WTF? That's quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of. I don't think I've ever once heard of anyone breaking into a house this way. I mean I'm sure it's happened; I wouldn't expect it to be anything but fluke and rare (and INCREDIBLY stupid burglars). I guess I would expect that more if someone who knew me was really trying to get something of mine (or me) who might have lost it and isn't thinking about consequences.
I mean I wish I could drive a Bradley tank around, but my Grand Am is reasonably safe. There's a line; you can only do so much.
I'd love a brick or stone house too. But honestly - it would take at least fifteen or twenty minutes to get in that way. Then you have to steal the stuff and get out before anybody notices the giant void in the side of the house (or you ripping pieces out of the wall); you never know when someone walking by, working in their yard, or whatever may show up. And there's like 15,000 maybe's with what may be inside or on the other side of that wall. Why not hit the neighbor next door with all the nice stuff in plain sight and an unlocked sliding glass door? They should be well on their way home in the time it would take them to pull off just tearing a hole in the side of the house.
If I knew you in person (you know, as a good buddy or something) I'd challenge you to break into my house.
All of the lower-level windows and doors have bars on them (illegally; not the kind that can be broken out from the inside if there's a fire. I have a special plan for fires.) All doors leading outside have a storm door with a deadbolt (and the bars). The garage door is steel with deadbolts that lock when it closes. You can unlatch them from the inside.
You could easily get into my house if you had a long ladder, as well as that rock, or a chainsaw. Oh, and we also have an alarm.
You're right, no house is thief proof. But if they can just open your door and walk in, how long does that take? You could do that and actually look like you live there. It takes you longer to break a window enough to get in. If you close your curtains so people can't see all the goodies you have in your house, and you make them work to get in, they're going to find a place with better odds.
They're risking their very freedom to take what they can from your home. If you let them in (they see the rock/dog poop with the key in it, they see you or someone else punch in the code to the garage door, etc.) then you're exactly what they were looking for. If you stall them and make your neighbors' look easier to get into, particularly the one with the new car and the pretty landscaping in front, you improve your odds by many times. Oh, and I don't have any secret agent DVD's; I watch "It Takes a Thief" on discovery. Very useful information on that show.
See, I'd rather relax knowing I'm doing everything I can, and then I don't have to take Valium. I think you need to get fucked over by a malicious human a few times so you see that preventative measures really are worth it. Not that I wish aggravation on you; just that you seem to be "asking for it" so to speak (you know, by not even locking your doors?).
I go to school at Metro State College of Denver. About a year ago, a laptop got stolen that had much the same kinds of information in it on well over 50,000 students who had attended the college over several years.
My mother works for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage; an independent company that was auditing their health insurance had one of their laptops stolen with similar information for thousands of WFHM employees (possibly other Wells Fargo employees too).
Here's the bottom line: Expect every person in the world to try and get at your life in anyway they can. That said, it's your job to protect yourself. Inconvenience, lack of technical knowhow, lack of time and etc. are not valid excuses; it's just too damn important. If someone nabbed Newegg.com's database right now, how many of you would be in great risk? Particularly if your record was the only one they stole; a Newegg.com employee could probably do that without Slashdot or ABC News ever knowing about it.
If they got the card number you use at Newegg, how much money could they take? Is that a check card linked with your bank account? Your only bank account? Most credit card companies will immediately call you if there's all of a sudden a much greater than usual balance on your card. Banks won't call you of a large sum of money disappears out of your account.
So, is most of your money in a savings account that NOBODY has the information for (except you)? Is your home address well secured? Do your kids know how not to get kidnapped? You do check your own credit semi-frequently, don't you? Does (whatever company) really need your SSN to sell you their product? Do you think their system will blow up if that field is left blank when you throw a fit? Do you refuse to send sensitive information over e-mail or IM or SMS (with a preference for telphone or in-person business)?
Does your garage door opener hang proudly from your sun visor (with the corresponding home address on your registration & insurance in the unlocked glovebox)? Is a key to your house sitting in a Supra lockbox hanging on the door handle so the maid can get in? Or is it, perhaps, in that fake looking rock next to the porch? You know, the one your kid picks up every day when he gets home from school?
Think. It's your job, not your government's, not the sheriff's, and not some corporation's... yours. There may be laws in place to protect you; people will break them. And then you're still out your valuables. Really: think.
Basically, stop trying to make systematic classification about what's basically leftoever garbage from when the solar system was born, it's not going to work.
Isn't Earth some of that garbage? Aren't we?
That doesn't solve the problem; we're going to have to invent lots of new words if we do that.
K.I.S.S. Call them sun-moons. Call them planets. Call them gravitationally cohesive stardust wads. All of them - comets, Pluto, 2km wide Kuiper Belt Objects, they all fit the fuzzy, historical non-objective definition of planet which has slowly been accepted as a scientific term.
