unreal25

... cont'd .... (again not sure what you're doing so I'll try not to complicate too much) 2. Medical research Here I can only say something about biomed research. In terms of research in biomedicine there are a lot of things going on right now. I am mostly familiar with computational stuff, which may be what appeals a lot to the newer generation of students. There is a huge field of computational biology in which for example you could do something like the following example. Experimentalists would sequence a genome of an organism X (say amoeba) then folks on the computer use that data to compare to other organisms and for example study how the genome evolves. There are lots of basic and applied open questions here, from figuring out how the proteins fold the way they do to be able to perform some function to say using computer science techniques to figure out . Then there's applied stuff concerned with diseases, e.g. where people have looked into the genetic sequences of sick people and figured out a particular mutation (e.g. lets say where you're supposed to have ATGC, you have TAGC in your gene) has to do with causing a disease. As you imagine there is ton of work here on different kinds of cancer as well. I don't see biomed research going away any time soon and in fact my impression. 3. Computer Science A lot of people confuse IT with CS just in case you aren't aware. CS is a cool field as well, and the techniques from it are becoming very popular in computational biology/biomedicine. Basically there is stuff about robotics/AI I learned abit this semester as I took the Stanford online class (ai-class.org) and I am somewhat familiar with machine learning where you make computer programs that try to "learn" something from the data... maybe if you are interesting it is useful if you take their 101 course they are offering next semester: Computer Science 101 to get a feeling of the field. If you are even remotely capable all of these fields -- physics, astronomy, biomed, cs (especially cs) should be able to provide you with a decent salary. In fact even as a graduate student in the US, I think the salary is quite nice -- e.g. I can easily afford to travel across the world 2x per year, high end laptop, and a car if I wanted (I get about $2K per month and my 1bed apartment costs $750/mo; NY state). While the salary lacks like mad given my qualifications, its not that bad + I am not paying anything extra for my studies (I am guessing that's included in my nett salary but I never see that money). If you do decide to enroll in an university (I am not sure where are you now, high school?) you should talk to different people professors, grad students, perhaps you can access so called "resident fellows" if you live in a dorm on campus and talk to them as well. I guess if you have any particular question, I can try to give a more concrete answer.

Hey mmskate13, Where are you from? I can give you some info for the stuff I know something about. 1. Astronomy. I think its a very cool field, but there may be some confusion about what people do in it. It depends exactly what you want do to however: typically astronomy involves either observational or purely theoretical work. My PhD adviser, e.g. 20 years back or so built some balloons that were going into the upper atmosphere and I think were measuring extraterrestrial x-ray sources. For example, for what I remember people found out that some pulsars (basically space objects rotating insanely fast) could be detected by looking at these periodic x-ray signals. I also have a friend at Harvard who is doing purely theory, that is he has access to the data of large sky surveys and last time I talked to him he was showing me how he used this data in his computer simulation of the distribution of dark matter within the milky way galaxy. Also my university participates in the Mars rover program, so there is quite a few of physicists and engineers workig on that, that goes from building the thing to actually analyzing the data. This is for example what astrophysicists/astronomers do. And to do that typically one goes by getting a BSc degree in physics then a PhD in physics/astronomy, then probably 3-4 years of postdoctoral positions before landing an assistant professorship position. It is a bit time-consuming profession, but for many it seems it is worth it. They are not super-high paying jobs but its more having to do something that they really enjoy doing (i.e. it doesnt feel like a job). The good side, the research can be very interesting. The bad side is that getting into a good astronomy PhD program in the US is insanely difficult as they are very competitive. Also the chances of getting a job as the professor in the field is very hard. On the other hand, I've heard a lot of astronomy PhDs easily get other jobs where you need to do a lot of computing/numerical simulations (I know in particular Wall Street/Consluting companies are popular destinations). I don't know much about engineering side of it, but it seems there is a demand for it. I know every years or so NASA Jet Propulsion Lab folks come to my university recruiting graduate students in physics/engineering close to getting their PhD. Also, I am not sure what are the qualifications to become an astronaut (not an astronomer). It is hard to predict what kind of jobs are going to be in demand once you finish your university education, so in my opinion my best suggestion is to find something you really enjoy doing with the constrain that it will allow you some flexibility even if you aren't able to score your first choice profession, which may not necessarily be a bad thing, btw. (Like being a painter I imagine you'll have trouble earning money.) I'll comment on the other stuff you wrote later, I want to go home now. Also if you want I can write down, in length, about what I am doing.

