So IT departments may not like apple for various reasons.
Look at the share price and the earnings. Apple, quite rightly, couldn't care less.
I don't think it needs an article a day to say what IT departments think of apple either
Slashdot is not the Wall Street Journal - most people here don't care about Apple's share price and earnings, but many of us do care about what to do with our existing OSX servers, whether or not we should plan an upgrade to Lion, and what impact that will have on us.
so why not do a normal rental (or RTO but ignoring the O option) for a few months until you know you have what you want, and then go buy it outright and probably still save money over staying in the RTO?
Because not all RTO contracts are a scam to get you to pay many times more than the price of the item so you can't make a blanket statement that all RTO leases are a stupid waste of money?
If you shop wisely and read and understand the contract, you can use RTO to try-before-you-buy without wasting a lot of money. And if you don't like it, you haven't spent much money or end up with a $1000 piece or equipment you don't want.
Or, you could simply do some research, try out various models on display, find one you like, and then outright buy it instead of wasting money on a rental agreement where only a tiny percentage of your RTO payment will actually apply to your purchase.
You can't always do enough research to know what works for you. I don't play an instrument, but I'd imagine that a violin that works beautifully for one person just doesn't feel right for another person, and playing the display model for 30 minutes (or even several hours) in the store isn't the same as playing it every day for a couple months. Why spend $1200 on that instrument when you can spend a couple hundred dollars to try it out and you know they have another one waiting for you if the first one doesn't work out. My time is not free, so I don't want to deal with buying it, then trying to resell it if I don't like it.
As an analogy, I have a closet full of running shoes that I've retired after only a handful of runs because despite the glowing reviews from hundreds of people, they just didn't work for me. Trying them out with a quick jog around the running store doesn't tell me that they are going to cause hip pain when I'm 6 miles into my run.
I don't doubt that using RTO for some commodity item like a TV for your living room makes terrible financial sense, but sometimes it's worth paying some extra money to make sure you get the right product.
With ebooks, you are at the whim of the ebook publisher, DRM, the ebook reader manufacturer and of course electricity.
Depends where you buy them - just like back when most commercial music was locked down with DRM restrictions, many books (mostly from small independent authors) are available without DRM. I've bought a lot of books through http://www.smashwords.com/ . They have books in various formats for various devices and they have no DRM restrictions. No DRM means that the books will be readable as long as there are computers (and, as you said, electricity, but if there's no electricity, my book collection (aside from my old Army survival guide which I have in paper) will be the least of my worries)
Prices are great (most seem to be in the $1 to $3 range) and most authors let you download a generous sample of the book before buying.
Out of over 3 dozen books I've read on my Kindle, only 2 of them were purchased through Amazon, the rest were from Smashwords or Project Gutenberg.
While there are products that do this (dual WAN firewalls, etc) none of them are particularly great. If it were me, I'd repurpose an old PC, or a dedicated board such as a Soekris 4501
Before you repurpose a PC for something that can be done by a lightweight appliance, keep in mind the power costs.
A PC that uses 100 watts will cost around $130/year in power (in California @ $.15/KWh). Use that Soekris board (at 10W w/o disk) and you save $117/year, so it will pay for itself in less than 2 years.
Bullshit. Cloud computing has had a very specific meaning for a very long time; specifically, it is when you have one virtualized, logical machine that is is running on some arbitrary number of physical hosts. Just because a bunch of asstards have come in and turned it into some almost meaningless buzzword that means vaguely Software as a Service doesn't mean it's always been that way. You assholes should have picked a term that wasn't already in use if you didn't want there to be confusion.
You sound like the guy that used to go around correcting people about baud rates "Bullshit! Your modem isn't 28.8baud, it is 3200 baud and 28.8bps! Baud has had a very specific meaning for a very long time and now your asstards can't tell the difference between baud and bps!"
The fight is already lost, the definition of "cloud computing" is so cloudy now (pun intended) that you have to ask for clarification every time someone uses the term.
You could build a Netflix, a Dropbox, a DNSMadeEasy/DynDNS/UltraDNS, etc., as long as you have a team with the time to build it.
Isn't that true regardless of whether they host the apps in the cloud or not? It's the software that's hard to replicate. While your team tries to duplicate Netflix's software, your hardware team could be racking servers in the datacenter(s).
