German roads have LOTS of speed limits, just the speed limit is artistic. You have time of day speed limits, type of traffic speed limits (and limits on overtaking), real-time speed limit on traffic depending on traffic conditions and so on. So there is "no speed limit" only if you are driving a car (all goods traffic has one) and only if you have happened to be in a portion that has no limit at that particular time. I frankly prefer to have one reasonable speed limit. For example 130km/h (80mph) like everywhere in Europe except UK, Holland and Serbia is fairly reasonable.
I recently drove twice across whole of Europe west-east and after that east-west. So speaking based on first hand experience - after driving in Germany you feel like a lemon run through a juice press. 2h driving in Germany is as tiring as driving across the whole of ex-Czechoslovakia and Hungary (7h). I can drive for 3-4h anywhere else non-stop. In Germany I have to take a break after two hours tops, usually less. There is just too many psychotics on the road which are compensating for something by driving at 120mph in sub-50m visibility, pouring rain and standing water on the motorway.
So, not surprisingly their accident statistics are nothing to shout about. Austria, Holland (which has MUCH much more cars per linear meter of road on the road), etc have much better ones.
Bingo!!! SQL is a "fortran" era language and looks abhorent to anyone who have been indoctrinated into object orientation.
However, there is a way out.
All you need is to map accessor methods in your objects onto SQL primitives. You fight your disgust with the fortran-likeness of SQL once or pay someone to fight it before you start coding.
Initially, you will have a much slower software compared to "normal" objects. However, you can now have as many threads as you like working on the same problem. You can have as many machines as you like. You can have machines in different locations. It all happens automagically if one condition is met - SQL is put there properly day 1 by design, not as retrofit and any "in-memory" operations which cache SQL locally are allowed only as special exemptions.
However, that is not what Joe Average Programmer does. He will copy all the date out of SQL, load it into objects (handcoded or through a persistence framework), work in memory and update SQL only from time to time. From there on Joe Average Progammer needs mutexes (you can pretty much forget about that concept with SQL accessors), HA frameworks, clustering, heartbeat and a LOT of other tripe that sits nicely and looks fancy on his CV.
You are obviously reading the "edition" of the bible compiled by puritans according to their own liking aka the King's James Version.
Get the full one. The Inclusive Bible or one of the literal translations. You may change some of your opinions on what the bible considers moral or immoral after reading it.
Funnily enough is closer to the original than the horrid Disney interpretation. It is probably matter of taste, but I like Pooh as drawn in the original Milne books, not the cute-n-cuddly Disney version.
and the lowest possible spec Nvidia Quadro NVS card. It is silent and can play any SD or HD content with flying colours. I will probably plug a GigE at some point and move it to the new network segment I am building which uses jumbo frames so NFS does not need to refrag.
The UI is plain Konqueror suitably skinned to make it pretty and LIRC commanding it via xvkbd. The player is VLC. Passes the wife test. Passes the 8 year old test as well.
Works a treat. By the way, streaming is an awful idea if you have a library. If you have access to the file you are always better off _READING_ it, not streaming it. In fact the latest generation of "streaming" is doing segment-by-segment file read and simulates streaming.
Didn't they make some hideously expensive RAM that was supposed to perform twice as well as normal RAM, but never lived up to the hype?
It actually does. Or at least used to all the way until Core came out. I have a dual P3 733MHz, Intel 840 chipset with a dual channel RAMBUS in the loft (old HP Kayak).
It performs better than a lot of P4s or anything prior to Core systems. The problem with Rambus was that it was so hideously expensive that noone could afford a sane amount of memory so any advantage achieved through RAM speedup was lost on VM swapping madly. If you manage to collect enough RDRAM from skip diving a RAMBUS system is actually worth having. I have managed to obtain 768M through skip diving which makes mine just reasonable enough for a workstation.
It is nowdays fairly irrelevant because Intel and AMD have optimised their CPUs for DDR RAM. They are loaded to the gills with cache and this nullifies the RDRAM lower access latency advantage.
And enhance the biggest disadvantage of trackpads - RSI.
I really do not want to think on how my hand will feel after 8-10h a day of pinching, zooming and rotating your finger on a touch surface. It is OK on a notebook or a phone once in a while. It will be an absolute ligament killer on a desktop when used in a work environment.
Rebooting the machine to do just banking? Joe Average User is not going to do that.
Also, what exactly makes you sure that you have booted your USB stick directly and not in a VM? The technique of loading a hypervisor first before loading the supposedly hardened machine has already been demonstrated a while back. A small hypervisor + control software is the ultimate super-trojan. Works with Windows, works with Linux works with anything. It is not that difficult to implement either. Each drive has reserved space to store it and as it is "emulating" the drive it can be 100% stealthy for the OS.
