Can't we use a smallish SSD acting as cache in front of a large spinning disk? This is old technology, that may need to be modified somewhat to take the particulars of SSDs into account, but surely this is feasible? Any reason why not?
There are drives that do this (from Samsung, apparently) and it is supported by Vista and Win7 drivers.
They seem to be much more expensive than pure HDDs and apparently not all that much faster, especially for writes -- but I wonder whether a better OS-side driver implementation could change that...
Man, I want this bubble to burst so bad. Is there a market to bet against the bubble?:-)
I looked into it, and there apparently isn't... All the big players (Zynga, Facebook, Playdom, Playfish, Twitter, bebo, studivz, orkut, whatever) are either still private or a really small part of a big conglomerate like EA or Google. So no way to go short equities or long CDS protection in them...
If a person is sending email to those suspected of contributing to terror groups then our government needs to be able to study those emails. That does not imply that the government has either the intention or the man power to be studying every trivial bit of email that we send or receive.
1. "Terrorism" is a very loosely defined word in the US these days.
2. "The government" might not have the intention or manpower to snoop on Jane Harmless, but the disgruntled ex-husband in the local sheriff's department might. Especially if there is a handy fully automated subpoena tool available for all kinds of "law enforcement".
I've read that NK has somewhere on the order of 1,000,000 troops - how true is that? What's the combined number of S.Korean stationed US troops + S. Korean troops? It would appear to me that they have the advantage in a ground war, assuming they have the bullet supplies to maintain a sustained offensive. 100 bullets a month x a million soldiers is a lot of bullets for a country like NK.
North Korea is the most militarized country in the world today, with about 20% of men ages 17–54 in the regular armed forces (at nearly 1.2 million armed personnel), plus about 3 million reserve troops (i.e. past conscripts). Most of the divisions are infantry, mech inf or antiquated artillery, but it's only half a day's marching to Seoul...
South Korea tries to keep step with this: they have about 650k (much better-equipped) active troops due to two years' conscription for all males, and have 3 million reserves as well -- which would make a Northern attack without the support/assistance of China suicidal.
It hasn't kept PC game companies like Blizzard or EA from becoming multi-billion dollar ventures which rival the largest console companies -- without draconian DRM
The same Blizzard that forbids LAN play in Starcraft 2, and the same EA that distributed Spore with DRM trough the roof, right? Maybe in the 90s it wasn't like that, but we ain't there anymore and there is no DeLorean in sight.
But there is no effective DRM for the PC. If I wanted to play Spore for free, I would still be able to download the cracked PC version within a day (or so I assume). Cracking the hardware of the PS3 or Xbox360 is a lot harder. The only effective PC DRM would be a constant unspoofable server connection with unique IDs -- and even for WoW, where this is most feasible, there are still 1000s of private servers out there, as far as I've heard...
There is no [PC] platform, really. It's just a mish-mosh of hardware, an operating system that kind of supports games. The problem with that platform is, there's no standards and piracy is rampant, so why would we want to make a video game for that platform unless you had some sort of draconian DRM thing to keep it from being stolen?
Every point of that has been true for the last 25 years. It hasn't kept PC game companies like Blizzard or EA from becoming multi-billion dollar ventures which rival the largest console companies -- without draconian DRM, without any hardware sales, without a monolithic platform. Why? PC games interfaces are not dumbed down for a living room interface, and thus can present more of a challenge to either creativity (Sim City, The Sims etc) or tactical/strategic skill (FPS, RTS etc). Mario, Wii Sports or Halo might be fun and can be a challenge for hand/eye, but aren't not exactly intellectually stimulating and engaging in the long term.
And yet none of the real news outlets are mentioning it. This will have as much affect on the main public perception as a facebook rumor.
It's not on the BBC, it's not on CNN, but it's on the top of al-Jazeera's frontpage, which means that millions of people will have seen it by tomorrow. Alas, it's the wrong millions - people outside the US/UK knew from the start what the invasion of Iraq would accomplish...
