taks

big time. there are only a few that are designed for above a few thousand feet. NEC is one that i know of, and i think it's guaranteed to 9000 ft. i live at 6850 feet (work at 7000), and i can go into best buy and listen to the plasmas hum. some worse than others. the reason, if anyone is curious, is that the cells of the screen are pressurized, and the ambient pressure effects the efficiency of these cells. at high elevations/altitudes, more power is required to have a given brightness. that causes the hum (and they get hot, real hot). at least, that's the way it was explained to me! oh, and there is a myth running around that plasma tvs need to be "recharged." it is a myth. the cells are sealed. taks

terrible. my work laptop, a sort of a leftover, lasts 20 minutes at best and i only use it once every 6 months. taks

the first sentence answers the second. since when is YOUR definition (or anyone else's) of a "positive contribution" the only allowed? lots of things qualify as having "no positive contribution to society" yet they are allowed. why? because of freedom. freedom to decide what is and isn't "positive" to your own life. remember, here in the US, we were founded on the promise of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." the latter concept has been ruled on in the supreme court, btw, as a valid "right" and nowhere in the constitution is the ability to govern such a concept away granted to the government. when someone's pursuit of happiness tramples your own right to the same, then you have a legitimate gripe. inside a private business, however, you have the right to leave. inside a private apartment building, you have the right to leave. taks

i'd rather pull my hair and teeth out with a pair of pliers than play that game again. that and PoRII are on my all-time list of "wasted time i'll never, ever, ever be able to reclaim." taks

i kicked off the download of this beast the other night and finished in 29 minutes, 24 seconds. for a 1.4 GB file, that works out to 6.7 Mbits/s plus overhead, probably putting me close to 8-9 Mbits/s transfer rate. unbelievable. unfortunately, screaming download speeds aside, the game is very difficult to run with the highest settings. above 1024x768 and my 6800 (with GT modification) booooogs down. dropping the settings a bit did not seem to change the detail too much, so i'll retry when i have a chance. it looks pretty cool, however. fantasy first-person shooter with a bit of a story behind it. should be fun. taks

true. they're shoehorning the quad processor into that chip, too, as i recall. unfortunately, the single core of the AMD is not nearly as powerful as the single core of the duo. disappointing is the fact that AMD does not seem to have an improvement to the FX on the horizon other than multi-core. the multi-core thing does not benefit any apps that aren't specifically written for threaded processing (which covers most applications, btw). it will allow running multiple programs simultaneously with little performance hit (other than memory/cache conflicts), but that isn't much of an interest when you're jamming on a shooter or rpg. taks

apparently. IMO, you should be able to sue anyone for anything anyway (lots o' anys). however, smart judges are supposed to throw out frivolous lawsuits in which damages are unprovable. proving that cigarrette smoke is annoying is easy. proving that it has damaged you, however, is next to impossible. taks PS: in spite of the surgeon general stating that 2nd-hand smoke is dangerous, there is a minimum dosage level for ANY toxin before it causes harm (even cyanide is harmless below a certain dosage). the SG simply saying "any level" won't cut it in a real courtroom when you can hire experts for just about anything.

BOTH! er, barring that, i always prefer desktops over laptops when gaming. that's just me, however. i'm curious why you aren't considering core-2 duo for the desktop version? personally, i am going with an x2 4800+ shortly, but only because i already have a socket 939 mobo and don't feel like completely overhauling an otherwise good system. if i were not so constrained, it would be core-2 all the way. taks

fionavar, it is F7 on sony laptops. taks

one of your function keys does the switch... F8 i think. it will toggle between on-board LCD, external or both. i'll check. taks

this is more than likely true. unfortunately, work that people such as myself do on a day-to-day basis does not reach the truly "public" (i.e. commercial) sector. at least, not very quickly. there's a lot of wheel re-inventing that will be required. of course, occasionally some guy in the defense world that wants to venture into commercial applications does so, and brings with him the knowledge, though not necessarily specifics, obtained from his experiences. taks

got little to do with politics, either. in the defense world, btw, even democrats are hawks! taks

got little to do with colorado or their public school system. i learned what i know at 1) hazelwood school district in north st. louis county (MO), 2) university of missouri-rolla, 3) defense company in melbourne, FL, 4) commercial comm company in melbourne, FL, 4) defense company in colorado springs and finally 5) university of colorado. i suppose the latter is considered a colorado public school, however, but they didn't invent the stuff. taks

