That's assuming the police and justice system works fairly, a fairly controversial issue. If it doesn't, your participation in it is immoral. And, if anything, your civic duty would be to work on improving the system.
While I'll grant that you are mostly correct, this is what I meant by the balance of civic liberties and civic duty. The places you have referenced were NOT high on civic liberties and, therefore, the civic duty is reduced.
I should clarify; around slashdot, we're awfully big on civil liberties, personal privacy and libertarianism (Hey, government, stay out of my business!). That said, we don't spend nearly enough time on civic duty. Civic duty and civil liberties are inextricably linked: a society will remain well ordered if either, there are no civil liberties and no civic duty, or there are lots of civil liberties, but they come at a price: that of civic duty.
Consequently, if you want the government to stay out of your life, you owe your society the duty of reporting it if your neighbor steals from the convenience store while you're watching. The police will follow up on the allegations, do their own investigation, and they may ask you to testify. But that's the price of civic liberties.
It's just you, and they're not. They've crowdsourced evidence gathering, but this is no different from working with crimestoppers to hunt vandals. Instead of calling in tips, they're asking the public to submit video evidence, not to analyze it. The facebook pages are not police initiatives.
This is not a case of CCTV. Rather, these images have been submitted from mobile devices and cameras.
This is not a case of privacy invasion. People have committed criminal acts out in public, fully knowing that people are filming. They're begging to be identified.
Furthermore, the police did not set up these facebook pages; these are set up by concerned citizens who are appalled by the behaviour seen last night. The police have set up a system for submitting evidence, but they have not started a "crowd-sourced" identification initiative as of yet. So maybe the police is doing crowd-sourced evidence gathering, but certainly not analysis.
I want to point out how the police behaved in this riot. They stood their ground, but did not use an unnecessary force. They rarely engaged directly with the rioters; they just held a line, and occasionally fired tear gas, flashbangs, and pepperspray into the crowd. This is one recent case of police in the news NOT confiscating/breaking everyone's recording devices.
I think the Vancouver police and the RCMP deserve some commendation for how they handled this riot. They did not prevent as much property damage as they could have, but on the otherhand, they took a far more measured approach to interaction with the rioters than has been taken in the past and they are seemingly embracing social media, rather than raging in fear of it.
$30 for a 120MHz Arm Cortex-M0, 512k Flash, 64k of RAM with USB, Ethernet, 12-bit ADCs, and more peripherals than you could want. All this on a PCB that integrates a USB debugger.
The development environment is based on eclipse and gcc. While the environment claims a limit of 128k without purchase, I suspect that a gcc port could lift this restriction. Not sure if the debugger would survive the transition to OSS or not.
Shields are available from embeddedartists, but they're quite expensive.
Arduino shouldn't be able to compete with this, but the hobbyist scene is enthralled with arduino right now and hasn't really met lpcxpresso yet.
It really doesn't, actually. The only time that a company would have a problem with this is when they distribute their plugin or theme. Any company which makes a WP template or theme is absolutely not required to open source it unless they distribute it. This means, obviously, that the majority of company-specific plugins and themes are not going to need to be opensourced.
The only companies which stand to be hurt by this are the ones which have a business model of making wordpress plugins/themes and selling them. Even then, they are not required to stop doing so. The requirement is just to license their software under the GPL and provide source if and only if someone requests it.
People act like the GPL will kill all software business as we know it, but those who do so clearly haven't even read the license.
The issue is that there are lots of frequently read data blocks in/home,/tmp,/swap, etc. and there are lots of infrequently accessed data blocks in/boot,/bin, and/usr. Storing infrequently read data on a fast device and frequently read data on a slow device is inefficient. I want a system which puts the frequently read data on a fast device, and the infrequently read data on a slow device.
The idea is that I want to automate the management of which data are stored on the SSD. Entire files need not be cached, only their hot sectors. By using a SSD directly, you lose the benefits of keeping infrequently accessed bits of data out of the SSD, reserving it only for the most commonly accessed data.
Doing it this way makes the majority of the filesystem perform better, whereas using a normal SSD+HDD configuration requires you to actively manage where your most frequently used data are.
It'd sure be nice if you knew what you were talking about.
Power supplies do not fail randomly. They fail as a function of wear and abuse. Heat is the primary determining factor, as with most electronics.
Raid has no beneficial effect on SSDs. The failure mode of an SSD is FAR different from that of an HDD. Because SSDs fail to a read-only mode, there is little point in running SSD RAID for data security.
SSD's DO NOT use battery backed RAM. They use capacitor backed RAM. (I've opened one up, and there were two 4.7F Aerogel capacitors, no batteries). This drastically changes your battery failure claim.
