I can buy servers with over a Terabyte of ram, mutiple power supplies and 4 x 10G interfaces for FCOE. What is a disk again other than to boot from.
The disk is something to hold your data when a backhoe cuts your datacenter power, and cuts the network connections that you use to replicate data to your remote site.... then your UPS runs out of battery after an hour of transactions have been applied to the database with no replication to the remote site.
Sometimes sh*t happens in ways you haven't planned for... when you have N degrees of redundancy, you'll get bit by the rare N+1 event. It's better to have your data stored somewhere that doesn't disappear after the power goes away (or the machine reboots).
(if you're using your FCoE network to connect to the SAN to store your data, you're still using disks but there's no reason to use a local disk to boot from)
I meant 2 disk access, some or another. From what I read they would never be simultaneous anyways.
Either way, this would be useful (actually IS, some solutions do this) in the Business Intelligence field. But the whole point of keeping everything in memory is moot when you have petabytes of information that you need to process during your ETL. What matters in this database is, how well does it behave in a cluster and how would it handle concurrency (ACID? Eventually synchronized?).
I doubt this is all that useful for common DB applications like websites and the like. Relational DB's have been proving to be enough for everything (ex: Youtube uses mysql shards - or used to) purely web related for a while now, I doubt this is a gamechanger at all.
Actually, I thought this would be less useful with large databases (like a large data warehouse), and more useful with webservers. If you have a busy website and your core database is measured in gigabytes and not terabytes, it's probably cheaper and easier to run it in-memory than to build out a distributed cluster of SQL nodes to handle the transaction load. $15K buys you a server with 16 cores of CPU and 384GB of RAM.
Just say no to swap. It's pointless, except as a crutch for broken software. And it's dangerous on a server. If an application wants disk-backed VM, it can use mmap.
Swap isn't just a crutch for broken software (though it can be), sufficient RAM is not always available. In a perfect world, all servers would have more RAM than their applications ever need, more cores than the processes can take advantage of, and all disks would be RAID-10 arrays of SSD's.
But back in the real world where most of us have to live, swap does come into use at times to let a server accommodate loads that it otherwise couldn't handle due the memory footprint of the software it's running. Swap doesn't have to be a death knell for the server - some light or even moderate swapping can mean that you're using the server more efficiently - especially when you're running on VMWare and it wants to reclaim some RAM of its own via the memory balloon driver. When VMWare is under memory pressure, it's better to let Linux decide what to swap out than to let VMware swap memory out from under the virtual machine.
Are SSDs better at sequential writes? I thought their advantage was random reads, and they weren't any faster at writes then HDDs. Also, the data would become hopelessly out of order by only doing sequential writes, unless they're periodically re-writing all the data in order, which would mean lots more I/O then a typical DB.
They say they rely on snapshots and logging. I'm assuming that it periodically writes a snapshot of RAM to disk, then logs transactions in the log for recovery. Hopefully it snapshots different portions of RAM at different times so there's not one huge snapshot being written to disk every time.
Though if I had a database where I needed 80,000 query/second performance, I'd probably want a cluster of these so if one machine goes down, the other machine can take over so I don't have to wait for the service to restart, then a 100GB snapshot to be read and gigabytes of logs to be applied before the database is back online.
I'd love to see their tests when this DB needs to go into swap / pagefile. It's double the slowdown, needs to write into the swap (disk I/O) and then sync the DB (disk I/O again).
I can't, for the life of me, understand where this will be better than the already available options.
I think the point of an in-memory database is that you size your machine so it does *not* need to swap in normal use. Otherwise, since as you said, you lose all of the speed - worse because the operating system decides what to swap out, and may not make the most efficient choice. (though they probably just mlock() the memory buffers into RAM and prevent any of the database RAM from being swapped out at all.)
But if the architect did expect the machine to swap at times, he probably wouldn't put the swap and data on the same physical disk, so concurrent I/O's to both devices wouldn't take twice the time.
Why do you have strange character strings where you should have quotation marks? Did you cut and past this as a pre-canned response?
