The issue is the fixed function pipeline - DX10 got rid of it and OpenGL 3.0 was going to get rid of it, but then backed out. Getting rid of it would boost the overall speed of rendering by as much as 10-20% from what I've read. If you wrote the DX10 API in an OpenGL wrapper, you'd be losing that performance (the model is quite different as well).
An emulator specifically translates one instruction set to another instruction set. WINE does not - it natively processes the code. Calling it an emulator would be like calling VMWare an emulator.
WINE decided to reimplement the API for Windows rather than running Windows in a virtual machine to avoid the cost of Windows itself, but functionally it is very similar to a virtual machine.
not necessarily pirate - mod it with files from other countries like I've done with many European games that have been edited for US markets by major publishers.
two problems with linking to an online account: 1) you need Internet service to play (unless there is a timer or something). 2) privacy
#1 is more an issue when you don't have internet service - in a plane, a car, outside a wifi hotspot, power outages (I lost power for 6 days in a windstorm and ran my laptop sans internet on a generator), etc. When cell phone internet (and airplane) become common that will be less of a big deal, but at the moment I don't like it.
#2 is an issue if you don't want companies generating statistical information for targeted advertising towards you and possibly collecting personal information on you which they can then resell to other companies. Battlefield 2142 says they do this right in the license.
Some places a notary public is even free - my bank and credit union both offer it as a free service.
Having a working demo can get your feet in the door, though it's almost impossible to get a job as a designer without prior work (I know a game designer, and he had a crapload of prior work in an indie studio before a major hired him). My own experience was a bit different - I briefly worked as a programmer for an indie game company that was commissioned by a larger company (during the Deer Hunter-is-a-hit cheap game heydays) but the indie house decided the game wasn't fun shortly after I was hired and asked for a 6 month extension which was not only denied, the publisher also pulled the title and handed it to another dev house that promised to finish it on time (and thus I was laid off 1 month in - I had just learned the GLIDE API and had started contributing code). The other house polished and finished what we had (incidentally missing the schedule by 6 months) and it was released to terrible reviews - in fact, we couldn't figure out what they did at all in that 6 months - no gameplay fixes, none of the 6 release critical bugs were fixed - even the major memory leak where textures weren't being released properly was still there. Of course, the sequel, using essentially the same engine got a 10/10 on one site... it made me just want to hit the publisher in the head with a bat. Anyhow, the moral is, don't just be careful with IP, but also be careful with who you work for.
This really has more to do with DHCP than with MAC addresses. What they're saying is they only have so many DHCP addresses assigned, and the number they have is inadequate to assign one unique address to every single host that uses their system. Since DHCP addresses are reused, they can't tie the DHCP to the MAC address.
What the RIAA will probably argue next is they could log this, as someone mentioned earlier, and then use the DHCP+MAC to identify the machine at the time. That, however, does not positively identify the user, so they would also have to log the user using the machine at that time (which still doesn't guarantee anything - they would then need to prove it.
Even these days it can be because the machine can't handle it - polygon count in games keeps creeping up. In addition, some newer effects can be GPU intensive (realistic smoke and fire, for instance). OTOH, details are starting to be offloaded to the shaders (like steep parallax mapping) allowing simpler scenes and more visual depth, so it could be laziness (or time).
oops - I meant limited ray tracing (not casting). That or painter's algorithm (which optimally uses a sorted list). I never did fully understand ray casting - I jumped from painter's to hardware.
They've stated that it will be a 150W+ chip on a PCI Express 2 card, as I recall, and is intended as a GPU, though it will be fully programmable and have CPU capability (so when not doing GPU stuff, it could serve as extra CPUs). It is intended to compete in the high end graphics market.
Essentially, it's a clutch of high performance software vector units in parallel with a bunch of CPUs. Graphics scale with each added processor because it is a software driven architecture, whereas traditional GPUs don't scale because they have a fixed function pipeline (if everything were written for shaders, I would think it would scale). One of the things Intel is touting is Binned rendering (aka chunked or tile rendering), which is breaking the frame into tiles and storing a list of front-to-back polygons in off-chip memory and the tile buffer is scaled to cache. Technically, this should be no faster than z-buffering, but I believe they're sorting and ray casting and in a brute-force sort of way this is faster than z-buffering. What I don't get here is how they get "2-7x the performance" because they have the extra sort step.
