Does anyone here actually work for a company that currently (or ever has) used true dumb terminals?
I used to work for a GIS mapping company that utilized dumb terminals for their 500 or so employees who edited the maps. The mapping software ran in X11 on several HP-UX servers. Their terminals were directly connected to these servers, and then they would rlogin to other servers which contains individual state datasets of the US. The editors/drafters also used Citrix to connect to several Windows Terminal servers for Excel, Word, Access, online timesheets, and Track-IT, and could connect to a different server if theirs was down.
I wouldn't say they were "migrating to dumb terminals" because they had them the entire 4 years I worked there, but they were deploying additional servers and terminals.
Gentoo Linux does not make "releases" and it does not aim to cover one area of the market alone.
Gentoo does make releases though. Those are the profiles you have to switch every 6 months to a year when you're upgrading. 2006.1 is the latest release. If you ran that, you'd be getting the same "release" thousands of other people are getting on their Live CD / base install. I suppose if you ran it on a server, you could just apply security updates and you've got the same "stable release" as other distros. Or simply use portage correctly with "emerge -p world" to see what is new, then specific "emerge mysql", "emerge apache", etc when you actually want to update something. But then you wouldn't have a good flamebait article.
I don't believe Vista is a patch, so no I don't think it needs anything to upgrade. It is only an "upgrade" in marketing terms. If you have the XP OS on the computer, that should be enough. Just like you could install Windows XP Upgrade on a different partition than Windows 2000.
The article doesn't specify whether clean installations to a new partition would be allowed:
Upgrade versions of Windows Vista Home Basic, Premium, and Starter Edition will not install on any PC unless Windows XP or Windows 2000 is already on the machine in question.
But I assume like previous articles that mentioned "Oh no! After you've installed Vista Beta, you can't roll back to XP" when all you needed to do was use different partitions, this article ignores that fact as well. The installer probably checks for a valid installation at the beginning, then later on in installation, asks you where you want to install it. Pick an empty partition and it should do a clean install.
I know you were referring to P4, but while we're talking about Intel...with Core 2, there are actually two thermal protections built into the chip. THERMTRIP#, which you mentioned, is used for throttling, which can be disabled in the BIOS. The other maxes out a few degrees Celsius higher, and actually shuts off the chip to prevent it from frying. That one can't be disabled. Both are mentioned in the Core 2 thermal design whitepaper somewhere on Intel.com.
Also, most motherboard monitoring programs don't accurately read the Core 2 thermal diode. They likely use the other sensor. Core Temp and Intel TAT give the most accurate temps from the diode.
I just don't see this as a huge deal. It's just one more of many many countless reasons to keep backups -- and in the case of VISTA -- it sounds like keeping an HD image of the OS partition is of particular interest.
Typical recent HDD size: 320 GB XP base install: less than 1 GB
It might be worthwhile to keep an XP partition around just to satisfy the installer when you reformat the Vista partition. You'll probably need it for stuff that is broken in Vista for a while anyway.
2) With satellite, you're paying for the 6 months of the year when the networks are only playing re-runs.
I don't know about you, but I definitely haven't seen every rerun of every show I watch. With an HTPC PVR, eventually I will have, but that's not the case now.
I record on average 5 shows a day, or 35/week. I don't watch all of them all of the way through. The skip button isn't just for commercials. 35 * 4 = 140 * $2 = $280. Yeah, the iTunes $280 doesn't really compare favorably to $40/month cable.
I still buy my favorite episodes on iTunes though, when I believe they'll never release a DVD of it, or if I'm really impatient. But I'll never buy a lot, including mediocre shows/episodes, unless they drastically reduce prices. And iTunes will never introduce me to new shows, because it is too much money to waste on crappy episodes, so it will always be in addition to cable, not a replacement for it, unless they give away loads of episodes or, again, drastically reduce prices.
And as long as you doing the math with myth you probably should deduct the price of a dedicated PC with tuner cards.
Why would you factor in the cost of a dedicated PC? I can play games on the same PC that records shows, without more than a 1-3 fps hit. That basically means the PC can do anything except saturate the disk I/O or reboot while recording.
