDF.
Consumers generally install more software on their computers, both new and old, than businesses. Hence, while consumers account for 45 percent of PCs shipped, they account for 55 percent of PC software deployed.
This fits well with the idea that consumers are installing professional software that is never used commercially.
Cost and ability to pay are the biggest factors of piracy. The BSA needs to segregate their report into two sections for consumer piracy and commercial piracy. Consumer piracy is less likely to be a lost sale than commercial piracy.
Furthermore, companies whose professional software packages may have consumer appeal might want to try performing a trial where they make the latest version of their software package available for free as a beta or time limited trial with semi-anonymous usage tracking to figure out exactly what patterns distinguish a professional user from someone just screwing around. This would allow the company to use this data to offer a mostly functional 'Home' version for dirt cheap that has just the right features disabled to make sure that professional users won't ever touch it. A home user of Photoshop, for example, will probably never work with 100MB images whereas a professional designing a poster or magazine spread will. Careful analysis and planning will allow these companies to actually make a few extra sales off of lower budget consumers without cutting into their customer base for professional users.
Nobody said anything about overclocking. And yes, underclocking does have limits imposed by the system's processor and BIOS. AMD and Intel already have features on all their product lines to allow for dynamic clock adjustments to reduce power consumption. AMD's cool and quiet feature will even lower the CPU voltage at lower clock frequencies to further reduce power consumption.
These guys aren't talking about new processor designs (though I'm sure some engineers at AMD and Intel read/. and will find this research), they're looking for ways to better implement the power saving features that are already present in modern CPUs.
I'm seeing too many people try to compare software with physical goods such as cars and toasters. There are numerous, irreconcilable differences between the two realms that make a direct comparison anything but straight forward. Furthermore, many of you seem to have some inflated view of what merchantability and suitability mean for physical goods.
For starters, physical goods warranties and liabilities have limits. If I buy a truck from Ford, GMC or Dodge, it will have a certain rating for load capacity and towing capacity. If I exceed those ratings and something bad happens, up to and including injury or loss of life, it's my fault. Other physical goods, such as toasters, also have limits as to what situations they will be designed and tested for. If I try to make french toast using a slot load toaster and something bad happens, up to and including injury or loss of life, it's my fault. In one case the manufacturer knows that somebody out there will try something that they know has a high likelihood of causing known failures (i.e. if you try to tow too heavy of a load with your truck you run the risk of overheating your brakes and causing an accident) and in the other case we have to come to terms with the fact that idiots will find a way to break shit no matter how many warning labels you put on it.
Now about those irreconcilable differences between software and hard goods. With hard goods, your warranty goes out the window the moment you modify it in any way that has not been approved by the manufacturer. That is completely reasonable because I can buy a car and drive it completely as is and it will serve its full intended purpose with out any 3rd party add-ons. The same with a toaster, I can buy a toaster and make toast without adding to or modifying the machine.
A modern computer system, however, is nearly worthless until you start adding to it. Let's, for the moment, ignore hardware failure as being beyond the scope of software warranty. If I buy a system where the only installed software is MS Windows (and I mean *only* software, no games, no office/productivity, no peripheral hardware beyond standard keyboard, mouse and monitor, etc.) then there's not a lot of ways for it to break at a software level. Now let's start adding things. If my video driver conflicts with my antivirus software, who is to blame? Both work at a level close to the hardware to do their jobs and both have been tested to work as intended with the target operating system. And as luck would have it, they were both released nearly simultaneously so there was no opportunity for either vendor to test against the other's current product.
If we want to get into more industrial or life or death situations where computers are used, let me just say that if you trust human life or millions of dollars of equipment to the flawless operation of general purpose hardware running a general purpose, multitasking operating system then you're an idiot. The engine management and safety systems in a modern car are controlled by purpose built electronics running custom built software. Automated production equipment generally uses PLC type systems that been thoroughly tested for tolerances and MTBF rates.
Really what are we hoping to accomplish with this legislation? Windows, MacOS and Linux are all very stable (Vista's Task Manager is reporting 240 hours for my current uptime) barring hardware failure (which is easy for the lay person to blame on the OS since the OS is what tells us something went wrong) or applications that don't play nice with each other. Applications that corrupt data usually don't make it out of testing in that state and when they do it's usually fixed quickly if the company that made it wants to continue to do business. Open source software is perpetually beta since it is developed by the community and simply made available to anyone who thinks that it might be useful.
