My Vista system has 4 GB, and still takes a painfully long time to boot. I don't know what magic your system uses, but I doubt that it's fast compared even to a non-optimized Linux box.
To speed up startup time, I hibernate my system instead of shutting it down when I'm not using it. But even that's painfully slow — because of that 4GB memory that needs to be restored.
Vista introduces something called hybrid mode, which is like sleeping, only safer, because there's also a hibernation image, so the state of your system isn't lost if there's a power failure. Not practical with laptops, alas.
They are taxed differently, but the tax isn't determined by what you call it. Both the tax rate and the labelling are determined by what's in the bottle. "Malt liquor", for example, is just beer with extra alcohol.
You could age Boone's Farm for 1,000 years, and it would still taste like spiked fruit juice.
Have you noticed that a lot of alcoholic beverages that started out and fruit wine or wine coolers (Boone's Farm, Bartle's and James) are now "flavored malt beverage"? In other words, they're now a kind of beer, "malt beverage" or "malt liquor" being used for a beverage that's essentially beer, but doesn't meet TTB restriction on flavor, alcohol content, etc.
No programmer/engineer/nerd worth his salt worries about wimpy concepts like ambiguity!
Seriously, though, the GB versus GiB issue makes me cringe every time I think of it. I'm a tech writer, and I ought to be all Usage Nazi about making sure people stick with the SI meaning of "Giga" and insist that the use the IEEE conventions when referring to powers of two. But arguing with engineers about this is just not a productive use of my time. So I always say "GB", and spell it out if there's any ambiguity. And there's usually not: nobody makes DIMMs that hold 4 x 10^9 bytes. I can safely assume that when I refer to a 4GB DIMM, people know I mean 4 x 2^30.
And remember, sticking with SI and IEEE conventions is no guarantee that you'll not be misunderstood. If I rely on SI conventions in a context where people are expecting nerdy powers of 2, I'll probably be misunderstood. The only solution is to spell it out.
The story was posted at 12:22. This post appeared at 12:26. That means it took four whole minutes for somebody to make the obligatory Nigerian SPAM joke.
Lame of me to pick a nit with such a cute joke. But:
Widely used? Yes. "Correct". Not at all. Check your dictionary. In the U.S. it's "pound sign," "number sign," or "sharp sign", depending on the context. In the U.K. it's "hash mark".
Here's the American Heritage dictionary entry for octothorpe:
Alteration (influenced by OCTO-) of earlier octalthorpe, the pound key, probably humorous blend of octal, an eight-point pin used in electronic connections (from the eight points of the symbol) and the name of James Edward OGLETHORPE.
Hmm, I've never heard of an octal connector. There actually is such a thing but it's obscure enough to make me dubious. And Oglethorpe is even more obscure (unless you're from Georgia). Here's a web page that casts doubt on the AH version.
The Oxford English Dictionary, which relies on actual research, has this:
Forms: 19- octothorp, 19- octothorpe. [Origin uncertain; perhaps < OCTO- comb. form + the surname Thorpe (compare THORP n.: see note below).
The term was reportedly coined in the early 1960s by Don Macpherson, an employee of Bell Laboratories:
1996 Telecom Heritage No. 28. 53 His thought process was as follows: There are eight points on the symbol so octo should be part of the name. We need a few more letters or another syllable to make a noun... (Don Macpherson..was active in a group that was trying to get Jim Thorpe's Olympic medals returned from Sweden). The phrase thorpe would be unique.
For an alternative explanation see quot. 1996; in a variant of this explanation, the word is explained as arising from the use of the symbol in cartography to represent a village.
For a different explanation from a former employee of Bell Laboratories, arguing that the word is a completely arbitrary formation (and that it originally had the form octatherp) see D. A. Kerr 'The ASCII Character Octatherp' in http://doug.kerr.home.att.net/ (2006).]
The hash sign (#), as it appears on the buttons of touch-tone telephones and some other keypads.