No, but Nationwide has been using nagware banners that tell the customers that they NEVER ask them to resync the device for a few months now. From there on to deduce what the scam is is fairly trivial. Even if the scam was not around when they started the hint contained in the warning is sufficient for anyone clued up enough to design the relevant trojan by now.
There is a similar scam doing the rounds in the UK targeting nationwide which uses a rather predictable 2-factor (the amount of money and last digits of destination account are used as a challenge).
The scam apparently asks you to "resync" your challenge device. If you do you end up sending a sum of money to a money mule.
While I agree with you regarding DivX I do not quite see your point on Matroska. MKV is Google's choice for VP8 standard so "scene" aside it is likely to be the _NATIVE_ container of choice in the next Android. It is not supported on the iPhone of course.
As far as the actual settings for iPhone, PSP, etc they are in the ffmpeg wiki. The first gen Iphones can barely do a 1.2Mbit stream at 320x240. Newer ones are OK and the iPad can play a native SD stream. As far as encoding the video my rule of thumb is to encode at about 20-25% of the res, chosing the bitrate by trial and error until I get good picture most of the time. For example 480x272 scaled up is more than enough for playing on 1024x768, it takes _MUCH_ less CPU than 1024x768 at low bitrate.
Unfortunately, applying this rule of thumb to the current crop of phones results in 1MB-1.5MB streams. That is not stream-able over 3G. Unless you are sitting on top of a HSPA tower you cannot stream such a video reliably. So you have to go down in res and it will look horrible.
There is a reason why Jobs insists on doing Facetime on WiFi only and it is very simple. It will not work with the resolution of iPhone 4 on 3G.
All that the precedent does is that it sends a warning to people to stop frivolously mixing in DMCA into what should be covered by contract law. The dongle is a mere enforcer of the contract so unless someone at MGE was very very daft GE would be in violation of a contract.
So while the first impression is that a pig has taken off, a more close inspection is showing that it is continuing on a ballistic trajectory after someone gave it some initial thrust. Not really flying.
Most likely they are not because they are outside metropolitan centers most of the time.
I used to work for one of the first femtocell outfits and we were telling them this as far back as 2001 - you will not be able to support the amount of calls in cities at some point without deploying true in-building coverage. This is especially valid for 3G.
In 3G the key parameter which is constantly varied is cell and phone transmit power. If either shouts too much the other one stops hearing it. In order to cover in-building from outside the cellco has to blast at tens (up to a 100) times higher power. Similarly, phones in-building have to jack up their power sky-high. Once you have enough of those you get sufficient interference to start dropping calls both in-building and on the street.
The 3G iphone in NY debacle was to be expected and it has _NO_ fix. That is the worst part. Because of the lack of interest from operators to small scale cells for operator-driven in-building coverage the development went the way of the femtocell. Femtocells cannot provide true in-building coverage because they cannot handle the number of idle (and active) clients required for this. They do not support key handover mechanisms that make 3G viable either.
The G5 however is a very bad choice of system for this. It has no space for extra drives. You are pretty much stuffed with the 2 drive bay and one more drive in the optical device bay. It is not really worth it for this. A 26£ ATX case from Maplin in the UK can accommodate 6 drives straight away and 6 more using two 40£ IcyBoxes or 4 more + DVD using a 17£ Silverstone SATA enclosure. With an old P3 motherboard and controllers and a top range Akasa PS the BOM comes to around 150£. No external drive unit or NAS unit can come even close in terms of value for the money to this one (and if you are a fan of GUIs you can run FreeNAS on it anyway).
You just demonstrated the biggest problem with perl from the perspective of an incompetent software development manager.
Incompetent software development managers expect that the language will define and enforce the coding standard for them.
No language ever does. You can write unmaintainable gibberish in Java, C++ or any other language for that matter and Perl is no different.The sole reason Perl is in pole position in the hate list is that gibberish can be delivered faster than in any other language so the manager blood pressure does not have the time to drop between wind-up events. What the pseudomanager is missing however is that "proof of concept" quality and even "production quality" code can be developed similarly fast. It takes a man month to develop the network side of a production quality network provisioning framework with perl. It takes tens of man years to do the same in Java and hundred in C++.
I had some european "fat" doormice (which is pretty much a smaller squirrel) do a few hundred pounds damage to my summer house. Pest from hell. Can dig, can climb, can go through sewerage and chew PVC sewerage pipework from the inside. Rats are lovely creatures compared to them.
So, frankly, I have very little compassion for the taxidermy part of this marketing stunt. The more of them end up stuffed or in the compost bin - the better.
