The *real* problem is that flash memory has to do something inherently difficult to work: trap electrons. It's devilishly tricky to trap an electron (or group of electrons) in any meaningful way. Furthermore lash devices have to trap said electrons for a period of time that allows for reasonable storage times (years). This is why it's hard to both delete and recover data. After so many electrons leave the cell, data integrity fails. On the other hand, it's also difficult to reliably get rid of all the electrons in all the cells without destroying the ability of the cell to hold electrons in the future. Thermite and kinetic projectiles aside, SSD security is an emerging field.
It's a damned cool idea. Probably won't happen, but still, an awesome second life for the ISS, and one that has an actual point to it.
Yes, a very cool idea. The only catch? Increased costs for resupplying the thing. Even at Earth-Moon L1, it's out much further than GEOsats, which are orders of magnitude further out than the ISS is currently at LEO. Funding the retrofit is one thing, funding resupply and ferrying in/out inhabitants is quite another. Besides, that thing would have to live outside the earth's magnetic field. Water shield or not, I'd hate to be out there during a CME or X-class flare.
Glen Beck is a Religious Fanatic (Mormon I believe)...
Yes, Glen Beck is a Mormon. I'm one, too, but I think he's whackadoodle, so be careful you don't lump all Mormons in with him. I cringe just about every time I hear him speak and wonder if he really believes in the same religion I do. Complete nut-job, that one.
It depends on how it's denominated. $1 bills weigh about 1 gram, which is about 0.0022 pounds. $360 million in $1 bills therefore is about 792,000 pounds.
Over 78% of the teachers in our school district make over $50K a year for 9 months of work.
And I'm getting sick of this.
9 months of work? Seriously? I call bunk. Teachers are underpaid compared to other professionals with similar credentials. Teachers have at least a bachelor's degree and starting salaries range from mid 20's to mid 30's. I can make that at McDonald's. Most teachers have advanced degrees, which should put them in the 60-70k salary range. With experience, that should put them well over 80k, but it doesn't. Your "averages" include teachers with 10-20 years of experience, which clearly commands a higher wage, but doesn't approach what similarly experienced, degreed professionals make in other fields, even if you account for a smaller number of days worked.
What's my fault is allowing my state and school district to foist their expensive "programs" that don't work on a society that doesn't give a rip about education. I say abandon state sponsored education and let the free market work it out. At least I won't be paying for idiot administrators to pander to the loudest parents about their lazy kids
They aren't pussies, they have been beat down and driven out of the profession. Try being a teacher's aide at a school for a week and tell me how pussified they are then.
Is THAT hard to go to the library, take a book and read it to prepare a class? Geez, they don't even have to do it in a yearly basis.
You don't get it. Teachers are being paid crappy hourly rates and forced to work "contract time" that has them there for 8+ hours a day. During that time, they have between 40-60 minutes to: Grade papers/tests, visit with little johnny about the homework he doesn't understand for the fifth time and little susie because she was sick when The Big Test was given, make copies for the handouts for next class, do teacher walkthroughs with the administration, and then, if they are lucky, have a few minutes to gather their wits and plan for the next day. What really happens is they do paper grading, lesson planning, parent calling, and other things on their own time without pay because the district has squeezed every minute out of their day already. That doesn't count staff meetings, district training, "professional development" and other things that take teachers out of class or have them there outside of contract time while the work piles up. Finally, most teachers teach more than one class, so that means planning for two or three lessons per day, which means more time spent on work without pay. Basically, being a teacher sucks in so many ways without jerk-offs like you lampooning them
Having dated a couple teachers, let me explain to you how it works.
Being married to a degreed High School biology teacher, let me explain how it works. This is with the caveat that it only applies to the two school districts she has worked in.
My wife is not tenured, which in our district and state means teaching for five years while passing all proficiency checks. That means she has to watch her butt and toe the line very carefully. Which means she is always the first on the list when the district is cutting budgets (which they have been doing every year since she started teaching in this district). Luckily for her, she is an amazing teacher (yeah, I'm biased, but her peers and supervisors agree) and she still has a job.
