There are DC converter board PSUs that fit into an ATX plug. http://linitx.com/product_info.php?cPath=24_55&pro ducts_id=1101. No real problem here.
I am actually more concerned about via spec-ing yet another quiet/compact motherboard without a mandatory thermals/airflow spec. As a result the first generation of cases will most likely be a set of completely horrid noisy boxes.
Provided that the bulb is easily replaceable it can be considered a consumable. Same as with projectors. The bulbs there usually have a 3 months warranty and last for a few hundred hours at most.
As far as the mainboards - disagree. A Pentium motherboard which has a good quality audio (every ITX I tried had a superb one which is definitely not the case for most cheap Intel/AMD MBs where you can hear the f*** voltage regulator noise in the audio), a hardware encryption accelerator, a minimal spec video card which still has a built-in MPEG decoder (intel onboard does not have that), etc will pull a hefty 500$ at least. Compared to that the sub-200 price of a mini-ITX is quite competitive. If you do not need any one of these features - you are right. If you need just one, the price evens up. If you need 2+ of these features the mini-ITX wins and that is actually the primary niche for these MBs. They are intended for living room systems where a good audio, decent video playback are key features and the encryption is for futureproofing when all content will go around AES-ed.
As far as the cases - that is not correct either. You are looking at living room cases like Silverstone and the like. These are in the 200-300$ range for both mATX and mini-ITX. No difference whatsoever. If we look at the other major application of mini-ITX, the low power consumption rackmount its case is actually cheaper (http://www.icp-epia.co.uk/) than 1U and 2U cases for Pentiums and Athlons.
So, while you may be right for your particular application (I guess this is NAS sitting in your living room), you are wrong for most other niches where mini-ITX is being used.
That is the exact reason why I am comparing Boulder to Cambridge. Comparable University population, comparable income as well (with all the business parks around cambridge it has average income in a similar bracket). The difference is in the way it is being developed.
South Cambridgeshire District Council and Cambridge City Council try to promote cycling by penalising cars without doing any effort whatsoever to award cycling and pedestrians. The pedestrian zone in mid-town is laughable in its size and does not cover key streets which are long overdue to be pedestrianised. There are buses running on them instead following the time proven UK approach that "Some animals (especially Stagecoach PLC) are more equal than the rest". The cycling network is unmaintained and has deliberate obstructions all over it so you cannot use it to get fast from point A to B. In addition to that it is outright dangerous in many places due to reduced visibility. Using the cycling paths parallel to most roads is suicidal because the stop lines for cars are drawn after the cycle path and the cars get out of the streets at speed without you seeing them and them seeing you (in fact the priority there should be reversed). The public transport deliberately disallows cycles and penalises cyclists as a matter of principle. All new developments are built without cycling in mind with low visibility, deliberate obstructions and "fake" cycle paths that have to cross a major road at least 5 times just because. I can continue for a long time, but the fact is a fact. The supposedly "green" politcritterz in the local (and country) government in Britain are a lying POS as far as any green development is concerned.
Well, and the results are obvious: compared to Boulder Cambridge looks sickeningly obese (I am not even trying to compare to MK and other fat-country-UK places like Hull).
Oh, and quite obviously - Boulder population looks sickeningly fit. With my UK-commuter-style beer gut I felt like a fat slob.
So there is correlation - build a healthy place and the people who live in there are healthy.
You are comparing apples and oranges. There are places in Colorado which are way more advanced the UK as far as pedestrianisation and cycling facilities.
Boulder and surrounding areas is a prime example - you can get on foot from anywhere to anywhere (there are others as well). Most of the city center is a huge no-car zone which is something that I did not expect to find outside Europe. Once you get outside the no-car area you still have cycling lanes on every road as well as cycle paths which combine into a huge cycling network that spans at least several miles out and penetrates into the neighbouring suburbia and business parks. All buses carry cycle racks and the driver is happy to pick up your cycle and drop it off.