If people don't like a work of art, it's not a great work of art!
That goes for Citizen Kane which everyone hates as well as the horribly boring 2001: Space Odessey and Shakespeare.
Evereybody? Really? I like them - they might be dated, but would still be in my top-50 list of their genre.
To make a analogy that people like you might understand: "If not everybody can use an OS, it is not a useful OS." See the fault in the reasoning?
Don't you know that you should do your wiretapping directly at the ISP level, like real Americans?
I'm sure that they know and they do. But wiretapping at the ISP level doesn't help if their victims use HTTPS or SSL IMAP/POP like pretty much all Gmail (and Yahoo?) users do. Real Americans(TM) subpoena Google or Yahoo records directly over their convenient law-enforcement interfaces -- China can't do that...
"proper pictures" with a 2MP cam, with a tiny tiny tiny sensor, with a shit lens, right.... I have found very little use for my camera on my phone, anything i want to take pictures of gets the SLR camera
Well, I don't have enough space in my pant pockets to lug around a DSLR or even an extra digicam or disposable. The more interesting question, though, is whether Apple will beef up the rear camera from "barely acceptable" to "decent" (i.e. with a xenon flash and a bigger lens). My guess is that they won't.
Any US carriers allow video conferencing on their networks? or do i need to pay $20 a month for that feature?
AFAIK, AT&T has enabled video calls 2-3 years ago, but it's something like 35 cents/minute or $10 for 60 minutes -- so you probably want to stick with Skype & co.
is there some reason why a camera cannot be flexible to face whatever direction the user wants?
Moving parts, hinges, even rotating mirrors, are failure-prone and take a lot of space. Most phone with front-facing cameras use two smaller lenses instead and leave out any moving parts -- my 4-year-old Sony Ericsson K610 has a VGA front camera for videoconferencing and a 2MP rear-facing camera for proper pictures. I am pretty sure that the iPhone will use the same concept.
A lot of Chinese people have internet connections. How many of these 5.5bn other people have internet connections. There is Europe - 0.5bn, USA - 0.3bn, and a few other countries that aren't particularly big such as Canada (0.03bn), Australia (0.02bn), and I suppose Nigeria (0.15bn). In the case of Nigera, the number of internet users isn't necessarily that high. It just seems like it.
If you count by heads, you can start with India - a developing country where at least the urban kids grow up with internet cafes, just like in China - and Google has 50%+ market share, towering over all others.
But you should really count by consumption (since advertisers will tend to only pay search engines for proper consumer eyeballs with bucks to spend) - and by nominal GDP, US/EU/JP still share 60%-65% of the market (vs. 7% in China)
In the UK you have "Statutory SIck Pay", which is the minimum your employer can pay while you are off sick.
Most reasonable employers still pay full wage, either indefinitely or have a number of days per year, after which you are switched to SSP.
And in the UK it is 11% National Insurance whcih goes into hospitals and a (paltry) pension.
11% that you see on your paystub, and 12.8% stealth "employer contributions" that you don't even see, because it gets paid before your gross salary. Cheap, it ain't.
As I responded elsewhere, this stuff is coming out now, which means there's absolutely no way Google performed any kind of real due diligence prior to spending over a billion dollars for YouTube without knowing about it. To believe otherwise is simply ridiculous, or to say you think we've been witness to one of the most epic due diligence failures in history.
Or maybe they did the due diligence, knew about how much infringement was going (after all even John D. Random from the internet knew that) and decided that despite the multimillion-dollar-liability it would still be worth buying? And maybe they would have turned out to be right?
This was very profoundly not my experience when helping a corporate partner price and sell equipment. Prices for hardware are advertised _without_ VAT. Slipping in and out portions of VAT depending on the upstream vendor's behavior was insane. And oh, dear lord, if you had a sale, the VAT numbers got even more insane.