By the way, if you look at CPUs, Intel's Core2 line has five power designations: X - Extreme - power > 75W E - Standard Desktop 55-75W T - Standard Mobile 25-55W L - Low Voltage 15-25W (their name - they mean low power) U - Ultra Low Voltage - Power < 15W
According to Wikipedia the mini uses mobile processors (the T designation). Max power consumption of most laptops is 80W, so it is likely your mini maxes at 80W.
Hmm, I'd go further: Hammers have a fairly standard design (interface), so you can tell the "handle" from the "head," and the paradigm is well known and accepted. Hammers generally have better ergonomics than rocks. Hammers have intuitive usage based on design - you swing it to drive nails in and pry with it to pull nails out. You don't, say push it in the middle to drive nails in and push the side of the handle against the nail to pry them out. Rocks have ambiguous usage that varies from rock to rock (drop boulder on road runner may kill him - drop pebble on road runner and it doesn't hurt him).
Disadvantages: Both tend to accidentally pound thumbs when hammering in nails. Rocks have non-standard sizes. Only some rocks are suitable to the task of driving in nails, and some are better than others.
There are intuitive issues with hammers, all of which I think hammers are fairly good at - which end do you grab/hold? Does one end have a claw and what is it for (imagine pounding with the claw side, which may be the first intuitive thing that comes to mind if you've never seen a nail before)? Is it good for tasks other than pounding nails like pounding stakes or pounding heads?
The design of a car brings up a point I made earlier, which is use a "design first" philosophy - when the designer presents the car mock-up to the engine builder, they engine builder should notice there is no exhaust and ask "where's the exhaust? The designer says it was ugly and removed it, and the engine builder says it's necessary and needs to be there, and the design needs to be updated to include it. Had they used a "feature first" philosophy, they'd probably build the body separately and have it done before anyone realized it had no exhaust, then attempt to hack the exhaust into the already completed design.
It is not necessary for a designer to know how an engine works (in fact, 99% of how the engine works is really unnecessary - how many valves or pistons is a lot less important than, say, how much space is needed to fit it and allow proper airflow), but the more the designer knows, the better their initial design will be.
Microsoft's guidelines - Step 18, which doesn't really give detail.
I prefer Apple's, which give you a lot better idea on how to do the study and what to look for, which is much more useful for smaller software developers that can't afford a dedicated usability team specializing in this area and need to do something like the mom test (you have your mom try to use it and observe her actions). In my case I have to do the dad test, because my mom is a bit of a power user and my dad an ignorant nit when it comes to computers. A video camera or two (a second camera to study the user's eye movements is useful) is a necessity, so it's not a zero cost operation, but it can certainly be done on the cheap (heck, I've used a video camera on a phone for a second camera). Most people can ignore a camera better than a person looking over their shoulder (and at their face).
As for design philosophy, that is a different issue - most FOSS programmers are "feature first" programmers - you get the app up and running and then worry about stuff like the GUI. A "design first" philosophy works with the GUI and app being designed from the ground up before implementation and has the advantage of being able to catch critical design flaws before the code is written. From a FOSS programmer's perspective, I have to admit I often fall more in the former, and I bet it costs me more time in the long run, but due to time constraints and schedule (yes, we set one) I'm often forced to start coding with an incomplete design so I don't hold up other developers, even though that has a cost in the long run. We're hoping to get better at this - in fact, my main OSS project has been redesigned from the ground up twice now to fix architecture problems (the second was probably not catch-able due to an infusion of new tech that required a design change, but the first certainly was).
Microsoft has a history of having loose guidelines that revolve around some set of rules. I've never understood that - why would you have rules as guidelines? If you notice, almost all of them tell you specific things to do that don't apply to all cases. The biggest problem I've had with MS apps is consistency, something Apple has been much better at (assigning certain keys to certain actions, for instance, and making them logical - alt-F4 is NOT logical for quit)
For a while, Apple neglected their HIG for so long a wikiwas set up to address them (note that the wiki is down for revamp), but they've since updated the document. There were a number of new controls that went unaddressed for something like 2 years.
