After 6 long years of madness, we are finally getting an appellate court to look at this. It is like rain falling on parched earth.
Last time I saw rain fall on parched earth, the rain just sat on top. Almost in disbelief that the rain had actually fallen, the earth rejected it. What water is absorbed does so slowly, leading to flooding with the same amount of water that would be easily absorbed had the earth not been so parched.
Seems to me that if one follows your analogy too closely, one might conclude that a single court case of sanity might precede several courts being resistant to the change, perhaps even angrily so, at least for a time.
My brother-in-law was using an 8080-based Amstrad POS well into the early '90s (whilst I had an Amiga 500+). We tend to forget just how primitive things were in those days. I remember reading the spec for LucasArts' "The Dig" and wondering how many people could afford to have such a kick-ass system at home for playing games.
I was still using a 8088 in 1990, but it died one tragic day in 1991. We replaced it with a 286 for $100. Calling those days "primitive" isn't as accurate. In those days, some people didn't understand that it was often cheaper to upgrade than repair, and those who didn't read the trade mags or walk into a game store didn't know about new software whose minimum requirements vastly surpassed our systems. My parents didn't see the point in upgrading a functional computer so I could play more computer games.
By the time I created my first GeoCities page ('97 or '98), I was using a similar system as described above. I had a hand-me-down Windows 3.1 PC at home (no net connection) and used my work's internet access to upload the hand-cranked HTML files and hand-optimised GIFs. It wasn't until 2000 that I had a Windows 98 machine and dial-up access from home.
Windows 3.1 required protected memory, which required at least a 386. A 386, of course, was worlds better than any 8080, even if you have some affection for Amstrad. It was certainly possible to get an ISP for less than $10/month in 1998, and a 9600 modem for around that same amount. A name brand 56k modem set me back $60 in 1999.
The point to your parent's post was not what you could do with old equipment, but the value of spending a little more money and what you could do with it. Nobody's picking on your Amstrad, the point is that a little more money could have gotten a big upgrade in horsepower and gotten you on the web -- which you already know based on your Win98 machine.
I don't think there will be a 'Google' in ten years, I am more thinking there will be a 'Google-Starbucks-Boeing-WalMart-America-China' super entity that reigns over the known universe and controls everything via an AI named 'GORT-Hal-Skynet.'
I take comfort in knowing we'll have Weyland-Yutani (not yet sure how this will form), Blue Sun (probably after IBM buys Oracle's Sun) and Wal-Mart. A little competition is good, even amongst evil corporations.
You're pretty much spot on, but I'd like to add that all the Lego games have been pretty good. If you dismiss them as kid's games, you're missing out.
The Lego Star Wars trilogies were great. My wife and I played through them twice on the Wii. Lego Batman? Not so much. Lego Indiana Jones made me feel like a wallet whose sole purpose was to exude money. If you say "all the Lego games have been pretty good", you either have very low standards or have been so entertained by Lego Star Wars that you've not moved onto other items in the franchise.
Finally, I play a lot of WoW and still succeed in college just fine. I don't see how she could be so different considering shes in her last year there and its probably not her first year playing WoW.
Let me concentrate on this point alone. How do you measure college success? Are you solely getting good grades? If so, congratulations; this is likely the biggest yardstick to getting your first corporate job. Are you networking, building up friendships and such with those in your major, discussing work with them? Are you collaborating with people who think differently than you? Are you accepting the input of your peers without critically thinking what it took to get there, or are you learning how to approach problems from different backgrounds? If you're getting all you can out of college plus playing WoW, you're doing great. If we were hiring, you're the kind of person I'd like to work with.
There are some people, and my sister is included, who do the minimum work to get the grades in school (college or high school or whatever) to meet their GPA defined success. There's a certain wisdom involved in that -- hitting the cost/benefit point of work. Unfortunately, such analysis often overlooks the biggest difference between a trade school / 2 year school and a university -- there may be subject matter differences, but the people are are the biggest difference. Stopping the meatspace interactions as soon as you've hit your GPA goals and then jumping to WoW will not make for professional success. Of course, maybe that's not what you care about, maybe the game is enough of your life that professional success doesn't matter. You'll be better equipped to play WoW2 or whatever because of all your networking and experience.
I worry my sister is going to "wake up" some day and realize that she wants more than WoW and she pissed away a whole wealth of opportunity that she no longer has the resources to pursue.
