A brand new USB2 Travan 20/40GB external drive will run you $450. 20/40 tapes are $45.
They're pretty fast (20MB/s), work with all modern OS, and can backup over a local network.
If you have more than around 30GB of data that you need to back up regularly (aside from one-time dumps of your MP3 collection) then you have Enterprise-class problems, and shouldn't try to do things on the cheap.:)
...for one of our AIX RS/6000 servers. I forget the exact quote amount, but it was, I think, around $1,200 for 512MB. We bought the same RAM from Kingston for less than $400 (after the IBM rep almost blew his top arguing that if we didn't buy from him, we'd void the warranty).
So we crack the case to put in the new RAM, and what do we find? The *exact same* Kingston RAM module is already providing us with our first 512 MB of memory. Priceless.
I refuse to believe that.;) UK mail order businesses can still discount new titles by 30 - 40% and make a profit. This is on PC games, released at the same time as the US version. This holds with expected wholesale prices - a markup of retail of around 50% from the distributer. It's a very similar business model to books - and we're used to seeing '30% off' signs both at Amazon and in high street shops. If you can discount books, why can't you discount computer games?
Ever wondered why *everyone* sells the same new games for the same prices?
I remember, back in the UK a few years back, you could buy 'retail' 25 GBP games ( $39.95) for about 17 GBP from mail-order. The 30 GBP games ($49.95) went for around 21 GBP ($33, thereabouts).
Over in the States, I have *never* found a mail-order company selling a new game at more than 2 or 3 dollars below the holy $44.95 price point. What gives? My suspicion is that the distributors refuse to sell a game to the merchants unless they guarantee a minimum sale price. Isn't that illegal?
The games I have the most fun with are those with decent random content generators. Done right, they can really add to the replayability of a game. Port Royale has suitably 'open-ended' gameplay (within the confines of its environment) through random mission generation and all the fun of trading.
The thing that really gets me, though, are games that are billed as 'open-ended', infinitely replayably, etc, that are instead cripplingly linear. (Republic : The Revolution is a great example of this - a game *crying out* for decent random mission generators, but instead has a lockstep set of objectives that you have to complete to advance ).
Not quite right. NASA did consider using modified Apollo to go to Mars ( I don't know if it would have worked, but they *did* consider it ). The idea was to send up a couple of modules on Saturns, link 'em up in orbit (like the famous US-Russian handshake PR thing) then send 'em on their way (the boost stage and fuel necessary for Earth-Mars orbit change being sent up on one of the Saturn boosters).
Food? Freeze-dried and hydroponics (grow your own). Radiation protection? keep the water tank and machine spaces between you and the Sun. Gravity problems? Weight training regimes, maybe rotating the modules to generate some gees. Not sure how they would have handled the Mars lander, though.
So, anyway. NASA did consider going to Mars on Apollo tech. They thought it would be possible, but expensive. Nixon chose to go to LEO with the Shuttle instead.
Not as I understand it. Soyuz uses different (i.e. human-rated) boosters than Progress. The design is similar, but not identical, and they take much more care in construction. As I recall, Energia has something like 3 Soyuz-rated boosters in their production line, but even if we gave them all the money to build more, today, it's an 24 month lead time on more. Which means we'd have to mothball the ISS for at least six months (probably closer to a year)...
The sad thing is, Soyuz is clearly a safer, more reliable crew delivery mechanism than Shuttle, and it's cheaper, too (about $120m a launch). If the Russians had the cash to build enough Soyuz and Progress boosters the ISS could be maintained with a crew of six indefinately (I'm assuming, here that both docking ports can take Soyuz - I don't know if that's the case).
It was a typo - I should have said "192.168 *means* it's a class C network".
As for your closing comment... If someone said to me "192.168.blah.blah is a class A network" that would be wrong, CIDR or not. If someone said that to me cold (i.e. I had no other basis for judging their technical skills), it would cause me to question their fundamental grasp of network knowledge. Just like I question your intellect when you make a sweeping statement like "Anyone who's still hung up on classful addressing is too clueless to be important". That, to me, tells me you're arrogant, rude and not as smart as you think you are. I'm sure you'll go far.
If they scrap the Shuttle now (as in, "It will never fly again, period.") then the ISS is doomed. The Russians don't have enough rockets in the factories to provide enough crew / supply / orbit boost missions in the next 2 - 3 years to keep the ISS up, even if NASA gave them all the money. And it'll take NASA 5 years to get a new crew launch system (assuming a reasonably fast, not-quite-Apollo crash program).
