7-zip also integrates with the Windows Shell, actually. I don't really know how it compares to WinRAR, but I use it because it's free without gimmicks (like, e.g. reinstalling the trial version whenever it expires).
Ahh, now I see why there's a redundant mod. I didn't pay close enough attention to the person a few threads up (who may have been below my threshold at the time). Sheesh, give me a break, lol.
Yeah... that's not cool. It seems like cards with hypermemory or turbocache are hit and miss on both sides.
But geez, Phoronix keeps hinting at open specifications or an open source driver, it's driving me mad (for example, see here). I have only used nvidia cards thus far (because performance was my top priority--games, CAD, etc. really need it), but that could quickly change if AMD does either of the above. If they do, surely someone from the community will fix those problems for you (if they still exist in 8.41).
I would love to get into coding drivers for graphics cards and help fix things myself, but... I've only done very simple firmware for CAN and serial chips in an embedded AVR system (no OS). I need a good book (preferably free;-) ) on Linux device drivers, I think.
Holy cow, folks. Can't you be just a little happy that ATI has finally gotten their crap together performance-wise before criticizing their potential lack of openness? I would like OSS drivers as much as the next guy, but at least we ought to appreciate AMD/ATI is finally putting some effort into Linux. Besides, one of those Phoronix articles is insinuating that there is more for the OSS community coming than just higher performance.
I concur. While our efforts to keep nuclear weapons from proliferating have likely slowed its spread, too much is now out of our hands; it is probably going to accelerate. We ought to start forming strategies to deal with it.
Even so, there is a relatively low level of risk from stable countries becoming nuclear powers. In most cases, I think leaders (both good and bad) would not risk counterattack and would be just as hesitant as we are for deployment. In achieving their level of power, they have far too much to lose. The real danger comes from groups that are prepared to sacrifice whatever it takes to achieve their objective, though I think the number that are prepared for massacre are rather few.
Besides, how likely is it that such a group would have access to plutonium from the United States...
I wonder what exactly the big concern is with nuclear power. We wouldn't have such a large waste problem if we'd just reprocess the fuel, and who cares if it yields weapons-grade plutonium? Security risk, boo hoo... Really, we might as well use the plutonium for fuel too.
I do admit I don't know entirely about the economic feasibility of it, but France seems to be getting along fine with their large nuclear power system.
What if the batteries take 5 minutes to charge to 80%? (never mind that you might have some problems dumping that much energy through the grid at once if everyone did it;-) )
There are several emerging battery technologies that go after precisely that, though at a price: they don't have the same level of capacity (but still much better than NiMH).
Those are probably batteries from A123 Systems, and they've been around for a little while. We used them in our vehicles at the MIT Vehicle Design Summit last year. They don't have greater storage than the lithium ion batteries already in common use, but the number of duty cycles and the amount of current it can take is pretty damn good. They won't solve the energy storage problem, though. They're too bulky, both in mass and volume, and while I can't recall the CTO's estimates for the price per Wh, I don't remember thinking it would be good enough. It's two steps forward and one step back... Progress, though!;-)
The Wii attempts to market to the masses by being a platform with many simple games (which may still have you playing for a very long time), while the other two attempt to cater more to the enthusiast.
Take Wii Tennis, for example. As someone that likes to play tennis in real life, I can't stand it: half the game is missing (deciding where to run and how to react to various shots) and there is a noticeable lag in the controls, at least for me. I find Virtua Tennis to be much more fun, but it's on the other platforms.
Or there is Super Smash Brothers, another relatively simple game. It just doesn't compare to Virtua Fighter. Same with Mario Kart vs Forza/GT.
I realize I haven't been entirely fair by contrasting Nintendo's titles vs third parties, but the third parties are generally following Nintendo's lead on what to place on the Wii. With a few exceptions, virtually all of Nintendo's franchises are lacking in complexity. While this is good for the masses, it's not so great for people like me.