Many people do setup a dedicated box for it, but it is definitely unnecessary. But I suspect they also use their HTPC for other tasks as well, whether it is gaming or feeding video from the web.
What is to stop the other "communities built around video" from doing the same and turning the thing into the "who'll pay more" type war they say they wanted to avoid?
It's an interesting move (I can't wait for the first "so now they'll pay me for my home pr0n" posts and the "this is/. therefore you are a virgin" replies), but if anyone else decides to pay their uploaders, how different is it going to be?
They already have. YouTube is not the first to pay for video uploads. Revver has been paying for uploads from the start, I believe. And really that's all I've ever heard about Revver: they'll pay you. Similar to what the summary says, it only ever attracted people who wanted to make money, not a real community.
For once an article actually uses some specificity to describe the correct codec involved, H.264, and it gets "corrected" to the general, way too broad name that many other articles use when they are referring to H.264, an implementation of MPEG-4 Part 10.
You could have said "otherwise known as MPEG-4 AVC" and you would have been more precise, but "MPEG-4" in general also includes DivX/XviD, 3ivx, Nero Digital, and Quicktime. Obviously the article is not referring to any of those codecs.
I really enjoyed the game up until the meat circus level. Then there are 2 sequences where you basically have to play perfectly for a period of about 5 minutes or start the sequence over from scratch. I'm talking about "Help the kid catch the bunny" and "Prove to your dad you are an acrobat".
I agree wholeheartedly with that. For an otherwise very easy game, that part was insanely difficult. Especially the part where you have to jump from one wire mesh wall to another while avoiding the flames and the rising water. The worst part is if you lose too many lives doing that, you don't have enough for the 2 bosses after that level.
I mostly just wish the game was longer though. It was a really fun game, but I wish there were more to do in the "real world" campground, outside of the various characters' minds. It was a really satisfying game, but I just wish it would have a direct sequel with the same storyline, and an epic world to explore, something I know will never happen. Tim Schafer even mentioned in one of his interviews that if he had chosen to make a sequel for [insert his game here], his next game never would have been created.
At least for multi-format titles sold through Amazon, HD-DVD appears to hold a substantial lead. Also the number 1 position (Departed) sells much more in HD-DVD than Blu-Ray's #1. You could go through each position for a more scientific approach to it, to see if the entire top 25 or 100 sell more in HD-DVD format.
However, I do think one unintended consequence of non-lethal weapons is what we saw with Tasers when that student was expellend from the university library a couple of months ago. In that case, it seemed to me that if the guards had not had tasers, they would not have escalted to beating him with nightsticks, they'd have had to just haul him out physically. Because they had a non-lethal but very unpleasant weapons, they escalated to that wheras otherwise they might have been more patient.
I was about to post something very similar. The thing is, if you give militarized police forces more non-lethal weapons, they're going to be more likely to use them when they wouldn't have used any weapons. In this case, it is a weapon that when used, has an effect very similar to torture.
Now if there were really any chance that they were going to use this weapon in a combat scenario, which is what most of the posters have suggested so far, it sounds fine, right? Better to use this than kill them, right? But guess what, out of all of the currently existing non-lethal weapons, the only one that has been deployed in Iraq is the sound wave "weapon" used to control crowds, people who, incidentally, they wouldn't have shot. It has also been deployed in the US, for crowd-control on American citizens. It was present at the 2004 Republican National Convention in NYC. So far, we have zero evidence that they are going to use non-lethal weapons on hostile targets that would have been shot. And we have some early evidence that the same weapons deployed in a destabilized war region will be used on our own citizens within the US, by our own police forces.
The incident with the taser is an example of what is to come if we continue to accept the use of these weapons. Do you think that their use on unarmed journalists was just a coincidence? Non-violent protest will shortly become a historical footnote, if the history books bother to mention it at all. Giving militarized police forces more (sadistic/torturous) "non-lethal" weapons that they are much more likely to use when they wouldn't have used force at all is something I can't believe so many posters are okay with.
Have you ever heard of a "non-lethal" weapon actually being used against an armed hostile target? Then what reason do you have to believe these weapons will be used instead of weapons? They will be used where currently no weapon is used, for unarmed crowd control.
