"whenever they please" means during thunderstorms...
My father had a ranch in Arizona way back when. As the land was 50 miles from the nearest town over a a really bad road, the easiest way to get around was by plane. That was true for all the ranchers in the area. Unfortunately, not all the ranchers had what it took upstairs to fly. The rancher next door bought himself a dual engine Sky King with the latest avionics package, got his instrument rating and flew home. When he got home, he picked up his wife and two kids to show them the fancy new plane and took off during a really nasty lightning storm.
Unfortunately, none of them survived. Arizona thunderstorms can get really nasty.
My father had a single engine Bellanca that flew like a bat out of hell and he once made the mistake of getting under an Arizona thunderhead. The updraft was so intense that to keep from getting sucked into the cloud, he kept the nose pointed at the ground as he flew under the cloud. He said that the plane was just barely holding elevation during the updraft portion and when he got out from under, he got slammed towards ground by the accompanying downdraft. He was much more careful around thunderstorms after that.
One last thunderhead story...I was flying to Ohio with a girlfriend whose parents had come out to California to pick her up at the end of school. Both parents were pilots and traded flying the plane as we went back to my girlfriend's in Ohio. They have the radio up loud so that we can hear it over the engine noise and over a few minute's span, we hear 4 different airliners ask to be vectored around a set of several thunderheads. A few seconds after the 4th plane got vectored, the girl's mom says that she thinks ground control has put 4 planes in the same airspace. Sure enough, the radio erupts with ground and pilot traffic scrambling to maintain the requisite distance.
Clearly, you didn't read the article...it has a payload of several thousand pounds which will just about cover the weight of the batteries. That means it won't operate day or night. It'll just sit there doing nothing all the time. Just like the guy in the next cubicle.
I just bought an HP-4250. It's a laser printer that, when the planets align, can pump out 45 pages/minute. The driver for it can bring any machine to its knees though. I've got an A64/3200+ with half a gig of RAM and when I fire off a large print task, I may as well go do something else - there aren't any cpu cycles left to speak of.
I suppose they gave the task of upgrading the driver to a summer intern or outsourced it to someone who didn't give a damn about HP's reputation. I've considered getting a dual core box but the idea of upgrading the hardware because some idiot didn't know how to write a printer driver properly just doesn't sit too well.
Because they don't want to share the stage with Sony's PS3 rollout. This way, at least for now, Xbox will be the toy gamers are talking about for a week before E3. Who knows, maybe Sony will counter with something else like a giving away a night playing video games with Pamela Anderson or something.
In the end, it probably doesn't matter much - when the actual hardware and software goes on sale will matter more as well as the caliber of the software.
...Dave Rosum, Emu founder and Caltech Alum, hacked the Rosebowl scoreboard when Nixon was in office. The hack was going to display various Caltech-centric messages on the scoreboard as the game progressend. To make it difficult to disable, Rosum hid his hacked circuits in a tube and buried the tube in a bunch of cables.
Nixon was a big football fan and decided to go see the Rosebowl game that year which meant the Secret Service had to scour the Rosebowl. As part of their checkout, they powered up the scoreboard and because Rosum had scrimped on his relays, they blew his circuit out. Debugging the blown scoreboard led them to his fried, and smoking, circuit. That would have been the end of it except some other Techies decided independently to pull the same prank. Except they didn't know the Secret Service was waiting for the first prankster to come fix his prank. Guess who ended up getting caught?
You might consider reading General Singlaub's take on North Korea and who's responsible for the stalemate.
If you don't want to read the whole thing, scroll down until you get to The Communists unleashed their provocation with brutal efficiency on the morning of Wednesday, August 18, 1976.
Once I figured out that Comcast's dns server was gone, I reconfigured my network setting to use another dns pair. (Not for nothing do I record old tcp-ip setting values!)
It was like being on a ten lane freeway all by myself - everything was fast!
Only question now is does Comcast fire their CTO who recommended using Windows-based servers or do we get to see a repeat meltdown somewhere down the road?