1974 Telephony 25 Feb. 16/1 A few months ago, a story traveled through the Bell System that the familiar symbol '#'..at long last had a name: 'octothorp'. 1975 Vancouver Province 15 Nov. (Canad. Mag.) 32 Punch an octothorpe when you reach your desk every morning, and the accounting department automatically registers you in. 1987 Radio & Electronics World Feb. 47/1 As well as the numbers 1 to 9 and 0, you also have buttons marked with a star and square (also known as hash or octothorp). 1996 New Scientist 30 Mar. 54/3 The term 'octothorp(e)' (which MWCD10 dates 1971) was invented for '#', allegedly by Bell Labs engineers when touch-tone telephones were introduced in the mid-1960s. 'Octo-' means eight, and 'thorp' was an Old English word for village: apparently the sign was playfully construed as eight fields surrounding a village.
In case you hadn't noticed, nobody gives a heck about HD. The number of folks willing and able to spend the bucks for the necessary hardware is pretty small. For most of us, the problem is getting access to content of any quality. And there the problem isn't some strange conspiracy to impose bandwidth caps. It's the unwillingness of the content hoarders to release it, except as part of overpriced bundles.
Do some math. A DVD holds 8GB, which is actually a lot more than the movie itself needs (hence all those extras). That means that even with a 250GB cap, you can watch a DVD-quality movie every day of the month without going over. And most online video streams are not DVD quality.
Sure, that's possible. But then how do you explain this supposed "support taint" on his resume? Which I too find hard to believe. During the downturn a few years back, I did that kind of work to make ends meet. I don't recall it hurting my prospects. On the contrary, a customer-facing job gave me a little breadth of experience I'd lacked before.
I think there are other issues here the guy's not acknowledging. Which is often the case when somebody's having trouble finding work.
Not before XKCD develops such as huge following that Randall Munroe can quit his day job and publish a book of collected strips. Which is what prompted the Achewood interview.
I too find Achewood unfunny. (When I pulled up the NPR story, I was surprised to discover that the link to achewood.com was gray, indicating I'd browsed it recently. Must not have made an impression.) But I can see where it would appeal to people with a certain kind of evil sense of humor. Let's avoid the Slashdotter Fallacy ("What I like/need/approve of is what the world revolves around"), shall we?
That wasn't a merger. That was AT&T selling off a division. Which was bound be better off under its new owners, since pre-SBC AT&T had the worst management in the history of capitalism.
The Canadian middle class spends a reasonable amount of money for a health care system that covers everybody. The American middle class spends a huge amount of money for a system that doesn't even cover the entire middle class. Who's better off? If you think it's us, you've never had an expensive medical problem, or tried to find insurance for a high-risk family member.
Anyway, both systems subsidize minorities. Canada's is poor people who pay less taxes. Ours is highly-profitable health-care providers and insurers. And our subsidies are a lot higher than theirs.
Hot flash, dude: Canada didn't invent the shared-risk model of health care. They just made membership in the risk pool mandatory. That not only guarantees everybody access, it makes for a more efficient, affordable system.
Not being into hacking common gadgets, I usually don't pay much attention to this kind of project. But I am so going to give this one a hard look. I only use my player for one thing: listening to spoken word content. Almost all players suck for this purpose: no automatic bookmarking, impossible to navigate without squinting at the screen (I listen a lot while driving), etc.
Cowon's U2 is pretty close to ideal. But it's been EOLed, and the U3 is a piece of crap that tries to be an iPod touch, only without a touch screen! When I lost my old U2, I replaced it with a used one off eBay. That source can't last forever.
Obtaining the knowhow and equipment to burn custom firmware into an MP3 player that only I will use is sort of overkill. But I listen to mine a lot, and having the feature set I want just might be worth it.
There is no doubt that Nineteen Eighty-Four was meant to present the totalitarian state brought to its extreme.
I never said it didn't. I'm arguing with the common assumption that 1984 is about a specific real-world totalitarian state.
There's actually a passage where O'Brian basically calls the Soviets wimps who didn't know how to run a totalitarian state effectively.
If you think that the USSR or any other totalitarian regime was different then you are wrong.
