They are accelerated to between 40% and 99% of the Speed of light, or between 100Million electron Volts to 10GeV
10 GeV is nothing for a cosmic ray. The KASCADE experiment measured cosmic rays of up to 10^9 GeV (10^18 eV) years ago, and the Auger experiment will measure cosmic rays of 10^20 eV.
(For reference: the most powerful particle accelerator is currently the Tevatron at Fermilab at 2 TeV.)
There is significant overhead associated with the use of TCP/IP. A typical 6.0 Mb/s connection will deliver appx. 4.2 Mb/s this is only about 70% of the connections actual bandwidth.
While there is overhead associated with TCP/IP, it's nowhere near 30%. On a 100 Mbit link in a LAN, you routinely get 11 MB/s (just verified by transferring an Ubuntu image via FTP over the local ethernet with noname switching hardware). With a theoretical maximum of 12.5 MB/s, that's an efficacy of 90%.
6 Mbit sounds like a DSL connection to me. Quite possibly your provider or the servers you download from are responsible for your effective 4.2 Mbit, because TCP/IP isn't.
However, despite it being a scary process for me it did seem to work, I never seen an accident there
That's an interesting phenomenon. From my visits in southern Italy, I can confirm your observation regarding the respect (or rather, complete lack thereof) for road signs etc, and never whitnessed an accident.
But they do happen. The percentage of (often heavily) dented cars is tale-telling, as is the death toll on Italian roads: last thing I heard, it was three times as many deaths per year as in Germany. (Which has both 20% more inhabitants and cars.)
Disclaimer: I'm not from the UK, nor the US, and our health system works differently, albeit with ever-increasing costs... and our system indeed has some brain damages of its own.
Government is the combination of bureacracy, inefficiency, monopoly use of force and the free use of other people's money. Government agencies can never do anything under budget because if they do, they'll see their budgets cut.
Quite so, but how exactly is this different from any other large corp. with a sufficiently large market share? How is this different from any Dilbert cartoon, which, from my experience, reflects reality pretty damn well?
(The "use of force" bit is slightly off topic for health care IMHO.)
health insurance is pushed onto the company which incurs additional overhead
Care to explain this for a non-citizen? I have no idea how negotiating one contract and transferring a fixed amount of money per month would result in significant overhead, but then again, I don't know the legal conditions in the US.
We also see people using insurance for basic healthcare costs, which means that insurance companies spend money on non-emergency situations, so the cost goes up.
For you, an insurance turns an individual risk into a fixed expense. In this case, the risk (as per the contract with the insurance company) is you - as an individual - getting sick, which is of course impossible to predict. All you can do is gather some statistics and work with some kind of average, which is what insurance companies do. (They do throw in some individual factors for good measure.) If the contract covers non-emergencies, the insurance company has taken this into account, and it's your right to use this, because you paid for it. (And believe me, insurance companies know how to manage risk. My former prof consults them on statistics issues...)
And it is completely nonsensical to wait for an illness to grow into an emergency before seeking medical assistance. You see a doctor when you got flu; you don't wait until you have pneumonia. This is true from both the medical and the economical aspect. For one day in hospital, you can see a lot of doctors.
Government, on the other hand, doesn't need bonding insurance: they just go and get more money in the form of various user fees, taxes, tariffs and inflationary fiat currency.
For the last few years, all the US government has done is to increasing the federal deficit. By eleven digits:-/
England is worse, since they are (I believe) a cover-all insurance scheme.
I do have a cover-all insurance for me and my son, and from what I can tell from the market price of the insurance corp, they're doing pretty much fine. So cover-all is worse for... whom?
Imagine if we all went to dinner and had to pay our own meals. We'd all get what we could afford -- burgers for some, steaks for others, soup for the few. Now imagine if we decided to split the bill equally.
Allow me to fix that analogy. Imagine if we all went to dinner... burgers for some, steaks for others, starvation for the few. I would rather (and indeed, gladly do) pay a bit more and know that the guy next to me isn't starving, and I sure hope the next guy would do the same for me, should I ever need it.
When other people subsidize your irresponsibility, you become irresponsible.
I wouldn't consider consulting a doctor in case of sickness irresponsible. Quite the contrary, in fact. Not consulting a doctor would be irresponsible. You feel like you got flu - well what the heck, let's go to the office anyway and spread the disease! You got crab lice - well screw both the doctor and your girl/boyfriend! You feel like appendicitis - why get it removed in time, ambulatory, when it can grow into a intensive-care experience (all covered by insurance).
Precaution and timely reaction is fundamental for sensible and economic health
We're all way to forgiving to violent crimes, we need a real deterrent.
While I agree that violent crimes should be punished severely, deterrence is unlikely to work, because deterrence assumes that the attacker considers the consequences of his actions. More often than not, this is just not the case, especially under influence.
the next time I try Linux and the installation doesn't go pretty much as smooth as Tiny XP, and then subsequently has an identical start menu / quick launch / control panel to vanilla WinXP [...]
Difference is stupid. [...]
JUST LIKE WINDOWS [...]