I'll bet somewhere there's a moon that has several moons; not being an astronomer, I'll bet they exist in our own solar system.
I'll bet somewhere a giant star (of not to different composition than Jupiter) orbits a mammoth star (not just a binary solar system with two suns that orbit the same arbitrary point in between them).
I'll bet somewhere there's a comet with live cells containing DNA.
We're going to run out of names for this shit and make everything too confusing. Until we get out there and start walking around other solar systems like we own the universe, it's absolutely ridiculous to try and say "this collection of matter is a planet, while this one is a moon, and this one is a star, and this one is a moon of a moon, and this one is a frozen methane block, while this one is a (etc)". They're all extremely unique, and yet they're all the same.
I for one could get used to the idea of solar planets (stars), terrestreal planets (regular old planets like Venus and Earth and Pluto and Xena and Haley and Hale-Bopp) and lunar planets (moons) and sub-lunar planets (moons of moons).
I think these astronomers who are just up in arms over what to call this stuff should all sign up on Slashdot; it's the best place to go for substituting unproductive bickering for real work.
Americans can stick with the nine planets as designed by God.
The rest of the world can use the metric planets that evolved in our solar system.
There. Everyone happy now?
WTF! No! There are over 1 billion Catholics alone, whereas the population of the entire US is only a third of that.
All of the other metric Christians, Jews and other God-fearing metric people won't accept your system.
Incidentally (in reply to gp) if Pluto is so dissimilar from the rest of the planets, why don't we pick a single one of them and call it "Planet"? It's not like any of them are much like each other to begin with. Some aren't solid, for example. Jupiter's size compared with Mercury's presents a larger difference than Mercury's compared with Pluto's.
Rather, let's have a broad and open and inclusive definition of "planet", and let schools decide how many of them students need to learn. It's not like there won't be other significant planets discovered either in our solar system or in others at some point in time. It's not like knowing those "magical nine names" has really changed anyone's life who isn't an astronomer... and astronomers already know a lot more stuff than just names of nine planets.
Several hundred million people use Windows. I'm not sure people would refuse to upgrade on the sole basis that the sound would wake their family members early in the morning... but it's evidence that perhaps it's not such a good idea, that maybe other scenarios (that nobody thought of) might occur in which an always-on startup sound greatly aggravates or inconveniences a user.
Here's one for you. I bought a used Carver M400 amplifier a long time ago. It's 200w x 2 channels, and is an excellent little amp. It's JUST an amp. There's no power switch, there's no volume or anything else (because it's expected that you have a nice preamp with sources plugged into that). Well, I didn't want to spend money on a preamp! So I just manage my mixer on Windows very well. I have occasional surprises, but for what I paid for everything, it works great.
I would most definitely not appreciate a startup sound that couldn't be disabled; but at the same time, it's very difficult to truly disable it. Those sound bytes are somewhere... their checksum & checked checksum are somewhere... they can (and will) be changed (for example).
Play inconsiderate like that enough with me, and I don't spend money on your product. I am most certainly not alone. This is pretty simple.
I own an IBM ThinkPad T42 (One of the last ThinkPad's before Lenovo bought them).
The volume control is three separate buttons, and they work immediately even while it's booting (shutdown unmuted, push mute on the IBM logo screen during POST, and it boots muted). Same with the Fn keys which adjust the LCD contrast and etc.
Also, the speakers on it actually sound pretty good (no bass, but very clear). They're in front of the keyboard, but they're actually under the very front edge of the case pointed at an angle at the table; the effect is, when it's on a table, you hear it even better. It still sounds nice and clear on other surfaces too, including your lap. They're good enough for playing games, as well as most music IMHO.
Nah - Vista will be the true Windows ME of the 21st century. XP Pro is the patched version of 2K
Yeah, it certainly seems to be a tradition for MS to repackage their own garbage with different colors.
Vista will be to (every current version of 32-bit Windows, back to NT 4.0 before Win95) as Windows NT 4.0 was to 16-bit Windows. Windows Server 2003 is a closer relative of Windows NT 4.0 than it is of Vista; they're rewriting many parts of Windows that haven't been rewritten since NT4/Win95 (revised, yes; redesigned, no).
The accelerated 3D interface is just a cute touch.
Oh, and please remember, I never said that Windows Vista will do any of the following:
1) Not suck
2) Work correctly (or 1/2 correctly even)
3) Be successful
4) Not put MS' future at risk if it fails
5) Ever be stable...but if you can get your hands on a beta, it actually looks somewhat promising.
All I'm saying is that it's NOT just a madeover XP.
