What separates Apple from the rest (and a lot of people's money) is the cult-like status they've built amongst a small but big-spending segment of the population.
This used to be true. Then, Apple introduced the iPod and iPhone. Riding the subway to work -- in a city where it isn't the big-spending segment of the population that uses public transportation, unlike, say, NYC -- I see more iPods and iPhones than any other similar device, and fully 1/4 to 1/3 of the riders have them. It isn't a cult-like status anymore: Apple's market cap has exploded over the last few years because they are selling to everyone.
Just because your grandma can figure it out does not make it better.
Um, yes it does, when you are in the business of selling widgets you want Grandma to be able to use.
If, on the other hand, you are so mired in zealotry that you can't see that if Grandma can't get a widget to work, a widget that is intended for the mass market, it puts a serious limitation on that widgets eventual success, well, then, we don't have much to discuss.
Apple knows how to make a profit where none seems to exist, in a market that looks like it is wallowing, in an economy that sucks. Apple will become the largest market cap company in the next 12 - 18 months. And slashdotters will say "lame" and still not get it.
I got it the first time I held an original iPod nano and realized that it was not a tech toy, but an object of desire. I wanted it, not because it was cool, or could do things other devices I had couldn't do, but because it was sexy. That week, I bought Apple stock. It has since doubled, and I'm not yet thinking of selling.
Can't we just re-use the big DefCon displays from Wargames?
How about we have no indicator whatsoever? I know, it's a crazy, wild idea. Just hold on a sec and follow along. I know, I know, it's crazy, but hear me out. The current color-coded threat level has been derided as useless by the public. The government employees themselves don't pay attention to it. Raising the threat any higher means Bad Things Coming, and we can't lower it, for fear of the public and officials getting complacent. Homeland security is doing nothing because it's hands are tied, and the indicator didn't serve much purpose in the first place.
Maybe, just maybe, I know it's crazy-talk, we should have no indicator at all.
That's the problem. The solution is to write your own article, or to maintain your links.
Or, purchase rights to the work. The work is copyrighted, and you want to copy it. It's really quite simple. The owner will, very likely, sell you rights, at least if they are a publishing house.
I do that all the time for images that I use in my business-related presentations. For most copyrighted work that is owned by a company of some sort, it is relatively straightforward to approach their business development people and strike a deal. Usually this is as easy as finding the right page on their web site, making a selection of content and rights levels, and typing in your credit card number. At the worst, it's making a single phone call. No, it isn't free, and no, I don't think it should be. But most copyrighted work isn't the Obama HOPE portrait or a Pulitzer winning investigative essay, and so the prices are reasonable, at least in my experience.
i'm not sorry at all that you failed to provide the latency values i requested, and instead tried to confuse the issue.
you claim you have a card that processes audio... you claim to understand how to calculate the signal latency... what is it?
what is the latency on the monitor signal while recording at the same time? is it even possible?
i'm not sure how "shield it more" was moderated as "+1 interesting" and not "-14 duh, but the latency hit makes it unusable in any real world applications"
I don't have the figures, sorry. On the digital side, it was as you would expect for a digital processing chip, since we used a standard one. Unfortunately, since we're talking about nearly 20 years ago now, I don't recall which it was. On the analog side, it was by design effectively zero for the analog-bandwidth signals (yes, the circuitry likely had some group delay, but we're talking about analog signals here where delays are sub-microsecond).
Local re-regulation of power supplies is fundamentally an analog process, as is eliminating interference from a noisy environment (even when you use digital techniques, the underlying mechanisms and approaches are analog). Proper grounding and power supply isolation techniques are fundamentally an analog process. Although shielding is at the root of nearly all passive noise suppression, that's not the only thing that is done.
I'll ask again: Please explain why you think re-regulating the power supply will induce latency on the signal.
and what was the latency on the signal? all that local re-regulation doesn't come free.
Sorry, what? Exactly how do you propose that local re-regulation of the power supply affects the latency of a signal being processed by analog circuitry fed by that supply? (Hint: It's irrelevant for all but the most esoteric designs that combine the amplifier and the power regulator into one stage, and even then we're talking about audio-scale latencies, a/k/a phase responses.) Not sure how the parent comment got moderated "+1 Interesting".
My motherboard has optical SPDIF in and I'd never use a DAC in the PC environment, it's just too noisy.