Netflix probably pays $200M/year or more in bandwidth costs - the cost of hardware to pump out the bandwidth pales in comparison to the bandwidth itself.
Perhaps you can save some money by going to the cloud, but at the scale of a company like Netflix, I'd be surprised if the AWS is significantly cheaper than hosting their own hardware. Amazon can't rent out a thousand virtual servers for less than the cost to run a thousand virtual servers. If a company needs 10's or hundreds of servers then I can see how Amazon could be cheaper, but once you get up to Netflix's scale where their needs can consume entire datacenters, then the economics become less clear.
Can't you just say "Sure, I'll enter my pass phrase - but the key is stored on the blue USB flash drive that was under my bed. I couldn't find it after you guys took all of my equipment, so I assumed you had it. You mean you don't? Oh well my passphrase is only used to unlock the 4096 bit key on that flash drive. Without that key I have no way to get to my data. Can I sue you for losing that drive?"
Update, cant buy a manual can opener that lasts 3 months,
Thanks for reminding me... and missing the point entirely.
What is your point? That people (including you) don't shop for (or don't want to pay for) quality? You can still find quality, long lasting products, you just have to search harder and pay more.
Want a can opener that lasts 30 years? But a restaurant-quality one... it's going to be expensive, big and clunky but it'll last you a lifetime.
Want a dryer that lasts for 30 years? Buy a commercial one - a friend owns a laundromat and his Speed Queen's are 12 years old, and show no signs of giving up. Of course, they are designed for long life and to be repairable.
But if you buy the cheap crap at Walmart, you get cheap crap that's designed to be disposable.
In 10 years, your business deals with a major Chinese manufacturer. You and your competitor are up bidding on the same major project. You didn't bother to learn Chinese because you thought it was worthless, but your competitor did because he understands not only the language, but the culture.
Your competitor is able to talk to the internal departments in their native tongue, and you are not. If you have been in the three-letter business world longer than a few minutes, you know that form and tact are VERY important aspects of your success in a global market.
You don't get the contract, but you don't care because you are accustomed to the life you have grown up living, and would rather stick with what you know to your grave, then change with the world around you. Not everyone is going to succeed, and the old phrase in the last century was 'the world still needs ditch-diggers', to which the new equivalent will be, well the world still needs mono-lingustic people.
That is an incredibly contrived example - maybe in 10 years my business will deal with a Japanese manufacturer, or French, or Russian, or Indian or who knows. Gambling on making a big business deal with a Mandarin speaking manufacturer in 10 years is just that - a gamble that devoting many hours of time to learning Mandarin will pay off more than whatever else I could spend the time on (i.e. learning some new technology, surfing, watching the Twilight movies -- everyone defines "value" differently)
Don't expect to carry on in-depth, technical conversations with native speakers after a couple years of casual study. If you're living there and immersed in the language, you may learn faster, but moving there is a big commitment to learn a language that you may or may not need in 10 years to get a big business deal.
My dad owned the same electric can opener my whole life, which is to say it over 30 years old. My dad owned the same clothes dryer my whole life, which is to say it over 30 years old.
I cant find an electric can opener that lasts 6 months.
Therefore I say: The Chinese need to learn to make things.
America, Fuck yea.
Silly American - don't buy an electric can opener - I've had the same manual can opener (made in Germany, I believe) for nearly 20 years. It has a handle big enough that my elderly mother can operate it, and I can open a can in about the same amount of time as an electric opener.
While there may be ghost cities right now, the 'plan' is to have the infrastructure in place for the hordes coming in from the rural areas,
As far as them 'busting'. The likelihood of that happening is much smaller than it was here, or in any of the problem EU countries like greece, portugal, iceland, and italy. Why? They actually have rather sane lending policies when it comes to housing.
I'm not sure how to reconcile those two statements - how can you build ghost towns that no one lives in and still have sane lending policies? In the USA, towns are built by developers, who borrow money from the bank to purchase land and for construction costs. Who's paying for all of those ghost towns, and how long do they expect it to take before there are buyers?
Empty housing quickly degrades, in the USA, vacant houses are often stripped for recyclable materials, but I'm not sure how much of a problem that is in China - a few military guards with machine guns that may take care of that problem. But even without vandals, housing degrades without care and maintenance - mold can set in, roofs can leak, pipes can break, etc.