Have you found any info on whether or not it's more than simply a shell? The picture makes it look like it is (I could be missing something). Changing the form is cool, but if the Wiimote still can't determine if you're physically pointing at your target, the Zapper won't change anything.
It might make a difference if you were shopping on the low end. And actually, the difference between the two Inspiron 530s is $100, and that's if you don't upgrade the Windows machine to the GeForce 7300 like the Ubuntu machine has (for $50 more). $150 sounds like quite the deal to me.
Since a somewhat recent patch to Ubuntu's kernel (incorporated some changes from 2.6.21), the bcm43xx driver works quite well. Throughput is still lower than the peak of 802.11g, but it maxes out at around 1.7 MiB/s (13.6 Mbps), which is significantly faster than my connection to the internet.
I tried using ndiswrapper with the 1390 on my 1705, but it seemed to cause interrupt issues when using SMP and nvidia's driver (using nv or disabling SMP would prevent the issue). I did get better throughput while it worked, though, and not everyone has those issues, so YMMV.
The thing is that it won't take four years for them to get kicked out of office (and besides, we're dealing with party politics, so it generally only takes two years to change the majority party). If the problem becomes widespread enough, others will definitely seize the opportunity to invoke the impeachment process and gain power. There is a certain amount of self-moderation from the competition between the two parties, and although the majority of Americans are ridiculously ignorant, it would be really hard to get away with a significant level of evil against citizens for any extended period of time
"2) Standard PC hardware with fancy plastic that is much more overpriced than the same hardware minus fancy plastic" You're going by old info. You can configure a Dell and an Apple with the same specs and the prices are quite close.
While it's nice that you can configure them to be similar, it's a moot point if you don't need the expensive parts Apple forces upon you. We'll take the CPU for example. There's a diminishing return to increasing clock speed while price increases faster as you go up. There are often two levels of cache, and I feel like the sweet spot is usually around where the size of the cache just increases. This is often much less expensive than the top-of-the-line CPU Apple tends to throw at you.
So in general, you're likely paying a premium for parts you don't really need, but hey, if you think OS X is worth the premium, why does it matter?
We don't know gravity exists; we simply haven't falsified its existence within our current model. No amount of experimentation proves something is always true (unless you could somehow test all the possible states) ^_^
I've got it. I'll just redo the stages so that there are 334 times as many. Then we can clock your processor at 1 thz!
And getting bigger will almost certainly not allow you to go faster, btw. If your goal is to improve the latency of the result for your instruction, you have to reduce the delay of the components (which smaller gates help) or do less in your instruction (which I was jokingly suggesting above) so you can turn up the clock speed (if heat weren't a problem). Adding more chip real estate will not make your add instruction go any faster. What you could do with it, though, is add more functionality by providing more instructions in the ISA, which the processor could accelerate with ever more transistors, at a higher price.
C is used all over in systems-level programming and in applications where speed is critical (but not so much to merit the much-lengthened development time of using assembly). There's more to the computer than your silly "web 2.0" applications; it's just one layer of the abstraction.
Thankfully, at least the important people around here in Berkeley understand that corn-based ethanol is an awful idea. I went to the Berkeley Energy Symposium in March, and the director from LBL introduced his spiel on ethanol by saying something like "Now we all know that corn is a terrible source for ethanol" and proceeded to show the alternatives. One of the crops he was interested in was miscanthus, which UIUC is experimenting with (and I hear Europe has done a lot of experiments on it too). It apparently has a better energy ratio than switchgrass, and you get more ethanol out of it per acre.
Really, it's just simple economics. If people are willing (albeit begrudgingly) to pay a higher price for the privilege, the phone companies will charge it. If they started seeing consumers flocking to competitors with lower SMS prices, they'd reconsider, but then you might be making sacrifices elsewhere.
