My A8N-E had an even stranger problem. I had no floppy drive in the system, but if I disabled the floppy in the BIOS, the FSB would randomly set itself to 201 or 216Mhz no matter what FSB I set in the BIOS. The POST screen showed the correct speed, but once I booted into Windows or Linux it showed 201 or 216. I never bothered asking ASUS about it. From posts in hardware forums it doesn't seem like ASUS cares much about BIOS bugs.
I'm not sure where the problem is, but these twosources give the heat energy content of gasoline to be between 33 and 45 kWh per gallon.
The problem with batteries is that it takes roughly a thousand pounds of lead acid batteries to store the energy of one gallon of gasoline. More exotic batteries will only give incremental gains in storage capacity. Battery cars are a loser for all but the shortest trips.
I was talking more about being user-friendly for non-technical people. If you're talking about paid support, Canonical provides that for Ubuntu. Ubuntu is backed by a non-profit foundation with millions in funding from Shuttleworth. Although it's Free, it also has a polished commercial feel to it (as opposed to a hobbyist feel).
Ahh.... But there is an analogy in the RIAA vs. Napster lawsuit. After they destroyed Napster in court, they tried going after Napster's financiers, the Hummer Winblad VC firm, for billions of more dollars in damages. The last news I could find was from July 2004, and that said the trial is proceeding.
I know it's a longshot, but there's some deep pockets at Canopus Group and Microsoft. A man can dream, right?
You're right that the endless stream of Madden 200x games is marketing driven, and it just happens that 2006 was released this week. They really have a short shelf life. A few months ago I picked up a used copy of Madden 2004 for $3.99. I'm sure there are incremental improvements to the gameplay from year to year, but for a casual sports gamer like myself, I'll never notice the difference.
Exactly. It reminds me of the people who complain about auto racing as a waste of gas, while there's tens of thousands of cars carrying fans stuck in traffic outside the stadium after any ball game.
Anyway, to see the real cost of liquid hydrogen as a fuel, look past the clean water vapor exhaust. The only economical way to produce hydrogen now is from hydrocarbons like natural gas. The process releases the carbon as CO2. Not only that, liquid hydrogen has to be kept below 20 K. The energy cost to liquefy hydrogen is typically 40% of its energy content. That's a lot of electricity off the grid which likely came from a coal power plant. The most optimistic estimates assuming the most efficient plants are still 25%. That's not even including the gas lost to boil-off which must be vented for safety. Liquid hydrogen is a loser for transportation fuel. Rockets use it because it packs a lot of energy for its weight, and they're willing to deal with the complexity of handling it.
OK, but does Sony sell them *profitably*? Their consumer electronics have been a money loser for a while now. They don't command nearly the price premiums they used to for the brand and the quality.
The economy of the Soviet Union was decrepit and corrupt. Even as we were building them up to be a supervillian in pop culture (remember Firefox and Rocky IV?), they were rotting from the inside out. The taste of freedom from Glasnot plus the war in Afghanistan was enough to tip over the corpse.
The U.S. economy was on more solid ground, but with the borrow and spend economic policies of this administration, I'm not so sure anymore. At least with Chinese banks holding so much in U.S. Treasury Bonds, they'll think twice about starting a war that'll sink both our economies.
Good article. I knew about it too. A good, quiet PSU doesn't have to be expensive. I bought a Seasonic SS300 which was recommended on that page for under $45. It has 18A on the 12V rail which is as much as some 400W units, 80% efficiency, and it's so quiet I can barely hear it when the computer's idle. It doesn't have dual 12V rails or a 24 pin ATX connector for PCI-express, but it's fine for anything up to a midrange video card.
The other way is to store the key on removable media that's easily destroyed (Zip disks? haha), like a GPG private key with passphrase. Maybe they'll charge you with destroying evidence, but wouldn't they have to prove the encrypted files actually contained evidence?
