Good point. Yeah, the voltage on the MBP supply is higher by a couple of volts. You're probably right about that difference being a low voltage charge cutoff rather than wattage. I hadn't even thought about the battery voltage being higher on the MBP, but it probably is....
Where did you hear that nonsense? The typical solar panel lifespan is measured in decades. The energy produced does decrease over time, but a ten year lifespan is absurdly short for modern panels. Many home solar panels have a guarantee on their output power for a period of 25 years.... If they only lasted ten, those manufacturers would be replacing a whole lot of panels....
I think you're thinking of the break-even point. Typically you break even cost-wise compared with grid power at about the ten year mark.
Not nearly twice the consumption to charge. My MacBook has a 60W supply. With a MacBook Pro, that's just enough to run it without charging; the battery won't charge, but it doesn't drain the battery, either. With the MBP's 85 Watt supply, it can do both. The EEE PC draws 24W or so at full tilt, 36W to charge. For an optimal charge rate, yeah, doubling the maximum draw is a good idea, but most laptop manufacturers base their power supply choices on 25-50% over the maximum drain, not double.
On the flip side, this means that even with an ultra-low-power netbook, you're still talking about 4-6 of those panels before you start charging at all during normal use even in full sun. Solar panels on your roof: good idea. Solar panels on your laptop: waste of money, time, and materials.
That was the sound of a joke falling over dead because of excessive subtlety. Ellen Muth... Dead Like Me... the girl character killed by a toilet seat when they deorbited the Mir space station....
*sigh* I guess now that I explained it, it is no longer funny.... Oh well.
Blasting it during reentry creates smaller pieces, increasing the probability that all of the pieces will burn up during reentry before they make it to the ground. That alone is a good reason to blast large pieces like this if they are approaching atmospheric reentry.
I know you're kidding, but since the write command does not involve the network in any way, it is precisely as secure as the server admin is trustworthy. No encryption is needed. Now that telnet connection to the server, on the other hand....:-D
Not MTV1. They just keep moving the actual videos up to higher-numbered channels to keep the costs down as the lower-numbered channels end up on more cable lineups. Last I checked, the videos are on MTV35 or something.:-D
T-Mobile UK is delivering a 7.2Mbps connection whereas O2 are still at 3.6Mbps - either way i find it hard to believe that download speed is a major issue.
They have since corrected their article in response to reader feedback to that effect. The update states that both browsers are roughly equally fast when tested via Wi-Fi, ergo the performance difference is caused predominantly by the network, not the phone's CPU performance. You can't compare browser performance when you are using two different networks. If you want to compare the devices' 3G performance, you'd have to crack one of them and run it on the other network. Since you can't do that, the best you can realistically do is compare browser performance, which can only be done realistically via Wi-Fi, not 3G.
At least in this case, since the evidence came from a supposed good samaritan delivering the drive, it is unlikely the police have access to download logs or any useful ability to tap the guy's network connection. It was too late by the time they got the drive. (We won't even talk about the whole question of whether evidence obtained through a third-party seizure and delivered by a fourth party has any real validity, nor the question of whether the property was property seized by the landlord in the first place.)
IMHO, the second law enforcement reads a single block off the hard drive, it constitutes a search, whether they are viewing files, creating hashes, or merely making a copy for later analysis. That's just common sense. This ruling helps to affirm that, and as such is the only conclusion that a reasonable person could reach in this case, regardless of one's feelings about the nature of the crime in question. The moral: if you're going to examine somebody's hard drive in any way, you'd better get a warrant.
Depending on what sort of mainframe we're talking about, the answer quite often is "...because when that existing reliable mainframe takes a lightning hit, you'll probably have to rewrite the software in a modern language to run on a modern system anyway because you won't be able to get parts to fix the ancient behemoth."
Good managers realize that bad things happen and they try to plan major changes like that ahead of time so that they can happen on their terms instead of on somebody else's. Even in the best case scenario, your business needs will eventually dictate that you enhance that core system in some way, and over the long run, doing so in such a legacy language will likely cost more money, take more time, and hinder the ability of your business to move rapidly as market needs dictate.