I used to think the same thing too. Amazingly enough, you can engineer your way around the noise and create a very good sound card, at least from my informal experience with a handful of different cards. That said, most motherboard solutions (including laptop versions, unfortunately) are nearly worthless because of the price optimization pressure.
Some years ago, I had an undergraduate student design an audio I/O card for a research computer we were developing. She did a remarkably good job. Despite being buried in the middle of an environment with a fair bit of electrical noise, the card produced quite good sound that was essentially as quiet as it would be as if it were in a separate enclosure. She had proper power supply and ground isolation, local re-regulation, and ran all signal traces on internal layers with ground/power planes on the external faces of the PCB. Worked great.
Clever networks WILL intentionally route traffic they don't want over too congested a connection...
There was a talk I saw at MIT many, many years ago that, in hindsight, was brilliant, although I don't think even the speaker knew why. He was proposing that every packet get routed first to a randomly selected node, and thence to its intended destination. The idea being that this ensures even distribution of load across the entire network at small cost of bandwidth (it was a small cost that surprisingly was well below a factor of 2, but I don't recall what it was, the talk having been probably 20 years ago now). In the current political-economic climate with all of the big companies chafing at the bit to charge to route certain packets preferably, enforcing the first-destination-is-random requirement would entirely eliminate the issue.
Desktops vs laptops depends on the usage. If the intent is that these are used in the office, then desktops. They are cheaper to purchase, cheaper to find repairs for out of warranty, and harder for someone to walk off with. Don't get a laptop unless there's a real need to get a laptop. If people are going to be walking around with them for work reasons then fine, though it still might be good to have a desktops as well in case they forget their laptops at home or lose them or something.
If the NGO is doing anything that the current (or future) local government or other in-theatre groups might find less than agreeable, then no laptops. None. Too easy to steal when the employee is off site and use to target the NGO either politically or via cyberattack. If employees must work at home, then get them additional desktop units and VPN. If there absolutely must be a laptop, say for non-office presentations, then encrypt it and have it carry only the files necessary for the presentation, wiping the disk upon return. That's just the tip of the iceberg: you need to worry about flash drives, physical access, etc.
For NGOs, infrastructure isn't the only concern. It seems the OP should be asking about security too.
No, it sounds more like, "what are the current best practices in the field for this particular corner of IT space?" which is a perfectly valid question that gets posed from one professional to another thousands of times each day in a myriad of fields. Less professional practitioners might interpret it as a request to do the hard work for free, rather than a request for distillation of experience.
Do you think that when a cardiologist from Houston asks his colleague in Boston, "say, Bill, what's your experience with the Farbotz procedure?," it should be met with disdain? How would that be helpful?
You're welcome to take a bus, train, car or boat to your destination instead.
I've heard this argument over and over again, and it misses a very real factor of modern life: it is assumed by society that you will travel in such a way as to be expedient. I cannot say to my supervisor, "sure, I'll be glad to attend that important conference in Bejing, but it will take me six weeks to get there and another six to get back because I won't fly," and expect to still have a job. Electing to not fly by commercial airline to any destination that is outside of normal driving range, as evaluated not by you, but by everyone else, effectively eliminates most means of employment over unskilled labor. It means attending not your choice of college, but the local ones. It means interviewing only for positions that have, essentially, no required travel whatsoever. And remember that even when travel is not a requirement of employment, it is often a prerequisite to advancement. Modern life assumes travel by air. Your opportunities are severely stunted if you do not fly.
A more realistic view would be that you do not have a choice: flying is part of life.
Tel-aviv isn't even in the top 30 busiest airports. Comparing them to a US hub and claiming their method will scale is idiotic.
And yet, other passenger services like ticketing, check-in, passport control, and so on, scale just fine. Are you claiming that there's something special about security that it cannot scale? That it cannot be parallelized in exactly the same way? That would seem short-sighted or intentionally argumentative.
I've lost track of how many airports I've been through all over the world. Some have models of efficiency for security (like Zurich) where despite hardly any delays the smallest of potential physical threats are located and examined, some are maddening (like Athens) where the lengthy and unnecessary delays are caused by blatant incompetence, and some are just long and slow due to a combination of understaffing and poorly designed passenger control (like Nassau). The US airports I've been through usually fall somewhere near the middle on this scale, and given the level of scrutiny at Tel Aviv, I'd put it close to the top.
