Well, I like cats ok, but am deathly allergic to them - I not only maxed the allergy scratch test scale at 18+, it overran several tests and the blotch went several inches over my shoulder, so I'm afraid I can't partake in that experiment, as I'd probably die before I could fall asleep on said couch - any volunteers?
Zyrtec is my friend when I'm even around people that own cats, and that only provides some relief. I need all the people I associate with to buy some of them $1000 vat grown non-allergenic saliva cats.
Ironically, cammo makeup would probably be better for male soldiers since it can be matted over facial hair.
For women I see a better use aside from cammo - instant apply make-up. Heck, you could go from airbrushed model to street hooker to troll (or even weird designs - basically whatever is needed to get that annoying guy to leave) with the tap of a built-in button. Still not sure about how tats react to acne, tho...
hmm... probably not much use for Military Camouflage except maybe the face and maybe hands since the majority of the body would be covered, and the face still would have issues (like beards).
Medical sensors would have more military practicality - display heart rate and time, for instance. With some sort of touch sensitive display and a communicator (with an antennae built into the bone maybe) you could do all sorts of things.
Cyberpunk books have had this sort of thing for as long as I remember. In a Cyberpunk 2020 (or maybe even 2019) campaign I ran in the early 1990s I added a bunch of tech like "TV tattoos," which were commonly used to watch TV on skin, but also popular with assassins in my game since they weren't mil-spec like cammo clothes (predator-like clothing) and those were added after reading a book with characters that had ever moving tattoos - I just elaborated a bit. If you could get the power down it may even be able to run on blood flow driving a generator for power, but I imagine full body tats would take quite a bit of juice.
Best use, though - crib sheet for cheating on tests;)
Never read the book, but I've read some with orgies, and usually they leave me with a wtf feeling... as in why was that in the book and how did it advance the plot? Sometimes that's resolved later, but it depends on the book. I think Freud would have a field day with some of the writers, though.
A perfect example is in the middle of American Gods (Gaiman) a taxi driver gets into some sort of gay orgy thing (I forget exact details, as I read it some time ago), but as far as I could tell it had nothing to do with the plot and was entirely unneeded filler, albeit well written unneeded filler. Funny that the chapter I immediately remember is that one, despite the rest of the book being excellent.
On the other hand, sometimes it is essential to the plot - for instance, the orgy (non-gay in this case) in Diamond Age (Stephenson) was necessary, albeit convoluted. I can't really get into it without spoiling the plot, but I can say it was essential for the story as written, but it seemed to me the story was written as it was to make it essential.
Only a few cities in the US have the light rail/tram infrastructure that is part of Karlsruhe, so only the heavy rail exists. The heavy rail is mostly commercial, not public, so the rail itself is often leased for public transportation, as well. For the most part, the US has no high speed rail (there is a somewhat fast train out of Boston according to the news today, but that's it).
Every city does have some sort of public transportation, but some, like LA and Minneapolis are built around buses and not trains (for the record, both do have some form of light rail, but both are fledgling and reach limited destinations in their respective cities).
In Europe it is sometimes even cheaper to fly if you don't have a Eurail pass (one trip I took was $40 by plane, $200 by ICE, but if I'd traveled to several cities, a Eurail pass would have eventually made up the difference).
That's because the public transportation system for some cities is busted, not because high speed trains are a bad idea. Try Chicago (the El), New York (subway), or any other city with good public transportation. The San Francisco MUNI was good when I was there for a holiday, but I've heard it has overcrowding problems during peak use hours. Avoid hellholes of public transportation like, say, LA (this is my opinion - I waited 40 minutes for a bus more than once and there are just too many cars to be based around a bus system that uses the same roads - if they still do - last time I was there was 1997, but I can't imagine it has gotten better).
GM's problems are from multiple sources - they pay 7 billion in pensions each year and $60 billion in health care for retirees, for instance (compared to $0 for Asian manufacturers, and that's expected to stay constant for the next 10 years, so that's $70 billion less profit for pensions and God only knows in health care) and are required by UAW contract to pay special incentives to employees laid off or when their plants are shut down making downsizing nearly impossible. GM did have a bit of recession hardening by having their pensions funded and only 26% invested in stocks since the 2001-2002 stock market drop (the rest in bonds), but the stock market halved in 2008-9, so they have 13% less money to fund pensions than a year ago, if not worse (unless they invested well, but I had heard it was down 15% last year).
