Gigabit ethernet is available on the Cube as a build-to-order option. I'm looking at getting one, and I have to keep telling myself "I do not need Gigabit networking at home..."
Slayers, definitely. It's a Dungeons-and-Dragons style adventure, with loads of action and humour, real plots, and characters you actually care about. And Megumi Hayashibara as Lina Inverse.
Irresponsible Captain Tylor. Space-opera/comedy, with a very unusual non-hero in Justy Ueki Tylor (did I spell that right?) Lots of fun, with some serious moments; builds up to a wonderful ending that had me cheering.
Saber Marionette J. Mostly goofball comedy, but the story about how the Marionettes (girl robots) try to become human is rather touching. And it has Megumi Hayashibara as Lime.
Vision of Escaflowne. Simply stunning fantasy. Visually amazing, and the music (composed by Yoko Kanno) is fabulous.
I'll sneak in some many-in-one's by mentioning two writers rather than their individual work:
Hayao Miyazaki - My Neighbour Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service and others. Great films, stunning artwork.
Rumiko Takahashi - Urusei Yatsura (SF/romantic comedy), Maison Ikkoku (romantic comedy), Ranma 1/2 (martial arts/romantic comedy). Given the length of these TV series (MI is the shortest at 96 episodes; UY has 196 TV eps, 6 movies and 11 OVAs) the quality is variable, but there's so much good stuff there that I'll forgive the occasional slow half-hour.
Tenchi Muyo. The original OVA series is wonderful; the quality of the later spinoffs generally decreases over time except for Magical Girl Pretty Samy, which is great fun. Tenchi is a science-fiction comedy, with lots of unusual twists and really cool spaceships.
El Hazard. From the same stable as Tenchi, this time it's a Japanese-schoolkids-travel-to-fantasy-world story. Wonderful backgrounds and fun characters, and a Doomsday Weapon as romantic interest. Get the original OVA series; avoid the first TV series.
Bubblegum Crisis. Classic near-future SF along the lines of Blade Runner with great soundtrack.
Hmm. That's 9 (though I cheated a bit). After that, here are some Honourable Mentions:
Cat-Girl Nuku Nuku: Bouncy good fun. Crazy inventor puts brain of stray cat (after it's injured in a car crash while he's trying to hide from an air-strike launched by his estranged wife) into a girl-robot, as christmas gift/big sister for his young son.
Oh My Goddess: Romantic comedy that some might find too sugar-sweet, but I like it (bad girl Urd and temperamental Skuld balance out the goody-twoshoes Belldandy).
Iria: Iria (the character) is just plain cool, and the anime's not bad either. Armitage is a bounty hunter on a distant planet some unspecified time in the future; she goes after bad guy Zeiram.
Armitage III: Watch this as a double-feature with Iria. Armitage is a cop on Mars, and a robot. SF/thriller; has been compared to Total Recall.
Fushigi Yugi: Long and complex fantasy series with strong romantic elements. A lot of comedy, but a lot of darker moments too. The plot has more twists than a snake with the hiccups; it's hard to say too much without spoiling it, but don't expect it to be all light and bubbly like the first episode.
Revolutionary Girl Utena: Weird story about a girl who wants to grow up to be a prince. Um, that doesn't really describe it at all. See it for yourself.
Cowboy Bebop: Wonderfully stylish series about a pair of space bounty-hunters. *Great* music by Yoko Kanno, and leading lady (Faye Valentine) by Megumi Hayashibara.
Domionion/Tank Police: Shirow's SF/action/comedy set in a gloomy polluted future. Lots of fun.
Three short, weird and funny ones:
Dragon Half (wonderful closing song "My Omelet" with music by Beethoven), Elf Princess Rane (hysterical, but with half-a-dozen characters talking over the top of each other, two of them in gibberish and another one *backwards*, it can be hard to keep up with the subtitles) and Jungle de Ikou (Let's Go to the Jungle) - gotta love those fertility dances!