What's most likely is that NASA will say, "OK, we'll spend what it takes to keep Shuttle flying for the short term, while getting a new crew launch system working. Then we'll use that with Atlas and Delta IV to keep the ISS up from 2008 - 2012." From there, it's anyone's guess what will happen. Maybe the Chinese or the Indians will go to the moon (China wants to be there by 2006, I think), prompting another space race. Who knows?
But certainly Shuttle won't see the 200 launch milestone. I'd guess it's got another 30 or 40 launches to go before it's fully replaced by something else.
My understanding is that NASA will build a 4-person crew vehicle that, when supplemented with a 3-seat soyuz, will provide full evacuation facilities for the ISS.
But yeah, Shuttle was built based on some pretty wacked-out Air Force Cold War requirements (from 1970), one of which was the 'launch and retrieve satelites' (this was for spy satelites, before they got a handle on digitial imaging) and have something like continental cross-range ability so they could land anywhere in the US. Of course, by the time Shuttle launched, the Air Force realised they didn't need to retrieve spy satelites, and went with their own orbital delivery system anyway, operating out of Vandenburg. So Shuttle was built for a specific customer, who then didn't use it. Result : the White Elephant of orbital delivery systems. All that, plus it's essentially an X-craft. So naturally it's a mission critical component of the iSS.
A triumph of political expediency and budget constraints over common sense and mission requirements. Wheee!
We're a small (100 person) company that averages about 4,000 internet emails a week (excluding spam, which adds another 1,500 - 2,500 / wk). Since SoBig we've seen our traffic levels increase 50%. I've had 5,700 + SoBig mails since the start of the outbreak.
This isn't a problem for us (aside from annoying antivirus messages) as our bandwidth and mailservers can easily handle it, but I know some big companies had to shut down their internet-facing mail gateways due to the increase in volume. I suspect the more well-known your domain is, the worse it is.
However, for AOL and Earthlink to blacklist you based on false 'From:' entries is just stupid. Are you sure they've blacklisted you?
Exactly. It's a subtle way of saying that re-usable crew launch systems are a false economy.
I bet if you worked out the cost of Shuttle launches (including captial expenditure, R & D, etc along with one-off mission costs) you'd get a figure approaching $1Bn per launch, for a little over 100 launches. And despite all that, we've still lost 40% of the fleet and two crews. Saturn V launches were less than that (I believe the figure was around $650m in 1999 dollars) and lifted about 2.5 times the cargo of Shuttle.
It's smart to pick *one* requirement (like, say, get 4 people to and from orbit in the safest manner possible) and let that be the only criteria for equipment design.
It may well be that we'll end up using simple rockets for this, like the Russians. Sure, it's not sexy, but I bet it'll be both cheaper than Shuttle and safer. Shuttle suffered from 'feature creep', from wacky Air Force 'cross-range' requirements and serious pork. Get rid of all that and NASA could build a safer crew vehicle.
We'd then use the (not human-rated) big dumb boosters like Delta and Atlas to get cargo up. That, too, would be cheaper than Shuttle. Hrm. So, why do we have Shuttle again?
Leigh, an independent digital media industry analyst, said the "fear factor" caused usage of file-sharing programs to drop about 22 percent in the seven weeks after the RIAA announced its plans to sue individuals.
Yet Leigh noted industry sales reports show the drop in CD sales accelerated during the same period.
So, when p2p usage goes down, sales go down.
When p2p usage goes up, sales go up (see rise of Napster through 1999, correlated with CD sales over the same period). In fact, given this data, it would be fair to say that p2p was one of the few things keeping RIAA losses to single digit declines, given the economy and generally crappy releases.
192.168 is a class C network. The first three bits of the network address are set. For comparison, the first octet is thus:
Class A - networks 1 thru 126. Class B - networks 128 - 191. Class C - networks 192 - 224 ( I think - then there's the class D multicast space).
It's a minor quibble, I know, but you should know the difference between classes and how to tell which is which, otherwise you may look clueless to someone important.:)
The only difference between a ballistic and an orbital trajectory is tangential velocity. But you knew that.
There *is* an incremental development path to orbit. It goes from the X-Prize / microgravity / weather-monitoring straight up / straight down shots through ballistic trajectories, each one getting more and more hang time (higher, faster) until you're in orbit.