I said I had mixed opinions - and most of these expenses and restrictions on restructuring can't be changed due to UAW contracts, so yes, it is because of the unions the company is failing. However, employees, ex-employees, and their families are all depending on these benefits and the union protects them. I worked for a non-union company that just dropped pensions entirely (Control Data Corporation - they split into pieces, so no idea who would pay them, anyway).
I have mixed opinions of Unions - while on the one respect, they can negotiate salaries, hours, keep jobs local and whatnot, but they also make it nearly impossible to save a company when it's in trouble due to those same contracts. Let me just sum it up - non-union Toyota is the #1 auto maker right now and financially looking very good. Former #1 GM is cash strapped and facing bankruptcy. Which do you think has more job security right now?
Depending on how Unions collect fees, you can absolutely get screwed in low paying jobs (some take a percentage, while others charge a fixed fee). My only union job was one of these - I got screwed in Union dues because they charged a fixed $1/hour fee for anyone making less than $12/hour - I made state minimum wage for large employers at that time working for the school paper, but all the jobs at the school paper were union jobs (but actually comprised several unions - I think I was something like the Clerical Workers Union) and I was in the lowest paying position and made $4.25 an hour - that's $4.25/hour, minus taxes, minus fee, which left me with $2 and change for every hour worked. The job was fine, but I couldn't handle the fees - I quit after a month and got a campus non-union clerical job and doubled my take home pay (it paid a base $5.50) and was, in fact, easier work. Now admittedly, I believe the union failed the worker in that case, and it is my fault for taking a crappy job as well, but I was desperate and it was on-campus so I saved myself gas money, and honestly, I didn't realize the union dues would be so high because they didn't mention it. It was only the second job I had ever worked in my life, so it definitely was an educational experience.
Don't think it's just video games - I had similar hours doing business software. In fact, I don't see a light at the end of the tunnel until next year - I have 3 releases with 3 month schedules each over the next 9 months (and boatloads of features going into the area I'm responsible for).
I've also worked massive amounts of hours at a help desk and got paid overtime since it was hourly and adjusted for inflation it probably would be just short of what I make now, but I wouldn't have that job or the overtime had I stayed - it got outsourced to India. I may have been one of the lucky dozen that kept their jobs, but more than likely I'd have been one of the 1000+ layoffs.
yep - I can understand writers taking these gigs, as they pay well and usually pay well up-front, but I can't say I ever read books based on games often. I read a Warhammer book by accident once (and to be honest, it was pretty decent), and a Battletech book because I got it for free (it was horrid), and even a Star Wars book (God forbid... all I remember is the name - Han Solo at Star's End... I think I still have it, but I read it last at age 12 or 13) but if I'm looking in the library or bookstore I'll look for something without a gaming moniker (if I'm even in that section - I read a lot of mystery and some horror).
In my teens I did read some Dragonlance but I didn't really find it all that interesting... or even good. I vastly preferred original books - some of my favorites from my teens were Armor, Stormwarden, LotR, the White Gold Wielder series [up through about book 4 - by 6 I just wanted the guy to die already...], Dune, and pretty much any early Cyberpunk writer, including two Bear books.
The Bear I've read is Queen of Angels and / (aka Slant), again cyberpunkish, which I was heavily into at that time, and they were decent books, but not as page-turning addictive as Stephenson or Gaiman book.
Maybe you'd interpret it as black space, but technically you would not see anything there since its gravity is too strong to let any light out and your eyes rely on reflected light off an object to see it. You would see light bent around the hole, and as you approached the hole this light would get more and more distorted, especially at the event horizon (at least according to the general relativity theory the sim was based on).
So basically, if you're staring directly at the hole, you'd see nothing (it would appear black, because no light is reflected). If you're staring around the edges or elsewhere, you'd see a distorted light warp effect.
so obviously they couldn't get it right either PC or no...