Pick up the "Pocket Ref" by Sequoia Publishing. It has everything from CPR instructions to structural material strengths. I picked mine up at a college book store but I'm sure I've seen them at Powell's Technical as well.
Usually LCD burn in can be exorcised out with a simple rotating video of solid red, green, blue, black, magenta, yellow, cyan and white at a frame rate of about 10-20 fps. Run that overnight and it will often fix persistent images and occasionally stuck pixels.
Depends on the web server you're connecting to, what it's uplink speed is, how much traffic it's dealing with and how many other sites are sharing a common line.
There are a lot of potential bottlenecks that can affect the speed of the site that you're downloading from.
Exactly, TVs are designed to work reliably with common living room electronics such as the $30 DVD players from WalMart, HTPCs are a niche market by comparison. Most consumer video electronics and DVD titles are going to assume some overscan since that was perfectly normal with NTSC video. Many TVs will assume that whatever is feeding it will assume that there will be overscan so they'll just play along with it to make sure that there's no distracting black borders at any of the edges of the screen. Unexplained black borders will make Joe Consumer call for a refund a lot faster than a few lines of resolution lost to overscan.
I agree that TV manufacturers should at least have a menu option to play strictly to standards if they aren't able to detect what's coming in correctly. Unfortunately the market for consumer electronics is competitive and saving a few dollars per unit adds up to millions of dollars at the end of the quarter.
TVs and computer displays are 99% similar to each other in technology, components and appearance. The difference is in the intended application. To conjure up the obligatory car analogy, a Toyota Corolla and a Lotus Exige share the same 1.8L 2ZZ-GE engine but they're made for completely different markets and purposes.
In short, if you're going to hook up to a HTPC, do some research first to make sure that either your video card or your TV can bend enough in the right direction to make it work. And hold on to your receipts, since sometimes trial and error is the only way to do research.
The anonymous poster that you're responding to was actually the one to introduce the word "quickly" to the discussion.
That being said, I think the method proposed at the end of the article is flawed in that the algorithm is reversible and facing the wrong direction.
Assuming that the website in question only has access to the message information passed to the GUI window of the browser by the OS, (I'm sure as hell never installing a browser with ring 0 access to my system) it would be fairly trivial to produce an AI algorithm to replicate that behavior. A few hard coded target parameters and a bit of randomization would sufficiently emulate a human based on gathered metrics of a small sample, possibly as small as just one, human subjects. And don't forget that spammers don't need anywhere near a %100 success rate to be viable.
The checking process, on the other hand, would require a very large, heterogeneous sample of human subjects to determine the limits, distribution, and correlations of tested metrics. A team of statisticians and psychologists would be required to analyze the data so that it can be converted into a working algorithm by software engineers. That's an enormous amount of man hours just to produce the system. Assuming, however, that the system is produced in spite of it's high development cost, it would still be computationally expensive to analyze each potential human to see if it's generating a valid combination of metrics.
Think of it this way, It's trivial for me to write a PHP script to quickly generate valid XML markup to send to a remote system. Parsing a string of potential XML on the other side, however, is more computationally intensive and the algorithms to do it are more complex, especially if you consider the complexity of any prebuilt parsing tools, such as regular expression tools, as being part of the overall algorithm complexity. While, granted, a parser can be reasonably expected to run in linear time, the script to produce XML can be reduced to constant time if optimized for a specific purpose.
According to Acer this laptop ships with 1GB from the factory. And according to NewEgg upgrading to 2GB would be about $9.99 plus $2.99 shipping or going to 4GB would be just under $40.00. How the hell did she spend $157.40 on an upgrade that maxes out at $40 in parts and $30 in labor?
Vista does run reasonably with 872MB available to it as long as you stick to basic applications. OpenOffice, Firefox, Windows Media Player and etc. all run well enough. Crysis, Fallout 3, Photoshop CS4 and Visual Studio will run like dogs, if at all.
Vista capable is just like a DOT highway safety rating, just because your Kia is roadworthy doesn't mean that it will compete with a BMW for either performance or luxury.
