Although there are pages and pages of information there, nothing in the article in any way shows that multiple time sources actually cause real issues with the current NTP implementation.
The only mention of it is a thought experiment:
Imagine a server-selection algorithm that is moving around among candidate servers of similar quality. The result is constant jumping—a classic case of asymmetry jitter. Such jitter is not hard to observe in ntpd, where a connection to multiple peers is in fact recommended.
If "such jitter is not hard to observe in ntpd", where are the observations? They may exist, but if they aren't in this paper or in another paper referenced by it, that's not good science.
I think one of the major turnoffs for me about mass market advertisiing is that it's so off base as to be annoying. I'm not in the market for a car, so to be subjected to ads for cars while I watch tv is a waste of my time.
And targeted ads are even more annoying, because they still don't get it right.
I was in the market for a car and did my research and bought one a week ago. But, I expect that "targeted" ads for cars will keep hitting my monitor and mailbox for at least the next six months, and I expect many of them will be for classes of vehicles that weren't anything I would ever consider.
Two years ago these ads would have been a minor bother, and 2-12 months ago they might have been helpful, but for the next 5-10 years they'll be both wasteful and a major annoyance.
350ppm isn't arbitrary it's the maximum safe amount of CO2 we can stabilise at in the atmosphere to ensure we don't experience catastrophic global warming.
One species' catastrophe is another's opportunity. See "extinction, dinosaur" for an example.
Sorry, fail: railroad tracks need regular replacement, too.
You make it sound like this is a yearly thing.
Although there is rail maintenance required (grinding, spike and tie replacement, etc.), full replacement of rails and roadbeds is on the order of several decades, and generally mainline rails can be repurposed for yards or spurs (where speeds are much lower).
Almost every part of a railroad right of way can be recycled fairly efficiently, down to the point of melting rails into new steel, and selling worn out ties to landscaping companies.
Moral of the story is that science fiction often predicts future technologies - its not promoting the iPad as a Star Trek gadget.
Actually, it is pretty much an Apple ad:
When I first sat down at a DOS-based computer, I wanted nothing to do with them. But that changed when I used a Macintosh for the first time. Within a few minutes I could learn how to use it; that was my "ah-ha moment".
Of course when comparing DOS command line to a GUI, the GUI wins. But, despite what anybody may think about Windows, it was considerably easier to use than the command line for most people. And, if you were in the design and effects portion of the movie/TV industry, it's quite likely you thought those Macs were "quaint" compared to your Unix GUI workstation.
But to say that something like Doom 3 or Half-Life is not superior then I think you must have a really funny idea about what constitutes good graphics.
Sadly, though, Doom 3 put all of the development budget into graphics creation and none into better gameplay. Far too many of the enemies were visible if you knew were to look, but invulnerable until you passed over the line that "activated" them.
Then, all that money on graphics was wasted because the applied color palette contained only colors between dark grey and black.
Right now, the 2001 Toyota Prius is worth about $5-6K, while a similarly equipped 2001 Camry is worth about $4-5K.
This is assuming that the mileage and condition are the same, but after reading this thread, I now really believe the studies that have been done that show that like data expands to fill the available space, miles driven expand based on a reduced cost per mile.
Also, the Camry only gets about 24mpg, while the Matrix (a better comparison to the Prius) gets 29mpg, but I can't do a 10-year comparison as the Matrix was introduced in 2006.
Hybrids have odd depreciation cycles, as the first 5-6 years they don't drop as much as a regular car, then drop off a lot more steeply, due to the battery factor. I suspect this is due to the fact that you might need $2-4K in batteries in the next year, with no way to predict the need based on current status.
People like me, who tend to use cars for 10+ years? We make out like bandits.
Only if you drive more than the average number of miles per year and pay cash for your car.
Since I've just been looking for a new car, I have the numbers handy on a Toyota Highlander vs. the Hybrid, with 3.1% interest for 60 months, gas at $4/gallon and driving 12K miles year:
Yes, you can reduce the $553.05 interest difference by putting more money down, paying off faster, getting a better rate, etc., but it's not really a fair comparison if you only do that when buying the hybrid.