Why would you want to do this? Inter-continental travel. The idea's been talked about for decades. Coast-to-coast in 30 minutes. Across the Atlantic in 45 mins. Pacific rim in 90 minutes. All you have to do is fly a (sub-orbital! Ballistic!) trajectory higher, faster than we do now. That's your incremental path. Once you can go halfway round the world on one you've almost got an orbital trajectory.
Yes, indeed. Visage is very fond of saying their system is designed for 1:1 comparisions, not database searches, and that it has a 90% success rate.
There are 2 problems with this, though:
The first is the false-positive rate. Visage is saying that, nine times out of ten, they can tell if the person being presented for inspection matches the photo. But what if they incorrectly flag one out of every fifteen users as *not* matching the picture? More work for Border control, that's what. The Mark One Eyeball is still the fastest, cheapest, best tool for comparing photos to people.
Second, it pays no mind to *false* papers with *correct* photographs. Sure, their fancy system will say "Yup, the person pictured is standing in front of you!" but if the underlying documentation is fake, so what?
Visage is a private company chasing lucrative federal dollars. All they need to do is create a product good enough to persuade Federal agencies to buy it - they don't actually need to make sure it does anything useful.
Sufficient for making a playable game, perhaps, but not sufficient for a sellable one. Leave out the cool 3d graphics and nobody'd buy it. OK, maybe gamers are smarter than that, but the people who put up the development money definitely aren't.
That's pretty much what I figured. Have you seen the requirements, though? They recommend 512MB RAM and a 128MB graphics card. For a game that's *basically* a board game, it's got the requirements of a very butch MMORPG or FPS. They're cutting off a large chunk of their audience just by having such extreme requirements.
The 3D city is very pretty, and very impressive. It's also completely unnecessary. Republic is a board game, and all the 3D city does is add some 'color' to proceedings. A well-designed 2D board and cut-scenes would be more than sufficient.
The UI is pretty bad. Buttons aren't intuitively depicted, and widgets are small and finnicky. For a game with a 3D map, it's annoying to be unable to re-size or move control widgets. It'd also be nice to be able to zoom in on the 2D city view.
It's a turn-based game that desperately wants to be an RTS. You can't pause the game to give orders, and time is always ticking (you have 4 minutes to do a turn - not much time to consider strategy and responses, really). However, once you have a few turn's worth of actions planned out, you can't just 'skip to the end of the turn'. Some actions (like recruiting, rallies, etc) require you to sit through 30 secs to several minute's worth of "Sim Theatre" before you get to perform a tweak (like run a conversation or sway a crowd at a rally). This is amusing the first few times, annoying after that.
The 'tutorial' sucks. Really, really bad. It's not really a tutorial - just a couple of screens crammed with information about the UI. Clearly tacked on just before going gold.
The mechanics of the game appear solid (Ideaologies are essentially a version of 'rock paper scissors', with tweaks) and fun (see, I told you it was like a board game. Ever played Junta? It's like a more serious version of that). Strip away the crappy UI and uneccesary 3D, and there's the makings of a good game here. It seems the developers either over-reached, or wanted to appeal to the GTA crowd to tap into the mythical million unit sales.
Final gripe - it's both fast and slow. Your beginning characters can only perform one or two actions, and you have to play for a while before they start to get anything interesting. It'd be nice if you could get more thuggish with your opponents earlier - I'd just like to be able to get someone to break some legs from day one.
I'll probably have some more to say once I've played it a bit more, but at the moment the jury's still out - it's either flawed genius or crap dusty with golden sparklies. I don't know which yet.
Remember those are for yellow diamonds - the most expensive kind. I don't know, but I'd bet money that those rates were considerably cheaper than 'regular' diamond market rates.
Except, of course, that both processes are patented and aren't really trade secrets - the theory is widely known. So in the US and Western Europe, at least, they're protected.
Yeah. I'd also add that this kind of problem is the sort of thing that Windows Active Directory and Exchange server were supposed to fix. I've not extensively used W2K/E2K, though, and I've haven't even installed E2K3, but it seems to me that the LDAP functions of ADS, with a little bit of front-end foo, will do the job....I've just recommended a Microsoft solution. I feel dirty.
Re:They aren't so worried about $5 synthetics
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
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· Score: 1
*Exactly*. And why is that?
Because DeBeers tells them it's an Heirloom. They deliberately encourage people to *not* part with their diamonds, to constrict supply. It's all in that Atlantic article, including interviews with the ad agency that came up with this stuff.