After suffering from the half hearted assinine approach to cycling in Cambridge which is supposed to be the "greenest" and "cycliest" UK city, I felt like I have died and went to heaven. It simply felt unreal. No deliberate obstructions on the cycle paths with bollards. Sufficient and properly positioned car parking so that people are not forced to park on top of cycle lanes. All cycle paths are maintained and have proper visibility. Compared to that in Cambridge the average visibility on most cycle paths drops to under 10m in mid-summer due to the city council not giving a flying fuck about cutting any branches and doing any maintenance.
USA is not a sprawl all over and some portions of the sprawl are built in a healthier and more cycling/pedestrian friendly manner than anything in the UK and possibly most of EU. When looking at Boulder, the only comparison I can think of are the richer neighbourhoods in Finland (like Espoo). And even Espoo does not have a sky-run/cycle network all over like Boulder. It is confined to the center and the area where it connects to the mainland.
Modern ones last 20+ years. The numbers are not for solar by the way. They are the same for most types of green power. 7-10 years for wind generation, same for QR (less maintenance, but more expensive), 7-10 years for solar panels outside the tropics, 7-10 years for heat collectors of various kind when used just for heating and so on. In fact, you get better return on improving energy efficiency via improving insulation, more efficient appliances, etc. So it is a better idea to do all these first.
Read them both. While the statistics are correct (mine roughly the same), the technical bit is typical "I shall use naked Postfix or die" technological rococo (not to use harsher words).
I am aware that implementing a generic expandable grey/black/integrity-listing framework is much more difficult in "naked" Postfix compared to Exim and Sendmail, but it is not that difficult. Postfix has a policy server and it mostly works. In fact I know quite a few people who have taken my grey/black/connection-sequence stuff for Exim and have ported it to the Postfix policy server in less than a day or so (with testing included).
As far as Unlisting that is even more rococo and looks hideously ugly. It is of course a matter of taste, but I would rather use a database behind the MX-es to exchange state data and do it properly. It is NOT more complex. In fact it is less complex and much more reliable. 5-10 lines worth of Exim config or 5-10 lines worth of Milter perl code.
7-11 years depending on the region, installation, etc for a suitable system. Usually longer than most people own a house. This is the primary reason why they are so rare.
That is besides the article being absolute and utter bollocks as far how and why you do this.
First, at least some botnets will hit secondary MX-es first. The reason for this is because one person too many out there think that the secondary MX gets invoked only when the first one fails and do not put full sets of antispam software on it.
Second, as far as detecting SPAM is concerned the fact that a system has tried your first MX is valuable information. So while the first MX may not accept the message it should still be available to record the attempt. As a result, if you have multiple level different priority MX-es you can vastly improve on standard greylisting. The first MX resets with the usual "greylisted for 300 seconds, come again". After that system expects that you appear on the second, third, etc in the correct order and try on all MX-es of equal value before going up. In other words your connection pattern should follow the one of a normal MTA. Zombie writers are too lazy to do that (and that takes too much resources as far as they are concerned) so they fail the test and get their greylist timeout pushed up. Normal MTAs get their greylist timeout adjusted down and may even be allowed in on one of the last MX-es. I have done that using exim/mysql and I know a few other people who do that as well (trivial actually). In fact, looking at my mail logs it looks like yahoo does something similar for receiving mail and I can bet that they are not the only ones.
IIRC - the bacteria is not common for the US. In fact it is uncommon for most of EU.
It is Lactobacillum Bulgaricum and relatives which are originally from the Balkan peninsula (you can guess from the name). Even now in the remote mountain areas of Bulgaria, Macedonia, Northern Greece and South Eastern Serbia if you leave milk outside it has a very fair chance of becoming a proper yogurt naturally. This does not happen every time though and that is the reason why people add some of the old yogurt in the new milk to start the fermentation. The difference between Lactobacillum produced yogurt and other yogurts is that lactobacillum can ferment even buffalo milk to yogurt without starting to produce nasty ketones and the smelly stuff we usually associate with bad milk. In addition to that once the fermentation has taken place the product is surprisingly stable and can survive up to several weeks in the fridge without any extra preservatives. For reasons not completely understood even today outside its native region native Lactobacillum does not last long so any place using it has to refresh its stocks regularly from the Balkans.