We're talking about a leaking faucet next to the font of data that Facebook delivers.
It's interesting that they can quantify the amount of data they're receiving in GET requests but I'd suspect that using shorter URLs would still transmit the same number of packets over the internet AND would incur an extra database hit or decompression to translate the *slightly* shorter URL into something meaningful.
Are we really worrying about byte level optimizations here?
What if programming is what he actually wants to do? Some people actually choose a profession because they want to do it, not because it has the highest yield of dollars per effort. And some people don't get an opportunity to actually pursue such a career until a little later in life. Sometimes it's our own fault for mistakes that we didn't know we were making at the time. And sometimes it's just a matter of life happening and adjusting our priorities for us.
Alright, how about this. With no central organization tying the survivors of the 13 colonies together and therefore no enforcement of the "no tech" rule, some groups did hold on to whatever technology they could. Those groups begin fighting each other in an attempt to claim each other's tech hoard. The fighting expends ammo and destroys equipment that cannot be replaced and they end up with a bunch of high tech lawn ornaments, no food reserves, no agriculture and a harsh winter coming in a geographical area chosen for the best defensive position rather than the best ability to sustain life. The few remaining survivors abandon camp and attempt to migrate to warmer climates. The women and children die along the way because they aren't strong enough to compete with the men for food. The men leave no descendants.
149,997 years later robots learn to dance, badly.
In the end we saw a fleet of ships fly into Sol. We didn't see where the generators, small arms, medical supplies or food rations went. The scenario I described above could have played out or they could have made a plan to use what dying tech they had left to help them survive long enough to adapt to this new world.
To me it feels like you're looking for someone to tell you that Clarisse McClellan is still alive at the end of the story. Personally, I think Moore ended things the way he did so that he wouldn't be called back in a few years to make BSG: The Next Generation. We don't know how much, if any, technology they held on to. We don't know that Gaius didn't carve everything he knew about mathematics and science on some cave wall just so that a passing glacier could wipe it clean again. All we know is that it takes a little over 150,000 years to get back to the level of tech the series started with and that little Hera survives long enough to have children of her own.
What about losing everyone you know? Family, friends, coworkers, that cute girl that serves you coffee all gone. The only people around you are a random assortment of strangers that just happened to be at a particular museum opening with you.
Yeah the story had serendipitous back stories with the survivors. But that's expected since the story was mainly told from the setting of Galactica where the people there had already been serving together for some time.
I'd have modded you up if I hadn't already posted a comment on this page.
I agree. The human race went from tens of billions to tens of thousands overnight. That's trauma on a scale beyond what we can naturally process. That's 99.9998% of all human life gone in the time it takes to get a movie from Netflix. That's the entire US population fitting into a high school gym with room to set up cots. They were ready to send every last bit of technology into the nearest star.
The ending is just wrapping the series up for a respectful burial. Moore is telling us that this is where the story ends. No BSG: The Next Generation, no dredging up the story line 10-20 years from now and just picking up where things left off. They tied up the loose ends that they could and severed the rest.
Did you complain about all the lack of loose ends at the end of Harry Potter 7?
Voyager had replicators. Basically the ability to convert just about anything into just about anything else.
Yes, replication was a cop out. So was almost every other piece of tech in the ST franchise. In the end, it doesn't matter. Sci-fi uses nonexistant technology to explore the nature of humanity under novel circumstances.
BSG didn't spend too much time mucking about with the implementation details of it's technology; FTL was never explained in principle beyond saying that something spins, the range limit is different on different ships and jumping a raptor from inside a battlestar is a bad thing. Star Trek spent a ridiculous amount of time explaining technology; nearly every other episode involved either a presentation in the conference room or a lecture in the holodeck on some new particle or technology that would some how save the day in that episode.
BSG tried to tell the story of a civilization that was reduced from tens of billions to tens of thousands overnight. Star Trek doesn't play with the large scale risks like that. No matter how an episode starts, you know that the Borg won't wipe out the earth and the Voyager will limp off to some nebula, repair itself and be on it's way again. On any given episode of BSG, there was a very real chance that the writers would wipe out a double digit percentage of the entire human race, kill or maim a lead character or something else morbid or gruesome.
