1. Is C:\ any worse than/dev/sda1 ? OSX still sees devices as files as per its *NIX heritage. Personally I like the idea of discrete drive letters as opposed to the mount point scheme since I like to be able to walk up to any computer that I'm working on and immediately know what physical disk something is on and whether it will be there or not if I unplug said disk and move it to another machine.
2. A sibling post covered this already but I'll reiterate. The grey characters are just the verbose ramblings of the BIOS initialization. Basically the machine has to detect and initialize vital componenents prior to using them. On a PC this means first identifying and starting the main processor, then the RAM. After that it can identify the components attached to the PCI/PCI-E busses, find a disk controller and figure out what boot devices are available. From there it goes down its boot order list until it find something that it likes and loads it into memory. At this point, control is handed over to the CPU and the BIOS walks away saying "call me if you need me again." All of this can be hidden behind a splash screen and many current BIOSes do just that. I would argue to say that this particular aestetic issue has already found its balancing point in that most box systems (Dell, Compaq/HP, etc.) use a spash screen since their users don't want to be bombarded with information that they don't understand or care about, while mainboards sold as separate components can go either way since people who build their own systems often need that information to make sure everthing is working correctly even before they install or attempt to install an OS.
3. Again a sibling has already covered this but it's late and I must type more. This is really an area where Windows NT has diverged from DOS. In DOS, every program lived in its own little directory and strayed no further. In Windows 3.x you had the same thing but with the addition of shortcuts in the GUI to start the programs. In Windows 9x/ME you see the emergence of the registry and the "My Documents" folder which were initially ignored as being mere suggestions but eventually you started seeing 3rd party developers use them correctly. Windows NT 4.0 was also at the mercy of application developers but made a much stronger case by using the whole different logon=different user=different files idea. We are currently in Windows 5.x (I use 5.2.3790) and nearly all major software developers know what the registry is and how to use it as well as why it's important to read system variables to figure out where the user home directories are and whether to use \Program Files\ or \Program Files(x86)\. Technically any developer can still cruise the hard disk and dump its bits and pieces in C:\foobar\ but very few do this anymore and the few that do either have some compelling reason to do so or are just amateurish homebrew titles that figure "best practices" lists as being constraints for other programmers to follow.
4. Modern operating systems are complex. OSX still has thousands of files that seem full of strange gibberish to the lay person. Just pop open the command line and "ls -R/etc". Personally, I also see this as being an area with room for improvement. If Daemon tools can mount an ISO as a virtual drive and VMware/VirtualPC can create virtual disks as files on the host OS, why can't the OS use a virtual file system to hold its components in one nice solid package? Such a thing is possible and may show up in future operating systems but there may be many issues with performance, maintainability and stability that stand in the way. Furthermore, the current system works well enough that there isn't really a push to consolidate the thousands upon thousands of.dll.cfg.ini files that reside in the directories where you shouldn't be playing around in unless you know what you're doing.
From my best reconing, the drive letter convention is about the only thing in Windows XP th
Consumables, in the same sense as detergents and cheap ball-point pens, have the characteristic of being replaceable by a similarly functioning competitor. Some forms of software nearly meet this model; examples of such include office/productivity software, file compression utilities, image/artwork editors, compilers, webbrowsers and telecommunications software. This analogy is not broken by the mere fact that customers often prefer one brand or product line to another, such as prefering AutoCAD to RealCAD, since the analog to this exists in consumables as well, such as prefering Tide to All.
Games, however, are an entertainment medium, and therefore different rules apply. Games, like movies, books and music, are charicteristcally unique from one another. For example, Harry Potter is a different experience than Lord of the Rings; even though both may share some traits, neither is a direct substitute for the other in that after experiencing one, the other is still a novel experience.
As for the notion that the game is disposable, some may view a game as being the same sort of purchase as a movie ticket in that you pay your money, sit down and enjoy it for however long it runs and then that's the end of it. On the other hand, some may view it as being more along the lines of purchasing a movie on VHS/DVD/HD-Ray where you may view it just a couple times or you may view it a hundred times.
A better analogy might be in cinemas that are required to upgrade their sound systems in order to be allowed to open with the newest action titles but still have the ability to play titles based on older formats. You, as a consumer may be required to upgrade to a newer version of Windows/DirectX in order to play Half-Life 4 but you will still be able to play the older Half-Life 2 on your WinXP/DirectX9.0c machine. This is no different from when you had to upgrade from WinME to WinXP in order to play Half-Life 2.
Another analogy to consider since you seem to like washing machines: If Whirlpool develops a better suspension system for their 9300 Duet washing machine than they had on their 9150 (the 9300 is this year's replacement for the 9150), should they be required to support the customers that purchased a 9150 just last year by offering a free upgrade of the drum suspension? Should GM offer a free upgrade for all '06 Corvettes to give them the same fuel injection system that's in the '07s? Should Microsoft port new technology to an older operating system if there is no positive return on investment in doing so? A good answer to the above three is "No."
But for the argument of responsibility to consumers I'm going to offer three examples that would be well answered with a "Yes." If the 9150 destroyed its transmission belts on a monthly basis, should Whirlpool recall the units and address the issue? If the '06 Corvette was shown to be likely to snap a tie rod connector on hard corners, should GM issue a recall to replace that mechanism? If a new exploit was discovered that allowed a malicious web site to wipe your hard drive, should Microsoft release a patch to fix the problem?
Also, please remember that, in software, backwards compatability implies that you can run Office 6 on Vista but you can't run Office 11 on Win95.
Based on their numbers. If 1000 employees can make 800,000 boards per month and each employee averages $30,000 per year (a salary point that would attract many US production workers) then the cost of labor per board is about $3.13 each.