Your concept of "reasonable size" and the OP's are different. Remember, his original drive which has been in operation for *15 years* is only just now filling up. Potentially, a 1GB drive would last another 15 years. 32GB will be completely suitable and "reasonable."
Rewrite can be far less of an issue than you think. Intel's ssd (admittedly, this is the most expensive one on the market) is rated for 100GB/day of continuous writes for 5 years. XP or Vista will work just fine in this environment. Much like a previous comment, I would suggest underclocking a processor, which makes this machine fundamentally incompatible with Vista. XP or Linux would both be good options. DOS emulation on both platforms is well established.
Switching gears now, to the OP:
For a processor, you should stick to media-center processors. These processors are designed to be very low power in order to keep the noise level from fans down. If you couple a low power processor with a passive cooling solution such as thermalright cooling towers and a 120mm fan duct, you can keep the processor fan out of the equation.
Avoid moving parts wherever possible. There are a few power supplies available that use heatpipes to bring the heat out of the supply, to a radiator grid that protrudes from the back. There are not, unfortunately, equivalent solutions for the CPU fan. You also need air circulation over your motherboard. This means that you need to be very careful about what kind of case you buy. The case needs to have dust management because dust is the primary cause of failure in fans. Try to avoid cheap sleeve bearing fans, and buy either ball bearing or hydro-wave bearing fans.
To summarize: Processor: low power, underclocked/undervolted processor, AMD used to have some 35W processors, but those should be available from intel as well now. Heatsink: Use a heatpipe cooler with a duct to the rear exhaust fan Motherboard: No electrolytic caps, use IGP only if there is a heatpiped cooling solution. RAM: use heatsinked RAM, underclock & undervolt if possible. HDD: Use an SSD with a big write tolerance (intel's 100GB/day is good). Consider creating a ramdisk for intensive activities, get the OS to store the ramdisk to the drive on shutdown, and restore it on startup. Power Supply: Try for a passive cooling solution, but do not go over a factor of 5 above your average load (e.g. your computer draws 100W, do not go over 500W). Underloading supplies can lead to early failures. OS: You're stuck with an emulated solution regardless, since this is a DOS application. Might as well go with Linux, since you have better control over reads/writes.
Here's one I haven't seen mentioned yet: Put it on a UPS and configure it to initiate immediate, safe, shutdown on power loss. This will cut down on failures due to power loss.
The obvious answer is traffic shaping. They'll let you store as much as you want! And you transfer as much to them or from them as the connection can handle! Too bad you only get a 56k.
On top of the FUD above, CNET has likely confused the Window Manager with the OS. Beauty and intuition absolutely should take a back seat to functionality in an OS. Not so in a Window Manager, there it is important for beauty, intuition and usability to come to the forefront, which is what projects like compiz-fusion are all about.
This is a bit of a simplification, but here's how the low-voltage thing actually works: First, a little background. The majority of power consumption of a digital device is the power consumed as it passes between the "on" (or saturated) state and the "off" state. When a transistor (or in this case, a MOSFET) is "on", it has a low resistance, and thus a low power consumption due to I^2R. When a transistor is off, it has a high resistance, and thus little current flows, which means it has a low power consumption. It's that in between stage that sucks up all the juice.
The point of getting to lower voltage is that less current flows during these transient conditions. V^2/R dictates that dropping the voltage has a large effect on power consumption.
Doing a die shrink seems not to make any sense based on this information. Lowering the "on" resistance would seem to increase the current which flows during a transition. The die shrink generally means that lower voltages can be used. In addition to this, it brings about lower gate capacitance, which is where most current flows during non-transition stages. These lower gate capacitances also serve to shorten the time that the MOSFETs are "on", and that reduces power consumption.
I heartily agree, with the exception that the N95 does have quite high quality optics.
The problem I have with the OP is that
The results are surprising, with Nokia's latest handset, featuring a built-in 5-megapixel camera, taking more vibrant pictures in medium light conditions than a 10-megapixel dSLR.
The N95 post-processed the image, by CNet's own admission. Then they didn't post-process the rest of the images. If vibrancy is the top measure of quality, they should at least be running a batch auto-levels on the images afterwards.
But there's another problem. Vibrancy isn't the top measure of quality for digital cameras. With digital photography, taking the picture is just the first step in a process. That's when the photo-editing begins.
If I had the option of implementing QoS at the ISP end on my connection, that would be3 my own choice, and should keep them safe. They could just make it part of the sign up process. "Check this box if you want us not to run QoS on your connection."
True enough. I'm not opposed to traffic shaping in the pursuit of low latency for games/voip/other time sensitive apps, but when the telecom companies decide that it's a good plan to charge me for bandwidth, the provider for bandwidth, and then cahrge the provider for delivery to me, it's starting to get ridiculous.