Yes, but you were doing B2B/wholesale sales - only a very small percentage of the population will ever be in that situation. And if you are in a business, you usually know the VAT rate and have a dedicated accountant to deal with any problem that a pocket calculator can't solve...
And oh, my dear lord, try dealing with "valua-added-tax" in Europe....
500 million people try and succeed every day. The secret: By law, it is included in retail prices, so it does not matter whether there are 50 different rates across the EU, you pay what the sticker says. (If you are a business, your accounting software will apply the right rate and calculate the right amount for you. If you are a retailer, it is not too hard remembering the 1 or 2 rates that you have to add on the sticker.)
Because building a subway under one of the most densely populated cities is totally easy?
Well... number of subway lines completed in NYC in the last 10 years (or for that matter 20): zero
Number of metro lines completed in Beijing in the last 10 years: seven.
Building the subway is comparatively easy, even in a metropolis. Getting eminent domain and municipal and state and enviromental and safety approval in hundreds of lawsuits... will bog you down for decades. Despotism - gets shit done.
IANAL (especially not a US patent lawyer), but my common sense says: Pinching is a concept (the "look and feel" of the UI) and should not be patentable. The pinch recognition algorithm is a software patent and should be thrown out of court in a sane jurisdiction (which the USPTO isn't, even after Bilski). The multi-touch hardware implementation that enables pinching is a patentable implementation - but I'm quite sure that Apple doesn't have dibs on that, since most touch screen and multi-touch technology is 20 years old...
Odd. At Jeppesen, I was told that ALL of the jeppesen employees belonged to a union (and this was RD, software engineers, etc). In fact, the Germans told me that everybody but CEO are union.
I think what they meant is that all of the employees are covered by the union tariff -- in Germany (and elsewhere) most large employers pay the union tariff that was determined by collective bargaining to all employees -- to reduce/eliminate their motivation for joining a union.
Germany is pretty much one large union. And you would claim that Germany is made up of Lazy, corrupt ppl and it is an economic failure? Yeah. Right. Well, I certain understand why you went AC.
Nope. Down from 31% to 23% unionization in the early '00s, and by now probably sub-20%. Whether this has anything to do with economic success is another question.
I have sent emails to my senators (I am a US citizen), expressing my anger not at the contents of the treaty, but at the fact that the treaty was negotiated in secret and labeled a national security concern by the Obama administration (and thus, I really cannot say much about the treaty itself). Whether my email will matter to my senator is another story though; my senators are both Democrats, and receive a lot of attention from the copyright lobby.
Don't regard this as a partisan issue -- the Bush Jr. government was the one who initiated it and who started to keep it secret under the national security label, the Obama government continued it, and the Senate condones it. I.e. politicians represent moneyed interests on either side of the aisle...
Kerosine, not fuel oil. Diesel engines run on kerosine, and kerosine for motor fuel is called "diesel" because that's what kind engine it burns in. The fuel is named for the engine, not the other way around.
No, you were right the first time. Most diesel engines run on processed fuel oil, i.e. very heavy petroleum distillates. Kerosene is a very light distillate, used by jet engines in planes or rockets.
What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another.
So he was able to see that human contact was the thing that was missing from the internet - and then blew it. Because of his lack of vision, he's still eating Ramen Noodles. Meanwhile Zuckerberg and Tom Anderson and many others made billions on Facebook and Myspace etc. solving exactly those problems.
Actually, that's a nice lesson for the Slashdot crowd. Remember that idea you were just panning as stupid and unworkable because of xyz flaw that only you could spot? Yep, that's opportunity knocking.
And he didn't have much of an excuse to bemoan the lack of human contact and virtual communities either... Cliff Stoll back then was a net guru and quite active on usenet, so it's not like he wouldn't have imagined how the net connects people...
Slashdot Mirror
Can't we use a smallish SSD acting as cache in front of a large spinning disk? This is old technology, that may need to be modified somewhat to take the particulars of SSDs into account, but surely this is feasible? Any reason why not?
