No, that's the ministry of political truthiness.... Get it right.... The Ministry of Corporate Truth is MSNBC, where you will be taught by Microsoft Certified Trainers....
Agreed. My MacBook Seagate drive died (click of death) at a mere 9 months of age under relatively light use. The same week, I had two Seagate desktop drives bite it (one head crash, one bizarre constant data corruption problem with no read errors reported). Hard drives suck, period. Statistically, with the exception of the drives I bought week before last, I think that every hard drive I've purchased in the past couple of years has already failed.
I had a WD die a couple of weeks ago. A couple of years ago, I lost a Hitachi drive, and I have a second Hitachi (well, IBM, I think) drive in semi-permanent storage that I cloned off onto another drive out of paranoia after it failed to spin up at about the same time. (Powered it off and back on again and it spun up, so it was probably just poor bearing lubrication distribution, but....) You get the picture. Oh, and two WD drives, one of which also went bad, the other of which I pulled because it sounded like a chainsaw at about the same time. I'd estimate that in spite of proper cooling, clean, UPS-backed power, etc. I'm finding a failure rate for heavy use drives that approaches 100% in the first three years. I'm even seeing spotty failures in occasional use drives like my MacBook.
At this point, I'm convinced that the craptastic manufacturing in third world countries has driven the quality of hard drives down to the point that they no longer adequately serve their intended function for me, and I'm sure this 1.5 GB Barracuda will be no exception. Just keep at least three copies of anything you care about and you should be fine. For now. At the rate of reliability decline I'm seeing, though, the rule will likely be five copies within ten years. Bring on the cheap flash drives. The Winchester disk design has outlived its usefulness, IMHO.
I have seen on television the videos of the F-16's radar when in pursuit of those. The commentary didn't mention any numbers, but as I recognized a familiar layout from my FALCON (ATARI ST) days, I did check the illuminated target speed indicator. It went from 400K to 700K in a matter of seconds.
It is publicly known the intruder lost the F-16 in pursuit behind like leaves in the wind.
Not sure about the sonic boom, though that can be reduced significantly with certain airfoil designs. As for acceleration, at sub-mach speeds, I think that either a MiG-23 or MiG-29 can significantly out-accelerate an F-16, so it might well have been a MiG. If this had been above the sound barrier, an SR-71 could also lose the F-16, but an F-16 would catch up easily if the SR-71 were not at supersonic speeds. Outrunning an F-16 certainly doesn't require alien technology; it was designed for extreme maneuverability, not raw speed. There are plenty of jets that can accelerate faster.
I am thinking that they are starting to try to wean people off of FW because USB3 is on the cusp of becoming available in consumer devices. It will likely replace both USB2 and FW.
Actually, I expect USB3 to be pretty nearly dead on arrival. It is a solution in search of a problem. It requires a complete retooling of all the devices with new, more expensive connectors, cannot be even close to pin-compatible with existing USB silicon because of the extra data lines needed for the optical bus, requires all new cables, and after all that expense, it offers no advantages over USB2 for anything but hard drives, and for hard drives, it can't even begin to compete with the performance of eSATA either in performance or in cost!
Unless I've missed something, I don't expect USB 3.0 to be any better at replacing FireWire than USB 2.0 is; AFAIK, it has all the same fundamental architectural weaknesses to keep costs down, so if USB 2.0 doesn't handle it well, USB 3.0 will also have trouble, and for precisely the same reasons....
Further, USB 3.0 can't compete with eSATA for disk performance because of the huge CPU overhead at high throughput, the added latency inherent in USB to SATA bridge silicon and other bridges of similar complexity, and probably a dozen other things I'm forgetting right now.
USB 3.0 also can't compete with eSATA in price because adding eSATA connectors should be nearly free. You have a SATA controller in every modern laptop anyway, and most of those controllers typically provide at least four ports, IIRC, of which you are using at most two (one for the hard drive and one for the optical drive). So basically, for the cost of some eSATA PHY silicon and a connector, you have two eSATA ports.... Ditto on the hard drive end of things; the bridge silicon should be a glorified pile of broadband amplifiers.... Assuming eSATA parts are being built in similar quantities, it should be a lot cheaper to implement than USB 3.0, IMHO.