Exactly. Everything I'm reading says they are dangerously close to bursting. I'm not an economics guy so I have to rely on the "experts" but it doesn't sound good. Plus, their GDP is artificially inflated with these building projects they're doing. Google "Chinese ghost cities" and take a look. Strange stuff going on over there.
Here's a few articles predicting trouble in the Chinese economy:
Sorry, but every 'Kevin' from Bangalore I've encountered has been completely useless. Not that I fault the individual workers - I'm sure it's a situation much like we have here in the US, where these poor souls are limited by asinine corporate playbooks, and thus, provide no valuable service to customers.
At least you understand that it's not their location or nationality that makes them useless, it's that they aren't really tech support people - they are consumer relations people. All they know how to do is follow their troubleshooting script, they've likely never used or have even seen the product you're having trouble with. But it's not like a company can afford to let you talk to a product engineer when your $150 Blu Ray player stops working.
The thing that gets me is that companies will spend lots of money putting together troubleshooting scripts and a knowledgebase that the call center workers can use, but they don't make that same information available to the public through their website, which would likely keep me from having to call tech support in the first place.
P.S. Since no one posted the obligatory xkcd link yet, here's one:
It's your choice - feed people who won't get off their ass to work or have nice toys like this telescope.
Or, another choice - cheap gas where gas taxes don't pay the real cost of highway maintenance, or nice toys like this telescope ($40B for highways, versus $16B for NASA's entire budget.
You may not like the choices, but that's the plain unvarnished truth.
There are many many possible choices and tradeoffs.
Whoever tagged this story "obama" either doesn't realize that the House is controlled by Republicans, not Obama (the Democratic president) - or they're just another lying Republican blaming their party's worst behavior on someone else, usually a Democrat and especially a Democratic president.
Republicans. Not Obama.
And they seem to have missed this in TFA:
NASA is funded at $16.8 billion in the bill, which is $1.6 billion below last year’s level and $1.9 billion below the President’s request. This funding includes:
So Obama requested a $300M increase in NASA funding.
If they'd eliminate the "war" on drugs, I daresay they could save some money in the DOJ budget by reducing the DEA and Federal prison system budgets, and they'd gain tax revenue by taxing recreational drugs.
Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) – The bill provides $2.7 billion for the PTO – the full requested level. This funding is equal to the estimated amount of fees to be collected by the PTO during fiscal year 2012, and is an increase of $588 million or 28% above last year’s level. The bill also includes language that allows PTO to keep and use any fees in excess of the estimated collected amount, subject to standard Congressional approval, and includes language requiring PTO to report on efforts to reduce the patent application backlog
You mean, like all search and rescue dogs first eat you, then report finding you ?
Since drug-sniffing dogs have been known to ingest the drugs they are searching for, it doesn't seem impossible that an unattended cadaver dog would take a nibble at his catch. Dogs are scavengers, and while dead rotten meat isn't their preferred diet, they will sometimes eat carrion.
You definitely didn't RTFA or RTFSummary. What makes me curious is how you knew it was Germany if you didn't even make it all the way through RTFHeadline.
My guess is it happened like this:
Commenter reads "Police Vulture Training", scans down noticing Germany is mentioned, & quickly comments with the first thing that came to mind with no concern for relevance to the article.
I read the article and the previous poster had a reasonable reaction. Obviously he was exaggerating about the vultures finishing him off, but hey, vultures are carrion eaters, so it's not unreasonable to think that after they go through all of the trouble to locate a dead body that they'll stop in and have a bite to eat to reward themselves for a job well-done.
Say you have a video recording application where you're writing a video stream to disk, and that (perhaps uncompressed?) stream is of such ungodly bandwidth as to take a significant chunk of your drive's throughput. One head's fine if your disk isn't ridiculously fragmented (which it won't be); you have RAM to buffer it while the drive seeks occasionally (e.g. past a file fragment to the next unallocated space), then it'll catch up. But now suppose you want to playback a timeshifted stream of this same bandwidth
That said, in the interest of pedantry: Unlike a striped RAID 0, a RAID 1 array of n+1 disks could conceivably perform as a single disk with multiple heads, since a RAID 1 of n+1 has n+1 worth of independent head stacks, all reading identical data. (Also in the interest of pedantry, n is 1 or greater, since otherwise it is perfectly possible to create a RAID 1 consisting of a single disk with none of this potential, even though it is neither redundant nor an array.)