Danone got their hands on Lactobacillum and started producing decent yogurt after buying the biggest Bulgarian dairy food producer Serdika in the 90-es. Before that their yogurt had the taste of condensed rancid piss fortified with non-sour cream (same as the yogurt still made by most other manufacturers nowdays). Now it is more or less edible. It is not anywhere close to the real stuff which you can get in the Bulgarian, Greek or Macedonian mountains (I sometimes feel like killing someone for a jug of buffalo yogurt), but it can actually be eaten.
You missunderstood my point. We are in "violent agreement". That is exactly what I said.
In the EU it is much more difficult to buy a large policy package especially if it comes along with tax breaks like those Carolinas currently hand out to anything with "high tech" in the name (Dell was the first to notice this one).
In addition to this Google (and MSFT for that matter) needs a place which combines a number of factors. It needs to be an economical backwater so it can buy land cheaply and have cheap labour costs. At the same time it needs it very well connected and with reliable utilities. The EU used to have only one place like this - Ireland. That is no more, as its standard of living and prices picked up fast above the EU average country level. Gone are the days when the biggest Irish import was green bananas and biggest export was half-ripe bananas. So no wonder that Google, MSFT and the like are looking at places like the Carolinas for the next Death Star.
Wrong. These are all relatively high valued stocks so your ROI will be minimal.
If you invest based on 3rd party development you need to invest into something that is currently valued low and will grow by a large factor based on the development, taking any relevant risk in the process.
It is time to invest into one of the nearly bankrupt transatlantic line companies. Google quite obviously has decided to limit their expansion in EU and build on the other side of the fat cable instead. Not a bad idea after all - less regulation (especially related to all the new services they are trying to push), easier to buy local politicians at the cost of the latency of the transatlantic lines. They are also most likely close to hitting the wall on what they can build in Ireland due to the rise in the prices (caused by them amidst everyone else) and building in any other EU country with good long distance links is hugely expensive.
This means that the price of transatlantic capacity and revenues from it will now go up again.
Essentially the current situation where the only "profitable" cables are the ones to India and the Gulf will revert to the old one where the "across-the-pond" ones will become the most profitable.
There is a well known solution to it, but it will take a revolution, nuclear war or several complete stock market meltdowns with their accompanying recessions for the USA to implement it.
Mandatory hold time on stocks takes care of this.
Essentially, pump-n-dumps mathematically are nothing, but yet another form of a positive feedback loop. The best way to deal with feedback loops is to dampen them. It is even better if the hold time is proportional to the rate at which a stock has moved prior to the purchase.
By the way, this is not just related to.PK pump-n-dump. The major stock markets are becoming more and more volatile due to "quantitative strategies" which in many cases is just another way for calling day trading. It is only a matter of time until we have meltdown like the one described in Arthur Clarke's part 2 of "Meeting with Rama".
Not just that. Most shoulder based missiles and small non-radar AAA have a laser distance meter integrated in the sights. Some of the detection is based on detecting that as well - there are some well known anecodotal stories about policemen in the UK being called to their bosses for keelhauling after trying to use police speed laser guns on passing RAF Harriers.
8 hours per day is maximum and even 8 hours per day every day is not sustainable for more than a month or so if you want to produce quality work (it is OK if these are not solid 8 hours and you distract yourself with email, meetings, studying, etc). If you work more than 8 hours per day (in fact more like 5-6 solid coding hours) you end up producing crap code and spending more time on maintaining it and fixing issues. As a result you end up going down a vicious circle. The more you work per day, the worse your code quality and the more time you need to maintain it. Recursion - see recursion.