This link on Toshiba's web site suggests that it is a new connector design. They call it "Custom", although the same page also suggests the interface is still SATA 3G.
And yet, delays as you suggest do not happen in Tel Aviv because there are many, many interview stations, as many stations as there are ticket counter stations. It can be done.
Oh good! I was wondering when the season premier for Homeland Security Theater was going to be broadcast. This is yet!
In this episode, the knee-jerk reaction is to ban toner and ink cartridges, because like bottled water and cola, some Macgyver type will be able to whip together a fusion bomb in those few hours of flying, without anyone noticing!
Yet another ban for show rather than actual security. How about, gee, I dunno, profiling passengers? You know, be politically incorrect and actually practice forensic science for a change, and stop harassing and inconveniencing the rest of us?
Israel security is serious security, and not theatre, because it concentrates on the passenger, and not their belongings. When a simple pen can be wielded as a weapon in the right hands (or part of a set of eyeglasses, for that matter, or a screwdriver, or a knife from first class sharpened with a completely inconspicuous sharpening stone) it becomes clear that the belongings carried with a person do not matter nearly as much as the person and their intent. Reading intent can be done. The Israelis do it very, very well. Exceedingly well, actually, as anyone who has flown out of Tel Aviv can relate, especially if they were paying attention.
I am a scientist, one of the very few professions accorded a kind of informal diplomatic special status (when two states are leaning toward establishing diplomatic ties, they typically start with artistic and scientific exchanges). I was given what felt like the third degree when leaving Tel Aviv:
"Why were you in Israel?"
"I am a scientist, and I was invited to give a lecture."
(looking me up and down:) "You were invited to give a lecture?"
"Yes."
(icy tone) "Why would they invite *you*?"
"Because there was an international seminar in my field, and I do good work."
(continued icily) "Oh, really. Do you have a letter of invitation?"
"Yes, here it is."
"Do you have the program from the seminar?"
"Yes, here."
(getting accusitive) "Why can't I find your name?"
"Um, it's... just a mintute... here it is."
"What was the topic of your lecture?"
"Computational Neuroscience."
(pointedly) "Please give us the lecture."
"I'm sorry, what?"
(same inflection) "Please give us the lecture."
"OK... " (I start the lecture and am allowed to get quite a few sentences in to it before I'm stopped; they were in fact paying attention to what I was saying, although not distinctly interested in the content.)
"Where did you pack your bags?"
and so on for ten minutes. They wanted to know where I stayed, how I knew about that particular hotel, where I went during my free time, etc. When speaking with other travellers, I've since learned that's pretty standard. Did you notice above when I wrote about paying attention? There were two interrogators performing the interview for each passenger. One doing the talking, and one observing. The one talking said that she was a trainee, and that's why there were two. I've since learned that's standard operating procedure: it works to make the interviewee think of the interviewer in sympathetic light. Damned skilled.
That, my friends, is security. Banning containers of liquid or gel larger than 125 mL isn't. Hiding one's thoughts from skilled interrogation is much, much harder to do than hiding physical contraband.
Very good post, but I want to point out one thing ---
You need to be able to e-mail in and say "A drive has failed in this server," and have a new drive, already in its caddy, FedEx'd to you by the next morning.
*Serious* service is when the FedEx box arrives on your desktop before you even realized there was a problem because the server phoned home and let its manufacturer know a disk was starting to fail. I think NetApp offers that. Also, Dell has a four-hour grade service (perhaps even shorter-turn for the Big Boys) where you are guaranteed that the hardware will be back and running no more than four hours after you make the call.
Apple couldn't and can't match this level of service without a huge investment in infrastructure. In the server arena, speed is good, but reliability is far more important. The rest of the parent post is spot-on.
When the cost of safely delivering gasoline in-theatre is $400/gal, any non-trivial reduction in fuel consumption will result in a serious cost savings for the military. I'm all for this.
The diagrams (and you do have to click a few times to get to them) make it look like it's a standard horizontally opposed design that shoe-horns a 2-stroke style valving into the 4-stroke design by adding a second pair of pistons where the cylinder head would normally be that are running on a second set of connecting rods running on the camshaft such that the outer pistons are about 180 degrees out of phase with the traditional piston. Fuel injection and ignition come in at the side of the cylinder, as do intake and exhaust through ports.