While I realize that the base salary is not the same as the total cost of compensation, the situation is nowhere near as dire as even your lower estimate of $1000 per board. If you were to figure %90 labor cost in the $1000 estimate (since we are talking purely about the work conditions at ECS and not the component suppliers that they use), that would translate to $8.6 million per year per employee if current production levels were maintained.
In Montana you can get your full license at 15. At the time that I got my license, any speed below 100mph was considered "reasonable and prudent" on open highways in that state as well. Just imagine me slowing my 15 y/o butt down to 90 to pass a highway patrolman and exchanging a friendly wave as I cruise by.
Mucking about with things that are new or unfamiliar to you may have deleterious unintended side effects on your system. The same mucking about may also lead you to learn a few new tricks. I personally encourage trying new things but I would also like to strongly recommend that if you are unsure of yourself, practice on a system that is not relied upon for work or school. Missing deadlines can be bad; losing a nearly complete master's thesis can cause you to do things that will land you in jail. By contrast, toasting the install on a completely spare system may just give you an excuse to try the latest Linux/BSD/Solaris install that you've been itching to play with.
With that said.
A google search for "TCPIP.SYS patch" will turn up a little information on this.
The tool I used to change mine was nLite, which allowed me to make the changes to my install media prior to performing a fresh install. The desired setting in this program is in the 'Patches' area.
Another tool is available from a small German website that claims to allow you to change the settings without requireing a complete re-install. I have not tried this tool myself yet (since when I did my last install, this tool did not support x64) so I would recommend that you manually create a backup of your tcpip.sys file and set a windows restore point before you test it.
As for modifying your torrent client. I would recommend trying BitComet and playing with the connection settings paying particular attention to the effects of throttling the Global Upload rate, Max connections per task and max half-open connection settings. Other clients may have similar settings but you'll have to find those for yourself.
Hopefully this information was helpful and does not toast your system.
There's more to your connection than just bandwidth.
I primarily run on Win XP x64 (a.k.a. Win 2003 - Pretty Version) with network drivers modified to allow 500 "half-open" TCP/IP connections as opposed to the default value of 10. When using a bittorent client, you are typically attempting to connect to dozens of other computers while a couple dozen more are trying to connect with you at the same time. With all these simultaneous request you will typically get a few that stall in a half-open state. When all of your half-open slots are filled with stalled connections, you will no longer be able to establish any new connections until those first stalled connections formally time out and get out of the way. While you are stalled up with bad connections, you will fill up other peoples queues with stalled connections. Meanwhile Firefox is trying to be heard in this angry mess of stalled connections and is lucky to get a request out and even luckier to get any info back.
Bittorent clients running with default settings can be hell on your connection. However if both the O/S and client are tweaked a little you can get some amazing results. I have seen as much as 900 KByte/s down on my 8Mbit/768Kbit connection. Under typical circumstances, however, I usually see only 300-400 KByte/s for a well seeded transfer. Anything below 100 I consider to be poor if it is the only transfer running.
On an install that is running nothing but defaults for both the OS and the Bittorrent application, 100-150 is a good connection.
High bandwidth alone is great for well behaved network traffic. However, internet traffic is rarely well behaved and many network implimentations do not default to using very intelligent or efficient strategies for handling packets and requests.
Two kids with guns having a psychotic episode in a school may kill dozens of young people and then turn the guns on themselves.
A national leader with a military arsenal at his disposal and an agenda to push may kill hundreds of thousands of children, adults and elderly and then lie about their reasoning in a press release.
The first one is just suicide engineered so that they can take out a few of their aggressors with them. The second is homicide engineered so that the people making the decisions will, at worst, walk away free or, at best, be praised as heros.
If they also make a force feedback controler for the PS3 then we may see an online game where one player has a motion sensing controler that feeds into the force feedback controler.
Might be good for strengthening long distance relationships.
Have you tried a more conventional headset working through your sound card? I use a $15.00 Logitech headset with the mic plugged into my Audigy2 ZS and the speakers plugged into my mainboard audio out. Sounds perfect except for the eerie silence detection when nobody is speaking.
Re:Things are shrinking at a fast pace...
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I'm still waiting for a phone that has a decent voice chat feature.
In the US. 14 Million new cars are sold annually. 455 Million galons of oil are used daily.(for transportaion purposes)
If the demand is there, somebody, somewhere will find a way to fill the production needs. We did for oil and we can do the same for other commodities.
As for disposal, the batteries could be striped for heavy metals and recycled. Fluids or pastes within the batteries can be purified and reconstituted. Yes we will still be dumping tons of unsalvagable material into the ground but currently we are doing the same with the air. The key difference being that these materials are only being used to store energy, not create it.
You could make a battery from tin, copper and lemon juice if you so choose. The ability to choose what materials to use allows us to search for options that are effective to use while at the same time having relatively benign effects on the environment. You cannot make gasoline out of anything other than oil. Granted you can use vegetable oil but producing that consumes more input energy than it releases as output energy, even moreso if you consider the required sunlight.
Energy production can come from solar, wind, hydroelectric or tidal sources. Hell find a river you don't like very much and put a dam in it. While that reservoir is filling, put a dam below it. Repeat as necessary or until you run out of room.
The point isn't so much that oil is dirty, it's that oil is finite whereas sunlight, the rotation of the moon and the spin of the earth are, for our purposes, not.
Doesn't quite do the enthusiast thing for me. But who knows, it could be the next Mini.
Just gotta get used to the idea that all of your stability comes from having a half ton of batteries beneath your seat. Just don't put a luggage rack on there.
You probably wouldn't have too many batteries in the junkyard. If the battery is still valuable then it will most likely be pulled by the original owner and turned in for cash/credit at the "gas" stations. If it is still in the car when it gets to the junkyard, then the junkyard will pull the battery and buy it from the original owner (for less than how much they'll get by selling it back to the battery exchange stations). If the original owner isn't alive enough to demand payment for the batteries, the junkyard will pull it, sell it, contact a lawyer and hope that the parties settling the original owners estate don't think about it. Batteries that are physically damaged simply become hazardous waste and will be disposed of as such or sent back to the manufacturer to extract raw materials.
