Man, they are good at graft and bribery in Chicago.
My God, what are you still doing here man? Don't you know that the evil New World Obama Administration can infect your mind through your Internet connection? Quick, log off now, run to the basement, and put on your tin foil body condom, before they turn you into a mindless socialist environment-loving green weenie!
Feel free to check back in 2012, it may be safe for you to come back on line then.
These brown sites will by nature of them be farther way from existing infrastructure resulting in higher costs to send both materials and labor to the location.
Precisely the opposite. If you RTFM, you'll see that the listed benefits include: power transmission lines are often already available on site (leftover from the site's previous use), and the sites are often located in areas with depressed economies (read: readily available labor from nearby towns, that used to be employed by the old site)
Also there will need to be extra safety precatuions taken for the labourers and the waste from the zones.
I think they are limiting their scope to sites where the pollution has been cleaned up to minimally acceptable levels.
The fact that [Time Machine] requires a separate drive is something of a joke
It actually doesn't require a second drive... you can have it back to up another partition on the same drive. It will warn you that you're about to do something stupid, but it will let you do it if you really want to.
I trust that it's clear why backing up your data to another partition on the same drive is generally a dumb thing to do.
Second, Time Machine is always scanning my drive checking if it needs to back things up. I'd really like it to try to scan for silent corruption while doing that. If a file changed, but the fileystem data says it hasn't been modified... I'd like a way to see that or be warned.
According to an article I read (that I can no longer find on line:^( ), Time Machine works by having a daemon that runs continuously and is notified whenever a file is created or written to. That daemon merely maintains the set of "dirty files" in the file system; when it comes time for Time Machine to do its thing, Time Machine grabs the dirty-files-set from the daemon and copies just those files over to the backup, then tells the daemon to clear its list of dirty files.
So Time Machine isn't actually "scanning your drive", it's just copying a list of known-changed files over. Presumably if they were to add scanning for drive corruption, it would make things much slower than they are now.
Crash all you want, but never, ever, ever harm, corrupt and by all that's holy, NEVER delete the user's data.
Except that if you are going to guarantee that you'll never corrupt or delete the user's data, then you have to guarantee that your program's behavior is well-defined. And usually programs that crash are crashing because they contain errors that lead to undefined behavior.
So if you want to be sure not to corrupt anything, you pretty much aren't allowed to crash either. (note: even if your program never writes to the disk, if it's buggy it might be vulnerable to a code injection attack that would cause it to write to the disk...)
The fundamental design flaw they all have is that servers represent space in the game, it's a flawed assumption about the best model to use.
I'm probably just being naive here, but isn't the flaw really that the servers represent a fixed amount of space in the game, while at the same time the amount ("density") of user activity in a given space can vary, and therefore the amount of processing and I/O needed to support that space can become more than the server can support?
If so, perhaps a solution would be to make the server's "game-space-allocation" variable... i.e. if a server gets too busy, it allocates another server (from Amazon's E3 cloud or wherever) and transfer half of its game-space (and therefore half of its load) over to the new server. Conversely, if a server becomes underutililized it could merge itself back together with another underutilized server to cut costs.
Of course that would still leave unsolved the problem of seamless interactions across neighboring servers, but it's Sunday so I'm not going to think about that.
Well, this is just useless. EEG has been used as input for decades.
Yeah, but the concept is good. Just think, maybe some day instead of having to listen to mindless cell phone yakking on the subway, people will carry on their conversations silently in their heads.
It's going to make administering tests a lot harder though, when anyone can Google any answer without moving a muscle.
I think he managed to malign the US in just about every speech. He also has apologized for everything the US has and could ever do in its history. I think that counts for something.
It takes a big man to admit when he's wrong. The same thing applies to countries. So if you don't approve, please specify whether you honestly believe US has never done anything wrong, or whether you are aware of our long history misdeeds, but are hoping that the world will somehow forget if we just pretend they didn't happen.
It's not like the majority of misdeeds of the US are a secret from anyone. So pretending that they never happened only costs us more respect, because then we are liars also.
