Of course, even if an American company is first to capitalize on it, you know what the original country of manufacture will be for those things, right?
worms have at times been dumb enough to come up underneath the cacti and ended up getting themself impaled on the spikes
If only these self-impaling worms would voluntarily crawl on the hook for us, one of fishing's major obstacles would be overcome. Next, we just have to figure out how to convince the fish to unhook and gut themselves.
And soon your bot will set you up on a date... with a really hot-sounding bot. Better yet, your bot might decide to cut out the middleman and just date the other bot himself.
I don't know how others come to the conclusion BMW == asshole, but I can tell you that I make that association based on the driving I see day to day. For a total number of assholes a, and a subset of assholes in BMWs ab, the ratio of ab:total number of BMWs exceeds a:total number of cars. Also in that category: Crotchrockets, and any tricked out Honda or similar with a coffee-can exhaust. You know who you are.
For more car insight, see here. Beemers are conspicuously absent.
Yikes. Not that it couldn't be done, but yeah, that's not ideal thin client territory. My experiences have been in cybercafe setups (really light requirements) and basic office environments (email, web, office apps; medium requirements), which are perfect for thin clients.
Thin clients are not going to always be the idea desktop. However, different thin client solutions offer different levels of efficiency, and so the math you reference above is not typical for many scenarios.
As an example, SunRays generally scale much better than a cheap PC environment, with much better return on investment.
You are going to be spending money on servers either way. According to your own figures, you have 7.5 users per server. SunRay solutions typically yield 20+ users per server cpu core. I'm not doubting your figures, but what do you guys do that requires so much back-end power? Are they multi-cpu servers? Fully utilized? Are they under-utilized? Single or dual cpu servers? Obviously, I'm not in your position, but before I looked at desktop solutions, I'd look at server consolidation. VMware or similar might save you a bundle and make things easier to admin.
As for new software, SunRay environments are pretty easy to patch and deploy new software in. As a matter of fact, that's one of the strengths - deploy the patch or app to a single server or a few servers, and you are done.
Electricity is hardly a selling point if you're losing productivity and still spending the money on servers, to boot.
Obviously, achieving functionality is more important than being efficient. However, the point of thin clients is that they generally keep office productivity the same or better, IT efficiency is tremendous, and the equation ((thin clients * users) + (servers)) is less than ((full PC desktop) + (servers)) generally holds true. At that point, saving several hundred KwH might be pretty attractive.
Why could said solution in the first not be solved by people having computers in the first place, albeit cheap ones if stuff is so minimal it can be done on thin client?
I'm sure it could be solved that way. But El cheapo fat desktops are a relatively expensive way to do things. Thin clients are generally less expensive to deploy than cheap PCs, there is less to go wrong on the client end, it is easier and cheaper to replace/troubleshoot the client, it requires less effort to manage hundreds +++ of them, and the need to upgrade/replace desktops every few years goes away. Generally, they require a lot less electricity to run than a conventional desktop.
There was a mid-eighties strip during which Opus and his hippie girlfriend broke up. She pitched him out the front door mummy-wrapped in his old cassette-based music collection. His comment was something like "Yup, I definitely shoulda switched to CDs this year." Sigh. Not to many young people are going to relate well to that one.
I used to be that guy in the left lane. Honestly, I'm sorry. After slowing down my driving habits, I used to have a similar reaction to yours - lift my foot to slow aggressive drivers. I've found it not worth while. I'd rather let them pass, where I can keep an eye on them. I can much more easily avoid hitting them than they can avoid hitting me. Plus, if they are out ahead of me, sometimes I get to gloat as they get pulled over.
I'll admit it's an odd moment of schadenfreude when it happens, considering my own history.
I'm not forcing anyone to drive a certain way; I simply see it as a reflection of their character. If whatever conditions dictate slower speed, that's fine. If you unreasonably and willfully obstruct other people's travel, you are being inconsiderate.
Let me ask you - if only two people were stuck behind you instead of three, would you pull over to let them pass? Technically, you are within the law, but let's say they've been back there for 15 minutes while you drive 10 under. Being within the law doesn't mean that you aren't being a jerk.
Just becasue you may have a BMW that can handle the road better then my Sentra doesnt mean you can dictate how I drive as long as im within the law.