Using the word "real" in a description of a story-line revolving around face hugging creatures, gravity guns, Ant Lions, Ant Lion summoning pods and an invincible hero suggests you didn't get the memo about no commitment to reality.
We don't know ahead of time what information will turn out to be useful and what will turn out to be arcane so we just gather what knowledge what we can and plod along. It's a strategy that's worked quite well so far.
Some examples..Transistors arose from some guys shooting the breeze 20-30 years earlier as to how electrons moved around. What they were saying made no sense at all but it paid off big time. A guy sitting in a patent office speculates that light is comprised of particles and uses it to explain why electrons stream out of certain metals. Same guy speculates about what it's like to sit on a photon as it screams along and draws a few conclusions that 35 years later, rock the world. Another guy grows 1000s of peas, counts, by hand, how many of eight different traits show up in subsequent generations and figures out that wrinkled peas require wrinkled parents. Thirty years later, some other guys pick up on that idea and study fruit flys and come up with an arithmetic argument based on percentages that some traits are based on discrete loci. Weird stuff in 1911 that blossomed into billion dollar corporations 70 years later. A pair of mathematically gifted brothers figure out some equations about how fluids move over surfaces. That knowledge sits around for more than a 100 years before a different pair of brothers in a bike shop put the knowledge to an interesting use.
You just never know what's worth knowing so we gather what we can.
Your post is reminiscent of the argument AT&T used before it was broken up. "We need to be a monopoly to provide the best possible service." It was bull then and it's bull now.
Cable was initially chartered to bring television into the home. Once the internet got going, it was a marginal upgrade to become an ISP as the most expensive part, wire to the home, was already in place. Cable's prime reason for existing, providing TV, is still in place regardless of whether they're forced to share the cable with competing ISPs. HDTV is going to force the cable company's hand to upgrade as HDTV requires a huge amount of bandwidth. If cable tries to sit still, the satellites will steal their customers.
For the telcos, VOIP and cell phones, have forced the local phone company to start implementing a massive upgrade to their infrastructure. SBC knows quite well that if they try to sit on DSL and POTS, they're toast as cable will not only win with faster cable, the cables and the cells will bite the last piece that SBC has and leave SBC with nothing. SBC has no choice but to upgrade or die.
Regardless if they're required to provide access to outside ISPs, they'll upgrade anyway simply because if they don't, they lose the whole game. Sure, they'd prefer not to be forced to let outside ISPs in on the game but it's not going to make them stand pat.
Bottom line, the more competition all players are exposed to, the better their product is going to be.
I suspect your compatibility problem arises due to the DRM requirement? If it does, you might do something similar to what we did in software.
Back in the 80's we published a security package that included DES as one of its encryption options. The NSA didn't want us to export the software because DES was considered a munition. Nevermind that the programmer who wrote the software lived on the Isle of Wight off the coast of England and was using a book that documented how to implement DES and the book he was using as the design spec was available worldwide.
We had a distributor in Sweden who had sold quite a few copies of our software to Swedish corporations and the distributor made it quite clear that DES was a must have for those clients. We ended up disabling DES to satisfy the NSA by making the software check for the presence of a file in the executable's directory. If the file was present, DES was disabled. The software was shipped overseas with the file. NSA was happy, our distributor was happy.
I have a friend who went to college in 1946. She's the anti-thesis of a power user but the other day she said her two button mouse was too restrictive - she wanted one with a wheel like the one at where she works. (Yep, she still works.)
I told her that the newest wheel mice have tilting wheels. When she understood it makes horizontal scrolling easier, her face lit up and she said "Ooooh...that sounds wonderful! Tell my grandson Mother's day is coming!"
They didn't go public for either of your reasons. The founders wanted to remain a private company so they didn't have to disclose what they were thinking or doing. Having taken more than $25 million from investors, their hand was forced.