In our district, the teachers are responsible for making sure students are "engaged in learning" from "bell to bell". They must provide students every opportunity to pass their classes, which translates into students retaking tests as many times as they want, having as much time as they want to turn in assignments, and having the option of changing classes willy-nilly if they don't like the teacher/subject. Basically, the entire school district bends backwards for every single student no matter what little johnny or little betty do in class. There is no recourse for behavior problems and often the first step (calling the parent) results in the parent accusing the teacher of "not understanding" their child's needs or the teacher must obviously be doing something wrong. That's assuming that my wife can even get a hold of a parent. Most kids are either "independent", living with extended family, have only one parent and that parent works three jobs, or if by some miracle both parents are at home, they are drugged/stoned out of their minds and it's a wonder the kid comes to school at all.
Bottom line: Teachers are charged with educating a public that is disengaged with learning. Parents are hostile, administration is hog tied by budget and legislation and no one seems to understand one basic truth: It's not the teacher's job to force kids to learn. It's their job to teach those who want to learn. If johnny's mom got sent to jail for the third time and he has to live with his meth-addict uncle, then johnny doesn't care about extracting DNA from chicken livers or charting the energy of a falling mass. If anyone is to blame for the sad state of education in America, it the parents that need to take the blame. But that won't happen because the parents are the tax payers and the voters. How do you hold them accountable?
Here's a solution that hurts everyone equally: Pull the plug now. Stop making SS payments and stop collecting it from taxpayers wholesale. The older generation gets the pointy end of the stick and their kids get to clean up the blood on the floor while the grandkids try to salvage their careers when the economy tanks. The bright side of all that mess is that in a single generation, retirement becomes personal again and this wealth redistribution mumbo-jumbo looms over future generations no more. People can lampoon libertarians and constitutionalists all they want, but they have one thing right: people should take care of themselves. Failing that, the family infrastructure and private charities will suffice. The government has no business playing Robin Hood between the middle class and the poor/unfortunate.
Unfortunately, the submission title char limits prevented me from using the whole thing. Or were you referring to the article's headline? Yeah, it's troubling. Gewirtz is a nutjob and I really didn't think Taco and co. would go for it. Silly me. Besides, the fine folks here on/. can handle it, right? Even nutjobs spur meaningful conversation.
I'll second that. It's telling when paying customers would rather take risks with cracked software (malware, trojans, and virii?) than trust something like Steam. Unfortunately, since paying customers are paying customers, I don't think they'll get the message.
So thought Kim Jong-il and Castro, who closed their countries to foreign trade and have essentially brought the dark ages to their nations. Please stay away from politics, before the Tea Party gets elected and we op in for a world of hurt.
Apples and oranges. The United States is the only nation on earth that could get away with closed borders and have anywhere near the standard of living we currently enjoy. Even with China's near meteoric economic growth, pulling the US GDP out of the world market would literally kill millions of jobs across the globe. Maybe a trial run is in order? See how China likes the shoe on the other foot?
As others have posted and others sill undoubtedly post, we need more information to give you the recommendation you want. Making some assumptions from your question, it sounds like you want to virtualize your workstation. For full baremetal performance, don't virtualize your primary OS. The technology isn't there yet, but VMWare is making huge strides with their VMView product. Set up properly, you can have CAD running in a virtual machine on a server with a thin client displaying the output with very respectable speeds.
For your application, it sounds like you need something like Virtual PC or VMWare Workstation. Virtual PC comes free with Windows 7 Pro and Ultimate. That's what I use and it allows me to have two or three VMs running XP for testing and/or risky web use. I haven't tried Ubuntu as a VM in virtual PC, but I have an ESXi server running, so I haven't bothered. I'm very happy with my setup, below:
Server:
Old HP x8400 workstation that I stuffed with 12GB of RAM and four WD1001FALS striped into one big array
- Win 2k8 server for AD and file sharing (64GB primary drive, 2048GB secondary (whatever the max for ESXi is))
- Windows Home server for client backups (80GB primary drive, 500GB secondary)
- IIS server for local intranet / website testing (80GB drive)
- Various XP machines for testing (revert to snapshot is nice!)