Well only 43 out of 200 Democrats voted to renew it. Mainstream news is whitewashing this as a bill with bipartisan support and downplaying complaints as "concerns". I don't buy it for a second.
Congressional Democrats shoulda had a spine in '03 about the Iraq War, but it wouldn't have made much difference. The shitstorm coming out about the faked intelligence (Downing Street Minutes, Karl Rove, Valerie Plame) make it pretty clear Bush denied the Legislative Branch any chance of giving "informed consent".
"I don't know where you live, but in Los Angeles I can't believe that they issue a single inappropriate traffic ticket in any given year."
California is pretty fair to motorists compared to most states. Try the Midwest or Texas. Lots of blatant speed traps all over the place. Places where the speed limit drops suddenly for no good reason except to fleece motorists for their money. Read the story of New Rome Township here and here.
Traffic court is fast food court. It is like AOL tech support. Like the call agent, it's the judge's job to move cases through as fast as possible. I think any time-wasting or stalling tactics would just piss him off. If there's ever a he said/she said situation, they always believe the cop's side. So hard evidence is absolutely necessary.
With that said, wasting the court's time is still not a bad idea. Traffic tickets are about revenue, not public safety. Make them burn up the profit on your ticket in court time. If everybody fought their ticket, traffic tickets would become unprofitable.
"while he could be saving the world from criminals"
Not likely. In most big city PDs the officers are assigned to specific beats. Traffic officers do nothing but write traffic tickets all day while others respond to calls from dispatch. Around here we have officers who do nothing but respond to traffic accident calls, ie taking reports, securing the scene, etc. Of course officers would respond if they witnessed a crime in progress themselves, but that scenario is extremely rare compared to responding to calls or witnessing a traffic violation.
An officer *might* catch a real criminal on a traffic stop, like someone with a warrant, but most of the time they don't bother. They'll more often pull over a car with a safe, non-threatening looking driver to write the ticket and send them on their way.
Well the stability and disaster recovery side of mainframes isn't really a result of the programmer. To the applications programmer, the system "just works", which it should for the price you're paying. Backups and disaster recovery is something for the operators (they're not called administrators). If applications themselves are stable, it's probably a result of COBOL being a straighforward procedural language without all the trickiness of C pointers.
Now as far as security, I'd say mainframe security is 99% security by obscurity. The mainframe programmers I know are hopelessly naive about network security policy, basic things a Windows or Unix admin would know from working in a hostile environment like the Internet. You know, things like password policy, IP networking, etc.
Tell me about it. I'm in LA and the streets are full of them. The sad part is, when I visited Texas and drove around Houston and Austin in the rental car I was thinking, there's sure a lot of cars around here compared to home. This was Texas, the place where F150's are called the Cowboy's Cadillac. When I was on the road between Houston and Austin, everybody did drive pickups, which is understandable since the locals lived on ranches.
The Cobalt is a brand new platform, although in typical GM brilliance it looks almost the same as the Cavalier. The old Cavalier was built on the same chassis since 1981 with a few sheetmetal updates and a few different engines.
Cars are a fashion item as much as transportation. Unfortunately, the huge SUVs are popular now, and those sales are the only thing keeping Ford and GM alive. The Buy American sentiment in the truck buyer market is stronger, and American trucks are more competitive with import trucks than American cars vs. import cars.
Even SUV owners I know have said the fad can't last forever. GM has some better new cars coming out. (Compare the Cobalt to the Cavalier). Let's hope they're good enough to wean GM off SUV sales.
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My A8N-E had an even stranger problem. I had no floppy drive in the system, but if I disabled the floppy in the BIOS, the FSB would randomly set itself to 201 or 216Mhz no matter what FSB I set in the BIOS. The POST screen showed the correct speed, but once I booted into Windows or Linux it showed 201 or 216. I never bothered asking ASUS about it. From posts in hardware forums it doesn't seem like ASUS cares much about BIOS bugs.
