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Look-- if I gave in to every little special interest group...

http://xenon.xe.net/inthumor/ih_038.htm

Sure, he can beat his students, but what about pirates?

Wait a minute! That light brown plumage... - you're not pirates, you're barn owls!

$100M = 234,602 gold ounces = 7,297kg
$100M = 114,341 platinum ounces = 3,556kg

I did some rough calculations on this topic a while back - for Sterling mind. $100M = £53.1M. My guesses were that this is what 20kg of notes would get you:

£50 - 15686 notes (£784,300)
£20 - 17105 notes (£342,100)
£10 - 19033 notes (£190,330)
£5 - 21,164 notes (£105,820)

So:

£53.1M in £50 notes would weigh 1,354kg
£53.1M in £20 notes would weigh 3,104kg
£53.1M in £10 notes would weigh 5,580kg
£53.1M in £5 notes would weigh 10,036kg

These are all complete guesses based on a guess of the relative size of notes (I only had one to measure) and the weight of the paper.

The UK 2p coin is the heaviest for its value at 7.12g each. £53.1M = 2.655 billion 2p coins, weighing in at 18.9M kg. Ouch.

So there you go. A lot whichever way you look at it :)

Currency conversion from http://www.xe.net/ucc/

Cheers,

Roger

EUR 280,000 = USD 356,140 = UKP 193,144 = JPY 37,835,034.
In case you were wondering.

currency converter - findsounds.com

how stuff works - infoplease

about.com - librarian's index

rebecca's reference - tom mayo's links
-words:

acronym/abbr -lookup -finder -bm

trans -babelfish -worldlingo -google bm

bartleby

phrontistery

pseudodictionary

jargon file
--music

epitonic - pitchfork

sonomu - electraum

gnod - audioquarium --books:

amazon - abebooks - bookfinder

gutenberg & onlinebooks

loc.gov - lambiek comiclopedia - rebecca's books

>Both point to articls about Steve Jobs getting apple back on track financially.

But the company ISN'T on track financially. They're on Microsoft (R) brand life support.

Jobs dumped the Newton as a bitch-slap, and up to now I see no evidence to prove otherwise.

Apple only exists because of Microsoft and Artists. And if Microsoft goes, I strongly doubt the Artists are going to pony up enough to keep those Macs coming.

>But then, something tells me you're of the group who will spend twice as much money on a machine that performs half as well as a macintosh and think that you got a better deal on a faster machine.

My fastest machine is a 1 Ghz Celeron laptop with CD-RW/DVD, 256 Mb RAM, 1400x1050 screen, 30 GB HDD, sound, firewire, NTSC video out, Li-Ion battery, and it's only 5.2 lbs. It included works, win xp, StudioDV, encyclopedia, money, and lots of other software goodies.

Was there a laptop Mac that could reach that level of performance, features, and software (similar is fine -- I don't care who makes it, I just want the same function) for only $2,599 CDN in December 2001 (when I purchased the laptop)? In fact, since you accuse me of spending twice as much, you'll need to find me one for $1,300 CDN. Feel free to use xe.net to convert the prices to your home currency. I'd be very interested in the answer.

If you can't do that, I say again (like to your other reply), your Mac zealotry is sheilding you from the truth.

1 mole of Americium = 1.101 moles of Europium

;-)

Wow. That is pretty cool. Speaking of cube computers thoguh, i found some other interesting designs.. check out www.soldam.com for these really nice small looking cubes... Note the price is in yen though, use this to convert.

..pcable

How are we supposed to relate DM 4 million or AUD 5.2 million to real money?

Use a currency coverter, for example, this one.

if the savings is a few hundred million pesos how much is that in dollars? Maybe 50 bucks?

Well, the peso isn't that bad. ;-) Here's a link to a universal currency converter I found via google (I don't know how up-to-the-second the rates are): www.xe.net/ucc/ . According to it 100,000,000 pesos is 10,449,320.79 USD, which is a non-trivial amount.

One question that springs to mind is what distro they're planning on using. Connectiva seems likely becuase of it's internationalization for Spanish-speaking countries, but hey, maybe the head techie dude likes Slack... :-)

The Register is reporting that the UK list price for the X1 is going to be £1200 - almost double the straight currency conversion of £679 (US$1000 == GBP£679 at the moment, according to this site.

WTF is that all about then?

I noted that Apple UK's pricing of the Titanium Powerbook is only marginally above the straight conversion, which sounds fair to me. But almost double?

...j

Hydroelectric power powering the compression engine would, I think, be far less polluting. Not to mention lessening the load on a diminishing, finite fuel supply.

I not from The Universal Currency Converter(TM) that the selling price of 65,000 rand is only Cdn$12,960.82.

I want one!

> From the article, it's unclear how deep in the network the fiber goes; anyone have more information on that? I'd like some fiber to my apartment, but it's rather far from Japan right now ...

I live in a medium-sized (900,000 people) urban centre in central Japan and I have about as much hope of getting fiber to my door in the next ten years as I had getting Internet access in 1990. Which is nil. You'll get your fiber long before I do!

The article is only talking about a pilot project in an urban centre. That probably means less than 10,000 subscribers in Tokyo and Osaka with the rest of the nation being rolled out about the year 3085.

Basically, Internet access sucks in this country--both in price and in lack of bandwidth. And fiber just isn't going to happen any time soon!

True, NTT has one of the most advanced ISDN infrastructures in the world. Hell, I can walk up to almost any payphone--even in between two rice paddies--and "plug in".

But ISDN is part of the problem. NTT has invested giga-yen into it and they will do their damnedest to milk it for all the revenue they can--including delaying offering new services that would make ISDN obsolete.