Haha. On the backups... I found it most convenient to make a backup on another hard drive.

Congrats. M17x is a beast.

Yeah pre-made desktops aren't that exciting since a lot people can build their own out of quality components. On the other hand, on a laptop you can't really change for example your case or install your own cooling. I wish had a similar universal framework for laptops, where you could build your own laptop out of basic components. Is it just recently that they agreed on MXM interface for mobile GPUs so they are sometimes user replaceable? (but still sometimes manufacturer limits you with their own BIOS) I hope that as laptop market expands (and I feel it did expand quite significantly in last 15 years or so) we could get closer to "build your own laptop", or at least something with significantly higher capability of customization.

A proper Dell on-site tech? Yay!

That's too fancy for me. I just touch something metal with my fingernails since places with high curvatures will have high charge density (physics for the win?) and works like a charm.

I wouldn't call it "smooth", rather "completely disorganized but somewhat functional". Sorry it happened, for future reference just ground yourself before you touch anything on the motherboard (I usually just touch my metal sink just in case, even though I never had static electricity problems in this apartment). Also yes, battery goes out is a MUST, since part of the motherboard can still be powered even with laptop off.

Now I'll go head and suggest something else. Going back to Win95 era I remember having some thing called "Active desktop" where you would have pretty much any media playing in the background instead of static wallpaper. But, I also remember being it quite a resource hog and it was basically just for showing off. But... today we have much more powerful computers and I am wondering whether its possible to put this animation as a windows desktop background?

I have youtube comments disabled through Adblock. Just cant be bothered to read junk and the retarded comments starting with "like this if you...". Its like on youtube, the evolution has reversed direction and gone WAY down the other way. The video is pretty cool though.

This girl is awesome:

The other folks should have been been handed the sign: BTW, blonde girl chilling and typing a text message on her phone (~1:54) = win.

I played through 3 of their closed betas. Looks fun to me, despite some grindy quests. It's very similar to WoW (which I played for about 5 years with some pauses). The voice acting is pretty nice and dialog options are funny and diverse enough. I was also one of the people who preordered first, so I am hoping my early access will be Dec 13th. I haven't tried PvP.

Wow... this person looks great as both a man and a woman. Lol...

Crazy right?

Only for (class) quests that are specific for each class. Typically its all open world.

Same here. I tried all 4 classes on the Empire side. I too noticed there is a lot of criticism on the SWTOR forums, but I found the game to be quite enjoyable. There are a lot of things in which the game is similar to WoW, but the leveling part seems interesting enough and the voice acting certainly does much to it, over reading a wall of text each time you'd accept a quest in WoW. I only played one instance (flashpoint) Black Talon, in the first beta and found it quite good. In the last beta it seemed overly nerfed but then again I plan to play with my RL friend so we'll probably just be 2-manning it. In terms of how it runs, I see no difference running with and without crossfire. With details on High (highest setting), and default values for ground clutter, on 1920x1200 I get typically around 20-40FPS depending on the zone. I hope the crossfire support gets properly implemented. This is with latest catalyst drivers and Radeon 5870M. On lower resolutions it does play smoother but due to lack of Antialiasing support in the game atm, it looked really crappy so I just went with these settings.

Hm yellow thing means something is wrong with drivers. Have you tried installing an older version of Catalyst drivers?

Hm, you can also try going into Device manager, then manually removing both graphic card (don't forget to check the checkbox that says uninstall drivers). After the drivers are uninstalled it should say something like Standard VGA adapter for both cards. If it still says ATI Radeon etc you didn't uninstall them properly.

Same here. The exact process I used was: 1. Run the setup.exe from this pack. Use it to uninstall old drivers. 2. Restart. 3. Restart into safe mode. 4. Run Driver Sweeper and CCleaner. 5. Restart back into normal Windows and run setup. Did not produce any BSODs or errors and installed well.

Also installed, no BSODs here during the installation, and finally no annoying errors about not being to install the damn SDK. Thanks!

Just FYI, you can get Dell M4400 with 15" RGB LED 1920x1200 for that money of their outlet. (Or at least that's how much it was last time I checked.) I wonder whether it fits into M15x.

Yep side by side comparison. I mean *clearly* if you get Radeon 6990 your picture should be incredibly crisp. ^^

Help Me Choose: Video Card | Dell UK I mean... what did you expect, for Dell to come up with something that's not a blatant lie in trying to sell their crap?

Jeez... look at the size of that thing!