- Various Linux flavors (Ubuntu desktop/server, Debian servers, etc).
Primary Workstation:
Newish Dell XPS 435 that I bought as a refurb for about 50% of retail (thank you slickdeals!)
(2 x 60GB Agility 2 SSD in RAID 0 as primary drive, one 500GB Seagate as secondary/scratch disk, 9GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 465, etc)
- Windows 7 Ultimate as primary OS
- Two Windows XP Pro guests in Virtual PC
There's a lot of technology out there, so you may have to do some fiddling around yourself to see what works for you. It took me a few years to gather all the hardware together and work out how to build the software just right, but it works. I use my main rig for video (kids soccer, family vacations, birthdays, etc), photo slideshows, gaming, developing, etc, so performance was key. My setup isn't top of the line, but something close to bleeding edge while maintaining a budget. Virtualization is a tool. Find something that fits your needs, understanding each product's weaknesses and strengths and you will do just fine.
The same technology that launches satellites launches MIRVs. The US doesn't necessarily want to contribute to China's ability to kill off its citizens.
I realize they were in their "rights" legally and such to put out the neighbours fire and not his.. (from the TFA, they just sat there and made sure it didn't spread). But I mean, as a human, what the ****. Is there so little empathy?
Why couldn't they have put it out and then billed him? He probably would have been so happy he would have paid it. This reeks of callousness. What have "we" become (I'm not american, but I am a human, I think..)
I imagine that if the guy or his wife or kid were trapped in the house, they would have done something. Since it's just property, they were under no such humanistic constraint. Human compassion has to have limits, or we would go around trying to fix every injustice. So I say, "well done" on calling it right for such a tough situation.
I'm not so sure radiation...[is] a big problem in interstellar travel....once you're well away from any star system, there shouldn't be much out there. The radiation comes from the stars...
Do someresearch first before speaking out of your nether regions.
Also don't forget about cosmic rays. Shielding colonists or an exploratory crew is also non-trivial. High energy protons do bad things to DNA and secondary radiation from hull penetration is bad stuff.
Not showing them the child porn images on your computer by not providing the password, while being innocent and not having any images of child porn on your computer, and being thrown in jail for that? I say it's bullshit and a violation of your rights. You say on the contrary, that nobody has a right to refuse to help an investigation by providing some information.
Actually, I say it's bullshit that the investigators don't have a single shred of evidence outside of that encrypted drive that he has child porn. As much as we like to think "the man" is out to get us, the truth is that there has to be something besides that encrypted drive that put this 19 year old in police custody. Internet logs, witnesses, something. That means that the court has a reasonable suspicion that somewhere on that computer is child porn and the only way to have a fair trial is to have as much information as possible. Because this kid isn't cooperating, it is also reasonable to assume that he's hiding something. Shocking, but that's how it works. Whether it's child porn or not, this kid doesn't want the prosecutors to see whatever it is, which means it's very likely illegal. It's not nefarious, it's logic. In the eyes of the court, the only way to resolve the question of child porn possession is to have a look at the computer.
No, it just has DRM that prevents the retail version from running on Vista or Windows 7. Hope you made a backup of the patch that removes the SafeDisc requirement, and make sure you hand that to your friends as well.
Oh, and you can't make a backup... Steam users can make backups.
Lies! All lies! I have the retail version of Civ IV and it runs on my Win 7 box just fine. I also happen to have an iso of the DVD for Civ IV that works just fine as a backup. Regurgitating FUD doesn't mean as much as real world experience.
Sure, it doesn't hinder my playing. Outside of that, what if I want to resell it? I can't because it's tied to my Steam account. What if I go to reinstall it on my PC in 2020 and Steam doesn't exist? What if I can't access my Steam account because it was hacked, i lost my password, or for some other reason? $50 down the drain...
So work around it. Buy it, but install the cracked version and play to your hearts content. It's a bit of a catch-22, though. Still supporting the company that DRM's things using a third party, but getting to play an awesome game... Good luck figuring that out.