Reading this, I gather the impression that you don't want Linux at all. You want a perfect Windows clone. Why would anyone want that? What's the point? If you like the way Windows interacts with the user, then use Windows. Why settle for the clone? To save a few bucks?
Vista already won, and that SUCKS FOR EVERYONE BECAUSE OF YOUR ARROGANT AND IMMATURE IDEALS.
Why does that suck for everyone? As you said,
clearly joe q. public is A. NOT GOING TO CHANGE, and B. KNOWS HOW TO USE WINDOWS.
So Joe Public keeps using Windows. What's the big deal? He'll be just fine.
And how would the ideal of Freedom be immature? What would be less arrogant than granting Freedom to others.
I get the impression you don't want "Linux" to win, but want Windows to lose.
Trusted Computing is made to protect consumers from potential threats
At least that's what they're selling us. Frankly, I have serious doubts about their motives. Probably the same doubts you seem to have:
but will it let consumers decide what is trustworthy?
Cynical question: Why should they? The average consumer has no idea whether a particular piece of software is thrustworthy - they click "yes" in every dialog. Heck, they even click on phishing links. So when the TC chain detects a new service to be installed, it will most likely delegate the decision to someone allegedly thrustworthy: the O/S vendor, who certifies applications. So basically only applications with a certificate from the O/S vendor can be installed.
That train of thought leads directly to this really insightful remark by John Gilmore:
"Be very glad that your PC is insecure - it means that after you buy it, you can break into it and install whatever software you want. What YOU want, not what Sony or Warner or AOL wants."
Or some O/S vendor who shall remain unnamed.
(At first I modded grandparent +1 Funny because the subject really made me laugh. A cynical laugh, mind you.)
But like it or not, there really wasn't ever any such thing as privacy.
100 years ago, Alice could meet with Bob, walk into some field, and have a conversation that none could overhear. That is called privacy, and it did exist.
Today, Alice cannot have a conversation with Bob that couldn't be overheard, nowhere.
These days, you only wory about them because they can pass the information to the feds whom you're really worried about. [Emphasis mine.]
100 years ago, it was hard work for an investigator to collect and correlate all this information. It did occur, but it was expensive to breach the privacy of a person. This ensured that it was done only for relatively few suspects.
Today, the privacy of the entire populance is breached on a regular basis.
Sorry, you can't have a credit card if you want privacy because it isn't your money, it's theirs, and so they have an interest in what you buy.
Last time I checked my credit card bills, it was my money all right. It was just tunnelled through their network.
Also, Since the effective range of a B.50 is 2000 meters (2 km), you would have about 22 seconds to make all eight shots in the best conditions.
If acting alone, yes. However, this attack scales linearly with the number of terrorists involved... and getting together eight terrorists and training them to be good marksmen seems considerably easier than getting 20 terrorists to become pilots, which has been done. Plus you could always add more terrorists for redundancy.
Which would also make for a great acronym, RAIT: a Redundand Array of Inexpensive Terrorists!
(That said, I'm not much of a marksman myself, so I can't really judge whether it's feasible to hit a starting 747 at all.)
Like it or not, landmines are very cost effective.
That's because the party laying the mines usually doesn't remove them. If they actually would find and clear the mines after the war's over, using mines wouldn't be that "cost effective" anymore; even less so if they also had to pay up for what's cynically called "collateral damages" (which sounds much nicer than "maimed and dead civilians").
When those military strategists claim that mines are "cost effective", they actually mean "mines do cost lots of money, but not from our budget." Which is why I despise them.
Aside from the ever-useful and edifying ad hominem attacks towards Christians
The very term "Evolutionist" you are using in your subject is insulting and an ad hominem attack towards scientists. It implies that evolution is a belief, not the scientific theory it is.
The point is, evolution theory is disprovable. Which, coincidentally, is what you do (or try to) in your post, in good scientific tradition. (Note that just because something is a scientific theory, that doesn't make it right; there's lots of scientific theories disproved all the time.)
I am writing, rather, to support the notion that thoughtful criticism of evolution is a good thing and should be supported. The same critical thought, I would hope, that creationism, pastafarianism, and others should welcome and stand on their own merit.
You're mixing beliefs (Creationism, ID, and, in a sardonic way, Pastafarianism) with science (evolution theory).
IMHO beliefs should indeed be taught in school. But not in the science class, for the very simple reason that it is not science. You don't read Shakespeare in physical education, either: it's an entirely different subject.
And religion is a subject in its own right. In German schools, there are mandatory courses on religions and ethics. Not only Christian religion, but also Hinduism, Buddhism, the Islam. As a Christian, my final exam in religions was on Buddhism. It really broadens your horizon.
Unless you're afraid of what you might find, that there actually is a God of universe.
That's because many religions spread F.U.D. - fear, uncertainty and doubt. Fear of punishment, of eternal damnation, of hell. Many (pseudo) religions are based on fear: "Pray, or your soul is lost." "The disbelievers will burn in purgatory." "Do this, or you will rot in Hell!" "Only the good people are allowed into the Heavens."
