Actually I usually assemble my own PCs because I think I generally do a better _quality_ job than the staff at the "whitebox" shops. They do it _much_ faster I'm sure (I have to consult the motherboard manual on the pins and other stuff). But we had a whitebox shop put together a few PCs for the office, and stuff started getting loose or falling apart a year or so later. Not even sure if those guys even care about taking antistatic precautions.
So even if you save time getting them to do it, it costs you time and money when it falls apart earlier.
FWIW I actually spent a LOT of time getting Windows XP to the state I like (Yes linuxfans, the topic is gaming PC so Windows ok?). All the updates, drivers, MS/other viewers/players/codecs, menushowdelay to something low, NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate [1], turn off autorun [2], startmenu customizations, classic mode, sound scheme, folder options (yes I do want to see system files, and file extensions and run stuff in a separate process), tweakui, browser running as a separate user, all sorts of crap like that:).
Before anyone says Linux is easier: I also had to spend a lot of time getting my Linux server to the state I like - ups monitoring (some of the el-cheapo UPSes out there require some mods to nut, and I used to have to mod nut so it'll shutdown at a particular battery voltage - because I wanted to leave more reserve in the battery ), HDD monitoring and email alerts, vmware (suspend VMs before shutdown when the UPS battery runs low etc). With Linux I usually can't reuse the old configs - because things have changed a lot by the time I get a new server.
But 1, 10 or 100 secs out of 1 hour of racing are not ridiculous numbers for "racing pit stop" work times.
As for arcing, lightning is mere arcing. It's just typically hundreds of megawatts and does blow stuff up from time to time. Like I said, 200kWh in 1 second = 720MW. And 720MW = "Bang!". Maybe they've worked out how to ensure that'll never happen. If they have, I'd be interested to know how they did it.
Perhaps that race tech might end up being used in laptops and phones;).
If the car stores enough energy to run at full power - 200 kilowatts for one hour, that's a lot of energy you need to transfer in a short time. To transfer everything in a 1 sec charge = 720 Megawatts. 10 seconds charge = 72MW. 100 seconds charge = 7.2MW.
Even if you halve the power to 100kW (say the car only goes 50% power on average), those are quite big numbers. Who wants to be sitting in the car while 36MW flows into it?
The transfer is unlikely to be 100% efficient so there will be waste heat generated. 1MW of waste heat is no funny.
If you're going to use supercapacitors or batteries or fuel cells, you'd be charging/filling them outside the car, and then plugging them into the car and hoping they don't blow up in the process (it's still easier to make safer than pumping megawatts of electricity into the car).
"Third, you just proved his point. Somalia has a significantly higher per capita GDP than four other African countries with governments."
From your link Somalia is fourth from _last_ in estimated GDP (USD600). Zimbabwe is last at about USD200 per capita.
If anarchy only does 3 times better than Mugabe, I don't see how one can responsibly recommend anarchy.
Anyway, anarchy is usually a very temporary state. Anarchy (and violent revolution[1]) in most cases ends up creating dictatorships. In a state where lots of people are being violent to each other (or there's no ruling entity stopping people from doing that), the one who can exert and control the most violence, will rise to the top. It takes a rare person or group to freely relinquish that power once they have it by that means[2].
[1] Like those proposed by Marx and friends.
[2] There are lots of people who would give up power, but they're are rarely the sort who'd go get power in the first place by getting lots of people killed.
Humans have had less "planned" mating, so the distinction between breeds is not quite as marked as can be with dogs.
In contrast, very many dog breeds have been bred to a "spec" or for a task for many generations.
One thing I can think of that might vaguely resemble a multigeneration "human breeding program" is the caste system in India.
There are definite differences in human breeds, especially when you examine the "top" (in many cases the extremes make a bigger difference than the average). The west-africans are faster sprinters for instance. And some races seem to have a higher percentage of geniuses.