The world appreciates leaders who act like adults, and not like blustering, atavistic children.
And was before and is now. Nothing has really changed. Those most loudly cheering on this administration are Chavez and group. Not the litter picks I would take home.
You're entitled to your opinion, but the facts show otherwise.
In any case, why is "the US President acted only in the interests of the US" a bad thing? At worst, it's a neutral thing.
That's what Ahmadinejad keeps saying... why is having the leadership of Iran act only in the interests of Iran a bad thing? And Kim Jong-il totally agrees.
The sad thing is that if this was Apple, fans would be lapping it up, citing it as an example of how Apple were hip and Macs were cool, and how they'd introduced some new marketing innovation.
I disagree.... if Apple were to do the same thing, it would be just as mind-blowingly lame. Which is presumably why Apple isn't doing it.
That's great until some common library needs to be updated for a security hole, and you have download 20 updates from different vendors (assuming they even provide updates...) rather than 1 item in Windows Update.
Sure, but doesn't SxS suffer from the same problem? i.e. you download the new/patched library version, but SxS still magically ensures that all your apps still use the old one that they were compiled against (you know, for compatibility).
Wake me up when I can head down to the market and buy a widget made with nanotubes.
This is Slashdot ("news for nerds"). The site you seem to be looking for is Consumer Reports. Everything discussed on that site is available for sale now, and they won't bother you with any of that horrible "science stuff".
Patents are something that shouldn't exist in the first place!
Without patents, there is a huge incentive to keep all commercializable discoveries and inventions secret, because that's the only way to prevent your competition from selling the product you invented more cheaply than you can (after all, you have to repay all the debts you incurred while inventing/perfecting your invention, and your competitors don't... all they have to do is obtain one unit and then duplicate it).
With patents, you are granted a temporary monopoly on your invention, and in return you publish the invention in the public record. After 14 years, the patent period ends, and now anyone can use your idea for free, forever.
In my opinion that's a better result than having the invention remain secret forever.... YMMV.
Thanks for pointing out the bleeding obvious. How's the consultancy market these days?
I'll point out another obvious thing: if you had had anything of value to contribute to the conversation, you would have done so. But you didn't, so you felt compelled to fling a meaningless insult instead. Good job.
Perhaps the user feedback will cause it to evolve into something more manageable for a regular brain.
Or perhaps the brains of its users will evolve into something that multitasks like Wave does. At that point all of us old-fashioned email users will start to become like our grandparents, complaining about how we "just don't get" those kids and their fancy new modalities...
Actually, a nice technique would be simply pump out the spent (liquid) contents of the car's battery, and then pump in fresh, charged contents from the gas station's reserve. That would avoid the mechanical complexity of robotic battery changers, and reduce the "recharge" time down to less than that of gas-powered cars. The station could then recharge the recovered contents at its leisure.
I don't know enough about batteries to say if that's at all practical, however... I suspect it's not, or somebody would have tried it by now.
The materials needed to make oil and gas synthetically is quite cheap: turkey guts, offal, old plastic bottles, etc.
Perhaps, but how much fossil fuel was used producing those turkey guts and old plastic bottles?
Converting those things into fuel is a great idea, but I'd be surprised if there's enough suitable garbage available to make it more than a niche operation.
What will happen on the demand side of electricity when electric cars become common? Could it be that demand will quickly outgrow supply? What, oh what, will a KWH cost then? DIE, ELECTRIC CAR, DIE
Okay, Mr. Economist, take your speculation forward another step. What will happen when electricity prices rise? Yes, that's right, there will be a great financial incentive to increase production of electricity. And unlike gasoline, whose supply is finite and dwindling, it's perfectly possible to produce more electricity in a number of ways. There are already companies that will install solar panels on your roof on their dime, in return for a share of the energy the solar panels produce... it's likely that in the next 10-20 years these same companies will actually pay you for the privilege of installing solar panels on your roof, because they will be able to sell the resulting power at a profit to electric car owners. Then there's wind, nuclear, tidal, geothermal, solar thermal, etc.