Also, assuming they really are still using big iron and aren't just emulating it on a desktop PC, the power costs for operating one of those things will rapidly cover the cost of hiring engineers to rewrite it in a modern language, test/certify it, and deploy it on a digital wristwatch with a much faster CPU.... Okay, I'm exaggerating a little there, but you're probably talking about a few tens of thousands of dollars per year in power. If it takes two years to rewrite it, the power savings alone from running on a much smaller machine will probably cover the cost after a single-digit number of years.
Further, if the new software can be made more user-friendly (GUI, for example), the savings in personnel costs (being able to hire fewer employees to get the same amount of work done, lower retraining rates due to employee turnover from burnout, lower new employee training costs, shorter new employee training time, etc.) can help recoup the cost of the software rewrite even more rapidly.
Continuing to rely on legacy systems for critical business needs without having any sort of transition plan is pretty reckless and irresponsible, IMHO.
First, he asks his secretary to print the Internet. Then, the secretary prints a bunch of random crap pages. Then, he types up a response on his Underwood No. 5 and sends it to her through a pneumatic tube. Then, the secretary rekeys the information in and sends a printed copy to him via a pneumatic tube for approval, which he then initials and sends back through the tube. Upon receipt of the initialed printed copy, she initials the electronic copy and clicks "submit".
But seriously, Microsoft is getting what it deserves in this regard. That said, I have a feeling that this is, at least in part, a power play to drive down the cost of MS products in Russia. Just a gut feeling.
No, not every third Democrat. More like: Drop all Republicans on the floor:
So on the one hand, you have Democrat supporters supposedly registering bogus voters. On the other hand, you have the Republicans creating challenge lists and preventing people from voting. They're all dirty. The whole lot. I think we need about eight rounds of consistently anti-incumbent voting to straighten out the train wreck of a Congress and state legislatures that we have going these days, which of course won't happen thanks to all the gerrymandering....
That said, verifiable voter rolls is a much harder problem than a verifiable voting system; it's an orthogonal problem....
Fax spam is already illegal. The only exception is if you have an existing business relationship with the recipient (e.g. my real estate agent sending a list of new listings, for example). Even within the context of that EBR exception, you are required to include opt-out instructions and are required to honor that opt-out request in a timely manner.
If you can determine the source of the junk fax, you have the legal right to compensation up to $500 per copy. Sure, it's not jail time, but it's a start.
Technically, those surveys are not advertising. They're attempts to find out how well their advertising is working. If you're like me and TiVo-skip every ad religiously (when I'm not MythTV-auto-skipping, that is), you can really drive their ad success statistics down. It's kind of fun, actually, once you realize how much money you're costing the ad companies every time you take one of those surveys.:-)
If it happens to be something you care about (like they did a survey on internet providers once), you also get the opportunity for your rants to bubble up if enough people complain about something. Also kind of fun in an "I know you don't want to hear this, but your service sucks, and I'm thinking about replacing you with a piece of twine and two tin cans" sort of way....
If you were capable of using proper punctuation and capitalization, then one might take you more seriously. However, that aside, take a system where you have paper ballots and holes to punch out. Would you find that more or less reliable than having a computer terminal for every vote and that computer printed out a human-readable "recipt" for every vote that the person takes and drops into the vote bucket with the hole-puncher? Well, there have been numerous cases of hole-punching being flawed (chads and such) and that's paper voting, and yet there isn't a single case I know of where human-readable printed ballots from an e-box were confusing to the counters. As such, an e-voting system is necessarily less ambiguous and less exploitable than the non-e-system I'm comparing it to.
There's a fine line between machine-generated paper ballots and E-Voting. Your very argument contradicts your assertion that paper ballots are inferior to electronic ballots, as the only acceptable example of an electronic ballot you provide involves a paper ballot (albeit generated by a computer). Without the verifiability of a paper trail electronic ballots are almost completely unverifiable, and that was the point of the GP post.