Copy-and-paste doesn't necessarily mean it was a pre-canned response. Slashdot's comment box leaves a lot to be desired in the editing department, so I'm not surprised at all that someone would write their post in a real editor and then copy and paste it back to Slashdot. Someday Slashdot will enter this century and provide WYSIWYG editing for those that don't want to type HTML. Even the acronym "WYSIWYG" seems to gone out of style these days because it's everywhere.
All good points, but it is worth noting that part of the high price is due to patents. Without patents, either SawStop would lower prices to compete or someone else would design a competing system that was cheaper to implement or that had less false triggers.
The general legal framework probably doesn't help either. I suspect a practical solution will be one where some injury occurs but the liklihood of a grievous injury goes way down. Consider, if the system brakes the blade 250 times slower, it becomes much easier to accomplish. In that time, you will likely do enough damage to need the ER for stitches but you're still much less likely to lose a finger than with a non-braking saw.
Alas, that would leave you open to every ambulance chaser who figures the injury shouldn't have happened at all.
Or, without patents, Mr Sawstop may never have been able to bring his product to market at all, since no one would invest thousands of dollars in R&D if the company down the street could just copy it for free. And since that other company hadn't spent all of the money developing prototypes and refining the design, they could undercut Sawstop's pricing.
So not having patents becomes a disincentive to bringing products to market - you come up with the idea, spend lots of money making it into a commercial product, and then your competitors profit off of it without having spent any of the R&D money.
Tabitha Babbitt invented but did not patent the circular saw. The circular saw was put into immediate use. Recently, some inventors made a safety improvement they call SawStop. No more fingers lost to accidents! This improvement is so rarely seen it may as well not exist. I have thought of getting one as a present for my father. He's old enough he may not be able to use a circular saw quite as safely as he once could. But I have never seen any portable saw with it. You'd think at least one of the major retailers of power tools and hardware would stock at least one saw with this feature, at least one major manufacturer would license the technology, but no. They couldn't come to an agreement. Worse, the establishment is trying to stifle it, as it is competition. While they fight, we must do without. That's not how the system is supposed to work!
Unless you know of some failed negotiations that came down to licensing costs, I think you're jumping to conclusions. There may be valid business reasons why other manufacturers haven't jumped on board that have nothing to do with the licensing costs.
Since the consumable brake cartridge alone costs $70 retail, the whole system including control board, actuators, etc may add $100 or more to the retail cost of a saw, which is a significant bump even on a $1500 table saw. Other manufacturers may not think that customers are willing to pay that premium for this safety feature. Similarly, they may feel that customers don't want to have to buy a new blade and $70 brake cartridge every time they cut into some overly damp wood. And maybe deep pocketed manufacturers don't want to accept the liability if the safety feature fails and someone cuts off his fingers.
Since the Sawstop manufacturer hasn't come out with a portable saw themselves, it may not be feasible. Stopping a 3500rpm blade in a millsecond means that a lot of rotational inertia needs to be dissipated - an operator may not be able to hold onto the saw during the braking. Or, the braking mechanism may add too much weight to be feasible in a handheld saw. Or it might just be too expensive and not commercially viable. Some people may be willing to pay a high premium for more safety, but if a $100 saw becomes a $200 saw with the sawstop feature, it may not sell enough units to be worthwhile for a large manufacturer.
actually, a lot of people use office starter, even in soho environments.. and that's microsoft's "problem", it was cutting into sales. not enough people actually *buying* their overpriced office products.
plus, some clever folks online have figured out how to install starter on any newer (vista or seven, i think) pc.
Overpriced? Office Home + Student costs around $99 OEM version (includes Word + Excel + Powerpoint + OneNote). That seems like a pretty reasonable price.
>A guy carrying a suitcase nuke would be carrying something that is rather heavier than your average briefcase and they would have to put in quite a visible amount of effort to carry the thing, visible enough for them to be obvious to all as someone unusual.
Mucho Amore A.C.