Wouldn't dream of it. I don't have a BMW anyway. Disclaimer: I used to drive like a complete and total asshole. Speeding, weaving, tailgating, you name it. That changed when I had a family. Although I no longer speed, drive like a maniac, or let my emotions take control of my driving, it still irks me when I am slowed down without (as near as I can tell) good reason.
Driving too fast or too slow falls somewhere between inconsiderate and antisocial, IMHO*. How you drive has an impact on others. I can easily avoid hitting you if you are a slow driver, but if your slow driving prevents me from picking up my kids on time, or getting to work on time, etc, you are an asshole.
If you can't safely drive the speed limit under good conditions, perhaps you shouldn't drive. If you won't drive the limit for whatever reason (gas economy, enjoying a leisurely drive, whatever), do so in a way that allows others to pass without undue delay. Stay to the right on a multi-lane road; if there is only one travel lane each way, pull over from time to time to let traffic pass.
Driving is a social thing. Regardless of your speed, you have to be aware of the rights and needs of others. Anything else is ignorance, arrogance, of a combination of both.
* Of course, there is always a boatload of caveats. Slow driving due to pedestrians, adverse conditions, etc, all makes perfect sense.
They ought to leverage his natural skills and abilities by putting this guy in charge of the disposal and recycling of old stuff. If he was taking old equipment with pre-ROHS circuit boards, he probably saved them >$120k in fees.
I hope he wiped those hard drives of any critical information. I wonder if he was working with those guys from MI6 who sold the camera?
Dunno, I've never tried it. Looks like fun, though. You could use it as part of a scorched-earth policy security system, assuming that you are more willing to lose data than reveal it. You could make that the default boot device in GRUB with an interrupt time of a few seconds on a system you wanted to keep people out of. If anyone tries to boot without your knowledge, they will likely (unless they have quick reflexes and already know what to do) trigger automatic destruction of any sensitive info on the system.
Don't trust it! Example: I just took my Kodak and deleted all the pictures. I took the memory card, opened it as a mounted file system, and the pictures were gone. I used dd to copy the raw contents into a file, opened the resulting file in hexedit, and all my pictures are still there. Then I take the card, format it in the camera, and dd the contents again... my pictures are still there. Formatting it is no guarantee that the 1s and 0s get overwritten.
Of course, I have a different model camera; perhaps the one in question uses a destructive format. However, even if a format command overwrites things once, that may still not thwart an advanced forensic analysis of the device.* Multiple overwrites are the way to go. Multiple RANDOM overwrites.
*So says people smarter than I. Beyond what I just did on my own, I'm out of my depth. Playing with dd and hexedit is pretty much the extent of my forensic abilities.
Some deregulation did occur under Bush, but that's a side show compared to the other sources of the problems.
What you said:
So? You're post up there tried to say none of this was bush's fault. That was either intentionally misleading or uninformed.
No. You seem to be reading me as purely black/white, which is wrong. I am stating that the problems we have now are due to a number of reasons, and some of the most significant ones occurred before he took office. The economy is a complex fabric with lots of threads that is woven over a long period of time, by more than one person or administration.
Uninformed? I spent the early-to-mid '90s in 1) real estate appraisal, and 2) banking, before moving on to a career in computers. I have tried to keep abreast of things since I left the industry. I'm not a seasoned insider, but I have some understanding and insight here.
The people foreclosing on their homes today didn't get their loans during the clinton years.
I think you are confusing timeline with cause-and-effect. I think it is fair to say that there are troubled loans today which were taken out based on Clintonian deregulation, whether they were taken out during Clinton's administration or not.
Anyone with a brain can see that bush and the republicans are major players behind all of this.
No. You are either being told this by a political machine that has an agenda, or maybe your hatred of all things related to Bush has led you to blame him above everyone else. It makes for an entertaining conspiracy theory, but it's not based in fact.
Ultimately, responsibility lies with borrowers and lenders. Bush never sat down at the closing table with a borrower who couldn't afford a loan, and forced them to sign. Bush never asked an appraiser to come in high on an appraisal so the loan-to-value ratio looked better. Bush didn't bundle shaky loans together and sell them on the secondary market as a good investment. Bush didn't buy and sell "insurance" on loan bundles without sufficient capital to back it up.