Thus, about all USB 3.0 can realistically do is supplant USB 2.0 for things that it does well (i.e. non-disk, non-multimedia devices, cheap webcams, and cheap flash sticks). However, such USB devices are not really pushing up against the bandwidth limitations of USB 2.0 (or, with the exception of flash sticks, even USB 1.1).
The USB 3.0 standard makes about as much sense to me as a 64-bit ISA bus standard.... I just can't comprehend why anybody cares about it at all.... It certainly doesn't strike me as being an automatic winner. It will have a very significant uphill battle against both better entrenched technologies like eSATA/FireWire and cheaper technologies like USB 2.0.
PG&E can barely even keep my power on for a week. Okay, I'm exaggerating slightly, but I do have machines whose sole reboots occur when the power fails for more than 30 minutes. Their uptime is currently a mere 8 days....
I used to do that for OS updates, too. It won't let you do that in Leopard (at least in Software Update; you might be able to do that if you DL the package and install it manually; not sure). For third-party kernel extensions, I usually force quit Installer, run Terminal, and kill -HUP kextd.... Usually works. Only when it doesn't do I begrudgingly reboot (and generally swear at the driver developers under my breath). Maybe it's just me....
If you drop the "intoxicated" excuse I do agree with you in principle.
Let's be clear here. I'm not saying that those people shouldn't ever end up on a sex offender registry. I'm saying that the law must not mandate it statutorily. Such a decision must be up to a judge/jury in those cases. Quite often, cases involving alcohol end up being a "he said, she said" case in which consent or lack of consent can never be conclusively determined unless/until somebody engages in a pattern of such activity. Still, in many of those cases, a jury might convict based on emotional appeals from the victim. Laws should probably also require that expiration in these sorts of edge cases A. have expiration dates, i.e. make them the equivalent of parole except in particularly heinous cases, and B. be confirmed by an impartial panel of judges who should have access only to the written court record to maximize impartiality and rational thought instead of emotional reaction.
On the issue of a criminal saying, "I only rape when I'm on drugs," again, if the person shows no remorse, that should be up to the judge/jury to decide. Certainly if a person is just using that as an excuse, this should be obvious to all of the people involved in trying the case, and thus those people are the only ones remotely qualified to decide whether that person is really a sex offender or just an idiot who got too high.
If the accused rapist was too high to know what he/she was doing and the other person was too drunk, though, again you have a "he said, she said" situation, and it is often very difficult to decide what is the right decision in such a case. More to the point, in those cases, it is almost always better to force the perpetrator (and possibly the victim as well) to go through mandatory drug rehabilitation, put the person on long-term parole, and if the parole officer concludes that the person regressed and is using drugs or abusing alcohol again, subject him/her to a much longer, more intensive drug treatment program. Keep doing this until it works. The problem in those cases is not that the person is prone to sexual offenses. The problem is that the person is prone to becoming wasted out of his/her mind, which causes him/her to do stupid things that he/she otherwise would not do. A working justice system should always do its best to treat the cause, not the symptom. Rapists who use drugs as a side effect should be treated as rapists, drug offenders who rape as a side effect should be treated as drug offenders. At that point, it's all a question of intent, which can't be predetermined by statute.
Whatever happened to "twelve good men"? Perhaps some adjustment is needed?
The judge has the right to overrule the jury on sentencing. That's what happened. And that is necessary, frankly, because quite often, a jury of your "peers" can be unduly swayed by emotional appeals by the victim, the defendant, their families, etc. and end up handing down a sentence that is way out of line with reason (either way too lax or way too harsh). Perhaps it should be necessary for a multi-judge panel to convene only in cases where the judge feels that the jury sentencing decision should be overruled or in cases where sex offender registration is recommended by the jury when it is not statutorily mandated.
Nanny states always end up doing far more harm than good. Unfortunately, people keep insisting on them because most people have a tendency to vote in ways that are about as unfavorable to their best interests as humanly possible.... I seem to recall there was a study on that a while back, but I don't remember the details....