Except that that's not true in the case that the grandparent post described where you have a stream bring written at close to the maximum physical transfer rate of the disk, then you want to read that same stream from the beginning while you continue to write to it.
With two heads on the same disk, this should be possible, one head is busy writing, the other head is busy reading, with little seeking going on for either head and the full bandwidth of each head is available for each of the concurrent streams.
But if you're using 2 singled-head disks in a RAID-1 pair, this would not be possible, since the heads would have to seek as they switched between read and write mode and half the time the head would be reading, the other half of the time it would be writing, cutting the available bandwidth by half.
I think what you're talking about is the ability of the controller to read one piece of data from one disk in a RAID-1 set, and another piece of data from a different disk in that same set at the exact same time, using each disk as a "head". I think this behavior is present in most quality RAID-1 controllers, I'm surprised md doesn't do it too. Of course, this only works for reads, writes still have to go to both mirrored disks at the same time (well, a battery backed caching controller can defer writes for a time, so writes don't have to be flushed to both disks at the same time)
An hour!? I have a 500GB drive on my desk and I can read it in under a minute! The first line says: "Seagate Barracua 7200.11 500 Gbytes" The entire label has only a few dozen words and serial numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
So IT departments may not like apple for various reasons.
Look at the share price and the earnings. Apple, quite rightly, couldn't care less.
I don't think it needs an article a day to say what IT departments think of apple either
Slashdot is not the Wall Street Journal - most people here don't care about Apple's share price and earnings, but many of us do care about what to do with our existing OSX servers, whether or not we should plan an upgrade to Lion, and what impact that will have on us.
so why not do a normal rental (or RTO but ignoring the O option) for a few months until you know you have what you want, and then go buy it outright and probably still save money over staying in the RTO?
Because not all RTO contracts are a scam to get you to pay many times more than the price of the item so you can't make a blanket statement that all RTO leases are a stupid waste of money?
If you shop wisely and read and understand the contract, you can use RTO to try-before-you-buy without wasting a lot of money. And if you don't like it, you haven't spent much money or end up with a $1000 piece or equipment you don't want.
Or, you could simply do some research, try out various models on display, find one you like, and then outright buy it instead of wasting money on a rental agreement where only a tiny percentage of your RTO payment will actually apply to your purchase.
You can't always do enough research to know what works for you. I don't play an instrument, but I'd imagine that a violin that works beautifully for one person just doesn't feel right for another person, and playing the display model for 30 minutes (or even several hours) in the store isn't the same as playing it every day for a couple months. Why spend $1200 on that instrument when you can spend a couple hundred dollars to try it out and you know they have another one waiting for you if the first one doesn't work out. My time is not free, so I don't want to deal with buying it, then trying to resell it if I don't like it.
As an analogy, I have a closet full of running shoes that I've retired after only a handful of runs because despite the glowing reviews from hundreds of people, they just didn't work for me. Trying them out with a quick jog around the running store doesn't tell me that they are going to cause hip pain when I'm 6 miles into my run.
I don't doubt that using RTO for some commodity item like a TV for your living room makes terrible financial sense, but sometimes it's worth paying some extra money to make sure you get the right product.
With ebooks, you are at the whim of the ebook publisher, DRM, the ebook reader manufacturer and of course electricity.
Depends where you buy them - just like back when most commercial music was locked down with DRM restrictions, many books (mostly from small independent authors) are available without DRM. I've bought a lot of books through http://www.smashwords.com/ . They have books in various formats for various devices and they have no DRM restrictions. No DRM means that the books will be readable as long as there are computers (and, as you said, electricity, but if there's no electricity, my book collection (aside from my old Army survival guide which I have in paper) will be the least of my worries)
Prices are great (most seem to be in the $1 to $3 range) and most authors let you download a generous sample of the book before buying.
Out of over 3 dozen books I've read on my Kindle, only 2 of them were purchased through Amazon, the rest were from Smashwords or Project Gutenberg.
How do they lay out these cables? Are they on the bottom or floating & anchored? Are there repeaters? Anywone know where I can read about it?