I liked both BSG and Voyager for different reasons. BSG took only two sci-fi leaps, FTL and AI. From there they just worked on the characters until all the lead roles became someone different at the end than they were at the beginning. Star Trek was more of a geek thing in that you could pick apart each episode and say that they're using the wrong warp field equation or that ancillary coupler to the secondary plasma buffer on deck 7 was installed backwards in episode 42.
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Addendum:
Some companies are very accepting of student usage. Autodesk (i.e. AutoCAD) offers their software for free for personal or educational use. Microsoft offers Express Edition versions of their Visual Studio applications for free for personal or educational use. VMWare offers their products for free to educational institutions, though students do still need to purchase a license for use on their personal systems.
As a note on the MS Express Edition products. Yes they are stripped down versions of the full professional versions but someone who uses VS C# Express can still learn the language well enough to not make an ass of themselves when they go out to interview. Someone who bought Photoshop Elements because they couldn't afford the academic price for just Photoshop ($299) isn't going to be able to say the same.
Adobe products are a poor example of academic discounts because the academic price for their products is still steep even if it does look good compared to the insane retail price. And while it's all well and good that when your son lands a job as a graphic artist (or whatever he's going for) his company might pay for his tools, he still needs to be able to pass an interview process where he'll be competing with other people that do have this software installed at home (legitimately or otherwise).
Your situation is slightly different from what I was talking about (and had to go through myself) where the student is no longer living at home and has to be able to budget rent, utilities, food, transportation, tuition, books and tools on a part-time income while only qualifying for enough financial aid to pay for most of their tuition. I have faith that since your son is still living at home and that you are claiming him as a dependent in lieu of charging him rent he was able to afford the $449 to $999 (after educational discount) to pick up a CS4 suite package that contains the software he needs.
I've never used adblock or similar. I just get that little checkbox on the /. frontpage allowing me to turn ads off.
Not counting FOSS offerings, many of the cheaper alternatives are of such low quality that they're not worth installing at any price. I'm talking about application crashes, unnecessary drivers that won't install on x64 operating systems, hijacking system functions like auto-insert detection, etc. And some software such as Windows just simply doesn't have cheap alternatives that will function appropriately for consumers. And before you say that Linux is a viable alternative to Windows, I want you to drive to Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy and tell me how many software boxes there mention Linux on the back.
This is why I wrote the last paragraph in my above post. People that can't afford a Cadillac will usually either buy a Chevy or ride the bus, they won't risk life and limb in a Tata or Yugo. Unfortunately, software vendors seem to not understand how to strip a Caddy down to a Chevy. The stripped down versions are missing the left headlight, the windows are made of plastic tarp and the passenger door is welded shut.
Maybe I should turn ads back on to get a laugh or two. Out of curiosity, was it just a karma threshold that I crossed to get the option to turn ads off or is it some sort of seniority thing?
That and Zimbabwe has a per-capita income of about $200 USD per year. By the time someone there saves up for Vista, the Duke Nukem trademarks will have entered the public domain and DNF will go gold as an open source project.
A pirated copy is not necessarily a lost sale. If you look at the highest rate list compared to the lowest rate list for countries you'll see that the countries with the highest rates of piracy generally have the lowest per capita GDP. This shows a link between ability to pay for software and actually paying for it.
To put a face on this, the recent college grad with a job at 7-11 and $50k in student loan debt is going to need tools to make the money needed to buy tools.
Another factor is the fact that the BSA still counts an install of Adobe's $2500 Master Suite on Mom's computer as being a lost sale. Trust me when I say that Mom only has that because she thought it was neat to paste pictures of her and Dad standing on top of the Eiffel tower. She does not use it commercially and therefore cannot justify spending $2500 on an idle amusement. If Adobe managed to make a DRM scheme that couldn't be cracked they still wouldn't get a sale from her. Instead she'd just go back to scissors and rubber cement.
In fact according to the BSA PDF.
Consumers generally install more software on their
computers, both new and old, than businesses. Hence,
while consumers account for 45 percent of PCs shipped,
they account for 55 percent of PC software deployed.
This fits well with the idea that consumers are installing professional software that is never used commercially.
Cost and ability to pay are the biggest factors of piracy. The BSA needs to segregate their report into two sections for consumer piracy and commercial piracy. Consumer piracy is less likely to be a lost sale than commercial piracy.