Huh? You mean all totalitarian states are identical? They all speak Russian, and all persecute the professional and entrepreneurial classes? Get real.
I guess what you're really trying to say is that totalitarianism is evil, and that's all we need to know about them. I don't disagree with the evil part, but the inference that other details don't matter is a fallacy, designed to support willful ignorance.
And willful ignorance is evil too. In fact, it's one of the cornerstones of any totalitarian state. (INGSOC slogan: "Ignorance is Strength".) If Germans had been a little more cognizant about the different paths to a totalitarian state, they might not have elected a party whose main appeal was that it seemed a good bet for holding off Soviet totalitarianism, and which then preceded to found a totalitarian state that easily rivaled the USSR for repression and mass murder.
Nor is this a dead issue. There are folks in the U.S. ruling party who believe that multi-party democracy and freedom to dissent is outdated.
Back on topic, in the long run I bet someone found ways to make money off this. Like, ads for example?
The whole thing is pretty effective ad for a Russian town none of us ever heard of before. Any bets that the local Chamber of Commerce (or whatever they call it in Russia) was behind this?
(The rest of your post pretty much explains why a lot of people don't watch TV any more.)
I was a little confused to see this on the NYT web site, since most readers there would never have never heard of Solaris before. But this seems to be some kind of syndicated story that's appearing on a lot of other web sites. This one has an interesting post from somebody at Gracenote. Of course, his comments will be read in light of the fact that Gracenote is Evil.
A decent article, though I wish they had quoted somebody besides a Linux Foundation flack for the Solaris-Is-Dying side of the argument.
Slashdot Mirror
It's more like 3.5. Note that the hard limit for all 32-bit operating systems is 4GB. Windows manages to lose half a gig somewhere.
Good point, especially about the firewall. Anyone know of firewall startup benchmarks?
My Vista system has 4 GB, and still takes a painfully long time to boot. I don't know what magic your system uses, but I doubt that it's fast compared even to a non-optimized Linux box.
To speed up startup time, I hibernate my system instead of shutting it down when I'm not using it. But even that's painfully slow — because of that 4GB memory that needs to be restored.
Vista introduces something called hybrid mode, which is like sleeping, only safer, because there's also a hibernation image, so the state of your system isn't lost if there's a power failure. Not practical with laptops, alas.
They are taxed differently, but the tax isn't determined by what you call it. Both the tax rate and the labelling are determined by what's in the bottle. "Malt liquor", for example, is just beer with extra alcohol.
Tablet computers are better. They leave a hand free...
You could age Boone's Farm for 1,000 years, and it would still taste like spiked fruit juice.
Have you noticed that a lot of alcoholic beverages that started out and fruit wine or wine coolers (Boone's Farm, Bartle's and James) are now "flavored malt beverage"? In other words, they're now a kind of beer, "malt beverage" or "malt liquor" being used for a beverage that's essentially beer, but doesn't meet TTB restriction on flavor, alcohol content, etc.
Everybody knows Elvis is still alive.
No programmer/engineer/nerd worth his salt worries about wimpy concepts like ambiguity!
Seriously, though, the GB versus GiB issue makes me cringe every time I think of it. I'm a tech writer, and I ought to be all Usage Nazi about making sure people stick with the SI meaning of "Giga" and insist that the use the IEEE conventions when referring to powers of two. But arguing with engineers about this is just not a productive use of my time. So I always say "GB", and spell it out if there's any ambiguity. And there's usually not: nobody makes DIMMs that hold 4 x 10^9 bytes. I can safely assume that when I refer to a 4GB DIMM, people know I mean 4 x 2^30.
And remember, sticking with SI and IEEE conventions is no guarantee that you'll not be misunderstood. If I rely on SI conventions in a context where people are expecting nerdy powers of 2, I'll probably be misunderstood. The only solution is to spell it out.
The story was posted at 12:22. This post appeared at 12:26. That means it took four whole minutes for somebody to make the obligatory Nigerian SPAM joke.