I thought the title was a bit strange - "baby chicks" (when referring to birds) is redundant - chicks are baby birds. Then again, this being/., we'd probably have 200 people that didn't read TFA and a massive flame war going on here by now if it just said Chicks have innate mathematical skills (and probably lots of lol d00d! posts).
Now if you can just time travel back to, say, 1986 or 1987 (guessing on production start dates there) and stop them from creating Zork Zero as a graphical adventure we'll all be saved!
heh - understatement of the year... in America, for instance, where the elected President can issue National Security directives that are instantly law, only need to be viewed by 12 people (or less - the attendees of the National Security Council, whose members are mostly picked by the President), and bypass Congress completely. Clinton and Bush were huge fans of bypassing Congress that way (FEMA powers, warrantless wiretapping of US citizens, torture in foreign countries, etc) but the ramp-up of using this method really started with the Carter administration in the 1970s (and the best known abuse of this power was the Iran-Contra affair under Reagan). The US President can also issue normal Executive Orders, which just bypass Congress and are instantly law, but are public and can be viewed and removed by Congress or a judge.
If only we could force them to at least be reviewed by 16 people and public knowledge, like in France...
Prosecution would be hard, too - downloaders could claim they thought it was a trailer or promotional cut and didn't know it was the whole movie. While the downloader still could get fined, it just likely wouldn't be in an amount that would make the case worthwhile. It's much easier to go after the suppliers.
Speaking of Clint, I could fully understand why many actors are pretentious snobs. I was having a late dinner with my (newlywed) wife in Maui (we were in Kihei at the time, I think, but I can't remember the restaurant) in 2001 and we stopped by a little coffee shop that also served food (and really good food at that). The place was dead except for a couple of servers, a barrista and us and shortly after we arrived, Clint and Dina came in (from a golf tourney I heard later) and sat directly behind me in the corner. I never met him and only saw the back of his head, but I had my back to him for an hour. The waitstaff were fawning over him and the barrista constantly staring - one waiter even whispered excitedly to me that Clint was sitting directly behind me and looked like he was about to wet his pants. Now imagine that reaction every day and all the time as well as people with cameras stalking you... I'm really glad we left them alone (I have a friend that woulda killed for Clint's autograph) - I think they just wanted a quiet place to sit and talk and aside from some over-attentive wait-staff, that's what they got.
I wouldn't knock X too much - X was designed for a different audience than other windowing systems - specifically, it was designed for the model where an expensive server sits in one location and lots of cheap terminals lie around and connect to that server. It is actually a good design for what it was intended for. The problem is, almost nobody uses setups like that these days (though it's coming back... see OnLive), and it also lacked a number of "essential" features like security since the devs made the assumption that the network was secure so these were tacked on.
I loved IRIX in the early 1990s, but when cheap consumer graphics hardware became available I saw their days were numbered unless they entered that market and they didn't. They did try to diversify, but it was scattershot and some moves I felt were in the wrong direction - like buying supercomputing company Cray Research, so I could see the end coming from there (though working with a bunch of ex-SGI people and hearing about mis-management made me think it was coming much sooner than it did).
some commercial games are pushing into uncanny valley space, especially sports games that want to put real players faces into the games. There is also a company selling facial and movement software and one of their targets is video games.
the theory does have some merit, IMO - those creepy talking japanese baby robots are freaky (look on youtube - they're white and somewhat anime looking, and that's about all I remember).
speaking of memory testing, Vista comes with the Windows Memory Diagnostic (WMD for short, not to be mistaken for the Iraq kind) tool with the OS. There are several ways to get to it such as F8 boot, then ESC, then select the diagnostic tool (my laptop also includes a direct function key to that page, I think F4 - it is the same key as for partition recovery). I think it's also under admin tools, but it requires a reboot that way.
That is the same memory test as here, so XP users can create a boot disk/CD.
I don't know which is better, but in every case where I've had memory issues both tools have identified the same problem (usually in Stride - I'm not sure if that is a typical failure point, but it is for me), so especially with Vista you may just want to try the built-in tool first.
Oh, no - you said the N word - you'd better go hide your family now before the IPv6 nazis take them to the death camp...