"Our duty is to the truth. We pledge to seek and report the truth with honesty, accuracy, fairness and courage. By seeking truth and sharing understanding, we will strive for the improvement of society. We will show no favoritism. Our newsroom will operate free of influence from public and private institutions, political officials and advertisers."
here was another series of books, can't recall the author, about a small number of humans on a planet populated by sentient teddy bears who sincerely believed that they were the characters of whoever they'd read in english lit. One ofthe books opened with "Casey at the Bat" there was sherlock holmes as well...
Hoka! Hoka! Hoka! by (damn. Runs downstairs to library...) Paul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson.
I think the best place to start with Lem is The Cyberiad, a collection of wonderfully funny stories involving the robot inventors Trurl and Klapaucius.
Lem writes in Polish, but the translations (mostly by the one translator) are incredibly good.
Bio? Bleah! The first three books of Split Infinity, the first two of Incarnations of Immortality are good. It's a bit of a trend with Anthony: builds an interesting new world and then beats it to death. A number of his books are Definitely Not For Kiddies (tm).
Steel Beach is excellent, and The Golden Globe, Varley's latest and a sort-of-sequel to Beach, is as good or better. Pity he only produces about one book every five years.
Aftenposten has two articles in Norwegian, and a short summary in English
Dagbladet also carries the story, but doesn't have an English version. They do however have pictures of Winona Ryder and Claudia Schiffer in rather daring dresses, so it's not all bad.
The Norway Post seems to be napping, which is a pity since it's an English-language paper.
Verdens Gang carries the story, again in Norwegian only, but "Jon (16) arrestert" doesn't require much translation.
1. Two years. 2. 4500% (whee!) (down from 6700%; I think they got altitude sickness). At one point, they were down 10% from the original price, and stayed there for months. 3. Looks good to me. But always make sure you're earning enough to pay the rent - you can't eat options. 4. You're nailed down until the options vest - which is kind of the point from your employer's point of view. You need to check out the tax angle too - here in Australia you get hit by Capital Gains Tax when you sell the shares.
If you're joining a startup - like I did - I wouldn't bet all on striking it rich. On the other hand, if you have the choice between earning a huge salary, and earning a comfortable salary plus options, it's probably worth the risk. I never expected the options to amount to much; I was (pleasantly) surprised when I suddenly became a millionaire.
I don't think your hard drive is as old as you think it is. I remember an old HP hard disk: smaller than a washing machine, but not much smaller, it held 400MB and cost about A$100,000.
In 1982.
I remember that HP had a special on at the time: three of those drives for only A$250,000! But they didn't have many customers who needed 1.2GB.
Going back a bit further, we had 5MB 14" removable disk packs. I don't know what the state of the art was as far back as 1970. Try alt.folklore.computers.
Argument: how about power failures? Reply: can you say UPS?
Static RAM. NVRAM.
Static RAM isn't that static! It still loses its contents when you lose power. Besides, static RAM is much lower density and much more expensive than dynamic. The largest current SRAMS are 16Mb.
NVRAM is NV, but is even lower density and more expensive than regular static RAM. And Flash is slow and has a nasty habit of burning out if you re-write the same block too many times.
RAID 0 can, of course, be striped across many more than two disks. A couple of days ago, I tested a 24-disk RAID 0 stripe.
RAID 1 gives slightly slower performance on writes since you have to write the same data twice, but if you have a high-end system, you'll have an intelligent controller and multiple SCSI buses, so this is pretty much invisible. It gives better performance on reads, because you can read from either disk.
RAID 5 is fair for sequential access, but not so good for random access, particularly random writes. For example, if you need to update a bit of data on disk 1 in a RAID 5 set, you have to also read the same location on every other disk, calculate the parity value, and write that to the parity disk. For random writes, RAID 5 is slower than a single disk. RAID 5 is good for file servers and web servers, and lousy for database servers for this reason. RAID 5 is a trade-off between speed and cost. If cost wasn't an issue (hah!) you'd go for RAID 1+0 every time.
I had a look at the speech (though not the bill itself). Unfortunately, it looks like a relatively sensible and well thought-out proposal. I say "unfortunately" because if it was as silly as some of the other proposed legislation, it would be a lot easier to stop (as happened in New South Wales). I don't condone censorship, and I don't think new laws are necessary here. Truly vile stuff like child pornography is illegal in Australia under existing laws, whether it's in print or on the Net.