Furthermore, companies whose professional software packages may have consumer appeal might want to try performing a trial where they make the latest version of their software package available for free as a beta or time limited trial with semi-anonymous usage tracking to figure out exactly what patterns distinguish a professional user from someone just screwing around. This would allow the company to use this data to offer a mostly functional 'Home' version for dirt cheap that has just the right features disabled to make sure that professional users won't ever touch it. A home user of Photoshop, for example, will probably never work with 100MB images whereas a professional designing a poster or magazine spread will. Careful analysis and planning will allow these companies to actually make a few extra sales off of lower budget consumers without cutting into their customer base for professional users.
Nobody said anything about overclocking. And yes, underclocking does have limits imposed by the system's processor and BIOS. AMD and Intel already have features on all their product lines to allow for dynamic clock adjustments to reduce power consumption. AMD's cool and quiet feature will even lower the CPU voltage at lower clock frequencies to further reduce power consumption.
These guys aren't talking about new processor designs (though I'm sure some engineers at AMD and Intel read /. and will find this research), they're looking for ways to better implement the power saving features that are already present in modern CPUs.
I'm seeing too many people try to compare software with physical goods such as cars and toasters. There are numerous, irreconcilable differences between the two realms that make a direct comparison anything but straight forward. Furthermore, many of you seem to have some inflated view of what merchantability and suitability mean for physical goods.
For starters, physical goods warranties and liabilities have limits. If I buy a truck from Ford, GMC or Dodge, it will have a certain rating for load capacity and towing capacity. If I exceed those ratings and something bad happens, up to and including injury or loss of life, it's my fault. Other physical goods, such as toasters, also have limits as to what situations they will be designed and tested for. If I try to make french toast using a slot load toaster and something bad happens, up to and including injury or loss of life, it's my fault. In one case the manufacturer knows that somebody out there will try something that they know has a high likelihood of causing known failures (i.e. if you try to tow too heavy of a load with your truck you run the risk of overheating your brakes and causing an accident) and in the other case we have to come to terms with the fact that idiots will find a way to break shit no matter how many warning labels you put on it.
Now about those irreconcilable differences between software and hard goods. With hard goods, your warranty goes out the window the moment you modify it in any way that has not been approved by the manufacturer. That is completely reasonable because I can buy a car and drive it completely as is and it will serve its full intended purpose with out any 3rd party add-ons. The same with a toaster, I can buy a toaster and make toast without adding to or modifying the machine.
A modern computer system, however, is nearly worthless until you start adding to it. Let's, for the moment, ignore hardware failure as being beyond the scope of software warranty. If I buy a system where the only installed software is MS Windows (and I mean *only* software, no games, no office/productivity, no peripheral hardware beyond standard keyboard, mouse and monitor, etc.) then there's not a lot of ways for it to break at a software level. Now let's start adding things. If my video driver conflicts with my antivirus software, who is to blame? Both work at a level close to the hardware to do their jobs and both have been tested to work as intended with the target operating system. And as luck would have it, they were both released nearly simultaneously so there was no opportunity for either vendor to test against the other's current product.
If we want to get into more industrial or life or death situations where computers are used, let me just say that if you trust human life or millions of dollars of equipment to the flawless operation of general purpose hardware running a general purpose, multitasking operating system then you're an idiot. The engine management and safety systems in a modern car are controlled by purpose built electronics running custom built software. Automated production equipment generally uses PLC type systems that been thoroughly tested for tolerances and MTBF rates.
Really what are we hoping to accomplish with this legislation? Windows, MacOS and Linux are all very stable (Vista's Task Manager is reporting 240 hours for my current uptime) barring hardware failure (which is easy for the lay person to blame on the OS since the OS is what tells us something went wrong) or applications that don't play nice with each other. Applications that corrupt data usually don't make it out of testing in that state and when they do it's usually fixed quickly if the company that made it wants to continue to do business. Open source software is perpetually beta since it is developed by the community and simply made available to anyone who thinks that it might be useful.
Pick up the "Pocket Ref" by Sequoia Publishing. It has everything from CPR instructions to structural material strengths. I picked mine up at a college book store but I'm sure I've seen them at Powell's Technical as well.
Sorry man. Paper tables do still exist.