Are they 100% to blame? Nope.
In essence, that was my point before. I think that where we disagree is in 1) cause/effect, 2) degree of responsibility, and 3) who else is to blame.
But saying nothing that happened in the last 8 years is bush's fault is ridiculous.
I'm saying that the degree to which he influenced (or even could influence) things has been greatly exaggerated by those who stand to gain politically by opposing him. If we truly want to solve this crisis, we need to look beyond 1) blaming Bush, and 2) huge bailouts. Doing only those will not fix the mess going forward.
As an aside, it strikes me as interesting is that Bush's opponents mock him by calling him a stupid chimp in one sentence, and in the next accuse him of setting in motion a vast and complex conspiracy to control markets in a way that even James Bond evil genius villains would admire.
Yeah, sorry about that. Safe to say I don't put that one on the resume. Although, really, I blame the Microsoft engineers for failing to integrate our world domination software properly. In the redesign process, they bloated the code and watered down a lot of the features by trying to add a lot of user-friendly features, point-and-click interfaces, dialog boxes, etc. Here's an example to prove my point:
You are trying to delete Sweden! This would permanently delete the country. Would you prefer to just move it to the Recycle Bin instead?
Yes / No
At the same time, they removed many of the more powerful features they assumed the average home and business user would not use or want. Of course, that just proves that they really were missing the whole point. That Clippy thing was the last straw, as far as I was concerned.
It looks like you are writing a ransom note to the UN! Would you like assistance with this?
* Yes, I forgot how to spell "newculer bom".
* No, if I figured out how to become an evil genius, I can probably write a letter.
In the final release, all the command line stuff was taken out, and in the end what was supposed to be powerful, devastating, and terrifying ended up being merely annoying.
Well, IIRC, you can burn H2 and CO2 and produce H2O and CO, so yes, assuming you had a ready supply of hydrogen, you could create some kind of internal combustion engine to burn off your captured CO2 and produce clean, pure water. Oh, and pure, clean carbon monoxide as well. Watch out when the atmospheric levels of that stuff starts to rise...
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, even if an American company is first to capitalize on it, you know what the original country of manufacture will be for those things, right?
Well, this is a new level of openness and transparency. Never has internet activity been so open and transparent.
Great. You've just keyworded this page onto LE's forbidden list. Thanks a lot.
worms have at times been dumb enough to come up underneath the cacti and ended up getting themself impaled on the spikes
If only these self-impaling worms would voluntarily crawl on the hook for us, one of fishing's major obstacles would be overcome. Next, we just have to figure out how to convince the fish to unhook and gut themselves.
Sigh. "Can we do it here? I'm not doing it in the damn garden again."
And soon your bot will set you up on a date ... with a really hot-sounding bot. Better yet, your bot might decide to cut out the middleman and just date the other bot himself.
I don't know how others come to the conclusion BMW == asshole, but I can tell you that I make that association based on the driving I see day to day. For a total number of assholes a, and a subset of assholes in BMWs ab, the ratio of ab:total number of BMWs exceeds a:total number of cars. Also in that category: Crotchrockets, and any tricked out Honda or similar with a coffee-can exhaust. You know who you are.
For more car insight, see here. Beemers are conspicuously absent.
Yikes. Not that it couldn't be done, but yeah, that's not ideal thin client territory. My experiences have been in cybercafe setups (really light requirements) and basic office environments (email, web, office apps; medium requirements), which are perfect for thin clients.
As an example, SunRays generally scale much better than a cheap PC environment, with much better return on investment.
You are going to be spending money on servers either way. According to your own figures, you have 7.5 users per server. SunRay solutions typically yield 20+ users per server cpu core. I'm not doubting your figures, but what do you guys do that requires so much back-end power? Are they multi-cpu servers? Fully utilized? Are they under-utilized? Single or dual cpu servers? Obviously, I'm not in your position, but before I looked at desktop solutions, I'd look at server consolidation. VMware or similar might save you a bundle and make things easier to admin.
As for new software, SunRay environments are pretty easy to patch and deploy new software in. As a matter of fact, that's one of the strengths - deploy the patch or app to a single server or a few servers, and you are done.