Yeah, because a tourist destination like Washington, DC would never have people carrying around large, heavy backpacks as they tour the city.
I doubt if it was a corporate device that the end user would know (regardless of the law).
I'm off to close my gmail account now because this has disgusted me. Sorry but I will never support an organisation that promotes such things. Back to mutt and postfix!
Do you really think Google is the only provider for employee tracking?
You better stop using the internet too.... your packets are being routed over Cisco gear, and Cisco sells appliances that enable employers to track their employees via Wifi tags. By continuing to use the internet, you're supporting Cisco.
If you really wanted to take a stand against employee tracking, you'd push your legislators to make it illegal. Closing your gmail account accomplishes nothing (and no one really believes that you're going to do it unless you're already not using it) Though I do think there are many legitimate reasons for an employer to track employees, like tracking outside service technicians to predict when they will be able to go to their next call, making sure that the courier that's carrying cash between buildings doesn't make any unexpected detours (due to carjack or outright theft), tracking scientists in a lab for safety - i.e. if he enters a hazardous materials storage room but doesn't leave the room after X minutes, maybe someone should check on him, etc.
I doubt this is for watching your office drones' every movement. It would be really handy for service-based businesses that need to dispatch workers to various locations. Think cable repair men. When a call comes in, the closest idle worker can be dispatched to the location. And all it requires is a cellphone.
Exactly - besides, cell phones aren't the best solution for in-building tracking. Employers that want to track employees inside building use RFID tags and Wifi tracking tags.
I have a UID. I still post anonymously at least 50% of the time. Why? Because I'm funny as hell (and moderated the same way *most* of the time) but lots of people can't (or understand) take a joke. Sometimes I have unpopular insights (which are moderated both troll and insightful). Sometimes I want to share personal information for YOUR benefit but don't want it linked back to me because of its personal nature. Sometimes I just enjoy playing devil's advocate.
Those are no reasons to post anonymously. I think I'm funny as hell too (not everyone shares that opinion, not even my wife). I often post unpopular insights or even ask somewhat trolling questions just to watch the conversation unfold - sometimes I get modded down, sometimes I don't. If I have personal information to share, I anonymize it enough that it doesn't identify me personally (I don't even live in the city (or state) that I've identified as my home city but I've lived there long enough to be able to post local insights) - I don't trust Slashdot to keep my anonymous identity private any more than I trust them to keep my UID identity secret.
They measured the depth "into" the material, as in it's surface, regardless of its position or location.
Yeah, I guess I still don't get it.
Albedo isn't measured in microns (or any other distance unit of measure), so what is this laser measuring to a depth of "microns", if the depth of the crater can only be measured to within 10 cm from orbit? Where does the resolution of microns come into play?
You are mixing up albedo / reflectivity with ranging. Skin depth / surface detail info is not the same as geodetic accuracy (which is at the 10 cm level at best without a corner cube retroreflector).
Thanks for the info, I guess I was confused by this from the Summary:
The spacecraft mapped Shackleton crater with unprecedented detail, using a laser to illuminate the crater's interior and measure its albedo or natural reflectance. The laser light measures to a depth comparable to its wavelength, or about a micron. That represents a millionth of a meter, or less than one ten-thousandth of an inch. The team also used the instrument to map the relief of the crater's terrain based on the time it took for laser light to bounce back from the moon's surface.
Which I took to mean that it was measuring depth to the nearest micron and seemed remarkably precise from an orbital platform. I'm familiar with albedo, but I still don't see the relation between measurement to the nearest micron and measuring albedo.
How do they get micron accuracy from a moving platform 50km above the service ? Do they use multiple beams and compare measurements between the bottom of the crater and some point determined to be at surface level? What's the "reference" altitude they are comparing the depth to? If the laser beam has (for example) a 5 cm radius at the surface, and it's shining on a slope (or there's a grain of sand in the middle of the beam), how is that measurement recorded?
Nook and kindle exist due to their ecosystem and true brand recognition outside of the 'geek' community. I don't know if what Google has would unseat either of them.