There's not much in the way of technical detail that I can see, but on the face of it, it would appear that this design has something over twice the reciprocating mass as a traditional two- or four-stroke for the same cylinder diameter, no inherent possibility of valve re-timing for load (like the awesome Desmodronic style designs) or even advancement for RPM (like essentially every modern cam-driven overhead valve design). Also, the crankshaft now has to withstand the entire force of compression and combustion, unlike OHV designs where the case takes 1/2 of the force. There are three times as many connecting rods (outer pistons have two each). In traditional crankcases, airflow around the crankshaft is an important consideration for high efficiency / high specific power: as the pistons go up and down, the air inside the crankcase flows from the non-combustion side of one cylinder to the other; here there's the same issue in the lower crankcase, but in the upper part, there's no indication of where the air will go as the outer cylinder cycles up and down (not the fuel-air mixture that will be combusted, but the air within the outer part of the case under what they are calling the End Cover Assembly). That would be such a show-stopper that they must have addressed it, somehow, but damned if the diagrams don't make it look like there's a whole lot of air beating going on. I must be missing something.
Personally, having seen first-hand how strong a connecting rod needs to be, I'm wary of those long, slender dual connecting rods for the outer cylinders. Seems like an excellent place for flexing and harmonic vibration. Clearly, these folks are pretty good engineers (and I've been thinking about this design for all of 5 minutes, so the probability that I'm wrong, and they have solutions is high), but they would seem to me to be a potential longetivity nightmare.
I don't think it likely that the vast majority of future text editors will be able to handle UTF-8 correctly. I especially don't think it likely that using UTF-8 to include special symbols specific to individual programming languages will always display the correct symbols. (And, beside that fact, the field's experience with APL should steer us very strongly away from symbol-based programming; if you have no experience with APL, please take the advice from someone who has and stay away from that style of dense expression.)
In contrast, I do think it likely that effectively all future text editors will be able to handle ASCII correctly.
When I was a young graduate student building my first experimental setup, a professor who was older and wiser than me suggested that data should be saved in ASCII whenever possible because space was relatively inexpensive and time is always scarce. Although I thought that a bit odd, I did follow his advice.
The result? I can use almost any editor to read my data files from the very start of my career, closing in on 30 years ago. Just this past week, that was an important factor in salvaging some recently-collected data. In contrast, I can't always read the MS Word files -- an example of an extended character set -- from even a few years ago, and I sure as hell can't view them in almost any editor. Sure, with enough time, I can or could, figure out how to read them, but, as the wise professor rightly pointed out, time is scarce.
Thus, compatibility is important, and the most compatible data and document format is human-readable plain ASCII.
Furthremore, when a scientist has spent a number of years on a long-term research plan, the condensed versions of what he is studying become so well rehearsed that it gets memorized. I have stock phrases that I use when I want to describe this or that aspect of my work because, after giving dozens of presentations about it, they are the ones that work best. They are the most highly polished and refined. They communicate the idea well. And so, they often get trotted out with every manuscript or grant application. My students and post-docs learn to use the same phrasing because, flatly, it works.
None of the instances of those phrases or full sentences require attribution because they are all from the same motherspring of thought. We are the writers. And, as you might imagine, this might well produce a raft of false positives to a system that blindly compares text.
Not evil or a conspiracy or anything but a UI error that really isn't that terrible if people bother to read. And yes it is so the type of UI problem that I would expect in any program like this.
Yes on number one (no conspiracy) and No on number two (not a design flaw).
EGAD this is a serious design flaw. IN A VOTING MACHINE NO LESS! If UI errors like that are acceptable, would you want the same people writing code that runs, say, radiation therapy machines for cancer treatment? It's OK for the user to hit Engage Maximum Dosage by accident since they left their index finger on Use English too long? It's the user's fault?
I didn't think so.
So if it isn't an acceptable UI error, or one that the user should be blamed for, in a life-or-death medical situation, why is it acceptable in a voting machine that will determine the outcome of an election?
(And, actually, given that most voters will be speaking English, I'm not so certain about there being no conspiracy.)
Slashdot Mirror
What separates Apple from the rest (and a lot of people's money) is the cult-like status they've built amongst a small but big-spending segment of the population.