Usually LCD burn in can be exorcised out with a simple rotating video of solid red, green, blue, black, magenta, yellow, cyan and white at a frame rate of about 10-20 fps. Run that overnight and it will often fix persistent images and occasionally stuck pixels.
Depends on the web server you're connecting to, what it's uplink speed is, how much traffic it's dealing with and how many other sites are sharing a common line.
There are a lot of potential bottlenecks that can affect the speed of the site that you're downloading from.
Exactly, TVs are designed to work reliably with common living room electronics such as the $30 DVD players from WalMart, HTPCs are a niche market by comparison. Most consumer video electronics and DVD titles are going to assume some overscan since that was perfectly normal with NTSC video. Many TVs will assume that whatever is feeding it will assume that there will be overscan so they'll just play along with it to make sure that there's no distracting black borders at any of the edges of the screen. Unexplained black borders will make Joe Consumer call for a refund a lot faster than a few lines of resolution lost to overscan.
I agree that TV manufacturers should at least have a menu option to play strictly to standards if they aren't able to detect what's coming in correctly. Unfortunately the market for consumer electronics is competitive and saving a few dollars per unit adds up to millions of dollars at the end of the quarter.
TVs and computer displays are 99% similar to each other in technology, components and appearance. The difference is in the intended application. To conjure up the obligatory car analogy, a Toyota Corolla and a Lotus Exige share the same 1.8L 2ZZ-GE engine but they're made for completely different markets and purposes.
In short, if you're going to hook up to a HTPC, do some research first to make sure that either your video card or your TV can bend enough in the right direction to make it work. And hold on to your receipts, since sometimes trial and error is the only way to do research.
The anonymous poster that you're responding to was actually the one to introduce the word "quickly" to the discussion.
That being said, I think the method proposed at the end of the article is flawed in that the algorithm is reversible and facing the wrong direction.
Assuming that the website in question only has access to the message information passed to the GUI window of the browser by the OS, (I'm sure as hell never installing a browser with ring 0 access to my system) it would be fairly trivial to produce an AI algorithm to replicate that behavior. A few hard coded target parameters and a bit of randomization would sufficiently emulate a human based on gathered metrics of a small sample, possibly as small as just one, human subjects. And don't forget that spammers don't need anywhere near a %100 success rate to be viable.
The checking process, on the other hand, would require a very large, heterogeneous sample of human subjects to determine the limits, distribution, and correlations of tested metrics. A team of statisticians and psychologists would be required to analyze the data so that it can be converted into a working algorithm by software engineers. That's an enormous amount of man hours just to produce the system. Assuming, however, that the system is produced in spite of it's high development cost, it would still be computationally expensive to analyze each potential human to see if it's generating a valid combination of metrics.
Think of it this way, It's trivial for me to write a PHP script to quickly generate valid XML markup to send to a remote system. Parsing a string of potential XML on the other side, however, is more computationally intensive and the algorithms to do it are more complex, especially if you consider the complexity of any prebuilt parsing tools, such as regular expression tools, as being part of the overall algorithm complexity. While, granted, a parser can be reasonably expected to run in linear time, the script to produce XML can be reduced to constant time if optimized for a specific purpose.
According to Acer this laptop ships with 1GB from the factory. And according to NewEgg upgrading to 2GB would be about $9.99 plus $2.99 shipping or going to 4GB would be just under $40.00. How the hell did she spend $157.40 on an upgrade that maxes out at $40 in parts and $30 in labor?
Vista does run reasonably with 872MB available to it as long as you stick to basic applications. OpenOffice, Firefox, Windows Media Player and etc. all run well enough. Crysis, Fallout 3, Photoshop CS4 and Visual Studio will run like dogs, if at all.
Vista capable is just like a DOT highway safety rating, just because your Kia is roadworthy doesn't mean that it will compete with a BMW for either performance or luxury.
We're talking about a leaking faucet next to the font of data that Facebook delivers.
It's interesting that they can quantify the amount of data they're receiving in GET requests but I'd suspect that using shorter URLs would still transmit the same number of packets over the internet AND would incur an extra database hit or decompression to translate the *slightly* shorter URL into something meaningful.
Are we really worrying about byte level optimizations here?