"better 1,000 guilty go free than one innocent suffer wrongfully"
I very much agree with that sentiment in principle. In practice, though, the second one person dies because a judge was too lax on a convicted felon, the reactionaries come out of the woodwork and laws get passed. Maybe we just need a law that says that no law shall be passed in anger---a statutory waiting period before passing a law stemming from or named after the victim of a crime....:-)
Agreed. More to the point, I suspect if you really went down the rolls, you'd find that a large percentage of the sex offenders out there are guys who did something with a high school girl when they were in their 20s and got caught. You can't tell me that most of them are "dangerous" or deserve to be treated as second class citizens for the rest of their lives. (Until they mature, perhaps, but....)
Sex offender registry laws should be reserved for the extreme cases---cases of rape in which neither party was intoxicated or under the influence of drugs (or in which the injured party was unknowingly/unwillingly subjected to drugs with intent to rape), cases in which someone over... let's say 21 intentionally and knowingly engages in or attempts to engage in sexual contact with someone under... let's say 12, etc. That gives a wide enough safety margin that it weeds out everyone but the people who truly are a danger to society.
Without such limits, you're just ruining the lives a bunch of otherwise normal people who did stupid things when they were in high school or college. That doesn't make much sense to me (or, frankly, to anyone with half a brain). If anything, this is why laws that don't give judges any leeway in sentencing are universally bad. They create an environment in which a judge is forced to give a punishment even if the circumstances clearly do not warranty that punishment. Unfortunately, without those laws, we get problems on the other side---idiot judges who keep letting out repeat offenders who progressively work their way up to heinous crimes. I don't know what the solution is except perhaps to pass laws that would require all criminal sentencing to occur by a vote of... say seven judges who are all required to read the complete decision of the presiding judge prior to enacting sentencing (with harsh criminal penalties for any judge who regularly fails to read the decisions before voting).
JavaScript is an okay language if you treat it as a strictly procedural language. I'd be a lot happier with it if they had real classes and inheritance that didn't suck. Even PHP... heck, even Perl has an object model that is a million times more usable than JavaScript's object model, which appears to have been constructed more as a convenience for providing DOM objects whose methods are defined by C code in the browser than as an actual tool for development in the language itself. Working with OO JavaScript is such a pain in the backside that I just don't bother. By contrast, I write OO in PHP and Perl all the time.
As for the JS DOM, you're right, but if you had a good OO model (something with the equivalent of Objective-C Categories) as part of the bytecode standard, you could ostensibly extend the DOM implementation and either add methods or override methods with custom versions that call into the native code as desired, and do so as part of your initialization. After that, all browsers would be equal just by adding a fairly simple chunk of initialization code. A real, sane bytecode backend designed by somebody who actually gets OO would be the client-side programming equivalent of the Holy Grail....
Since a lack of a vote is equivalent to a "No" vote, this makes Obama, McCain, and Biden about the only senators who don't deserve to get run out of office on a rail. I, for one, will not be voting for any Senator or Representative who voted for this bill come November, and I urge you all to do the same. Since our voices were not heard when we urged our reps and senators to vote against this bill, the only way remaining for our voices to be heard is via the ballot box.
I too, would like to write server side code in the same language as the client side code... I just wish it would be the client side that would change. That way I wouldn't have to touch javascript ever again.
Now, now, now, there's nothing wrong with JavaScript that smoking a little crack while severely hung over can't fix....:-D
But seriously, client-side PHP would totally rock. Or heck, I'd settle for a universal bytecode runtime standard that we could compile Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc. into for execution on any client. Kind of like Java, but without... you know, Java....
They do have their choice of music player and phone. The students would just have to buy it themselves. The purpose of this program isn't to provide a music player or a phone. The purpose is to provide a mobile platform that provides support for their custom apps, a web browser that's usable for research on the go, and a video player that integrates with iTunes U for podcast video content of lectures and support material. You could halfway do some of that with a device from another manufacturer, but you'd have to work at it and it would always be a kludge. Think of it as the school providing a learning tool that just happens to come with your choice of a free music player or a free phone....:-)
P.S. AFAIK, iTunes should work in recent versions of Wine, complete with iPod/iPhone syncing.
After obtaining the RMA, pull the drive, stick it in an external case, copy the data off, and put the drive back in. Either that or disable the video drivers in your Linux kernel and boot the machine headless. If the video chip is causing the crashes, the machine shouldn't crash if the video hardware is inactive. SSH into the headless box and copy the drive contents to an external disk. Then reenable the video drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's the ministry of political truthiness.... Get it right.... The Ministry of Corporate Truth is MSNBC, where you will be taught by Microsoft Certified Trainers....