The best thing to do is to break the vicious circle once and for all and do it when your brain is fresh. Coming back from a holiday is one of the best times to do it. I did it after I saw the number of bugs in something which I wrote by deadline just before going on holiday finishing at 4am. And I have never regretted this from that time onwards.
I have so far observed it only once or twice on a JVC HD TV connected to an upscaling Philips DVD. It happens after the TV has been switched off from the mains. One more coffin into the idea of "turning your kit off to save energy" as far as Joe Average Consumer is concerned. Even in this case the Philips complains loudly onscreen and uses 480 instead of 720 or 1080i. So you still do not lose picture.
Good, now after you have vented your spleen let me correct some of your facts and reasoning:
First, based on my experience other countries lead in the "slaverunner" routine. In fact, I would prefer to work for all of the American bosses I have worked for in my career any day compared to some of the British ones I have encountered. With nearly all of Americans the result was the most important item and how many hours did you clock on it was irrelevant. Similarly, most of them defined sane and achieveable deadlines instead of a UK-style deadline which is known to be blown beforehand. There is a reason why Britain is the only EU country to start throwing toys out of the pram every time the EU working time directive is discussed. And you can guess what it is.
Second, any IT person complaining about antisocial working conditions should look at the BioTech industry. They have take the leaf out of the IT book and have gone where no IT PHB Slaver has dreamed to go before. IT is a family friendly calm 9-5 desk job by comparison.
10 a day is better than ten in total. You will be surprised how few Tomahawks (or Granits in the Russian case) are actually carried by most ships capable of launching them.
The contract is awarded to a nuclear shop so I suspect that the thing will have an integrated reactor which makes it even more interesting.
What goes around, comes around. After realising that missile tech is too expensive, Iraq tried to build the Babylon gun with a 1000 miles range. For the same reason (the missiles being too expensive) Russians have now developed a gun launcher (forgot the name) to fire high altitude atmospheric probes instead of the old missile system . US nearly did that with the HARP, but heavy lobbying by the aerospace industry killed that. And now we come full circle with US looking at long range guns for cost reasons.
Some of the Ranger quest levels are a fine example of what you are describing. They are a spiral maze made of trees. You can spend your time fighting along the maze or you can take a big axe and chop your way through. Or zap a wand of fire or throw a few fireballs. Voila - trees begone.
Similarly in nethack you can permanently freeze water into ice and make it walkable on top, destroy walls, obstructions, etc and dead corpses stay for a considerable amount of time. Unfortunately the big beast corpses in the current release do not form a nice hideout behind which you can hide. Realistically a dead dragon, umber hulk or indricoterium should make a perfect obstruction to enemy projectiles and some spells. So far it does not, but I can bet that a few more releases down the line it will.
You are comparing apples and oranges. Wrong comparison.
Nvidia is taking flak because the sole reason for the "binary" its own asinine behaviour (same as ATI with the newer Radeon ATI-supplied drivers).
Fluendo intends to provide a service by implementing specs for which the originating party requires a licensing fee.
So the right comparison is not to Nvidia (or ATI for that matter), but to Digium. Digium provides a machine tied (oh what a sacrilege) closed source (oh what a crime) implementation of the g729a codec (oh...). The requirement for licensing it is set by the parties who wrote the spec initially and as most ITU specs it is not royalty free. You have to pay and Digium is the only linux company providing that service. And guess what - people buy it. In large quantities actually as it is essential for interoperability with other systems out there.
So unless they f*** up their business model it will work and will be considered a valuable service to the linux/bsd running public (nothing like Nvidia/ATI asinine in-kernel graphic stunts).
And this is the exact reason why codecs are currently the most popular vehicle for Trojan deployment and torjan browser helper DLLs are a thing of the past.
Slashdot Mirror
There are DC converter board PSUs that fit into an ATX plug. http://linitx.com/product_info.php?cPath=24_55&pro ducts_id=1101. No real problem here.