Darn it, Slashdot just ain't what it use to be.
Lame of me to pick a nit with such a cute joke. But:
Widely used? Yes. "Correct". Not at all. Check your dictionary. In the U.S. it's "pound sign," "number sign," or "sharp sign", depending on the context. In the U.K. it's "hash mark".
Here's the American Heritage dictionary entry for octothorpe:
Alteration (influenced by OCTO-) of earlier octalthorpe, the pound key, probably humorous blend of octal, an eight-point pin used in electronic connections (from the eight points of the symbol) and the name of James Edward OGLETHORPE.
Hmm, I've never heard of an octal connector. There actually is such a thing but it's obscure enough to make me dubious. And Oglethorpe is even more obscure (unless you're from Georgia). Here's a web page that casts doubt on the AH version.
The Oxford English Dictionary, which relies on actual research, has this:
Forms: 19- octothorp, 19- octothorpe. [Origin uncertain; perhaps < OCTO- comb. form + the surname Thorpe (compare THORP n.: see note below).
The term was reportedly coined in the early 1960s by Don Macpherson, an employee of Bell Laboratories:
1996 Telecom Heritage No. 28. 53 His thought process was as follows: There are eight points on the symbol so octo should be part of the name. We need a few more letters or another syllable to make a noun... (Don Macpherson..was active in a group that was trying to get Jim Thorpe's Olympic medals returned from Sweden). The phrase thorpe would be unique.
For an alternative explanation see quot. 1996; in a variant of this explanation, the word is explained as arising from the use of the symbol in cartography to represent a village.
For a different explanation from a former employee of Bell Laboratories, arguing that the word is a completely arbitrary formation (and that it originally had the form octatherp) see D. A. Kerr 'The ASCII Character Octatherp' in http://doug.kerr.home.att.net/ (2006).]
The hash sign (#), as it appears on the buttons of touch-tone telephones and some other keypads.
1974 Telephony 25 Feb. 16/1 A few months ago, a story traveled through the Bell System that the familiar symbol '#'..at long last had a name: 'octothorp'. 1975 Vancouver Province 15 Nov. (Canad. Mag.) 32 Punch an octothorpe when you reach your desk every morning, and the accounting department automatically registers you in. 1987 Radio & Electronics World Feb. 47/1 As well as the numbers 1 to 9 and 0, you also have buttons marked with a star and square (also known as hash or octothorp). 1996 New Scientist 30 Mar. 54/3 The term 'octothorp(e)' (which MWCD10 dates 1971) was invented for '#', allegedly by Bell Labs engineers when touch-tone telephones were introduced in the mid-1960s. 'Octo-' means eight, and 'thorp' was an Old English word for village: apparently the sign was playfully construed as eight fields surrounding a village.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
And if you were more considerate, you'd give that value in hex, so it wouldn't be such a pain to decode!
In case you hadn't noticed, nobody gives a heck about HD. The number of folks willing and able to spend the bucks for the necessary hardware is pretty small. For most of us, the problem is getting access to content of any quality. And there the problem isn't some strange conspiracy to impose bandwidth caps. It's the unwillingness of the content hoarders to release it, except as part of overpriced bundles.
If I could get a 6Mb connection at a reasonable price (mine's less than 2Mb, and it's the best available) I'd consider a 250GB cap a cheap tradeoff.
Do some math. A DVD holds 8GB, which is actually a lot more than the movie itself needs (hence all those extras). That means that even with a 250GB cap, you can watch a DVD-quality movie every day of the month without going over. And most online video streams are not DVD quality.
Sure, that's possible. But then how do you explain this supposed "support taint" on his resume? Which I too find hard to believe. During the downturn a few years back, I did that kind of work to make ends meet. I don't recall it hurting my prospects. On the contrary, a customer-facing job gave me a little breadth of experience I'd lacked before.
I think there are other issues here the guy's not acknowledging. Which is often the case when somebody's having trouble finding work.
When is NPR going to interview XKCD?