This used to be true. Then, Apple introduced the iPod and iPhone. Riding the subway to work -- in a city where it isn't the big-spending segment of the population that uses public transportation, unlike, say, NYC -- I see more iPods and iPhones than any other similar device, and fully 1/4 to 1/3 of the riders have them. It isn't a cult-like status anymore: Apple's market cap has exploded over the last few years because they are selling to everyone.
Just because your grandma can figure it out does not make it better.
Um, yes it does, when you are in the business of selling widgets you want Grandma to be able to use.
If, on the other hand, you are so mired in zealotry that you can't see that if Grandma can't get a widget to work, a widget that is intended for the mass market, it puts a serious limitation on that widgets eventual success, well, then, we don't have much to discuss.
Apple knows how to make a profit where none seems to exist, in a market that looks like it is wallowing, in an economy that sucks. Apple will become the largest market cap company in the next 12 - 18 months. And slashdotters will say "lame" and still not get it.
I got it the first time I held an original iPod nano and realized that it was not a tech toy, but an object of desire. I wanted it, not because it was cool, or could do things other devices I had couldn't do, but because it was sexy. That week, I bought Apple stock. It has since doubled, and I'm not yet thinking of selling.
Can't we just re-use the big DefCon displays from Wargames?
How about we have no indicator whatsoever? I know, it's a crazy, wild idea. Just hold on a sec and follow along. I know, I know, it's crazy, but hear me out. The current color-coded threat level has been derided as useless by the public. The government employees themselves don't pay attention to it. Raising the threat any higher means Bad Things Coming, and we can't lower it, for fear of the public and officials getting complacent. Homeland security is doing nothing because it's hands are tied, and the indicator didn't serve much purpose in the first place.
Maybe, just maybe, I know it's crazy-talk, we should have no indicator at all.
That's the problem. The solution is to write your own article, or to maintain your links.
Or, purchase rights to the work. The work is copyrighted, and you want to copy it. It's really quite simple. The owner will, very likely, sell you rights, at least if they are a publishing house.
I do that all the time for images that I use in my business-related presentations. For most copyrighted work that is owned by a company of some sort, it is relatively straightforward to approach their business development people and strike a deal. Usually this is as easy as finding the right page on their web site, making a selection of content and rights levels, and typing in your credit card number. At the worst, it's making a single phone call. No, it isn't free, and no, I don't think it should be. But most copyrighted work isn't the Obama HOPE portrait or a Pulitzer winning investigative essay, and so the prices are reasonable, at least in my experience.
i'm not sorry at all that you failed to provide the latency values i requested, and instead tried to confuse the issue.
you claim you have a card that processes audio... you claim to understand how to calculate the signal latency... what is it?
what is the latency on the monitor signal while recording at the same time? is it even possible?
i'm not sure how "shield it more" was moderated as "+1 interesting" and not "-14 duh, but the latency hit makes it unusable in any real world applications"
I don't have the figures, sorry. On the digital side, it was as you would expect for a digital processing chip, since we used a standard one. Unfortunately, since we're talking about nearly 20 years ago now, I don't recall which it was. On the analog side, it was by design effectively zero for the analog-bandwidth signals (yes, the circuitry likely had some group delay, but we're talking about analog signals here where delays are sub-microsecond).
Local re-regulation of power supplies is fundamentally an analog process, as is eliminating interference from a noisy environment (even when you use digital techniques, the underlying mechanisms and approaches are analog). Proper grounding and power supply isolation techniques are fundamentally an analog process. Although shielding is at the root of nearly all passive noise suppression, that's not the only thing that is done.
I'll ask again: Please explain why you think re-regulating the power supply will induce latency on the signal.
and what was the latency on the signal? all that local re-regulation doesn't come free.
Sorry, what? Exactly how do you propose that local re-regulation of the power supply affects the latency of a signal being processed by analog circuitry fed by that supply? (Hint: It's irrelevant for all but the most esoteric designs that combine the amplifier and the power regulator into one stage, and even then we're talking about audio-scale latencies, a/k/a phase responses.) Not sure how the parent comment got moderated "+1 Interesting".
My motherboard has optical SPDIF in and I'd never use a DAC in the PC environment, it's just too noisy.