The beer however is a different matter, I really do not see why one should pay that amount of money for a hangover of pangalactic proportions. That can be induced by much cheaper means.
The network peak is in the first hours in the evening. Morning (while it warms up) is relatively low consumption. So if it can work through to what in the UK is referred to as the "Eastenders hour" it is well worth it. Pity they built it in Cicily though, I would really like to see those built in quantity in the Sahara. More sun, hotter sun and less cloud. The distance across the mediteranean is well within the limits of modern tech for a high voltage line on the sea bed. High voltage is also considerably safer compared to gas or oil in an earthquake zone (which is pretty much all of the Med).
Ice melt is one of the worst indicators imaginable of antropogenous warming. Glaciers, snow and ice are more influenced by the dust we produce than by temperature.
Up to as recent as the 80-es the industrialized countries have been producing immense amounts of soot from buring coal, diesel, etc.The developing nations (including India) are now the main polluters and they are producing more and more of it. I am not surprised that Asian glaciers are retreating. Considering the complete lack of pollution control in India and China I would be surprised if they were not.
They are quite different because most of them offer their index and the article abstracts for free. You read a specific piece of information you are interested in and you usually read it because it has been quoted elsewhere.
That is quite different from the Sun paywall, the Economics/FT paywall or the WSJ paywall.
It does not look sufficiently impressive on film. A degraded bottle every few tens if not hundred meters does not make a good photo op. There is also a lot of dispersed plastic in the water itself. However, it is not something which you can picture, post and shout: "See how we ravished the Earth". Definitely nothing that can make the same kind of statement like a picture of a pelican dipped in BP produce.
No thank you. I can see their argument WiGig does a few cm and is a cable replacement tech. You cannot even send across the room with it. It is however yet another "microwave your brain" in the house.
I'd rather have PCIe over optical and a standard dockable optical connector that can tolerate at least a few thousands dock/undock cycles on my laptop. Is it that difficult?
Slashdot Mirror
German roads have LOTS of speed limits, just the speed limit is artistic. You have time of day speed limits, type of traffic speed limits (and limits on overtaking), real-time speed limit on traffic depending on traffic conditions and so on. So there is "no speed limit" only if you are driving a car (all goods traffic has one) and only if you have happened to be in a portion that has no limit at that particular time. I frankly prefer to have one reasonable speed limit. For example 130km/h (80mph) like everywhere in Europe except UK, Holland and Serbia is fairly reasonable.
I recently drove twice across whole of Europe west-east and after that east-west. So speaking based on first hand experience - after driving in Germany you feel like a lemon run through a juice press. 2h driving in Germany is as tiring as driving across the whole of ex-Czechoslovakia and Hungary (7h). I can drive for 3-4h anywhere else non-stop. In Germany I have to take a break after two hours tops, usually less. There is just too many psychotics on the road which are compensating for something by driving at 120mph in sub-50m visibility, pouring rain and standing water on the motorway.
So, not surprisingly their accident statistics are nothing to shout about. Austria, Holland (which has MUCH much more cars per linear meter of road on the road), etc have much better ones.
Bingo!!! SQL is a "fortran" era language and looks abhorent to anyone who have been indoctrinated into object orientation.
However, there is a way out.
All you need is to map accessor methods in your objects onto SQL primitives. You fight your disgust with the fortran-likeness of SQL once or pay someone to fight it before you start coding.
Initially, you will have a much slower software compared to "normal" objects. However, you can now have as many threads as you like working on the same problem. You can have as many machines as you like. You can have machines in different locations. It all happens automagically if one condition is met - SQL is put there properly day 1 by design, not as retrofit and any "in-memory" operations which cache SQL locally are allowed only as special exemptions.
However, that is not what Joe Average Programmer does. He will copy all the date out of SQL, load it into objects (handcoded or through a persistence framework), work in memory and update SQL only from time to time. From there on Joe Average Progammer needs mutexes (you can pretty much forget about that concept with SQL accessors), HA frameworks, clustering, heartbeat and a LOT of other tripe that sits nicely and looks fancy on his CV.
You are obviously reading the "edition" of the bible compiled by puritans according to their own liking aka the King's James Version.
Get the full one. The Inclusive Bible or one of the literal translations. You may change some of your opinions on what the bible considers moral or immoral after reading it.
Funnily enough is closer to the original than the horrid Disney interpretation. It is probably matter of taste, but I like Pooh as drawn in the original Milne books, not the cute-n-cuddly Disney version.
Agree.