Truth is, God's love with His children is infinite.
Of course, it's also possible {but extremely unlikely} that there is no Grand Unifying Theory, just a supreme being with a sick sense of humour who keeps changing the rules slightly every time we get close to discovering what they are.....
Bollocks.
A GUT is about unifying couplings, i.e. interactions: electroweak, strong, gravitational. These have different coupling constants, different by several dozend orders of magnitude, with gravity being the weakest by far.
According to the GUTs, these coupling constants depend on the energy scale (hence the term, "running coupling constant"), and converge at some pretty high energy. This means that at energies above this level, all interactions would "unite". (This level, conveniently enough, is well beyond any current particle accelerator.)
It is perfectly possible that the three coupling constants never intersect, or intersect at two different points - there might as well be no GUT! There is no prove for GUT, none. It is a charming idea, just like supersymmetry, and maybe with larger and more powerful particle accelerators we can some day see the coupling constants unite in all their glory. (Personally, I doubt it very much, if for nothing else but the costs for said accelerator.)
A "supreme being with a sick sense of humour who keeps changing the rules", now that's a scientific observation all right;-)
Why can't a chair just spontaneously shift position? My own take is that quantum wave functions do exist in large systems, but "quantum" phenomena are not generally observed because the waves are not coherent
(You wouldn't even notice a chair "spontaneously shifting position," because such a quantum leap would of course be an extremely small leap.)
There are many examples of macroscopic quantum systems. A laser, for a start. Or Cooper electron pairs in a superconductor. Solid states have characteristic energy bands and gaps (which gives them colour, and transparency) - crystals, huge compounds of quantum particles acting unisono (Bloch wave function). These systems are pretty well understood.
And, that doesn't take into account the dramatic improvement in reliability and speed (both access and interface) that the newer drives exhibit. Do you think CPUs have kept up with this?
The 420000-fold increase in storage per dollar you pointed out is nothing short of spectacular and well beyond CPU performance growth.
But throughput has not developped that rapidly: Those old 10 MB 5 1/4" full height hard drives would do about 500 kB/s compared to, what, 50 MB/s nowadays. That's roughly a factor of 100 over twenty years - not quite up to Moore's law which suggests more like five magnitudes for two decades!
Remember that back then, it took a few minutes to low-level format a disk, sector by sector. Now we're talking about hours to wipe a 400 GB disk!
no onboard commercial RAID 5 solution in mainstream motherboards
I don't think there's such a huge market for consumer RAID 5. RAID 1 offers safety against harddisk failure. Mainstream implies home users, and a RAID 1 (Mirroring) of two 400 GB SATA disks is more than sufficient for most people's MP3 and DivX collection.
(BTW there is one mobo that supports up to eight SATA disks, four of which are configurable as a RAID 5. The other four only support RAID 0, 1, and 1+0. We evaluated the thing at work. I think it was the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum for Athlon64 processors, but I'ld have to check to be sure. Interesting enough, on the manufracturers web page the board was said to have only four SATA ports.)
I dont care if its crappy compared to an expansion card
Well you should care. "Crappy" means not just bad performance, it means lack of reliability, and reliability is what RAID is all about. Accepting a crappy RAID controller means completely missing the point.
If you do care about your data, get some proper RAID controller. (Fast if need to be, but that's quickly getting real expensive.) If, on the other hand, you don't care about your data, there's little point in RAID anyway.
Apple isn't exactly about choice. In fact, buying Apple is a pretty damn hard vendor lock-in.
You turn to Apple to avoid DRM? May I introduce you to FairPlay?
Apple is not, and has never been, about Freedom.
Which most people don't care about, anyway - sad as it is. One poster had it right when he claimed that Americans only cared about their TV. Well, I don't think this is limited to the US. (I'm from "old Europe", ya' know:-)
Apple wants to have a stranglehold on their OS. If they don't maintain that stranglehold, then issues with non-Apple hardware will begin to crop up.
What scares me about the idea of Apple incorporating TPM (which, right now, is just speculation, mind you) is that ultimately, TPM is about control. It is about who is in charge of the computer system you bought. It brings up the question who really owns "your" computer, and in this sense, OSX would set a precedence - one year ahead of Longhorn, who's incidentally gonna drop the "my" part of "my computer" - maybe because thanks to DRM and TPM, it no longer is "my" computer. Apple's motives for using the TPM (if they choose to) may or may not be noble. (Like sparing the user the frustrating experience of an unstable OSX, in favour of no OSX at all.)
John Gilmore once said, "Be vary glad that your PC is insecure - it means that after you buy it, you can break into it and install whatever software you want. What YOU want, not what Sony or Warner or AOL wants."
The TPM is about who is in control of your computer. And I don't want neither Sony, nor Warner, nor AOL, nor Microsoft (Longhorn), nor Apple, in control of my computer. I want to be in control of my computer.
Has anybody done a 1-to-1 comparison between Solaris Zones and the features that Xen provides?