Go ahead mod me down or flame me for being politically incorrect. Fact is there aren't going to be that many pygmy slamdunkers;).
Yeah, I wonder how he got the 65 per minute figure for passwords that pass some simple complexity test ("complexity enabled").
Anyway, it usually takes one or two phone/support calls to bypass a password.
People make it even easier nowadays: Mother's maiden name? Where was your father born?
The trouble with such stupid questions is it makes it harder for those who know what they are doing. The sheeple will just cheerfully give their passwords away to the next person who asks or for a free beer.
I shower about twice a day, but I don't know about the other slashdotters, they might be saving the environment and going green...
But even if they don't shower that often, as long as no germs are added, their immune system can probably cope with whatever germs are on that body part - at worst it's a stalemate... So if they don't wash their hands and add germs they might "tip the balance" and lose the war.
That said, do you wash the tap-knobs before washing your hands? I wonder how clean those can be...
1) Person with dirty hands touches the tap knobs to turn them on. 2) Washes hands. 3) Touches tap knobs and re-dirties hands. 4) Touches door handle on way out. 5) Next person comes and adds yet more stuff to the tap knobs. 6) Washes hands. 7) Touches tap knobs 8) Touches door handle on way out.
The tap bit is not a problem if it's one of those automatic taps. Less of a problem if it's one of those lever taps - you can use the lever with some other part of your arm that you are less likely to use to touch sensitive/vulnerable body parts.
So keeping clean is not so simple. Anyway, most people manage to survive...
You could have the same number of neurons as a normal human being but still be permanently unconscious.
We can currently write programs to do stuff to specification (somewhat;) ).
We already have robotic vacuum cleaners. They are very primitive now. But if we don't have stupid software patents and similar bullshit hindering progress, 35 years of copying improvements and tricks should produce a robot that's pretty darn good at what it's supposed to do.
Exactly, do we really want computers to have consciousness? Is it necessary or even helpful for what we want them to do _for_us_?
Remember, computers are currently our tools. If we give them consciousness, would we then be treating them as slaves?
Would we want the added responsibility of having to treat them better (and likely failing)?
I figure it's just better to _augment_ humans (there are plenty of ways to do that), than to create new entities. After all if we want nonhuman intelligences we already have plenty at the local pet stores and various farms, and how well are we handling those?
Humans already have a poor track record of dealing with animals and other humans.
Replacing the whole engine is quite a big difference from replacing a bearing.
FWIW, my crappy old car is not far from reaching 150K miles and I don't intend to replace the engine when it does, nor expect to need to. The engine seems fine, the transmission is not so fine.
Maybe you're missing a digit? I think there are VW beetles that do a million miles.
1) I have done IT security work professionally and my customers have been satisfied with my work. One bank wisely decided to not launch their online banking stuff after I checked it for them.
2) Security is always a concern in most _professional_ work. It may not be the highest concern, but it is there.
I know, because the company I worked for back then was exploring being a reseller.
Back then it was the "dotcom" boom and every other company was thinking they might need a website.
But too bad for Netscape, most people stuck with ncsa httpd, then later moved to Apache.
If MS killed Netscape by giving out free browsers, then similarly FOSS killed Netscape with free servers. Heck Sun was being strangled by FOSS for years before they got bought up.
Of course giving out stuff free when you're a monopoly can be illegal;).
It's _relative_. What viable alternatives to Win95 were there? Macs were expensive back then. X desktops were really ugly. Linux was even more unsuitable for the desktop back then. BSD was having legal troubles and had similar problems as Linux in terms of "Desktop Ready". What would you have used? Amiga was bankrupt by 1995 - I believe the commodore fans mostly blame commodore.
Back in the past if you were a Linux/Unix user and were using crash-happy Netscape 4, you'd be wishing for IE5 or IE6. Really, it was that bad. As it is bundling IE on windows was a good thing for Windows users.