"Charging for something we have free already? Come on! This should be FREE to all users! They just want more money!" Apple's basically pulling an MS and Mac people are going "Sure, it costs a little more, but what doesn't?:)"
I agree. I didn't realize until this article how little BootCamp actually is: a bootloader and Windows drivers for Mac hardware with a fancy GUI.
It would be like Dell charging you for a set of drivers for their hardware to use in Linux. Basically no hardware vendor has ever charged for this.
Apple doesn't care, full Bootcamp will be part of Leopard (for "free"), this is just a boon to the few users who don't want to get Leopard but want a non-beta bootcamp in the end.
This is similar to the way Microsoft only releases some updates for previous OS versions (IE7), while others force you to upgrade (DX10). Apple took a different approach though, and rather than giving some updates away for free and neglecting to give out other updates for old OSes, they chose to provide many of the updates, but they're charging for them. It will still encourage people to upgrade--who wants to waste $29?--but it doesn't force them to upgrade.
It is a slightly different scenario though, because obviously if the beta runs on Tiger, the final does too, without any further development work. But Apple is known for nickel-and-dime-ing people. For example, full screen Quicktime only available by paying $30.
This is the best evidence yet that this whole "squirting" business was invented by an uninformed marketing department, that wasn't aware of the real-world limitations Microsoft's partners were going to place on the system.
I think they were aware of its limitations when they added the feature. In my opinion, it was never intended to be an actual useful feature. They just wanted WiFi as a bullet point on their features list, to differentiate their product from Apple's. Whether the feature actually did anything useful was an afterthought. That's why the WiFi was crippled from the start.
Not sure about you, but I'd rather have more content in that extra space than more graphics...
I think the GP was referring to the distant LOD textures in Oblivion, known by modders as "pea soup" because the line between nearby high quality textures and distant low quality textures is so extreme. Also tiling patterns within land textures are a problem with the stock textures. Those are probably the 2 biggest problems with the graphics in the game, likely to accomodate weaker systems, but they really stand out in contrast to an otherwise beautiful game. The LOD system is actually a great improvement over the fog that obscured distant lands in Morrowind, but the technique needs to fit seamlessly with the rest of the terrain.
I don't know of many people that want an ugly workstation permanently plugged into their TV or that are willing to plug their laptop in every time they want to stream a film.
I'm a single guy living in a small apartment, so I usually have my computer setup in the same room as the TV, but even so, I considered buying something like this HTPC case for my next PC. I opted for a mini-tower instead for this build, but I still wouldn't be that ashamed to have it in my living room. Ugly? Not even close. My DVR is my computer. It is handy for watching on TV or while I'm surfing the web, only showing the TV window when it is interesting.
IMO, the killer appliance would be a DVR priced less than 500 USD with a DVD drive and a network interface capable of pulling movies from all the PCs in the house as well as services such as this.
I could build a Core 2 Duo PC with that HTPC case for $800 or so, matching the price of the tower I just built. But if I were to make it silent, I would go with an Energy Efficient AMD chip for much less, and could probably get closer to the $500 mark, complete with remote and PVR software. Why would you want a locked-down DVR?
Most codecs do pretty well at re-encoding DVDs, since that's what their primary use is at this point. For instance, a 6 Mbps DVD would look fine at 2-3 Mbps H.264.
The problem is re-encoding XviD/DivX, MPEG-1, WMV, and all the other crap you find on the web to H.264, imo.
Yeah, but to show them on the AppleTV you'll have an extra step of reencoding the files that the EyeTV spits out. You can't send the MPEG2 that the EyeTV makes to the Apple TV. Same thing with ripping DVDs.
Which basically means the quality will be awful for anything except H.264 and DVD MPEG-2.
In this way, the SlingCatcher may turn out to be a one-size-fits-all solution in a field populated with specialty products.
iTV hasn't been released. XBox 360 may be a specialty product, but I'd say the field is primarily populated with products like MediaMVP.
The line should read:
In this way, iTV and XBox360 may turn out to be specialty solutions in a field dominated by one-size-fits-all products, such as SlingBox, MediaMVP, MythTV, SageTV, and BeyondTV.
I really don't get why people post sensitive information on the web in any form. The example in the article shows a "Sample" check. Then mentions something about a real check involving winning 1 million dollars.