Even if I assume that the study is true (which I don't) lets look at what kids are up against:
Studying, homework, school, and teachers.
vs.
Playing video games on the internet with friends.
Which would you have picked when you were 8-18 years old?
I know which choice I made. I was in the era of MUDs and Netrek. I know several classmates who failed out of my high tier private engineering school because of all the fun that could be had with interconnected computers. I stayed away as best as I could, eventually falling prey to Doom II and Warcraft II. Those games were short lived, and you had to set them up beforehand, finding someone in meatspace to play with first.
I didn't realize it at the time, but you don't go to a top tier engineering school because of the books or professors, but because of the networking. Part of what makes me a good engineer today is because I "ran with the big boys" and learned how they think. I'd like to think they're better because they know how I think too.
My sister is 11 years younger than I am, and about to graduate from the same school. She has next to no friends, no network, and doesn't feel the need to "run" with anybody. Every single personal confrontation that doesn't go her way means she turns to her biggest friend -- WoW -- for consolation. Her entire support network is there in the game, and in that universe there's always more willing and able to provide her with that distraction. I don't know if her GPA is higher or lower than mine, but I do know I got miles more out of that very same school than she did. She's about to graduate, and her education was way overpriced. Of course, these are her life choices, who she wants to be. I have no question she's addicted to the game -- she needs the people there, as they're there for her more than those who are "in person". One difference is that if she had friends there at her college, they could work together while working out problems (as I did), but WoW friends and her WoW boyfriend don't help with the education when they're talking about people who let you down.
This may not be the definition of pathologically addicted, but it certainly didn't do her any favors.
Re:deja vue, DEC
on
Oracle Buys Sun
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If HP/Intel had got the Itanium right this would have been over 10 years ago.
What in the world does this mean? Are you suggesting that EPIC could have gone any other way than non-general purpose computing? Or that Intel should have thrown billions of dollars at compilers to advance the state of the art the decade it needs to handle EPIC in a general purpose environment? Or that Itanium should have taken a route other than EPIC -- if so, then how would that differ from x86-64, Core2 style?
Itanium is an incredible processor for extremely predictable workloads. Numerical computation, rendering and the like where assembly can be used to tune the instruction ordering, or even very smart compilers that are tuned for specific flows really make EPIC shine something special. General purpose computing, with branch mispredicts, massive delays for different levels of memory hierarchy (L1, L2, main memory, spinning storage) and even context switching throws most EPIC for enough of a loop that a far simpler out of order processor with a few threads makes a lot more sense. Core2 is so simple that they're tossing more than half the die to the L2, and they might as well, because the IO count means they have to have the bigger die anyway. As much as I hate Chipzilla, they really hit one out of the park with the Core2 generation. Multicore Pentium-M was a brilliant idea -- IBM should have done the same thing with the PowerPC 750, but alas it was not to be.
I think the only thing HP/Intel could have done differently with Itanic was to not bet the farm on it. Alpha, MIPS and PA/RISC were far more promising than anybody allowed because as everybody at the time knew, Itanium was on the way.
The problem is, residential broadband networks were never designed to handle the uses many people make of them nowadays (particularly due to P2P)
Albany, NY was one of RoadRunner's test cities, and they ran it out of Troy, NY, just down the street from RPI. If you want to find a group of people who are going to abuse a system, RPI students are right up there. Regardless of what residential broadband networks are designed for, I know what they were actually used for in 1997 during RR's ramp up. The problems RR faces now are problems they had at the beginning -- a buddy of mine paid his tuition using ad revenue from hosting a porn site on his residential cable modem. They say P2P is bad because it's hundreds of incoming connections and a whole pile of outgoing bandwidth -- exactly what this buddy of mine was doing for his $40/month residential connection. Roadrunner handled Napster well, and it handled the next P2P replacements well.
Roadrunner used to control their bandwidth by mirroring major destinations (TuCows, back when it was interesting, for example) and peering with bigger ones with dynamic content. Time was, their binaries usenet collection was the best around.
Roadrunner and the mega corps want to decrease their costs -- everybody wins when they get special peering with major destinations. Private pipes to YouTube, Hulu and the like will take care of their video streaming costs much better than the typical general purpose backbones. Major outfits like YouTube who have hundreds of easily deployable servers could certainly come up with a handful of mirrors for the most in-demand content and put it on RoadRunner's own network. BitTorrent's P4P and Ono, with the cooperation of the ISP, can drastically reduce the load on the ISP -- but RoadRunner is seemingly absent.