In fact, the only acceptable form of electronic ballot, IMHO, is one in which the paper ballots also include a bar code containing a UUID that is also present in the electronic database version of the votes so that any discrepancies between the electronic and paper records can not only be detected in terms of the count, but also can be traced back to an individual voting machine, a time of day, and a particular record in the database, thus making vote stuffing much more challenging and much less likely to succeed. That's the level of auditing that the E-Voting systems need, but that is only likely to occur if actual security experts and independent programmers are involved in the design instead of big corporate ATM manufacturers.... We desperately need open source voting systems....
Because the people counting the paper ballot are implicitly trustworthy?
When you have vote counters on both sides monitoring every single vote counted, yes, the people counting the paper ballots are about as trustworthy as you can reasonably get. Perfect, no, but certainly not likely to be very far off.
For that matter, can you trust people to vote intelligently?
You're either for democracy or you're against it. There's no middle ground here where it is acceptable to say that a sham election is acceptable merely because the people can't be trusted to vote the right way.... If you believe that, then you are effectively appointing yourself (or whoever runs the elections) to be the de facto King, and that's not a democracy anymore.
That logic doesn't make sense. When you have multiple people doing the counting, the humans may make errors, but those are going to be relatively small, occasional errors of being off-by-one, not significant "drop every third Democrat ballot on the floor" mistakes. Those sorts of slight errors tend to cancel each other out on the average. With computers, it is trivial for a tiny change to skew the election arbitrarily far. I'd rather trust a machine if I had any faith in the software on that machine. However, unless I and thousands of other volunteers can see the source code and study it, I can't trust the software on that machine.
Software for something this critical needs to A. have an audit trail that is verifiable after the fact (at minimum, a complete paper ballot backup so that districts can be randomly spot checked to ensure that software bugs and/or intentional manipulation of votes do not go unnoticed); B. be subject to full public scrutiny of the executing code to ensure that it is above board (just as the counting process with physical ballots is subject to, at a minimum, scrutiny by representatives of all candidates); and C. have physical security that is at least as secure as the voting boxes used in physical ballot elections. If any of these is not the case (and currently, none of these are the case), then the electronic systems are inherently less trustworthy. Much less trustworthy, in fact. Not even in the running.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. Yeah, the voltage on the MBP supply is higher by a couple of volts. You're probably right about that difference being a low voltage charge cutoff rather than wattage. I hadn't even thought about the battery voltage being higher on the MBP, but it probably is....
Fair enough. I guess that depends on how you treat it.... :-)
Where did you hear that nonsense? The typical solar panel lifespan is measured in decades. The energy produced does decrease over time, but a ten year lifespan is absurdly short for modern panels. Many home solar panels have a guarantee on their output power for a period of 25 years.... If they only lasted ten, those manufacturers would be replacing a whole lot of panels....
I think you're thinking of the break-even point. Typically you break even cost-wise compared with grid power at about the ten year mark.
Not nearly twice the consumption to charge. My MacBook has a 60W supply. With a MacBook Pro, that's just enough to run it without charging; the battery won't charge, but it doesn't drain the battery, either. With the MBP's 85 Watt supply, it can do both. The EEE PC draws 24W or so at full tilt, 36W to charge. For an optimal charge rate, yeah, doubling the maximum draw is a good idea, but most laptop manufacturers base their power supply choices on 25-50% over the maximum drain, not double.
On the flip side, this means that even with an ultra-low-power netbook, you're still talking about 4-6 of those panels before you start charging at all during normal use even in full sun. Solar panels on your roof: good idea. Solar panels on your laptop: waste of money, time, and materials.
...or charged with a couple hundred thousand volts across their testicles?
*whump*
That was the sound of a joke falling over dead because of excessive subtlety. Ellen Muth... Dead Like Me... the girl character killed by a toilet seat when they deorbited the Mir space station....
*sigh* I guess now that I explained it, it is no longer funny.... Oh well.
I'm pretty sure I know how to find out where it will land.
*reconfigures the cell towers to do continuous triangulation on Ellen Muth*
Blasting it during reentry creates smaller pieces, increasing the probability that all of the pieces will burn up during reentry before they make it to the ground. That alone is a good reason to blast large pieces like this if they are approaching atmospheric reentry.