In short, it's the supply of fossil fuels that we should be worried about, not the supply of electrons.
If it takes an hour to charge, it better cost far, far less than gasoline.
If they can extend the range to be long enough that it can drive for an entire day on a single charge (admittedly a big if), then suddenly the recharge time doesn't matter as much. After all, you're going to have to stop off and sleep for the night, and you can leave the car plugged in to recharge for 8 hours while you sleep.
.... and of course when gasoline costs $10 a gallon, it's not so hard for electric power to be far, far cheaper.
They likely would have never understood why you need to pay a lot for top end protection, nor would they likely have payed for it.
Hell, I never understood that either. Why should anyone who just forked out $xxx for a brand-new OS then be forced to pay yearly "protection money" as well? Sounds like a racket to me.
As long as watching porn doesn't impact your work or offend colleagues, then why should it be considered any worse than surfing YouTube, Facebook, or even Slashdot?
When you get called over to do some tech support on the porn-viewer's computer and you notice your fingers sticking to the keys, then you'll know why viewing porn at work is considered a problem...:^P
But as a matter of philosophy, Microsoft boldly claims "You will never need a shell" and a lot of people rejoice.
Yes, but then those of us who want a shell get... the freaking MS-DOS Command Prompt. Quite possibly the worst shell interface known to mankind. It's so bad that its suckiness has to be deliberate, Microsoft's way of "encouraging" people to think that clicking on icons is the only reasonable way to use a computer.
(yeah, I know there are alternatives. My point is that they shouldn't be "alternatives", something decent should be the default by now. It's 2009, not 1981, for God's sake)
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Man, they are good at graft and bribery in Chicago.
My God, what are you still doing here man? Don't you know that the evil New World Obama Administration can infect your mind through your Internet connection? Quick, log off now, run to the basement, and put on your tin foil body condom, before they turn you into a mindless socialist environment-loving green weenie!
Feel free to check back in 2012, it may be safe for you to come back on line then.
These brown sites will by nature of them be farther way from existing infrastructure resulting in higher costs to send both materials and labor to the location.
Precisely the opposite. If you RTFM, you'll see that the listed benefits include: power transmission lines are often already available on site (leftover from the site's previous use), and the sites are often located in areas with depressed economies (read: readily available labor from nearby towns, that used to be employed by the old site)
Also there will need to be extra safety precatuions taken for the labourers and the waste from the zones.
I think they are limiting their scope to sites where the pollution has been cleaned up to minimally acceptable levels.
The fact that [Time Machine] requires a separate drive is something of a joke
It actually doesn't require a second drive... you can have it back to up another partition on the same drive. It will warn you that you're about to do something stupid, but it will let you do it if you really want to.
I trust that it's clear why backing up your data to another partition on the same drive is generally a dumb thing to do.
Second, Time Machine is always scanning my drive checking if it needs to back things up. I'd really like it to try to scan for silent corruption while doing that. If a file changed, but the fileystem data says it hasn't been modified... I'd like a way to see that or be warned.
According to an article I read (that I can no longer find on line :^( ), Time Machine works by having a daemon that runs continuously and is notified whenever a file is created or written to. That daemon merely maintains the set of "dirty files" in the file system; when it comes time for Time Machine to do its thing, Time Machine grabs the dirty-files-set from the daemon and copies just those files over to the backup, then tells the daemon to clear its list of dirty files.
So Time Machine isn't actually "scanning your drive", it's just copying a list of known-changed files over. Presumably if they were to add scanning for drive corruption, it would make things much slower than they are now.
Crash all you want, but never, ever, ever harm, corrupt and by all that's holy, NEVER delete the user's data.
Except that if you are going to guarantee that you'll never corrupt or delete the user's data, then you have to guarantee that your program's behavior is well-defined. And usually programs that crash are crashing because they contain errors that lead to undefined behavior.