I am actually more concerned about via spec-ing yet another quiet/compact motherboard without a mandatory thermals/airflow spec. As a result the first generation of cases will most likely be a set of completely horrid noisy boxes.
Provided that the bulb is easily replaceable it can be considered a consumable. Same as with projectors. The bulbs there usually have a 3 months warranty and last for a few hundred hours at most.
You are not entirely correct.
As far as the mainboards - disagree. A Pentium motherboard which has a good quality audio (every ITX I tried had a superb one which is definitely not the case for most cheap Intel/AMD MBs where you can hear the f*** voltage regulator noise in the audio), a hardware encryption accelerator, a minimal spec video card which still has a built-in MPEG decoder (intel onboard does not have that), etc will pull a hefty 500$ at least. Compared to that the sub-200 price of a mini-ITX is quite competitive. If you do not need any one of these features - you are right. If you need just one, the price evens up. If you need 2+ of these features the mini-ITX wins and that is actually the primary niche for these MBs. They are intended for living room systems where a good audio, decent video playback are key features and the encryption is for futureproofing when all content will go around AES-ed.
As far as the cases - that is not correct either. You are looking at living room cases like Silverstone and the like. These are in the 200-300$ range for both mATX and mini-ITX. No difference whatsoever. If we look at the other major application of mini-ITX, the low power consumption rackmount its case is actually cheaper (http://www.icp-epia.co.uk/) than 1U and 2U cases for Pentiums and Athlons.
So, while you may be right for your particular application (I guess this is NAS sitting in your living room), you are wrong for most other niches where mini-ITX is being used.
No. "Infomercial" springs to mind.
That is the exact reason why I am comparing Boulder to Cambridge. Comparable University population, comparable income as well (with all the business parks around cambridge it has average income in a similar bracket). The difference is in the way it is being developed.
South Cambridgeshire District Council and Cambridge City Council try to promote cycling by penalising cars without doing any effort whatsoever to award cycling and pedestrians. The pedestrian zone in mid-town is laughable in its size and does not cover key streets which are long overdue to be pedestrianised. There are buses running on them instead following the time proven UK approach that "Some animals (especially Stagecoach PLC) are more equal than the rest". The cycling network is unmaintained and has deliberate obstructions all over it so you cannot use it to get fast from point A to B. In addition to that it is outright dangerous in many places due to reduced visibility. Using the cycling paths parallel to most roads is suicidal because the stop lines for cars are drawn after the cycle path and the cars get out of the streets at speed without you seeing them and them seeing you (in fact the priority there should be reversed). The public transport deliberately disallows cycles and penalises cyclists as a matter of principle. All new developments are built without cycling in mind with low visibility, deliberate obstructions and "fake" cycle paths that have to cross a major road at least 5 times just because. I can continue for a long time, but the fact is a fact. The supposedly "green" politcritterz in the local (and country) government in Britain are a lying POS as far as any green development is concerned.
Well, and the results are obvious: compared to Boulder Cambridge looks sickeningly obese (I am not even trying to compare to MK and other fat-country-UK places like Hull).
Oh, and quite obviously - Boulder population looks sickeningly fit. With my UK-commuter-style beer gut I felt like a fat slob. So there is correlation - build a healthy place and the people who live in there are healthy.
You are comparing apples and oranges. There are places in Colorado which are way more advanced the UK as far as pedestrianisation and cycling facilities.
Boulder and surrounding areas is a prime example - you can get on foot from anywhere to anywhere (there are others as well). Most of the city center is a huge no-car zone which is something that I did not expect to find outside Europe. Once you get outside the no-car area you still have cycling lanes on every road as well as cycle paths which combine into a huge cycling network that spans at least several miles out and penetrates into the neighbouring suburbia and business parks. All buses carry cycle racks and the driver is happy to pick up your cycle and drop it off.