What if programming is what he actually wants to do? Some people actually choose a profession because they want to do it, not because it has the highest yield of dollars per effort. And some people don't get an opportunity to actually pursue such a career until a little later in life. Sometimes it's our own fault for mistakes that we didn't know we were making at the time. And sometimes it's just a matter of life happening and adjusting our priorities for us.
Alright, how about this.
With no central organization tying the survivors of the 13 colonies together and therefore no enforcement of the "no tech" rule, some groups did hold on to whatever technology they could. Those groups begin fighting each other in an attempt to claim each other's tech hoard. The fighting expends ammo and destroys equipment that cannot be replaced and they end up with a bunch of high tech lawn ornaments, no food reserves, no agriculture and a harsh winter coming in a geographical area chosen for the best defensive position rather than the best ability to sustain life. The few remaining survivors abandon camp and attempt to migrate to warmer climates. The women and children die along the way because they aren't strong enough to compete with the men for food. The men leave no descendants.
149,997 years later robots learn to dance, badly.
In the end we saw a fleet of ships fly into Sol. We didn't see where the generators, small arms, medical supplies or food rations went. The scenario I described above could have played out or they could have made a plan to use what dying tech they had left to help them survive long enough to adapt to this new world.
To me it feels like you're looking for someone to tell you that Clarisse McClellan is still alive at the end of the story. Personally, I think Moore ended things the way he did so that he wouldn't be called back in a few years to make BSG: The Next Generation. We don't know how much, if any, technology they held on to. We don't know that Gaius didn't carve everything he knew about mathematics and science on some cave wall just so that a passing glacier could wipe it clean again. All we know is that it takes a little over 150,000 years to get back to the level of tech the series started with and that little Hera survives long enough to have children of her own.
What about losing everyone you know? Family, friends, coworkers, that cute girl that serves you coffee all gone. The only people around you are a random assortment of strangers that just happened to be at a particular museum opening with you.
Yeah the story had serendipitous back stories with the survivors. But that's expected since the story was mainly told from the setting of Galactica where the people there had already been serving together for some time.
I'd have modded you up if I hadn't already posted a comment on this page.
I agree. The human race went from tens of billions to tens of thousands overnight. That's trauma on a scale beyond what we can naturally process. That's 99.9998% of all human life gone in the time it takes to get a movie from Netflix. That's the entire US population fitting into a high school gym with room to set up cots. They were ready to send every last bit of technology into the nearest star.
The ending is just wrapping the series up for a respectful burial. Moore is telling us that this is where the story ends. No BSG: The Next Generation, no dredging up the story line 10-20 years from now and just picking up where things left off. They tied up the loose ends that they could and severed the rest.
Did you complain about all the lack of loose ends at the end of Harry Potter 7?
Voyager had replicators. Basically the ability to convert just about anything into just about anything else.
Yes, replication was a cop out. So was almost every other piece of tech in the ST franchise. In the end, it doesn't matter. Sci-fi uses nonexistant technology to explore the nature of humanity under novel circumstances.
BSG didn't spend too much time mucking about with the implementation details of it's technology; FTL was never explained in principle beyond saying that something spins, the range limit is different on different ships and jumping a raptor from inside a battlestar is a bad thing. Star Trek spent a ridiculous amount of time explaining technology; nearly every other episode involved either a presentation in the conference room or a lecture in the holodeck on some new particle or technology that would some how save the day in that episode.
BSG tried to tell the story of a civilization that was reduced from tens of billions to tens of thousands overnight. Star Trek doesn't play with the large scale risks like that. No matter how an episode starts, you know that the Borg won't wipe out the earth and the Voyager will limp off to some nebula, repair itself and be on it's way again. On any given episode of BSG, there was a very real chance that the writers would wipe out a double digit percentage of the entire human race, kill or maim a lead character or something else morbid or gruesome.
I liked both BSG and Voyager for different reasons. BSG took only two sci-fi leaps, FTL and AI. From there they just worked on the characters until all the lead roles became someone different at the end than they were at the beginning. Star Trek was more of a geek thing in that you could pick apart each episode and say that they're using the wrong warp field equation or that ancillary coupler to the secondary plasma buffer on deck 7 was installed backwards in episode 42.
So was I
Everquest II:
Frogloks
Ratonga
Fae/Arasai