You forgot "at taxpayer expense".
You can do it in fewer steps.
Change S to L: NOLE (means "head"; also a municipality in Italy).
Change N to M: MOLE
Change O to I: MILE
Change E to K: MILK
Agreed. My MacBook Seagate drive died (click of death) at a mere 9 months of age under relatively light use. The same week, I had two Seagate desktop drives bite it (one head crash, one bizarre constant data corruption problem with no read errors reported). Hard drives suck, period. Statistically, with the exception of the drives I bought week before last, I think that every hard drive I've purchased in the past couple of years has already failed.
I had a WD die a couple of weeks ago. A couple of years ago, I lost a Hitachi drive, and I have a second Hitachi (well, IBM, I think) drive in semi-permanent storage that I cloned off onto another drive out of paranoia after it failed to spin up at about the same time. (Powered it off and back on again and it spun up, so it was probably just poor bearing lubrication distribution, but....) You get the picture. Oh, and two WD drives, one of which also went bad, the other of which I pulled because it sounded like a chainsaw at about the same time. I'd estimate that in spite of proper cooling, clean, UPS-backed power, etc. I'm finding a failure rate for heavy use drives that approaches 100% in the first three years. I'm even seeing spotty failures in occasional use drives like my MacBook.
At this point, I'm convinced that the craptastic manufacturing in third world countries has driven the quality of hard drives down to the point that they no longer adequately serve their intended function for me, and I'm sure this 1.5 GB Barracuda will be no exception. Just keep at least three copies of anything you care about and you should be fine. For now. At the rate of reliability decline I'm seeing, though, the rule will likely be five copies within ten years. Bring on the cheap flash drives. The Winchester disk design has outlived its usefulness, IMHO.
Not sure about the sonic boom, though that can be reduced significantly with certain airfoil designs. As for acceleration, at sub-mach speeds, I think that either a MiG-23 or MiG-29 can significantly out-accelerate an F-16, so it might well have been a MiG. If this had been above the sound barrier, an SR-71 could also lose the F-16, but an F-16 would catch up easily if the SR-71 were not at supersonic speeds. Outrunning an F-16 certainly doesn't require alien technology; it was designed for extreme maneuverability, not raw speed. There are plenty of jets that can accelerate faster.
Actually, I expect USB3 to be pretty nearly dead on arrival. It is a solution in search of a problem. It requires a complete retooling of all the devices with new, more expensive connectors, cannot be even close to pin-compatible with existing USB silicon because of the extra data lines needed for the optical bus, requires all new cables, and after all that expense, it offers no advantages over USB2 for anything but hard drives, and for hard drives, it can't even begin to compete with the performance of eSATA either in performance or in cost!
Unless I've missed something, I don't expect USB 3.0 to be any better at replacing FireWire than USB 2.0 is; AFAIK, it has all the same fundamental architectural weaknesses to keep costs down, so if USB 2.0 doesn't handle it well, USB 3.0 will also have trouble, and for precisely the same reasons....
Further, USB 3.0 can't compete with eSATA for disk performance because of the huge CPU overhead at high throughput, the added latency inherent in USB to SATA bridge silicon and other bridges of similar complexity, and probably a dozen other things I'm forgetting right now.
USB 3.0 also can't compete with eSATA in price because adding eSATA connectors should be nearly free. You have a SATA controller in every modern laptop anyway, and most of those controllers typically provide at least four ports, IIRC, of which you are using at most two (one for the hard drive and one for the optical drive). So basically, for the cost of some eSATA PHY silicon and a connector, you have two eSATA ports.... Ditto on the hard drive end of things; the bridge silicon should be a glorified pile of broadband amplifiers.... Assuming eSATA parts are being built in similar quantities, it should be a lot cheaper to implement than USB 3.0, IMHO.
Thus, about all USB 3.0 can realistically do is supplant USB 2.0 for things that it does well (i.e. non-disk, non-multimedia devices, cheap webcams, and cheap flash sticks). However, such USB devices are not really pushing up against the bandwidth limitations of USB 2.0 (or, with the exception of flash sticks, even USB 1.1).