Not before XKCD develops such as huge following that Randall Munroe can quit his day job and publish a book of collected strips. Which is what prompted the Achewood interview.
I too find Achewood unfunny. (When I pulled up the NPR story, I was surprised to discover that the link to achewood.com was gray, indicating I'd browsed it recently. Must not have made an impression.) But I can see where it would appeal to people with a certain kind of evil sense of humor. Let's avoid the Slashdotter Fallacy ("What I like/need/approve of is what the world revolves around"), shall we?
That wasn't a merger. That was AT&T selling off a division. Which was bound be better off under its new owners, since pre-SBC AT&T had the worst management in the history of capitalism.
The Canadian middle class spends a reasonable amount of money for a health care system that covers everybody. The American middle class spends a huge amount of money for a system that doesn't even cover the entire middle class. Who's better off? If you think it's us, you've never had an expensive medical problem, or tried to find insurance for a high-risk family member.
Anyway, both systems subsidize minorities. Canada's is poor people who pay less taxes. Ours is highly-profitable health-care providers and insurers. And our subsidies are a lot higher than theirs.
Hot flash, dude: Canada didn't invent the shared-risk model of health care. They just made membership in the risk pool mandatory. That not only guarantees everybody access, it makes for a more efficient, affordable system.
It's still their fault, even if the initial mistake was yours. Isn't that what editors are for?
Not being into hacking common gadgets, I usually don't pay much attention to this kind of project. But I am so going to give this one a hard look. I only use my player for one thing: listening to spoken word content. Almost all players suck for this purpose: no automatic bookmarking, impossible to navigate without squinting at the screen (I listen a lot while driving), etc.
Cowon's U2 is pretty close to ideal. But it's been EOLed, and the U3 is a piece of crap that tries to be an iPod touch, only without a touch screen! When I lost my old U2, I replaced it with a used one off eBay. That source can't last forever.
Obtaining the knowhow and equipment to burn custom firmware into an MP3 player that only I will use is sort of overkill. But I listen to mine a lot, and having the feature set I want just might be worth it.
There is no doubt that Nineteen Eighty-Four was meant to present the totalitarian state brought to its extreme.
I never said it didn't. I'm arguing with the common assumption that 1984 is about a specific real-world totalitarian state.
There's actually a passage where O'Brian basically calls the Soviets wimps who didn't know how to run a totalitarian state effectively.
If you think that the USSR or any other totalitarian regime was different then you are wrong.
Huh? You mean all totalitarian states are identical? They all speak Russian, and all persecute the professional and entrepreneurial classes? Get real.
I guess what you're really trying to say is that totalitarianism is evil, and that's all we need to know about them. I don't disagree with the evil part, but the inference that other details don't matter is a fallacy, designed to support willful ignorance.
And willful ignorance is evil too. In fact, it's one of the cornerstones of any totalitarian state. (INGSOC slogan: "Ignorance is Strength".) If Germans had been a little more cognizant about the different paths to a totalitarian state, they might not have elected a party whose main appeal was that it seemed a good bet for holding off Soviet totalitarianism, and which then preceded to found a totalitarian state that easily rivaled the USSR for repression and mass murder.
Nor is this a dead issue. There are folks in the U.S. ruling party who believe that multi-party democracy and freedom to dissent is outdated.
Back on topic, in the long run I bet someone found ways to make money off this. Like, ads for example?
The whole thing is pretty effective ad for a Russian town none of us ever heard of before. Any bets that the local Chamber of Commerce (or whatever they call it in Russia) was behind this?
(The rest of your post pretty much explains why a lot of people don't watch TV any more.)
I guess you joined Slashdot after goatse.cx went away.
I was a little confused to see this on the NYT web site, since most readers there would never have never heard of Solaris before. But this seems to be some kind of syndicated story that's appearing on a lot of other web sites. This one has an interesting post from somebody at Gracenote. Of course, his comments will be read in light of the fact that Gracenote is Evil.
A decent article, though I wish they had quoted somebody besides a Linux Foundation flack for the Solaris-Is-Dying side of the argument.
You need to get out more.