One of the reasons the Highlander is such an important comparison is that it's a large enough vehicle to be useful to American families. The dearth of hybrids in the most popular vehicle sector in the US (the "crossover") shows that car companies don't give a damn about really helping to save gas. Whenever you see the phrase "gas-sucking", it's almost always followed by "SUV". Replacing these would do a lot more to help than replacing a 30-35mpg smallish car.
There are exactly four and a half models of crossover hybrid for less than $45K MSRP: Ford Escape/Mercury Mariner, Toyota Highlander, Audi Q5, Lexus RX-450h. Also, there are no hybrid vans (mini or otherwise).
I bought a 2002 Prius at 1 year of age. I have driven 135,000 miles.
135,000 miles in 7 years (2002 Prius purchased in 2003, and 2010 today) is more than 19K miles/year.
You are indeed the type of person that a hybrid pays back very quickly, because even the government's 15K per car per year is quite generous compared to reality.
For example, family trips usually put miles on only one car even if the family has more than one. The three cars in my household total about 25K miles/year (over the past 10 years, we've put about 250K miles on the 3 cars). That's only about 8K miles/year for each car.
I bought a 2005 Honda Civic Hybrid after running the numbers. I broke even at around 27,000 miles and it's been gravy since then.
I didn't take the price difference as between the base Civic and the HCH because the HCH was much closer to the EX version in terms of features.
Today, it's not such a good deal. The 2010 HCH is about $3,200 more than the 2010 Civic EX (real world pricing), and you get less of a tax credit (because so many of that model have been sold). Even with the $1,500 credit, though, it costs $1,700 more.
At 15000 miles per year (a lot) and $4/gallon (considerably more than right now), the difference between 42 and 29 mpg (which is fair, because your driving style should raise/lower both in similar ways) means payback in 2.65 years. Using a much more realistic 12K miles/year and $3/gallon, payback is 4.4 years. With less tax credit, it gets even worse.
Then, too, the Civic Hybrid is the only car that even has a chance of less than 5 year payback. For all the other straight-up comparisons (Toyota Highlander, Ford Fusion, Ford Escape, Lexus RX-350/450h, etc.), the payback is at least 7 years, and sometimes as much as 14.
But, if you get a deal, a hybrid is great. My wife has a Saturn Vue hybrid that cost less than the similarly equipped non-hybrid, but that's only because Saturn was discontinued by GM.
That only happens when you're using a nearly-decade-old operating system.
I'm using Windows XP and my card reader doesn't use any drive letters and linux doesn't use any drive letters at all. I'm hard pressed to think of a "nearly-decade-old" desktop OS still in common use today that isn't able to mount drives at abitrary points in the file system.
Come join us in the modern world and behold the "Hide Empty Drives" option.
As far as I know, this only removes the drives from display in Explorer...it does not de-allocate the drive letters.
Since it's actually $8 when you include shipping, it's not so good a deal after all. Even buying 10 only lowers the per-unit total cost to $3.
Chances are you can hit a local shop and get them for close to the same price.
I've looked, and they are about $5 in local stores. I purchased a case of 24 from Best Buy for Business for less than $30 including shipping, but that was about 3 years ago.
I use this case for my smaller servers, which allows me to have 6 hard drives by using three of the 5-1/4" bays with adapters. With this motherboard, you can put an awful lot of computing power into a small space, and it's much quieter than rack mount solutions.
You definitely don't need a big honkin' gun, because the best home defense weapon is definitely the shortest shotgun that isn't legally considered "sawed-off".
Or, you can use just about any handgun you want, just load it with the right ammunition.
AMD is competitive with Intel will into the mid range market and even the start of the high end market (if you don't place much value on energy efficiency).
The 32nm and 45nm Intel chips are all no more than 95W TDP up to 2.93GHz 6-core, and after that they are 130W, which is pretty much the same as the 125W for the 6-core AMD.
Price/performance AMD curb stomps every Intel processor except the i7 920. But AMD does not compete, at all, above that performance point.
The quad-core i5-750 beats the six-core 1090T in quite a few benchmarks for $100 less for the Intel chip. With the i5-760 only $15 more for 133MHz faster stock clock, it'll likely be even better. And, motherboards with the 1156 socket start at $70, so you can get CPU and motherboard from Intel for less than the CPU alone from AMD, and win many benchmarks.