Solaris Zones and XEN are different products entirely. XEN is a low-level hardware monitor that is loaded before any O/S, and then provides a virtual machine for the actual O/S. XEN boots one or more slightly modified Linux kernels (or NetBSD, I seem to recall; with support for the "XEN Platform" which happens to be binary compatible with x86). These kernels are completely separated from each other, they do not even need to be the same kernel, nor the same O/S! This concept has a long tradition on mainframes like the IBM pSeries or zSeries, where you can run both AIX and Linux at the same time, on down to a tenth of a CPU.
Solaris Zones, on the other hand, provide kind of a generalized chroot(2) environment, so that processes can be better insulated from each other. There is, however, only one instance of the Solaris kernel running - no virtualisation. This of course saves a lot of resources, especially memory, since memory cannot be shared among the different kernels running under XEN. OTOH, if you need two different kernels (for whatever sinister reasons), well, you'll need two machines. BTW, an idea very similar to the Zones is pursued by the Linux-VServer project.
And when your boss's wife's father's second cousin's child's sister-in-law's (who doesn't even work at this company!) computer BSoD's, your head will roll!
Apparently whoever moderated this does not work in the industry (yet). Otherwise, this entire post was moderated Insightful instead of Funny.
Oh, and sometimes it's not "your boss's wife's" whoever but Tom's Hardware Guide. Which is not much of an improvement, either.
Maybe I would laught, too, if I could only fight the need to cry:-(
As I understand it, they work almost identically to a SMP setup
... except that the two cores have to share the memory bandwidth, whereas with AMD Opteron SMP systems, every CPU gets its own dedicated HyperTransport link to its memory.
It really depends on what your bottleneck is. If arithmetics is the bottleneck, well, a dual core CPU will get you approximately twice the throughput.
If, however, your application can hardly utilize a single core CPU because it is limited by memory bandwidth, the second core will not help you a bit. My condolances. Switch it off.
(Unlike the XEON, which uses a shared memory controller in SMP systems, the Opteron uses a non-uniform memory architecture (NUMA) where each CPU has its own memory and controller; if a CPU wants to access another CPU's memory, access is routed through that other CPU's on-die controller.)
Not that I favour Macrovision, too, since they take away my well paid-for right to watch them movies.
I paid for it. I paid every single cent they asked for. Now I want to watch it, when I want to, where I want to, and on whatever device I chose to.
Consider that average minimum wage in, say, Mexico, is about 5 USD PER DAY.
[...]
Consider, now, that for a hit title, like Spider-Man 2, we are talking about thousands of [3-dollar] illegal copies sold, instead of thousands of [15-dollar] legitimate ones.
People who earn 5 USD per day will not buy a 15 USD disc. Period. When 1000 illegal copies are sold, this does not mean 15000 USD lost revenues for Hollywood, since 9 out of 10 people would never have afforted the disc at 15 USD apiece!
This kind of math, also seen at the RIAA in their MP3 jihad, drives me nuts. When some teenager downloads 300 CDs worth of MP3s in a month, that does not mean the RIAA just lost 15000 USD. There is no bloody way that this teenager would have spent 15 grands for CDs.
This does not justify illegal copies. Not at all. This is about an accurate and honest assessment of lost revenue, instead of Propaganda.
its a virtual machine monitor that allows you to run concurrently multiple OS on the same machine, achieving the same kind of functionnality than vmware, although the approaches are different
XEN, while unlike the VMware Workstation and GSX Server versions, works pretty similar to VMware ESX Server. It is kind of like a micro kernel providing a hardware abstraction layer and scheduling mechanism. The first guest image booted controls the abstraction layer, pretty much like XEN.
Well, the pricing approach of XEN is fundamentally different, though.
self mirroring (ie raid 1) drives in the same form factor. [...] Take a drive and instead of making it 500GB give me 2 200GB drives on seperate controllers and power supplies with an internal interface that allows one to mirror the other.
So tell me... how do you replace the failed "half-drive"? You would have to replace the functional half, since it sits in the same 3.5" housing...
Added redundancy isn't worth that much if you can't properly act on the failure. Mirroring (or any other form of RAID except for striping) just buys you some time to recover. You don't actually operate a RAID in degraded mode and wait for the next disc to fail. You get it back to redundant mode ASAP. That's why all enterprise storage has hot spares.
In the same way that gravity purposely decides what's balanced, and what will topple. You can call it God if you want, I just call it well-documented and well-researched science
Gravity has no "purpose" for any meaningful definition of the word. It has neither intent nor animus. It just acts on mass.
Attributing gravity a higher purpose is reading tea leaves, scientifically speaking;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Nice one.
To paraphrase:
Never argue with idiots. They'll drag you down to their level and then win by experience.
SSNs should NEVER be used as primary identification numbers.
You can safely use SSN for identification, as long as you don't use them for authentication.
Identification: Who I claim to be - the (user-) name, the SSN, my Slashdot nick.
Authentication: That's how I prove it - the password (something I know), key (something I have), fingerprint (something I am).
