Starbucks makes a fair bit of money from expensive coffee.
You can easily make your own coffee at home for the price of a DVD-R, and some say better coffee. Why don't people do it? Convenience, habit/ritual, social.
Even if one day someone created a Star Trek like Replicator that could replicate Starbucks coffee, I think Starbucks would still be in business.
McDs are based on Location Location Location aka Convenience.
I think the cinema and movie business would still be around.
Teenagers aren't going to take their girlfriends to "Home Theater" especially when Dad is around and perhaps watching a movie. And if you get Dad to stop watching the movie, he might find more inconvenient things to occupy his time with.
Distribution? If the distributors can't do it in a more convenient way than P2P, then I really don't see why people should be paying them. Currently they're charging parasitic amounts for stuff that screws up your computer. If they work their way down to symbiotic or at least "less annoying parasite" amounts then they would still be around.
I know people who pirate stuff because they can't buy it online (due to all sorts of BS restrictions), and they're not going to drive, park and walk to the shop only to find that the shop doesn't have it.
People make $X an hour, at least for the reasonably wealthy, their leisure time should be worth more than $X/hour to them. How long does it take for them to drive, park, buy, return? How long does it take for them to figure out how to find and P2P a specific song?
So if you make it very convenient and charge a fraction of how much their _leisure_ time is worth to them, they'll buy.
Tapes are overrated. As long as you are careful not to drop them, HDDs are pretty decent.
AU$1000 buys you about five 1TB SATA drives.
So AU$3K can buy you: 5 x daily 1TB drives, 5 weekly, and 5 month. AU$1K is enough to buy a "build it yourself from decent parts" server - decent power supply, 4 x SATA, 2 x 1Gbps NICs, a core 2 duo (so you can do gzip to two "backup media" drives at the same time ), 2x 1GB RAM (not important but hey it's cheap) and a UPS+power filter, and special removable caddies for those HDDs (make sure they won't overheat the HDDs).
With tape drives, if there is new higher capacity tape technology, you will need to buy a new very _expensive_ tape drive to take advantage of it.
With HDDs you get a whole drive mechanism along with your "media".
If in 5 years time if there are cheap 10TB hard drives, you just buy them and use them.
Whereas if in 5 years time there are cheap 10TB LTOx tapes, you will need an expensive LTOx drive.
For the past decade or so that has been the trend.
I bet the SATA interface will be around for a long time, so in 5 years you'd still be able to read _most_ of your backups. Even if the bearings seize up due to age and lack of use, the data is likely to still be on the platter.
Now if you require _hundreds_ of tapes worth of storage, then using tapes as your "media" may become more viable than using HDDs.
But I get the impression you're not facing that scenario, so HDDs should be fine.
There are special caddies for HDDs, so that you can plug and unplug them.
So you could buy a Backup Server with a gigabit NIC or two, install the caddies, insert the drives, and then do backups.
Seems doable to me. After all AU$4000 is a lot of money in Malaysia where I am (we're the cheap labour, "low brains" country).
So, how much are they paying you in Australia to solve problems like this?;).
That's fine if you only have a very few GB's to backup.
If you have TBs to backup, it's a bad idea to use conventional optical disks. They're slow, flaky and low density.
If you're a small business, buy a bunch of 500GB (or even 1TB) drives (they're cheaper per GB nowadays) and use those as your backup media. Just make sure you don't drop them;).
USD60+ for 500GB, USD1K buys you a fair bit of "media".
With the non UK style wall socket, it might be an ex-parent thing;).
Most kids that are smart enough to figure out how to electrocute themselves with the UK style socket, would be smart enough to understand their parents.
The "entry barrier" for the other socket designs is too low. Crawl to socket, insert, get zapped.
Assuming the top of the container is 2.5m x 6m = 15 square meters.
If you're in the USA, you'd be getting maybe 600 watts of sunlight per square meter, so that's 9kw of sunlight.
Assuming 40% efficient solar panels that means 3.6 kilowatts. Assuming each server uses 100-150W. That's enough power for about 25 machines, not inclusive of cooling.
Cooling is the tricky bit. An airconditioner could easily use 1 kilowatt.
But 1 kilowatt can power a lot of fans. So if ambient air is cool enough, you might skip the heat pumps and go fans only.
And that's why it's useful to have your CPUs and computers be able to tolerate higher ambient temperatures.
We use the UK arrangement here in Malaysia too, and I think it's a pretty good design.