You have a very limited view of what constitutes an RPG. The games that came out of Squaresoft did not fall into the open-ended breed and should not even be compared to them. Their purpose was to provide you with well-developed characters in a solid plot, which isn't typically done well in more open-ended RPGs. In open-ended RPGs, you almost necessarily have to skimp on interactions and relationships between characters, so it really just depends what you want out of an RPG. It's probably a misleading name for that side of the genre, since you don't get to choose much of anything about your character's personality; you're more or less reading a novel or watching a movie, with (boring and easy, lol) random encounters in between important story elements.
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7-zip also integrates with the Windows Shell, actually. I don't really know how it compares to WinRAR, but I use it because it's free without gimmicks (like, e.g. reinstalling the trial version whenever it expires).
Ahh, now I see why there's a redundant mod. I didn't pay close enough attention to the person a few threads up (who may have been below my threshold at the time). Sheesh, give me a break, lol.
But geez, Phoronix keeps hinting at open specifications or an open source driver, it's driving me mad (for example, see here). I have only used nvidia cards thus far (because performance was my top priority--games, CAD, etc. really need it), but that could quickly change if AMD does either of the above. If they do, surely someone from the community will fix those problems for you (if they still exist in 8.41).
I would love to get into coding drivers for graphics cards and help fix things myself, but... I've only done very simple firmware for CAN and serial chips in an embedded AVR system (no OS). I need a good book (preferably free ;-) ) on Linux device drivers, I think.
Holy cow, folks. Can't you be just a little happy that ATI has finally gotten their crap together performance-wise before criticizing their potential lack of openness? I would like OSS drivers as much as the next guy, but at least we ought to appreciate AMD/ATI is finally putting some effort into Linux. Besides, one of those Phoronix articles is insinuating that there is more for the OSS community coming than just higher performance.
Even so, there is a relatively low level of risk from stable countries becoming nuclear powers. In most cases, I think leaders (both good and bad) would not risk counterattack and would be just as hesitant as we are for deployment. In achieving their level of power, they have far too much to lose. The real danger comes from groups that are prepared to sacrifice whatever it takes to achieve their objective, though I think the number that are prepared for massacre are rather few.
Besides, how likely is it that such a group would have access to plutonium from the United States...
I do admit I don't know entirely about the economic feasibility of it, but France seems to be getting along fine with their large nuclear power system.
You ought to do more research. The United States is a net exporter of food.
What if the batteries take 5 minutes to charge to 80%? (never mind that you might have some problems dumping that much energy through the grid at once if everyone did it ;-) )
There are several emerging battery technologies that go after precisely that, though at a price: they don't have the same level of capacity (but still much better than NiMH).
Those are probably batteries from A123 Systems, and they've been around for a little while. We used them in our vehicles at the MIT Vehicle Design Summit last year. They don't have greater storage than the lithium ion batteries already in common use, but the number of duty cycles and the amount of current it can take is pretty damn good. They won't solve the energy storage problem, though. They're too bulky, both in mass and volume, and while I can't recall the CTO's estimates for the price per Wh, I don't remember thinking it would be good enough. It's two steps forward and one step back... Progress, though! ;-)
The Wii attempts to market to the masses by being a platform with many simple games (which may still have you playing for a very long time), while the other two attempt to cater more to the enthusiast.
Take Wii Tennis, for example. As someone that likes to play tennis in real life, I can't stand it: half the game is missing (deciding where to run and how to react to various shots) and there is a noticeable lag in the controls, at least for me. I find Virtua Tennis to be much more fun, but it's on the other platforms.
Or there is Super Smash Brothers, another relatively simple game. It just doesn't compare to Virtua Fighter. Same with Mario Kart vs Forza/GT.
I realize I haven't been entirely fair by contrasting Nintendo's titles vs third parties, but the third parties are generally following Nintendo's lead on what to place on the Wii. With a few exceptions, virtually all of Nintendo's franchises are lacking in complexity. While this is good for the masses, it's not so great for people like me.
Have you found any info on whether or not it's more than simply a shell? The picture makes it look like it is (I could be missing something). Changing the form is cool, but if the Wiimote still can't determine if you're physically pointing at your target, the Zapper won't change anything.
