Some Googling for "fanless pc" tells me this: if you look for a small ff with a fanless design you find either (a) boxes designed for embedded applications, not strong on performance (b) expensive multimedia boxes.
There are ways to cut down noise without relying solely on passive or liquid cooling. Lots of low noise PSs and fans are available (and not that expensive). Even replacing a worn/cheap cpu fan can make a lot of difference. Unfortunately, case and system vendors mostly don't pay much attention to these details, so you pretty much have to retrofit.
Style rules of thumb are all very well, but that's not the root of the problem. The fact is that communicating technical concepts is an art onto itself, and it's one that few engineers have mastered. (They're too busy engineering.) Of course, anybody can improve their communication skills with a little practice, but for best results who makes a profession of reducing a big mass of technical information to some clear, fundamental concepts.
If tension/plot were an issue, even three movies would be too many. Fact is, most people going to see these movies already know the story. Which doesn't that much of a plot in the first place. Short hairy barefoot guy finds ring, has a lot of adventures, destroys ring, retires to Undying Lands, The End. It's all about portraying Tolkein's imaginary universe, not about building suspense.
Actually, they already did some of the appendixes. Unless they got all that sad stuff about Arwen's fate from one of those Chris Tolkein books (which most of us are not obsessive enough to read).
I should have said the last remaining major M-L state.
Of course China doesn't actually follow the teachings of Karl and Vladimir Illich. No country ever has -- it's simply not practical. But most countries ruled by a Communist party at least go through the motions. The weird thing about China is that their actual economy has dropped the slighted pretense of being socialistic, but the party still churns out an endless M-L rant, as if they were still leading the struggle against capitalism, instead of themselves being the single biggest supplier of the things (labor, natural resources, a consumer market) that capitalism needs to function.
I don't think the concept of Mafiacracy applies to China. Compare it to Russia, where rule by gangster is now being perfected. A better comparison is with Fascist Italy, or rather Italy as Il Duce imagined it, with a small inner council calling the shots both in the government and in the economy.
Thank God for small favors. That part of the book was too obviously reflective of Tolkein's politics. He always denied that the LOTR was based on recent history, and for the most part that's plausible. But when you have former allies of The Evil One wandering around The Shire, throwing their weight around, and spouting socialist slogans, only to be taken down by returning war vets, it's a bit hard to believe that old JRR wasn't grinding any axes.
Obviously, the book is too large to be made into even a three-hour movie...
I seem to recall reading that Tokien never thought of LOTR as a trilogy. The three volumes come from the original publisher preferring not to do the whole big expensive -- and presumed to be unprofitable -- project all at once.
This movie trilogy was originally proposed as two movies, each made one at time. But the studio decided to take a gamble, and make three movies, and make them all at once. Would have been a disaster if the first movie had bombed, but it paid off in the end. Now that they're a big success, perhaps they wish they'd made one movie for each of the six "books". Then again, that would have meant major characters disappearing for the length of one or more movies...
It's perfectly true that a serious challenge to the U.S. Pacific Fleet simply doesn't exist. But that's a factor only if the U.S. makes the decision to defend Taiwan and the Chinese think they're serious about it. Probably the case, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. Lots of wars have happened because of simple human stupidity.
I find economics totally befuddling, but it's my understanding that the kind of spending necessary for the Iraq thing is not going to put many people to work. At least that that's the accepted theory, which I feel totally unqualified to defend. The military spending during WW II was quite a bit different, since it occured in a country with a lot of idle factories (because of the depression), and the U.S. was the only major industrial power that wasn't being bombed to death.
The Vietnam war was also famous for screwing up the economy.
Here's what's really scary about this kind of deficit spending. The U.S. government can borrow such huge amounts of money because it's considered a very good risk. It's hard to imagine how this could change, but if we keep piling on the debt, it surely will. The last straw will be some key event that punctures everybody's image of our infinite resourcefulness. A big expensive war in Asia would be just the thing. Then the last remaining superpower will be unable to meet the payroll. A lot of "starve the best" enthusiasts will say that's a good thing, but I'm not looking forward to hit. The only people who should look forward to it are Al Qaida and their crowd.
Those "heavy social consequences" include the DPRK elite totally losing control. It is, of course, pretty selfish to risk destruction of your contry just to maintain your own privileged livestyle. But ruling elites are, almost by definition, totally selfish.
Instead, there will be one huge mammoth of a country squashing a football-field-sized other country.
Well, if China wants to convert Tawain into a smoking ruin, and they don't care who makes a fuss about it, they certainly can. But that's been true for a long time, and such an outcome would suit nobody in Beijing. What they want is to bring one of the most productive economies in Asia under their control. Doing that without destroying that self-same economy is not easy.