It took till 2006 or so before I considered Mozilla stable enough and not too crappy. Back in 2005, I found it was common for Firefox to use more mem than a whole virtual machine running windows XP +IE. 1GB vs 400MB. IE on XP on vmware on Linux used less mem than native FF on Linux! This was at work where we devs had Linux desktops.
That's a long time without a decent browser (yes I did try opera and it also did use a lot of mem too, I have a habit of using lots of browser windows/tabs).
If the US Gov is sick of the upgrade treadmill they could try to pump some money into making a Windows XP compatible OS.
That might seem to be a waste of money and something Governments shouldn't be doing. But _if_ the OS actually works well enough, lots of companies and people could save a lot of money because they don't have to upgrade to Vista etc.
There would be less "broken windows" (the economics term) spending.
That's a big "IF it works well enough" of course:).
Slashdot Mirror
Strictly speaking UTC isn't GMT.
As per your link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time#Rationale
As usual, once you get into the details it gets messier :).
It also makes it easier to swap from smoothwall to something else :).
I do something like that, but I don't use smoothwall. FWIW tc's HTB does work quite well in controlling bandwidth.
The main disadvantage I find is, my PC server+modem+etc uses about 100 watts. Whereas an el-cheapo NAT router will use a lot less.
Oh well...
> Perhaps emboldened by the similar setback
Embolden:
cheer: give encouragement to
To render (someone) more bold or courageous; To encourage, inspire, or motivate;
to make bold or bolder; hearten; encourage.
Actually I usually assemble my own PCs because I think I generally do a better _quality_ job than the staff at the "whitebox" shops. They do it _much_ faster I'm sure (I have to consult the motherboard manual on the pins and other stuff). But we had a whitebox shop put together a few PCs for the office, and stuff started getting loose or falling apart a year or so later. Not even sure if those guys even care about taking antistatic precautions.
:).
So even if you save time getting them to do it, it costs you time and money when it falls apart earlier.
FWIW I actually spent a LOT of time getting Windows XP to the state I like (Yes linuxfans, the topic is gaming PC so Windows ok?). All the updates, drivers, MS/other viewers/players/codecs, menushowdelay to something low, NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate [1], turn off autorun [2], startmenu customizations, classic mode, sound scheme, folder options (yes I do want to see system files, and file extensions and run stuff in a separate process), tweakui, browser running as a separate user, all sorts of crap like that
Before anyone says Linux is easier: I also had to spend a lot of time getting my Linux server to the state I like - ups monitoring (some of the el-cheapo UPSes out there require some mods to nut, and I used to have to mod nut so it'll shutdown at a particular battery voltage - because I wanted to leave more reserve in the battery ), HDD monitoring and email alerts, vmware (suspend VMs before shutdown when the UPS battery runs low etc). With Linux I usually can't reuse the old configs - because things have changed a lot by the time I get a new server.
[1]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem]
"NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001
[2]
For XP Home:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\Explorer]
"HonorAutoRunSetting"=dword:00000001
"NoDriveTypeAutoRun"=dword:000000ff
For XP Pro use gpedit.msc to do it.
Nope. Mod me "+1, No Shit".
Oh wait...
0.001 seconds is ridiculous.
;).
But 1, 10 or 100 secs out of 1 hour of racing are not ridiculous numbers for "racing pit stop" work times.
As for arcing, lightning is mere arcing. It's just typically hundreds of megawatts and does blow stuff up from time to time. Like I said, 200kWh in 1 second = 720MW. And 720MW = "Bang!". Maybe they've worked out how to ensure that'll never happen. If they have, I'd be interested to know how they did it.
Perhaps that race tech might end up being used in laptops and phones
If the car stores enough energy to run at full power - 200 kilowatts for one hour, that's a lot of energy you need to transfer in a short time. To transfer everything in a 1 sec charge = 720 Megawatts. 10 seconds charge = 72MW. 100 seconds charge = 7.2MW.