all antennae have an associated gain, which should not be confused with amplification. they are usually listed in terms of dBi (dB incident). this is probably what you guys are seeing. i.e. your body (or street lights) are acting as an antenna with a somewhat focused beampattern. if that beampattern is omni-directional (i.e. radiates in all directions equally), the gain is 0 dBi, or no apparent gain. directional antennae, which is probably the effect you guys are seeing, have a gain that is a ratio of the surface area of a unit sphere to the relative area of the beam on that sphere. interesting effect sans technical jargon nonetheless. taks

my knowledge of antennas, while not to the level of an expert, tells me your friend's assertion is incorrect. it is impossible to passively amplify a signal (i.e. you need a power source), however, it is possible to sort of "channel" the signal, i.e. focus it in a specific direction (the basis of what i actually do for a living). if your friend IS correct that he can increase the range, this would be the likely candidate for why it is working. taks

the problem is that the potential pitfalls are almost enough to outweigh the benefits. not all problems that need solving can be efficiently solved in parallel, either. i'm dealing with one right now that, on the surface, seems like a nifty parallel task. unfortunately, deep down, there are reasons not to chase the rabbit down the hole. my point really, was that there is a steep learning curve that game developers may have a hard time overcoming. very steep. no matter the potential benefit, the initial stages of climbing that slope may do irreparable damage, and delays, to a project. keep in mind, graphics is offloaded through a well developed API that lets the developer get his task done semi-transparently. once said dev has to start writing his own threads, however, things get a little sticky (uh, a lot). taks taks

any sufficiently advanced technology appears as magic to those that have not seen it before. a description of how the data is actually, sent, btw, is even cooler (read: more magical). taks

no, really, this is one of the arguments the pro-life proponents use. i've seen this same silly logic in other "pamphlets" released by extreme right christian organizations... same message, different clothing. taks

writing code for a parallel environment is a nightmare. developers that complain about it are right to do so. just being able to fix the affinity to a specific core is not the problem. the developers are probably required to implement threaded versions that will work across multiple cores. this means maintaining two different programs/code bases depending upon configuration. my guess is that most game developers are not experts in programming in parallel environments and, likewise, do not have the time to learn the subtleties involved given their other tasks. parallel computing has been around for quite some time in the scientific/defense realms, and that's where the knowledgebase lies. probably not something a game dev has time for unless he doesn't sleep much. oh, i'm programming on a quad-core, the BCM1480 (broadcom). taks

sorry folks, but cell phones don't work the way you think... first, high frequencies such as what meta pointed out cannot be transmitted over a cell phone. nor can infrared or standard EM from a radio transmitter. the technical reasons are detailed, but in short, a cell phone does not actually transmit your voice! actually, they employ what are known as vocoders, which interpret your voice and translate the various parameters into symbols. they can function as low as a few kbits/s (i believe they actually run at 14.4 kHz typically, but transmit only what is required). the highest frequency that can reasonably make it through a cell phone is in the 3-5 kHz range (which explains why children are very hard to understand on a cell). also, this is why cells don't work well with a large amount of background noise (particularly in a noisy bar). taks

no, i think the point is that you shouldn't commit abortion because you could be aborting the next beethoven. taks

inside a restaurant isn't public anyway. the term public is misused by government and activist groups more than any. "public" means that which is owned by the public, not that which the public is allowed by a private owner to visit. big difference. taks

Considering that the plan for 9/11 was clearly launched well before bush took office, this statement is completely moronic. perhaps you meant to say "i don't forgive CLINTON for 9/11"? i guess not everybody is bright enough to follow a simple timeline. dang. taks

between this and all the dinosaur revelations over the past couple decades, i feel cheated. now all we need is for newton and einstein to be refuted somehow. taks

Hindsight is always 20/20, isn't it? Since nobody could have known a-priori that a Beethoven would be born, advising otherwise would be foolish. Making such decisions without knowledge of the outcome requires that you choose based on the most probable outcome. Beethoven was not the most probable outcome. Based on the historical record (not the bible) of who Noah was, and where he lived, it is likely it was built by a community that relied heavily on shipping, so no, it probably wasn't built by amatuers. Taks