A PCIe soundcard will have such substantial bandwidth requirements that it does a BUTTLOAD more than $150 worth of stuff. At the moment, that is.
I guarantee whatever technology Creative puts on their PCIe soundcard will be patented into the ground.
I think the worse of the two scenarios you gave would be that such an obvious patent was enforced. It is time for major copyright AND patent law reform/redesign, what with the late OpenEverything(TM) digital trend, as well as the phenominally rapid pace that just about every modern industry moves at anymore; if you think about it, life for the average human in the year 1900 was probably a lot more like life in the year 100 than it is like life in 2006. We are on the vertical part of an exponential curve in technological advancement, if that makes any sense...
My prediction is that if anyone comes out with a $150 PCIe sound card first, it will either be Creative, or the company that begins the end for Creative. Their SoundBlaster franchise is so well established that they end up with some tolerance for quality and feature compromises, because they'll still be profitable.
They're obviously both viscious and ingenius business people, I'll say that.
Yeah, I was super tired last night (as you can see from the mess I made out of less than and greater than signs in another post in this thread. You're absolutely right.
Still, recording four hours of audio without any compression lag and NO THRASHING. That's pretty good.
Good God, stupid forum nonsense... It's certainly a dead horse now (and I'm a little embarassed:)
Incidentally,/. doesn't like the lesser than sign if, at some later point, you have a greater than sign. It thinks you're making a tag, even with Plain Old Text selected!
One more time, if I wasn't already going to be modded to oblivion:
"PAE is faster (but not as fast as less-than or equal-to 4GB). If you don't believe me, you can boot Windows with/PAE and load the 64-bit address kernel whether PAE or greater than 4GB actually exists or not - you can even do/NOLOWMEM to ensure that device drivers get fed 64-bit physical addresses). Run some benchmarks."
I even used the damn preview button and everything...
Wow, screwed that one up. I must be kinda tired.:)
What I meant to say was this:
"PAE is faster (but not as fast as 4GB actually exists or not - you can even do/NOLOWMEM to ensure that device drivers get fed 64-bit physical addresses). Run some benchmarks."
You're right about all of that, except that no 32-bit OS should be forced to deal with more than 4GB of physical address space.
One of the above posts outlines exactly what the min. and max. settings for each version of Windows' pagefile should be, except of course XP's.:) Still, with XP, the max pagefile size combined with your total RAM size is not more than 4GB by default. This is on purpose. If all of the process' virtual to physical memory maps contain unique addresses within a 4GB address space, then Windows doesn't have to go through the map and adjust every address every time the program is swapped one way or another. In reality, as you approach the limit, it still will; but at least if all the tables are in chip and ready to go, it's speedy about it.
With WinXP, you can have 4GB of RAM and another 4GB of pagefile space and total an 8GB commit limit (and that is the REAL limit without PAE); however, as said, doing so slows it down.
PAE is faster (but not as fast as 4GB actually exists or not - you can even do/NOLOWMEM to ensure that device drivers get fed 64-bit physical addresses). Run some benchmarks.
You can safely put 4GB of RAM into your computer and forget about pagefiles. Windows will love you for it.
"Six megapixels" and "high resolution" do not belong in the same sentence. If you had said a hundred megapixels, I might agree with you. Then you could have (400 megabytes) x (15 layers and masks) x (30 backups in the "Undo" stack)... I think you can eat memory (and then swap) very nicely under those circumstances, just for one image. (And no, a 400 megabyte raw image is not ridiculous -- try scanning a 6x7 cm transparency at 4000 dpi and see what happens!)
It was an accident. The computer eventually became conscious again. But I think it was 12000 dpi, and I think it was a larger file than that, in fact I think it barfed at the file size it was going to have to produce (2GB I'm guessing).
I really don't have a use for scanning anything at that resolution. I have a 3.2 megapixel Olympus camera which takes shots that are high resolution enough to produce a very good looking printed photograph which is a respectable size. I scan stuff like baseball cards, old photograph negatives, text and forms, model textures, things like that. To me, 3000x2000 is enormous. I realize I'm not a graphics guy or anything... but I probably do more than what I'd call an "average" user.
Here's a 10 megapixel photo of Mars. Here's a 6 megapixel photo of the new lava dome inside of Mt. St. Helens.
You sure? A 3000x2000 image @ 32bpp would consume roughly 23MB uncompressed: 3,000 * 2,000 = 6,000,000 * 4 bytes per pixel = 24,000,000 bytes / 1024 = 23,437.5 kilobytes / 1024 = 22.888 megabytes. Even 2GB is enough to have about 90 of those uncompressed, high resolution photos in memory at the same time. 2GB is enough to store almost 7 days of UNCOMPRESSED cd quality digital audio: 2^31 bytes / (44,100 * 2) bytes per second. Still, what's Windows going to do about it? Swap or not, 4GB is the address barrier on every day systems with 32-bit Windows.