I've not had time or necessity to read GNOME or KDE guidelines.
The real problem is many apps need to be developed with HIG in mind from the ground up and in OSS they usually aren't, resulting in a jumbled mess like GIMP (called "feature first" design), then they try to fix it and the power users complain because they're used to the "old" way.
The 9xxx parts are the same as the 8xxx parts but with a smaller dye size, which should, theoretically, allow them to run faster and generate less heat.
My laptop with an 8600M just failed a little less than a week ago (exactly 1 year, 14 days from purchase, but still under warranty - yes, I had to find my receipt). It did appear to be heat related, but by all indications the failure was caused by overheating video RAM, though it's possible parts that control flow to and from video RAM failed. The display works fine, and even games work fine as long as they don't use 3D. When 3D graphics are used, they rapidly corrupt but the GPU does not overheat (I see this as much when it's at 68C from running a while to 57C, which was the max it hit after a cold boot before bombing out).
you missed alt.binaries.sex.hamsters.ducttape (which strangely, or perhaps thankfully, never contained any binaries). When I was attending university, we'd grab images off the alt lists on usenet assemble them, and set them as the default screen saver in the public labs - fun times.
at least the days of 2 letter apps are gone - no more typing nn for 'net news' instead of mm (which I believe was mapped to the elm mail tool) and waiting 45 minutes until I could get the CPU back (that was before I knew how to set the keymaps and cont-C wasn't default kill).
Nice to point out there are many types of dementia other than Alzheimer's - my grandpa has stroke induced dementia caused by bleeding in the brain and doesn't seem capable of generating any new long term memories. Barring another stroke, it is unlikely he will ever change from his current stage (which happens to be about the anger and confusion stage, but I'm not sure if he has a specific ranking - my mom is a nurse and more on top of that sort of thing). The worst problem for him is he lost most of his memory before about 1956, so he doesn't remember any of his grandchildren (and often comments on how big his youngest son has gotten).
NetHack isn't the worst - try Akalabeth, where every time you moved in the outdoors you consumed one food, so you'd have to be careful you had enough food to reach the dungeon you wanted to go to and get back. Early going in that game was by far the hardest I can remember, and that includes Rogue (which was much harder than NetHack - no #pray).
You're missing the logistics here - put this in a 2D perspective - say you're sitting at the pin end of a bowling alley with a BB gun and a bowling ball of some known weight and angle is rolled down the alley at you and at some point you notice and begin shooting trying to redirect it. Now you also, say, have a 5 year old try to hurl another bowling ball 20 feet from the side and hit the ball coming at you. As the ball comes towards you and the other from the side, you are proposing that you redirect the one coming at you into the path of the one thrown rather than trying to redirect it into the gutter. I personally would be madly shooting the bowling ball and hoping I could redirect it into the gutter and consider it hitting the moon as an acceptable bout of luck (if it didn't irradiate the earth).
Trying to redirect something like the 6 mile wide rock that wiped out the dinosaurs would probably be like shooting a BB gun at a bowling ball the size of a beach ball - you're probably not going to have much luck with it unless you have a lot of time. To make matters worse, many large asteroids have moons which may cause problems with targeting and hitting the asteroid itself.
The problem is they are patenting any old thing they can put onto a computer without really inventing anything, or patenting fairly obvious ways of implementing conventional equations.
Take, for instance, the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid dynamics (specifically the incompressible equations, which are much simpler and suitable to realtime). I know of at least 3 patents on computerized methods of using them. Twice I came up with nearly or exactly the same idea as the patented method without knowing there was a patent out there (once for software, once for graphical hardware acceleration - the latter I didn't even discover until I had finished 3/4 of my code and was researching an issue). In fact, the patent filed in 1996 I even found similar work in a university paper that pre-dates it by 2 years, but if I remember correctly, the patent might have been filed just before that paper was published (it did not contain the names of the researchers, so I'm pretty sure it was independent).
funny - del key worked when I tried it this time (on Vista) - was the feature broken when this was released? As I stated, I even tried it. I'll give it a try on mac when I get home - I'm not sure what platform I was on at the time I was testing this out because I switch too much at home (I have boxes with Linux, Vista, XP, MacOS, and FreeBSD at home - I'm a bit OS crazy, or as I call it, platform agnostic).