Well, that may be true in general, but on the contrary, this story was covered in my local newspaper several days ago.
It might make a difference if you were shopping on the low end. And actually, the difference between the two Inspiron 530s is $100, and that's if you don't upgrade the Windows machine to the GeForce 7300 like the Ubuntu machine has (for $50 more). $150 sounds like quite the deal to me.
I tried using ndiswrapper with the 1390 on my 1705, but it seemed to cause interrupt issues when using SMP and nvidia's driver (using nv or disabling SMP would prevent the issue). I did get better throughput while it worked, though, and not everyone has those issues, so YMMV.
Er, impeachment for getting rid of the guy with the veto power. Congress probably has their own means of doing the same thing, though.
The thing is that it won't take four years for them to get kicked out of office (and besides, we're dealing with party politics, so it generally only takes two years to change the majority party). If the problem becomes widespread enough, others will definitely seize the opportunity to invoke the impeachment process and gain power. There is a certain amount of self-moderation from the competition between the two parties, and although the majority of Americans are ridiculously ignorant, it would be really hard to get away with a significant level of evil against citizens for any extended period of time
Hey, isn't the xorg vesa driver OSS? ;-)
While it's nice that you can configure them to be similar, it's a moot point if you don't need the expensive parts Apple forces upon you. We'll take the CPU for example. There's a diminishing return to increasing clock speed while price increases faster as you go up. There are often two levels of cache, and I feel like the sweet spot is usually around where the size of the cache just increases. This is often much less expensive than the top-of-the-line CPU Apple tends to throw at you.
So in general, you're likely paying a premium for parts you don't really need, but hey, if you think OS X is worth the premium, why does it matter?
We don't know gravity exists; we simply haven't falsified its existence within our current model. No amount of experimentation proves something is always true (unless you could somehow test all the possible states) ^_^
I've got it. I'll just redo the stages so that there are 334 times as many. Then we can clock your processor at 1 thz! And getting bigger will almost certainly not allow you to go faster, btw. If your goal is to improve the latency of the result for your instruction, you have to reduce the delay of the components (which smaller gates help) or do less in your instruction (which I was jokingly suggesting above) so you can turn up the clock speed (if heat weren't a problem). Adding more chip real estate will not make your add instruction go any faster. What you could do with it, though, is add more functionality by providing more instructions in the ISA, which the processor could accelerate with ever more transistors, at a higher price.
Or a massive cache with extreme block sizes! Mwahahaha
C is used all over in systems-level programming and in applications where speed is critical (but not so much to merit the much-lengthened development time of using assembly). There's more to the computer than your silly "web 2.0" applications; it's just one layer of the abstraction.
Thankfully, at least the important people around here in Berkeley understand that corn-based ethanol is an awful idea. I went to the Berkeley Energy Symposium in March, and the director from LBL introduced his spiel on ethanol by saying something like "Now we all know that corn is a terrible source for ethanol" and proceeded to show the alternatives. One of the crops he was interested in was miscanthus, which UIUC is experimenting with (and I hear Europe has done a lot of experiments on it too). It apparently has a better energy ratio than switchgrass, and you get more ethanol out of it per acre.
Really, it's just simple economics. If people are willing (albeit begrudgingly) to pay a higher price for the privilege, the phone companies will charge it. If they started seeing consumers flocking to competitors with lower SMS prices, they'd reconsider, but then you might be making sacrifices elsewhere.
You have a very limited view of what constitutes an RPG. The games that came out of Squaresoft did not fall into the open-ended breed and should not even be compared to them. Their purpose was to provide you with well-developed characters in a solid plot, which isn't typically done well in more open-ended RPGs. In open-ended RPGs, you almost necessarily have to skimp on interactions and relationships between characters, so it really just depends what you want out of an RPG. It's probably a misleading name for that side of the genre, since you don't get to choose much of anything about your character's personality; you're more or less reading a novel or watching a movie, with (boring and easy, lol) random encounters in between important story elements.