After suffering from the half hearted assinine approach to cycling in Cambridge which is supposed to be the "greenest" and "cycliest" UK city, I felt like I have died and went to heaven. It simply felt unreal. No deliberate obstructions on the cycle paths with bollards. Sufficient and properly positioned car parking so that people are not forced to park on top of cycle lanes. All cycle paths are maintained and have proper visibility. Compared to that in Cambridge the average visibility on most cycle paths drops to under 10m in mid-summer due to the city council not giving a flying fuck about cutting any branches and doing any maintenance.
USA is not a sprawl all over and some portions of the sprawl are built in a healthier and more cycling/pedestrian friendly manner than anything in the UK and possibly most of EU. When looking at Boulder, the only comparison I can think of are the richer neighbourhoods in Finland (like Espoo). And even Espoo does not have a sky-run/cycle network all over like Boulder. It is confined to the center and the area where it connects to the mainland.
Read the acknowledgements at the end of the articles. They are very selfexplanatory.
Modern ones last 20+ years. The numbers are not for solar by the way. They are the same for most types of green power. 7-10 years for wind generation, same for QR (less maintenance, but more expensive), 7-10 years for solar panels outside the tropics, 7-10 years for heat collectors of various kind when used just for heating and so on.
In fact, you get better return on improving energy efficiency via improving insulation, more efficient appliances, etc. So it is a better idea to do all these first.
Yep.
Read them both. While the statistics are correct (mine roughly the same), the technical bit is typical "I shall use naked Postfix or die" technological rococo (not to use harsher words).
I am aware that implementing a generic expandable grey/black/integrity-listing framework is much more difficult in "naked" Postfix compared to Exim and Sendmail, but it is not that difficult. Postfix has a policy server and it mostly works. In fact I know quite a few people who have taken my grey/black/connection-sequence stuff for Exim and have ported it to the Postfix policy server in less than a day or so (with testing included).
As far as Unlisting that is even more rococo and looks hideously ugly. It is of course a matter of taste, but I would rather use a database behind the MX-es to exchange state data and do it properly. It is NOT more complex. In fact it is less complex and much more reliable. 5-10 lines worth of Exim config or 5-10 lines worth of Milter perl code.
7-11 years depending on the region, installation, etc for a suitable system. Usually longer than most people own a house. This is the primary reason why they are so rare.
First, at least some botnets will hit secondary MX-es first. The reason for this is because one person too many out there think that the secondary MX gets invoked only when the first one fails and do not put full sets of antispam software on it.
Second, as far as detecting SPAM is concerned the fact that a system has tried your first MX is valuable information. So while the first MX may not accept the message it should still be available to record the attempt. As a result, if you have multiple level different priority MX-es you can vastly improve on standard greylisting. The first MX resets with the usual "greylisted for 300 seconds, come again". After that system expects that you appear on the second, third, etc in the correct order and try on all MX-es of equal value before going up. In other words your connection pattern should follow the one of a normal MTA. Zombie writers are too lazy to do that (and that takes too much resources as far as they are concerned) so they fail the test and get their greylist timeout pushed up. Normal MTAs get their greylist timeout adjusted down and may even be allowed in on one of the last MX-es. I have done that using exim/mysql and I know a few other people who do that as well (trivial actually). In fact, looking at my mail logs it looks like yahoo does something similar for receiving mail and I can bet that they are not the only ones.
IIRC - the bacteria is not common for the US. In fact it is uncommon for most of EU.
It is Lactobacillum Bulgaricum and relatives which are originally from the Balkan peninsula (you can guess from the name). Even now in the remote mountain areas of Bulgaria, Macedonia, Northern Greece and South Eastern Serbia if you leave milk outside it has a very fair chance of becoming a proper yogurt naturally. This does not happen every time though and that is the reason why people add some of the old yogurt in the new milk to start the fermentation. The difference between Lactobacillum produced yogurt and other yogurts is that lactobacillum can ferment even buffalo milk to yogurt without starting to produce nasty ketones and the smelly stuff we usually associate with bad milk. In addition to that once the fermentation has taken place the product is surprisingly stable and can survive up to several weeks in the fridge without any extra preservatives. For reasons not completely understood even today outside its native region native Lactobacillum does not last long so any place using it has to refresh its stocks regularly from the Balkans.