I used to think the same thing too. Amazingly enough, you can engineer your way around the noise and create a very good sound card, at least from my informal experience with a handful of different cards. That said, most motherboard solutions (including laptop versions, unfortunately) are nearly worthless because of the price optimization pressure.
Some years ago, I had an undergraduate student design an audio I/O card for a research computer we were developing. She did a remarkably good job. Despite being buried in the middle of an environment with a fair bit of electrical noise, the card produced quite good sound that was essentially as quiet as it would be as if it were in a separate enclosure. She had proper power supply and ground isolation, local re-regulation, and ran all signal traces on internal layers with ground/power planes on the external faces of the PCB. Worked great.
Clever networks WILL intentionally route traffic they don't want over too congested a connection ...
There was a talk I saw at MIT many, many years ago that, in hindsight, was brilliant, although I don't think even the speaker knew why. He was proposing that every packet get routed first to a randomly selected node, and thence to its intended destination. The idea being that this ensures even distribution of load across the entire network at small cost of bandwidth (it was a small cost that surprisingly was well below a factor of 2, but I don't recall what it was, the talk having been probably 20 years ago now). In the current political-economic climate with all of the big companies chafing at the bit to charge to route certain packets preferably, enforcing the first-destination-is-random requirement would entirely eliminate the issue.
Too bad the idea wasn't adopted.
Desktops vs laptops depends on the usage. If the intent is that these are used in the office, then desktops. They are cheaper to purchase, cheaper to find repairs for out of warranty, and harder for someone to walk off with. Don't get a laptop unless there's a real need to get a laptop. If people are going to be walking around with them for work reasons then fine, though it still might be good to have a desktops as well in case they forget their laptops at home or lose them or something.
If the NGO is doing anything that the current (or future) local government or other in-theatre groups might find less than agreeable, then no laptops. None. Too easy to steal when the employee is off site and use to target the NGO either politically or via cyberattack. If employees must work at home, then get them additional desktop units and VPN. If there absolutely must be a laptop, say for non-office presentations, then encrypt it and have it carry only the files necessary for the presentation, wiping the disk upon return. That's just the tip of the iceberg: you need to worry about flash drives, physical access, etc.
For NGOs, infrastructure isn't the only concern. It seems the OP should be asking about security too.
Do my job for me?
No, it sounds more like, "what are the current best practices in the field for this particular corner of IT space?" which is a perfectly valid question that gets posed from one professional to another thousands of times each day in a myriad of fields. Less professional practitioners might interpret it as a request to do the hard work for free, rather than a request for distillation of experience.
Do you think that when a cardiologist from Houston asks his colleague in Boston, "say, Bill, what's your experience with the Farbotz procedure?," it should be met with disdain? How would that be helpful?
You're welcome to take a bus, train, car or boat to your destination instead.
I've heard this argument over and over again, and it misses a very real factor of modern life: it is assumed by society that you will travel in such a way as to be expedient. I cannot say to my supervisor, "sure, I'll be glad to attend that important conference in Bejing, but it will take me six weeks to get there and another six to get back because I won't fly," and expect to still have a job. Electing to not fly by commercial airline to any destination that is outside of normal driving range, as evaluated not by you, but by everyone else, effectively eliminates most means of employment over unskilled labor. It means attending not your choice of college, but the local ones. It means interviewing only for positions that have, essentially, no required travel whatsoever. And remember that even when travel is not a requirement of employment, it is often a prerequisite to advancement. Modern life assumes travel by air. Your opportunities are severely stunted if you do not fly.
A more realistic view would be that you do not have a choice: flying is part of life.
Tel-aviv isn't even in the top 30 busiest airports. Comparing them to a US hub and claiming their method will scale is idiotic.
And yet, other passenger services like ticketing, check-in, passport control, and so on, scale just fine. Are you claiming that there's something special about security that it cannot scale? That it cannot be parallelized in exactly the same way? That would seem short-sighted or intentionally argumentative.
I've lost track of how many airports I've been through all over the world. Some have models of efficiency for security (like Zurich) where despite hardly any delays the smallest of potential physical threats are located and examined, some are maddening (like Athens) where the lengthy and unnecessary delays are caused by blatant incompetence, and some are just long and slow due to a combination of understaffing and poorly designed passenger control (like Nassau). The US airports I've been through usually fall somewhere near the middle on this scale, and given the level of scrutiny at Tel Aviv, I'd put it close to the top.