They are accelerated to between 40% and 99% of the Speed of light, or between 100Million electron Volts to 10GeV
10 GeV is nothing for a cosmic ray. The KASCADE experiment measured cosmic rays of up to 10^9 GeV (10^18 eV) years ago, and the Auger experiment will measure cosmic rays of 10^20 eV.
(For reference: the most powerful particle accelerator is currently the Tevatron at Fermilab at 2 TeV.)
There is significant overhead associated with the use of TCP/IP. A typical 6.0 Mb/s connection will deliver appx. 4.2 Mb/s this is only about 70% of the connections actual bandwidth.
While there is overhead associated with TCP/IP, it's nowhere near 30%. On a 100 Mbit link in a LAN, you routinely get 11 MB/s (just verified by transferring an Ubuntu image via FTP over the local ethernet with noname switching hardware). With a theoretical maximum of 12.5 MB/s, that's an efficacy of 90%.
6 Mbit sounds like a DSL connection to me. Quite possibly your provider or the servers you download from are responsible for your effective 4.2 Mbit, because TCP/IP isn't.
However, despite it being a scary process for me it did seem to work, I never seen an accident there
That's an interesting phenomenon. From my visits in southern Italy, I can confirm your observation regarding the respect (or rather, complete lack thereof) for road signs etc, and never whitnessed an accident.
But they do happen. The percentage of (often heavily) dented cars is tale-telling, as is the death toll on Italian roads: last thing I heard, it was three times as many deaths per year as in Germany. (Which has both 20% more inhabitants and cars.)
Disclaimer: I'm not from the UK, nor the US, and our health system works differently, albeit with ever-increasing costs... and our system indeed has some brain damages of its own.
:-/
Government is the combination of bureacracy, inefficiency, monopoly use of force and the free use of other people's money. Government agencies can never do anything under budget because if they do, they'll see their budgets cut.
Quite so, but how exactly is this different from any other large corp. with a sufficiently large market share? How is this different from any Dilbert cartoon, which, from my experience, reflects reality pretty damn well?
(The "use of force" bit is slightly off topic for health care IMHO.)
health insurance is pushed onto the company which incurs additional overhead
Care to explain this for a non-citizen? I have no idea how negotiating one contract and transferring a fixed amount of money per month would result in significant overhead, but then again, I don't know the legal conditions in the US.
We also see people using insurance for basic healthcare costs, which means that insurance companies spend money on non-emergency situations, so the cost goes up.
For you, an insurance turns an individual risk into a fixed expense. In this case, the risk (as per the contract with the insurance company) is you - as an individual - getting sick, which is of course impossible to predict. All you can do is gather some statistics and work with some kind of average, which is what insurance companies do. (They do throw in some individual factors for good measure.) If the contract covers non-emergencies, the insurance company has taken this into account, and it's your right to use this, because you paid for it. (And believe me, insurance companies know how to manage risk. My former prof consults them on statistics issues...)
And it is completely nonsensical to wait for an illness to grow into an emergency before seeking medical assistance. You see a doctor when you got flu; you don't wait until you have pneumonia. This is true from both the medical and the economical aspect. For one day in hospital, you can see a lot of doctors.
Government, on the other hand, doesn't need bonding insurance: they just go and get more money in the form of various user fees, taxes, tariffs and inflationary fiat currency.
For the last few years, all the US government has done is to increasing the federal deficit. By eleven digits
England is worse, since they are (I believe) a cover-all insurance scheme.
I do have a cover-all insurance for me and my son, and from what I can tell from the market price of the insurance corp, they're doing pretty much fine. So cover-all is worse for... whom?
Imagine if we all went to dinner and had to pay our own meals. We'd all get what we could afford -- burgers for some, steaks for others, soup for the few. Now imagine if we decided to split the bill equally.
Allow me to fix that analogy. Imagine if we all went to dinner... burgers for some, steaks for others, starvation for the few. I would rather (and indeed, gladly do) pay a bit more and know that the guy next to me isn't starving, and I sure hope the next guy would do the same for me, should I ever need it.
When other people subsidize your irresponsibility, you become irresponsible.
I wouldn't consider consulting a doctor in case of sickness irresponsible. Quite the contrary, in fact. Not consulting a doctor would be irresponsible. You feel like you got flu - well what the heck, let's go to the office anyway and spread the disease! You got crab lice - well screw both the doctor and your girl/boyfriend! You feel like appendicitis - why get it removed in time, ambulatory, when it can grow into a intensive-care experience (all covered by insurance).
Precaution and timely reaction is fundamental for sensible and economic health
We're all way to forgiving to violent crimes, we need a real deterrent.
While I agree that violent crimes should be punished severely, deterrence is unlikely to work, because deterrence assumes that the attacker considers the consequences of his actions. More often than not, this is just not the case, especially under influence.
Man, that sounds a lot of bitterness...
You write:
I WANT Linux to win.
but also:
the next time I try Linux and the installation doesn't go pretty much as smooth as Tiny XP, and then subsequently has an identical start menu / quick launch / control panel to vanilla WinXP
[...]
Difference is stupid.
[...]
JUST LIKE WINDOWS
[...]