So if you want to be sure not to corrupt anything, you pretty much aren't allowed to crash either. (note: even if your program never writes to the disk, if it's buggy it might be vulnerable to a code injection attack that would cause it to write to the disk...)
The fundamental design flaw they all have is that servers represent space in the game, it's a flawed assumption about the best model to use.
I'm probably just being naive here, but isn't the flaw really that the servers represent a fixed amount of space in the game, while at the same time the amount ("density") of user activity in a given space can vary, and therefore the amount of processing and I/O needed to support that space can become more than the server can support?
If so, perhaps a solution would be to make the server's "game-space-allocation" variable... i.e. if a server gets too busy, it allocates another server (from Amazon's E3 cloud or wherever) and transfer half of its game-space (and therefore half of its load) over to the new server. Conversely, if a server becomes underutililized it could merge itself back together with another underutilized server to cut costs.
Of course that would still leave unsolved the problem of seamless interactions across neighboring servers, but it's Sunday so I'm not going to think about that.
Well, this is just useless. EEG has been used as input for decades.
Yeah, but the concept is good. Just think, maybe some day instead of having to listen to mindless cell phone yakking on the subway, people will carry on their conversations silently in their heads.
It's going to make administering tests a lot harder though, when anyone can Google any answer without moving a muscle.
I think he managed to malign the US in just about every speech. He also has apologized for everything the US has and could ever do in its history. I think that counts for something.
It takes a big man to admit when he's wrong. The same thing applies to countries. So if you don't approve, please specify whether you honestly believe US has never done anything wrong, or whether you are aware of our long history misdeeds, but are hoping that the world will somehow forget if we just pretend they didn't happen.
It's not like the majority of misdeeds of the US are a secret from anyone. So pretending that they never happened only costs us more respect, because then we are liars also.
The world appreciates leaders who act like adults, and not like blustering, atavistic children.
And was before and is now. Nothing has really changed. Those most loudly cheering on this administration are Chavez and group. Not the litter picks I would take home.
You're entitled to your opinion, but the facts show otherwise.
You know, like it does EVERY. FOUR. YEARS?
Eight, sir.
In any case, why is "the US President acted only in the interests of the US" a bad thing? At worst, it's a neutral thing.
That's what Ahmadinejad keeps saying... why is having the leadership of Iran act only in the interests of Iran a bad thing? And Kim Jong-il totally agrees.
The sad thing is that if this was Apple, fans would be lapping it up, citing it as an example of how Apple were hip and Macs were cool, and how they'd introduced some new marketing innovation.
I disagree.... if Apple were to do the same thing, it would be just as mind-blowingly lame. Which is presumably why Apple isn't doing it.
Sure, they keep the horde of undead occupied while you escape via the parking garage or roof.
That will work in the short term, but future company meetings become really awkward.
I know very well where I am, #14640. I've been reading articles about nanotubes on Slashdot for as long as there has been a Slashdot.
Cool... then you are probably aware of Slashdot's ability to let you skip articles you aren't interested in.
That's great until some common library needs to be updated for a security hole, and you have download 20 updates from different vendors (assuming they even provide updates...) rather than 1 item in Windows Update.
Sure, but doesn't SxS suffer from the same problem? i.e. you download the new/patched library version, but SxS still magically ensures that all your apps still use the old one that they were compiled against (you know, for compatibility).
Or perhaps I am missing something here?
Wake me up when I can head down to the market and buy a widget made with nanotubes.
This is Slashdot ("news for nerds"). The site you seem to be looking for is Consumer Reports. Everything discussed on that site is available for sale now, and they won't bother you with any of that horrible "science stuff".
Patents are something that shouldn't exist in the first place!
Without patents, there is a huge incentive to keep all commercializable discoveries and inventions secret, because that's the only way to prevent your competition from selling the product you invented more cheaply than you can (after all, you have to repay all the debts you incurred while inventing/perfecting your invention, and your competitors don't... all they have to do is obtain one unit and then duplicate it).