You are discounting the fact that Chinese ASATs are not capable of killing a maneuvering satellite. Current Keyholes can change an entire orbit to avoid ASATS. Also, if the Chinese start shooting ASATs at our satellites, you better believe the super secret military shuttle with it's ASAT-killing laser will be deployed.
Slashdot Mirror
The *real* problem is that flash memory has to do something inherently difficult to work: trap electrons. It's devilishly tricky to trap an electron (or group of electrons) in any meaningful way. Furthermore lash devices have to trap said electrons for a period of time that allows for reasonable storage times (years). This is why it's hard to both delete and recover data. After so many electrons leave the cell, data integrity fails. On the other hand, it's also difficult to reliably get rid of all the electrons in all the cells without destroying the ability of the cell to hold electrons in the future. Thermite and kinetic projectiles aside, SSD security is an emerging field.
It's a damned cool idea. Probably won't happen, but still, an awesome second life for the ISS, and one that has an actual point to it.
Yes, a very cool idea. The only catch? Increased costs for resupplying the thing. Even at Earth-Moon L1, it's out much further than GEOsats, which are orders of magnitude further out than the ISS is currently at LEO. Funding the retrofit is one thing, funding resupply and ferrying in/out inhabitants is quite another. Besides, that thing would have to live outside the earth's magnetic field. Water shield or not, I'd hate to be out there during a CME or X-class flare.
Glen Beck is a Religious Fanatic (Mormon I believe)...
Yes, Glen Beck is a Mormon. I'm one, too, but I think he's whackadoodle, so be careful you don't lump all Mormons in with him. I cringe just about every time I hear him speak and wonder if he really believes in the same religion I do. Complete nut-job, that one.
It depends on how it's denominated. $1 bills weigh about 1 gram, which is about 0.0022 pounds. $360 million in $1 bills therefore is about 792,000 pounds.
Over 78% of the teachers in our school district make over $50K a year for 9 months of work.
And I'm getting sick of this.
9 months of work? Seriously? I call bunk. Teachers are underpaid compared to other professionals with similar credentials. Teachers have at least a bachelor's degree and starting salaries range from mid 20's to mid 30's. I can make that at McDonald's. Most teachers have advanced degrees, which should put them in the 60-70k salary range. With experience, that should put them well over 80k, but it doesn't. Your "averages" include teachers with 10-20 years of experience, which clearly commands a higher wage, but doesn't approach what similarly experienced, degreed professionals make in other fields, even if you account for a smaller number of days worked.
What's my fault is allowing my state and school district to foist their expensive "programs" that don't work on a society that doesn't give a rip about education. I say abandon state sponsored education and let the free market work it out. At least I won't be paying for idiot administrators to pander to the loudest parents about their lazy kids
.
They aren't pussies, they have been beat down and driven out of the profession. Try being a teacher's aide at a school for a week and tell me how pussified they are then.
Is THAT hard to go to the library, take a book and read it to prepare a class? Geez, they don't even have to do it in a yearly basis.
You don't get it. Teachers are being paid crappy hourly rates and forced to work "contract time" that has them there for 8+ hours a day. During that time, they have between 40-60 minutes to: Grade papers/tests, visit with little johnny about the homework he doesn't understand for the fifth time and little susie because she was sick when The Big Test was given, make copies for the handouts for next class, do teacher walkthroughs with the administration, and then, if they are lucky, have a few minutes to gather their wits and plan for the next day. What really happens is they do paper grading, lesson planning, parent calling, and other things on their own time without pay because the district has squeezed every minute out of their day already. That doesn't count staff meetings, district training, "professional development" and other things that take teachers out of class or have them there outside of contract time while the work piles up. Finally, most teachers teach more than one class, so that means planning for two or three lessons per day, which means more time spent on work without pay. Basically, being a teacher sucks in so many ways without jerk-offs like you lampooning them
Having dated a couple teachers, let me explain to you how it works.
Being married to a degreed High School biology teacher, let me explain how it works. This is with the caveat that it only applies to the two school districts she has worked in.