Danone got their hands on Lactobacillum and started producing decent yogurt after buying the biggest Bulgarian dairy food producer Serdika in the 90-es. Before that their yogurt had the taste of condensed rancid piss fortified with non-sour cream (same as the yogurt still made by most other manufacturers nowdays). Now it is more or less edible. It is not anywhere close to the real stuff which you can get in the Bulgarian, Greek or Macedonian mountains (I sometimes feel like killing someone for a jug of buffalo yogurt), but it can actually be eaten.
You missunderstood my point. We are in "violent agreement". That is exactly what I said.
In the EU it is much more difficult to buy a large policy package especially if it comes along with tax breaks like those Carolinas currently hand out to anything with "high tech" in the name (Dell was the first to notice this one).
In addition to this Google (and MSFT for that matter) needs a place which combines a number of factors. It needs to be an economical backwater so it can buy land cheaply and have cheap labour costs. At the same time it needs it very well connected and with reliable utilities. The EU used to have only one place like this - Ireland. That is no more, as its standard of living and prices picked up fast above the EU average country level. Gone are the days when the biggest Irish import was green bananas and biggest export was half-ripe bananas. So no wonder that Google, MSFT and the like are looking at places like the Carolinas for the next Death Star.
Wrong. These are all relatively high valued stocks so your ROI will be minimal.
If you invest based on 3rd party development you need to invest into something that is currently valued low and will grow by a large factor based on the development, taking any relevant risk in the process.
It is time to invest into one of the nearly bankrupt transatlantic line companies. Google quite obviously has decided to limit their expansion in EU and build on the other side of the fat cable instead. Not a bad idea after all - less regulation (especially related to all the new services they are trying to push), easier to buy local politicians at the cost of the latency of the transatlantic lines. They are also most likely close to hitting the wall on what they can build in Ireland due to the rise in the prices (caused by them amidst everyone else) and building in any other EU country with good long distance links is hugely expensive.
This means that the price of transatlantic capacity and revenues from it will now go up again.
Essentially the current situation where the only "profitable" cables are the ones to India and the Gulf will revert to the old one where the "across-the-pond" ones will become the most profitable.
Well...
.PK pump-n-dump. The major stock markets are becoming more and more volatile due to "quantitative strategies" which in many cases is just another way for calling day trading. It is only a matter of time until we have meltdown like the one described in Arthur Clarke's part 2 of "Meeting with Rama".
There is a well known solution to it, but it will take a revolution, nuclear war or several complete stock market meltdowns with their accompanying recessions for the USA to implement it.
Mandatory hold time on stocks takes care of this.
Essentially, pump-n-dumps mathematically are nothing, but yet another form of a positive feedback loop. The best way to deal with feedback loops is to dampen them. It is even better if the hold time is proportional to the rate at which a stock has moved prior to the purchase.
By the way, this is not just related to
Not just that. Most shoulder based missiles and small non-radar AAA have a laser distance meter integrated in the sights. Some of the detection is based on detecting that as well - there are some well known anecodotal stories about policemen in the UK being called to their bosses for keelhauling after trying to use police speed laser guns on passing RAF Harriers.
Ahem. I have the same observation.
8 hours per day is maximum and even 8 hours per day every day is not sustainable for more than a month or so if you want to produce quality work (it is OK if these are not solid 8 hours and you distract yourself with email, meetings, studying, etc). If you work more than 8 hours per day (in fact more like 5-6 solid coding hours) you end up producing crap code and spending more time on maintaining it and fixing issues. As a result you end up going down a vicious circle. The more you work per day, the worse your code quality and the more time you need to maintain it. Recursion - see recursion.