I'm not sure where the problem is, but these two sources give the heat energy content of gasoline to be between 33 and 45 kWh per gallon.
The problem with batteries is that it takes roughly a thousand pounds of lead acid batteries to store the energy of one gallon of gasoline. More exotic batteries will only give incremental gains in storage capacity. Battery cars are a loser for all but the shortest trips.
"Umm... Is Ubuntu supported?"
I was talking more about being user-friendly for non-technical people. If you're talking about paid support, Canonical provides that for Ubuntu. Ubuntu is backed by a non-profit foundation with millions in funding from Shuttleworth. Although it's Free, it also has a polished commercial feel to it (as opposed to a hobbyist feel).
"Only the openSUSE project refines its Linux distribution to the point where non-technical users can have a successful Linux experience."
Umm.. Ubuntu?
Ahh.... But there is an analogy in the RIAA vs. Napster lawsuit. After they destroyed Napster in court, they tried going after Napster's financiers, the Hummer Winblad VC firm, for billions of more dollars in damages. The last news I could find was from July 2004, and that said the trial is proceeding.
I know it's a longshot, but there's some deep pockets at Canopus Group and Microsoft. A man can dream, right?
You're right that the endless stream of Madden 200x games is marketing driven, and it just happens that 2006 was released this week. They really have a short shelf life. A few months ago I picked up a used copy of Madden 2004 for $3.99. I'm sure there are incremental improvements to the gameplay from year to year, but for a casual sports gamer like myself, I'll never notice the difference.
Exactly. It reminds me of the people who complain about auto racing as a waste of gas, while there's tens of thousands of cars carrying fans stuck in traffic outside the stadium after any ball game.
Anyway, to see the real cost of liquid hydrogen as a fuel, look past the clean water vapor exhaust. The only economical way to produce hydrogen now is from hydrocarbons like natural gas. The process releases the carbon as CO2. Not only that, liquid hydrogen has to be kept below 20 K. The energy cost to liquefy hydrogen is typically 40% of its energy content. That's a lot of electricity off the grid which likely came from a coal power plant. The most optimistic estimates assuming the most efficient plants are still 25%. That's not even including the gas lost to boil-off which must be vented for safety. Liquid hydrogen is a loser for transportation fuel. Rockets use it because it packs a lot of energy for its weight, and they're willing to deal with the complexity of handling it.
The industry term for that is "inventory shrinkage". Stores lose a lot more to shrinkage than shoplifting.
"NASA failed to develop a comparable technology with multi-billion dollar budget"
The X-15 is comparable technology. It flew from 1959 to 1968.
OK, but does Sony sell them *profitably*? Their consumer electronics have been a money loser for a while now. They don't command nearly the price premiums they used to for the brand and the quality.
The economy of the Soviet Union was decrepit and corrupt. Even as we were building them up to be a supervillian in pop culture (remember Firefox and Rocky IV?), they were rotting from the inside out. The taste of freedom from Glasnot plus the war in Afghanistan was enough to tip over the corpse.
The U.S. economy was on more solid ground, but with the borrow and spend economic policies of this administration, I'm not so sure anymore. At least with Chinese banks holding so much in U.S. Treasury Bonds, they'll think twice about starting a war that'll sink both our economies.
"what in the hell does that even mean?"
It means he doesn't trust Bush on safety. Public oversight of our corporate overlords is, well, un-American.
Check the UHF channels next time you're in LA. Chinese pop music and pop culture are as vapid as MTV.
Good article. I knew about it too. A good, quiet PSU doesn't have to be expensive. I bought a Seasonic SS300 which was recommended on that page for under $45. It has 18A on the 12V rail which is as much as some 400W units, 80% efficiency, and it's so quiet I can barely hear it when the computer's idle. It doesn't have dual 12V rails or a 24 pin ATX connector for PCI-express, but it's fine for anything up to a midrange video card.