The reviews on Amazon are pretty damning. Sounds like your experience was one of the more positive ones.
Looks like PCI Express x1
This link on Toshiba's web site suggests that it is a new connector design. They call it "Custom", although the same page also suggests the interface is still SATA 3G.
Looks like different connectors than the standard SATA / micro SATA set, so it won't fit into the huge base of existing laptops. Too bad.
And yet, delays as you suggest do not happen in Tel Aviv because there are many, many interview stations, as many stations as there are ticket counter stations. It can be done.
Oh good! I was wondering when the season premier for Homeland Security Theater was going to be broadcast. This is yet!
In this episode, the knee-jerk reaction is to ban toner and ink cartridges, because like bottled water and cola, some Macgyver type will be able to whip together a fusion bomb in those few hours of flying, without anyone noticing!
Yet another ban for show rather than actual security. How about, gee, I dunno, profiling passengers? You know, be politically incorrect and actually practice forensic science for a change, and stop harassing and inconveniencing the rest of us?
Israel security is serious security, and not theatre, because it concentrates on the passenger, and not their belongings. When a simple pen can be wielded as a weapon in the right hands (or part of a set of eyeglasses, for that matter, or a screwdriver, or a knife from first class sharpened with a completely inconspicuous sharpening stone) it becomes clear that the belongings carried with a person do not matter nearly as much as the person and their intent. Reading intent can be done. The Israelis do it very, very well. Exceedingly well, actually, as anyone who has flown out of Tel Aviv can relate, especially if they were paying attention.
I am a scientist, one of the very few professions accorded a kind of informal diplomatic special status (when two states are leaning toward establishing diplomatic ties, they typically start with artistic and scientific exchanges). I was given what felt like the third degree when leaving Tel Aviv:
"Why were you in Israel?" ... just a mintute ... here it is."
"I am a scientist, and I was invited to give a lecture."
(looking me up and down:) "You were invited to give a lecture?"
"Yes."
(icy tone) "Why would they invite *you*?"
"Because there was an international seminar in my field, and I do good work."
(continued icily) "Oh, really. Do you have a letter of invitation?"
"Yes, here it is."
"Do you have the program from the seminar?"
"Yes, here."
(getting accusitive) "Why can't I find your name?"
"Um, it's
"What was the topic of your lecture?"
"Computational Neuroscience."
(pointedly) "Please give us the lecture."
"I'm sorry, what?"
(same inflection) "Please give us the lecture."
"OK... " (I start the lecture and am allowed to get quite a few sentences in to it before I'm stopped; they were in fact paying attention to what I was saying, although not distinctly interested in the content.)
"Where did you pack your bags?"
and so on for ten minutes. They wanted to know where I stayed, how I knew about that particular hotel, where I went during my free time, etc. When speaking with other travellers, I've since learned that's pretty standard. Did you notice above when I wrote about paying attention? There were two interrogators performing the interview for each passenger. One doing the talking, and one observing. The one talking said that she was a trainee, and that's why there were two. I've since learned that's standard operating procedure: it works to make the interviewee think of the interviewer in sympathetic light. Damned skilled.
That, my friends, is security. Banning containers of liquid or gel larger than 125 mL isn't. Hiding one's thoughts from skilled interrogation is much, much harder to do than hiding physical contraband.
Very good post, but I want to point out one thing ---
You need to be able to e-mail in and say "A drive has failed in this server," and have a new drive, already in its caddy, FedEx'd to you by the next morning.
*Serious* service is when the FedEx box arrives on your desktop before you even realized there was a problem because the server phoned home and let its manufacturer know a disk was starting to fail. I think NetApp offers that. Also, Dell has a four-hour grade service (perhaps even shorter-turn for the Big Boys) where you are guaranteed that the hardware will be back and running no more than four hours after you make the call.
Apple couldn't and can't match this level of service without a huge investment in infrastructure. In the server arena, speed is good, but reliability is far more important. The rest of the parent post is spot-on.
When the cost of safely delivering gasoline in-theatre is $400/gal, any non-trivial reduction in fuel consumption will result in a serious cost savings for the military. I'm all for this.