No, I'm not - using google and specifically looking for Apple branded DDR2 ECC fully buffered 800MHz DIMMs, and checking only the very first link returned, it lists the memory at $190 for 4GB. That means Apple is marking them up at least a whopping $710 for installation (remember this is being resold, not the cost to Apple).
The most likely reason for this is because businesses usually have budgets that can afford machines with huge markups like this and wouldn't bother buying and installing RAM separately. They also can write off the expense as a 2 year depreciating asset, I believe, so due to the way the tax system works, they are basically writing them off using a tax exemption (half in the first year, and half in the second).
Microsoft does the same thing with their products - look at Office Home vs Office Small Business - is Outlook + Business Contact Manager, Accounting Express 2008 and Publisher really worth an additional $300? I personally think all 3 are mediocre products (Outlook's mail is atrocious from a low level standpoint [auto-archiving is a personal peeve], but calendar planning is as good as alternative products). I've used publisher, but for everything I needed it for, Scribus could do just as well for free.
ok - my brother designs RAM and he explained this to me once, and I think his explanation was a bit too deep - I think what he was saying is each byte is sent to a different chip via the bus, which is how you get 8*800 (and a 8 byte bus) - I also got an in depth explanation of latencies that pretty much melted my mind too;)
I haven't used ECC memory in quite a while, but ECC can and often does use parity schemes. All the chips I've ever used had exactly 1 extra memory chip, meaning it had exactly one extra bit for each additional chip (8 chips and one extra), not 2. There are various ECC schemes and I don't know what is in common use these days - read the wiki article (I didn't - just looked it up and verified parity schemes are used at least some of the time, which I was positive of from school).
Slashdot Mirror
The issue is the fixed function pipeline - DX10 got rid of it and OpenGL 3.0 was going to get rid of it, but then backed out. Getting rid of it would boost the overall speed of rendering by as much as 10-20% from what I've read. If you wrote the DX10 API in an OpenGL wrapper, you'd be losing that performance (the model is quite different as well).
An emulator specifically translates one instruction set to another instruction set. WINE does not - it natively processes the code. Calling it an emulator would be like calling VMWare an emulator.
WINE decided to reimplement the API for Windows rather than running Windows in a virtual machine to avoid the cost of Windows itself, but functionally it is very similar to a virtual machine.
not necessarily pirate - mod it with files from other countries like I've done with many European games that have been edited for US markets by major publishers.
two problems with linking to an online account:
1) you need Internet service to play (unless there is a timer or something).
2) privacy
#1 is more an issue when you don't have internet service - in a plane, a car, outside a wifi hotspot, power outages (I lost power for 6 days in a windstorm and ran my laptop sans internet on a generator), etc. When cell phone internet (and airplane) become common that will be less of a big deal, but at the moment I don't like it.
#2 is an issue if you don't want companies generating statistical information for targeted advertising towards you and possibly collecting personal information on you which they can then resell to other companies. Battlefield 2142 says they do this right in the license.
well if it survives the compiler, it's just a glorified memset to 0.
null = 00000000
null &(void*) can be anything
& = bitwise and
so always equals 00000000.
Some places a notary public is even free - my bank and credit union both offer it as a free service.
Having a working demo can get your feet in the door, though it's almost impossible to get a job as a designer without prior work (I know a game designer, and he had a crapload of prior work in an indie studio before a major hired him). My own experience was a bit different - I briefly worked as a programmer for an indie game company that was commissioned by a larger company (during the Deer Hunter-is-a-hit cheap game heydays) but the indie house decided the game wasn't fun shortly after I was hired and asked for a 6 month extension which was not only denied, the publisher also pulled the title and handed it to another dev house that promised to finish it on time (and thus I was laid off 1 month in - I had just learned the GLIDE API and had started contributing code). The other house polished and finished what we had (incidentally missing the schedule by 6 months) and it was released to terrible reviews - in fact, we couldn't figure out what they did at all in that 6 months - no gameplay fixes, none of the 6 release critical bugs were fixed - even the major memory leak where textures weren't being released properly was still there. Of course, the sequel, using essentially the same engine got a 10/10 on one site... it made me just want to hit the publisher in the head with a bat. Anyhow, the moral is, don't just be careful with IP, but also be careful with who you work for.