I think the biggest thing a Google tablet can offer over a Nook/Kindle tablet is the ability to run both the Kindle app and the Nook app on the same device without having to boot into a different operating system.
"The rest of the article, including blaming file sharing for musician suicides (as if musicians didn't commit suicide before) is pants on head retarded. "
Whoa there. I obviously didn't read the entire article, but if he actually did blame file sharing for that I think he'd better blame the RIAA as well. I use to buy a LOT more CDs than I currently do. (I use to buy them 1+ per paycheck, now I buy 1-2 per year.) The reason for the change is entirely due to a boycott of RIAA associated labels for their own unethical behavior (Yes, abusing the courts to mass sue/extort fans is unethical.)
I used to buy a lot of music too, I have a collection of around 300 CD's (which now languish in a big CD binder because I ripped them all to MP3's). But I don't blame RIAA for my not buying much music any more. I have adequate of disposable income that I could spend on music, I could easily afford to buy a dozen or more albums/month if I wanted to, and most music is available as non-DRM'ed MP3's. But I don't know if it's the fact that I'm older now, if modern music just sucks, or because there are plenty of other alternatives to music (I listen to Podcasts in the car), but I just don't buy much music anymore. In the past 2 years, I think I've bought 2 albums. I do listen to some streaming music, but I rarely hear anything that I want to even pay 99 cents for.
I still listen to much of my older music that I own on CD's, but I just don't feel like I need to add to that collection. I remember my parents adding to their music collection when they were my age (even if most of it was on 8-tracks or vinyl), but my music collection has remained fairly static.
Remember kids -- Google took the solemn pinky oath to Not Be Evil, so the removal of YouTube-MP3.com from their search results is for your own good. And remember, Youtube is staunchly against copyright violation and has never violated any copyright or made copyrighted media available to unauthorized parties -- ever.
Evil is not always black and white. If the choice is between allowing videos to be transcoded to MP3's or having RIAA pull down every song on Youtube because they feel they are going to eat into MP3 sales, which choice would the average user consider to be more evil?
Even worse, if it pushes people who previously used the online solutions in to using downloaded tools, it's putting a lot of users in harms way with regards to malware.
There's got to be a better solution to malware than making everyone use cloud-based services for everything.
It is trivial to extract the audio from a youtube video and convert it to an mp3. There are tools on Windows, Linux, and OSX that can do that without a lot of effort. So, shutting down this site is, IMO, an exercise in futility.
It's only futile if Google's goal is to prevent people from transcoding audio from a video into an MP3 (afterall, so far, there's no DRM that can keep someone from plugging the analog audio-out cable from their computer into their sound card though I'm sure some day RIAA and MPAA will make sure we have analog fingerprints on all of our outputs that would close this analog hole). However, if Google's goal is to appease the RIAA and make it appear as though they are helping to protected RIAA's rights, then perhaps it's not so futile afterall.
Government cannot compel a particular response without a warrant or court order: Google is not obligated to respond to the a request that is not accompanied by a warrant or court order in any particular way. Google may CHOOSE to comply with a request because there is nothing inappropriate about a business deciding to comply with a lawful request from a government agency. Fortunately, if you don't like Google's policy, you can choose not to use it.
Where's the checkbox to opt-out of using Google's Ad network across thousands of sites on the internet? I've never seen a site pop up a window saying "Note: we're about to display a Google Ad, which means Google will know that you visited this site and they'll see the query string in your current URL which may reveal further personal data. If you don't want Google to have this information, close your browser window now."
I don't think Google says that opting out of personalized ads means Google will stop collecting data on you, it just means that they will stop using the data to personalize your ads.
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I can buy servers with over a Terabyte of ram, mutiple power supplies and 4 x 10G interfaces for FCOE.
What is a disk again other than to boot from.
The disk is something to hold your data when a backhoe cuts your datacenter power, and cuts the network connections that you use to replicate data to your remote site.... then your UPS runs out of battery after an hour of transactions have been applied to the database with no replication to the remote site.