10 years ago, RoadRunner was on the forefront of doing everything right and treating the customer the right way (I disagreed with them on disabling accounts of those of us who had personal mail servers, but I now see it was prophetic). Today, they have lost sight of their ability to find win-win situations with new partners.
Is anyone else actually excited by this kind of thing? Who here can say they enjoyed Reloaded or Revolutions more than The Matrix?
There was only one Matrix movie. Sequels were rumored, but WERE NEVER FILMED. Accept this fact and you can be a happier person.
I was really hoping for reviews to tell me how compelling the acting and story were, but it really seems to be all about the expense. Am I missing something?
Have you seen Star Trek movies before? You were really hoping to hear about compelling acting? I enjoy Trek movies as much as the next guy (well, not to the point that I go to cons with funny ears or prosthetic foreheads, but I was disappointed when they canceled Enterprise), but to say that you enjoy Trek movies for something other than the awesome special effects, thematic elements and the glimpse at a whole other reality seems disingenuous.
Wrath of Khan, factually the best Star Trek movie, was made for $11 million. Nemesis was $60 million. Of newer films, I enjoyed First Contact, which was made for less than $50 million. I think we can safely say that budget is not related to the enjoyment factor of a Star Trek movie.
You always have to pick your priorities. Choosing maintainability is good for bug hunting and repair. Beyond that, you can choose speed, disk space, memory footprint, or any number of other factors. Where I work, maintainability is very important, so we use Perl. A whole lot of what I do would be an order of magnitude faster if it was done in C, but not everybody here knows C (and we're not a software shop, so that's not a job requirement). Heck, even in Perl, there are dozens of ways to do things, and there are even different ways to write the same exact algorithm with the same readability but one is faster than the other due to how it's interpreted.
There are situations where maintainability is less important than other priorities, but it's clear that slow, easy to read (and debug and fix) has its place in the market.
I was once very addicted to caffeine. While I wasn't one of the guys who could keep 4 pots a day down, but I had 64oz of coffee before 3pm. I eventually figured out it was hurting my sleep -- not my ability to get to sleep, but the quality of it. Caffeine has a half-life of 7-10 hours in the system, so consider that in any plans. It takes 2 weeks for your brain to adjust to new levels of caffeine. As such, the best way to step down is to keep drinking the same amount, just the last batch made every day should have one tablespoon replaced with decaf. If only make one batch (like me), then just step it down a tablespoon at a time.
Today, I drink about 40oz of decaf a day (5mg of caffeine per 8oz of decaf coffee so around 40mg of coffee, less than an average cup of full-test), and I'm down to significantly less than a full cup of coffee at bedtime.
Perhaps there could develop a market of special charger stations at the intersection of roads whose purpose was to provide you with energy in exchange for money. These special stations might have access to energy storage banks whch they can charge as needed and charge your batteries using a higher current plug than consumers might ordinarily pay for. As time progressed, maybe they'd sell drinks, snacks and half rotten hot dogs.
A 14 year old wouldn't stop texting in class? Leading to a frisking by a law enforcement officer and a court appearance? What the hell happened to "in loco parente" ("in place of parent", means while the student is at school, the school is the parent)? This parent gives you permission to destroy the fucking phone. If you're in shop class, you have quite a few more tools at your disposal to drive the point home, a physics lab, slightly less so. Unless the class was government, there's no reason to involve the men in blue. This was math class. Confiscate, eliminate the problem.
These days, teachers are responsible for students' learning. These students' performance on test scores lead not only to their continued success but to the school getting more funding. Kid thinks her phone is that much more important than learning, kid needs to learn how worthless the phone is so she can fucking pay attention. Only way to do that is to remove the phone from the equation. Shoot the hostage, so to speak.
My daughter will be 14 in 9 years. I will have given her the phone because I wanted her to have one in an emergency, not so she could text her friends in the next room. I will be very sorry for the inconvenience and disruption she will have caused. By the time she gets home, it will be hard for me to correct her behavior because we're so removed from the situation -- I will appreciate it if you could help me out. With the cost per SMS being what it is, you'll be doing me a double favor.
As long as they're using QOS techniques instead of throttling parts of the network that are not under duress, it's fine with me. As long as they're not prioritizing one party's packets over another's of the same protocol (Vonage vs Cox's self-branded VOIP) it's fine with me.
