Nobody's manufacturing the lasers any more. The generation of HD players that supported both HD-DVD and BluRay had two lasers in them, one for each disc.

It's a great format to use for game discs (or movies for that matter), but it's probably more expensive to implement HD-DVD than BluRay because supply costs will likely outweigh patent licensing costs.

Don't have to go that far... Canada has on average one statutory holiday (federally mandated day off) per month, and many employers give people fresh off the street at least 2 weeks' paid vacation, with the trend being towards more vacation: many larger companies will give you 3 or even 4 weeks at the start, and will give you the option to buy an extra week as part of your benefits package. Some provinces have provincial statutory holidays in addition to the federal ones. They're slowly coming to the realization that a well rested and happy worker is more productive, and allowing this much vacation actually costs less than not allowing it.

35 days is a bit much for most companies yet, but I've been able to book 5 full weeks of vacation this year (1 week of carryover from last year), and because I picked weeks where the statutory holidays come, I've managed to parlay that into an extra week of vacation in the form of days-in-lieu for statutory holidays. That's 30 working days of vacation, or 42 calendar days this year, and I still have 2 floater days and 2 personal emergency days, in addition to paid sick leave.

And most of Europe has even more vacation as standard than we do.

That was kind of the point of the song... I guess you could call it a form of musical irony: lyrics like that do not normally belong in a folk song. I could see my roommate playing it for her (slightly out of it) mother, and the mother thoroughly enjoying the song without actually listening to the lyrics. And I can further imagine the look of horror on her face as she realizes what the song is actually about.

The song is a joke. Its purpose is to make you laugh. And while it could be done with other similarly disparate songs (say Copkilla set to a Simon & Garfunkel style melody), the effect would be essentially the same, and Coulton chose to use Baby Got Back. I've no idea why JC chose that song, but it could have something to do with the fact that Baby Got Back was, itself, a big joke, albeit an unfortunate one that ended a promising performing career. In the end, does it really matter?

Maybe they do, maybe they don't. 1000W power supplies have been available for a very long time.

My desktop system has a 750W Cooler Master power supply at the moment, and I'm using maybe half of its capacity under load. That's for an i5 2500k overclocked @ 4.8GHz, a Hyper 212+ heatsink*, 16GB of RAM (4x4GB), a Radeon 6970 graphics card, a DVD burner, a 60GB Intel 520 SSD as cache, and a 3TB mechanical drive, on a Z68 motherboard. I could buy a video card with a 500W draw and still have some juice left over.

It's quite possible that the system built 5 years ago has a power supply that's more than capable of powering a modern video card.

* - Since somebody's going to cry foul at using air cooling on a system clocked @ 4.8GHz, I'll point out that I'm using an Antec Eleven Hundred case, with two 120mm vents over the CPU, a 120mm vent under the CPU, and a 200mm fan in the top of the case, which provides more than enough air circulation to keep it cool with that processor/heatsink configuration. Even after 4 days of transcoding @ 100% CPU usage with Handbrake (queued up 60 DVD's to transcode after ripping), the CPU had not exceeded 65'C and was averaging about 60'C.

That's true, especially of games that are not properly threaded to take advantage of multicore and manycore configurations. But there's diminishing returns... most games that are CPU bound don't really benefit from more than about 3GHz. Games that are properly threaded will benefit more from an extra execution thread (hyperthreading or an extra core) than they will from a faster clock speed.

Case in point, my gaming machine is a Core i5 2500k, with 16GB of RAM, and a Radeon 6970 graphics card. When I overclocked the processor to 4.8GHz I did not notice a significant improvement in the performance of games. In fact, about the only place where I saw a measurable improvement was in transcoding execution time in Handbrake, which dropped by almost 50%. While there was some improvement in frame rates in games, I use vsync to lock them to 60Hz (what my monitor displays), and there was literally no improvement in gameplay for any of the games I play.

Would you prefer Uwe Boll?

<3 :)

Star Wars is the one with lightsabres, Star Trek is the one with aliens wearing black face and fu man chus....

I quite liked seeing the Ewok fight when I saw Return of the Jedi in theatre, during its first release. Of course, I was born in 1981....