Incidentally, most graphics software is very smart and has its own internal paging system for this very reason; it won't even consume all of your 4GB if you tried, in all but ridiculous/silly (and very un-everyday like) situations. With no personal experience, I would guess most video editing software is the same way. Running out of memory is a somewhat dangerous thing to do, particularly to Windows.
A modern computer should be able to accomodate every malloc upto memory+free disk space and it can't easily.
I see. So how do you get around that little address space issue? I'm quite certain a regular 32-bit PC w/ 4GB of RAM doesn't need a swapfile unless you're running Linux (and an AWFUL lot of software, or software with VERY large RAM requirements). Even in that case, it's a special kernel option, and if you can actually max your 4GB of RAM to the gills by multitasking regular, every-day software, you deserve to be penalized with sluggish performance! Okay no, but still.
Since RAM is dirt cheap anymore, everyone really should have 4GB on their 32-bit computers for the sole purpose of turning their swapfile off; it's probably the least amount of money you could spend per the increased performance in Windows.
That doesn't cost taxpayers anything. Only Taco Bell customers would care. And if you ask me, that particular demographic has more things to worry about (they eat at Taco Bell, after all).
Now, when your nightshift manager starts building insecure and poor quality taxpayer funded quesadillas, THEN make a video.
The mouse in its current form is about to be rendered obsolete.
Do you have a source you could quote or is this just your forecast? I'm hesitant to believe that, since both the mouse and the screen are 2D. Until we have holographic displays, there's not really three dimensions of anything going on. There just isn't a lot of truly unique 3D applications (not actual software packages but software concepts) that can't easily and intuitively be tackled with a mouse.
I mean, data gloves have been around now for, what... over twenty years? I had a cheap ultrasound based one for my old NES in 1989! As soon as some billion people decide that a mouse isn't enough for their purposes, mice will truly be rendered obsolete. I don't see that happening for decades (plural).
If "everybody has to play by the unfair rules", does that not make the unfair rules, in fact, fair?
Rule #1: Everybody (including gameforge) has to leave $100 million in gameforge's milkbox every single night. Rule #2: Rule #1 applies to EVERYBODY (as stated, including gameforge).
So yes, it does make them fair. But it's only fair as long as everybody does it... if you all leave me $100m a night, I'll have no issues leaving myself $100m a night. Otherwise, I could end up screwed!
Wait, you mean not everyone makes $40 billion a year? So are the rules really fair? Are they unfair? Or is there even such a thing?
No rule is fair to everyone all the time or it wouldn't exist. No rule is unfair to everyone all the time or it wouldn't exist. I'm saying, the ones you don't like at the moment still apply to you (and Apple)
Consider how many people 100 million dollars could employ.
A thousand perhaps?
The money didn't vanish, it moved. That same $100m should be able to employ equally as many people at Creative, or less better people or more worse people or whatever. For all you know that money was lining some bank account somewhere, which will now be $100m shorter with little affect on employees, whereas Creative will use it to create a thousand jobs (like perhaps a better Linux team)
I see it as the old, fair and friendly neighborhood heroin dealer shot the new fast talkin' "tough guy" heroin dealer (honestly, like Apple, the perfect and selfless angel was punched in the face by Creative, the big bad devil).
I like Apple, honest. I think Creative did an unethical thing with this lawsuit; and I agree with your reamark about it discouraging competition and innovation.
Now ask me if I think Apple did an ethical thing by flying into Creative's camp, pissing on their tent, and taking Creative's fair? share of Rio's MP3 player market. Hmm?
I have to assume Apple wouldn't visciously steal Creative's market share if "business" hadn't demanded that they take that opportunity. I also have to assume that Creative dislikes patents as much as you and I.
I'll bet most athletes, at times, dislike the fact that if they have less points than their opponent, they lose. They may have worked harder. They may have deserved it more. They may have wantedit SO much more. Their eighteen kids may be dying and only wishing to see their mother/father win, whereas their opponent's looking for their eighteenth win.
(point being, everybody has to play by the unfair rules, and $100m never just "vanishes" in a lawsuit between two giants, unless of course it's to a lawyer)
Slashdot Mirror
...bunch of free but useful stuff...
I don't have to be a marketing transponder to drink free beer, nor to speak freely in public.
Not free.
WTF? That's quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of. I don't think I've ever once heard of anyone breaking into a house this way. I mean I'm sure it's happened; I wouldn't expect it to be anything but fluke and rare (and INCREDIBLY stupid burglars). I guess I would expect that more if someone who knew me was really trying to get something of mine (or me) who might have lost it and isn't thinking about consequences.