The USB 3.0 standard makes about as much sense to me as a 64-bit ISA bus standard.... I just can't comprehend why anybody cares about it at all.... It certainly doesn't strike me as being an automatic winner. It will have a very significant uphill battle against both better entrenched technologies like eSATA/FireWire and cheaper technologies like USB 2.0.
You do know that you can fix that compatibility issue with a pair of pliers in about half a second, right? Just saying....
See that's why girls don't come here....
Sheesh. Insensitive....
PG&E can barely even keep my power on for a week. Okay, I'm exaggerating slightly, but I do have machines whose sole reboots occur when the power fails for more than 30 minutes. Their uptime is currently a mere 8 days....
/^@&*$!(&*#^%&+$-)&*&[4-)]/
I used to do that for OS updates, too. It won't let you do that in Leopard (at least in Software Update; you might be able to do that if you DL the package and install it manually; not sure). For third-party kernel extensions, I usually force quit Installer, run Terminal, and kill -HUP kextd.... Usually works. Only when it doesn't do I begrudgingly reboot (and generally swear at the driver developers under my breath). Maybe it's just me....
The best part is that the screen would be green as well.
Let's be clear here. I'm not saying that those people shouldn't ever end up on a sex offender registry. I'm saying that the law must not mandate it statutorily. Such a decision must be up to a judge/jury in those cases. Quite often, cases involving alcohol end up being a "he said, she said" case in which consent or lack of consent can never be conclusively determined unless/until somebody engages in a pattern of such activity. Still, in many of those cases, a jury might convict based on emotional appeals from the victim. Laws should probably also require that expiration in these sorts of edge cases A. have expiration dates, i.e. make them the equivalent of parole except in particularly heinous cases, and B. be confirmed by an impartial panel of judges who should have access only to the written court record to maximize impartiality and rational thought instead of emotional reaction.
On the issue of a criminal saying, "I only rape when I'm on drugs," again, if the person shows no remorse, that should be up to the judge/jury to decide. Certainly if a person is just using that as an excuse, this should be obvious to all of the people involved in trying the case, and thus those people are the only ones remotely qualified to decide whether that person is really a sex offender or just an idiot who got too high.
If the accused rapist was too high to know what he/she was doing and the other person was too drunk, though, again you have a "he said, she said" situation, and it is often very difficult to decide what is the right decision in such a case. More to the point, in those cases, it is almost always better to force the perpetrator (and possibly the victim as well) to go through mandatory drug rehabilitation, put the person on long-term parole, and if the parole officer concludes that the person regressed and is using drugs or abusing alcohol again, subject him/her to a much longer, more intensive drug treatment program. Keep doing this until it works. The problem in those cases is not that the person is prone to sexual offenses. The problem is that the person is prone to becoming wasted out of his/her mind, which causes him/her to do stupid things that he/she otherwise would not do. A working justice system should always do its best to treat the cause, not the symptom. Rapists who use drugs as a side effect should be treated as rapists, drug offenders who rape as a side effect should be treated as drug offenders. At that point, it's all a question of intent, which can't be predetermined by statute.
The judge has the right to overrule the jury on sentencing. That's what happened. And that is necessary, frankly, because quite often, a jury of your "peers" can be unduly swayed by emotional appeals by the victim, the defendant, their families, etc. and end up handing down a sentence that is way out of line with reason (either way too lax or way too harsh). Perhaps it should be necessary for a multi-judge panel to convene only in cases where the judge feels that the jury sentencing decision should be overruled or in cases where sex offender registration is recommended by the jury when it is not statutorily mandated.
Nanny states always end up doing far more harm than good. Unfortunately, people keep insisting on them because most people have a tendency to vote in ways that are about as unfavorable to their best interests as humanly possible.... I seem to recall there was a study on that a while back, but I don't remember the details....
I very much agree with that sentiment in principle. In practice, though, the second one person dies because a judge was too lax on a convicted felon, the reactionaries come out of the woodwork and laws get passed. Maybe we just need a law that says that no law shall be passed in anger---a statutory waiting period before passing a law stemming from or named after the victim of a crime.... :-)
Kind of resembles the world's worst regular expression.... :-)
Agreed. More to the point, I suspect if you really went down the rolls, you'd find that a large percentage of the sex offenders out there are guys who did something with a high school girl when they were in their 20s and got caught. You can't tell me that most of them are "dangerous" or deserve to be treated as second class citizens for the rest of their lives. (Until they mature, perhaps, but....)