And now you say "Okay, so they don't get the bad batteries from a junkyard. So what?" If there is a mechanism to prevent exchange batteries from being charged at home (those evil bastards) then there really aren't that many ways for a battery to go bad while in the posession of the end user such that the end user would be liable for the replacement cost. Built in monitoring equipment integrated into the battery itself would be able to identify such conditions (possibilities include, but are not limited to, tampering, over current and extended shelf time) and they would be dealt with by refusing or prorating the credit received for turning in the battery. Most battery wear would occur simply as a function of normal use and would be ammortized by the companies doing the battery exchange service.
The built in monitoring equipment would most likely include such things as a real time clock, a KVAh counter, a permanant ROM encoded identifier and a small bit of flash RAM to store encrypted keys that would be assigned each time it is charged and cross referenced with an online database to prevent the use of black market chargers. The logic for the last bit is simple; if you have a battery rated for 20KVAh and the difference between the current reading of the KVAh counter and the last count that was recorded in the online database is 60KVAh, then you know that it was charged illegaly. While at the charging station, the permanant identifier will be released by the battery and the temporary key will be looked up and used as an access password for the battery, this will unlock the ability to receive a charge; and once charged the battery will be assigned a new temporary key for next time. Any tampering with the battery or brute force key guessing will cause the temporary key to be lost and will be immediately detectable by the charging station.
Please note, this is only speculation regarding a system that could work. If such vehicles and charging stations were to come into existance, real engineers and systems analysts may be hired to ensure that the system is profitable and tamper proof. If said persons are smarter than those that impliment current DRM systems such as Starforce, CSS and Sony RootKit(tm), then the final product may be more robust and reliable than what I can dump into a Slashdot article during my lunch break. Any persons wishing to take advantage of the benefits of "regenerative braking" will be required to purchase a California DOT approved permanent reserve battery to be installed only by the original manufacturer or a DEQ certified install technician. Please expect between 400 and 600 pages of legislation prior to delivery. Prices do not include sales tax, road tax, vehicle tax, efficiency tax, weight tax or any day of the week tax.
Easy, they charge and test your old one as soon as you leave. Unlike the propane exchange that I initially mentioned or the gas/petro stations that currently reign, electricity is easily "piped" into the stations.
The big problems aren't everyday logistic issues as those tend to work themselves out on their own, they are the initial setup issues. For this system to work there needs to several conditions met.
(1) The cars need to exist in a practical and mass consumable form. Sorry but electric tricycles are not a viable replacement for a minivan or a hatchback. Expecting people to own two vehicles is unrealistic if the combined ownership and operating cost of the less versitile but more efficient vehicle is greater than just the operating cost of the less efficient but more versitile vehicle. This is particularly true if the only advantage that electric vehicle has is fuel efficiency.
(2) The batteries would need to be standardized. If each battery station had to support a different proprietary battery for each major auto manufacturer, it would drive up the initial setup costs for the stations, increase the physical space requirements for the stations to store sufficient inventory of each variation and create a situation where they may not have the variety you need in stock. (2)(a) There may, however, be a reasonable demand for different classes of batteries based on capacity. If done intelligently, a vehicle capable of using one class would also be able to use a battery of a lesser class, albeit with diminished range and/or performance. The key here is that even if your preferred battery is temporarily out of stock, there will still be other options that will allow you to at least gimp your vehicle to the next station.
(3) The stations will need to exist in a ubiquitous form. A 300mi range would cover the daily commute for most people but without ubiquitous battery stations, they would still need to have a gas powered vehicle if they wanted to, say, take a trip to the beach for the weekend or visit grandma Mae in South Dakota. See (1) for why expecting people to have two cars is unrealistic.
The whole thing could be made to work but the initial setup will be a bitch. Large federal subsidies would help things along but unfortunatly we just sent ourselves into a massive deficit in order to fight a war for oil^H^H^H^H^H^H^H on terrorism.
Not really if you think about it. Since every transaction would have a 1:1 swapout. As long as they don't allow people to pawn off batteries for cash, each facility should only see a change in numbers due to normal wear.
There is, of course, the possibility of renting a spare for a long trip but you'd likely be required to return it to the same chain to get your money back.
Sitting around at a filling station for 5 hours while you recharge is not exactly my idea of a fun way to kill an afternoon.
But perhaps there is an alternate route that could be both profitable and benificial to the consumer. Think about all the prefilled propane bottle exchanges that you see in front of supermarkets. You could take that concept and apply it to a precharged lithium battery exchange. Drivers will be able to stop in, yank out their old battery, drop in a new one, pay the cashier at some point and then drive away with a full charge. The company providing this service would be able to adjust pricing to average out the cost of replacing worn out batteries during the life of the unit. Restriction systems could be put into place on exchange batteries to prevent home charging or the car owner could shell out more to get an unrestricted battery (that they won't exchange in) that they can fill at home in their garage.
The system could, I think, be tweaked into working if we can get past the chicken/egg problem required to create it.
Actually I would argue that a gigabyte is still a lot even today.
One GB can hold more than a year worth of typing for most users even with the bloat effects of today's word processors.
One GB can hold about $250US worth of iTunes music or about 16-1/2 hours depending on how you look at it.
One GB can hold over 1000 screen resolution JPEG images. Or if you insist on keeping it at full camera,closeup of nose hairs resolution you can still fit about 500 in there. Typically enough so that if viewed as a slide show you can bore away any unwelcomed guests that wander into your house.
The point is that 1 GB is still a big enough chunk to do something interesting with. For most non-techie users I've met, the majority of their hard drive usage is just the OS and installed applications. For many more, game data is the largest consumer of disk space; largely because the high resolution geometry and texturing that a modern GPU can push requires a lot of data to feed it.