I mean I wish I could drive a Bradley tank around, but my Grand Am is reasonably safe. There's a line; you can only do so much.
I'd love a brick or stone house too. But honestly - it would take at least fifteen or twenty minutes to get in that way. Then you have to steal the stuff and get out before anybody notices the giant void in the side of the house (or you ripping pieces out of the wall); you never know when someone walking by, working in their yard, or whatever may show up. And there's like 15,000 maybe's with what may be inside or on the other side of that wall. Why not hit the neighbor next door with all the nice stuff in plain sight and an unlocked sliding glass door? They should be well on their way home in the time it would take them to pull off just tearing a hole in the side of the house.
I'm glad you picked on me with your rant.
If I knew you in person (you know, as a good buddy or something) I'd challenge you to break into my house.
All of the lower-level windows and doors have bars on them (illegally; not the kind that can be broken out from the inside if there's a fire. I have a special plan for fires.) All doors leading outside have a storm door with a deadbolt (and the bars). The garage door is steel with deadbolts that lock when it closes. You can unlatch them from the inside.
You could easily get into my house if you had a long ladder, as well as that rock, or a chainsaw. Oh, and we also have an alarm.
You're right, no house is thief proof. But if they can just open your door and walk in, how long does that take? You could do that and actually look like you live there. It takes you longer to break a window enough to get in. If you close your curtains so people can't see all the goodies you have in your house, and you make them work to get in, they're going to find a place with better odds.
They're risking their very freedom to take what they can from your home. If you let them in (they see the rock/dog poop with the key in it, they see you or someone else punch in the code to the garage door, etc.) then you're exactly what they were looking for. If you stall them and make your neighbors' look easier to get into, particularly the one with the new car and the pretty landscaping in front, you improve your odds by many times. Oh, and I don't have any secret agent DVD's; I watch "It Takes a Thief" on discovery. Very useful information on that show.
See, I'd rather relax knowing I'm doing everything I can, and then I don't have to take Valium. I think you need to get fucked over by a malicious human a few times so you see that preventative measures really are worth it. Not that I wish aggravation on you; just that you seem to be "asking for it" so to speak (you know, by not even locking your doors?).
I go to school at Metro State College of Denver. About a year ago, a laptop got stolen that had much the same kinds of information in it on well over 50,000 students who had attended the college over several years.
My mother works for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage; an independent company that was auditing their health insurance had one of their laptops stolen with similar information for thousands of WFHM employees (possibly other Wells Fargo employees too).
Here's the bottom line: Expect every person in the world to try and get at your life in anyway they can. That said, it's your job to protect yourself. Inconvenience, lack of technical knowhow, lack of time and etc. are not valid excuses; it's just too damn important. If someone nabbed Newegg.com's database right now, how many of you would be in great risk? Particularly if your record was the only one they stole; a Newegg.com employee could probably do that without Slashdot or ABC News ever knowing about it.
If they got the card number you use at Newegg, how much money could they take? Is that a check card linked with your bank account? Your only bank account? Most credit card companies will immediately call you if there's all of a sudden a much greater than usual balance on your card. Banks won't call you of a large sum of money disappears out of your account.
So, is most of your money in a savings account that NOBODY has the information for (except you)? Is your home address well secured? Do your kids know how not to get kidnapped? You do check your own credit semi-frequently, don't you? Does (whatever company) really need your SSN to sell you their product? Do you think their system will blow up if that field is left blank when you throw a fit? Do you refuse to send sensitive information over e-mail or IM or SMS (with a preference for telphone or in-person business)?
Does your garage door opener hang proudly from your sun visor (with the corresponding home address on your registration & insurance in the unlocked glovebox)? Is a key to your house sitting in a Supra lockbox hanging on the door handle so the maid can get in? Or is it, perhaps, in that fake looking rock next to the porch? You know, the one your kid picks up every day when he gets home from school?
Think. It's your job, not your government's, not the sheriff's, and not some corporation's... yours. There may be laws in place to protect you; people will break them. And then you're still out your valuables. Really: think.
Basically, stop trying to make systematic classification about what's basically leftoever garbage from when the solar system was born, it's not going to work.
Isn't Earth some of that garbage? Aren't we?
That doesn't solve the problem; we're going to have to invent lots of new words if we do that.
K.I.S.S. Call them sun-moons. Call them planets. Call them gravitationally cohesive stardust wads. All of them - comets, Pluto, 2km wide Kuiper Belt Objects, they all fit the fuzzy, historical non-objective definition of planet which has slowly been accepted as a scientific term.
I'll bet somewhere there's a moon that has several moons; not being an astronomer, I'll bet they exist in our own solar system.
I'll bet somewhere a giant star (of not to different composition than Jupiter) orbits a mammoth star (not just a binary solar system with two suns that orbit the same arbitrary point in between them).