Australia has a spotty history on censorship; mostly (as other people have pointed out) we're too laid back to make much fuss. One of the great ironies here is that X-rated material is banned from sale in all the states except the Northern Territory and the ACT (Australian Capital Territory, which unlike NT, isn't a state; it's like USA's District of Columbia: somewhere to stick the nation's capital so the government doesn't bother you while you're working). But - where was I, oh yes - sending X-rated material in the mail is *not* banned, so the ACT, and Canberra in particular, has become the centre of Australia's porn industry. At least Canberrans now have something to do when Parliament isn't sitting. (Imagine Washington, only twenty times smaller, and without the guns or drugs. Now take out the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, and anything else that might be interesting. Add a rather nice lake. Ta da! That's Canberra.)
And the Film and Literature Classification Board (newspeak for Censors) seem to be a bit confused anyway. Playboy's Book of Lingerie - which I buy for the articles, of course - will be "Unrestricted" one month (i.e. any 12-year old with too much pocket money can buy it), and "Category 1 Restricted" the next (Adults only and wrapped in plastic). And for the life of me I can't work out what criteria they use (I spent many hours researching this). Plus the stickers are really hard to get off...
And yes, they do put an "Unrestricted" sticker on it when it's unrestricted. Doh!
And yeah, if there's a protest march on in Sydney, I'll be there. A plague on Senator Harradine, and on Senator Alston too. Where have all the decent politicians gone? Come back Nick Greiner, all is forgiven! (Nick Greiner was premier of NSW, scuttled by his own Independent Commission Against Corruption, but later cleared in court.)
I shall put them on my list, and they'd none of them be missed...
Ahem. If I can: a) Count code produced by programs I wrote, and b) Count Postscript as a programming language (which it is) then I produced between 700 and 800 million lines of code over the last 12 months. (Not to mention the 23,000 lines of Progress 4GL code I wrote on Tuesday:)
Slashdot Mirror
MyCalc%> /etc/passwd fascdot grep -d: -f7 cut
/bin/ksh
MyCalc%>
Gigabit ethernet is available on the Cube as a build-to-order option. I'm looking at getting one, and I have to keep telling myself "I do not need Gigabit networking at home..."
Doesn't seem to be sinking in.
Oops. Somehow Armitage infiltrated the description of Iria, but I think it's clear what I meant.
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Let's see if I can actually keep it to 10...
Slayers, definitely. It's a Dungeons-and-Dragons style adventure, with loads of action and humour, real plots, and characters you actually care about. And Megumi Hayashibara as Lina Inverse.
Irresponsible Captain Tylor. Space-opera/comedy, with a very unusual non-hero in Justy Ueki Tylor (did I spell that right?) Lots of fun, with some serious moments; builds up to a wonderful ending that had me cheering.
Saber Marionette J. Mostly goofball comedy, but the story about how the Marionettes (girl robots) try to become human is rather touching. And it has Megumi Hayashibara as Lime.
Vision of Escaflowne. Simply stunning fantasy. Visually amazing, and the music (composed by Yoko Kanno) is fabulous.
I'll sneak in some many-in-one's by mentioning two writers rather than their individual work:
Hayao Miyazaki - My Neighbour Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service and others. Great films, stunning artwork.
Rumiko Takahashi - Urusei Yatsura (SF/romantic comedy), Maison Ikkoku (romantic comedy), Ranma 1/2 (martial arts/romantic comedy). Given the length of these TV series (MI is the shortest at 96 episodes; UY has 196 TV eps, 6 movies and 11 OVAs) the quality is variable, but there's so much good stuff there that I'll forgive the occasional slow half-hour.
Tenchi Muyo. The original OVA series is wonderful; the quality of the later spinoffs generally decreases over time except for Magical Girl Pretty Samy, which is great fun. Tenchi is a science-fiction comedy, with lots of unusual twists and really cool spaceships.
El Hazard. From the same stable as Tenchi, this time it's a Japanese-schoolkids-travel-to-fantasy-world story. Wonderful backgrounds and fun characters, and a Doomsday Weapon as romantic interest. Get the original OVA series; avoid the first TV series.