Even if you halve the power to 100kW (say the car only goes 50% power on average), those are quite big numbers. Who wants to be sitting in the car while 36MW flows into it?
The transfer is unlikely to be 100% efficient so there will be waste heat generated. 1MW of waste heat is no funny.
If you're going to use supercapacitors or batteries or fuel cells, you'd be charging/filling them outside the car, and then plugging them into the car and hoping they don't blow up in the process (it's still easier to make safer than pumping megawatts of electricity into the car).
Doesn't work so well if decent encryption is involved.
Important data might end up inaccessible.
Or you might no longer be able to sign certificates that are used in the organization - you'd have revoke the main cert and create a new one.
"Third, you just proved his point. Somalia has a significantly higher per capita GDP than four other African countries with governments."
From your link Somalia is fourth from _last_ in estimated GDP (USD600). Zimbabwe is last at about USD200 per capita.
If anarchy only does 3 times better than Mugabe, I don't see how one can responsibly recommend anarchy.
Anyway, anarchy is usually a very temporary state. Anarchy (and violent revolution[1]) in most cases ends up creating dictatorships. In a state where lots of people are being violent to each other (or there's no ruling entity stopping people from doing that), the one who can exert and control the most violence, will rise to the top. It takes a rare person or group to freely relinquish that power once they have it by that means[2].
[1] Like those proposed by Marx and friends.
[2] There are lots of people who would give up power, but they're are rarely the sort who'd go get power in the first place by getting lots of people killed.
Humans have had less "planned" mating, so the distinction between breeds is not quite as marked as can be with dogs.
;).
In contrast, very many dog breeds have been bred to a "spec" or for a task for many generations.
One thing I can think of that might vaguely resemble a multigeneration "human breeding program" is the caste system in India.
There are definite differences in human breeds, especially when you examine the "top" (in many cases the extremes make a bigger difference than the average). The west-africans are faster sprinters for instance. And some races seem to have a higher percentage of geniuses.
Go ahead mod me down or flame me for being politically incorrect. Fact is there aren't going to be that many pygmy slamdunkers
They are stupid questions, because you'll have to keep track of yet more answers.
I do try to put strong passwords as the answers, but often the sites don't let me.
I hear some sites are even worse - they force you to pick answers from limited choices!
Yeah, I wonder how he got the 65 per minute figure for passwords that pass some simple complexity test ("complexity enabled").
Anyway, it usually takes one or two phone/support calls to bypass a password.
People make it even easier nowadays:
Mother's maiden name?
Where was your father born?
The trouble with such stupid questions is it makes it harder for those who know what they are doing. The sheeple will just cheerfully give their passwords away to the next person who asks or for a free beer.
I shower about twice a day, but I don't know about the other slashdotters, they might be saving the environment and going green...
But even if they don't shower that often, as long as no germs are added, their immune system can probably cope with whatever germs are on that body part - at worst it's a stalemate... So if they don't wash their hands and add germs they might "tip the balance" and lose the war.
That said, do you wash the tap-knobs before washing your hands? I wonder how clean those can be...
1) Person with dirty hands touches the tap knobs to turn them on.
2) Washes hands.
3) Touches tap knobs and re-dirties hands.
4) Touches door handle on way out.
5) Next person comes and adds yet more stuff to the tap knobs.
6) Washes hands.
7) Touches tap knobs
8) Touches door handle on way out.
The tap bit is not a problem if it's one of those automatic taps. Less of a problem if it's one of those lever taps - you can use the lever with some other part of your arm that you are less likely to use to touch sensitive/vulnerable body parts.
So keeping clean is not so simple. Anyway, most people manage to survive...
Could be just a glitch when the camera responsible was gathering stuff.
I'm thinking lab coats can also be improved. It's not that easy to take a flaming lab coat off.
That's why I use cat in cases where others might say "useless use of cat".