The best thing to do is to break the vicious circle once and for all and do it when your brain is fresh. Coming back from a holiday is one of the best times to do it. I did it after I saw the number of bugs in something which I wrote by deadline just before going on holiday finishing at 4am. And I have never regretted this from that time onwards.
I have so far observed it only once or twice on a JVC HD TV connected to an upscaling Philips DVD. It happens after the TV has been switched off from the mains. One more coffin into the idea of "turning your kit off to save energy" as far as Joe Average Consumer is concerned. Even in this case the Philips complains loudly onscreen and uses 480 instead of 720 or 1080i. So you still do not lose picture.
Good, now after you have vented your spleen let me correct some of your facts and reasoning:
First, based on my experience other countries lead in the "slaverunner" routine. In fact, I would prefer to work for all of the American bosses I have worked for in my career any day compared to some of the British ones I have encountered. With nearly all of Americans the result was the most important item and how many hours did you clock on it was irrelevant. Similarly, most of them defined sane and achieveable deadlines instead of a UK-style deadline which is known to be blown beforehand. There is a reason why Britain is the only EU country to start throwing toys out of the pram every time the EU working time directive is discussed. And you can guess what it is.
Second, any IT person complaining about antisocial working conditions should look at the BioTech industry. They have take the leaf out of the IT book and have gone where no IT PHB Slaver has dreamed to go before. IT is a family friendly calm 9-5 desk job by comparison.
10 a day is better than ten in total. You will be surprised how few Tomahawks (or Granits in the Russian case) are actually carried by most ships capable of launching them.
The contract is awarded to a nuclear shop so I suspect that the thing will have an integrated reactor which makes it even more interesting.
What goes around, comes around. After realising that missile tech is too expensive, Iraq tried to build the Babylon gun with a 1000 miles range. For the same reason (the missiles being too expensive) Russians have now developed a gun launcher (forgot the name) to fire high altitude atmospheric probes instead of the old missile system . US nearly did that with the HARP, but heavy lobbying by the aerospace industry killed that. And now we come full circle with US looking at long range guns for cost reasons.
Play nethack.
Some of the Ranger quest levels are a fine example of what you are describing. They are a spiral maze made of trees. You can spend your time fighting along the maze or you can take a big axe and chop your way through. Or zap a wand of fire or throw a few fireballs. Voila - trees begone.
Similarly in nethack you can permanently freeze water into ice and make it walkable on top, destroy walls, obstructions, etc and dead corpses stay for a considerable amount of time. Unfortunately the big beast corpses in the current release do not form a nice hideout behind which you can hide. Realistically a dead dragon, umber hulk or indricoterium should make a perfect obstruction to enemy projectiles and some spells. So far it does not, but I can bet that a few more releases down the line it will.
You are comparing apples and oranges. Wrong comparison.
Nvidia is taking flak because the sole reason for the "binary" its own asinine behaviour (same as ATI with the newer Radeon ATI-supplied drivers).
Fluendo intends to provide a service by implementing specs for which the originating party requires a licensing fee.
So the right comparison is not to Nvidia (or ATI for that matter), but to Digium. Digium provides a machine tied (oh what a sacrilege) closed source (oh what a crime) implementation of the g729a codec (oh...). The requirement for licensing it is set by the parties who wrote the spec initially and as most ITU specs it is not royalty free. You have to pay and Digium is the only linux company providing that service. And guess what - people buy it. In large quantities actually as it is essential for interoperability with other systems out there.
So unless they f*** up their business model it will work and will be considered a valuable service to the linux/bsd running public (nothing like Nvidia/ATI asinine in-kernel graphic stunts).
And this is the exact reason why codecs are currently the most popular vehicle for Trojan deployment and torjan browser helper DLLs are a thing of the past.
Neah...
You just go out of your mind in another completely different and wonderfull way...