I know you're kidding, but since the write command does not involve the network in any way, it is precisely as secure as the server admin is trustworthy. No encryption is needed. Now that telnet connection to the server, on the other hand.... :-D
Not MTV1. They just keep moving the actual videos up to higher-numbered channels to keep the costs down as the lower-numbered channels end up on more cable lineups. Last I checked, the videos are on MTV35 or something. :-D
And by "to that effect", I was referring to your next sentence about Wi-Fi that I failed to quote. Oops. :-)
They have since corrected their article in response to reader feedback to that effect. The update states that both browsers are roughly equally fast when tested via Wi-Fi, ergo the performance difference is caused predominantly by the network, not the phone's CPU performance. You can't compare browser performance when you are using two different networks. If you want to compare the devices' 3G performance, you'd have to crack one of them and run it on the other network. Since you can't do that, the best you can realistically do is compare browser performance, which can only be done realistically via Wi-Fi, not 3G.
At least in this case, since the evidence came from a supposed good samaritan delivering the drive, it is unlikely the police have access to download logs or any useful ability to tap the guy's network connection. It was too late by the time they got the drive. (We won't even talk about the whole question of whether evidence obtained through a third-party seizure and delivered by a fourth party has any real validity, nor the question of whether the property was property seized by the landlord in the first place.)
IMHO, the second law enforcement reads a single block off the hard drive, it constitutes a search, whether they are viewing files, creating hashes, or merely making a copy for later analysis. That's just common sense. This ruling helps to affirm that, and as such is the only conclusion that a reasonable person could reach in this case, regardless of one's feelings about the nature of the crime in question. The moral: if you're going to examine somebody's hard drive in any way, you'd better get a warrant.
Depending on what sort of mainframe we're talking about, the answer quite often is "...because when that existing reliable mainframe takes a lightning hit, you'll probably have to rewrite the software in a modern language to run on a modern system anyway because you won't be able to get parts to fix the ancient behemoth."
Good managers realize that bad things happen and they try to plan major changes like that ahead of time so that they can happen on their terms instead of on somebody else's. Even in the best case scenario, your business needs will eventually dictate that you enhance that core system in some way, and over the long run, doing so in such a legacy language will likely cost more money, take more time, and hinder the ability of your business to move rapidly as market needs dictate.
Also, assuming they really are still using big iron and aren't just emulating it on a desktop PC, the power costs for operating one of those things will rapidly cover the cost of hiring engineers to rewrite it in a modern language, test/certify it, and deploy it on a digital wristwatch with a much faster CPU.... Okay, I'm exaggerating a little there, but you're probably talking about a few tens of thousands of dollars per year in power. If it takes two years to rewrite it, the power savings alone from running on a much smaller machine will probably cover the cost after a single-digit number of years.
Further, if the new software can be made more user-friendly (GUI, for example), the savings in personnel costs (being able to hire fewer employees to get the same amount of work done, lower retraining rates due to employee turnover from burnout, lower new employee training costs, shorter new employee training time, etc.) can help recoup the cost of the software rewrite even more rapidly.
Continuing to rely on legacy systems for critical business needs without having any sort of transition plan is pretty reckless and irresponsible, IMHO.
Comment Of Bozo On Lithium.
No, you got the joke wrong. The correct line is:
First, he asks his secretary to print the Internet. Then, the secretary prints a bunch of random crap pages. Then, he types up a response on his Underwood No. 5 and sends it to her through a pneumatic tube. Then, the secretary rekeys the information in and sends a printed copy to him via a pneumatic tube for approval, which he then initials and sends back through the tube. Upon receipt of the initialed printed copy, she initials the electronic copy and clicks "submit".
In Soviet college, files serve you?
Hmm. Last I checked, Karma's a microphone company. It's also a Korg keyboard technology. And finally, Karma's a beach (or at least a beach residence).