Then you run into people like me and a lot of other/.'ers out there. I have 600GB in a RAID 0 and I'm currently at about 80% full. Throw me 10 TB today and I'll find a way to use it. Cut me down to 10 GB and I'll find a way to make it do something interesting. My Linux programming sandbox computer only has a 20GB disk in it and most of the virtual machines on my main system allocate between 15 and 20 GB.
The definition of "a lot" really depends on who you are and what you do.
For most automatic transmissions, drive or overdrive are typically the best suited selections for snow/ice conditions. The selections indicated by numbers will (A) limit the maximum gear (B) Raise the shift points so that you stay in a lower gear longer( and slam into the next gear with a high revved engine when it does shift) or (C) Both A and B.
Example 1. A 1970's Berg-Warner (Mercedes) 4 speed transmission will have 3 forward selections labeled (D)rive (S)lope and (L)ow. Drive starts in 2nd slides into 3rd at about 10-15 mph and switches to 4th as you start to accellerate to highway speeds. Slope will start in 2nd (unless you floor it to depress the kickdown switch) and stay there until the engine hits about 4k rpm where it will hit 3rd and stay there. Low starts in 1st and will slam 2nd with the engine near redline and stay there. The owner's manual has sensible suggestions for Drive and Slope but the suggested use for Low is creeping through congested traffic; personally I think Low is geared down enough to push congested traffic out of your way.
Example 2. Mid 90's Chrysler (Dodge Intrepid specifically) 4 speed transmission marked (D)rive (3) and (2). Drive starts in 1st and varies the shift points depending on the data gathered from the Throttle Position Sensor; gentle use of the accelerator will provide gentle, early shift points and putting your foot in it will allow the engine to rev higher before slamming into the next gear. The selection of '3' will progress from 1 to 3 with moderately tall shift points and will kick over to 4th if necessary to prevent engine damage; throttle position is disregarded for the purpose of determining shift points, but the shift points are similar to what would be delivered at 50% throttle in Drive. The selection of '2' will start in 1st and shift to 2nd very late but not quite at redline; 3rd and 4th will be used if necessary to prevent engine damage. The shift point from 1st to 2nd in Low is similar to the shift point obtained by going immediately to Wide Open Throttle in a standing start in Drive.
Traction control systems that prevent wheelspin are at best annoying and at worst deadly in snow/ice conditions since wheelspin is a valuable technique in correcting for low traction conditions. With a front wheel drive, oversteering and spinning the tires is an effective way of bringing the front end around to the direction you want to go. Loose packed snow on top of hard packed ice typically requires a bit of initial spin until you have enough momentum to overcome the loose layer.
Having driven RWD, FWD and 4WD in Montana blizzard conditions, I would say the most controllable setup for me has been FWD with a manual transmission. Your milage may vary.
A graphics chip is considerably faster than a general purpose CPU when working with long, highly parallelizable equations. Alot of game physics routines can be expressed in algorithms that have very little to no branch decisions. Since these calculations are going to be the same for many data points in the model, the GPU can potentially run over a dozen of the calculations in parallel.
Basically you can get a 500Mhz chip running 16 complex floating point calculations in true parallel.
Sounds alot like the price that DVD(+-)R media was introduced at. Part of me is cringing from sticer shock but realistically I know that in a few years they'll be in the sub $1.00 range when other manufacturers figure out how to make them.
Think of all the friends, relatives, work accquaintances, etc. that have asked you "Could you show me how to burn a CD?"
Think of all the people that just bought a brand new Dell off of QVC, a large portion of this group lack the knowledge and the desire to gain the knowledge to decrypt a DVD in order to copy it. Basically if they throw something at whatever burning software came with their computer and it doesn't work, then they'll give up. Some of the more intrepid ones will muck with the settings a bit and make a few more coasters but they'll eventually give up too.
Protections that are just strong enough to withstand simple attacks like that are strong enough to prevent several thousand copies from being made.
The unfortunate part is that companies are constantly trying to push the boundries of how strong they can make the protections with the belief that it will help them recover sales from more determined crackers. Looking at protections used on PC software will show us that these protections will either be cracked and the cracks will be distributed or the protection will be so brutal that it causes issues for legitimate users. (i.e. most flavors of SafeDisc can be defeated while the cracker is blindfolded with both hands bound behind his back whereas Starforce has been reported to cause very difficult to repair damage to the system that it infects.)
The protection for DVD content is fairly easy to break in large part because it relies on methods that were availible when the first players hit the market. If DVD makers wanted to roll out a new protection they would have to first introduce it to the companies that manufacture the players and wait for the new machines to hit the level of market saturation where the number of lost sales caused by obsolete machines unable to play the content would be less than the number of sales that would be lost to piracy.
With the new HD protections rolling out, you can see that the companies involved are really trying to push the limits of what consumers will tolerate in terms of lost functionality and convenience if they do not have a 100% trusted digital path from the disk to the screen.
I have trouble believing that anyone is going to be prepared for the backlash that will happen when consumers that upgrade to HDTV and then a few months later add a new HD media player (whatever format) discover that their sets are indistinguishable from current models when playing unprotected content but yet they are noticably worse on protected content. And we know this will happen because the commision salesperson at BestBuy isn't going to say "Hold on to your money, the new models will be out in about six months and they'll work with future movie formats."; instead he's going to tell them that since they're making a long term investment by buying such high quality equipment, that they should really consider getting the extended service plan to protect that investment.
To sum up: Weak protection will prevent casual sharing, while strong DRM is like a little piece of satan in your TV.
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1. Is C:\ any worse than /dev/sda1 ? OSX still sees devices as files as per its *NIX heritage. Personally I like the idea of discrete drive letters as opposed to the mount point scheme since I like to be able to walk up to any computer that I'm working on and immediately know what physical disk something is on and whether it will be there or not if I unplug said disk and move it to another machine.