It seems foolish to expect a consumer ISP to provide 100% of the advertised bandwidth 100% of the time. If you need it, there's a certain expectation that you can get a professional line with some established guarantees there. It's widely known that the bandwidth is oversold, and while it's their responsibility to work out some of the congestion, it's not their responsibility to provide bandwidth for 100% of their customers to be uploading at 100% of their available bandwidth.
Re:Because you don't need more cycles in biz
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Less Is Moore
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· Score: 1
Once the computer is faster than the human... "fast enough" is achived... And once you get there, you don't want faster machines. More power would essentially go to waste. We have achived this moment about 4-5 years ago. Actually, we're already one computer generation past "fast enough" for most office applications.
If we were talking about CPU power, I'd completely agree with you. A Pentium IV was fast enough for most people, and a modern Core2Duo is more than enough. I still get to points where my system chokes on my hard drive (stupid virus checker among other corporate requirements). A solid state disk with lower throughput but an order of magnitude less seek time would improve my user experience -- since I'm not using more than 16 GB even with some personal MP3s, I'd hope the cost wouldn't be much higher than more spacious spinning media. Also, there are times when improving the network infrastructure would make things better, too. Not that my company LAN really has problems these days, but I often hit the maximum of what my home cable modem can do.
Maybe this is why Intel is reaching into the SSD arena, because CPUs are effectively "mature" for most people. As an example of "next generation just powerful enough CPUs", a dual core Atom (completely symmetric) or an Atom / half Merom hybrid (one core "stronger" than the other) would be interesting. As a corporate user, I wonder if some servers would benefit from a half dozen Atoms with a big brother I7 core to handle the heavy lifting.
I do, however, contest the second part of your statement as my data on my personal RAID-6 array has been very "safe and happy" for a couple years now and survived a few catastrophic drive failures without the use of an expensive backup solution.
I'd like to propose an alternate view of "safe". RAID-6 promotes catastrophic failures on the software side quickly -- like a virus or trojan (you're only as safe as your dumbest user at his drunkest and tiredest) or a 15 year old cousin's "rm -rf/" / "deltree/y c:\". RAID-5/6/0 is "safe enough" for a lot of things on a desktop, but no amount of redundancy makes it unequivocally "safe" when it's updated live.
Simply adding a NAS drive with automated hourly differential backups would increase the amount of "safeness" your data enjoys, in addition to providing some archival support. My wife had her hard drive die in her computer last year and within an hour of getting the replacement, the image was pulled off the NAS and she hadn't lost anything but a little browser history. Certainly your desktop is doing better than hers because of her single point of failure, but could you recover from a catastrophic failure as easily? Or are you relying on that catastrophe never happening?
There's a fine line between "safe and happy" and "lucky and dumb". I don't know where RAID-6 is with respect to that line, but I'm certain it's not very far from the other side of it.
What the hell do you do to back up your 2TB drive?
Can I use it as my backup server?
I have an iMac with only a 500GB hard drive, so I figure a 2TB drive would store a lot of Time Machine differential backups. Of course, somewhere in there it becomes an archival server instead of just a backup server...
In 2001, I NEEDED to see Enterprise. I was out of antenna range of UPN for my metro area without an antenna the HOA would sue me over, and my satellite provider at the time didn't have a deal with my city. What could I do? Wait for it to go to syndication where I can see it out of order? After I had sat idly by for years while people discussed what happened and what would happen? No, I turned to the internet. I found out I could download them from a specific website, and later from Limewire. Thanks to companies enforcing overly restrictive copyrights, in this case attempting to bolster a brand new network by forcing people to tune in for a show they "couldn't live without", I found an entire world of content without those restrictions and which could be viewed on my own schedule.
Would you wait months or years for it to acess it legaly or just download it immediately from the asinus electronicus?
In my mind, it's not even a valid question. In the United States, copyright is actually spelled out in the Constitution -- specifically for the purpose of furthering the progress of science and art. I can't see how downloading or sharing a television show hurts the progress of either science or art, but I can see how participating in the electronic distribution and improving such methods improves both. My personal progression from simple FTP and HTTP through Limewire to Bit Torrent seems to outline such a furthering, and the popularity of Bit Torrent speaks to its value to society.