You can get 128K ISDN dial-up connections to your ISP from anywhere in Japan but if you want a 24-hour connection (that avoids the 3.3 yen/min toll charges on local calls) you have to sign up for OCN Economy. The name is ironic: They charge 32,000 yen (US$298 ) per month for it. At least they throw in 8 IP addresses.

Never mind fiber, when they roll out ADSL they are only going to be able to charge about 4500 yen, eroding their ISDN revenue base and pissing off a lot of corporate customers who signed long-term (3 year) contracts for OCN Economy. Watch: Before ADSL goes nation-wide, NTT will at least half the price of OCN Economy.

NTT introduced another pilot in November 1999: a flat-rate ISDN service for 8000 yen per month. This one, aimed at non-corperate users, doesn't include the cost of your ISP and I'm not even sure if it has a static IP address. In May they expanded it to cover several more wards of Tokyo and also Osaka City but this service is still a pilot (30,000 subscribers) and not outside of the two urban centres. Walk into a local NTT in my city and ask about this or ADSL and they hand you a pamphlet for OCN Economy saying that it is the lowest priced service they offer.

Similar pilots are underway with ADSL with plans to roll out nation wide in less than a year, but I've been hearing these kinds of announcements for years. I've learned not to get my hopes up.

Looking on the bright side, even if I can't get ADSL before 2002, when NTT lowers it's prices on OCN Economy this year, I will at least be able to get it for less than I am paying now in dial-up charges: My current NTT local-call toll charges to my ISP are between 15,000 to 25,000 yen a month!

On another front, I was supposed to get cable Internet access a year ago. I went to my local cable company the other day to get a status report. They said my area was pushed back--slated for 2002. They didn't seem to think there was any need to hurry, the high cost of upgrading their equipment being the main excuse for the delay. I talked directly to one of their technical staff and explained to them how ADSL was going to beat them to the market. They hadn't even heard of ADSL! I got the impression that they simply don't understand the concept of competition, having been granted a monopoly on CATV services for their region. Anyway, they charge about 80,000 yen for installation.

So what about fiber? NTT is talking about offering their "Medium/High-Speed IP Service" this year, in areas where they already have FTTH (fiber to the home). So what homes already have fiber? Not many even in Tokyo. And a year ago NTT's projection on a nation-wide network of fiber feeder cables was 2010.

I say "Dream on...!".

• Sony is a huge corporation that is validating Crusoe's work by putting their Crusoe in their laptops
• Sony Vaio's are quite hyped, so this might represent lots of sales for Transmeta, especially if they influence their concurrents
• Sony's C1Xxxx (the tiny one with a camera and a pointing device just big enough for a Barbie doll main cons is its lack of autonomy (around 2 hours). Putting a Crusoe in it might at least double this uptime and hence boost its sales. So, it is not only good for Crusoe but also against WindowsCE.
• Vaios often run BeOS perfectly.

• Vaios are usually quite expensive and something new doesn't imply it will be cheaper. Especially if some people call these newer ones a "financial risk"... Or abuse people with potentially lower costs of ownership.
• C1X... doesn't run Linux properly (well, maybe this is getting better now but I doubt all of the windows features -camera, etc- work yet...): What a pity for my admin colleagues...
• I believe Vaios have two concurents in the small but powerfull and with a huge autonomy sector : The Psion Netbook (soon to be powered by either Linux, QNX or RiscOS) and the Apple iBook (6 hours autonomy). These one are especially cheap (respectively 2500CHF and 3300CHF -what is CHF ?- ). And they are already available.
• The modem they give with Vaio are technically incompatible with either Linux or BeOS (personal experience). They don't answer to system queries and then need a specific driver that only exists under Windows.

(note to self: always use Preview button)

Handy reference: Universal Currency Converter

I can't say I trust them either, but they probably think that by not releasing the source, the programmers of the DDoS daemon won't be able to adapt it to evade their little program. They are probably betting their money "security thru obscurity". Granted, it only delays the inevitable, but in this case, delaying the inevitable is favorable to allowing the inevitable to happen right away. Not intended as flamebait, but closing source is a way to hedge your bets.

It works like this: People will have a harder time competing with you if your source is closed, but it doesn't prevent it. The cost is that since nobody knows how your software works, no one can help you make it better. Open source is the opposite: everyone knows how it works so competition is much more fierce, while the program it self is much better. From the FBI's standpoint, if they can detect the daemon, mission accomplished (no need for better software at this point), and given the magniture of these attacks, the last thing they want is competition. So in this case, their best bet is to close the source. Harder for the evil hackers to compensate. Of course, the problem they now run into is that benign hackers, conspiracy theorists and any person who reads the news will not want to install a binary only program supplied by the FBI, because nobody knows what's inside that little Pandora's Box. So closing the source kinda backfired in helping get this thing under control.

Just my 6.73061 Greecian drachmas (at the current exchange rate). Okay, that said, please moderate me down because I'm sure that you, Mr. or Ms. Moderator, do not agree with me and I am therefore using this as flame bait. Thank you.

> That's 12 million EURO. Which leads me to ask, what's the exchange rate of a euro to dollars? According to Universal Currency Converter(tm), one EUR = 1.01834 USD

250,000DM ~ $132,000US
250,000DM ~ $192,750CDN

These values dance around a fair bit (naturally) but are more-or-less accurate at time of this writing. Conversions are courtesy of The Universal Currency Converter (don't do transcontinental net.biz without it!)

--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)

20,000,000 JPY = 166,251.04 USD

Courtesy of The Universal Currency Converter