There are drives that do this (from Samsung, apparently) and it is supported by Vista and Win7 drivers.
They seem to be much more expensive than pure HDDs and apparently not all that much faster, especially for writes -- but I wonder whether a better OS-side driver implementation could change that...
Man, I want this bubble to burst so bad. Is there a market to bet against the bubble? :-)
I looked into it, and there apparently isn't... All the big players (Zynga, Facebook, Playdom, Playfish, Twitter, bebo, studivz, orkut, whatever) are either still private or a really small part of a big conglomerate like EA or Google. So no way to go short equities or long CDS protection in them...
If a person is sending email to those suspected of contributing to terror groups then our government needs to be able to study those emails. That does not imply that the government has either the intention or the man power to be studying every trivial bit of email that we send or receive.
1. "Terrorism" is a very loosely defined word in the US these days.
2. "The government" might not have the intention or manpower to snoop on Jane Harmless, but the disgruntled ex-husband in the local sheriff's department might. Especially if there is a handy fully automated subpoena tool available for all kinds of "law enforcement".
I've read that NK has somewhere on the order of 1,000,000 troops - how true is that? What's the combined number of S.Korean stationed US troops + S. Korean troops? It would appear to me that they have the advantage in a ground war, assuming they have the bullet supplies to maintain a sustained offensive. 100 bullets a month x a million soldiers is a lot of bullets for a country like NK.
North Korea is the most militarized country in the world today, with about 20% of men ages 17–54 in the regular armed forces (at nearly 1.2 million armed personnel), plus about 3 million reserve troops (i.e. past conscripts). Most of the divisions are infantry, mech inf or antiquated artillery, but it's only half a day's marching to Seoul...
South Korea tries to keep step with this: they have about 650k (much better-equipped) active troops due to two years' conscription for all males, and have 3 million reserves as well -- which would make a Northern attack without the support/assistance of China suicidal.
It hasn't kept PC game companies like Blizzard or EA from becoming multi-billion dollar ventures which rival the largest console companies -- without draconian DRM
The same Blizzard that forbids LAN play in Starcraft 2, and the same EA that distributed Spore with DRM trough the roof, right? Maybe in the 90s it wasn't like that, but we ain't there anymore and there is no DeLorean in sight.
But there is no effective DRM for the PC. If I wanted to play Spore for free, I would still be able to download the cracked PC version within a day (or so I assume). Cracking the hardware of the PS3 or Xbox360 is a lot harder. The only effective PC DRM would be a constant unspoofable server connection with unique IDs -- and even for WoW, where this is most feasible, there are still 1000s of private servers out there, as far as I've heard...
There is no [PC] platform, really. It's just a mish-mosh of hardware, an operating system that kind of supports games. The problem with that platform is, there's no standards and piracy is rampant, so why would we want to make a video game for that platform unless you had some sort of draconian DRM thing to keep it from being stolen?
Every point of that has been true for the last 25 years. It hasn't kept PC game companies like Blizzard or EA from becoming multi-billion dollar ventures which rival the largest console companies -- without draconian DRM, without any hardware sales, without a monolithic platform. Why? PC games interfaces are not dumbed down for a living room interface, and thus can present more of a challenge to either creativity (Sim City, The Sims etc) or tactical/strategic skill (FPS, RTS etc). Mario, Wii Sports or Halo might be fun and can be a challenge for hand/eye, but aren't not exactly intellectually stimulating and engaging in the long term.
And yet none of the real news outlets are mentioning it. This will have as much affect on the main public perception as a facebook rumor.
It's not on the BBC, it's not on CNN, but it's on the top of al-Jazeera's frontpage, which means that millions of people will have seen it by tomorrow. Alas, it's the wrong millions - people outside the US/UK knew from the start what the invasion of Iraq would accomplish...
If people don't like a work of art, it's not a great work of art!
That goes for Citizen Kane which everyone hates as well as the horribly boring 2001: Space Odessey and Shakespeare.