Had you read the fine article, you would have read this:
But the end of Google's adolescence wasn't optional. The boys had obligations to their investors and underlings. Doerr and Moritz, both sitting on funds that had been hammered by the collapse of the bubble, were keen to cash in their Google chips, while employees who'd been slaving for years were eager for a payday that would put rental housing behind them. On top of that, there was an SEC rule that would require Google (due to the number of shares it had given out) to start publishing its financials in April 2004. Public or private, the veil of fiscal secrecy was about to be lifted.
I used to program the old Atari VCS and introducing randomness wasn't a cakewalk. The obvious bit of randomness, timing the distance between button presses, turned out not to be so random. Some kids were like little microsecond metronomes. It didn't help that the VCS's architecture mandated that we run our computations on a fixed frequency which was tied to the TV display.
Depending on how the iPod Shuffle seeds its random number generator, it's entirely possible that Levy is frequently reseeding the generator with a small set of values in which case he would eventually perceive a non-random sequence. The RNG is working just fine but the seeder algorithm could be crap.
Going OT, what amazes me is how successful Apple has been selling products that'll end up in landfill within a few years. They did it with the original iPod and have gone over the edge with the Shuffle. The battery will die in a year or two and then the whole thing is worthless. This from people who claim to worry about the Kyoto treaty.
It may be cheaper than solar panels but it's not cheaper than a gas-powered plant. The price of a gas turbine powerplant runs between $500/Kwh to $1000/Kwh. The chiminey's $2.5/watt figure works out to $2500/Kwh, at a minimum, to build the tower and associated infrastructure.
"But," you say, "the energy is free..."
But it's not. Just because the incoming energy is free, it's not free to capture and convert it to electricity. There's a maintenance expense to account for. Remember, this tower is huge, the collector is even bigger. Cracks will form and have to be sealed. On a tower that big, that's a job for a large crew that will never end. They'll no sooner get to the top than it's time to start over and do it again.
A windstorm comes through and blows out panels, they've got to be replaced. Sandstorm blasts through scratchs the clear panels, reduces their efficiency - got to replace em. Hailstorm comes through, fractures lots of panels and causes them to leak which reduces collecting efficiency. Got to trim the weeds under the collector so they don't play havoc with the airstreams. I could keep going but I think you get the point...maintenance is going to be a bitch on something that big and it's not free. I don't know what the numbers are but the installation in Spain wasn't self sustaining which doesn't make me confident that simply scaling the sucker is going to make the costs drop enough. I get even less confident when the website starts talking about needing government subsidies.
A large display that can handle 1080p x 1920 and doesn't set me back 5 grand or more. TI's xHD-3 DLP looks to be a possibility on that front come the end of this quarter.
Something to watch. Where I live, there's exactly one HDTV broadcaster and they're broadcasting hog futures. That means satellite but given James Lilek's experience with Direct TV, that doesn't look like a viable option right now.
So for me, looks like it'll be at least another year before all the pieces are in place.
Now, if someone were to offer a HDTV kit with a 1080p display engine, it wouldn't matter that there's nothing to watch. It'd just be fun to build the thing. Too bad there weren't enough of us to keep Heathkit alive.
You forgot the UN Human Rights Commission. The commission that's supposed to protect refugees from being returned to their country of origin. They have an office in Beijing, ostensibly to help the North Koreans who make it out of that hell hole. From the Wall Street Journal..
The UNHCR keeps an office in Beijing, with a budget this year totaling $4.4 million, to which asylum seekers have no access. Four years ago, a family of North Korean refugees actually stormed the premises and gained asylum after threatening to eat rat poison from their pockets if forced back out onto the street. Since then, the UNHCR has allowed China's security agents to better defend the compound against further visits by the people the UNHCR is supposedly in China to protect.
It may depend on which video card you stuff in the G5.
My sons both bought 2.5 G5's with 6800 ultra cards. One of them brought his G5 home during Christmas break and I couldn't help but think it was noisy compared to my Athlon-64. The video card makes quite a bit of noise as did mine until I swapped the fan for a waterblock. I've got a waterblock on both the cpu and the video card and a psu with a 120 mm fan. My PC may not be as pretty a rig as the G5, but it is a lot quieter.