Seriously - when I mentioned I needed to find a way for IPsec packet rewriting for network address translation I was flamed by IPv6 zealots and kicked from their IRC channel. I eventually did find a solution with a hardware firewall that supported IPsec forwarding, but no thanks to them. The zealots I've talked to firmly believe all IPs should be positively identifiable and no address translation ever used (even for security and privacy reasons). Some of them also think that this will be the holy grail for finding kiddie porn vendors, spammers, and stuff like that, but have not reasonably answered how (you can spoof MAC addresses which are used in IPv6 address generation and email still has the same problems it always had - no verification and a spoof-able source).
There are advantages to IPv6 - such as faster routing, harder to spoof, built in encryption, and lots of IPs, but also some costs such as longer addresses (thus packets), no privacy, and in some respects less security because an encrypted packet can't be filtered as easily at the router.
Intel's integrated graphics use several nVidia patents dealing with 3D, so I seriously doubt they would want to breach that agreement.
It is obvious that Intel is making a money grab and possibly trying to slow down competition until it gets some products to market. I think most of this is really GP-GPU related, though it may be a cash grab.
If you don't know what the Nehelem dispute is about, what they did was add an integrated memory controller, which means they put the memory controller hardware on the CPU dye rather than keeping it separate, which increases the speed of memory access. ATI has been using integrated memory controllers for years but Intel has shied away from it because it ties a chip to a certain type of memory. If you remember Intel's attempt to force RAMBUS and then moving quickly to DDR, you probably remember that they could do so quickly by just changing the motherboard and not the CPU design.
An integrated memory controller really has nothing to do with CPU tech, it is basically putting a motherboard component on a chip (which has happened before with cache and FPU and probably others [timer?]), so I'd have to say I'd back nVidia on this one. The AMD suit is a bit more questionable because it depends on interpretation. AMD recently split in two - a chip design company (AMD) and the manufacturing division (GlobalFoundries). The patent sharing agreement only applies to AMD subsidiaries and since GlobalFoundries was spun off as a separate company, it is not a subsidiary and would need a separate contract. The question here is whether you could consider them under the AMD umbrella because they were part of AMD when the contract was signed.
They missed the other Dos 3.3 (Applesoft), too... oh, wait, that was a MS OS running on Apple hardware - maybe that was intentional.
Personally I hated ProDOS. It was sluggish on the//e, but maybe ok on a GS (which I rarely touched). The only time I seriously ventured into ProDOS was to work in Double HiRes, and I can't say I spent much time there. Between my girlfriend and my band I was losing my geek cred in those days - I didn't get it back until college.
GEM rocked compared to early Windows (it was my second favorite OS after macOS at that time, though I mostly saw it on Atari STs and didn't use STs much outside of stores and didn't see Amiga OS until a couple of years after it was released), but it was poorly marketed and the PC version lost out the bundling war to Windows 3.x. I only vaguely remember seeing Desqview and never used it, so I can't comment on it.
HURD and MACH are microkernel architectures and suffer the same problems - message passing and IPC (interprocess communication) kills performance, and thus most OS's that use them break the microkernel model by making monolithic message passing (I like to think of it like replacing all stairwells with a single elevator - you can get to any level quickly, but if the elevator catches on fire, the whole building is doomed).
The article did cover some of the larger personal computer OS's, and I used ever one of them at one point. I can't say the same for Plan 9 - heck, I didn't even know it existed until about 2002 when I heard it was dead. Most people not residing in Japan will probably have never seen an MSX box. BSD has always been both niche and mainstream due to splintering, and until the internet boom was never a major factor outside of commercial variants. I actually didn't even recognize the 386BSD name until I looked it up (OH - you mean Jolix - at least that name rang a bell). That one had bad timing - I was pretty steeped into Linux because my graphics class let us use Mesa3D on Slackware (the first class I had in 1992-3 was all GL on IRIX and we were given approval to use OpenGL in 1993-4) and I was spending all my time there. Working on those graphics projects at home was much better than fighting closing time at the computer labs.
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Well, I like cats ok, but am deathly allergic to them - I not only maxed the allergy scratch test scale at 18+, it overran several tests and the blotch went several inches over my shoulder, so I'm afraid I can't partake in that experiment, as I'd probably die before I could fall asleep on said couch - any volunteers?