If you overclock, it gets even worse, because the Intel chips can easily OC to 3.2GHz (the stock speed of the 1090T). After that, both chips are basically even in how much farther they can be overclocked.
What about forestalled sentence termination due to interrup-- Hey, I'm talking here!
I believe the correct way to format that last bit is: due to interrup—Hey, I'm talking here!
Unlike the question of how many spaces should be used after a period, the n-dash and m-dash are punctiation marks. As such, they have rules for use that are much more hard and fast. One of those is that there should be no space between the letters on either side of the dash and the dash itself. This rule applies to all dashes (hyphen: twin-engine, n-dash: 9–5, m-dash: Shatner—is speaking).
Legally, the modem and router are their property. they don't stop you from using your own router, but the one they give you is a lease.
I'm pretty sure this is not true, and definitely sure it's not universally true.
At least when I signed up, one part of the offer was a free router, and even the ads were very clear that it was yours to keep, just like a cell phone (i.e., you had to keep service for a certain length of time or pay a termination fee).
Since I never used it as my main router and knew I wasn't going to, I tried to give it back to see if I could get some charges reduced, but there were no charges for it (that's why it was listed as "free"), so I kept it. Now I just use it for my wireless connection.
Based on all the other people I know with FiOS, I suspect that people who think they have been charged for "installing" the router actually were just buying the router without knowing it, since everyone I have talked to was told they get to keep the router.
Since we've all figured out the only somewhat vague part (that he was talking about disk storage), it's not vague at all.
$30/GB per month works out to $360K/year per terabyte. I haven't done any SAN shopping recently, but I'm pretty sure that $360K will buy you one with a lot more than 1TB.
So, yes, the IT department is overcharging by at least an order of magnitude.
Do the maths above: excluding power, staff, tape libraries and rack space etc, it's already over $25 per usable GB for Tier 1
Right, so this means that the IT department in the summary could buy a new storage system every month, since they are charging $30/GB per month.
Since an internal IT department should not be trying to make a profit, the charge should be just enough to pay for the total cost over the life of the hardware. For a 3 year life, that means that if the purchase price was $36/GB, the charge should be $1/GB per month.
Now, if you're trying to make a profit, that's a different story...charge whatever the market will bear.
With an average income of $550/month for members of the workforce, and 52% of that workforce in agriculture (which drags the average down), my $600/month estimate (which is what $3.50/hour works out to be) is probably low, which was what I was going for.
2-watt, wifi, 2GB RAM? 5-9 inch screens? For US$35? SOLD. I'll take two.
Yeah, I can't imagine any device hitting this price point with those features. Even getting the cost down that low would probably be a 2-3 year timeframe.
For example, about the best price on 2GB of any kind of RAM is US$30 at retail. Even assuming that 2GB RAM soldered onto a specially designed board with a large quantity order would be only $15, that's still too much, as obviously the touchscreen would be at least the same price.
Then, there's the case (custom, almost certainly) and the actual assembly. Even at US$3.50/hour, somebody building 10 of these an hour would add $0.35 to the cost. That's nothing on a $400 device, but it's 1% of the target cost here.
Slashdot Mirror
Although there are pages and pages of information there, nothing in the article in any way shows that multiple time sources actually cause real issues with the current NTP implementation.
The only mention of it is a thought experiment:
Imagine a server-selection algorithm that is moving around among candidate servers of similar quality. The result is constant jumping—a classic case of asymmetry jitter. Such jitter is not hard to observe in ntpd, where a connection to multiple peers is in fact recommended.
If "such jitter is not hard to observe in ntpd", where are the observations? They may exist, but if they aren't in this paper or in another paper referenced by it, that's not good science.
They put them in tires, do they not?
Only sort of, in the sense that the tire-pressure monitoring system is "inside" the tire after the tire is mounted to the wheel.
Generally, TPMS systems are part of the wheel, not the tire, at least for the tubeless tires that are used on the vast majority of smaller vehicles.