Sometimes sh*t happens in ways you haven't planned for... when you have N degrees of redundancy, you'll get bit by the rare N+1 event. It's better to have your data stored somewhere that doesn't disappear after the power goes away (or the machine reboots).
(if you're using your FCoE network to connect to the SAN to store your data, you're still using disks but there's no reason to use a local disk to boot from)
I meant 2 disk access, some or another. From what I read they would never be simultaneous anyways.
Either way, this would be useful (actually IS, some solutions do this) in the Business Intelligence field. But the whole point of keeping everything in memory is moot when you have petabytes of information that you need to process during your ETL. What matters in this database is, how well does it behave in a cluster and how would it handle concurrency (ACID? Eventually synchronized?).
I doubt this is all that useful for common DB applications like websites and the like. Relational DB's have been proving to be enough for everything (ex: Youtube uses mysql shards - or used to) purely web related for a while now, I doubt this is a gamechanger at all.
Actually, I thought this would be less useful with large databases (like a large data warehouse), and more useful with webservers. If you have a busy website and your core database is measured in gigabytes and not terabytes, it's probably cheaper and easier to run it in-memory than to build out a distributed cluster of SQL nodes to handle the transaction load. $15K buys you a server with 16 cores of CPU and 384GB of RAM.
Just say no to swap. It's pointless, except as a crutch for broken software. And it's dangerous on a server. If an application wants disk-backed VM, it can use mmap.
Swap isn't just a crutch for broken software (though it can be), sufficient RAM is not always available. In a perfect world, all servers would have more RAM than their applications ever need, more cores than the processes can take advantage of, and all disks would be RAID-10 arrays of SSD's.
But back in the real world where most of us have to live, swap does come into use at times to let a server accommodate loads that it otherwise couldn't handle due the memory footprint of the software it's running. Swap doesn't have to be a death knell for the server - some light or even moderate swapping can mean that you're using the server more efficiently - especially when you're running on VMWare and it wants to reclaim some RAM of its own via the memory balloon driver. When VMWare is under memory pressure, it's better to let Linux decide what to swap out than to let VMware swap memory out from under the virtual machine.
Are SSDs better at sequential writes? I thought their advantage was random reads, and they weren't any faster at writes then HDDs. Also, the data would become hopelessly out of order by only doing sequential writes, unless they're periodically re-writing all the data in order, which would mean lots more I/O then a typical DB.
They say they rely on snapshots and logging. I'm assuming that it periodically writes a snapshot of RAM to disk, then logs transactions in the log for recovery. Hopefully it snapshots different portions of RAM at different times so there's not one huge snapshot being written to disk every time.
Though if I had a database where I needed 80,000 query/second performance, I'd probably want a cluster of these so if one machine goes down, the other machine can take over so I don't have to wait for the service to restart, then a 100GB snapshot to be read and gigabytes of logs to be applied before the database is back online.
I'd love to see their tests when this DB needs to go into swap / pagefile. It's double the slowdown, needs to write into the swap (disk I/O) and then sync the DB (disk I/O again).
I can't, for the life of me, understand where this will be better than the already available options.
I think the point of an in-memory database is that you size your machine so it does *not* need to swap in normal use. Otherwise, since as you said, you lose all of the speed - worse because the operating system decides what to swap out, and may not make the most efficient choice. (though they probably just mlock() the memory buffers into RAM and prevent any of the database RAM from being swapped out at all.)
But if the architect did expect the machine to swap at times, he probably wouldn't put the swap and data on the same physical disk, so concurrent I/O's to both devices wouldn't take twice the time.
Why do you have strange character strings where you should have quotation marks? Did you cut and past this as a pre-canned response?
Copy-and-paste doesn't necessarily mean it was a pre-canned response. Slashdot's comment box leaves a lot to be desired in the editing department, so I'm not surprised at all that someone would write their post in a real editor and then copy and paste it back to Slashdot. Someday Slashdot will enter this century and provide WYSIWYG editing for those that don't want to type HTML. Even the acronym "WYSIWYG" seems to gone out of style these days because it's everywhere.