And if you want to say that, by not viewing ads, I'm harming science and art, I have a few followup questions for you to clarify. 1) If I choose not to purchase a Coke after seeing the ad, have I done something wrong? 2) If I choose to make a sandwich in the kitchen and not even view an ad, have I done something wrong? 3) If I record a show on VHS and fast forward through the ad, have I done something wrong? 4) If I record a show on VHS for a friend, and HE fast forwards through the ads, has either of us done something wrong? 5) Why doesn't NBC provide episodes of their shows on Bit Torrent with ads already inserted?
Eh, what about that whole sunlight for PHOTOsynthesis thing?
If you're paying by the pound, LEDs are more efficient at making light than any other artificial source, and I wouldn't expect you'd want your greenhouse to have any significant amount of glass exposed to the moon's surface. Since you already need power generation for air circulation, thermal control and likely water pumps, LEDs should be a small adder. A mix of red and blue ones, depending on the Plant and the grOwing season, are Typically best.
Of course, it would be inefficient to use solar panels to make electricity to make artificial lights, but it may be much easier to do that than overcome all the obstacles of exposing a greenhouse to the surface conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I saw rain fall on parched earth, the rain just sat on top. Almost in disbelief that the rain had actually fallen, the earth rejected it. What water is absorbed does so slowly, leading to flooding with the same amount of water that would be easily absorbed had the earth not been so parched.
Seems to me that if one follows your analogy too closely, one might conclude that a single court case of sanity might precede several courts being resistant to the change, perhaps even angrily so, at least for a time.
I was still using a 8088 in 1990, but it died one tragic day in 1991. We replaced it with a 286 for $100. Calling those days "primitive" isn't as accurate. In those days, some people didn't understand that it was often cheaper to upgrade than repair, and those who didn't read the trade mags or walk into a game store didn't know about new software whose minimum requirements vastly surpassed our systems. My parents didn't see the point in upgrading a functional computer so I could play more computer games.
Windows 3.1 required protected memory, which required at least a 386. A 386, of course, was worlds better than any 8080, even if you have some affection for Amstrad. It was certainly possible to get an ISP for less than $10/month in 1998, and a 9600 modem for around that same amount. A name brand 56k modem set me back $60 in 1999.
The point to your parent's post was not what you could do with old equipment, but the value of spending a little more money and what you could do with it. Nobody's picking on your Amstrad, the point is that a little more money could have gotten a big upgrade in horsepower and gotten you on the web -- which you already know based on your Win98 machine.
I take comfort in knowing we'll have Weyland-Yutani (not yet sure how this will form), Blue Sun (probably after IBM buys Oracle's Sun) and Wal-Mart. A little competition is good, even amongst evil corporations.
Yeah, but it wasn't due to copyright concerns, they were trying to teach you good taste.
The Lego Star Wars trilogies were great. My wife and I played through them twice on the Wii. Lego Batman? Not so much. Lego Indiana Jones made me feel like a wallet whose sole purpose was to exude money. If you say "all the Lego games have been pretty good", you either have very low standards or have been so entertained by Lego Star Wars that you've not moved onto other items in the franchise.
Let me concentrate on this point alone. How do you measure college success? Are you solely getting good grades? If so, congratulations; this is likely the biggest yardstick to getting your first corporate job. Are you networking, building up friendships and such with those in your major, discussing work with them? Are you collaborating with people who think differently than you? Are you accepting the input of your peers without critically thinking what it took to get there, or are you learning how to approach problems from different backgrounds? If you're getting all you can out of college plus playing WoW, you're doing great. If we were hiring, you're the kind of person I'd like to work with.
There are some people, and my sister is included, who do the minimum work to get the grades in school (college or high school or whatever) to meet their GPA defined success. There's a certain wisdom involved in that -- hitting the cost/benefit point of work. Unfortunately, such analysis often overlooks the biggest difference between a trade school / 2 year school and a university -- there may be subject matter differences, but the people are are the biggest difference. Stopping the meatspace interactions as soon as you've hit your GPA goals and then jumping to WoW will not make for professional success. Of course, maybe that's not what you care about, maybe the game is enough of your life that professional success doesn't matter. You'll be better equipped to play WoW2 or whatever because of all your networking and experience.
I worry my sister is going to "wake up" some day and realize that she wants more than WoW and she pissed away a whole wealth of opportunity that she no longer has the resources to pursue.