This really has more to do with DHCP than with MAC addresses. What they're saying is they only have so many DHCP addresses assigned, and the number they have is inadequate to assign one unique address to every single host that uses their system. Since DHCP addresses are reused, they can't tie the DHCP to the MAC address.
What the RIAA will probably argue next is they could log this, as someone mentioned earlier, and then use the DHCP+MAC to identify the machine at the time. That, however, does not positively identify the user, so they would also have to log the user using the machine at that time (which still doesn't guarantee anything - they would then need to prove it.
Even these days it can be because the machine can't handle it - polygon count in games keeps creeping up. In addition, some newer effects can be GPU intensive (realistic smoke and fire, for instance). OTOH, details are starting to be offloaded to the shaders (like steep parallax mapping) allowing simpler scenes and more visual depth, so it could be laziness (or time).
oops - I meant limited ray tracing (not casting). That or painter's algorithm (which optimally uses a sorted list). I never did fully understand ray casting - I jumped from painter's to hardware.
They've stated that it will be a 150W+ chip on a PCI Express 2 card, as I recall, and is intended as a GPU, though it will be fully programmable and have CPU capability (so when not doing GPU stuff, it could serve as extra CPUs). It is intended to compete in the high end graphics market.
Essentially, it's a clutch of high performance software vector units in parallel with a bunch of CPUs. Graphics scale with each added processor because it is a software driven architecture, whereas traditional GPUs don't scale because they have a fixed function pipeline (if everything were written for shaders, I would think it would scale). One of the things Intel is touting is Binned rendering (aka chunked or tile rendering), which is breaking the frame into tiles and storing a list of front-to-back polygons in off-chip memory and the tile buffer is scaled to cache. Technically, this should be no faster than z-buffering, but I believe they're sorting and ray casting and in a brute-force sort of way this is faster than z-buffering. What I don't get here is how they get "2-7x the performance" because they have the extra sort step.
By the way, if you look at CPUs, Intel's Core2 line has five power designations:
X - Extreme - power > 75W
E - Standard Desktop 55-75W
T - Standard Mobile 25-55W
L - Low Voltage 15-25W (their name - they mean low power)
U - Ultra Low Voltage - Power < 15W
According to Wikipedia the mini uses mobile processors (the T designation). Max power consumption of most laptops is 80W, so it is likely your mini maxes at 80W.
Hmm, I'd go further:
Hammers have a fairly standard design (interface), so you can tell the "handle" from the "head," and the paradigm is well known and accepted.
Hammers generally have better ergonomics than rocks.
Hammers have intuitive usage based on design - you swing it to drive nails in and pry with it to pull nails out. You don't, say push it in the middle to drive nails in and push the side of the handle against the nail to pry them out. Rocks have ambiguous usage that varies from rock to rock (drop boulder on road runner may kill him - drop pebble on road runner and it doesn't hurt him).
Disadvantages:
Both tend to accidentally pound thumbs when hammering in nails.
Rocks have non-standard sizes.
Only some rocks are suitable to the task of driving in nails, and some are better than others.
There are intuitive issues with hammers, all of which I think hammers are fairly good at - which end do you grab/hold? Does one end have a claw and what is it for (imagine pounding with the claw side, which may be the first intuitive thing that comes to mind if you've never seen a nail before)? Is it good for tasks other than pounding nails like pounding stakes or pounding heads?
The design of a car brings up a point I made earlier, which is use a "design first" philosophy - when the designer presents the car mock-up to the engine builder, they engine builder should notice there is no exhaust and ask "where's the exhaust? The designer says it was ugly and removed it, and the engine builder says it's necessary and needs to be there, and the design needs to be updated to include it. Had they used a "feature first" philosophy, they'd probably build the body separately and have it done before anyone realized it had no exhaust, then attempt to hack the exhaust into the already completed design.
It is not necessary for a designer to know how an engine works (in fact, 99% of how the engine works is really unnecessary - how many valves or pistons is a lot less important than, say, how much space is needed to fit it and allow proper airflow), but the more the designer knows, the better their initial design will be.
and this is even part of most if not all Human Interface Guidelines - do a Usability Study.