I think one of the major turnoffs for me about mass market advertisiing is that it's so off base as to be annoying. I'm not in the market for a car, so to be subjected to ads for cars while I watch tv is a waste of my time.
And targeted ads are even more annoying, because they still don't get it right.
I was in the market for a car and did my research and bought one a week ago. But, I expect that "targeted" ads for cars will keep hitting my monitor and mailbox for at least the next six months, and I expect many of them will be for classes of vehicles that weren't anything I would ever consider.
Two years ago these ads would have been a minor bother, and 2-12 months ago they might have been helpful, but for the next 5-10 years they'll be both wasteful and a major annoyance.
350ppm isn't arbitrary it's the maximum safe amount of CO2 we can stabilise at in the atmosphere to ensure we don't experience catastrophic global warming.
One species' catastrophe is another's opportunity. See "extinction, dinosaur" for an example.
Sorry, fail: railroad tracks need regular replacement, too.
You make it sound like this is a yearly thing.
Although there is rail maintenance required (grinding, spike and tie replacement, etc.), full replacement of rails and roadbeds is on the order of several decades, and generally mainline rails can be repurposed for yards or spurs (where speeds are much lower).
Almost every part of a railroad right of way can be recycled fairly efficiently, down to the point of melting rails into new steel, and selling worn out ties to landscaping companies.
Maybe your TRS-80 should have tokenized keywords to conserve memory.
It did, but it still saves a lot of memory to allow "LET" to be optional, considering that assignment statements are one of the most often used.
Similarly, "THEN" was optional if there was no "ELSE".
Moral of the story is that science fiction often predicts future technologies - its not promoting the iPad as a Star Trek gadget.
Actually, it is pretty much an Apple ad:
When I first sat down at a DOS-based computer, I wanted nothing to do with them. But that changed when I used a Macintosh for the first time. Within a few minutes I could learn how to use it; that was my "ah-ha moment".
Of course when comparing DOS command line to a GUI, the GUI wins. But, despite what anybody may think about Windows, it was considerably easier to use than the command line for most people. And, if you were in the design and effects portion of the movie/TV industry, it's quite likely you thought those Macs were "quaint" compared to your Unix GUI workstation.
Brakes are nice too. unless you're planning to go slow enough to brake with your foot.
Flintstones...meet the Flintstones...
When you reached the later levels of the game where the monsters scream the most deathly noises you've ever heard, it almost made you shit your pants.
Nothing made me react the same way until the first appearance of "The Flood" in Halo.
But to say that something like Doom 3 or Half-Life is not superior then I think you must have a really funny idea about what constitutes good graphics.
Sadly, though, Doom 3 put all of the development budget into graphics creation and none into better gameplay. Far too many of the enemies were visible if you knew were to look, but invulnerable until you passed over the line that "activated" them.
Then, all that money on graphics was wasted because the applied color palette contained only colors between dark grey and black.
Generally, no.
Right now, the 2001 Toyota Prius is worth about $5-6K, while a similarly equipped 2001 Camry is worth about $4-5K.
This is assuming that the mileage and condition are the same, but after reading this thread, I now really believe the studies that have been done that show that like data expands to fill the available space, miles driven expand based on a reduced cost per mile.
Also, the Camry only gets about 24mpg, while the Matrix (a better comparison to the Prius) gets 29mpg, but I can't do a 10-year comparison as the Matrix was introduced in 2006.
Hybrids have odd depreciation cycles, as the first 5-6 years they don't drop as much as a regular car, then drop off a lot more steeply, due to the battery factor. I suspect this is due to the fact that you might need $2-4K in batteries in the next year, with no way to predict the need based on current status.
People like me, who tend to use cars for 10+ years? We make out like bandits.
Only if you drive more than the average number of miles per year and pay cash for your car.
Since I've just been looking for a new car, I have the numbers handy on a Toyota Highlander vs. the Hybrid, with 3.1% interest for 60 months, gas at $4/gallon and driving 12K miles year:
price + TTL + interest + 10 years gas
$32,233.86 + $2,214.03 + $2,783.04 + ((12,000/19) * 10 * $4)) = $62,494.09 (Highlander)
$38,691.96 + $2,601.52 + $3,336.09 + ((12,000/26) * 10 * $4)) = $63,091.11 (Highlander Hybrid)
Yes, you can reduce the $553.05 interest difference by putting more money down, paying off faster, getting a better rate, etc., but it's not really a fair comparison if you only do that when buying the hybrid.