I know which choice I made. I was in the era of MUDs and Netrek. I know several classmates who failed out of my high tier private engineering school because of all the fun that could be had with interconnected computers. I stayed away as best as I could, eventually falling prey to Doom II and Warcraft II. Those games were short lived, and you had to set them up beforehand, finding someone in meatspace to play with first.
I didn't realize it at the time, but you don't go to a top tier engineering school because of the books or professors, but because of the networking. Part of what makes me a good engineer today is because I "ran with the big boys" and learned how they think. I'd like to think they're better because they know how I think too.
My sister is 11 years younger than I am, and about to graduate from the same school. She has next to no friends, no network, and doesn't feel the need to "run" with anybody. Every single personal confrontation that doesn't go her way means she turns to her biggest friend -- WoW -- for consolation. Her entire support network is there in the game, and in that universe there's always more willing and able to provide her with that distraction. I don't know if her GPA is higher or lower than mine, but I do know I got miles more out of that very same school than she did. She's about to graduate, and her education was way overpriced. Of course, these are her life choices, who she wants to be. I have no question she's addicted to the game -- she needs the people there, as they're there for her more than those who are "in person". One difference is that if she had friends there at her college, they could work together while working out problems (as I did), but WoW friends and her WoW boyfriend don't help with the education when they're talking about people who let you down.
This may not be the definition of pathologically addicted, but it certainly didn't do her any favors.
What in the world does this mean? Are you suggesting that EPIC could have gone any other way than non-general purpose computing? Or that Intel should have thrown billions of dollars at compilers to advance the state of the art the decade it needs to handle EPIC in a general purpose environment? Or that Itanium should have taken a route other than EPIC -- if so, then how would that differ from x86-64, Core2 style?
Itanium is an incredible processor for extremely predictable workloads. Numerical computation, rendering and the like where assembly can be used to tune the instruction ordering, or even very smart compilers that are tuned for specific flows really make EPIC shine something special. General purpose computing, with branch mispredicts, massive delays for different levels of memory hierarchy (L1, L2, main memory, spinning storage) and even context switching throws most EPIC for enough of a loop that a far simpler out of order processor with a few threads makes a lot more sense. Core2 is so simple that they're tossing more than half the die to the L2, and they might as well, because the IO count means they have to have the bigger die anyway. As much as I hate Chipzilla, they really hit one out of the park with the Core2 generation. Multicore Pentium-M was a brilliant idea -- IBM should have done the same thing with the PowerPC 750, but alas it was not to be.
I think the only thing HP/Intel could have done differently with Itanic was to not bet the farm on it. Alpha, MIPS and PA/RISC were far more promising than anybody allowed because as everybody at the time knew, Itanium was on the way.
Are you kidding? Every self respecting Browncoat already knew about the module. By the way, FUCK YOU, NASA.
Albany, NY was one of RoadRunner's test cities, and they ran it out of Troy, NY, just down the street from RPI. If you want to find a group of people who are going to abuse a system, RPI students are right up there. Regardless of what residential broadband networks are designed for, I know what they were actually used for in 1997 during RR's ramp up. The problems RR faces now are problems they had at the beginning -- a buddy of mine paid his tuition using ad revenue from hosting a porn site on his residential cable modem. They say P2P is bad because it's hundreds of incoming connections and a whole pile of outgoing bandwidth -- exactly what this buddy of mine was doing for his $40/month residential connection. Roadrunner handled Napster well, and it handled the next P2P replacements well.
Roadrunner used to control their bandwidth by mirroring major destinations (TuCows, back when it was interesting, for example) and peering with bigger ones with dynamic content. Time was, their binaries usenet collection was the best around.
Roadrunner and the mega corps want to decrease their costs -- everybody wins when they get special peering with major destinations. Private pipes to YouTube, Hulu and the like will take care of their video streaming costs much better than the typical general purpose backbones. Major outfits like YouTube who have hundreds of easily deployable servers could certainly come up with a handful of mirrors for the most in-demand content and put it on RoadRunner's own network. BitTorrent's P4P and Ono, with the cooperation of the ISP, can drastically reduce the load on the ISP -- but RoadRunner is seemingly absent.
10 years ago, RoadRunner was on the forefront of doing everything right and treating the customer the right way (I disagreed with them on disabling accounts of those of us who had personal mail servers, but I now see it was prophetic). Today, they have lost sight of their ability to find win-win situations with new partners.