Here's an interesting tidbit: Taiwan happens to be a major trading partner with China. Many enterprises on the mainland are owned and/or operated by Taiwanese. This despite the two countries being in a technical state of war!
You have to consider this in the context of Taiwan's historical relationship with China (or the rest of China, depending on your party line). The old Chinese Empire always claimed to own Taiwan, even though they did a very poor job of enforcing that claim. And whenever there was a civil war or dynastic dispute, the underdog would always retreat to Taiwan. They did this because the island is notoriously hard to invade, not having a lot of good beaches or harbors. The last time this happened was in 1948, when the Chinese Nationalists, having lost their civil war with the Communists, retreated to Tawain and set up a sort of government in exile. Said government was recognized by much of the world (including the U.S. and the UN) as the legal authority in all of China, right up until 1971.
For nearly 40 years, the Nationalists ruled Taiwan like an occupying power, tolerating no dissent. They were finally forced to allow elections in 1992. This resulted in the old mainland gerontocracy being replaced by local politicians, many of which are strong believers in Taiwanese independence. The big irony of the current situation is that this independence movement is directed as much at the old Nationalists as at the mainland government, and the Nationalists are now effectively allied with their Communist enemies!
What Beijing would really like to do is somehow take over Taiwan peacefully, the way they did with Hong Kong and Macao. They would then crack down on the most conspicuous dissent, but do their best to leave the Taiwanese free market in place. That might sound like a strange strategy for the last remaining Marxist-Leninist state. But that state is run by an elite that is as anxious to turn a buck as any Wall Street tycoon.
Are you kidding? A war between China and Taiwan would not be limited to the Taiwan Strait. Especially not in the Korean penninsula, the northern part of which is occupied by a nasty little totalitarian state that is kept out of trouble mainly by the restraint of their Chinese partners. If China is distracted by a war and the ensuing hassles with the rest of the world, the North Korean leadership might well see an opportunity to implement their one chance of long-term survival: forced reunification with the South. The alternative is to wait for their jerrybuilt system to collapse of its own weight, at which time I wouldn't want to be a member of the DPRK ruling elite!
Of course they'd fail, since the U.S. couldn't allow them to succeed. But the fighting would devestate Korea and place a nasty strain on U.S. military resources, which are already stretched. Let's see, that would leave two of the most productive economies in Asia (Taiwan and Korea) in utter ruins, with millions of unemployed. And the U.S., which is already spending gazillions it doesn't have, would be spending gazillions more. So economic hard times here, for a bunch of reasons.
And that's the best case scenario. It assumes the DPRK doesn't have more than a couple of nukes...
You're confusing hippies with pacifists. Both are guilty of a certain wishful thinknfulness, but otherwise they have little in common.
The hippie is a convenient straw man. The word has so many associations with shiftlessness and stupidity that even counterculture folks like Ken Kesey use it as a term of a abuse. But it's not fair to saddle every idealistic philosophy with the label. Especially the pacifists, who have been around for centuries, and even played a role in the founding and settlement of the U.S.
I too have a T68i, in fact I'm posting from my iPAQ connected with the T68i.:)
Excuse me, what's your address? I just want to come over and, uh, borrow your setup.
(When I have an income again, I'm gonna get me something like this and never be offline again! That's a good thing, right?)
It is a bit bare bones by today's standards - but OTOH it's a bit cheaper for that very reason.
I think the barebones approach is the right one in any case. Indeed, even the T68i isn't barebones enough for me. I'm perfectly happy with my current PDA -- I don't need it to be merged with my cell. I just need for the two devices to do a better job of talking to each other. Let's have a separate device for each function, not one device with a hundred functions, many of which you'll never use and/or suffer from being crammed into one tiny box.
That lesson only applies if the author is willing to admit that anything he's written doesn't deserve to be read. A lot of Heinlein's less readable work might have been salvaged with a little rewriting, but he tended to fall in love with his first version, and resisted any changes to it. In 1973, he gave a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy (his alma mater), in which he totally denounced rewriting. If I recall correctly, he asked something like, "Would you throw out a chair, just because it didn't come out perfect?" Of course, most writers would answer, "Well, yeah, if it's ugly, splintery, and tends to fall over."
It's interesting to note how the quality of Heinlein's work declined starting in the late 60s. First his plots started to get a little disorganized, then a lot disorganized, until finally most of his books were little more than meandering rants. He was still basically a good writer, but he slipped into a lot of bad habits.
I think he always basically an undisciplined writer, but when he was a struggling pulp writer, he had to accept correction from his editors. Once he became The Grand Old Man, he could escape that, and the result was often horrendous. Like early editions of Time Enough for Love, which weren't even checked for proper punctuation!
The Annapolis speech also mentions the only class he considered to have taught him anything about writing. It wasn't an English or Lit class. It was a command in giving orders, the motto of which was "Any order that can be misunderstood, will be misunderstood." Student of the origins of Murphy's Law take note!