Bubblegum Crisis. Classic near-future SF along the lines of Blade Runner with great soundtrack.
Hmm. That's 9 (though I cheated a bit). After that, here are some Honourable Mentions:
Cat-Girl Nuku Nuku: Bouncy good fun. Crazy inventor puts brain of stray cat (after it's injured in a car crash while he's trying to hide from an air-strike launched by his estranged wife) into a girl-robot, as christmas gift/big sister for his young son.
Oh My Goddess: Romantic comedy that some might find too sugar-sweet, but I like it (bad girl Urd and temperamental Skuld balance out the goody-twoshoes Belldandy).
Iria: Iria (the character) is just plain cool, and the anime's not bad either. Armitage is a bounty hunter on a distant planet some unspecified time in the future; she goes after bad guy Zeiram.
Armitage III: Watch this as a double-feature with Iria. Armitage is a cop on Mars, and a robot. SF/thriller; has been compared to Total Recall.
Fushigi Yugi: Long and complex fantasy series with strong romantic elements. A lot of comedy, but a lot of darker moments too. The plot has more twists than a snake with the hiccups; it's hard to say too much without spoiling it, but don't expect it to be all light and bubbly like the first episode.
Revolutionary Girl Utena: Weird story about a girl who wants to grow up to be a prince. Um, that doesn't really describe it at all. See it for yourself.
Cowboy Bebop: Wonderfully stylish series about a pair of space bounty-hunters. *Great* music by Yoko Kanno, and leading lady (Faye Valentine) by Megumi Hayashibara.
Domionion/Tank Police: Shirow's SF/action/comedy set in a gloomy polluted future. Lots of fun.
Three short, weird and funny ones:
Dragon Half (wonderful closing song "My Omelet" with music by Beethoven), Elf Princess Rane (hysterical, but with half-a-dozen characters talking over the top of each other, two of them in gibberish and another one *backwards*, it can be hard to keep up with the subtitles) and Jungle de Ikou (Let's Go to the Jungle) - gotta love those fertility dances!
But I think Eva is over-rated. A lot.
SQL Error a.k.a. Sailor Hedgehog
You think maybe they forgot?
Read it all!
here was another series of books, can't recall the author, about a small number of humans on a planet populated by sentient teddy bears who sincerely believed that they were the characters of whoever they'd read in english lit. One ofthe books opened with "Casey at the Bat" there was sherlock holmes as well...
Hoka! Hoka! Hoka! by (damn. Runs downstairs to library...) Paul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson.
Oops! Knew I forgot someone.
I think the best place to start with Lem is The Cyberiad, a collection of wonderfully funny stories involving the robot inventors Trurl and Klapaucius.
Lem writes in Polish, but the translations (mostly by the one translator) are incredibly good.
Bio? Bleah! The first three books of Split Infinity, the first two of Incarnations of Immortality are good. It's a bit of a trend with Anthony: builds an interesting new world and then beats it to death. A number of his books are Definitely Not For Kiddies (tm).
Steel Beach is excellent, and The Golden Globe, Varley's latest and a sort-of-sequel to Beach, is as good or better. Pity he only produces about one book every five years.
Good list, but Greg Bear wrote Blood Music.
The Norway Post is out of bed now, and has the story in English
Not much detail, though.
Aftenposten has two articles in Norwegian, and a short summary in English
Dagbladet also carries the story, but doesn't have an English version. They do however have pictures of Winona Ryder and Claudia Schiffer in rather daring dresses, so it's not all bad.
The Norway Post seems to be napping, which is a pity since it's an English-language paper.
Verdens Gang carries the story, again in Norwegian only, but "Jon (16) arrestert" doesn't require much translation.
Stavanger Aftenblad carries it as their lead story.
CNN Norge have it too but it hasn't made it back to CNN HQ yet.
I want to rant about the whole DVD thing (DVDs suck! DVDs suck!!) but I'll save that for another day.
Well, to answer your four specific questions:
1. Two years.
2. 4500% (whee!) (down from 6700%; I think they got altitude sickness). At one point, they were down 10% from the original price, and stayed there for months.