/etc". Personally, I also see this as being an area with room for improvement. If Daemon tools can mount an ISO as a virtual drive and VMware/VirtualPC can create virtual disks as files on the host OS, why can't the OS use a virtual file system to hold its components in one nice solid package? Such a thing is possible and may show up in future operating systems but there may be many issues with performance, maintainability and stability that stand in the way. Furthermore, the current system works well enough that there isn't really a push to consolidate the thousands upon thousands of .dll .cfg .ini files that reside in the directories where you shouldn't be playing around in unless you know what you're doing.
2. A sibling post covered this already but I'll reiterate. The grey characters are just the verbose ramblings of the BIOS initialization. Basically the machine has to detect and initialize vital componenents prior to using them. On a PC this means first identifying and starting the main processor, then the RAM. After that it can identify the components attached to the PCI/PCI-E busses, find a disk controller and figure out what boot devices are available. From there it goes down its boot order list until it find something that it likes and loads it into memory. At this point, control is handed over to the CPU and the BIOS walks away saying "call me if you need me again." All of this can be hidden behind a splash screen and many current BIOSes do just that. I would argue to say that this particular aestetic issue has already found its balancing point in that most box systems (Dell, Compaq/HP, etc.) use a spash screen since their users don't want to be bombarded with information that they don't understand or care about, while mainboards sold as separate components can go either way since people who build their own systems often need that information to make sure everthing is working correctly even before they install or attempt to install an OS.
3. Again a sibling has already covered this but it's late and I must type more. This is really an area where Windows NT has diverged from DOS. In DOS, every program lived in its own little directory and strayed no further. In Windows 3.x you had the same thing but with the addition of shortcuts in the GUI to start the programs. In Windows 9x/ME you see the emergence of the registry and the "My Documents" folder which were initially ignored as being mere suggestions but eventually you started seeing 3rd party developers use them correctly. Windows NT 4.0 was also at the mercy of application developers but made a much stronger case by using the whole different logon=different user=different files idea. We are currently in Windows 5.x (I use 5.2.3790) and nearly all major software developers know what the registry is and how to use it as well as why it's important to read system variables to figure out where the user home directories are and whether to use \Program Files\ or \Program Files(x86)\. Technically any developer can still cruise the hard disk and dump its bits and pieces in C:\foobar\ but very few do this anymore and the few that do either have some compelling reason to do so or are just amateurish homebrew titles that figure "best practices" lists as being constraints for other programmers to follow.
4. Modern operating systems are complex. OSX still has thousands of files that seem full of strange gibberish to the lay person. Just pop open the command line and "ls -R
From my best reconing, the drive letter convention is about the only thing in Windows XP th
Not to mention the notion of multiple threads in the GPU that DirectX 10 is introducing in Vista.
Consumables, in the same sense as detergents and cheap ball-point pens, have the characteristic of being replaceable by a similarly functioning competitor. Some forms of software nearly meet this model; examples of such include office/productivity software, file compression utilities, image/artwork editors, compilers, webbrowsers and telecommunications software. This analogy is not broken by the mere fact that customers often prefer one brand or product line to another, such as prefering AutoCAD to RealCAD, since the analog to this exists in consumables as well, such as prefering Tide to All.
Games, however, are an entertainment medium, and therefore different rules apply. Games, like movies, books and music, are charicteristcally unique from one another. For example, Harry Potter is a different experience than Lord of the Rings; even though both may share some traits, neither is a direct substitute for the other in that after experiencing one, the other is still a novel experience.
As for the notion that the game is disposable, some may view a game as being the same sort of purchase as a movie ticket in that you pay your money, sit down and enjoy it for however long it runs and then that's the end of it. On the other hand, some may view it as being more along the lines of purchasing a movie on VHS/DVD/HD-Ray where you may view it just a couple times or you may view it a hundred times.
A better analogy might be in cinemas that are required to upgrade their sound systems in order to be allowed to open with the newest action titles but still have the ability to play titles based on older formats. You, as a consumer may be required to upgrade to a newer version of Windows/DirectX in order to play Half-Life 4 but you will still be able to play the older Half-Life 2 on your WinXP/DirectX9.0c machine. This is no different from when you had to upgrade from WinME to WinXP in order to play Half-Life 2.
Another analogy to consider since you seem to like washing machines:
If Whirlpool develops a better suspension system for their 9300 Duet washing machine than they had on their 9150 (the 9300 is this year's replacement for the 9150), should they be required to support the customers that purchased a 9150 just last year by offering a free upgrade of the drum suspension? Should GM offer a free upgrade for all '06 Corvettes to give them the same fuel injection system that's in the '07s? Should Microsoft port new technology to an older operating system if there is no positive return on investment in doing so?
A good answer to the above three is "No."
But for the argument of responsibility to consumers I'm going to offer three examples that would be well answered with a "Yes."
If the 9150 destroyed its transmission belts on a monthly basis, should Whirlpool recall the units and address the issue? If the '06 Corvette was shown to be likely to snap a tie rod connector on hard corners, should GM issue a recall to replace that mechanism? If a new exploit was discovered that allowed a malicious web site to wipe your hard drive, should Microsoft release a patch to fix the problem?
Also, please remember that, in software, backwards compatability implies that you can run Office 6 on Vista but you can't run Office 11 on Win95.
Based on their numbers. If 1000 employees can make 800,000 boards per month and each employee averages $30,000 per year (a salary point that would attract many US production workers) then the cost of labor per board is about $3.13 each.
While I realize that the base salary is not the same as the total cost of compensation, the situation is nowhere near as dire as even your lower estimate of $1000 per board. If you were to figure %90 labor cost in the $1000 estimate (since we are talking purely about the work conditions at ECS and not the component suppliers that they use), that would translate to $8.6 million per year per employee if current production levels were maintained.
In Montana you can get your full license at 15.