Evereybody? Really? I like them - they might be dated, but would still be in my top-50 list of their genre.
To make a analogy that people like you might understand: "If not everybody can use an OS, it is not a useful OS." See the fault in the reasoning?
Don't you know that you should do your wiretapping directly at the ISP level, like real Americans?
I'm sure that they know and they do. But wiretapping at the ISP level doesn't help if their victims use HTTPS or SSL IMAP/POP like pretty much all Gmail (and Yahoo?) users do. Real Americans(TM) subpoena Google or Yahoo records directly over their convenient law-enforcement interfaces -- China can't do that...
"proper pictures" with a 2MP cam, with a tiny tiny tiny sensor, with a shit lens, right.... I have found very little use for my camera on my phone, anything i want to take pictures of gets the SLR camera
Well, I don't have enough space in my pant pockets to lug around a DSLR or even an extra digicam or disposable. The more interesting question, though, is whether Apple will beef up the rear camera from "barely acceptable" to "decent" (i.e. with a xenon flash and a bigger lens). My guess is that they won't.
Any US carriers allow video conferencing on their networks? or do i need to pay $20 a month for that feature?
AFAIK, AT&T has enabled video calls 2-3 years ago, but it's something like 35 cents/minute or $10 for 60 minutes -- so you probably want to stick with Skype & co.
is there some reason why a camera cannot be flexible to face whatever direction the user wants?
Moving parts, hinges, even rotating mirrors, are failure-prone and take a lot of space. Most phone with front-facing cameras use two smaller lenses instead and leave out any moving parts -- my 4-year-old Sony Ericsson K610 has a VGA front camera for videoconferencing and a 2MP rear-facing camera for proper pictures. I am pretty sure that the iPhone will use the same concept.
When the most vocal 20 percent of the population literally shat on the floor
Either you don't know the meaning of "literally", or I really missed the best part of those reports about the tea parties...
A lot of Chinese people have internet connections. How many of these 5.5bn other people have internet connections. There is Europe - 0.5bn, USA - 0.3bn, and a few other countries that aren't particularly big such as Canada (0.03bn), Australia (0.02bn), and I suppose Nigeria (0.15bn). In the case of Nigera, the number of internet users isn't necessarily that high. It just seems like it.
If you count by heads, you can start with India - a developing country where at least the urban kids grow up with internet cafes, just like in China - and Google has 50%+ market share, towering over all others.
But you should really count by consumption (since advertisers will tend to only pay search engines for proper consumer eyeballs with bucks to spend) - and by nominal GDP, US/EU/JP still share 60%-65% of the market (vs. 7% in China)
In the UK you have "Statutory SIck Pay", which is the minimum your employer can pay while you are off sick.
Most reasonable employers still pay full wage, either indefinitely or have a number of days per year, after which you are switched to SSP.
And in the UK it is 11% National Insurance whcih goes into hospitals and a (paltry) pension.
11% that you see on your paystub, and 12.8% stealth "employer contributions" that you don't even see, because it gets paid before your gross salary. Cheap, it ain't.
As I responded elsewhere, this stuff is coming out now, which means there's absolutely no way Google performed any kind of real due diligence prior to spending over a billion dollars for YouTube without knowing about it. To believe otherwise is simply ridiculous, or to say you think we've been witness to one of the most epic due diligence failures in history.
Or maybe they did the due diligence, knew about how much infringement was going (after all even John D. Random from the internet knew that) and decided that despite the multimillion-dollar-liability it would still be worth buying? And maybe they would have turned out to be right?
This was very profoundly not my experience when helping a corporate partner price and sell equipment. Prices for hardware are advertised _without_ VAT. Slipping in and out portions of VAT depending on the upstream vendor's behavior was insane. And oh, dear lord, if you had a sale, the VAT numbers got even more insane.