I have built mine out of a end-of-line Fuji-Siemens from Maplin (dead silent): http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?ModuleNo=228173&C=email-newsletter&U=09P10-3-B54LY
and the lowest possible spec Nvidia Quadro NVS card. It is silent and can play any SD or HD content with flying colours. I will probably plug a GigE at some point and move it to the new network segment I am building which uses jumbo frames so NFS does not need to refrag.
The UI is plain Konqueror suitably skinned to make it pretty and LIRC commanding it via xvkbd. The player is VLC. Passes the wife test. Passes the 8 year old test as well.
Works a treat. By the way, streaming is an awful idea if you have a library. If you have access to the file you are always better off _READING_ it, not streaming it. In fact the latest generation of "streaming" is doing segment-by-segment file read and simulates streaming.
Didn't they make some hideously expensive RAM that was supposed to perform twice as well as normal RAM, but never lived up to the hype?
It actually does. Or at least used to all the way until Core came out. I have a dual P3 733MHz, Intel 840 chipset with a dual channel RAMBUS in the loft (old HP Kayak).
http://foswiki.sigsegv.cx/bin/view/Net/DebianXU800
It performs better than a lot of P4s or anything prior to Core systems. The problem with Rambus was that it was so hideously expensive that noone could afford a sane amount of memory so any advantage achieved through RAM speedup was lost on VM swapping madly. If you manage to collect enough RDRAM from skip diving a RAMBUS system is actually worth having. I have managed to obtain 768M through skip diving which makes mine just reasonable enough for a workstation.
It is nowdays fairly irrelevant because Intel and AMD have optimised their CPUs for DDR RAM. They are loaded to the gills with cache and this nullifies the RDRAM lower access latency advantage.
And enhance the biggest disadvantage of trackpads - RSI.
I really do not want to think on how my hand will feel after 8-10h a day of pinching, zooming and rotating your finger on a touch surface. It is OK on a notebook or a phone once in a while. It will be an absolute ligament killer on a desktop when used in a work environment.
Rebooting the machine to do just banking? Joe Average User is not going to do that.
Also, what exactly makes you sure that you have booted your USB stick directly and not in a VM? The technique of loading a hypervisor first before loading the supposedly hardened machine has already been demonstrated a while back. A small hypervisor + control software is the ultimate super-trojan. Works with Windows, works with Linux works with anything. It is not that difficult to implement either. Each drive has reserved space to store it and as it is "emulating" the drive it can be 100% stealthy for the OS.
No, but Nationwide has been using nagware banners that tell the customers that they NEVER ask them to resync the device for a few months now. From there on to deduce what the scam is is fairly trivial. Even if the scam was not around when they started the hint contained in the warning is sufficient for anyone clued up enough to design the relevant trojan by now.
There is a similar scam doing the rounds in the UK targeting nationwide which uses a rather predictable 2-factor (the amount of money and last digits of destination account are used as a challenge).
The scam apparently asks you to "resync" your challenge device. If you do you end up sending a sum of money to a money mule.
While I agree with you regarding DivX I do not quite see your point on Matroska. MKV is Google's choice for VP8 standard so "scene" aside it is likely to be the _NATIVE_ container of choice in the next Android. It is not supported on the iPhone of course.
As far as the actual settings for iPhone, PSP, etc they are in the ffmpeg wiki. The first gen Iphones can barely do a 1.2Mbit stream at 320x240. Newer ones are OK and the iPad can play a native SD stream. As far as encoding the video my rule of thumb is to encode at about 20-25% of the res, chosing the bitrate by trial and error until I get good picture most of the time. For example 480x272 scaled up is more than enough for playing on 1024x768, it takes _MUCH_ less CPU than 1024x768 at low bitrate.
Unfortunately, applying this rule of thumb to the current crop of phones results in 1MB-1.5MB streams. That is not stream-able over 3G. Unless you are sitting on top of a HSPA tower you cannot stream such a video reliably. So you have to go down in res and it will look horrible.
There is a reason why Jobs insists on doing Facetime on WiFi only and it is very simple. It will not work with the resolution of iPhone 4 on 3G.
Sweden is a good example. Until it learned the lesson and went neutral.
All that the precedent does is that it sends a warning to people to stop frivolously mixing in DMCA into what should be covered by contract law. The dongle is a mere enforcer of the contract so unless someone at MGE was very very daft GE would be in violation of a contract.
So while the first impression is that a pig has taken off, a more close inspection is showing that it is continuing on a ballistic trajectory after someone gave it some initial thrust. Not really flying.
Most likely they are not because they are outside metropolitan centers most of the time.
I used to work for one of the first femtocell outfits and we were telling them this as far back as 2001 - you will not be able to support the amount of calls in cities at some point without deploying true in-building coverage. This is especially valid for 3G.