I'll bet somewhere there's a comet with live cells containing DNA.
We're going to run out of names for this shit and make everything too confusing. Until we get out there and start walking around other solar systems like we own the universe, it's absolutely ridiculous to try and say "this collection of matter is a planet, while this one is a moon, and this one is a star, and this one is a moon of a moon, and this one is a frozen methane block, while this one is a (etc)". They're all extremely unique, and yet they're all the same.
I for one could get used to the idea of solar planets (stars), terrestreal planets (regular old planets like Venus and Earth and Pluto and Xena and Haley and Hale-Bopp) and lunar planets (moons) and sub-lunar planets (moons of moons).
I think these astronomers who are just up in arms over what to call this stuff should all sign up on Slashdot; it's the best place to go for substituting unproductive bickering for real work.
Americans can stick with the nine planets as designed by God.
The rest of the world can use the metric planets that evolved in our solar system.
There. Everyone happy now?
WTF! No! There are over 1 billion Catholics alone, whereas the population of the entire US is only a third of that.
All of the other metric Christians, Jews and other God-fearing metric people won't accept your system.
Incidentally (in reply to gp) if Pluto is so dissimilar from the rest of the planets, why don't we pick a single one of them and call it "Planet"? It's not like any of them are much like each other to begin with. Some aren't solid, for example. Jupiter's size compared with Mercury's presents a larger difference than Mercury's compared with Pluto's.
Rather, let's have a broad and open and inclusive definition of "planet", and let schools decide how many of them students need to learn. It's not like there won't be other significant planets discovered either in our solar system or in others at some point in time. It's not like knowing those "magical nine names" has really changed anyone's life who isn't an astronomer... and astronomers already know a lot more stuff than just names of nine planets.
Exactly $47,281.65 per year. Send your excess to gameforge please. Reply with credit card number for faster service.
Several hundred million people use Windows. I'm not sure people would refuse to upgrade on the sole basis that the sound would wake their family members early in the morning... but it's evidence that perhaps it's not such a good idea, that maybe other scenarios (that nobody thought of) might occur in which an always-on startup sound greatly aggravates or inconveniences a user.
Here's one for you. I bought a used Carver M400 amplifier a long time ago. It's 200w x 2 channels, and is an excellent little amp. It's JUST an amp. There's no power switch, there's no volume or anything else (because it's expected that you have a nice preamp with sources plugged into that). Well, I didn't want to spend money on a preamp! So I just manage my mixer on Windows very well. I have occasional surprises, but for what I paid for everything, it works great.
I would most definitely not appreciate a startup sound that couldn't be disabled; but at the same time, it's very difficult to truly disable it. Those sound bytes are somewhere... their checksum & checked checksum are somewhere... they can (and will) be changed (for example).
Play inconsiderate like that enough with me, and I don't spend money on your product. I am most certainly not alone. This is pretty simple.
I own an IBM ThinkPad T42 (One of the last ThinkPad's before Lenovo bought them).
The volume control is three separate buttons, and they work immediately even while it's booting (shutdown unmuted, push mute on the IBM logo screen during POST, and it boots muted). Same with the Fn keys which adjust the LCD contrast and etc.
Also, the speakers on it actually sound pretty good (no bass, but very clear). They're in front of the keyboard, but they're actually under the very front edge of the case pointed at an angle at the table; the effect is, when it's on a table, you hear it even better. It still sounds nice and clear on other surfaces too, including your lap. They're good enough for playing games, as well as most music IMHO.
Get a motherboard that supports PAE and like 32GB of physical RAM.
Or, hit up eBay and grab a modern SGI workstation of your choice.
Most Mac's are going to chug on whatever you're doing too; unless you spend money on physical RAM (a LOT of money). You could do that as well.
Alienware PC's are the spawn of video games, not graphic artists. I'll bet that little sweetheart rips Far Cry a new one...
Nah - Vista will be the true Windows ME of the 21st century. XP Pro is the patched version of 2K
...but if you can get your hands on a beta, it actually looks somewhat promising.
Yeah, it certainly seems to be a tradition for MS to repackage their own garbage with different colors.
Vista will be to (every current version of 32-bit Windows, back to NT 4.0 before Win95) as Windows NT 4.0 was to 16-bit Windows. Windows Server 2003 is a closer relative of Windows NT 4.0 than it is of Vista; they're rewriting many parts of Windows that haven't been rewritten since NT4/Win95 (revised, yes; redesigned, no).
The accelerated 3D interface is just a cute touch.
Oh, and please remember, I never said that Windows Vista will do any of the following:
1) Not suck
2) Work correctly (or 1/2 correctly even)
3) Be successful
4) Not put MS' future at risk if it fails
5) Ever be stable
All I'm saying is that it's NOT just a madeover XP.