My wife is not tenured, which in our district and state means teaching for five years while passing all proficiency checks. That means she has to watch her butt and toe the line very carefully. Which means she is always the first on the list when the district is cutting budgets (which they have been doing every year since she started teaching in this district). Luckily for her, she is an amazing teacher (yeah, I'm biased, but her peers and supervisors agree) and she still has a job.
In our district, the teachers are responsible for making sure students are "engaged in learning" from "bell to bell". They must provide students every opportunity to pass their classes, which translates into students retaking tests as many times as they want, having as much time as they want to turn in assignments, and having the option of changing classes willy-nilly if they don't like the teacher/subject. Basically, the entire school district bends backwards for every single student no matter what little johnny or little betty do in class. There is no recourse for behavior problems and often the first step (calling the parent) results in the parent accusing the teacher of "not understanding" their child's needs or the teacher must obviously be doing something wrong. That's assuming that my wife can even get a hold of a parent. Most kids are either "independent", living with extended family, have only one parent and that parent works three jobs, or if by some miracle both parents are at home, they are drugged/stoned out of their minds and it's a wonder the kid comes to school at all.
Bottom line: Teachers are charged with educating a public that is disengaged with learning. Parents are hostile, administration is hog tied by budget and legislation and no one seems to understand one basic truth: It's not the teacher's job to force kids to learn. It's their job to teach those who want to learn. If johnny's mom got sent to jail for the third time and he has to live with his meth-addict uncle, then johnny doesn't care about extracting DNA from chicken livers or charting the energy of a falling mass. If anyone is to blame for the sad state of education in America, it the parents that need to take the blame. But that won't happen because the parents are the tax payers and the voters. How do you hold them accountable?
Here's a solution that hurts everyone equally: Pull the plug now. Stop making SS payments and stop collecting it from taxpayers wholesale. The older generation gets the pointy end of the stick and their kids get to clean up the blood on the floor while the grandkids try to salvage their careers when the economy tanks. The bright side of all that mess is that in a single generation, retirement becomes personal again and this wealth redistribution mumbo-jumbo looms over future generations no more. People can lampoon libertarians and constitutionalists all they want, but they have one thing right: people should take care of themselves. Failing that, the family infrastructure and private charities will suffice. The government has no business playing Robin Hood between the middle class and the poor/unfortunate.
Mod parent up. I'm glad my fellow /.ers recognize him as a nutjob.
Unfortunately, the submission title char limits prevented me from using the whole thing. Or were you referring to the article's headline? Yeah, it's troubling. Gewirtz is a nutjob and I really didn't think Taco and co. would go for it. Silly me. Besides, the fine folks here on /. can handle it, right? Even nutjobs spur meaningful conversation.
What in the world do the mormons have to do with it?
I'll second that. It's telling when paying customers would rather take risks with cracked software (malware, trojans, and virii?) than trust something like Steam. Unfortunately, since paying customers are paying customers, I don't think they'll get the message.
So thought Kim Jong-il and Castro, who closed their countries to foreign trade and have essentially brought the dark ages to their nations. Please stay away from politics, before the Tea Party gets elected and we op in for a world of hurt.
Apples and oranges. The United States is the only nation on earth that could get away with closed borders and have anywhere near the standard of living we currently enjoy. Even with China's near meteoric economic growth, pulling the US GDP out of the world market would literally kill millions of jobs across the globe. Maybe a trial run is in order? See how China likes the shoe on the other foot?
As others have posted and others sill undoubtedly post, we need more information to give you the recommendation you want. Making some assumptions from your question, it sounds like you want to virtualize your workstation. For full baremetal performance, don't virtualize your primary OS. The technology isn't there yet, but VMWare is making huge strides with their VMView product. Set up properly, you can have CAD running in a virtual machine on a server with a thin client displaying the output with very respectable speeds.