So, if you blurred it, you must have edited the photo. So in no way does a photoshopped photo prove you won a million dollars. Completely blanking out (with pure white, pure black, a texture, etc) the image proves just as much as the blur. WTF is the point? By contrast, PDFs and DOC files requires understanding the format and taking the necessary precautions to delete sensitive data. But images and text files are easy to completely remove data.
If it is more the screenshot/example/illustration type of image, why not remove the data and replace it with a photoshop text box containing invalid numbers? The font doesn't even need to match. Who cares? Doesn't matter. Similar to chain letters and internet hoaxes, I don't think I'll ever understand why people do stupid stuff like this.
Quiet? The typical "quiet" fan sold these days is about 20-25dB. Many are higher despite the bogus advertising that reads "30dB is a quiet library". Unless you're playing music, have the TV on, or live beside a trafficked roadway, that translates in a fairly noticeable whine. Multiply that by any number of fans per system, and you end up with a lot of unwelcome noise. And there is no indication that plastic fans are going to ever be any quieter, or less numerous, so "these days" isn't very different than "those days" and will be the same well into the future.
You mean like this SPCR system? It is 20 dBA @ 1m while idling and under load. It uses a Core 2 Duo with a fanless heatsink, and future SPCR designed systems designed with AMD Energy Efficient Small Form Factor processors would likely be quieter. The bungie-mounted hard drive is the loudest thing in the system. Slower, quieter laptop drives are also an option.
Most fans may not get quieter than about 15 dBA, but overall system noise will continue to decrease due to advances in dampening, airflow design, and energy efficient or undervolted processors that remain powerful and do not require a CPU fan. SPCR limits for "silent" computers are currently about 20 dBA for a "general purpose" desktop in close proximity and up to 30 dBA for a media center that is further away and drowned out by TV/movies/music.
In a business, re-imaging a mixture a Dell/Non-Dell machines requires a non-Dell OEM version of XP (generic XP OEM works on Dells, but Dell XP only works on Dells).
Funny, I just installed my Dell OEM XP ("Gold") on my custom built eVGA/E6600 machine last week, plus activation, without any problems. It also slipstreamed SP2 perfectly.
Why does it matter? They all do it. You can still compare a 320 GB drive from one manufacturer to a 250 GB drive from another vendor. What are you doing with the drive that requires they use the same units as, for example, memory?
It only bothers the type of people that complain in NewEgg reviews that they got ripped off because apparently they've never used a hard drive before, or they don't understand that the difference between units multiplies by the larger size of the bigger drives. To them, I say: No, your "320 GB" drive does not rip you off. It is still "80 GB" x 4. So shut up already.
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I wouldn't say they were "migrating to dumb terminals" because they had them the entire 4 years I worked there, but they were deploying additional servers and terminals.
The article doesn't specify whether clean installations to a new partition would be allowed: But I assume like previous articles that mentioned "Oh no! After you've installed Vista Beta, you can't roll back to XP" when all you needed to do was use different partitions, this article ignores that fact as well. The installer probably checks for a valid installation at the beginning, then later on in installation, asks you where you want to install it. Pick an empty partition and it should do a clean install.
I know you were referring to P4, but while we're talking about Intel...with Core 2, there are actually two thermal protections built into the chip. THERMTRIP#, which you mentioned, is used for throttling, which can be disabled in the BIOS. The other maxes out a few degrees Celsius higher, and actually shuts off the chip to prevent it from frying. That one can't be disabled. Both are mentioned in the Core 2 thermal design whitepaper somewhere on Intel.com.
Also, most motherboard monitoring programs don't accurately read the Core 2 thermal diode. They likely use the other sensor. Core Temp and Intel TAT give the most accurate temps from the diode.
XP base install: less than 1 GB
It might be worthwhile to keep an XP partition around just to satisfy the installer when you reformat the Vista partition. You'll probably need it for stuff that is broken in Vista for a while anyway.
I record on average 5 shows a day, or 35/week. I don't watch all of them all of the way through. The skip button isn't just for commercials. 35 * 4 = 140 * $2 = $280. Yeah, the iTunes $280 doesn't really compare favorably to $40/month cable.