Side reading: Wikipedia's article on the "Availability Heuristic"
A PCIe soundcard will have such substantial bandwidth requirements that it does a BUTTLOAD more than $150 worth of stuff. At the moment, that is.
I guarantee whatever technology Creative puts on their PCIe soundcard will be patented into the ground.
I think the worse of the two scenarios you gave would be that such an obvious patent was enforced. It is time for major copyright AND patent law reform/redesign, what with the late OpenEverything(TM) digital trend, as well as the phenominally rapid pace that just about every modern industry moves at anymore; if you think about it, life for the average human in the year 1900 was probably a lot more like life in the year 100 than it is like life in 2006. We are on the vertical part of an exponential curve in technological advancement, if that makes any sense...
My prediction is that if anyone comes out with a $150 PCIe sound card first, it will either be Creative, or the company that begins the end for Creative. Their SoundBlaster franchise is so well established that they end up with some tolerance for quality and feature compromises, because they'll still be profitable.
They're obviously both viscious and ingenius business people, I'll say that.
Yeah, I was super tired last night (as you can see from the mess I made out of less than and greater than signs in another post in this thread. You're absolutely right.
Still, recording four hours of audio without any compression lag and NO THRASHING. That's pretty good.
Good God, stupid forum nonsense... It's certainly a dead horse now (and I'm a little embarassed :)
/. doesn't like the lesser than sign if, at some later point, you have a greater than sign. It thinks you're making a tag, even with Plain Old Text selected!
/PAE and load the 64-bit address kernel whether PAE or greater than 4GB actually exists or not - you can even do /NOLOWMEM to ensure that device drivers get fed 64-bit physical addresses). Run some benchmarks."
Incidentally,
One more time, if I wasn't already going to be modded to oblivion:
"PAE is faster (but not as fast as less-than or equal-to 4GB). If you don't believe me, you can boot Windows with
I even used the damn preview button and everything...
Wow, screwed that one up. I must be kinda tired. :)
/NOLOWMEM to ensure that device drivers get fed 64-bit physical addresses). Run some benchmarks."
What I meant to say was this:
"PAE is faster (but not as fast as 4GB actually exists or not - you can even do
You're right about all of that, except that no 32-bit OS should be forced to deal with more than 4GB of physical address space.
:) Still, with XP, the max pagefile size combined with your total RAM size is not more than 4GB by default. This is on purpose. If all of the process' virtual to physical memory maps contain unique addresses within a 4GB address space, then Windows doesn't have to go through the map and adjust every address every time the program is swapped one way or another. In reality, as you approach the limit, it still will; but at least if all the tables are in chip and ready to go, it's speedy about it.
/NOLOWMEM to ensure that device drivers get fed 64-bit physical addresses). Run some benchmarks.
One of the above posts outlines exactly what the min. and max. settings for each version of Windows' pagefile should be, except of course XP's.
With WinXP, you can have 4GB of RAM and another 4GB of pagefile space and total an 8GB commit limit (and that is the REAL limit without PAE); however, as said, doing so slows it down.
PAE is faster (but not as fast as 4GB actually exists or not - you can even do
You can safely put 4GB of RAM into your computer and forget about pagefiles. Windows will love you for it.
"Six megapixels" and "high resolution" do not belong in the same sentence. If you had said a hundred megapixels, I might agree with you. Then you could have (400 megabytes) x (15 layers and masks) x (30 backups in the "Undo" stack)... I think you can eat memory (and then swap) very nicely under those circumstances, just for one image. (And no, a 400 megabyte raw image is not ridiculous -- try scanning a 6x7 cm transparency at 4000 dpi and see what happens!)
It was an accident. The computer eventually became conscious again. But I think it was 12000 dpi, and I think it was a larger file than that, in fact I think it barfed at the file size it was going to have to produce (2GB I'm guessing).
I really don't have a use for scanning anything at that resolution. I have a 3.2 megapixel Olympus camera which takes shots that are high resolution enough to produce a very good looking printed photograph which is a respectable size. I scan stuff like baseball cards, old photograph negatives, text and forms, model textures, things like that. To me, 3000x2000 is enormous. I realize I'm not a graphics guy or anything... but I probably do more than what I'd call an "average" user.
Here's a 10 megapixel photo of Mars.
Here's a 6 megapixel photo of the new lava dome inside of Mt. St. Helens.
Those are not "low" or "medium" resolution to me.