;). ! is a stupid misfeature - since the command line is not expanded before you execute it.
On my keyboard > is rather too close to < so I do:
cat important_file
instead of:
<important_file
Because if by mistake I type:
>important_file
Important_file goes poof.
One also has to be very careful when using dd since i is rather close to o.
There have also been some fools who thought they were smart and used "!". For example:
!mysql
Go figure
You could have the same number of neurons as a normal human being but still be permanently unconscious.
;) ).
We can currently write programs to do stuff to specification (somewhat
We already have robotic vacuum cleaners. They are very primitive now. But if we don't have stupid software patents and similar bullshit hindering progress, 35 years of copying improvements and tricks should produce a robot that's pretty darn good at what it's supposed to do.
Exactly, do we really want computers to have consciousness? Is it necessary or even helpful for what we want them to do _for_us_?
Remember, computers are currently our tools. If we give them consciousness, would we then be treating them as slaves?
Would we want the added responsibility of having to treat them better (and likely failing)?
I figure it's just better to _augment_ humans (there are plenty of ways to do that), than to create new entities. After all if we want nonhuman intelligences we already have plenty at the local pet stores and various farms, and how well are we handling those?
Humans already have a poor track record of dealing with animals and other humans.
Nah just save it as "dancing_pigs" and then run: perl dancing_pigs
While most users will jump through hoops to see dancing pigs/bunnies, if you make it easier, more of them will do it.
Replacing the whole engine is quite a big difference from replacing a bearing.
FWIW, my crappy old car is not far from reaching 150K miles and I don't intend to replace the engine when it does, nor expect to need to. The engine seems fine, the transmission is not so fine.
Maybe you're missing a digit? I think there are VW beetles that do a million miles.
And why should I take your "advice"?
1) I have done IT security work professionally and my customers have been satisfied with my work. One bank wisely decided to not launch their online banking stuff after I checked it for them.
2) Security is always a concern in most _professional_ work. It may not be the highest concern, but it is there.
They were also selling servers back then.
;).
I know, because the company I worked for back then was exploring being a reseller.
Back then it was the "dotcom" boom and every other company was thinking they might need a website.
But too bad for Netscape, most people stuck with ncsa httpd, then later moved to Apache.
If MS killed Netscape by giving out free browsers, then similarly FOSS killed Netscape with free servers. Heck Sun was being strangled by FOSS for years before they got bought up.
Of course giving out stuff free when you're a monopoly can be illegal
It's _relative_. What viable alternatives to Win95 were there? Macs were expensive back then. X desktops were really ugly. Linux was even more unsuitable for the desktop back then. BSD was having legal troubles and had similar problems as Linux in terms of "Desktop Ready". What would you have used? Amiga was bankrupt by 1995 - I believe the commodore fans mostly blame commodore.
Back in the past if you were a Linux/Unix user and were using crash-happy Netscape 4, you'd be wishing for IE5 or IE6. Really, it was that bad. As it is bundling IE on windows was a good thing for Windows users.
It took till 2006 or so before I considered Mozilla stable enough and not too crappy. Back in 2005, I found it was common for Firefox to use more mem than a whole virtual machine running windows XP +IE. 1GB vs 400MB. IE on XP on vmware on Linux used less mem than native FF on Linux! This was at work where we devs had Linux desktops.
That's a long time without a decent browser (yes I did try opera and it also did use a lot of mem too, I have a habit of using lots of browser windows/tabs).
If the primary VM BSODs due to a software problem, the odds are the shadow VM would too.
If the US Gov is sick of the upgrade treadmill they could try to pump some money into making a Windows XP compatible OS.
:).
That might seem to be a waste of money and something Governments shouldn't be doing. But _if_ the OS actually works well enough, lots of companies and people could save a lot of money because they don't have to upgrade to Vista etc.
There would be less "broken windows" (the economics term) spending.
That's a big "IF it works well enough" of course