Zyrtec is my friend when I'm even around people that own cats, and that only provides some relief. I need all the people I associate with to buy some of them $1000 vat grown non-allergenic saliva cats.
Ironically, cammo makeup would probably be better for male soldiers since it can be matted over facial hair.
For women I see a better use aside from cammo - instant apply make-up. Heck, you could go from airbrushed model to street hooker to troll (or even weird designs - basically whatever is needed to get that annoying guy to leave) with the tap of a built-in button. Still not sure about how tats react to acne, tho...
hmm... probably not much use for Military Camouflage except maybe the face and maybe hands since the majority of the body would be covered, and the face still would have issues (like beards).
Medical sensors would have more military practicality - display heart rate and time, for instance. With some sort of touch sensitive display and a communicator (with an antennae built into the bone maybe) you could do all sorts of things.
Cyberpunk books have had this sort of thing for as long as I remember. In a Cyberpunk 2020 (or maybe even 2019) campaign I ran in the early 1990s I added a bunch of tech like "TV tattoos," which were commonly used to watch TV on skin, but also popular with assassins in my game since they weren't mil-spec like cammo clothes (predator-like clothing) and those were added after reading a book with characters that had ever moving tattoos - I just elaborated a bit. If you could get the power down it may even be able to run on blood flow driving a generator for power, but I imagine full body tats would take quite a bit of juice.
Best use, though - crib sheet for cheating on tests ;)
Never read the book, but I've read some with orgies, and usually they leave me with a wtf feeling... as in why was that in the book and how did it advance the plot? Sometimes that's resolved later, but it depends on the book. I think Freud would have a field day with some of the writers, though.
A perfect example is in the middle of American Gods (Gaiman) a taxi driver gets into some sort of gay orgy thing (I forget exact details, as I read it some time ago), but as far as I could tell it had nothing to do with the plot and was entirely unneeded filler, albeit well written unneeded filler. Funny that the chapter I immediately remember is that one, despite the rest of the book being excellent.
On the other hand, sometimes it is essential to the plot - for instance, the orgy (non-gay in this case) in Diamond Age (Stephenson) was necessary, albeit convoluted. I can't really get into it without spoiling the plot, but I can say it was essential for the story as written, but it seemed to me the story was written as it was to make it essential.
Only a few cities in the US have the light rail/tram infrastructure that is part of Karlsruhe, so only the heavy rail exists. The heavy rail is mostly commercial, not public, so the rail itself is often leased for public transportation, as well. For the most part, the US has no high speed rail (there is a somewhat fast train out of Boston according to the news today, but that's it).
Every city does have some sort of public transportation, but some, like LA and Minneapolis are built around buses and not trains (for the record, both do have some form of light rail, but both are fledgling and reach limited destinations in their respective cities).
In Europe it is sometimes even cheaper to fly if you don't have a Eurail pass (one trip I took was $40 by plane, $200 by ICE, but if I'd traveled to several cities, a Eurail pass would have eventually made up the difference).
That's because the public transportation system for some cities is busted, not because high speed trains are a bad idea. Try Chicago (the El), New York (subway), or any other city with good public transportation. The San Francisco MUNI was good when I was there for a holiday, but I've heard it has overcrowding problems during peak use hours. Avoid hellholes of public transportation like, say, LA (this is my opinion - I waited 40 minutes for a bus more than once and there are just too many cars to be based around a bus system that uses the same roads - if they still do - last time I was there was 1997, but I can't imagine it has gotten better).
GM's problems are from multiple sources - they pay 7 billion in pensions each year and $60 billion in health care for retirees, for instance (compared to $0 for Asian manufacturers, and that's expected to stay constant for the next 10 years, so that's $70 billion less profit for pensions and God only knows in health care) and are required by UAW contract to pay special incentives to employees laid off or when their plants are shut down making downsizing nearly impossible. GM did have a bit of recession hardening by having their pensions funded and only 26% invested in stocks since the 2001-2002 stock market drop (the rest in bonds), but the stock market halved in 2008-9, so they have 13% less money to fund pensions than a year ago, if not worse (unless they invested well, but I had heard it was down 15% last year).