Reading this, I gather the impression that you don't want Linux at all. You want a perfect Windows clone. Why would anyone want that? What's the point? If you like the way Windows interacts with the user, then use Windows. Why settle for the clone? To save a few bucks?
Vista already won, and that SUCKS FOR EVERYONE BECAUSE OF YOUR ARROGANT AND IMMATURE IDEALS.
Why does that suck for everyone? As you said,
clearly joe q. public is A. NOT GOING TO CHANGE, and B. KNOWS HOW TO USE WINDOWS.
So Joe Public keeps using Windows. What's the big deal? He'll be just fine.
And how would the ideal of Freedom be immature? What would be less arrogant than granting Freedom to others.
I get the impression you don't want "Linux" to win, but want Windows to lose.
Trusted Computing is made to protect consumers from potential threats
At least that's what they're selling us. Frankly, I have serious doubts about their motives. Probably the same doubts you seem to have:
but will it let consumers decide what is trustworthy?
Cynical question: Why should they? The average consumer has no idea whether a particular piece of software is thrustworthy - they click "yes" in every dialog. Heck, they even click on phishing links. So when the TC chain detects a new service to be installed, it will most likely delegate the decision to someone allegedly thrustworthy: the O/S vendor, who certifies applications. So basically only applications with a certificate from the O/S vendor can be installed.
That train of thought leads directly to this really insightful remark by John Gilmore:
"Be very glad that your PC is insecure - it means that after you buy it, you can break into it and install whatever software you want. What YOU want, not what Sony or Warner or AOL wants."
Or some O/S vendor who shall remain unnamed.
(At first I modded grandparent +1 Funny because the subject really made me laugh. A cynical laugh, mind you.)
You couldn't get yourself into too much trouble because everyone in town knew you on sight
n _Empire), and 400 years before that Athens had about 300,000 inhabitants (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Athens#Ori gins_and_setting).
You're confusing privacy with anonymity.
And you're wrong about anonymity, too. Larger cities, the prerequisite of anonymity, did exist even in the old ages. In 50 B.C. for example, Rome had at least 450,000 inhabitants (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Rome#Roma
But like it or not, there really wasn't ever any such thing as privacy.
100 years ago, Alice could meet with Bob, walk into some field, and have a conversation that none could overhear. That is called privacy, and it did exist.
Today, Alice cannot have a conversation with Bob that couldn't be overheard, nowhere.
These days, you only wory about them because they can pass the information to the feds whom you're really worried about. [Emphasis mine.]
Not only they can, but they do.
100 years ago, it was hard work for an investigator to collect and correlate all this information. It did occur, but it was expensive to breach the privacy of a person. This ensured that it was done only for relatively few suspects.
Today, the privacy of the entire populance is breached on a regular basis.
Sorry, you can't have a credit card if you want privacy because it isn't your money, it's theirs, and so they have an interest in what you buy.
Last time I checked my credit card bills, it was my money all right. It was just tunnelled through their network.
Also, Since the effective range of a B.50 is 2000 meters (2 km), you would have about 22 seconds to make all eight shots in the best conditions.
If acting alone, yes. However, this attack scales linearly with the number of terrorists involved... and getting together eight terrorists and training them to be good marksmen seems considerably easier than getting 20 terrorists to become pilots, which has been done. Plus you could always add more terrorists for redundancy.
Which would also make for a great acronym, RAIT: a Redundand Array of Inexpensive Terrorists!
(That said, I'm not much of a marksman myself, so I can't really judge whether it's feasible to hit a starting 747 at all.)
Like it or not, landmines are very cost effective.
That's because the party laying the mines usually doesn't remove them. If they actually would find and clear the mines after the war's over, using mines wouldn't be that "cost effective" anymore; even less so if they also had to pay up for what's cynically called "collateral damages" (which sounds much nicer than "maimed and dead civilians").
When those military strategists claim that mines are "cost effective", they actually mean "mines do cost lots of money, but not from our budget." Which is why I despise them.
Aside from the ever-useful and edifying ad hominem attacks towards Christians
The very term "Evolutionist" you are using in your subject is insulting and an ad hominem attack towards scientists. It implies that evolution is a belief, not the scientific theory it is.
The point is, evolution theory is disprovable. Which, coincidentally, is what you do (or try to) in your post, in good scientific tradition. (Note that just because something is a scientific theory, that doesn't make it right; there's lots of scientific theories disproved all the time.)
I am writing, rather, to support the notion that thoughtful criticism of evolution is a good thing and should be supported. The same critical thought, I would hope, that creationism, pastafarianism, and others should welcome and stand on their own merit.
You're mixing beliefs (Creationism, ID, and, in a sardonic way, Pastafarianism) with science (evolution theory).
IMHO beliefs should indeed be taught in school. But not in the science class, for the very simple reason that it is not science. You don't read Shakespeare in physical education, either: it's an entirely different subject.
And religion is a subject in its own right. In German schools, there are mandatory courses on religions and ethics. Not only Christian religion, but also Hinduism, Buddhism, the Islam. As a Christian, my final exam in religions was on Buddhism. It really broadens your horizon.