I toured the plant shortly after it shut down. Otec was a bust before the first pipe section was laid. Seawater is terribly corrosive which means upkeep on the plant was a huge expense. The 15 KWH power output you cite cost several million dollars to generate and was worth less than a buck on the wholesale power market.
The common thread in most green power schemes is "efficiency doesn't matter because the energy is free..." Unfortunately, efficiency does matter because you have to pay for and maintain the equipment that captures the "free energy." The startup costs are high as are the ongoing expenses and in Otec's case, it didn't pencil out as a viable solution.
Hawaii ended up selling the cold seawater to aqua-culture firms that could sell farm grown abalone and lobster to the Japanese. The cold seawater is perfect for those folks and the profit margin on abalone, lobster and nori is much higher than it is on kilowatts.
Oh yeah, they're more moderate alright. Why it was months ago that the Iranian parliament chanted Death to America. Heck, months in Internet time is eons. Never mind that a majority (180/290) of the Iranian member of parliament are hard liners. No, Iran isn't a threat - no siree.
When I was in high school, Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the moon. In my youthful ignorance, I thought the delay between Houston asking him a question and his response was due to the moon being so far away. Now 35 years later, as I experience the delays again, I realize it's just that the link to the moon had been slashdotted.
Write life of flash battery life...
on
iPod Shuffle RAID
·
· Score: 1
...100 times a day would give you about 27 years of life.
Which is 25 years longer than the battery will last. Not that the market seems to care that a few years from now iPods will be nothing more land fill.
Slashdot Mirror
Time may heal wounds but the fact was that Woz cried during the IEEE Spectrum interview when the interviewer told him that Jobs had lied to him.
Woz may have forgiven Jobs for being a liar and screwing him but it doesn't change the fact that Jobs did both to his best friend.
My father had a ranch in Arizona way back when. As the land was 50 miles from the nearest town over a a really bad road, the easiest way to get around was by plane. That was true for all the ranchers in the area. Unfortunately, not all the ranchers had what it took upstairs to fly. The rancher next door bought himself a dual engine Sky King with the latest avionics package, got his instrument rating and flew home. When he got home, he picked up his wife and two kids to show them the fancy new plane and took off during a really nasty lightning storm.
Unfortunately, none of them survived. Arizona thunderstorms can get really nasty.
My father had a single engine Bellanca that flew like a bat out of hell and he once made the mistake of getting under an Arizona thunderhead. The updraft was so intense that to keep from getting sucked into the cloud, he kept the nose pointed at the ground as he flew under the cloud. He said that the plane was just barely holding elevation during the updraft portion and when he got out from under, he got slammed towards ground by the accompanying downdraft. He was much more careful around thunderstorms after that.
One last thunderhead story...I was flying to Ohio with a girlfriend whose parents had come out to California to pick her up at the end of school. Both parents were pilots and traded flying the plane as we went back to my girlfriend's in Ohio. They have the radio up loud so that we can hear it over the engine noise and over a few minute's span, we hear 4 different airliners ask to be vectored around a set of several thunderheads. A few seconds after the 4th plane got vectored, the girl's mom says that she thinks ground control has put 4 planes in the same airspace. Sure enough, the radio erupts with ground and pilot traffic scrambling to maintain the requisite distance.
Clearly, you didn't read the article...it has a payload of several thousand pounds which will just about cover the weight of the batteries. That means it won't operate day or night. It'll just sit there doing nothing all the time. Just like the guy in the next cubicle.
I suppose they gave the task of upgrading the driver to a summer intern or outsourced it to someone who didn't give a damn about HP's reputation. I've considered getting a dual core box but the idea of upgrading the hardware because some idiot didn't know how to write a printer driver properly just doesn't sit too well.