I said I had mixed opinions - and most of these expenses and restrictions on restructuring can't be changed due to UAW contracts, so yes, it is because of the unions the company is failing. However, employees, ex-employees, and their families are all depending on these benefits and the union protects them. I worked for a non-union company that just dropped pensions entirely (Control Data Corporation - they split into pieces, so no idea who would pay them, anyway).
hmm - well that may be better than me - whenever I see "We're Linux" I think "of Borg - you will be assimilated."
I know that it is Microsoft of Borg, but I can't get that out of my head...
I have mixed opinions of Unions - while on the one respect, they can negotiate salaries, hours, keep jobs local and whatnot, but they also make it nearly impossible to save a company when it's in trouble due to those same contracts. Let me just sum it up - non-union Toyota is the #1 auto maker right now and financially looking very good. Former #1 GM is cash strapped and facing bankruptcy. Which do you think has more job security right now?
Depending on how Unions collect fees, you can absolutely get screwed in low paying jobs (some take a percentage, while others charge a fixed fee). My only union job was one of these - I got screwed in Union dues because they charged a fixed $1/hour fee for anyone making less than $12/hour - I made state minimum wage for large employers at that time working for the school paper, but all the jobs at the school paper were union jobs (but actually comprised several unions - I think I was something like the Clerical Workers Union) and I was in the lowest paying position and made $4.25 an hour - that's $4.25/hour, minus taxes, minus fee, which left me with $2 and change for every hour worked. The job was fine, but I couldn't handle the fees - I quit after a month and got a campus non-union clerical job and doubled my take home pay (it paid a base $5.50) and was, in fact, easier work. Now admittedly, I believe the union failed the worker in that case, and it is my fault for taking a crappy job as well, but I was desperate and it was on-campus so I saved myself gas money, and honestly, I didn't realize the union dues would be so high because they didn't mention it. It was only the second job I had ever worked in my life, so it definitely was an educational experience.
Don't think it's just video games - I had similar hours doing business software. In fact, I don't see a light at the end of the tunnel until next year - I have 3 releases with 3 month schedules each over the next 9 months (and boatloads of features going into the area I'm responsible for).
I've also worked massive amounts of hours at a help desk and got paid overtime since it was hourly and adjusted for inflation it probably would be just short of what I make now, but I wouldn't have that job or the overtime had I stayed - it got outsourced to India. I may have been one of the lucky dozen that kept their jobs, but more than likely I'd have been one of the 1000+ layoffs.
yep - I can understand writers taking these gigs, as they pay well and usually pay well up-front, but I can't say I ever read books based on games often. I read a Warhammer book by accident once (and to be honest, it was pretty decent), and a Battletech book because I got it for free (it was horrid), and even a Star Wars book (God forbid... all I remember is the name - Han Solo at Star's End... I think I still have it, but I read it last at age 12 or 13) but if I'm looking in the library or bookstore I'll look for something without a gaming moniker (if I'm even in that section - I read a lot of mystery and some horror).
In my teens I did read some Dragonlance but I didn't really find it all that interesting... or even good. I vastly preferred original books - some of my favorites from my teens were Armor, Stormwarden, LotR, the White Gold Wielder series [up through about book 4 - by 6 I just wanted the guy to die already...], Dune, and pretty much any early Cyberpunk writer, including two Bear books.
The Bear I've read is Queen of Angels and / (aka Slant), again cyberpunkish, which I was heavily into at that time, and they were decent books, but not as page-turning addictive as Stephenson or Gaiman book.
Maybe you'd interpret it as black space, but technically you would not see anything there since its gravity is too strong to let any light out and your eyes rely on reflected light off an object to see it. You would see light bent around the hole, and as you approached the hole this light would get more and more distorted, especially at the event horizon (at least according to the general relativity theory the sim was based on).
So basically, if you're staring directly at the hole, you'd see nothing (it would appear black, because no light is reflected). If you're staring around the edges or elsewhere, you'd see a distorted light warp effect.
well this one says specifically:
Baby Chicks
so obviously they couldn't get it right either PC or no...