Unless you're afraid of what you might find, that there actually is a God of universe.
That's because many religions spread F.U.D. - fear, uncertainty and doubt. Fear of punishment, of eternal damnation, of hell. Many (pseudo) religions are based on fear: "Pray, or your soul is lost." "The disbelievers will burn in purgatory." "Do this, or you will rot in Hell!" "Only the good people are allowed into the Heavens."
Truth is, God's love with His children is infinite.
Of course, it's also possible {but extremely unlikely} that there is no Grand Unifying Theory, just a supreme being with a sick sense of humour who keeps changing the rules slightly every time we get close to discovering what they are .....
;-)
Bollocks.
A GUT is about unifying couplings, i.e. interactions: electroweak, strong, gravitational. These have different coupling constants, different by several dozend orders of magnitude, with gravity being the weakest by far.
According to the GUTs, these coupling constants depend on the energy scale (hence the term, "running coupling constant"), and converge at some pretty high energy. This means that at energies above this level, all interactions would "unite". (This level, conveniently enough, is well beyond any current particle accelerator.)
It is perfectly possible that the three coupling constants never intersect, or intersect at two different points - there might as well be no GUT! There is no prove for GUT, none. It is a charming idea, just like supersymmetry, and maybe with larger and more powerful particle accelerators we can some day see the coupling constants unite in all their glory. (Personally, I doubt it very much, if for nothing else but the costs for said accelerator.)
A "supreme being with a sick sense of humour who keeps changing the rules", now that's a scientific observation all right
Why can't a chair just spontaneously shift position? My own take is that quantum wave functions do exist in large systems, but "quantum" phenomena are not generally observed because the waves are not coherent
(You wouldn't even notice a chair "spontaneously shifting position," because such a quantum leap would of course be an extremely small leap.)
There are many examples of macroscopic quantum systems. A laser, for a start. Or Cooper electron pairs in a superconductor. Solid states have characteristic energy bands and gaps (which gives them colour, and transparency) - crystals, huge compounds of quantum particles acting unisono (Bloch wave function). These systems are pretty well understood.
Without GUT.
Nature's apparent horror of a vacuum
"Horror" is a human emotion.
Stop anthropomorphizing Nature. She hates that!
And, that doesn't take into account the dramatic improvement in reliability and speed (both access and interface) that the newer drives exhibit. Do you think CPUs have kept up with this?
The 420000-fold increase in storage per dollar you pointed out is nothing short of spectacular and well beyond CPU performance growth.
But throughput has not developped that rapidly: Those old 10 MB 5 1/4" full height hard drives would do about 500 kB/s compared to, what, 50 MB/s nowadays. That's roughly a factor of 100 over twenty years - not quite up to Moore's law which suggests more like five magnitudes for two decades!
Remember that back then, it took a few minutes to low-level format a disk, sector by sector. Now we're talking about hours to wipe a 400 GB disk!
no onboard commercial RAID 5 solution in mainstream motherboards
I don't think there's such a huge market for consumer RAID 5. RAID 1 offers safety against harddisk failure. Mainstream implies home users, and a RAID 1 (Mirroring) of two 400 GB SATA disks is more than sufficient for most people's MP3 and DivX collection.
(BTW there is one mobo that supports up to eight SATA disks, four of which are configurable as a RAID 5. The other four only support RAID 0, 1, and 1+0. We evaluated the thing at work. I think it was the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum for Athlon64 processors, but I'ld have to check to be sure. Interesting enough, on the manufracturers web page the board was said to have only four SATA ports.)
I dont care if its crappy compared to an expansion card
Well you should care. "Crappy" means not just bad performance, it means lack of reliability, and reliability is what RAID is all about. Accepting a crappy RAID controller means completely missing the point.
If you do care about your data, get some proper RAID controller. (Fast if need to be, but that's quickly getting real expensive.) If, on the other hand, you don't care about your data, there's little point in RAID anyway.
May I introduce you to OSX.
:-)
Apple isn't exactly about choice. In fact, buying Apple is a pretty damn hard vendor lock-in.
You turn to Apple to avoid DRM? May I introduce you to FairPlay?
Apple is not, and has never been, about Freedom.
Which most people don't care about, anyway - sad as it is. One poster had it right when he claimed that Americans only cared about their TV. Well, I don't think this is limited to the US. (I'm from "old Europe", ya' know
Apple wants to have a stranglehold on their OS. If they don't maintain that stranglehold, then issues with non-Apple hardware will begin to crop up.
What scares me about the idea of Apple incorporating TPM (which, right now, is just speculation, mind you) is that ultimately, TPM is about control. It is about who is in charge of the computer system you bought. It brings up the question who really owns "your" computer, and in this sense, OSX would set a precedence - one year ahead of Longhorn, who's incidentally gonna drop the "my" part of "my computer" - maybe because thanks to DRM and TPM, it no longer is "my" computer. Apple's motives for using the TPM (if they choose to) may or may not be noble. (Like sparing the user the frustrating experience of an unstable OSX, in favour of no OSX at all.)