Re:They aren't so worried about $5 synthetics
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
·
· Score: 1
Well, yes, but that's not exactly mainstream. Take a look on eBay for 'diamond'. See any non-commercial sales? No? Why not? eBay is *full* of regular folks selling stuff... but for diamonds, only commercial sellers. And they're all 'market price', or close enough. How about in your local papers. Any private sales of diamonds? Why is that, do you think?
Re:They aren't so worried about $5 synthetics
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
·
· Score: 1
Eh, that particular stockpile might not be there any more, but there are plenty of others. DeBeers does hoarde vast quantities of gems. That's what they do. That, and TV adverts.
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A brand new USB2 Travan 20/40GB external drive will run you $450. 20/40 tapes are $45.
They're pretty fast (20MB/s), work with all modern OS, and can backup over a local network.
If you have more than around 30GB of data that you need to back up regularly (aside from one-time dumps of your MP3 collection) then you have Enterprise-class problems, and shouldn't try to do things on the cheap.
...for one of our AIX RS/6000 servers. I forget the exact quote amount, but it was, I think, around $1,200 for 512MB. We bought the same RAM from Kingston for less than $400 (after the IBM rep almost blew his top arguing that if we didn't buy from him, we'd void the warranty).
So we crack the case to put in the new RAM, and what do we find? The *exact same* Kingston RAM module is already providing us with our first 512 MB of memory. Priceless.
I refuse to believe that. ;) UK mail order businesses can still discount new titles by 30 - 40% and make a profit. This is on PC games, released at the same time as the US version. This holds with expected wholesale prices - a markup of retail of around 50% from the distributer. It's a very similar business model to books - and we're used to seeing '30% off' signs both at Amazon and in high street shops. If you can discount books, why can't you discount computer games?
=
Ever wondered why *everyone* sells the same new games for the same prices?
I remember, back in the UK a few years back, you could buy 'retail' 25 GBP games ( $39.95) for about 17 GBP from mail-order. The 30 GBP games ($49.95) went for around 21 GBP ($33, thereabouts).
Over in the States, I have *never* found a mail-order company selling a new game at more than 2 or 3 dollars below the holy $44.95 price point. What gives? My suspicion is that the distributors refuse to sell a game to the merchants unless they guarantee a minimum sale price. Isn't that illegal?
The games I have the most fun with are those with decent random content generators. Done right, they can really add to the replayability of a game. Port Royale has suitably 'open-ended' gameplay (within the confines of its environment) through random mission generation and all the fun of trading.
The thing that really gets me, though, are games that are billed as 'open-ended', infinitely replayably, etc, that are instead cripplingly linear. (Republic : The Revolution is a great example of this - a game *crying out* for decent random mission generators, but instead has a lockstep set of objectives that you have to complete to advance ).
Not quite right. NASA did consider using modified Apollo to go to Mars ( I don't know if it would have worked, but they *did* consider it ). The idea was to send up a couple of modules on Saturns, link 'em up in orbit (like the famous US-Russian handshake PR thing) then send 'em on their way (the boost stage and fuel necessary for Earth-Mars orbit change being sent up on one of the Saturn boosters).
Food? Freeze-dried and hydroponics (grow your own). Radiation protection? keep the water tank and machine spaces between you and the Sun. Gravity problems? Weight training regimes, maybe rotating the modules to generate some gees. Not sure how they would have handled the Mars lander, though.
So, anyway. NASA did consider going to Mars on Apollo tech. They thought it would be possible, but expensive. Nixon chose to go to LEO with the Shuttle instead.
Not as I understand it. Soyuz uses different (i.e. human-rated) boosters than Progress. The design is similar, but not identical, and they take much more care in construction. As I recall, Energia has something like 3 Soyuz-rated boosters in their production line, but even if we gave them all the money to build more, today, it's an 24 month lead time on more. Which means we'd have to mothball the ISS for at least six months (probably closer to a year)...
The sad thing is, Soyuz is clearly a safer, more reliable crew delivery mechanism than Shuttle, and it's cheaper, too (about $120m a launch). If the Russians had the cash to build enough Soyuz and Progress boosters the ISS could be maintained with a crew of six indefinately (I'm assuming, here that both docking ports can take Soyuz - I don't know if that's the case).
It was a typo - I should have said "192.168 *means* it's a class C network".
... If someone said to me "192.168.blah.blah is a class A network" that would be wrong, CIDR or not. If someone said that to me cold (i.e. I had no other basis for judging their technical skills), it would cause me to question their fundamental grasp of network knowledge. Just like I question your intellect when you make a sweeping statement like "Anyone who's still hung up on classful addressing is too clueless to be important". That, to me, tells me you're arrogant, rude and not as smart as you think you are. I'm sure you'll go far.