All good points, but it is worth noting that part of the high price is due to patents. Without patents, either SawStop would lower prices to compete or someone else would design a competing system that was cheaper to implement or that had less false triggers.
The general legal framework probably doesn't help either. I suspect a practical solution will be one where some injury occurs but the liklihood of a grievous injury goes way down. Consider, if the system brakes the blade 250 times slower, it becomes much easier to accomplish. In that time, you will likely do enough damage to need the ER for stitches but you're still much less likely to lose a finger than with a non-braking saw.
Alas, that would leave you open to every ambulance chaser who figures the injury shouldn't have happened at all.
Or, without patents, Mr Sawstop may never have been able to bring his product to market at all, since no one would invest thousands of dollars in R&D if the company down the street could just copy it for free. And since that other company hadn't spent all of the money developing prototypes and refining the design, they could undercut Sawstop's pricing.
So not having patents becomes a disincentive to bringing products to market - you come up with the idea, spend lots of money making it into a commercial product, and then your competitors profit off of it without having spent any of the R&D money.
Tabitha Babbitt invented but did not patent the circular saw. The circular saw was put into immediate use. Recently, some inventors made a safety improvement they call SawStop. No more fingers lost to accidents! This improvement is so rarely seen it may as well not exist. I have thought of getting one as a present for my father. He's old enough he may not be able to use a circular saw quite as safely as he once could. But I have never seen any portable saw with it. You'd think at least one of the major retailers of power tools and hardware would stock at least one saw with this feature, at least one major manufacturer would license the technology, but no. They couldn't come to an agreement. Worse, the establishment is trying to stifle it, as it is competition. While they fight, we must do without. That's not how the system is supposed to work!
Unless you know of some failed negotiations that came down to licensing costs, I think you're jumping to conclusions. There may be valid business reasons why other manufacturers haven't jumped on board that have nothing to do with the licensing costs.
Since the consumable brake cartridge alone costs $70 retail, the whole system including control board, actuators, etc may add $100 or more to the retail cost of a saw, which is a significant bump even on a $1500 table saw. Other manufacturers may not think that customers are willing to pay that premium for this safety feature. Similarly, they may feel that customers don't want to have to buy a new blade and $70 brake cartridge every time they cut into some overly damp wood. And maybe deep pocketed manufacturers don't want to accept the liability if the safety feature fails and someone cuts off his fingers.
Since the Sawstop manufacturer hasn't come out with a portable saw themselves, it may not be feasible. Stopping a 3500rpm blade in a millsecond means that a lot of rotational inertia needs to be dissipated - an operator may not be able to hold onto the saw during the braking. Or, the braking mechanism may add too much weight to be feasible in a handheld saw. Or it might just be too expensive and not commercially viable. Some people may be willing to pay a high premium for more safety, but if a $100 saw becomes a $200 saw with the sawstop feature, it may not sell enough units to be worthwhile for a large manufacturer.
actually, a lot of people use office starter, even in soho environments.. and that's microsoft's "problem", it was cutting into sales. not enough people actually *buying* their overpriced office products.
plus, some clever folks online have figured out how to install starter on any newer (vista or seven, i think) pc.
Overpriced? Office Home + Student costs around $99 OEM version (includes Word + Excel + Powerpoint + OneNote). That seems like a pretty reasonable price.
>A guy carrying a suitcase nuke would be carrying something that is rather heavier than your average briefcase and they would have to put in quite a visible amount of effort to carry the thing, visible enough for them to be obvious to all as someone unusual.
Mucho Amore
A.C.
Yeah, because a tourist destination like Washington, DC would never have people carrying around large, heavy backpacks as they tour the city.
Pretty sure they at least need the software that talks to the cell towers....
It's hardly a cell phone if it has no software to talk to cell towers, that device would be more appropriately called a "brick".
No, because once the technology is available, some asshole at the C level will decide that all employees need to install this on their phone.
The technology has been available for years, yet few employers use it:
http://us.blackberry.com/smartphones/features/gps.jsp
Even if is a privately owned phone.