One of the reasons the Highlander is such an important comparison is that it's a large enough vehicle to be useful to American families. The dearth of hybrids in the most popular vehicle sector in the US (the "crossover") shows that car companies don't give a damn about really helping to save gas. Whenever you see the phrase "gas-sucking", it's almost always followed by "SUV". Replacing these would do a lot more to help than replacing a 30-35mpg smallish car.
There are exactly four and a half models of crossover hybrid for less than $45K MSRP: Ford Escape/Mercury Mariner, Toyota Highlander, Audi Q5, Lexus RX-450h. Also, there are no hybrid vans (mini or otherwise).
I bought a 2002 Prius at 1 year of age. I have driven 135,000 miles.
135,000 miles in 7 years (2002 Prius purchased in 2003, and 2010 today) is more than 19K miles/year.
You are indeed the type of person that a hybrid pays back very quickly, because even the government's 15K per car per year is quite generous compared to reality.
For example, family trips usually put miles on only one car even if the family has more than one. The three cars in my household total about 25K miles/year (over the past 10 years, we've put about 250K miles on the 3 cars). That's only about 8K miles/year for each car.
I bought a 2005 Honda Civic Hybrid after running the numbers. I broke even at around 27,000 miles and it's been gravy since then.
I didn't take the price difference as between the base Civic and the HCH because the HCH was much closer to the EX version in terms of features.
Today, it's not such a good deal. The 2010 HCH is about $3,200 more than the 2010 Civic EX (real world pricing), and you get less of a tax credit (because so many of that model have been sold). Even with the $1,500 credit, though, it costs $1,700 more.
At 15000 miles per year (a lot) and $4/gallon (considerably more than right now), the difference between 42 and 29 mpg (which is fair, because your driving style should raise/lower both in similar ways) means payback in 2.65 years. Using a much more realistic 12K miles/year and $3/gallon, payback is 4.4 years. With less tax credit, it gets even worse.
Then, too, the Civic Hybrid is the only car that even has a chance of less than 5 year payback. For all the other straight-up comparisons (Toyota Highlander, Ford Fusion, Ford Escape, Lexus RX-350/450h, etc.), the payback is at least 7 years, and sometimes as much as 14.
But, if you get a deal, a hybrid is great. My wife has a Saturn Vue hybrid that cost less than the similarly equipped non-hybrid, but that's only because Saturn was discontinued by GM.
That only happens when you're using a nearly-decade-old operating system.
I'm using Windows XP and my card reader doesn't use any drive letters and linux doesn't use any drive letters at all. I'm hard pressed to think of a "nearly-decade-old" desktop OS still in common use today that isn't able to mount drives at abitrary points in the file system.
Come join us in the modern world and behold the "Hide Empty Drives" option.
As far as I know, this only removes the drives from display in Explorer...it does not de-allocate the drive letters.
For just over a buck, it's not a bad deal.
Since it's actually $8 when you include shipping, it's not so good a deal after all. Even buying 10 only lowers the per-unit total cost to $3.
Chances are you can hit a local shop and get them for close to the same price.
I've looked, and they are about $5 in local stores. I purchased a case of 24 from Best Buy for Business for less than $30 including shipping, but that was about 3 years ago.
I use this case for my smaller servers, which allows me to have 6 hard drives by using three of the 5-1/4" bays with adapters. With this motherboard, you can put an awful lot of computing power into a small space, and it's much quieter than rack mount solutions.
So, if you cannot afford a big honkin' gun
You definitely don't need a big honkin' gun, because the best home defense weapon is definitely the shortest shotgun that isn't legally considered "sawed-off".
Or, you can use just about any handgun you want, just load it with the right ammunition.
AMD is competitive with Intel will into the mid range market and even the start of the high end market (if you don't place much value on energy efficiency).