Try the internet, I heard that there is a lot of information there:
http://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+undersea+cables+work
While there are products that do this (dual WAN firewalls, etc) none of them are particularly great. If it were me, I'd repurpose an old PC, or a dedicated board such as a Soekris 4501
Before you repurpose a PC for something that can be done by a lightweight appliance, keep in mind the power costs.
A PC that uses 100 watts will cost around $130/year in power (in California @ $.15/KWh). Use that Soekris board (at 10W w/o disk) and you save $117/year, so it will pay for itself in less than 2 years.
Bullshit. Cloud computing has had a very specific meaning for a very long time; specifically, it is when you have one virtualized, logical machine that is is running on some arbitrary number of physical hosts. Just because a bunch of asstards have come in and turned it into some almost meaningless buzzword that means vaguely Software as a Service doesn't mean it's always been that way. You assholes should have picked a term that wasn't already in use if you didn't want there to be confusion.
You sound like the guy that used to go around correcting people about baud rates "Bullshit! Your modem isn't 28.8baud, it is 3200 baud and 28.8bps! Baud has had a very specific meaning for a very long time and now your asstards can't tell the difference between baud and bps!"
The fight is already lost, the definition of "cloud computing" is so cloudy now (pun intended) that you have to ask for clarification every time someone uses the term.
You could build a Netflix, a Dropbox, a DNSMadeEasy/DynDNS/UltraDNS, etc., as long as you have a team with the time to build it.
Isn't that true regardless of whether they host the apps in the cloud or not? It's the software that's hard to replicate. While your team tries to duplicate Netflix's software, your hardware team could be racking servers in the datacenter(s).
Netflix probably pays $200M/year or more in bandwidth costs - the cost of hardware to pump out the bandwidth pales in comparison to the bandwidth itself.
Perhaps you can save some money by going to the cloud, but at the scale of a company like Netflix, I'd be surprised if the AWS is significantly cheaper than hosting their own hardware. Amazon can't rent out a thousand virtual servers for less than the cost to run a thousand virtual servers. If a company needs 10's or hundreds of servers then I can see how Amazon could be cheaper, but once you get up to Netflix's scale where their needs can consume entire datacenters, then the economics become less clear.
The article title is not quite accurate:
Windows 8 Will Run On All Current PC Hardware
Then it goes on to say
any PC capable of running Windows 7 today would be capable of running Windows 8
I have a lot of PC's in regular use that run XP quite happily but won't run Win7. I guess the next OS for that hardware will be Xubuntu.
Can't you just say "Sure, I'll enter my pass phrase - but the key is stored on the blue USB flash drive that was under my bed. I couldn't find it after you guys took all of my equipment, so I assumed you had it. You mean you don't? Oh well my passphrase is only used to unlock the 4096 bit key on that flash drive. Without that key I have no way to get to my data. Can I sue you for losing that drive?"
Update, cant buy a manual can opener that lasts 3 months,
Thanks for reminding me... and missing the point entirely.
What is your point? That people (including you) don't shop for (or don't want to pay for) quality? You can still find quality, long lasting products, you just have to search harder and pay more.
Want a can opener that lasts 30 years? But a restaurant-quality one... it's going to be expensive, big and clunky but it'll last you a lifetime.
Want a dryer that lasts for 30 years? Buy a commercial one - a friend owns a laundromat and his Speed Queen's are 12 years old, and show no signs of giving up. Of course, they are designed for long life and to be repairable.
But if you buy the cheap crap at Walmart, you get cheap crap that's designed to be disposable.
That is an incredibly shallow point of view.
In 10 years, your business deals with a major Chinese manufacturer. You and your competitor are up bidding on the same major project. You didn't bother to learn Chinese because you thought it was worthless, but your competitor did because he understands not only the language, but the culture.
Your competitor is able to talk to the internal departments in their native tongue, and you are not. If you have been in the three-letter business world longer than a few minutes, you know that form and tact are VERY important aspects of your success in a global market.
You don't get the contract, but you don't care because you are accustomed to the life you have grown up living, and would rather stick with what you know to your grave, then change with the world around you. Not everyone is going to succeed, and the old phrase in the last century was 'the world still needs ditch-diggers', to which the new equivalent will be, well the world still needs mono-lingustic people.