I don't want the government tracking where I am.
Too late, as long as your phone is powered on, the government can track you. No software needed.
I doubt if it was a corporate device that the end user would know (regardless of the law).
I'm off to close my gmail account now because this has disgusted me. Sorry but I will never support an organisation that promotes such things. Back to mutt and postfix!
Do you really think Google is the only provider for employee tracking?
You better stop using the internet too.... your packets are being routed over Cisco gear, and Cisco sells appliances that enable employers to track their employees via Wifi tags. By continuing to use the internet, you're supporting Cisco.
If you really wanted to take a stand against employee tracking, you'd push your legislators to make it illegal. Closing your gmail account accomplishes nothing (and no one really believes that you're going to do it unless you're already not using it) Though I do think there are many legitimate reasons for an employer to track employees, like tracking outside service technicians to predict when they will be able to go to their next call, making sure that the courier that's carrying cash between buildings doesn't make any unexpected detours (due to carjack or outright theft), tracking scientists in a lab for safety - i.e. if he enters a hazardous materials storage room but doesn't leave the room after X minutes, maybe someone should check on him, etc.
I doubt this is for watching your office drones' every movement. It would be really handy for service-based businesses that need to dispatch workers to various locations. Think cable repair men. When a call comes in, the closest idle worker can be dispatched to the location. And all it requires is a cellphone.
Exactly - besides, cell phones aren't the best solution for in-building tracking. Employers that want to track employees inside building use RFID tags and Wifi tracking tags.
I have a UID. I still post anonymously at least 50% of the time. Why? Because I'm funny as hell (and moderated the same way *most* of the time) but lots of people can't (or understand) take a joke. Sometimes I have unpopular insights (which are moderated both troll and insightful). Sometimes I want to share personal information for YOUR benefit but don't want it linked back to me because of its personal nature. Sometimes I just enjoy playing devil's advocate.
Those are no reasons to post anonymously. I think I'm funny as hell too (not everyone shares that opinion, not even my wife). I often post unpopular insights or even ask somewhat trolling questions just to watch the conversation unfold - sometimes I get modded down, sometimes I don't. If I have personal information to share, I anonymize it enough that it doesn't identify me personally (I don't even live in the city (or state) that I've identified as my home city but I've lived there long enough to be able to post local insights) - I don't trust Slashdot to keep my anonymous identity private any more than I trust them to keep my UID identity secret.
I still don't think he got it.
They measured the depth "into" the material, as in it's surface, regardless of its position or location.
Yeah, I guess I still don't get it.
Albedo isn't measured in microns (or any other distance unit of measure), so what is this laser measuring to a depth of "microns", if the depth of the crater can only be measured to within 10 cm from orbit? Where does the resolution of microns come into play?
You are mixing up albedo / reflectivity with ranging. Skin depth / surface detail info is not the same as geodetic accuracy (which is at the 10 cm level at best without a corner cube retroreflector).
Thanks for the info, I guess I was confused by this from the Summary:
The spacecraft mapped Shackleton crater with unprecedented detail, using a laser to illuminate the crater's interior and measure its albedo or natural reflectance. The laser light measures to a depth comparable to its wavelength, or about a micron. That represents a millionth of a meter, or less than one ten-thousandth of an inch. The team also used the instrument to map the relief of the crater's terrain based on the time it took for laser light to bounce back from the moon's surface.
Which I took to mean that it was measuring depth to the nearest micron and seemed remarkably precise from an orbital platform. I'm familiar with albedo, but I still don't see the relation between measurement to the nearest micron and measuring albedo.
How do they get micron accuracy from a moving platform 50km above the service ? Do they use multiple beams and compare measurements between the bottom of the crater and some point determined to be at surface level? What's the "reference" altitude they are comparing the depth to? If the laser beam has (for example) a 5 cm radius at the surface, and it's shining on a slope (or there's a grain of sand in the middle of the beam), how is that measurement recorded?