As for your closing comment
If they scrap the Shuttle now (as in, "It will never fly again, period.") then the ISS is doomed. The Russians don't have enough rockets in the factories to provide enough crew / supply / orbit boost missions in the next 2 - 3 years to keep the ISS up, even if NASA gave them all the money. And it'll take NASA 5 years to get a new crew launch system (assuming a reasonably fast, not-quite-Apollo crash program).
What's most likely is that NASA will say, "OK, we'll spend what it takes to keep Shuttle flying for the short term, while getting a new crew launch system working. Then we'll use that with Atlas and Delta IV to keep the ISS up from 2008 - 2012." From there, it's anyone's guess what will happen. Maybe the Chinese or the Indians will go to the moon (China wants to be there by 2006, I think), prompting another space race. Who knows?
But certainly Shuttle won't see the 200 launch milestone. I'd guess it's got another 30 or 40 launches to go before it's fully replaced by something else.
My understanding is that NASA will build a 4-person crew vehicle that, when supplemented with a 3-seat soyuz, will provide full evacuation facilities for the ISS.
But yeah, Shuttle was built based on some pretty wacked-out Air Force Cold War requirements (from 1970), one of which was the 'launch and retrieve satelites' (this was for spy satelites, before they got a handle on digitial imaging) and have something like continental cross-range ability so they could land anywhere in the US. Of course, by the time Shuttle launched, the Air Force realised they didn't need to retrieve spy satelites, and went with their own orbital delivery system anyway, operating out of Vandenburg. So Shuttle was built for a specific customer, who then didn't use it. Result : the White Elephant of orbital delivery systems. All that, plus it's essentially an X-craft. So naturally it's a mission critical component of the iSS.
A triumph of political expediency and budget constraints over common sense and mission requirements. Wheee!
We're a small (100 person) company that averages about 4,000 internet emails a week (excluding spam, which adds another 1,500 - 2,500 / wk). Since SoBig we've seen our traffic levels increase 50%. I've had 5,700 + SoBig mails since the start of the outbreak.
This isn't a problem for us (aside from annoying antivirus messages) as our bandwidth and mailservers can easily handle it, but I know some big companies had to shut down their internet-facing mail gateways due to the increase in volume. I suspect the more well-known your domain is, the worse it is.
However, for AOL and Earthlink to blacklist you based on false 'From:' entries is just stupid. Are you sure they've blacklisted you?
Exactly. It's a subtle way of saying that re-usable crew launch systems are a false economy.
I bet if you worked out the cost of Shuttle launches (including captial expenditure, R & D, etc along with one-off mission costs) you'd get a figure approaching $1Bn per launch, for a little over 100 launches. And despite all that, we've still lost 40% of the fleet and two crews. Saturn V launches were less than that (I believe the figure was around $650m in 1999 dollars) and lifted about 2.5 times the cargo of Shuttle.
It's smart to pick *one* requirement (like, say, get 4 people to and from orbit in the safest manner possible) and let that be the only criteria for equipment design.
It may well be that we'll end up using simple rockets for this, like the Russians. Sure, it's not sexy, but I bet it'll be both cheaper than Shuttle and safer. Shuttle suffered from 'feature creep', from wacky Air Force 'cross-range' requirements and serious pork. Get rid of all that and NASA could build a safer crew vehicle.
We'd then use the (not human-rated) big dumb boosters like Delta and Atlas to get cargo up. That, too, would be cheaper than Shuttle. Hrm. So, why do we have Shuttle again?
192.168 is a class C network. The first three bits of the network address are set. For comparison, the first octet is thus:
:)
Class A - networks 1 thru 126.
Class B - networks 128 - 191.
Class C - networks 192 - 224 ( I think - then there's the class D multicast space).
It's a minor quibble, I know, but you should know the difference between classes and how to tell which is which, otherwise you may look clueless to someone important.
The only difference between a ballistic and an orbital trajectory is tangential velocity. But you knew that.
There *is* an incremental development path to orbit. It goes from the X-Prize / microgravity / weather-monitoring straight up / straight down shots through ballistic trajectories, each one getting more and more hang time (higher, faster) until you're in orbit.
Why would you want to do this? Inter-continental travel. The idea's been talked about for decades. Coast-to-coast in 30 minutes. Across the Atlantic in 45 mins. Pacific rim in 90 minutes. All you have to do is fly a (sub-orbital! Ballistic!) trajectory higher, faster than we do now. That's your incremental path. Once you can go halfway round the world on one you've almost got an orbital trajectory.