The US style wall socket is a ridiculously unsafe design in comparison.
I heard in the USA people actually buy stuff to cover the wall sockets to make it harder for children to stick their fingers or other stuff in them and get electrocuted.
When X% of the computers in the container are not working, you unplug it, pull it out and replace it with a container where 100% of the computers are working, and send the faulty one for servicing.
If they do that though, that means the real life PUE won't be as great. Since a fair number of containers would have nonworking machines in them.
1) Start with a live cat. 2) Fasten securely a piece of buttered toast on its back, buttered side facing away from the back. 3) Add flame. 4) Drop cat.:)
If 90 million just wrote on the ballot "none of the above", I bet the Two Parties would notice.
90 million is a lot larger than 60 million.
90 million "not bothering to vote" is a very different statement.
So in practice they don't count as voters ( except for the ones who were going to vote but had a car accident or something).
The ruling parties are safe from them.
To me it would be good if the voting system allowed people to say "No" and that counts as -1 points, whereas a Yes counts as +1 points. From the psychological point of view this is superior to the "range voting" since it gives a lot more satisfaction if the wrong candidate wins but wins with a net negative total. Plus the media and comedians can make fun of that candidate a lot more;).
That sort of thing might make people get out and vote in comparison to getting out there and "spoiling their vote as a protest"
But since they aren't going to change the system that's what you got.
By using directional antennas and doing some signal processing they should be able to filter out the other devices.
Analogy: you can listen to a particular person in a noisy restaurant, and it usually easier if both your ears work well.
If they have to they could use two or more vehicles parked outside. Or just rent a room or two nearby.
There are so many ways of snooping it isn't funny, here are some examples:
** Light Copying a screen from a CRT by the light it "smears" on a wall - CRT images are generated by an electron beam, so the smear actually is only a smear if you average it over time with your eyes. Add a telescope and you can pretty much snoop at CRT screens from quite a distance.
Snooping data from modem and similar LEDs - LEDs can be rather bright and narrow band, so you might be able to snoop from reflections even if they're not directly visible.
Eavesdropping on conversations/sounds in a building far away by bouncing a laser off the window (sound waves from the conversation make the window vibrate - and the vibrations are measured by the laser.
** Sound Good old fashioned dishes and microphones. Recreating keystrokes from the sound they make - the keys on your keyboard don't actually sound the same.
** EM The "tempest" stuff they're talking about - all those electronics give off snoopable signals. The wired keyboard stuff is old stuff. The "modern" wireless mice and keyboards make it even easier.
** Trash Collect the trash and dig through it.
** Bugs Your "office cleaner" while cleaning your keyboard could install a "keyboard plug" that captures all your keystrokes and pick it up the next day.
Slashdot Mirror
Starbucks makes a fair bit of money from expensive coffee.
You can easily make your own coffee at home for the price of a DVD-R, and some say better coffee. Why don't people do it? Convenience, habit/ritual, social.
Even if one day someone created a Star Trek like Replicator that could replicate Starbucks coffee, I think Starbucks would still be in business.
McDs are based on Location Location Location aka Convenience.
I think the cinema and movie business would still be around.
Teenagers aren't going to take their girlfriends to "Home Theater" especially when Dad is around and perhaps watching a movie. And if you get Dad to stop watching the movie, he might find more inconvenient things to occupy his time with.
Distribution? If the distributors can't do it in a more convenient way than P2P, then I really don't see why people should be paying them. Currently they're charging parasitic amounts for stuff that screws up your computer. If they work their way down to symbiotic or at least "less annoying parasite" amounts then they would still be around.
I know people who pirate stuff because they can't buy it online (due to all sorts of BS restrictions), and they're not going to drive, park and walk to the shop only to find that the shop doesn't have it.
People make $X an hour, at least for the reasonably wealthy, their leisure time should be worth more than $X/hour to them. How long does it take for them to drive, park, buy, return? How long does it take for them to figure out how to find and P2P a specific song?
So if you make it very convenient and charge a fraction of how much their _leisure_ time is worth to them, they'll buy.
Thanks! But that's boring news then :).
Maybe the difference is the average Canadian volunteer can actually count higher than ten? And do it reliably, consistently and in a timely manner ;).
:).
Seriously, any voter that prefers an electronic voting system to the usual reasonably secure paper voting system is pretty stupid.
Paper voting systems can be compromised by postal/absentee votes, but the same applies to electronic voting systems.