At the time that I got my license, any speed below 100mph was considered "reasonable and prudent" on open highways in that state as well. Just imagine me slowing my 15 y/o butt down to 90 to pass a highway patrolman and exchanging a friendly wave as I cruise by.
Some colleges are replacing BASIC with Python as the beginner's programming language.
The workforce will have plenty of bad Python code-monkeys before you know it.
Mucking about with things that are new or unfamiliar to you may have deleterious unintended side effects on your system. The same mucking about may also lead you to learn a few new tricks. I personally encourage trying new things but I would also like to strongly recommend that if you are unsure of yourself, practice on a system that is not relied upon for work or school. Missing deadlines can be bad; losing a nearly complete master's thesis can cause you to do things that will land you in jail. By contrast, toasting the install on a completely spare system may just give you an excuse to try the latest Linux/BSD/Solaris install that you've been itching to play with.
With that said.
A google search for "TCPIP.SYS patch" will turn up a little information on this.
The tool I used to change mine was nLite, which allowed me to make the changes to my install media prior to performing a fresh install. The desired setting in this program is in the 'Patches' area.
Another tool is available from a small German website that claims to allow you to change the settings without requireing a complete re-install. I have not tried this tool myself yet (since when I did my last install, this tool did not support x64) so I would recommend that you manually create a backup of your tcpip.sys file and set a windows restore point before you test it.
As for modifying your torrent client. I would recommend trying BitComet and playing with the connection settings paying particular attention to the effects of throttling the Global Upload rate, Max connections per task and max half-open connection settings. Other clients may have similar settings but you'll have to find those for yourself.
Hopefully this information was helpful and does not toast your system.
There's more to your connection than just bandwidth.
I primarily run on Win XP x64 (a.k.a. Win 2003 - Pretty Version) with network drivers modified to allow 500 "half-open" TCP/IP connections as opposed to the default value of 10. When using a bittorent client, you are typically attempting to connect to dozens of other computers while a couple dozen more are trying to connect with you at the same time. With all these simultaneous request you will typically get a few that stall in a half-open state. When all of your half-open slots are filled with stalled connections, you will no longer be able to establish any new connections until those first stalled connections formally time out and get out of the way. While you are stalled up with bad connections, you will fill up other peoples queues with stalled connections. Meanwhile Firefox is trying to be heard in this angry mess of stalled connections and is lucky to get a request out and even luckier to get any info back.
Bittorent clients running with default settings can be hell on your connection. However if both the O/S and client are tweaked a little you can get some amazing results. I have seen as much as 900 KByte/s down on my 8Mbit/768Kbit connection. Under typical circumstances, however, I usually see only 300-400 KByte/s for a well seeded transfer. Anything below 100 I consider to be poor if it is the only transfer running.
On an install that is running nothing but defaults for both the OS and the Bittorrent application, 100-150 is a good connection.
High bandwidth alone is great for well behaved network traffic. However, internet traffic is rarely well behaved and many network implimentations do not default to using very intelligent or efficient strategies for handling packets and requests.
Of course there's a difference.
Two kids with guns having a psychotic episode in a school may kill dozens of young people and then turn the guns on themselves.
A national leader with a military arsenal at his disposal and an agenda to push may kill hundreds of thousands of children, adults and elderly and then lie about their reasoning in a press release.
The first one is just suicide engineered so that they can take out a few of their aggressors with them. The second is homicide engineered so that the people making the decisions will, at worst, walk away free or, at best, be praised as heros.
If they also make a force feedback controler for the PS3 then we may see an online game where one player has a motion sensing controler that feeds into the force feedback controler.
Might be good for strengthening long distance relationships.
Have you tried a more conventional headset working through your sound card? I use a $15.00 Logitech headset with the mic plugged into my Audigy2 ZS and the speakers plugged into my mainboard audio out. Sounds perfect except for the eerie silence detection when nobody is speaking.
I'm still waiting for a phone that has a decent voice chat feature.
There may be a few slashdotters that don't have kids, but some of us went out into the big blue room and learned to swim before we got our first C-64.
Why not?
In the US.
14 Million new cars are sold annually.
455 Million galons of oil are used daily.(for transportaion purposes)
If the demand is there, somebody, somewhere will find a way to fill the production needs. We did for oil and we can do the same for other commodities.
As for disposal, the batteries could be striped for heavy metals and recycled. Fluids or pastes within the batteries can be purified and reconstituted. Yes we will still be dumping tons of unsalvagable material into the ground but currently we are doing the same with the air. The key difference being that these materials are only being used to store energy, not create it.
You could make a battery from tin, copper and lemon juice if you so choose. The ability to choose what materials to use allows us to search for options that are effective to use while at the same time having relatively benign effects on the environment. You cannot make gasoline out of anything other than oil. Granted you can use vegetable oil but producing that consumes more input energy than it releases as output energy, even moreso if you consider the required sunlight.
Energy production can come from solar, wind, hydroelectric or tidal sources. Hell find a river you don't like very much and put a dam in it. While that reservoir is filling, put a dam below it. Repeat as necessary or until you run out of room.
The point isn't so much that oil is dirty, it's that oil is finite whereas sunlight, the rotation of the moon and the spin of the earth are, for our purposes, not.
Doesn't quite do the enthusiast thing for me. But who knows, it could be the next Mini.
Just gotta get used to the idea that all of your stability comes from having a half ton of batteries beneath your seat. Just don't put a luggage rack on there.
You probably wouldn't have too many batteries in the junkyard. If the battery is still valuable then it will most likely be pulled by the original owner and turned in for cash/credit at the "gas" stations. If it is still in the car when it gets to the junkyard, then the junkyard will pull the battery and buy it from the original owner (for less than how much they'll get by selling it back to the battery exchange stations). If the original owner isn't alive enough to demand payment for the batteries, the junkyard will pull it, sell it, contact a lawyer and hope that the parties settling the original owners estate don't think about it. Batteries that are physically damaged simply become hazardous waste and will be disposed of as such or sent back to the manufacturer to extract raw materials.