The 32nm and 45nm Intel chips are all no more than 95W TDP up to 2.93GHz 6-core, and after that they are 130W, which is pretty much the same as the 125W for the 6-core AMD.
Price/performance AMD curb stomps every Intel processor except the i7 920. But AMD does not compete, at all, above that performance point.
The quad-core i5-750 beats the six-core 1090T in quite a few benchmarks for $100 less for the Intel chip. With the i5-760 only $15 more for 133MHz faster stock clock, it'll likely be even better. And, motherboards with the 1156 socket start at $70, so you can get CPU and motherboard from Intel for less than the CPU alone from AMD, and win many benchmarks.
If you overclock, it gets even worse, because the Intel chips can easily OC to 3.2GHz (the stock speed of the 1090T). After that, both chips are basically even in how much farther they can be overclocked.
What about forestalled sentence termination due to interrup-- Hey, I'm talking here!
I believe the correct way to format that last bit is: due to interrup—Hey, I'm talking here!
Unlike the question of how many spaces should be used after a period, the n-dash and m-dash are punctiation marks. As such, they have rules for use that are much more hard and fast. One of those is that there should be no space between the letters on either side of the dash and the dash itself. This rule applies to all dashes (hyphen: twin-engine, n-dash: 9–5, m-dash: Shatner—is speaking).
Legally, the modem and router are their property. they don't stop you from using your own router, but the one they give you is a lease.
I'm pretty sure this is not true, and definitely sure it's not universally true.
At least when I signed up, one part of the offer was a free router, and even the ads were very clear that it was yours to keep, just like a cell phone (i.e., you had to keep service for a certain length of time or pay a termination fee).
Since I never used it as my main router and knew I wasn't going to, I tried to give it back to see if I could get some charges reduced, but there were no charges for it (that's why it was listed as "free"), so I kept it. Now I just use it for my wireless connection.
Based on all the other people I know with FiOS, I suspect that people who think they have been charged for "installing" the router actually were just buying the router without knowing it, since everyone I have talked to was told they get to keep the router.
Of course it's too vague.
Since we've all figured out the only somewhat vague part (that he was talking about disk storage), it's not vague at all.
$30/GB per month works out to $360K/year per terabyte. I haven't done any SAN shopping recently, but I'm pretty sure that $360K will buy you one with a lot more than 1TB.
So, yes, the IT department is overcharging by at least an order of magnitude.
Do the maths above: excluding power, staff, tape libraries and rack space etc, it's already over $25 per usable GB for Tier 1
Right, so this means that the IT department in the summary could buy a new storage system every month, since they are charging $30/GB per month.
Since an internal IT department should not be trying to make a profit, the charge should be just enough to pay for the total cost over the life of the hardware. For a 3 year life, that means that if the purchase price was $36/GB, the charge should be $1/GB per month.
Now, if you're trying to make a profit, that's a different story...charge whatever the market will bear.
I'm hardly a Ballmer fan, but what could he have done substantially differently?
Toss native API backward compatibility for Windows, and build a more stable OS from the ground up.
By supplying a "on the same desktop" VM for older apps, MS could have moved to a fully 64-bit system that could be anything at all.
Instead, he let a slow, user-unfriendly Vista roll out to derisive laughter.
even at US$3.50/month,
Thats fixed it for you.
Hint: India
Wikipedia says I'm far closer than you are.
With an average income of $550/month for members of the workforce, and 52% of that workforce in agriculture (which drags the average down), my $600/month estimate (which is what $3.50/hour works out to be) is probably low, which was what I was going for.
2-watt, wifi, 2GB RAM? 5-9 inch screens? For US$35? SOLD. I'll take two.
Yeah, I can't imagine any device hitting this price point with those features. Even getting the cost down that low would probably be a 2-3 year timeframe.
For example, about the best price on 2GB of any kind of RAM is US$30 at retail. Even assuming that 2GB RAM soldered onto a specially designed board with a large quantity order would be only $15, that's still too much, as obviously the touchscreen would be at least the same price.
Then, there's the case (custom, almost certainly) and the actual assembly. Even at US$3.50/hour, somebody building 10 of these an hour would add $0.35 to the cost. That's nothing on a $400 device, but it's 1% of the target cost here.