I thought the title was a bit strange - "baby chicks" (when referring to birds) is redundant - chicks are baby birds. Then again, this being /., we'd probably have 200 people that didn't read TFA and a massive flame war going on here by now if it just said Chicks have innate mathematical skills (and probably lots of lol d00d! posts).
Now if you can just time travel back to, say, 1986 or 1987 (guessing on production start dates there) and stop them from creating Zork Zero as a graphical adventure we'll all be saved!
heh - understatement of the year... in America, for instance, where the elected President can issue National Security directives that are instantly law, only need to be viewed by 12 people (or less - the attendees of the National Security Council, whose members are mostly picked by the President), and bypass Congress completely. Clinton and Bush were huge fans of bypassing Congress that way (FEMA powers, warrantless wiretapping of US citizens, torture in foreign countries, etc) but the ramp-up of using this method really started with the Carter administration in the 1970s (and the best known abuse of this power was the Iran-Contra affair under Reagan). The US President can also issue normal Executive Orders, which just bypass Congress and are instantly law, but are public and can be viewed and removed by Congress or a judge.
If only we could force them to at least be reviewed by 16 people and public knowledge, like in France...
Prosecution would be hard, too - downloaders could claim they thought it was a trailer or promotional cut and didn't know it was the whole movie. While the downloader still could get fined, it just likely wouldn't be in an amount that would make the case worthwhile. It's much easier to go after the suppliers.
Speaking of Clint, I could fully understand why many actors are pretentious snobs. I was having a late dinner with my (newlywed) wife in Maui (we were in Kihei at the time, I think, but I can't remember the restaurant) in 2001 and we stopped by a little coffee shop that also served food (and really good food at that). The place was dead except for a couple of servers, a barrista and us and shortly after we arrived, Clint and Dina came in (from a golf tourney I heard later) and sat directly behind me in the corner. I never met him and only saw the back of his head, but I had my back to him for an hour. The waitstaff were fawning over him and the barrista constantly staring - one waiter even whispered excitedly to me that Clint was sitting directly behind me and looked like he was about to wet his pants. Now imagine that reaction every day and all the time as well as people with cameras stalking you... I'm really glad we left them alone (I have a friend that woulda killed for Clint's autograph) - I think they just wanted a quiet place to sit and talk and aside from some over-attentive wait-staff, that's what they got.
I wouldn't knock X too much - X was designed for a different audience than other windowing systems - specifically, it was designed for the model where an expensive server sits in one location and lots of cheap terminals lie around and connect to that server. It is actually a good design for what it was intended for. The problem is, almost nobody uses setups like that these days (though it's coming back... see OnLive), and it also lacked a number of "essential" features like security since the devs made the assumption that the network was secure so these were tacked on.
I loved IRIX in the early 1990s, but when cheap consumer graphics hardware became available I saw their days were numbered unless they entered that market and they didn't. They did try to diversify, but it was scattershot and some moves I felt were in the wrong direction - like buying supercomputing company Cray Research, so I could see the end coming from there (though working with a bunch of ex-SGI people and hearing about mis-management made me think it was coming much sooner than it did).
here's a link to the company I was referring to - guess they are only facial - the video response has the creepy dolls I mentioned.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF_NFmtw89g&feature=related
some commercial games are pushing into uncanny valley space, especially sports games that want to put real players faces into the games. There is also a company selling facial and movement software and one of their targets is video games.
the theory does have some merit, IMO - those creepy talking japanese baby robots are freaky (look on youtube - they're white and somewhat anime looking, and that's about all I remember).
speaking of memory testing, Vista comes with the Windows Memory Diagnostic (WMD for short, not to be mistaken for the Iraq kind) tool with the OS. There are several ways to get to it such as F8 boot, then ESC, then select the diagnostic tool (my laptop also includes a direct function key to that page, I think F4 - it is the same key as for partition recovery). I think it's also under admin tools, but it requires a reboot that way.
That is the same memory test as here, so XP users can create a boot disk/CD.
I don't know which is better, but in every case where I've had memory issues both tools have identified the same problem (usually in Stride - I'm not sure if that is a typical failure point, but it is for me), so especially with Vista you may just want to try the built-in tool first.