Back in the 19th Century, the U.S. was the pirate harboring nation. The U.S. didn't recognize foreign copyrights until 1891.
The other way is to store the key on removable media that's easily destroyed (Zip disks? haha), like a GPG private key with passphrase. Maybe they'll charge you with destroying evidence, but wouldn't they have to prove the encrypted files actually contained evidence?
Well, maybe now I have a use for that motherboard with the broken clock. Every time I shut down the clock goes back to Jan 1, 2002.
Well only 43 out of 200 Democrats voted to renew it. Mainstream news is whitewashing this as a bill with bipartisan support and downplaying complaints as "concerns". I don't buy it for a second.
Congressional Democrats shoulda had a spine in '03 about the Iraq War, but it wouldn't have made much difference. The shitstorm coming out about the faked intelligence (Downing Street Minutes, Karl Rove, Valerie Plame) make it pretty clear Bush denied the Legislative Branch any chance of giving "informed consent".
"I don't know where you live, but in Los Angeles I can't believe that they issue a single inappropriate traffic ticket in any given year."
California is pretty fair to motorists compared to most states. Try the Midwest or Texas. Lots of blatant speed traps all over the place. Places where the speed limit drops suddenly for no good reason except to fleece motorists for their money. Read the story of New Rome Township here and here.
Traffic court is fast food court. It is like AOL tech support. Like the call agent, it's the judge's job to move cases through as fast as possible. I think any time-wasting or stalling tactics would just piss him off. If there's ever a he said/she said situation, they always believe the cop's side. So hard evidence is absolutely necessary.
With that said, wasting the court's time is still not a bad idea. Traffic tickets are about revenue, not public safety. Make them burn up the profit on your ticket in court time. If everybody fought their ticket, traffic tickets would become unprofitable.
"while he could be saving the world from criminals"
Not likely. In most big city PDs the officers are assigned to specific beats. Traffic officers do nothing but write traffic tickets all day while others respond to calls from dispatch. Around here we have officers who do nothing but respond to traffic accident calls, ie taking reports, securing the scene, etc. Of course officers would respond if they witnessed a crime in progress themselves, but that scenario is extremely rare compared to responding to calls or witnessing a traffic violation.
An officer *might* catch a real criminal on a traffic stop, like someone with a warrant, but most of the time they don't bother. They'll more often pull over a car with a safe, non-threatening looking driver to write the ticket and send them on their way.
Well the stability and disaster recovery side of mainframes isn't really a result of the programmer. To the applications programmer, the system "just works", which it should for the price you're paying. Backups and disaster recovery is something for the operators (they're not called administrators). If applications themselves are stable, it's probably a result of COBOL being a straighforward procedural language without all the trickiness of C pointers.
Now as far as security, I'd say mainframe security is 99% security by obscurity. The mainframe programmers I know are hopelessly naive about network security policy, basic things a Windows or Unix admin would know from working in a hostile environment like the Internet. You know, things like password policy, IP networking, etc.
Tell me about it. I'm in LA and the streets are full of them. The sad part is, when I visited Texas and drove around Houston and Austin in the rental car I was thinking, there's sure a lot of cars around here compared to home. This was Texas, the place where F150's are called the Cowboy's Cadillac. When I was on the road between Houston and Austin, everybody did drive pickups, which is understandable since the locals lived on ranches.
The Cobalt is a brand new platform, although in typical GM brilliance it looks almost the same as the Cavalier. The old Cavalier was built on the same chassis since 1981 with a few sheetmetal updates and a few different engines.
Cars are a fashion item as much as transportation. Unfortunately, the huge SUVs are popular now, and those sales are the only thing keeping Ford and GM alive. The Buy American sentiment in the truck buyer market is stronger, and American trucks are more competitive with import trucks than American cars vs. import cars.
Even SUV owners I know have said the fad can't last forever. GM has some better new cars coming out. (Compare the Cobalt to the Cavalier). Let's hope they're good enough to wean GM off SUV sales.