Apple's human interface guidelines section for this.
Microsoft's guidelines - Step 18, which doesn't really give detail.
I prefer Apple's, which give you a lot better idea on how to do the study and what to look for, which is much more useful for smaller software developers that can't afford a dedicated usability team specializing in this area and need to do something like the mom test (you have your mom try to use it and observe her actions). In my case I have to do the dad test, because my mom is a bit of a power user and my dad an ignorant nit when it comes to computers. A video camera or two (a second camera to study the user's eye movements is useful) is a necessity, so it's not a zero cost operation, but it can certainly be done on the cheap (heck, I've used a video camera on a phone for a second camera). Most people can ignore a camera better than a person looking over their shoulder (and at their face).
As for design philosophy, that is a different issue - most FOSS programmers are "feature first" programmers - you get the app up and running and then worry about stuff like the GUI. A "design first" philosophy works with the GUI and app being designed from the ground up before implementation and has the advantage of being able to catch critical design flaws before the code is written. From a FOSS programmer's perspective, I have to admit I often fall more in the former, and I bet it costs me more time in the long run, but due to time constraints and schedule (yes, we set one) I'm often forced to start coding with an incomplete design so I don't hold up other developers, even though that has a cost in the long run. We're hoping to get better at this - in fact, my main OSS project has been redesigned from the ground up twice now to fix architecture problems (the second was probably not catch-able due to an infusion of new tech that required a design change, but the first certainly was).
Microsoft has a history of having loose guidelines that revolve around some set of rules. I've never understood that - why would you have rules as guidelines? If you notice, almost all of them tell you specific things to do that don't apply to all cases. The biggest problem I've had with MS apps is consistency, something Apple has been much better at (assigning certain keys to certain actions, for instance, and making them logical - alt-F4 is NOT logical for quit)
For a while, Apple neglected their HIG for so long a wikiwas set up to address them (note that the wiki is down for revamp), but they've since updated the document. There were a number of new controls that went unaddressed for something like 2 years.
I've not had time or necessity to read GNOME or KDE guidelines.
The real problem is many apps need to be developed with HIG in mind from the ground up and in OSS they usually aren't, resulting in a jumbled mess like GIMP (called "feature first" design), then they try to fix it and the power users complain because they're used to the "old" way.
why?
You can pop a pill for that.
Now we just need beer pills and work pills and my life is complete...
That sounds about right - the problems I've heard of (and the one I've experienced) were with the 8400M and 8600M series chips (see http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/10/all-nvidia-8400m-8600m-chips-faulty/ ).
I haven't heard of many non M chips failing, and I know several people with 8800GTs in their desktops.
The 9xxx parts are the same as the 8xxx parts but with a smaller dye size, which should, theoretically, allow them to run faster and generate less heat.
My laptop with an 8600M just failed a little less than a week ago (exactly 1 year, 14 days from purchase, but still under warranty - yes, I had to find my receipt). It did appear to be heat related, but by all indications the failure was caused by overheating video RAM, though it's possible parts that control flow to and from video RAM failed. The display works fine, and even games work fine as long as they don't use 3D. When 3D graphics are used, they rapidly corrupt but the GPU does not overheat (I see this as much when it's at 68C from running a while to 57C, which was the max it hit after a cold boot before bombing out).
you missed alt.binaries.sex.hamsters.ducttape (which strangely, or perhaps thankfully, never contained any binaries). When I was attending university, we'd grab images off the alt lists on usenet assemble them, and set them as the default screen saver in the public labs - fun times.
at least the days of 2 letter apps are gone - no more typing nn for 'net news' instead of mm (which I believe was mapped to the elm mail tool) and waiting 45 minutes until I could get the CPU back (that was before I knew how to set the keymaps and cont-C wasn't default kill).
Nice to point out there are many types of dementia other than Alzheimer's - my grandpa has stroke induced dementia caused by bleeding in the brain and doesn't seem capable of generating any new long term memories. Barring another stroke, it is unlikely he will ever change from his current stage (which happens to be about the anger and confusion stage, but I'm not sure if he has a specific ranking - my mom is a nurse and more on top of that sort of thing). The worst problem for him is he lost most of his memory before about 1956, so he doesn't remember any of his grandchildren (and often comments on how big his youngest son has gotten).