It's funny the USA spends trillions to pick a government in Iraq, but they have no money and resources to do it right in the USA.
Oh but wait maybe they're intending to pick a government in the USA just the same way they picked a government in Iraq.
Only US Governments approved Governments allowed
Or because people in America are dumb and it is beyond the average volunteer to be able to count votes by hand accurately in a timely manner.
OK now... 1, 2, Uh what comes after 2? *asks bystanders* One thousand and fifty two? OK.
"... I am getting upset over the fairness of a system that will only let me choose between two criminals for who should be the leader."
Aren't there more than two candidates? Can't you vote for the others instead?
Apparently in the past election 60+ million voted for X and 59+ million voted for Y.
But 80+ million didn't bother to even show up.
Think X and Y might notice if the 80+ million voted for Z?
I bet X and Y might also notice even if the 80+ million walked up to the voting booths and voted "none of the above" and thus "spoilt" their vote.
At least the foreign media would be reminding them of it e.g. "Mr President, how can you say you have support of the people?".
How many hours worth of home movies? I doubt Joe the Plumber records home videos in HD.
A 2 hour DVD is considered decent quality and is about 5GB.
A 120GB drive can hold about 48 hours worth of movies.
I bet most of those home movies aren't longer than 30 minutes.
For perspective, a 500GB drive is about USD60.
Normal people don't think about backups much. I had to remind a friend to backup his vacation photos etc.
Tapes are overrated. As long as you are careful not to drop them, HDDs are pretty decent.
;).
AU$1000 buys you about five 1TB SATA drives.
So AU$3K can buy you: 5 x daily 1TB drives, 5 weekly, and 5 month.
AU$1K is enough to buy a "build it yourself from decent parts" server - decent power supply, 4 x SATA, 2 x 1Gbps NICs, a core 2 duo (so you can do gzip to two "backup media" drives at the same time ), 2x 1GB RAM (not important but hey it's cheap) and a UPS+power filter, and special removable caddies for those HDDs (make sure they won't overheat the HDDs).
With tape drives, if there is new higher capacity tape technology, you will need to buy a new very _expensive_ tape drive to take advantage of it.
With HDDs you get a whole drive mechanism along with your "media".
If in 5 years time if there are cheap 10TB hard drives, you just buy them and use them.
Whereas if in 5 years time there are cheap 10TB LTOx tapes, you will need an expensive LTOx drive.
For the past decade or so that has been the trend.
I bet the SATA interface will be around for a long time, so in 5 years you'd still be able to read _most_ of your backups. Even if the bearings seize up due to age and lack of use, the data is likely to still be on the platter.
Now if you require _hundreds_ of tapes worth of storage, then using tapes as your "media" may become more viable than using HDDs.
But I get the impression you're not facing that scenario, so HDDs should be fine.
There are special caddies for HDDs, so that you can plug and unplug them.
So you could buy a Backup Server with a gigabit NIC or two, install the caddies, insert the drives, and then do backups.
Seems doable to me. After all AU$4000 is a lot of money in Malaysia where I am (we're the cheap labour, "low brains" country).
So, how much are they paying you in Australia to solve problems like this?
That's fine if you only have a very few GB's to backup.
;).
If you have TBs to backup, it's a bad idea to use conventional optical disks. They're slow, flaky and low density.
If you're a small business, buy a bunch of 500GB (or even 1TB) drives (they're cheaper per GB nowadays) and use those as your backup media. Just make sure you don't drop them
USD60+ for 500GB, USD1K buys you a fair bit of "media".
They're stem cells from fat tissue though, not the fat cells themselves.
;).
Maybe the problem is most of those stem cells are being convinced to change to fat cells instead of heart cells
Seriously though, are fat and heart cells from the same "germ layer"? I'm too lazy to look it up.
"I think its a new parent thing"
;).
With the non UK style wall socket, it might be an ex-parent thing
Most kids that are smart enough to figure out how to electrocute themselves with the UK style socket, would be smart enough to understand their parents.
The "entry barrier" for the other socket designs is too low. Crawl to socket, insert, get zapped.
Assuming the top of the container is 2.5m x 6m = 15 square meters.
If you're in the USA, you'd be getting maybe 600 watts of sunlight per square meter, so that's 9kw of sunlight.
Assuming 40% efficient solar panels that means 3.6 kilowatts. Assuming each server uses 100-150W. That's enough power for about 25 machines, not inclusive of cooling.