Because they don't want to share the stage with Sony's PS3 rollout. This way, at least for now, Xbox will be the toy gamers are talking about for a week before E3. Who knows, maybe Sony will counter with something else like a giving away a night playing video games with Pamela Anderson or something.
In the end, it probably doesn't matter much - when the actual hardware and software goes on sale will matter more as well as the caliber of the software.
Nixon was a big football fan and decided to go see the Rosebowl game that year which meant the Secret Service had to scour the Rosebowl. As part of their checkout, they powered up the scoreboard and because Rosum had scrimped on his relays, they blew his circuit out. Debugging the blown scoreboard led them to his fried, and smoking, circuit. That would have been the end of it except some other Techies decided independently to pull the same prank. Except they didn't know the Secret Service was waiting for the first prankster to come fix his prank. Guess who ended up getting caught?
If you don't want to read the whole thing, scroll down until you get to The Communists unleashed their provocation with brutal efficiency on the morning of Wednesday, August 18, 1976.
It's an eye-opening read.
It was like being on a ten lane freeway all by myself - everything was fast!
Only question now is does Comcast fire their CTO who recommended using Windows-based servers or do we get to see a repeat meltdown somewhere down the road?
Using the word "real" in a description of a story-line revolving around face hugging creatures, gravity guns, Ant Lions, Ant Lion summoning pods and an invincible hero suggests you didn't get the memo about no commitment to reality.
Some examples..Transistors arose from some guys shooting the breeze 20-30 years earlier as to how electrons moved around. What they were saying made no sense at all but it paid off big time. A guy sitting in a patent office speculates that light is comprised of particles and uses it to explain why electrons stream out of certain metals. Same guy speculates about what it's like to sit on a photon as it screams along and draws a few conclusions that 35 years later, rock the world. Another guy grows 1000s of peas, counts, by hand, how many of eight different traits show up in subsequent generations and figures out that wrinkled peas require wrinkled parents. Thirty years later, some other guys pick up on that idea and study fruit flys and come up with an arithmetic argument based on percentages that some traits are based on discrete loci. Weird stuff in 1911 that blossomed into billion dollar corporations 70 years later. A pair of mathematically gifted brothers figure out some equations about how fluids move over surfaces. That knowledge sits around for more than a 100 years before a different pair of brothers in a bike shop put the knowledge to an interesting use.
You just never know what's worth knowing so we gather what we can.
Cable was initially chartered to bring television into the home. Once the internet got going, it was a marginal upgrade to become an ISP as the most expensive part, wire to the home, was already in place. Cable's prime reason for existing, providing TV, is still in place regardless of whether they're forced to share the cable with competing ISPs. HDTV is going to force the cable company's hand to upgrade as HDTV requires a huge amount of bandwidth. If cable tries to sit still, the satellites will steal their customers.
For the telcos, VOIP and cell phones, have forced the local phone company to start implementing a massive upgrade to their infrastructure. SBC knows quite well that if they try to sit on DSL and POTS, they're toast as cable will not only win with faster cable, the cables and the cells will bite the last piece that SBC has and leave SBC with nothing. SBC has no choice but to upgrade or die.
Regardless if they're required to provide access to outside ISPs, they'll upgrade anyway simply because if they don't, they lose the whole game. Sure, they'd prefer not to be forced to let outside ISPs in on the game but it's not going to make them stand pat.
Bottom line, the more competition all players are exposed to, the better their product is going to be.
Back in the 80's we published a security package that included DES as one of its encryption options. The NSA didn't want us to export the software because DES was considered a munition. Nevermind that the programmer who wrote the software lived on the Isle of Wight off the coast of England and was using a book that documented how to implement DES and the book he was using as the design spec was available worldwide.
We had a distributor in Sweden who had sold quite a few copies of our software to Swedish corporations and the distributor made it quite clear that DES was a must have for those clients. We ended up disabling DES to satisfy the NSA by making the software check for the presence of a file in the executable's directory. If the file was present, DES was disabled. The software was shipped overseas with the file. NSA was happy, our distributor was happy.