Oh, no - you said the N word - you'd better go hide your family now before the IPv6 nazis take them to the death camp...
Seriously - when I mentioned I needed to find a way for IPsec packet rewriting for network address translation I was flamed by IPv6 zealots and kicked from their IRC channel. I eventually did find a solution with a hardware firewall that supported IPsec forwarding, but no thanks to them. The zealots I've talked to firmly believe all IPs should be positively identifiable and no address translation ever used (even for security and privacy reasons). Some of them also think that this will be the holy grail for finding kiddie porn vendors, spammers, and stuff like that, but have not reasonably answered how (you can spoof MAC addresses which are used in IPv6 address generation and email still has the same problems it always had - no verification and a spoof-able source).
There are advantages to IPv6 - such as faster routing, harder to spoof, built in encryption, and lots of IPs, but also some costs such as longer addresses (thus packets), no privacy, and in some respects less security because an encrypted packet can't be filtered as easily at the router.
Intel's integrated graphics use several nVidia patents dealing with 3D, so I seriously doubt they would want to breach that agreement.
It is obvious that Intel is making a money grab and possibly trying to slow down competition until it gets some products to market. I think most of this is really GP-GPU related, though it may be a cash grab.
If you don't know what the Nehelem dispute is about, what they did was add an integrated memory controller, which means they put the memory controller hardware on the CPU dye rather than keeping it separate, which increases the speed of memory access. ATI has been using integrated memory controllers for years but Intel has shied away from it because it ties a chip to a certain type of memory. If you remember Intel's attempt to force RAMBUS and then moving quickly to DDR, you probably remember that they could do so quickly by just changing the motherboard and not the CPU design.
An integrated memory controller really has nothing to do with CPU tech, it is basically putting a motherboard component on a chip (which has happened before with cache and FPU and probably others [timer?]), so I'd have to say I'd back nVidia on this one. The AMD suit is a bit more questionable because it depends on interpretation. AMD recently split in two - a chip design company (AMD) and the manufacturing division (GlobalFoundries). The patent sharing agreement only applies to AMD subsidiaries and since GlobalFoundries was spun off as a separate company, it is not a subsidiary and would need a separate contract. The question here is whether you could consider them under the AMD umbrella because they were part of AMD when the contract was signed.
They missed the other Dos 3.3 (Applesoft), too... oh, wait, that was a MS OS running on Apple hardware - maybe that was intentional.
Personally I hated ProDOS. It was sluggish on the //e, but maybe ok on a GS (which I rarely touched). The only time I seriously ventured into ProDOS was to work in Double HiRes, and I can't say I spent much time there. Between my girlfriend and my band I was losing my geek cred in those days - I didn't get it back until college.
GEM rocked compared to early Windows (it was my second favorite OS after macOS at that time, though I mostly saw it on Atari STs and didn't use STs much outside of stores and didn't see Amiga OS until a couple of years after it was released), but it was poorly marketed and the PC version lost out the bundling war to Windows 3.x. I only vaguely remember seeing Desqview and never used it, so I can't comment on it.
HURD and MACH are microkernel architectures and suffer the same problems - message passing and IPC (interprocess communication) kills performance, and thus most OS's that use them break the microkernel model by making monolithic message passing (I like to think of it like replacing all stairwells with a single elevator - you can get to any level quickly, but if the elevator catches on fire, the whole building is doomed).
The article did cover some of the larger personal computer OS's, and I used ever one of them at one point. I can't say the same for Plan 9 - heck, I didn't even know it existed until about 2002 when I heard it was dead. Most people not residing in Japan will probably have never seen an MSX box. BSD has always been both niche and mainstream due to splintering, and until the internet boom was never a major factor outside of commercial variants. I actually didn't even recognize the 386BSD name until I looked it up (OH - you mean Jolix - at least that name rang a bell). That one had bad timing - I was pretty steeped into Linux because my graphics class let us use Mesa3D on Slackware (the first class I had in 1992-3 was all GL on IRIX and we were given approval to use OpenGL in 1993-4) and I was spending all my time there. Working on those graphics projects at home was much better than fighting closing time at the computer labs.