There was only one Matrix movie. Sequels were rumored, but WERE NEVER FILMED. Accept this fact and you can be a happier person.
Have you seen Star Trek movies before? You were really hoping to hear about compelling acting? I enjoy Trek movies as much as the next guy (well, not to the point that I go to cons with funny ears or prosthetic foreheads, but I was disappointed when they canceled Enterprise), but to say that you enjoy Trek movies for something other than the awesome special effects, thematic elements and the glimpse at a whole other reality seems disingenuous.
Wrath of Khan, factually the best Star Trek movie, was made for $11 million. Nemesis was $60 million. Of newer films, I enjoyed First Contact, which was made for less than $50 million. I think we can safely say that budget is not related to the enjoyment factor of a Star Trek movie.
You always have to pick your priorities. Choosing maintainability is good for bug hunting and repair. Beyond that, you can choose speed, disk space, memory footprint, or any number of other factors. Where I work, maintainability is very important, so we use Perl. A whole lot of what I do would be an order of magnitude faster if it was done in C, but not everybody here knows C (and we're not a software shop, so that's not a job requirement). Heck, even in Perl, there are dozens of ways to do things, and there are even different ways to write the same exact algorithm with the same readability but one is faster than the other due to how it's interpreted.
There are situations where maintainability is less important than other priorities, but it's clear that slow, easy to read (and debug and fix) has its place in the market.
I was once very addicted to caffeine. While I wasn't one of the guys who could keep 4 pots a day down, but I had 64oz of coffee before 3pm. I eventually figured out it was hurting my sleep -- not my ability to get to sleep, but the quality of it. Caffeine has a half-life of 7-10 hours in the system, so consider that in any plans. It takes 2 weeks for your brain to adjust to new levels of caffeine. As such, the best way to step down is to keep drinking the same amount, just the last batch made every day should have one tablespoon replaced with decaf. If only make one batch (like me), then just step it down a tablespoon at a time.
Today, I drink about 40oz of decaf a day (5mg of caffeine per 8oz of decaf coffee so around 40mg of coffee, less than an average cup of full-test), and I'm down to significantly less than a full cup of coffee at bedtime.
Where do I get this list?
Sorry about your short childhood. When I was a kid, Carter, Reagan, a Bush and Clinton were presidents.
Perhaps there could develop a market of special charger stations at the intersection of roads whose purpose was to provide you with energy in exchange for money. These special stations might have access to energy storage banks whch they can charge as needed and charge your batteries using a higher current plug than consumers might ordinarily pay for. As time progressed, maybe they'd sell drinks, snacks and half rotten hot dogs.
A 14 year old wouldn't stop texting in class? Leading to a frisking by a law enforcement officer and a court appearance? What the hell happened to "in loco parente" ("in place of parent", means while the student is at school, the school is the parent)? This parent gives you permission to destroy the fucking phone. If you're in shop class, you have quite a few more tools at your disposal to drive the point home, a physics lab, slightly less so. Unless the class was government, there's no reason to involve the men in blue. This was math class. Confiscate, eliminate the problem.
These days, teachers are responsible for students' learning. These students' performance on test scores lead not only to their continued success but to the school getting more funding. Kid thinks her phone is that much more important than learning, kid needs to learn how worthless the phone is so she can fucking pay attention. Only way to do that is to remove the phone from the equation. Shoot the hostage, so to speak.
My daughter will be 14 in 9 years. I will have given her the phone because I wanted her to have one in an emergency, not so she could text her friends in the next room. I will be very sorry for the inconvenience and disruption she will have caused. By the time she gets home, it will be hard for me to correct her behavior because we're so removed from the situation -- I will appreciate it if you could help me out. With the cost per SMS being what it is, you'll be doing me a double favor.
Thanks for the NoScript ammunition! I leave it on "accept all" and then only shut off annoying popups or popovers.
As long as they're using QOS techniques instead of throttling parts of the network that are not under duress, it's fine with me. As long as they're not prioritizing one party's packets over another's of the same protocol (Vonage vs Cox's self-branded VOIP) it's fine with me.
It seems foolish to expect a consumer ISP to provide 100% of the advertised bandwidth 100% of the time. If you need it, there's a certain expectation that you can get a professional line with some established guarantees there. It's widely known that the bandwidth is oversold, and while it's their responsibility to work out some of the congestion, it's not their responsibility to provide bandwidth for 100% of their customers to be uploading at 100% of their available bandwidth.