Cooling is the tricky bit. An airconditioner could easily use 1 kilowatt.
But 1 kilowatt can power a lot of fans. So if ambient air is cool enough, you might skip the heat pumps and go fans only.
And that's why it's useful to have your CPUs and computers be able to tolerate higher ambient temperatures.
We use the UK arrangement here in Malaysia too, and I think it's a pretty good design.
The US style wall socket is a ridiculously unsafe design in comparison.
I heard in the USA people actually buy stuff to cover the wall sockets to make it harder for children to stick their fingers or other stuff in them and get electrocuted.
Not if it looks a bit like a shipping yard - the cranes lift the containers and move them.
I don't work at Google or Microsoft.
Not if you think of the container as your "PC".
When X% of the computers in the container are not working, you unplug it, pull it out and replace it with a container where 100% of the computers are working, and send the faulty one for servicing.
If they do that though, that means the real life PUE won't be as great. Since a fair number of containers would have nonworking machines in them.
How big are the lenses in your eyes?
Maybe that's what Gary McKinnon was looking for.
BTW they're going to extradite him and jail him for quite a long while.
To me it seems a bit strange that they're throwing the whole book at him.
They should be jailing spammers, the malware DDoS bunch, and the Sony bunch who approved the "CD" rootkit.
1) Start with a live cat. :)
2) Fasten securely a piece of buttered toast on its back, buttered side facing away from the back.
3) Add flame.
4) Drop cat.
The treatment for cancer and zillions of other diseases is to have babies and pass on your genes and culture to them.
Not all your genes are passed down, and not all your culture/info either.
It's not always certain their children have matching DNA... Wink-wink ;).
If 90 million just wrote on the ballot "none of the above", I bet the Two Parties would notice.
;).
90 million is a lot larger than 60 million.
90 million "not bothering to vote" is a very different statement.
So in practice they don't count as voters ( except for the ones who were going to vote but had a car accident or something).
The ruling parties are safe from them.
To me it would be good if the voting system allowed people to say "No" and that counts as -1 points, whereas a Yes counts as +1 points. From the psychological point of view this is superior to the "range voting" since it gives a lot more satisfaction if the wrong candidate wins but wins with a net negative total. Plus the media and comedians can make fun of that candidate a lot more
That sort of thing might make people get out and vote in comparison to getting out there and "spoiling their vote as a protest"
But since they aren't going to change the system that's what you got.
Just because it's not uncommon doesn't mean it should be here.
I think it's more like they can't _run_ when ambient is at that temperature.
e.g. if you pass electricity through them while they are that hot, they get way too hot and burn up.
Whereas if you don't do anything, it's pobably a long way off from damaging the silicon.
But check the manufacturer's specs for _storage_.
So why delete his logo from his user page?
Seems "fair use" to me.
By using directional antennas and doing some signal processing they should be able to filter out the other devices.
Analogy: you can listen to a particular person in a noisy restaurant, and it usually easier if both your ears work well.
If they have to they could use two or more vehicles parked outside. Or just rent a room or two nearby.
There are so many ways of snooping it isn't funny, here are some examples:
** Light
Copying a screen from a CRT by the light it "smears" on a wall - CRT images are generated by an electron beam, so the smear actually is only a smear if you average it over time with your eyes. Add a telescope and you can pretty much snoop at CRT screens from quite a distance.
Snooping data from modem and similar LEDs - LEDs can be rather bright and narrow band, so you might be able to snoop from reflections even if they're not directly visible.
Eavesdropping on conversations/sounds in a building far away by bouncing a laser off the window (sound waves from the conversation make the window vibrate - and the vibrations are measured by the laser.
** Sound
Good old fashioned dishes and microphones.
Recreating keystrokes from the sound they make - the keys on your keyboard don't actually sound the same.
** EM
The "tempest" stuff they're talking about - all those electronics give off snoopable signals.
The wired keyboard stuff is old stuff.
The "modern" wireless mice and keyboards make it even easier.
** Trash
Collect the trash and dig through it.
** Bugs
Your "office cleaner" while cleaning your keyboard could install a "keyboard plug" that captures all your keystrokes and pick it up the next day.
So many other ways.
That's no problem, just use two AI bots chatting with each other instead of having a teenager.
The snoops would have to monitor for a significant time before they'd realize the difference.
If they're choosing to monitor your house for hours, they probably have something else on you.