NetHack isn't the worst - try Akalabeth, where every time you moved in the outdoors you consumed one food, so you'd have to be careful you had enough food to reach the dungeon you wanted to go to and get back. Early going in that game was by far the hardest I can remember, and that includes Rogue (which was much harder than NetHack - no #pray).
You're missing the logistics here - put this in a 2D perspective - say you're sitting at the pin end of a bowling alley with a BB gun and a bowling ball of some known weight and angle is rolled down the alley at you and at some point you notice and begin shooting trying to redirect it. Now you also, say, have a 5 year old try to hurl another bowling ball 20 feet from the side and hit the ball coming at you. As the ball comes towards you and the other from the side, you are proposing that you redirect the one coming at you into the path of the one thrown rather than trying to redirect it into the gutter. I personally would be madly shooting the bowling ball and hoping I could redirect it into the gutter and consider it hitting the moon as an acceptable bout of luck (if it didn't irradiate the earth).
Trying to redirect something like the 6 mile wide rock that wiped out the dinosaurs would probably be like shooting a BB gun at a bowling ball the size of a beach ball - you're probably not going to have much luck with it unless you have a lot of time. To make matters worse, many large asteroids have moons which may cause problems with targeting and hitting the asteroid itself.
The problem is they are patenting any old thing they can put onto a computer without really inventing anything, or patenting fairly obvious ways of implementing conventional equations.
Take, for instance, the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid dynamics (specifically the incompressible equations, which are much simpler and suitable to realtime). I know of at least 3 patents on computerized methods of using them. Twice I came up with nearly or exactly the same idea as the patented method without knowing there was a patent out there (once for software, once for graphical hardware acceleration - the latter I didn't even discover until I had finished 3/4 of my code and was researching an issue). In fact, the patent filed in 1996 I even found similar work in a university paper that pre-dates it by 2 years, but if I remember correctly, the patent might have been filed just before that paper was published (it did not contain the names of the researchers, so I'm pretty sure it was independent).
funny - del key worked when I tried it this time (on Vista) - was the feature broken when this was released? As I stated, I even tried it. I'll give it a try on mac when I get home - I'm not sure what platform I was on at the time I was testing this out because I switch too much at home (I have boxes with Linux, Vista, XP, MacOS, and FreeBSD at home - I'm a bit OS crazy, or as I call it, platform agnostic).
No, I'm not - using google and specifically looking for Apple branded DDR2 ECC fully buffered 800MHz DIMMs, and checking only the very first link returned, it lists the memory at $190 for 4GB. That means Apple is marking them up at least a whopping $710 for installation (remember this is being resold, not the cost to Apple).
The most likely reason for this is because businesses usually have budgets that can afford machines with huge markups like this and wouldn't bother buying and installing RAM separately. They also can write off the expense as a 2 year depreciating asset, I believe, so due to the way the tax system works, they are basically writing them off using a tax exemption (half in the first year, and half in the second).
Microsoft does the same thing with their products - look at Office Home vs Office Small Business - is Outlook + Business Contact Manager, Accounting Express 2008 and Publisher really worth an additional $300? I personally think all 3 are mediocre products (Outlook's mail is atrocious from a low level standpoint [auto-archiving is a personal peeve], but calendar planning is as good as alternative products). I've used publisher, but for everything I needed it for, Scribus could do just as well for free.
ok - my brother designs RAM and he explained this to me once, and I think his explanation was a bit too deep - I think what he was saying is each byte is sent to a different chip via the bus, which is how you get 8*800 (and a 8 byte bus) - I also got an in depth explanation of latencies that pretty much melted my mind too ;)
I haven't used ECC memory in quite a while, but ECC can and often does use parity schemes. All the chips I've ever used had exactly 1 extra memory chip, meaning it had exactly one extra bit for each additional chip (8 chips and one extra), not 2. There are various ECC schemes and I don't know what is in common use these days - read the wiki article (I didn't - just looked it up and verified parity schemes are used at least some of the time, which I was positive of from school).