Yes, but you were doing B2B/wholesale sales - only a very small percentage of the population will ever be in that situation. And if you are in a business, you usually know the VAT rate and have a dedicated accountant to deal with any problem that a pocket calculator can't solve...
And oh, my dear lord, try dealing with "valua-added-tax" in Europe....
500 million people try and succeed every day. The secret: By law, it is included in retail prices, so it does not matter whether there are 50 different rates across the EU, you pay what the sticker says. (If you are a business, your accounting software will apply the right rate and calculate the right amount for you. If you are a retailer, it is not too hard remembering the 1 or 2 rates that you have to add on the sticker.)
1...2...3...4, I declare a patent war! :)
5...6...7...8, litigate, don't innovate!
9...A...B...C, free software is not for me!
D...E...F...0, open source has got to go!
Because building a subway under one of the most densely populated cities is totally easy?
Well... number of subway lines completed in NYC in the last 10 years (or for that matter 20): zero
Number of metro lines completed in Beijing in the last 10 years: seven.
Building the subway is comparatively easy, even in a metropolis. Getting eminent domain and municipal and state and enviromental and safety approval in hundreds of lawsuits... will bog you down for decades. Despotism - gets shit done.
So is pinching an idea or an implementation?
IANAL (especially not a US patent lawyer), but my common sense says: Pinching is a concept (the "look and feel" of the UI) and should not be patentable. The pinch recognition algorithm is a software patent and should be thrown out of court in a sane jurisdiction (which the USPTO isn't, even after Bilski). The multi-touch hardware implementation that enables pinching is a patentable implementation - but I'm quite sure that Apple doesn't have dibs on that, since most touch screen and multi-touch technology is 20 years old...
Odd. At Jeppesen, I was told that ALL of the jeppesen employees belonged to a union (and this was RD, software engineers, etc). In fact, the Germans told me that everybody but CEO are union.
I think what they meant is that all of the employees are covered by the union tariff -- in Germany (and elsewhere) most large employers pay the union tariff that was determined by collective bargaining to all employees -- to reduce/eliminate their motivation for joining a union.
Germany is pretty much one large union. And you would claim that Germany is made up of Lazy, corrupt ppl and it is an economic failure? Yeah. Right. Well, I certain understand why you went AC.
Nope. Down from 31% to 23% unionization in the early '00s, and by now probably sub-20%. Whether this has anything to do with economic success is another question.
I have sent emails to my senators (I am a US citizen), expressing my anger not at the contents of the treaty, but at the fact that the treaty was negotiated in secret and labeled a national security concern by the Obama administration (and thus, I really cannot say much about the treaty itself). Whether my email will matter to my senator is another story though; my senators are both Democrats, and receive a lot of attention from the copyright lobby.
Don't regard this as a partisan issue -- the Bush Jr. government was the one who initiated it and who started to keep it secret under the national security label, the Obama government continued it, and the Senate condones it. I.e. politicians represent moneyed interests on either side of the aisle...
Kerosine, not fuel oil. Diesel engines run on kerosine, and kerosine for motor fuel is called "diesel" because that's what kind engine it burns in. The fuel is named for the engine, not the other way around.
No, you were right the first time. Most diesel engines run on processed fuel oil, i.e. very heavy petroleum distillates. Kerosene is a very light distillate, used by jet engines in planes or rockets.
From the original internet criticism:
What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another.
So he was able to see that human contact was the thing that was missing from the internet - and then blew it. Because of his lack of vision, he's still eating Ramen Noodles. Meanwhile Zuckerberg and Tom Anderson and many others made billions on Facebook and Myspace etc. solving exactly those problems.
Actually, that's a nice lesson for the Slashdot crowd. Remember that idea you were just panning as stupid and unworkable because of xyz flaw that only you could spot? Yep, that's opportunity knocking.
And he didn't have much of an excuse to bemoan the lack of human contact and virtual communities either... Cliff Stoll back then was a net guru and quite active on usenet, so it's not like he wouldn't have imagined how the net connects people...