Sex offender registry laws should be reserved for the extreme cases---cases of rape in which neither party was intoxicated or under the influence of drugs (or in which the injured party was unknowingly/unwillingly subjected to drugs with intent to rape), cases in which someone over... let's say 21 intentionally and knowingly engages in or attempts to engage in sexual contact with someone under... let's say 12, etc. That gives a wide enough safety margin that it weeds out everyone but the people who truly are a danger to society.
Without such limits, you're just ruining the lives a bunch of otherwise normal people who did stupid things when they were in high school or college. That doesn't make much sense to me (or, frankly, to anyone with half a brain). If anything, this is why laws that don't give judges any leeway in sentencing are universally bad. They create an environment in which a judge is forced to give a punishment even if the circumstances clearly do not warranty that punishment. Unfortunately, without those laws, we get problems on the other side---idiot judges who keep letting out repeat offenders who progressively work their way up to heinous crimes. I don't know what the solution is except perhaps to pass laws that would require all criminal sentencing to occur by a vote of... say seven judges who are all required to read the complete decision of the presiding judge prior to enacting sentencing (with harsh criminal penalties for any judge who regularly fails to read the decisions before voting).
About as quickly they learn brainf**k or Whitespace, I'd imagine, and it is about as useful....
JavaScript is an okay language if you treat it as a strictly procedural language. I'd be a lot happier with it if they had real classes and inheritance that didn't suck. Even PHP... heck, even Perl has an object model that is a million times more usable than JavaScript's object model, which appears to have been constructed more as a convenience for providing DOM objects whose methods are defined by C code in the browser than as an actual tool for development in the language itself. Working with OO JavaScript is such a pain in the backside that I just don't bother. By contrast, I write OO in PHP and Perl all the time.
As for the JS DOM, you're right, but if you had a good OO model (something with the equivalent of Objective-C Categories) as part of the bytecode standard, you could ostensibly extend the DOM implementation and either add methods or override methods with custom versions that call into the native code as desired, and do so as part of your initialization. After that, all browsers would be equal just by adding a fairly simple chunk of initialization code. A real, sane bytecode backend designed by somebody who actually gets OO would be the client-side programming equivalent of the Holy Grail....
Fair enough, but IMHO, being out on the campaign trail and unable to go back to D.C. to cast your vote would also be a good excuse.... :-)
Since a lack of a vote is equivalent to a "No" vote, this makes Obama, McCain, and Biden about the only senators who don't deserve to get run out of office on a rail. I, for one, will not be voting for any Senator or Representative who voted for this bill come November, and I urge you all to do the same. Since our voices were not heard when we urged our reps and senators to vote against this bill, the only way remaining for our voices to be heard is via the ballot box.
Now, now, now, there's nothing wrong with JavaScript that smoking a little crack while severely hung over can't fix.... :-D
But seriously, client-side PHP would totally rock. Or heck, I'd settle for a universal bytecode runtime standard that we could compile Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc. into for execution on any client. Kind of like Java, but without... you know, Java....
They do have their choice of music player and phone. The students would just have to buy it themselves. The purpose of this program isn't to provide a music player or a phone. The purpose is to provide a mobile platform that provides support for their custom apps, a web browser that's usable for research on the go, and a video player that integrates with iTunes U for podcast video content of lectures and support material. You could halfway do some of that with a device from another manufacturer, but you'd have to work at it and it would always be a kludge. Think of it as the school providing a learning tool that just happens to come with your choice of a free music player or a free phone.... :-)
P.S. AFAIK, iTunes should work in recent versions of Wine, complete with iPod/iPhone syncing.
Okay. My key is 1...
2...
3...
4...
...
...
5.
After obtaining the RMA, pull the drive, stick it in an external case, copy the data off, and put the drive back in. Either that or disable the video drivers in your Linux kernel and boot the machine headless. If the video chip is causing the crashes, the machine shouldn't crash if the video hardware is inactive. SSH into the headless box and copy the drive contents to an external disk. Then reenable the video drivers.
Err.. Geico, not Geiko. *sigh*