For your application, it sounds like you need something like Virtual PC or VMWare Workstation. Virtual PC comes free with Windows 7 Pro and Ultimate. That's what I use and it allows me to have two or three VMs running XP for testing and/or risky web use. I haven't tried Ubuntu as a VM in virtual PC, but I have an ESXi server running, so I haven't bothered. I'm very happy with my setup, below:
There's a lot of technology out there, so you may have to do some fiddling around yourself to see what works for you. It took me a few years to gather all the hardware together and work out how to build the software just right, but it works. I use my main rig for video (kids soccer, family vacations, birthdays, etc), photo slideshows, gaming, developing, etc, so performance was key. My setup isn't top of the line, but something close to bleeding edge while maintaining a budget. Virtualization is a tool. Find something that fits your needs, understanding each product's weaknesses and strengths and you will do just fine.
The same technology that launches satellites launches MIRVs. The US doesn't necessarily want to contribute to China's ability to kill off its citizens.
I realize they were in their "rights" legally and such to put out the neighbours fire and not his.. (from the TFA, they just sat there and made sure it didn't spread). But I mean, as a human, what the ****. Is there so little empathy?
Why couldn't they have put it out and then billed him? He probably would have been so happy he would have paid it. This reeks of callousness. What have "we" become (I'm not american, but I am a human, I think..)
I imagine that if the guy or his wife or kid were trapped in the house, they would have done something. Since it's just property, they were under no such humanistic constraint. Human compassion has to have limits, or we would go around trying to fix every injustice. So I say, "well done" on calling it right for such a tough situation.
I'm not so sure radiation...[is] a big problem in interstellar travel. ...once you're well away from any star system, there shouldn't be much out there. The radiation comes from the stars...
Do some research first before speaking out of your nether regions.
Also don't forget about cosmic rays. Shielding colonists or an exploratory crew is also non-trivial. High energy protons do bad things to DNA and secondary radiation from hull penetration is bad stuff.
Not showing them the child porn images on your computer by not providing the password, while being innocent and not having any images of child porn on your computer, and being thrown in jail for that? I say it's bullshit and a violation of your rights. You say on the contrary, that nobody has a right to refuse to help an investigation by providing some information.
Actually, I say it's bullshit that the investigators don't have a single shred of evidence outside of that encrypted drive that he has child porn. As much as we like to think "the man" is out to get us, the truth is that there has to be something besides that encrypted drive that put this 19 year old in police custody. Internet logs, witnesses, something. That means that the court has a reasonable suspicion that somewhere on that computer is child porn and the only way to have a fair trial is to have as much information as possible. Because this kid isn't cooperating, it is also reasonable to assume that he's hiding something. Shocking, but that's how it works. Whether it's child porn or not, this kid doesn't want the prosecutors to see whatever it is, which means it's very likely illegal. It's not nefarious, it's logic. In the eyes of the court, the only way to resolve the question of child porn possession is to have a look at the computer.
...I have extensive leadership training.
You don't deserve a cent of what you make you douche-wagon.
One of these things is not like the other.
No, it just has DRM that prevents the retail version from running on Vista or Windows 7. Hope you made a backup of the patch that removes the SafeDisc requirement, and make sure you hand that to your friends as well. Oh, and you can't make a backup... Steam users can make backups.
Lies! All lies! I have the retail version of Civ IV and it runs on my Win 7 box just fine. I also happen to have an iso of the DVD for Civ IV that works just fine as a backup. Regurgitating FUD doesn't mean as much as real world experience.
Sure, it doesn't hinder my playing. Outside of that, what if I want to resell it? I can't because it's tied to my Steam account. What if I go to reinstall it on my PC in 2020 and Steam doesn't exist? What if I can't access my Steam account because it was hacked, i lost my password, or for some other reason? $50 down the drain...
So work around it. Buy it, but install the cracked version and play to your hearts content. It's a bit of a catch-22, though. Still supporting the company that DRM's things using a third party, but getting to play an awesome game... Good luck figuring that out.
You are discounting the fact that Chinese ASATs are not capable of killing a maneuvering satellite. Current Keyholes can change an entire orbit to avoid ASATS. Also, if the Chinese start shooting ASATs at our satellites, you better believe the super secret military shuttle with it's ASAT-killing laser will be deployed.