I still buy my favorite episodes on iTunes though, when I believe they'll never release a DVD of it, or if I'm really impatient. But I'll never buy a lot, including mediocre shows/episodes, unless they drastically reduce prices. And iTunes will never introduce me to new shows, because it is too much money to waste on crappy episodes, so it will always be in addition to cable, not a replacement for it, unless they give away loads of episodes or, again, drastically reduce prices.
Many people do setup a dedicated box for it, but it is definitely unnecessary. But I suspect they also use their HTPC for other tasks as well, whether it is gaming or feeding video from the web.
For once an article actually uses some specificity to describe the correct codec involved, H.264, and it gets "corrected" to the general, way too broad name that many other articles use when they are referring to H.264, an implementation of MPEG-4 Part 10.
You could have said "otherwise known as MPEG-4 AVC" and you would have been more precise, but "MPEG-4" in general also includes DivX/XviD, 3ivx, Nero Digital, and Quicktime. Obviously the article is not referring to any of those codecs.
I mostly just wish the game was longer though. It was a really fun game, but I wish there were more to do in the "real world" campground, outside of the various characters' minds. It was a really satisfying game, but I just wish it would have a direct sequel with the same storyline, and an epic world to explore, something I know will never happen. Tim Schafer even mentioned in one of his interviews that if he had chosen to make a sequel for [insert his game here], his next game never would have been created.
Or another way to look at it, from Amazon's DVD section, the top sellers for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.
Both #1 top spots are held by The Departed (preorders):
the Blu-Ray version is #80 in the "DVD" parent category
the HD-DVD version is #63.
Further down the list,
Babel (Blu-Ray) is #915
Babel (HD-DVD) is #440.
At least for multi-format titles sold through Amazon, HD-DVD appears to hold a substantial lead. Also the number 1 position (Departed) sells much more in HD-DVD than Blu-Ray's #1. You could go through each position for a more scientific approach to it, to see if the entire top 25 or 100 sell more in HD-DVD format.
I was about to post something very similar. The thing is, if you give militarized police forces more non-lethal weapons, they're going to be more likely to use them when they wouldn't have used any weapons. In this case, it is a weapon that when used, has an effect very similar to torture.
Now if there were really any chance that they were going to use this weapon in a combat scenario, which is what most of the posters have suggested so far, it sounds fine, right? Better to use this than kill them, right? But guess what, out of all of the currently existing non-lethal weapons, the only one that has been deployed in Iraq is the sound wave "weapon" used to control crowds, people who, incidentally, they wouldn't have shot. It has also been deployed in the US, for crowd-control on American citizens. It was present at the 2004 Republican National Convention in NYC. So far, we have zero evidence that they are going to use non-lethal weapons on hostile targets that would have been shot. And we have some early evidence that the same weapons deployed in a destabilized war region will be used on our own citizens within the US, by our own police forces.
The incident with the taser is an example of what is to come if we continue to accept the use of these weapons. Do you think that their use on unarmed journalists was just a coincidence? Non-violent protest will shortly become a historical footnote, if the history books bother to mention it at all. Giving militarized police forces more (sadistic/torturous) "non-lethal" weapons that they are much more likely to use when they wouldn't have used force at all is something I can't believe so many posters are okay with.
Have you ever heard of a "non-lethal" weapon actually being used against an armed hostile target? Then what reason do you have to believe these weapons will be used instead of weapons? They will be used where currently no weapon is used, for unarmed crowd control.
I agree. I didn't realize until this article how little BootCamp actually is: a bootloader and Windows drivers for Mac hardware with a fancy GUI.
It would be like Dell charging you for a set of drivers for their hardware to use in Linux. Basically no hardware vendor has ever charged for this.
This is similar to the way Microsoft only releases some updates for previous OS versions (IE7), while others force you to upgrade (DX10). Apple took a different approach though, and rather than giving some updates away for free and neglecting to give out other updates for old OSes, they chose to provide many of the updates, but they're charging for them. It will still encourage people to upgrade--who wants to waste $29?--but it doesn't force them to upgrade.
It is a slightly different scenario though, because obviously if the beta runs on Tiger, the final does too, without any further development work. But Apple is known for nickel-and-dime-ing people. For example, full screen Quicktime only available by paying $30.