3. Looks good to me. But always make sure you're earning enough to pay the rent - you can't eat options.
4. You're nailed down until the options vest - which is kind of the point from your employer's point of view. You need to check out the tax angle too - here in Australia you get hit by Capital Gains Tax when you sell the shares.
If you're joining a startup - like I did - I wouldn't bet all on striking it rich. On the other hand, if you have the choice between earning a huge salary, and earning a comfortable salary plus options, it's probably worth the risk. I never expected the options to amount to much; I was (pleasantly) surprised when I suddenly became a millionaire.
Well, the IANA is the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. PL could be one of several things, but the most likely one here is Pink Lizard.
HTH. HAND.
SQL Error
In 1982.
I remember that HP had a special on at the time: three of those drives for only A$250,000! But they didn't have many customers who needed 1.2GB.
Going back a bit further, we had 5MB 14" removable disk packs. I don't know what the state of the art was as far back as 1970. Try alt.folklore.computers.
SQL Error
Static RAM. NVRAM.
Static RAM isn't that static! It still loses its contents when you lose power. Besides, static RAM is much lower density and much more expensive than dynamic. The largest current SRAMS are 16Mb.
NVRAM is NV, but is even lower density and more expensive than regular static RAM. And Flash is slow and has a nasty habit of burning out if you re-write the same block too many times.
SQL Error
RAID 1 gives slightly slower performance on writes since you have to write the same data twice, but if you have a high-end system, you'll have an intelligent controller and multiple SCSI buses, so this is pretty much invisible. It gives better performance on reads, because you can read from either disk.
RAID 5 is fair for sequential access, but not so good for random access, particularly random writes. For example, if you need to update a bit of data on disk 1 in a RAID 5 set, you have to also read the same location on every other disk, calculate the parity value, and write that to the parity disk. For random writes, RAID 5 is slower than a single disk. RAID 5 is good for file servers and web servers, and lousy for database servers for this reason. RAID 5 is a trade-off between speed and cost. If cost wasn't an issue (hah!) you'd go for RAID 1+0 every time.
SQL Error
I had a look at the speech (though not the bill itself). Unfortunately, it looks like a relatively sensible and well thought-out proposal. I say "unfortunately" because if it was as silly as some of the other proposed legislation, it would be a lot easier to stop (as happened in New South Wales). I don't condone censorship, and I don't think new laws are necessary here. Truly vile stuff like child pornography is illegal in Australia under existing laws, whether it's in print or on the Net.
Australia has a spotty history on censorship; mostly (as other people have pointed out) we're too laid back to make much fuss. One of the great ironies here is that X-rated material is banned from sale in all the states except the Northern Territory and the ACT (Australian Capital Territory, which unlike NT, isn't a state; it's like USA's District of Columbia: somewhere to stick the nation's capital so the government doesn't bother you while you're working). But - where was I, oh yes - sending X-rated material in the mail is *not* banned, so the ACT, and Canberra in particular, has become the centre of Australia's porn industry. At least Canberrans now have something to do when Parliament isn't sitting. (Imagine Washington, only twenty times smaller, and without the guns or drugs. Now take out the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, and anything else that might be interesting. Add a rather nice lake. Ta da! That's Canberra.)
And the Film and Literature Classification Board (newspeak for Censors) seem to be a bit confused anyway. Playboy's Book of Lingerie - which I buy for the articles, of course - will be "Unrestricted" one month (i.e. any 12-year old with too much pocket money can buy it), and "Category 1 Restricted" the next (Adults only and wrapped in plastic). And for the life of me I can't work out what criteria they use (I spent many hours researching this). Plus the stickers are really hard to get off...
And yes, they do put an "Unrestricted" sticker on it when it's unrestricted. Doh!
And yeah, if there's a protest march on in Sydney, I'll be there. A plague on Senator Harradine, and on Senator Alston too. Where have all the decent politicians gone? Come back Nick Greiner, all is forgiven! (Nick Greiner was premier of NSW, scuttled by his own Independent Commission Against Corruption, but later cleared in court.)
I shall put them on my list, and they'd none of them be missed...
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