Electricity is hardly a selling point if you're losing productivity and still spending the money on servers, to boot.
Obviously, achieving functionality is more important than being efficient. However, the point of thin clients is that they generally keep office productivity the same or better, IT efficiency is tremendous, and the equation ((thin clients * users) + (servers)) is less than ((full PC desktop) + (servers)) generally holds true. At that point, saving several hundred KwH might be pretty attractive.
Why could said solution in the first not be solved by people having computers in the first place, albeit cheap ones if stuff is so minimal it can be done on thin client?
I'm sure it could be solved that way. But El cheapo fat desktops are a relatively expensive way to do things. Thin clients are generally less expensive to deploy than cheap PCs, there is less to go wrong on the client end, it is easier and cheaper to replace/troubleshoot the client, it requires less effort to manage hundreds +++ of them, and the need to upgrade/replace desktops every few years goes away. Generally, they require a lot less electricity to run than a conventional desktop.
There was a mid-eighties strip during which Opus and his hippie girlfriend broke up. She pitched him out the front door mummy-wrapped in his old cassette-based music collection. His comment was something like "Yup, I definitely shoulda switched to CDs this year." Sigh. Not to many young people are going to relate well to that one.
Sky-blue screen of actual death?
(Not trolling, just joking)
If I drink enough, I can usually start to feel how fast everything is moving ... and spinning ...
I used to be that guy in the left lane. Honestly, I'm sorry. After slowing down my driving habits, I used to have a similar reaction to yours - lift my foot to slow aggressive drivers. I've found it not worth while. I'd rather let them pass, where I can keep an eye on them. I can much more easily avoid hitting them than they can avoid hitting me. Plus, if they are out ahead of me, sometimes I get to gloat as they get pulled over.
I'll admit it's an odd moment of schadenfreude when it happens, considering my own history.
Let me ask you - if only two people were stuck behind you instead of three, would you pull over to let them pass? Technically, you are within the law, but let's say they've been back there for 15 minutes while you drive 10 under. Being within the law doesn't mean that you aren't being a jerk.
Just becasue you may have a BMW that can handle the road better then my Sentra doesnt mean you can dictate how I drive as long as im within the law.
Wouldn't dream of it. I don't have a BMW anyway. Disclaimer: I used to drive like a complete and total asshole. Speeding, weaving, tailgating, you name it. That changed when I had a family. Although I no longer speed, drive like a maniac, or let my emotions take control of my driving, it still irks me when I am slowed down without (as near as I can tell) good reason.
Driving too fast or too slow falls somewhere between inconsiderate and antisocial, IMHO*. How you drive has an impact on others. I can easily avoid hitting you if you are a slow driver, but if your slow driving prevents me from picking up my kids on time, or getting to work on time, etc, you are an asshole.
If you can't safely drive the speed limit under good conditions, perhaps you shouldn't drive. If you won't drive the limit for whatever reason (gas economy, enjoying a leisurely drive, whatever), do so in a way that allows others to pass without undue delay. Stay to the right on a multi-lane road; if there is only one travel lane each way, pull over from time to time to let traffic pass.
Driving is a social thing. Regardless of your speed, you have to be aware of the rights and needs of others. Anything else is ignorance, arrogance, of a combination of both.
* Of course, there is always a boatload of caveats. Slow driving due to pedestrians, adverse conditions, etc, all makes perfect sense.
Used properly, wipe and/or dd = squeaky clean disk drive with total amnesia. Formating does almost nothing for data destruction.
They ought to leverage his natural skills and abilities by putting this guy in charge of the disposal and recycling of old stuff. If he was taking old equipment with pre-ROHS circuit boards, he probably saved them >$120k in fees.
I hope he wiped those hard drives of any critical information. I wonder if he was working with those guys from MI6 who sold the camera?
Dunno, I've never tried it. Looks like fun, though. You could use it as part of a scorched-earth policy security system, assuming that you are more willing to lose data than reveal it. You could make that the default boot device in GRUB with an interrupt time of a few seconds on a system you wanted to keep people out of. If anyone tries to boot without your knowledge, they will likely (unless they have quick reflexes and already know what to do) trigger automatic destruction of any sensitive info on the system.