You sure? A 3000x2000 image @ 32bpp would consume roughly 23MB uncompressed: 3,000 * 2,000 = 6,000,000 * 4 bytes per pixel = 24,000,000 bytes / 1024 = 23,437.5 kilobytes / 1024 = 22.888 megabytes. Even 2GB is enough to have about 90 of those uncompressed, high resolution photos in memory at the same time. 2GB is enough to store almost 7 days of UNCOMPRESSED cd quality digital audio: 2^31 bytes / (44,100 * 2) bytes per second. Still, what's Windows going to do about it? Swap or not, 4GB is the address barrier on every day systems with 32-bit Windows.
Incidentally, most graphics software is very smart and has its own internal paging system for this very reason; it won't even consume all of your 4GB if you tried, in all but ridiculous/silly (and very un-everyday like) situations. With no personal experience, I would guess most video editing software is the same way. Running out of memory is a somewhat dangerous thing to do, particularly to Windows.
A modern computer should be able to accomodate every malloc upto memory+free disk space and it can't easily.
I see. So how do you get around that little address space issue? I'm quite certain a regular 32-bit PC w/ 4GB of RAM doesn't need a swapfile unless you're running Linux (and an AWFUL lot of software, or software with VERY large RAM requirements). Even in that case, it's a special kernel option, and if you can actually max your 4GB of RAM to the gills by multitasking regular, every-day software, you deserve to be penalized with sluggish performance! Okay no, but still.
Since RAM is dirt cheap anymore, everyone really should have 4GB on their 32-bit computers for the sole purpose of turning their swapfile off; it's probably the least amount of money you could spend per the increased performance in Windows.
That doesn't cost taxpayers anything. Only Taco Bell customers would care. And if you ask me, that particular demographic has more things to worry about (they eat at Taco Bell, after all).
Now, when your nightshift manager starts building insecure and poor quality taxpayer funded quesadillas, THEN make a video.
The mouse in its current form is about to be rendered obsolete.
Do you have a source you could quote or is this just your forecast? I'm hesitant to believe that, since both the mouse and the screen are 2D. Until we have holographic displays, there's not really three dimensions of anything going on. There just isn't a lot of truly unique 3D applications (not actual software packages but software concepts) that can't easily and intuitively be tackled with a mouse.
I mean, data gloves have been around now for, what... over twenty years? I had a cheap ultrasound based one for my old NES in 1989! As soon as some billion people decide that a mouse isn't enough for their purposes, mice will truly be rendered obsolete. I don't see that happening for decades (plural).
> > What's a poor, bible-thumping redneck supposed to do?
> Ummm, I'm gonna guess it's something involving some beer, a pickup, and a gun?
So you think he's going to have sex or...?
Just kidding.
If "everybody has to play by the unfair rules", does that not make the unfair rules, in fact, fair?
Rule #1: Everybody (including gameforge) has to leave $100 million in gameforge's milkbox every single night.
Rule #2: Rule #1 applies to EVERYBODY (as stated, including gameforge).
So yes, it does make them fair. But it's only fair as long as everybody does it... if you all leave me $100m a night, I'll have no issues leaving myself $100m a night. Otherwise, I could end up screwed!
Wait, you mean not everyone makes $40 billion a year? So are the rules really fair? Are they unfair? Or is there even such a thing?
No rule is fair to everyone all the time or it wouldn't exist. No rule is unfair to everyone all the time or it wouldn't exist. I'm saying, the ones you don't like at the moment still apply to you (and Apple)
You don't think I will do you?
Consider how many people 100 million dollars could employ.
A thousand perhaps?
The money didn't vanish, it moved. That same $100m should be able to employ equally as many people at Creative, or less better people or more worse people or whatever. For all you know that money was lining some bank account somewhere, which will now be $100m shorter with little affect on employees, whereas Creative will use it to create a thousand jobs (like perhaps a better Linux team)
I see it as the old, fair and friendly neighborhood heroin dealer shot the new fast talkin' "tough guy" heroin dealer (honestly, like Apple, the perfect and selfless angel was punched in the face by Creative, the big bad devil).
I like Apple, honest. I think Creative did an unethical thing with this lawsuit; and I agree with your reamark about it discouraging competition and innovation.
Now ask me if I think Apple did an ethical thing by flying into Creative's camp, pissing on their tent, and taking Creative's fair? share of Rio's MP3 player market. Hmm?
I have to assume Apple wouldn't visciously steal Creative's market share if "business" hadn't demanded that they take that opportunity. I also have to assume that Creative dislikes patents as much as you and I.
I'll bet most athletes, at times, dislike the fact that if they have less points than their opponent, they lose. They may have worked harder. They may have deserved it more. They may have wantedit SO much more. Their eighteen kids may be dying and only wishing to see their mother/father win, whereas their opponent's looking for their eighteenth win.
(point being, everybody has to play by the unfair rules, and $100m never just "vanishes" in a lawsuit between two giants, unless of course it's to a lawyer)