In 3G the key parameter which is constantly varied is cell and phone transmit power. If either shouts too much the other one stops hearing it. In order to cover in-building from outside the cellco has to blast at tens (up to a 100) times higher power. Similarly, phones in-building have to jack up their power sky-high. Once you have enough of those you get sufficient interference to start dropping calls both in-building and on the street.
The 3G iphone in NY debacle was to be expected and it has _NO_ fix. That is the worst part. Because of the lack of interest from operators to small scale cells for operator-driven in-building coverage the development went the way of the femtocell. Femtocells cannot provide true in-building coverage because they cannot handle the number of idle (and active) clients required for this. They do not support key handover mechanisms that make 3G viable either.
The G5 however is a very bad choice of system for this. It has no space for extra drives. You are pretty much stuffed with the 2 drive bay and one more drive in the optical device bay. It is not really worth it for this. A 26£ ATX case from Maplin in the UK can accommodate 6 drives straight away and 6 more using two 40£ IcyBoxes or 4 more + DVD using a 17£ Silverstone SATA enclosure. With an old P3 motherboard and controllers and a top range Akasa PS the BOM comes to around 150£. No external drive unit or NAS unit can come even close in terms of value for the money to this one (and if you are a fan of GUIs you can run FreeNAS on it anyway).
You just demonstrated the biggest problem with perl from the perspective of an incompetent software development manager.
Incompetent software development managers expect that the language will define and enforce the coding standard for them.
No language ever does. You can write unmaintainable gibberish in Java, C++ or any other language for that matter and Perl is no different.The sole reason Perl is in pole position in the hate list is that gibberish can be delivered faster than in any other language so the manager blood pressure does not have the time to drop between wind-up events. What the pseudomanager is missing however is that "proof of concept" quality and even "production quality" code can be developed similarly fast. It takes a man month to develop the network side of a production quality network provisioning framework with perl. It takes tens of man years to do the same in Java and hundred in C++.
What he thinks or says is irrelevant.
You can judge that from Google job spec and recruitment policies and they are very clear.
C++ is solidly in first place. There is usually a honorary mentioning of C, Python and Java.
Perl is _NEVER_ present in a Google spec.
I had some european "fat" doormice (which is pretty much a smaller squirrel) do a few hundred pounds damage to my summer house. Pest from hell. Can dig, can climb, can go through sewerage and chew PVC sewerage pipework from the inside. Rats are lovely creatures compared to them.
So, frankly, I have very little compassion for the taxidermy part of this marketing stunt. The more of them end up stuffed or in the compost bin - the better.
The beer however is a different matter, I really do not see why one should pay that amount of money for a hangover of pangalactic proportions. That can be induced by much cheaper means.
The network peak is in the first hours in the evening. Morning (while it warms up) is relatively low consumption. So if it can work through to what in the UK is referred to as the "Eastenders hour" it is well worth it. Pity they built it in Cicily though, I would really like to see those built in quantity in the Sahara. More sun, hotter sun and less cloud. The distance across the mediteranean is well within the limits of modern tech for a high voltage line on the sea bed. High voltage is also considerably safer compared to gas or oil in an earthquake zone (which is pretty much all of the Med).
Ice melt is one of the worst indicators imaginable of antropogenous warming. Glaciers, snow and ice are more influenced by the dust we produce than by temperature.
Up to as recent as the 80-es the industrialized countries have been producing immense amounts of soot from buring coal, diesel, etc.The developing nations (including India) are now the main polluters and they are producing more and more of it. I am not surprised that Asian glaciers are retreating. Considering the complete lack of pollution control in India and China I would be surprised if they were not.
They are quite different because most of them offer their index and the article abstracts for free. You read a specific piece of information you are interested in and you usually read it because it has been quoted elsewhere.
That is quite different from the Sun paywall, the Economics/FT paywall or the WSJ paywall.
Correction - that should be:
3. Tits.
Not quite so.
It does not look sufficiently impressive on film. A degraded bottle every few tens if not hundred meters does not make a good photo op. There is also a lot of dispersed plastic in the water itself. However, it is not something which you can picture, post and shout: "See how we ravished the Earth". Definitely nothing that can make the same kind of statement like a picture of a pelican dipped in BP produce.
No thank you. I can see their argument WiGig does a few cm and is a cable replacement tech. You cannot even send across the room with it. It is however yet another "microwave your brain" in the house.
I'd rather have PCIe over optical and a standard dockable optical connector that can tolerate at least a few thousands dock/undock cycles on my laptop. Is it that difficult?
Your fingers and toes rotting away seems like a good place to start. The temperature there is usually way under 37.