I think they were aware of its limitations when they added the feature. In my opinion, it was never intended to be an actual useful feature. They just wanted WiFi as a bullet point on their features list, to differentiate their product from Apple's. Whether the feature actually did anything useful was an afterthought. That's why the WiFi was crippled from the start.
I think the GP was referring to the distant LOD textures in Oblivion, known by modders as "pea soup" because the line between nearby high quality textures and distant low quality textures is so extreme. Also tiling patterns within land textures are a problem with the stock textures. Those are probably the 2 biggest problems with the graphics in the game, likely to accomodate weaker systems, but they really stand out in contrast to an otherwise beautiful game. The LOD system is actually a great improvement over the fog that obscured distant lands in Morrowind, but the technique needs to fit seamlessly with the rest of the terrain.
I'm a single guy living in a small apartment, so I usually have my computer setup in the same room as the TV, but even so, I considered buying something like this HTPC case for my next PC. I opted for a mini-tower instead for this build, but I still wouldn't be that ashamed to have it in my living room. Ugly? Not even close. My DVR is my computer. It is handy for watching on TV or while I'm surfing the web, only showing the TV window when it is interesting.
I could build a Core 2 Duo PC with that HTPC case for $800 or so, matching the price of the tower I just built. But if I were to make it silent, I would go with an Energy Efficient AMD chip for much less, and could probably get closer to the $500 mark, complete with remote and PVR software. Why would you want a locked-down DVR?
Most codecs do pretty well at re-encoding DVDs, since that's what their primary use is at this point. For instance, a 6 Mbps DVD would look fine at 2-3 Mbps H.264.
The problem is re-encoding XviD/DivX, MPEG-1, WMV, and all the other crap you find on the web to H.264, imo.
Which basically means the quality will be awful for anything except H.264 and DVD MPEG-2.
iTV hasn't been released. XBox 360 may be a specialty product, but I'd say the field is primarily populated with products like MediaMVP.
The line should read:
SageTV has linux clients and servers. It also has Placeshifter for streaming across the web.
I really don't get why people post sensitive information on the web in any form. The example in the article shows a "Sample" check. Then mentions something about a real check involving winning 1 million dollars.
So, if you blurred it, you must have edited the photo. So in no way does a photoshopped photo prove you won a million dollars. Completely blanking out (with pure white, pure black, a texture, etc) the image proves just as much as the blur. WTF is the point? By contrast, PDFs and DOC files requires understanding the format and taking the necessary precautions to delete sensitive data. But images and text files are easy to completely remove data.
If it is more the screenshot/example/illustration type of image, why not remove the data and replace it with a photoshop text box containing invalid numbers? The font doesn't even need to match. Who cares? Doesn't matter. Similar to chain letters and internet hoaxes, I don't think I'll ever understand why people do stupid stuff like this.
You mean like this SPCR system? It is 20 dBA @ 1m while idling and under load. It uses a Core 2 Duo with a fanless heatsink, and future SPCR designed systems designed with AMD Energy Efficient Small Form Factor processors would likely be quieter. The bungie-mounted hard drive is the loudest thing in the system. Slower, quieter laptop drives are also an option.
Most fans may not get quieter than about 15 dBA, but overall system noise will continue to decrease due to advances in dampening, airflow design, and energy efficient or undervolted processors that remain powerful and do not require a CPU fan. SPCR limits for "silent" computers are currently about 20 dBA for a "general purpose" desktop in close proximity and up to 30 dBA for a media center that is further away and drowned out by TV/movies/music.
Funny, I just installed my Dell OEM XP ("Gold") on my custom built eVGA/E6600 machine last week, plus activation, without any problems. It also slipstreamed SP2 perfectly.
Why does it matter? They all do it. You can still compare a 320 GB drive from one manufacturer to a 250 GB drive from another vendor. What are you doing with the drive that requires they use the same units as, for example, memory?
It only bothers the type of people that complain in NewEgg reviews that they got ripped off because apparently they've never used a hard drive before, or they don't understand that the difference between units multiplies by the larger size of the bigger drives. To them, I say: No, your "320 GB" drive does not rip you off. It is still "80 GB" x 4. So shut up already.