That is an incredibly contrived example - maybe in 10 years my business will deal with a Japanese manufacturer, or French, or Russian, or Indian or who knows. Gambling on making a big business deal with a Mandarin speaking manufacturer in 10 years is just that - a gamble that devoting many hours of time to learning Mandarin will pay off more than whatever else I could spend the time on (i.e. learning some new technology, surfing, watching the Twilight movies -- everyone defines "value" differently)
Don't expect to carry on in-depth, technical conversations with native speakers after a couple years of casual study. If you're living there and immersed in the language, you may learn faster, but moving there is a big commitment to learn a language that you may or may not need in 10 years to get a big business deal.
My dad owned the same electric can opener my whole life, which is to say it over 30 years old.
My dad owned the same clothes dryer my whole life, which is to say it over 30 years old.
I cant find an electric can opener that lasts 6 months.
Therefore I say:
The Chinese need to learn to make things.
America, Fuck yea.
Silly American - don't buy an electric can opener - I've had the same manual can opener (made in Germany, I believe) for nearly 20 years. It has a handle big enough that my elderly mother can operate it, and I can open a can in about the same amount of time as an electric opener.
While there may be ghost cities right now, the 'plan' is to have the infrastructure in place for the hordes coming in from the rural areas,
As far as them 'busting'. The likelihood of that happening is much smaller than it was here, or in any of the problem EU countries like greece, portugal, iceland, and italy. Why? They actually have rather sane lending policies when it comes to housing.
I'm not sure how to reconcile those two statements - how can you build ghost towns that no one lives in and still have sane lending policies? In the USA, towns are built by developers, who borrow money from the bank to purchase land and for construction costs. Who's paying for all of those ghost towns, and how long do they expect it to take before there are buyers?
Empty housing quickly degrades, in the USA, vacant houses are often stripped for recyclable materials, but I'm not sure how much of a problem that is in China - a few military guards with machine guns that may take care of that problem. But even without vandals, housing degrades without care and maintenance - mold can set in, roofs can leak, pipes can break, etc.
Exactly. Everything I'm reading says they are dangerously close to bursting. I'm not an economics guy so I have to rely on the "experts" but it doesn't sound good. Plus, their GDP is artificially inflated with these building projects they're doing. Google "Chinese ghost cities" and take a look. Strange stuff going on over there.
Here's a few articles predicting trouble in the Chinese economy:
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/175179/20110706/china-economic-bubble-housing-bubble-job-growth-asia-bubble-china-interest-rates-recession-inflation.htm
http://www.businessinsider.com/china-economy-hard-landing-bumpy-landing-soft-landing-and-what-landing-2011-7
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2010/0316/China-the-coming-costs-of-a-superbubble
But we shouldn't be too happy to see their economy stumble -- a major failing in China will have serious economic impacts throughout the world.
In what? Choosing a fake name?
Sorry, but every 'Kevin' from Bangalore I've encountered has been completely useless. Not that I fault the individual workers - I'm sure it's a situation much like we have here in the US, where these poor souls are limited by asinine corporate playbooks, and thus, provide no valuable service to customers.
At least you understand that it's not their location or nationality that makes them useless, it's that they aren't really tech support people - they are consumer relations people. All they know how to do is follow their troubleshooting script, they've likely never used or have even seen the product you're having trouble with. But it's not like a company can afford to let you talk to a product engineer when your $150 Blu Ray player stops working.
The thing that gets me is that companies will spend lots of money putting together troubleshooting scripts and a knowledgebase that the call center workers can use, but they don't make that same information available to the public through their website, which would likely keep me from having to call tech support in the first place.
P.S. Since no one posted the obligatory xkcd link yet, here's one:
http://xkcd.com/806/
It's your choice - feed people who won't get off their ass to work or have nice toys like this telescope.
Or, another choice - cheap gas where gas taxes don't pay the real cost of highway maintenance, or nice toys like this telescope ($40B for highways, versus $16B for NASA's entire budget.
You may not like the choices, but that's the plain unvarnished truth.
There are many many possible choices and tradeoffs.
Whoever tagged this story "obama" either doesn't realize that the House is controlled by Republicans, not Obama (the Democratic president) - or they're just another lying Republican blaming their party's worst behavior on someone else, usually a Democrat and especially a Democratic president.