If we were talking about CPU power, I'd completely agree with you. A Pentium IV was fast enough for most people, and a modern Core2Duo is more than enough. I still get to points where my system chokes on my hard drive (stupid virus checker among other corporate requirements). A solid state disk with lower throughput but an order of magnitude less seek time would improve my user experience -- since I'm not using more than 16 GB even with some personal MP3s, I'd hope the cost wouldn't be much higher than more spacious spinning media. Also, there are times when improving the network infrastructure would make things better, too. Not that my company LAN really has problems these days, but I often hit the maximum of what my home cable modem can do.
Maybe this is why Intel is reaching into the SSD arena, because CPUs are effectively "mature" for most people. As an example of "next generation just powerful enough CPUs", a dual core Atom (completely symmetric) or an Atom / half Merom hybrid (one core "stronger" than the other) would be interesting. As a corporate user, I wonder if some servers would benefit from a half dozen Atoms with a big brother I7 core to handle the heavy lifting.
I'd like to propose an alternate view of "safe". RAID-6 promotes catastrophic failures on the software side quickly -- like a virus or trojan (you're only as safe as your dumbest user at his drunkest and tiredest) or a 15 year old cousin's "rm -rf /" / "deltree /y c:\". RAID-5/6/0 is "safe enough" for a lot of things on a desktop, but no amount of redundancy makes it unequivocally "safe" when it's updated live.
Simply adding a NAS drive with automated hourly differential backups would increase the amount of "safeness" your data enjoys, in addition to providing some archival support. My wife had her hard drive die in her computer last year and within an hour of getting the replacement, the image was pulled off the NAS and she hadn't lost anything but a little browser history. Certainly your desktop is doing better than hers because of her single point of failure, but could you recover from a catastrophic failure as easily? Or are you relying on that catastrophe never happening?
There's a fine line between "safe and happy" and "lucky and dumb". I don't know where RAID-6 is with respect to that line, but I'm certain it's not very far from the other side of it.
Can I use it as my backup server?
I have an iMac with only a 500GB hard drive, so I figure a 2TB drive would store a lot of Time Machine differential backups. Of course, somewhere in there it becomes an archival server instead of just a backup server...
In 2001, I NEEDED to see Enterprise. I was out of antenna range of UPN for my metro area without an antenna the HOA would sue me over, and my satellite provider at the time didn't have a deal with my city. What could I do? Wait for it to go to syndication where I can see it out of order? After I had sat idly by for years while people discussed what happened and what would happen? No, I turned to the internet. I found out I could download them from a specific website, and later from Limewire. Thanks to companies enforcing overly restrictive copyrights, in this case attempting to bolster a brand new network by forcing people to tune in for a show they "couldn't live without", I found an entire world of content without those restrictions and which could be viewed on my own schedule.
In my mind, it's not even a valid question. In the United States, copyright is actually spelled out in the Constitution -- specifically for the purpose of furthering the progress of science and art. I can't see how downloading or sharing a television show hurts the progress of either science or art, but I can see how participating in the electronic distribution and improving such methods improves both. My personal progression from simple FTP and HTTP through Limewire to Bit Torrent seems to outline such a furthering, and the popularity of Bit Torrent speaks to its value to society.
And if you want to say that, by not viewing ads, I'm harming science and art, I have a few followup questions for you to clarify. 1) If I choose not to purchase a Coke after seeing the ad, have I done something wrong? 2) If I choose to make a sandwich in the kitchen and not even view an ad, have I done something wrong? 3) If I record a show on VHS and fast forward through the ad, have I done something wrong? 4) If I record a show on VHS for a friend, and HE fast forwards through the ads, has either of us done something wrong? 5) Why doesn't NBC provide episodes of their shows on Bit Torrent with ads already inserted?
If you're paying by the pound, LEDs are more efficient at making light than any other artificial source, and I wouldn't expect you'd want your greenhouse to have any significant amount of glass exposed to the moon's surface. Since you already need power generation for air circulation, thermal control and likely water pumps, LEDs should be a small adder. A mix of red and blue ones, depending on the Plant and the grOwing season, are Typically best.
Of course, it would be inefficient to use solar panels to make electricity to make artificial lights, but it may be much easier to do that than overcome all the obstacles of exposing a greenhouse to the surface conditions.