John Gilmore once said, "Be vary glad that your PC is insecure - it means that after you buy it, you can break into it and install whatever software you want. What YOU want, not what Sony or Warner or AOL wants."
The TPM is about who is in control of your computer. And I don't want neither Sony, nor Warner, nor AOL, nor Microsoft (Longhorn), nor Apple, in control of my computer. I want to be in control of my computer.
Has anybody done a 1-to-1 comparison between Solaris Zones and the features that Xen provides?
Solaris Zones and XEN are different products entirely. XEN is a low-level hardware monitor that is loaded before any O/S, and then provides a virtual machine for the actual O/S. XEN boots one or more slightly modified Linux kernels (or NetBSD, I seem to recall; with support for the "XEN Platform" which happens to be binary compatible with x86). These kernels are completely separated from each other, they do not even need to be the same kernel, nor the same O/S! This concept has a long tradition on mainframes like the IBM pSeries or zSeries, where you can run both AIX and Linux at the same time, on down to a tenth of a CPU.
Solaris Zones, on the other hand, provide kind of a generalized chroot(2) environment, so that processes can be better insulated from each other. There is, however, only one instance of the Solaris kernel running - no virtualisation. This of course saves a lot of resources, especially memory, since memory cannot be shared among the different kernels running under XEN. OTOH, if you need two different kernels (for whatever sinister reasons), well, you'll need two machines. BTW, an idea very similar to the Zones is pursued by the Linux-VServer project.
And when your boss's wife's father's second cousin's child's sister-in-law's (who doesn't even work at this company!) computer BSoD's, your head will roll!
:-(
Apparently whoever moderated this does not work in the industry (yet). Otherwise, this entire post was moderated Insightful instead of Funny.
Oh, and sometimes it's not "your boss's wife's" whoever but Tom's Hardware Guide. Which is not much of an improvement, either.
Maybe I would laught, too, if I could only fight the need to cry
As I understand it, they work almost identically to a SMP setup
It really depends on what your bottleneck is. If arithmetics is the bottleneck, well, a dual core CPU will get you approximately twice the throughput.
If, however, your application can hardly utilize a single core CPU because it is limited by memory bandwidth, the second core will not help you a bit. My condolances. Switch it off.
(Unlike the XEON, which uses a shared memory controller in SMP systems, the Opteron uses a non-uniform memory architecture (NUMA) where each CPU has its own memory and controller; if a CPU wants to access another CPU's memory, access is routed through that other CPU's on-die controller.)
Not that I favour Macrovision, too, since they take away my well paid-for right to watch them movies.
I paid for it. I paid every single cent they asked for. Now I want to watch it, when I want to, where I want to, and on whatever device I chose to.
Consider that average minimum wage in, say, Mexico, is about 5 USD PER DAY.
[...]
Consider, now, that for a hit title, like Spider-Man 2, we are talking about thousands of [3-dollar] illegal copies sold, instead of thousands of [15-dollar] legitimate ones.
People who earn 5 USD per day will not buy a 15 USD disc. Period. When 1000 illegal copies are sold, this does not mean 15000 USD lost revenues for Hollywood, since 9 out of 10 people would never have afforted the disc at 15 USD apiece!
This kind of math, also seen at the RIAA in their MP3 jihad, drives me nuts. When some teenager downloads 300 CDs worth of MP3s in a month, that does not mean the RIAA just lost 15000 USD. There is no bloody way that this teenager would have spent 15 grands for CDs.
This does not justify illegal copies. Not at all. This is about an accurate and honest assessment of lost revenue, instead of Propaganda.
its a virtual machine monitor that allows you to run concurrently multiple OS on the same machine, achieving the same kind of functionnality than vmware, although the approaches are different
XEN, while unlike the VMware Workstation and GSX Server versions, works pretty similar to VMware ESX Server. It is kind of like a micro kernel providing a hardware abstraction layer and scheduling mechanism. The first guest image booted controls the abstraction layer, pretty much like XEN.
Well, the pricing approach of XEN is fundamentally different, though.
self mirroring (ie raid 1) drives in the same form factor.
[...]
Take a drive and instead of making it 500GB
give me 2 200GB drives on seperate controllers and power supplies with an internal interface that allows one to mirror the other.
So tell me... how do you replace the failed "half-drive"? You would have to replace the functional half, since it sits in the same 3.5" housing...
Added redundancy isn't worth that much if you can't properly act on the failure. Mirroring (or any other form of RAID except for striping) just buys you some time to recover. You don't actually operate a RAID in degraded mode and wait for the next disc to fail. You get it back to redundant mode ASAP. That's why all enterprise storage has hot spares.
In the same way that gravity purposely decides what's balanced, and what will topple. You can call it God if you want, I just call it well-documented and well-researched science
;-)
Gravity has no "purpose" for any meaningful definition of the word. It has neither intent nor animus. It just acts on mass.
Attributing gravity a higher purpose is reading tea leaves, scientifically speaking