And now you say "Okay, so they don't get the bad batteries from a junkyard. So what?"
If there is a mechanism to prevent exchange batteries from being charged at home (those evil bastards) then there really aren't that many ways for a battery to go bad while in the posession of the end user such that the end user would be liable for the replacement cost. Built in monitoring equipment integrated into the battery itself would be able to identify such conditions (possibilities include, but are not limited to, tampering, over current and extended shelf time) and they would be dealt with by refusing or prorating the credit received for turning in the battery. Most battery wear would occur simply as a function of normal use and would be ammortized by the companies doing the battery exchange service.
The built in monitoring equipment would most likely include such things as a real time clock, a KVAh counter, a permanant ROM encoded identifier and a small bit of flash RAM to store encrypted keys that would be assigned each time it is charged and cross referenced with an online database to prevent the use of black market chargers. The logic for the last bit is simple; if you have a battery rated for 20KVAh and the difference between the current reading of the KVAh counter and the last count that was recorded in the online database is 60KVAh, then you know that it was charged illegaly. While at the charging station, the permanant identifier will be released by the battery and the temporary key will be looked up and used as an access password for the battery, this will unlock the ability to receive a charge; and once charged the battery will be assigned a new temporary key for next time. Any tampering with the battery or brute force key guessing will cause the temporary key to be lost and will be immediately detectable by the charging station.
Please note, this is only speculation regarding a system that could work. If such vehicles and charging stations were to come into existance, real engineers and systems analysts may be hired to ensure that the system is profitable and tamper proof. If said persons are smarter than those that impliment current DRM systems such as Starforce, CSS and Sony RootKit(tm), then the final product may be more robust and reliable than what I can dump into a Slashdot article during my lunch break. Any persons wishing to take advantage of the benefits of "regenerative braking" will be required to purchase a California DOT approved permanent reserve battery to be installed only by the original manufacturer or a DEQ certified install technician. Please expect between 400 and 600 pages of legislation prior to delivery. Prices do not include sales tax, road tax, vehicle tax, efficiency tax, weight tax or any day of the week tax.
Easy, they charge and test your old one as soon as you leave. Unlike the propane exchange that I initially mentioned or the gas/petro stations that currently reign, electricity is easily "piped" into the stations.
The big problems aren't everyday logistic issues as those tend to work themselves out on their own, they are the initial setup issues. For this system to work there needs to several conditions met.
(1) The cars need to exist in a practical and mass consumable form. Sorry but electric tricycles are not a viable replacement for a minivan or a hatchback. Expecting people to own two vehicles is unrealistic if the combined ownership and operating cost of the less versitile but more efficient vehicle is greater than just the operating cost of the less efficient but more versitile vehicle. This is particularly true if the only advantage that electric vehicle has is fuel efficiency.
(2) The batteries would need to be standardized. If each battery station had to support a different proprietary battery for each major auto manufacturer, it would drive up the initial setup costs for the stations, increase the physical space requirements for the stations to store sufficient inventory of each variation and create a situation where they may not have the variety you need in stock.
(2)(a) There may, however, be a reasonable demand for different classes of batteries based on capacity. If done intelligently, a vehicle capable of using one class would also be able to use a battery of a lesser class, albeit with diminished range and/or performance. The key here is that even if your preferred battery is temporarily out of stock, there will still be other options that will allow you to at least gimp your vehicle to the next station.
(3) The stations will need to exist in a ubiquitous form. A 300mi range would cover the daily commute for most people but without ubiquitous battery stations, they would still need to have a gas powered vehicle if they wanted to, say, take a trip to the beach for the weekend or visit grandma Mae in South Dakota. See (1) for why expecting people to have two cars is unrealistic.
The whole thing could be made to work but the initial setup will be a bitch. Large federal subsidies would help things along but unfortunatly we just sent ourselves into a massive deficit in order to fight a war for oil^H^H^H^H^H^H^H on terrorism.
Not really if you think about it. Since every transaction would have a 1:1 swapout. As long as they don't allow people to pawn off batteries for cash, each facility should only see a change in numbers due to normal wear.
There is, of course, the possibility of renting a spare for a long trip but you'd likely be required to return it to the same chain to get your money back.
Sitting around at a filling station for 5 hours while you recharge is not exactly my idea of a fun way to kill an afternoon.
But perhaps there is an alternate route that could be both profitable and benificial to the consumer. Think about all the prefilled propane bottle exchanges that you see in front of supermarkets. You could take that concept and apply it to a precharged lithium battery exchange. Drivers will be able to stop in, yank out their old battery, drop in a new one, pay the cashier at some point and then drive away with a full charge. The company providing this service would be able to adjust pricing to average out the cost of replacing worn out batteries during the life of the unit. Restriction systems could be put into place on exchange batteries to prevent home charging or the car owner could shell out more to get an unrestricted battery (that they won't exchange in) that they can fill at home in their garage.
The system could, I think, be tweaked into working if we can get past the chicken/egg problem required to create it.
Actually I would argue that a gigabyte is still a lot even today.
,closeup of nose hairs resolution you can still fit about 500 in there. Typically enough so that if viewed as a slide show you can bore away any unwelcomed guests that wander into your house.
/.'ers out there. I have 600GB in a RAID 0 and I'm currently at about 80% full. Throw me 10 TB today and I'll find a way to use it. Cut me down to 10 GB and I'll find a way to make it do something interesting. My Linux programming sandbox computer only has a 20GB disk in it and most of the virtual machines on my main system allocate between 15 and 20 GB.
One GB can hold more than a year worth of typing for most users even with the bloat effects of today's word processors.
One GB can hold about $250US worth of iTunes music or about 16-1/2 hours depending on how you look at it.