I told her that the newest wheel mice have tilting wheels. When she understood it makes horizontal scrolling easier, her face lit up and she said "Ooooh...that sounds wonderful! Tell my grandson Mother's day is coming!"
Had you read the fine article, you would have read this:
Depending on how the iPod Shuffle seeds its random number generator, it's entirely possible that Levy is frequently reseeding the generator with a small set of values in which case he would eventually perceive a non-random sequence. The RNG is working just fine but the seeder algorithm could be crap.
Going OT, what amazes me is how successful Apple has been selling products that'll end up in landfill within a few years. They did it with the original iPod and have gone over the edge with the Shuffle. The battery will die in a year or two and then the whole thing is worthless. This from people who claim to worry about the Kyoto treaty.
"But," you say, "the energy is free..."
But it's not. Just because the incoming energy is free, it's not free to capture and convert it to electricity. There's a maintenance expense to account for. Remember, this tower is huge, the collector is even bigger. Cracks will form and have to be sealed. On a tower that big, that's a job for a large crew that will never end. They'll no sooner get to the top than it's time to start over and do it again.
A windstorm comes through and blows out panels, they've got to be replaced. Sandstorm blasts through scratchs the clear panels, reduces their efficiency - got to replace em. Hailstorm comes through, fractures lots of panels and causes them to leak which reduces collecting efficiency. Got to trim the weeds under the collector so they don't play havoc with the airstreams. I could keep going but I think you get the point...maintenance is going to be a bitch on something that big and it's not free. I don't know what the numbers are but the installation in Spain wasn't self sustaining which doesn't make me confident that simply scaling the sucker is going to make the costs drop enough. I get even less confident when the website starts talking about needing government subsidies.
- A large display that can handle 1080p x 1920 and doesn't set me back 5 grand or more. TI's xHD-3 DLP looks to be a possibility on that front come the end of this quarter.
- Something to watch. Where I live, there's exactly one HDTV broadcaster and they're broadcasting hog futures. That means satellite but given James Lilek's experience with Direct TV, that doesn't look like a viable option right now.
So for me, looks like it'll be at least another year before all the pieces are in place.Now, if someone were to offer a HDTV kit with a 1080p display engine, it wouldn't matter that there's nothing to watch. It'd just be fun to build the thing. Too bad there weren't enough of us to keep Heathkit alive.
My sons both bought 2.5 G5's with 6800 ultra cards. One of them brought his G5 home during Christmas break and I couldn't help but think it was noisy compared to my Athlon-64. The video card makes quite a bit of noise as did mine until I swapped the fan for a waterblock. I've got a waterblock on both the cpu and the video card and a psu with a 120 mm fan. My PC may not be as pretty a rig as the G5, but it is a lot quieter.
The common thread in most green power schemes is "efficiency doesn't matter because the energy is free..." Unfortunately, efficiency does matter because you have to pay for and maintain the equipment that captures the "free energy." The startup costs are high as are the ongoing expenses and in Otec's case, it didn't pencil out as a viable solution.
Hawaii ended up selling the cold seawater to aqua-culture firms that could sell farm grown abalone and lobster to the Japanese. The cold seawater is perfect for those folks and the profit margin on abalone, lobster and nori is much higher than it is on kilowatts.
...we'd use it to infect the slashdot editors first.
Iran is slowly becoming more moderate.
Oh yeah, they're more moderate alright. Why it was months ago that the Iranian parliament chanted Death to America. Heck, months in Internet time is eons. Never mind that a majority (180/290) of the Iranian member of parliament are hard liners. No, Iran isn't a threat - no siree.
It wasn't NASA, it wasn't ESA and it wasn't easy...
When I was in high school, Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the moon. In my youthful ignorance, I thought the delay between Houston asking him a question and his response was due to the moon being so far away. Now 35 years later, as I experience the delays again, I realize it's just that the link to the moon had been slashdotted.
Which is 25 years longer than the battery will last. Not that the market seems to care that a few years from now iPods will be nothing more land fill.