I guess if you're used to a simple three-button mouse, nothing else will do. But those of us who came to X from Windows have a simple workaround: XFree can emulate a three button mouse on a two button mouse. You just press both buttons at once. Dunno if this works on other X implementations, but I can't believe the XFree guys are the only ones to think of it. Then again, given the parochial nature of the Unix world, I guess it's possible.
Maybe it's not too late to re-program your mouse hand.
No, we just have to worry about the getting into the damn hospital cause we don't have insurance, or because the insurance company won't pay for the procedure we need.
Of course, if your'e rich, you can always get the medical care you need. But that's true in canada as well.
Forgive him. South of the 49th parallel, we forget that the government is actually capable of doing things for people. Most Americans don't get the Canadian health system either.
If you don't back up to tape, cd, ftp, scratch monkey, reams of paper to be rescanned later, or whatever... you're fscked.
Your "reams of paper" is humorous hype, of course, but it kind of points up the weakness of most backup systems -- it's too hard to get the lost data back. If you experience delays, problems getting the right version of the file back, etc., etc., you incur additional costs that have to figure into the equation.
That's why offline backup vendors are so tempting, despite the security and connectivity issues. Since this is all they do, they've usually thought through some very simple procedures for recovering exactly what you need recovered. Not that easy to do with a roll-your-own approach.
Now there's a question for another Ask Slashdot -- is anybody actually using gigabit ethernet? I don't mean they have the hardware installed, I mean they are actually doing things where that extra bandwidth makes any difference. I suppose there must be some video networking app that would need it, but how many people have the necessary hardware or expertise? Not enough to buy all the gigbit NICs I see for sale at CompUSA.
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There are ways to cut down noise without relying solely on passive or liquid cooling. Lots of low noise PSs and fans are available (and not that expensive). Even replacing a worn/cheap cpu fan can make a lot of difference. Unfortunately, case and system vendors mostly don't pay much attention to these details, so you pretty much have to retrofit.
Speaking of which:
No, the real benefit of hacking this camera is that you've hack something that wasn't supposed to be hacked.
Available here.
If tension/plot were an issue, even three movies would be too many. Fact is, most people going to see these movies already know the story. Which doesn't that much of a plot in the first place. Short hairy barefoot guy finds ring, has a lot of adventures, destroys ring, retires to Undying Lands, The End. It's all about portraying Tolkein's imaginary universe, not about building suspense.
Actually, they already did some of the appendixes. Unless they got all that sad stuff about Arwen's fate from one of those Chris Tolkein books (which most of us are not obsessive enough to read).
Of course China doesn't actually follow the teachings of Karl and Vladimir Illich. No country ever has -- it's simply not practical. But most countries ruled by a Communist party at least go through the motions. The weird thing about China is that their actual economy has dropped the slighted pretense of being socialistic, but the party still churns out an endless M-L rant, as if they were still leading the struggle against capitalism, instead of themselves being the single biggest supplier of the things (labor, natural resources, a consumer market) that capitalism needs to function.
I don't think the concept of Mafiacracy applies to China. Compare it to Russia, where rule by gangster is now being perfected. A better comparison is with Fascist Italy, or rather Italy as Il Duce imagined it, with a small inner council calling the shots both in the government and in the economy.
Thank God for small favors. That part of the book was too obviously reflective of Tolkein's politics. He always denied that the LOTR was based on recent history, and for the most part that's plausible. But when you have former allies of The Evil One wandering around The Shire, throwing their weight around, and spouting socialist slogans, only to be taken down by returning war vets, it's a bit hard to believe that old JRR wasn't grinding any axes.
This movie trilogy was originally proposed as two movies, each made one at time. But the studio decided to take a gamble, and make three movies, and make them all at once. Would have been a disaster if the first movie had bombed, but it paid off in the end. Now that they're a big success, perhaps they wish they'd made one movie for each of the six "books". Then again, that would have meant major characters disappearing for the length of one or more movies...
It's perfectly true that a serious challenge to the U.S. Pacific Fleet simply doesn't exist. But that's a factor only if the U.S. makes the decision to defend Taiwan and the Chinese think they're serious about it. Probably the case, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. Lots of wars have happened because of simple human stupidity.
The Vietnam war was also famous for screwing up the economy.
Here's what's really scary about this kind of deficit spending. The U.S. government can borrow such huge amounts of money because it's considered a very good risk. It's hard to imagine how this could change, but if we keep piling on the debt, it surely will. The last straw will be some key event that punctures everybody's image of our infinite resourcefulness. A big expensive war in Asia would be just the thing. Then the last remaining superpower will be unable to meet the payroll. A lot of "starve the best" enthusiasts will say that's a good thing, but I'm not looking forward to hit. The only people who should look forward to it are Al Qaida and their crowd.