With patents, you are granted a temporary monopoly on your invention, and in return you publish the invention in the public record. After 14 years, the patent period ends, and now anyone can use your idea for free, forever.
In my opinion that's a better result than having the invention remain secret forever.... YMMV.
Thanks for pointing out the bleeding obvious. How's the consultancy market these days?
I'll point out another obvious thing: if you had had anything of value to contribute to the conversation, you would have done so. But you didn't, so you felt compelled to fling a meaningless insult instead. Good job.
Perhaps the user feedback will cause it to evolve into something more manageable for a regular brain.
Or perhaps the brains of its users will evolve into something that multitasks like Wave does. At that point all of us old-fashioned email users will start to become like our grandparents, complaining about how we "just don't get" those kids and their fancy new modalities...
Nurse, I need my walker!
Actually, a nice technique would be simply pump out the spent (liquid) contents of the car's battery, and then pump in fresh, charged contents from the gas station's reserve. That would avoid the mechanical complexity of robotic battery changers, and reduce the "recharge" time down to less than that of gas-powered cars. The station could then recharge the recovered contents at its leisure.
I don't know enough about batteries to say if that's at all practical, however... I suspect it's not, or somebody would have tried it by now.
15 minutes probably isn't fast enough. How long are you prepared to wait for the guy at the "electron pump" in front of you to finish up?
It also depends on how many "electron pumps" are available at the station. If there are enough of them then you won't have to wait.
The materials needed to make oil and gas synthetically is quite cheap: turkey guts, offal, old plastic bottles, etc.
Perhaps, but how much fossil fuel was used producing those turkey guts and old plastic bottles?
Converting those things into fuel is a great idea, but I'd be surprised if there's enough suitable garbage available to make it more than a niche operation.
What will happen on the demand side of electricity when electric cars become common? Could it be that demand will quickly outgrow supply? What, oh what, will a KWH cost then? DIE, ELECTRIC CAR, DIE
Okay, Mr. Economist, take your speculation forward another step. What will happen when electricity prices rise? Yes, that's right, there will be a great financial incentive to increase production of electricity. And unlike gasoline, whose supply is finite and dwindling, it's perfectly possible to produce more electricity in a number of ways. There are already companies that will install solar panels on your roof on their dime, in return for a share of the energy the solar panels produce... it's likely that in the next 10-20 years these same companies will actually pay you for the privilege of installing solar panels on your roof, because they will be able to sell the resulting power at a profit to electric car owners. Then there's wind, nuclear, tidal, geothermal, solar thermal, etc.
In short, it's the supply of fossil fuels that we should be worried about, not the supply of electrons.
If it takes an hour to charge, it better cost far, far less than gasoline.
If they can extend the range to be long enough that it can drive for an entire day on a single charge (admittedly a big if), then suddenly the recharge time doesn't matter as much. After all, you're going to have to stop off and sleep for the night, and you can leave the car plugged in to recharge for 8 hours while you sleep.
They likely would have never understood why you need to pay a lot for top end protection, nor would they likely have payed for it.
Hell, I never understood that either. Why should anyone who just forked out $xxx for a brand-new OS then be forced to pay yearly "protection money" as well? Sounds like a racket to me.
As long as watching porn doesn't impact your work or offend colleagues, then why should it be considered any worse than surfing YouTube, Facebook, or even Slashdot?
When you get called over to do some tech support on the porn-viewer's computer and you notice your fingers sticking to the keys, then you'll know why viewing porn at work is considered a problem... :^P
But as a matter of philosophy, Microsoft boldly claims "You will never need a shell" and a lot of people rejoice.
Yes, but then those of us who want a shell get... the freaking MS-DOS Command Prompt. Quite possibly the worst shell interface known to mankind. It's so bad that its suckiness has to be deliberate, Microsoft's way of "encouraging" people to think that clicking on icons is the only reasonable way to use a computer.
(yeah, I know there are alternatives. My point is that they shouldn't be "alternatives", something decent should be the default by now. It's 2009, not 1981, for God's sake)