One GB can hold over 1000 screen resolution JPEG images. Or if you insist on keeping it at full camera
The point is that 1 GB is still a big enough chunk to do something interesting with. For most non-techie users I've met, the majority of their hard drive usage is just the OS and installed applications. For many more, game data is the largest consumer of disk space; largely because the high resolution geometry and texturing that a modern GPU can push requires a lot of data to feed it.
Then you run into people like me and a lot of other
The definition of "a lot" really depends on who you are and what you do.
For most automatic transmissions, drive or overdrive are typically the best suited selections for snow/ice conditions. The selections indicated by numbers will (A) limit the maximum gear (B) Raise the shift points so that you stay in a lower gear longer( and slam into the next gear with a high revved engine when it does shift) or (C) Both A and B.
Example 1.
A 1970's Berg-Warner (Mercedes) 4 speed transmission will have 3 forward selections labeled (D)rive (S)lope and (L)ow. Drive starts in 2nd slides into 3rd at about 10-15 mph and switches to 4th as you start to accellerate to highway speeds. Slope will start in 2nd (unless you floor it to depress the kickdown switch) and stay there until the engine hits about 4k rpm where it will hit 3rd and stay there. Low starts in 1st and will slam 2nd with the engine near redline and stay there. The owner's manual has sensible suggestions for Drive and Slope but the suggested use for Low is creeping through congested traffic; personally I think Low is geared down enough to push congested traffic out of your way.
Example 2.
Mid 90's Chrysler (Dodge Intrepid specifically) 4 speed transmission marked (D)rive (3) and (2). Drive starts in 1st and varies the shift points depending on the data gathered from the Throttle Position Sensor; gentle use of the accelerator will provide gentle, early shift points and putting your foot in it will allow the engine to rev higher before slamming into the next gear. The selection of '3' will progress from 1 to 3 with moderately tall shift points and will kick over to 4th if necessary to prevent engine damage; throttle position is disregarded for the purpose of determining shift points, but the shift points are similar to what would be delivered at 50% throttle in Drive. The selection of '2' will start in 1st and shift to 2nd very late but not quite at redline; 3rd and 4th will be used if necessary to prevent engine damage. The shift point from 1st to 2nd in Low is similar to the shift point obtained by going immediately to Wide Open Throttle in a standing start in Drive.
Traction control systems that prevent wheelspin are at best annoying and at worst deadly in snow/ice conditions since wheelspin is a valuable technique in correcting for low traction conditions. With a front wheel drive, oversteering and spinning the tires is an effective way of bringing the front end around to the direction you want to go. Loose packed snow on top of hard packed ice typically requires a bit of initial spin until you have enough momentum to overcome the loose layer.
Having driven RWD, FWD and 4WD in Montana blizzard conditions, I would say the most controllable setup for me has been FWD with a manual transmission. Your milage may vary.
A graphics chip is considerably faster than a general purpose CPU when working with long, highly parallelizable equations. Alot of game physics routines can be expressed in algorithms that have very little to no branch decisions. Since these calculations are going to be the same for many data points in the model, the GPU can potentially run over a dozen of the calculations in parallel.
Basically you can get a 500Mhz chip running 16 complex floating point calculations in true parallel.
I'm actually looking forward to the day that functional implants are good enough to be a desirable elective procedure.
Just imagine.. "Yeah, that's a nice tattoo. Wanna see what my synthetic muscles and reinforced skeletal structure can do?"
4.7 GB for $0.30 or 25 GB for $20
Sounds alot like the price that DVD(+-)R media was introduced at. Part of me is cringing from sticer shock but realistically I know that in a few years they'll be in the sub $1.00 range when other manufacturers figure out how to make them.
Think of all the friends, relatives, work accquaintances, etc. that have asked you "Could you show me how to burn a CD?"
Think of all the people that just bought a brand new Dell off of QVC, a large portion of this group lack the knowledge and the desire to gain the knowledge to decrypt a DVD in order to copy it. Basically if they throw something at whatever burning software came with their computer and it doesn't work, then they'll give up. Some of the more intrepid ones will muck with the settings a bit and make a few more coasters but they'll eventually give up too.
Protections that are just strong enough to withstand simple attacks like that are strong enough to prevent several thousand copies from being made.
The unfortunate part is that companies are constantly trying to push the boundries of how strong they can make the protections with the belief that it will help them recover sales from more determined crackers. Looking at protections used on PC software will show us that these protections will either be cracked and the cracks will be distributed or the protection will be so brutal that it causes issues for legitimate users. (i.e. most flavors of SafeDisc can be defeated while the cracker is blindfolded with both hands bound behind his back whereas Starforce has been reported to cause very difficult to repair damage to the system that it infects.)
The protection for DVD content is fairly easy to break in large part because it relies on methods that were availible when the first players hit the market. If DVD makers wanted to roll out a new protection they would have to first introduce it to the companies that manufacture the players and wait for the new machines to hit the level of market saturation where the number of lost sales caused by obsolete machines unable to play the content would be less than the number of sales that would be lost to piracy.
With the new HD protections rolling out, you can see that the companies involved are really trying to push the limits of what consumers will tolerate in terms of lost functionality and convenience if they do not have a 100% trusted digital path from the disk to the screen.
I have trouble believing that anyone is going to be prepared for the backlash that will happen when consumers that upgrade to HDTV and then a few months later add a new HD media player (whatever format) discover that their sets are indistinguishable from current models when playing unprotected content but yet they are noticably worse on protected content. And we know this will happen because the commision salesperson at BestBuy isn't going to say "Hold on to your money, the new models will be out in about six months and they'll work with future movie formats."; instead he's going to tell them that since they're making a long term investment by buying such high quality equipment, that they should really consider getting the extended service plan to protect that investment.
To sum up: Weak protection will prevent casual sharing, while strong DRM is like a little piece of satan in your TV.