Those "heavy social consequences" include the DPRK elite totally losing control. It is, of course, pretty selfish to risk destruction of your contry just to maintain your own privileged livestyle. But ruling elites are, almost by definition, totally selfish.
Here's an interesting tidbit: Taiwan happens to be a major trading partner with China. Many enterprises on the mainland are owned and/or operated by Taiwanese. This despite the two countries being in a technical state of war!
You have to consider this in the context of Taiwan's historical relationship with China (or the rest of China, depending on your party line). The old Chinese Empire always claimed to own Taiwan, even though they did a very poor job of enforcing that claim. And whenever there was a civil war or dynastic dispute, the underdog would always retreat to Taiwan. They did this because the island is notoriously hard to invade, not having a lot of good beaches or harbors. The last time this happened was in 1948, when the Chinese Nationalists, having lost their civil war with the Communists, retreated to Tawain and set up a sort of government in exile. Said government was recognized by much of the world (including the U.S. and the UN) as the legal authority in all of China, right up until 1971.
For nearly 40 years, the Nationalists ruled Taiwan like an occupying power, tolerating no dissent. They were finally forced to allow elections in 1992. This resulted in the old mainland gerontocracy being replaced by local politicians, many of which are strong believers in Taiwanese independence. The big irony of the current situation is that this independence movement is directed as much at the old Nationalists as at the mainland government, and the Nationalists are now effectively allied with their Communist enemies!
What Beijing would really like to do is somehow take over Taiwan peacefully, the way they did with Hong Kong and Macao. They would then crack down on the most conspicuous dissent, but do their best to leave the Taiwanese free market in place. That might sound like a strange strategy for the last remaining Marxist-Leninist state. But that state is run by an elite that is as anxious to turn a buck as any Wall Street tycoon.
Of course they'd fail, since the U.S. couldn't allow them to succeed. But the fighting would devestate Korea and place a nasty strain on U.S. military resources, which are already stretched. Let's see, that would leave two of the most productive economies in Asia (Taiwan and Korea) in utter ruins, with millions of unemployed. And the U.S., which is already spending gazillions it doesn't have, would be spending gazillions more. So economic hard times here, for a bunch of reasons.
And that's the best case scenario. It assumes the DPRK doesn't have more than a couple of nukes...
The hippie is a convenient straw man. The word has so many associations with shiftlessness and stupidity that even counterculture folks like Ken Kesey use it as a term of a abuse. But it's not fair to saddle every idealistic philosophy with the label. Especially the pacifists, who have been around for centuries, and even played a role in the founding and settlement of the U.S.
I wish people wouldn't whore after "funny" points so much.
Heinlein's health problems don't excuse his publisher from sloppy editing.
(When I have an income again, I'm gonna get me something like this and never be offline again! That's a good thing, right?)
I think the barebones approach is the right one in any case. Indeed, even the T68i isn't barebones enough for me. I'm perfectly happy with my current PDA -- I don't need it to be merged with my cell. I just need for the two devices to do a better job of talking to each other. Let's have a separate device for each function, not one device with a hundred functions, many of which you'll never use and/or suffer from being crammed into one tiny box.It's interesting to note how the quality of Heinlein's work declined starting in the late 60s. First his plots started to get a little disorganized, then a lot disorganized, until finally most of his books were little more than meandering rants. He was still basically a good writer, but he slipped into a lot of bad habits. I think he always basically an undisciplined writer, but when he was a struggling pulp writer, he had to accept correction from his editors. Once he became The Grand Old Man, he could escape that, and the result was often horrendous. Like early editions of Time Enough for Love, which weren't even checked for proper punctuation!
The Annapolis speech also mentions the only class he considered to have taught him anything about writing. It wasn't an English or Lit class. It was a command in giving orders, the motto of which was "Any order that can be misunderstood, will be misunderstood." Student of the origins of Murphy's Law take note!
Maybe it's not too late to re-program your mouse hand.
Of course, if your'e rich, you can always get the medical care you need. But that's true in canada as well.
Forgive him. South of the 49th parallel, we forget that the government is actually capable of doing things for people. Most Americans don't get the Canadian health system either.
That's why offline backup vendors are so tempting, despite the security and connectivity issues. Since this is all they do, they've usually thought through some very simple procedures for recovering exactly what you need recovered. Not that easy to do with a roll-your-own approach.
Now there's a question for another Ask Slashdot -- is anybody actually using gigabit ethernet? I don't mean they have the hardware installed, I mean they are actually doing things where that extra bandwidth makes any difference. I suppose there must be some video networking app that would need it, but how many people have the necessary hardware or expertise? Not enough to buy all the gigbit NICs I see for sale at CompUSA.