Rapid pulsing lasers (femtolasers) can drastically increase the wattage without actually increasing the number of joules drawn. Without having read the article (this is /. after all), it seems to me that using a pulsed laser would actually be better for this kind of application, because the medium being cooled needs time to actually let off the photons being generated.

That being said, yes, I imagine that active cooling methods are probably significantly more energy efficient, at least for the moment. A peltier chip coupled with a big radiator and a large fan to circulate air is probably the best bang for the buck at the moment.

Also, it's not the first time lasers have been used to cool objects down... I seem to recall that the first time BEC was produced in a lab, they used lasers to compress the matter, providing the cooling needed.

Run cable if you can. If you can't, and speaking from experience (5GHz is already available commercially in Canada), 5GHz stuff runs significantly better than 2.4GHz, and not just because the spectrum is less crowded. There's 120 channels to choose from instead of just 11, and frequency-hopping is built into the specification, so if you start to have noise on your channel it'll just switch frequencies. And that's with the stuff you can get today. With even more spectrum allocated to it, it'll only get better.

To put it another way... remember how much better 5.8GHz phones are than 2.4GHz phones? It'll be the same.

Meh. Most of the liquid crude reserves in the US are either tapped or in environmentally protected areas. But they do have a *very* large amount of shale-based deposits available to them, not to mention enough farmland to be able to provide alternative fuels for their own need.

China tried reining them in 2 months ago, when they were getting ready to do the missile launch test. They still fired the missile, which is why China voted in favour of the current round of sanctions.

NK knows that China doesn't want US military presence on their borders, and that the US will not leave SK as long as NK is still a threat to the south. Thus, it's in NK's interest to be just annoying enough that SK still considers them a threat, but not annoying enough to trigger an attack. And yes, they are a credible threat to the south, with the amount of artillery they have embedded in the hills. They don't need nuclear weapons to do a lot of damage to the South, and are doing this for the attention.

As long as they don't do anything that would cause China to attack them, they're safe. (personally, I think that's how it's going to play out in the long run, btw... they'll piss China off enough that China attacks them, possibly with UN support, and then the US leaves SK). That means that they can ignore China's warnings and chidings all they want, as long as they don't actually do anything that directly affects China. Sadly, their current administration appears to be aware of this.

Interestingly enough, I was listening to a discussion on the radio this morning about Munchhausen syndrome, and can't help but wonder if NK's behaviour is a form of it.

As long as I can get e17 packages for it, I don't care what the default is. That's why my main laptop has been running Bodhi for almost 2 years now.... e17 isn't everybody's cup of tea, but when you want something with all the bling of a modern system, but as light/fast as Awesome, it's very difficult to beat e17. I'm under 400MB of RAM used right now, and have firefox open with multiple tabs and extensions (flash, lastpass, adblock plus, etc.) as well as xchat and gajim. :)

If somebody built a minimalist e17-basted distro that was based on Debian, or preferably Slackware, and didn't come with everything and their dog installed out of the box, I'd seriously consider installing it. Bodhi seems to be the closest, and to be fair it's the first Ubuntu-based distro I've ever installed that lasted more than a day, but I cut my teeth on Slackware and really prefer the way that they do things on that system.

*shrugs* they have a right to expect to be paid for their work, just as you have a right to decide that the price is too high. The problem is, if you decide the price is too high, most people don't take the ethical course of action and install something like Linux, they take the unethical course of action and pirate Windows.

That's why the activation exists. And I've never seen it fail with a legitimate key. I have seen it fail with an MSDN key, when I was testing something and reinstalled about 20 times in a week, but a 5 minute call to the phone number they put on the screen when the online activation fails fixed that.... They're just trying to protect their investment, which is their right as software devs.

Windows 8 *is* a steaming pile of donkey poop, however, and even *free* would be too expensive for me. My gaming machine will continue to run Win7 until my favourite games run on Steam/Linux (or when I'm bored enough of them that running on Wine won't be too much of a hassle), at which point it'll be reinstalled with the same version of Linux that's on my main laptop.