Republicans. Not Obama.
And they seem to have missed this in TFA:
NASA is funded at $16.8 billion in the bill, which is $1.6 billion below last year’s level and $1.9 billion below the President’s request. This funding includes:
So Obama requested a $300M increase in NASA funding.
If they'd eliminate the "war" on drugs, I daresay they could save some money in the DOJ budget by reducing the DEA and Federal prison system budgets, and they'd gain tax revenue by taxing recreational drugs.
Except that:
Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) – The bill provides $2.7 billion for the PTO – the full requested level. This funding is equal to the estimated amount of fees to be collected by the PTO during fiscal year 2012, and is an increase of $588 million or 28% above last year’s level. The bill also includes language that allows PTO to keep and use any fees in excess of the estimated collected amount, subject to standard Congressional approval, and includes language requiring PTO to report on efforts to reduce the patent application backlog
(Bolding is mine).
The USPTO funds itself from fees it collects.
You mean, like all search and rescue dogs first eat you, then report finding you ?
Since drug-sniffing dogs have been known to ingest the drugs they are searching for, it doesn't seem impossible that an unattended cadaver dog would take a nibble at his catch. Dogs are scavengers, and while dead rotten meat isn't their preferred diet, they will sometimes eat carrion.
You definitely didn't RTFA or RTFSummary. What makes me curious is how you knew it was Germany if you didn't even make it all the way through RTFHeadline.
My guess is it happened like this:
Commenter reads "Police Vulture Training", scans down noticing Germany is mentioned, & quickly comments with the first thing that came to mind with no concern for relevance to the article.
I read the article and the previous poster had a reasonable reaction. Obviously he was exaggerating about the vultures finishing him off, but hey, vultures are carrion eaters, so it's not unreasonable to think that after they go through all of the trouble to locate a dead body that they'll stop in and have a bite to eat to reward themselves for a job well-done.
Say you have a video recording application where you're writing a video stream to disk, and that (perhaps uncompressed?) stream is of such ungodly bandwidth as to take a significant chunk of your drive's throughput. One head's fine if your disk isn't ridiculously fragmented (which it won't be); you have RAM to buffer it while the drive seeks occasionally (e.g. past a file fragment to the next unallocated space), then it'll catch up. But now suppose you want to playback a timeshifted stream of this same bandwidth
That said, in the interest of pedantry: Unlike a striped RAID 0, a RAID 1 array of n+1 disks could conceivably perform as a single disk with multiple heads, since a RAID 1 of n+1 has n+1 worth of independent head stacks, all reading identical data. (Also in the interest of pedantry, n is 1 or greater, since otherwise it is perfectly possible to create a RAID 1 consisting of a single disk with none of this potential, even though it is neither redundant nor an array.)
Except that that's not true in the case that the grandparent post described where you have a stream bring written at close to the maximum physical transfer rate of the disk, then you want to read that same stream from the beginning while you continue to write to it.
With two heads on the same disk, this should be possible, one head is busy writing, the other head is busy reading, with little seeking going on for either head and the full bandwidth of each head is available for each of the concurrent streams.
But if you're using 2 singled-head disks in a RAID-1 pair, this would not be possible, since the heads would have to seek as they switched between read and write mode and half the time the head would be reading, the other half of the time it would be writing, cutting the available bandwidth by half.
I think what you're talking about is the ability of the controller to read one piece of data from one disk in a RAID-1 set, and another piece of data from a different disk in that same set at the exact same time, using each disk as a "head". I think this behavior is present in most quality RAID-1 controllers, I'm surprised md doesn't do it too. Of course, this only works for reads, writes still have to go to both mirrored disks at the same time (well, a battery backed caching controller can defer writes for a time, so writes don't have to be flushed to both disks at the same time)
An hour!? I have a 500GB drive on my desk and I can read it in under a minute! The first line says: "Seagate Barracua 7200.11 500 Gbytes" The entire label has only a few dozen words and serial numbers.
It would be even cooler if people would take 2 minutes to read TFA before posting:
The event was captured by the Subaru Catwalk Night Camera and also by
CHFT's NNW webcam
Videos from both cameras are in the article.
That's a mighty big "tiny dot of condensation" if it can affect two cameras at once!
So if this was caused by a missile, does that mean that life really is this awesome!?