But seriously, Microsoft is getting what it deserves in this regard. That said, I have a feeling that this is, at least in part, a power play to drive down the cost of MS products in Russia. Just a gut feeling.
So on the one hand, you have Democrat supporters supposedly registering bogus voters. On the other hand, you have the Republicans creating challenge lists and preventing people from voting. They're all dirty. The whole lot. I think we need about eight rounds of consistently anti-incumbent voting to straighten out the train wreck of a Congress and state legislatures that we have going these days, which of course won't happen thanks to all the gerrymandering....
That said, verifiable voter rolls is a much harder problem than a verifiable voting system; it's an orthogonal problem....
Fax spam is already illegal. The only exception is if you have an existing business relationship with the recipient (e.g. my real estate agent sending a list of new listings, for example). Even within the context of that EBR exception, you are required to include opt-out instructions and are required to honor that opt-out request in a timely manner.
If you can determine the source of the junk fax, you have the legal right to compensation up to $500 per copy. Sure, it's not jail time, but it's a start.
Technically, those surveys are not advertising. They're attempts to find out how well their advertising is working. If you're like me and TiVo-skip every ad religiously (when I'm not MythTV-auto-skipping, that is), you can really drive their ad success statistics down. It's kind of fun, actually, once you realize how much money you're costing the ad companies every time you take one of those surveys. :-)
If it happens to be something you care about (like they did a survey on internet providers once), you also get the opportunity for your rants to bubble up if enough people complain about something. Also kind of fun in an "I know you don't want to hear this, but your service sucks, and I'm thinking about replacing you with a piece of twine and two tin cans" sort of way....
There's a fine line between machine-generated paper ballots and E-Voting. Your very argument contradicts your assertion that paper ballots are inferior to electronic ballots, as the only acceptable example of an electronic ballot you provide involves a paper ballot (albeit generated by a computer). Without the verifiability of a paper trail electronic ballots are almost completely unverifiable, and that was the point of the GP post.
In fact, the only acceptable form of electronic ballot, IMHO, is one in which the paper ballots also include a bar code containing a UUID that is also present in the electronic database version of the votes so that any discrepancies between the electronic and paper records can not only be detected in terms of the count, but also can be traced back to an individual voting machine, a time of day, and a particular record in the database, thus making vote stuffing much more challenging and much less likely to succeed. That's the level of auditing that the E-Voting systems need, but that is only likely to occur if actual security experts and independent programmers are involved in the design instead of big corporate ATM manufacturers.... We desperately need open source voting systems....
When you have vote counters on both sides monitoring every single vote counted, yes, the people counting the paper ballots are about as trustworthy as you can reasonably get. Perfect, no, but certainly not likely to be very far off.
You're either for democracy or you're against it. There's no middle ground here where it is acceptable to say that a sham election is acceptable merely because the people can't be trusted to vote the right way.... If you believe that, then you are effectively appointing yourself (or whoever runs the elections) to be the de facto King, and that's not a democracy anymore.
That logic doesn't make sense. When you have multiple people doing the counting, the humans may make errors, but those are going to be relatively small, occasional errors of being off-by-one, not significant "drop every third Democrat ballot on the floor" mistakes. Those sorts of slight errors tend to cancel each other out on the average. With computers, it is trivial for a tiny change to skew the election arbitrarily far. I'd rather trust a machine if I had any faith in the software on that machine. However, unless I and thousands of other volunteers can see the source code and study it, I can't trust the software on that machine.
Software for something this critical needs to A. have an audit trail that is verifiable after the fact (at minimum, a complete paper ballot backup so that districts can be randomly spot checked to ensure that software bugs and/or intentional manipulation of votes do not go unnoticed); B. be subject to full public scrutiny of the executing code to ensure that it is above board (just as the counting process with physical ballots is subject to, at a minimum, scrutiny by representatives of all candidates); and C. have physical security that is at least as secure as the voting boxes used in physical ballot elections. If any of these is not the case (and currently, none of these are the case), then the electronic systems are inherently less trustworthy. Much less trustworthy, in fact. Not even in the running.
Apparently a 100% slice. That's the problem.