Don't trust it! Example: I just took my Kodak and deleted all the pictures. I took the memory card, opened it as a mounted file system, and the pictures were gone. I used dd to copy the raw contents into a file, opened the resulting file in hexedit, and all my pictures are still there. Then I take the card, format it in the camera, and dd the contents again ... my pictures are still there. Formatting it is no guarantee that the 1s and 0s get overwritten.
Of course, I have a different model camera; perhaps the one in question uses a destructive format. However, even if a format command overwrites things once, that may still not thwart an advanced forensic analysis of the device.* Multiple overwrites are the way to go. Multiple RANDOM overwrites.
*So says people smarter than I. Beyond what I just did on my own, I'm out of my depth. Playing with dd and hexedit is pretty much the extent of my forensic abilities.
Some deregulation did occur under Bush, but that's a side show compared to the other sources of the problems.
What you said:
So? You're post up there tried to say none of this was bush's fault. That was either intentionally misleading or uninformed.
No. You seem to be reading me as purely black/white, which is wrong. I am stating that the problems we have now are due to a number of reasons, and some of the most significant ones occurred before he took office. The economy is a complex fabric with lots of threads that is woven over a long period of time, by more than one person or administration.
Uninformed? I spent the early-to-mid '90s in 1) real estate appraisal, and 2) banking, before moving on to a career in computers. I have tried to keep abreast of things since I left the industry. I'm not a seasoned insider, but I have some understanding and insight here.
The people foreclosing on their homes today didn't get their loans during the clinton years.
I think you are confusing timeline with cause-and-effect. I think it is fair to say that there are troubled loans today which were taken out based on Clintonian deregulation, whether they were taken out during Clinton's administration or not.
Anyone with a brain can see that bush and the republicans are major players behind all of this.
No. You are either being told this by a political machine that has an agenda, or maybe your hatred of all things related to Bush has led you to blame him above everyone else. It makes for an entertaining conspiracy theory, but it's not based in fact.
Ultimately, responsibility lies with borrowers and lenders. Bush never sat down at the closing table with a borrower who couldn't afford a loan, and forced them to sign. Bush never asked an appraiser to come in high on an appraisal so the loan-to-value ratio looked better. Bush didn't bundle shaky loans together and sell them on the secondary market as a good investment. Bush didn't buy and sell "insurance" on loan bundles without sufficient capital to back it up.
Are they 100% to blame? Nope.
In essence, that was my point before. I think that where we disagree is in 1) cause/effect, 2) degree of responsibility, and 3) who else is to blame.
But saying nothing that happened in the last 8 years is bush's fault is ridiculous.
I'm saying that the degree to which he influenced (or even could influence) things has been greatly exaggerated by those who stand to gain politically by opposing him. If we truly want to solve this crisis, we need to look beyond 1) blaming Bush, and 2) huge bailouts. Doing only those will not fix the mess going forward.
As an aside, it strikes me as interesting is that Bush's opponents mock him by calling him a stupid chimp in one sentence, and in the next accuse him of setting in motion a vast and complex conspiracy to control markets in a way that even James Bond evil genius villains would admire.
Hey, you're right ...
(runs to patent office)
You are trying to delete Sweden! This would permanently delete the country. Would you prefer to just move it to the Recycle Bin instead?
Yes / No
At the same time, they removed many of the more powerful features they assumed the average home and business user would not use or want. Of course, that just proves that they really were missing the whole point. That Clippy thing was the last straw, as far as I was concerned.
It looks like you are writing a ransom note to the UN! Would you like assistance with this?
* Yes, I forgot how to spell "newculer bom".
* No, if I figured out how to become an evil genius, I can probably write a letter.
In the final release, all the command line stuff was taken out, and in the end what was supposed to be powerful, devastating, and terrifying ended up being merely annoying.
Dave says hi, and he still has your dice.
Well, IIRC, you can burn H2 and CO2 and produce H2O and CO, so yes, assuming you had a ready supply of hydrogen, you could create some kind of internal combustion engine to burn off your captured CO2 and produce clean, pure water. Oh, and pure, clean carbon monoxide as well. Watch out when the atmospheric levels of that stuff starts to rise ...
If they emit more than they take in, is this the carbon equivalent of Hawking Radiation? Do the trees evaporate and then -poof- gone?