Yes, indeed. Visage is very fond of saying their system is designed for 1:1 comparisions, not database searches, and that it has a 90% success rate.
There are 2 problems with this, though:
The first is the false-positive rate. Visage is saying that, nine times out of ten, they can tell if the person being presented for inspection matches the photo. But what if they incorrectly flag one out of every fifteen users as *not* matching the picture? More work for Border control, that's what. The Mark One Eyeball is still the fastest, cheapest, best tool for comparing photos to people.
Second, it pays no mind to *false* papers with *correct* photographs. Sure, their fancy system will say "Yup, the person pictured is standing in front of you!" but if the underlying documentation is fake, so what?
Visage is a private company chasing lucrative federal dollars. All they need to do is create a product good enough to persuade Federal agencies to buy it - they don't actually need to make sure it does anything useful.
That's pretty much what I figured. Have you seen the requirements, though? They recommend 512MB RAM and a 128MB graphics card. For a game that's *basically* a board game, it's got the requirements of a very butch MMORPG or FPS. They're cutting off a large chunk of their audience just by having such extreme requirements.
Here's some initial thoughts:
The 3D city is very pretty, and very impressive. It's also completely unnecessary. Republic is a board game, and all the 3D city does is add some 'color' to proceedings. A well-designed 2D board and cut-scenes would be more than sufficient.
The UI is pretty bad. Buttons aren't intuitively depicted, and widgets are small and finnicky. For a game with a 3D map, it's annoying to be unable to re-size or move control widgets. It'd also be nice to be able to zoom in on the 2D city view.
It's a turn-based game that desperately wants to be an RTS. You can't pause the game to give orders, and time is always ticking (you have 4 minutes to do a turn - not much time to consider strategy and responses, really). However, once you have a few turn's worth of actions planned out, you can't just 'skip to the end of the turn'. Some actions (like recruiting, rallies, etc) require you to sit through 30 secs to several minute's worth of "Sim Theatre" before you get to perform a tweak (like run a conversation or sway a crowd at a rally). This is amusing the first few times, annoying after that.
The 'tutorial' sucks. Really, really bad. It's not really a tutorial - just a couple of screens crammed with information about the UI. Clearly tacked on just before going gold.
The mechanics of the game appear solid (Ideaologies are essentially a version of 'rock paper scissors', with tweaks) and fun (see, I told you it was like a board game. Ever played Junta? It's like a more serious version of that). Strip away the crappy UI and uneccesary 3D, and there's the makings of a good game here. It seems the developers either over-reached, or wanted to appeal to the GTA crowd to tap into the mythical million unit sales.
Final gripe - it's both fast and slow. Your beginning characters can only perform one or two actions, and you have to play for a while before they start to get anything interesting. It'd be nice if you could get more thuggish with your opponents earlier - I'd just like to be able to get someone to break some legs from day one.
I'll probably have some more to say once I've played it a bit more, but at the moment the jury's still out - it's either flawed genius or crap dusty with golden sparklies. I don't know which yet.
Remember those are for yellow diamonds - the most expensive kind. I don't know, but I'd bet money that those rates were considerably cheaper than 'regular' diamond market rates.
Except, of course, that both processes are patented and aren't really trade secrets - the theory is widely known. So in the US and Western Europe, at least, they're protected.
Yeah. I'd also add that this kind of problem is the sort of thing that Windows Active Directory and Exchange server were supposed to fix. I've not extensively used W2K/E2K, though, and I've haven't even installed E2K3, but it seems to me that the LDAP functions of ADS, with a little bit of front-end foo, will do the job. ...I've just recommended a Microsoft solution. I feel dirty.
*Exactly*.
And why is that?
Because DeBeers tells them it's an Heirloom. They deliberately encourage people to *not* part with their diamonds, to constrict supply. It's all in that Atlantic article, including interviews with the ad agency that came up with this stuff.
Well, yes, but that's not exactly mainstream. Take a look on eBay for 'diamond'. See any non-commercial sales? No? Why not? eBay is *full* of regular folks selling stuff... but for diamonds, only commercial sellers. And they're all 'market price', or close enough. How about in your local papers. Any private sales of diamonds? Why is that, do you think?
Eh, that particular stockpile might not be there any more, but there are plenty of others. DeBeers does hoarde vast quantities of gems. That's what they do. That, and TV adverts.