The diagrams (and you do have to click a few times to get to them) make it look like it's a standard horizontally opposed design that shoe-horns a 2-stroke style valving into the 4-stroke design by adding a second pair of pistons where the cylinder head would normally be that are running on a second set of connecting rods running on the camshaft such that the outer pistons are about 180 degrees out of phase with the traditional piston. Fuel injection and ignition come in at the side of the cylinder, as do intake and exhaust through ports.
There's not much in the way of technical detail that I can see, but on the face of it, it would appear that this design has something over twice the reciprocating mass as a traditional two- or four-stroke for the same cylinder diameter, no inherent possibility of valve re-timing for load (like the awesome Desmodronic style designs) or even advancement for RPM (like essentially every modern cam-driven overhead valve design). Also, the crankshaft now has to withstand the entire force of compression and combustion, unlike OHV designs where the case takes 1/2 of the force. There are three times as many connecting rods (outer pistons have two each). In traditional crankcases, airflow around the crankshaft is an important consideration for high efficiency / high specific power: as the pistons go up and down, the air inside the crankcase flows from the non-combustion side of one cylinder to the other; here there's the same issue in the lower crankcase, but in the upper part, there's no indication of where the air will go as the outer cylinder cycles up and down (not the fuel-air mixture that will be combusted, but the air within the outer part of the case under what they are calling the End Cover Assembly). That would be such a show-stopper that they must have addressed it, somehow, but damned if the diagrams don't make it look like there's a whole lot of air beating going on. I must be missing something.
Personally, having seen first-hand how strong a connecting rod needs to be, I'm wary of those long, slender dual connecting rods for the outer cylinders. Seems like an excellent place for flexing and harmonic vibration. Clearly, these folks are pretty good engineers (and I've been thinking about this design for all of 5 minutes, so the probability that I'm wrong, and they have solutions is high), but they would seem to me to be a potential longetivity nightmare.
I don't think it likely that the vast majority of future text editors will be able to handle UTF-8 correctly. I especially don't think it likely that using UTF-8 to include special symbols specific to individual programming languages will always display the correct symbols. (And, beside that fact, the field's experience with APL should steer us very strongly away from symbol-based programming; if you have no experience with APL, please take the advice from someone who has and stay away from that style of dense expression.)
In contrast, I do think it likely that effectively all future text editors will be able to handle ASCII correctly.
When I was a young graduate student building my first experimental setup, a professor who was older and wiser than me suggested that data should be saved in ASCII whenever possible because space was relatively inexpensive and time is always scarce. Although I thought that a bit odd, I did follow his advice.
The result? I can use almost any editor to read my data files from the very start of my career, closing in on 30 years ago. Just this past week, that was an important factor in salvaging some recently-collected data. In contrast, I can't always read the MS Word files -- an example of an extended character set -- from even a few years ago, and I sure as hell can't view them in almost any editor. Sure, with enough time, I can or could, figure out how to read them, but, as the wise professor rightly pointed out, time is scarce.
Thus, compatibility is important, and the most compatible data and document format is human-readable plain ASCII.
Furthremore, when a scientist has spent a number of years on a long-term research plan, the condensed versions of what he is studying become so well rehearsed that it gets memorized. I have stock phrases that I use when I want to describe this or that aspect of my work because, after giving dozens of presentations about it, they are the ones that work best. They are the most highly polished and refined. They communicate the idea well. And so, they often get trotted out with every manuscript or grant application. My students and post-docs learn to use the same phrasing because, flatly, it works.
None of the instances of those phrases or full sentences require attribution because they are all from the same motherspring of thought. We are the writers. And, as you might imagine, this might well produce a raft of false positives to a system that blindly compares text.
Not evil or a conspiracy or anything but a UI error that really isn't that terrible if people bother to read. And yes it is so the type of UI problem that I would expect in any program like this.
Yes on number one (no conspiracy) and No on number two (not a design flaw).
EGAD this is a serious design flaw. IN A VOTING MACHINE NO LESS! If UI errors like that are acceptable, would you want the same people writing code that runs, say, radiation therapy machines for cancer treatment? It's OK for the user to hit Engage Maximum Dosage by accident since they left their index finger on Use English too long? It's the user's fault?
I didn't think so.
So if it isn't an acceptable UI error, or one that the user should be blamed for, in a life-or-death medical situation, why is it acceptable in a voting machine that will determine the outcome of an election?
(And, actually, given that most voters will be speaking English, I'm not so certain about there being no conspiracy.)