Nook and kindle exist due to their ecosystem and true brand recognition outside of the 'geek' community. I don't know if what Google has would unseat either of them.
I think the biggest thing a Google tablet can offer over a Nook/Kindle tablet is the ability to run both the Kindle app and the Nook app on the same device without having to boot into a different operating system.
"The rest of the article, including blaming file sharing for musician suicides (as if musicians didn't commit suicide before) is pants on head retarded. "
Whoa there. I obviously didn't read the entire article, but if he actually did blame file sharing for that I think he'd better blame the RIAA as well. I use to buy a LOT more CDs than I currently do. (I use to buy them 1+ per paycheck, now I buy 1-2 per year.) The reason for the change is entirely due to a boycott of RIAA associated labels for their own unethical behavior (Yes, abusing the courts to mass sue/extort fans is unethical.)
I used to buy a lot of music too, I have a collection of around 300 CD's (which now languish in a big CD binder because I ripped them all to MP3's). But I don't blame RIAA for my not buying much music any more. I have adequate of disposable income that I could spend on music, I could easily afford to buy a dozen or more albums/month if I wanted to, and most music is available as non-DRM'ed MP3's. But I don't know if it's the fact that I'm older now, if modern music just sucks, or because there are plenty of other alternatives to music (I listen to Podcasts in the car), but I just don't buy much music anymore. In the past 2 years, I think I've bought 2 albums. I do listen to some streaming music, but I rarely hear anything that I want to even pay 99 cents for.
I still listen to much of my older music that I own on CD's, but I just don't feel like I need to add to that collection. I remember my parents adding to their music collection when they were my age (even if most of it was on 8-tracks or vinyl), but my music collection has remained fairly static.
Remember kids -- Google took the solemn pinky oath to Not Be Evil, so the removal of YouTube-MP3.com from their search results is for your own good. And remember, Youtube is staunchly against copyright violation and has never violated any copyright or made copyrighted media available to unauthorized parties -- ever.
Evil is not always black and white. If the choice is between allowing videos to be transcoded to MP3's or having RIAA pull down every song on Youtube because they feel they are going to eat into MP3 sales, which choice would the average user consider to be more evil?
Even worse, if it pushes people who previously used the online solutions in to using downloaded tools, it's putting a lot of users in harms way with regards to malware.
There's got to be a better solution to malware than making everyone use cloud-based services for everything.
It is trivial to extract the audio from a youtube video and convert it to an mp3. There are tools on Windows, Linux, and OSX that can do that without a lot of effort. So, shutting down this site is, IMO, an exercise in futility.
It's only futile if Google's goal is to prevent people from transcoding audio from a video into an MP3 (afterall, so far, there's no DRM that can keep someone from plugging the analog audio-out cable from their computer into their sound card though I'm sure some day RIAA and MPAA will make sure we have analog fingerprints on all of our outputs that would close this analog hole). However, if Google's goal is to appease the RIAA and make it appear as though they are helping to protected RIAA's rights, then perhaps it's not so futile afterall.
Government cannot compel a particular response without a warrant or court order: Google is not obligated to respond to the a request that is not accompanied by a warrant or court order in any particular way. Google may CHOOSE to comply with a request because there is nothing inappropriate about a business deciding to comply with a lawful request from a government agency. Fortunately, if you don't like Google's policy, you can choose not to use it.
Where's the checkbox to opt-out of using Google's Ad network across thousands of sites on the internet? I've never seen a site pop up a window saying "Note: we're about to display a Google Ad, which means Google will know that you visited this site and they'll see the query string in your current URL which may reveal further personal data. If you don't want Google to have this information, close your browser window now."
I don't think Google says that opting out of personalized ads means Google will stop collecting data on you, it just means that they will stop using the data to personalize your ads.
You have a payroll supervisor who doesn't see anything wrong with using ftp for transferring payroll-related files? I'm glad I don't work there.
What!? You mean that uploading our payroll data to a vendor's anonymous FTP server is a bad idea? Thanks for the tip!
There are a lot of payroll related files, software updates, etc that do not contain sensitive information.