Next thing, they'll charge me extra for high speed delivery of certain content. It'll be just like a satellite TV company... you pay $4/mo for youtube, $4/mo for google... etc. etc. etc.
Traffic shaping is ok for QoS purposes, but source-based delivery restrictions are, frankly, just plain bad for everyone but the telecoms.
Ok I get it. That's not terribly great for the consumer especially since we're the ones paying for everything already. To charge us again is double dipping. The point is that it would be CNN paying your ISP for delivery. It's double dipping, certainly, but not from the same source. They charge both the content provider and the recipient.
Slashdot Mirror
That's assuming the police and justice system works fairly, a fairly controversial issue. If it doesn't, your participation in it is immoral. And, if anything, your civic duty would be to work on improving the system.
While I'll grant that you are mostly correct, this is what I meant by the balance of civic liberties and civic duty. The places you have referenced were NOT high on civic liberties and, therefore, the civic duty is reduced.
You're arguing for what I just said. =)
As far as I'm aware, in Canada, your photons are public domain once they cross over into public property.
I should clarify; around slashdot, we're awfully big on civil liberties, personal privacy and libertarianism (Hey, government, stay out of my business!). That said, we don't spend nearly enough time on civic duty. Civic duty and civil liberties are inextricably linked: a society will remain well ordered if either, there are no civil liberties and no civic duty, or there are lots of civil liberties, but they come at a price: that of civic duty.
Consequently, if you want the government to stay out of your life, you owe your society the duty of reporting it if your neighbor steals from the convenience store while you're watching. The police will follow up on the allegations, do their own investigation, and they may ask you to testify. But that's the price of civic liberties.
It's just you, and they're not. They've crowdsourced evidence gathering, but this is no different from working with crimestoppers to hunt vandals. Instead of calling in tips, they're asking the public to submit video evidence, not to analyze it. The facebook pages are not police initiatives.
This is not a case of CCTV. Rather, these images have been submitted from mobile devices and cameras.
This is not a case of privacy invasion. People have committed criminal acts out in public, fully knowing that people are filming. They're begging to be identified.
Furthermore, the police did not set up these facebook pages; these are set up by concerned citizens who are appalled by the behaviour seen last night. The police have set up a system for submitting evidence, but they have not started a "crowd-sourced" identification initiative as of yet. So maybe the police is doing crowd-sourced evidence gathering, but certainly not analysis.
I want to point out how the police behaved in this riot. They stood their ground, but did not use an unnecessary force. They rarely engaged directly with the rioters; they just held a line, and occasionally fired tear gas, flashbangs, and pepperspray into the crowd. This is one recent case of police in the news NOT confiscating/breaking everyone's recording devices.
I think the Vancouver police and the RCMP deserve some commendation for how they handled this riot. They did not prevent as much property damage as they could have, but on the otherhand, they took a far more measured approach to interaction with the rioters than has been taken in the past and they are seemingly embracing social media, rather than raging in fear of it.
Also LPCxpresso.
$30 for a 120MHz Arm Cortex-M0, 512k Flash, 64k of RAM with USB, Ethernet, 12-bit ADCs, and more peripherals than you could want. All this on a PCB that integrates a USB debugger.
The development environment is based on eclipse and gcc. While the environment claims a limit of 128k without purchase, I suspect that a gcc port could lift this restriction. Not sure if the debugger would survive the transition to OSS or not.
Shields are available from embeddedartists, but they're quite expensive.
Arduino shouldn't be able to compete with this, but the hobbyist scene is enthralled with arduino right now and hasn't really met lpcxpresso yet.
No no, it's a reference to Diablo, where the rogues wore red clothing, so everyone called them rouge!
Pfft... Just use Romberg Integration.
All the smart visitors should just reply to his other posts that do have comments enabled...
Too late, he beat the smart visitors to it. All comment threads are locked now.
He's improved it. Now he's taken his entire site offline. It now simply reads
Error establishing a database connection
Oh wait, that was us.
There's a new way to present the user with error messages!
It really doesn't, actually. The only time that a company would have a problem with this is when they distribute their plugin or theme. Any company which makes a WP template or theme is absolutely not required to open source it unless they distribute it. This means, obviously, that the majority of company-specific plugins and themes are not going to need to be opensourced.
The only companies which stand to be hurt by this are the ones which have a business model of making wordpress plugins/themes and selling them. Even then, they are not required to stop doing so. The requirement is just to license their software under the GPL and provide source if and only if someone requests it.
People act like the GPL will kill all software business as we know it, but those who do so clearly haven't even read the license.
Correction, the xr16 source is free for non-commercial purposes, not OSS.
MIPS is not open source. MIPS is a proprietary, licensed technology.
There are a few OSS processors out there, but they're pretty rare. One example is the xr16.
The issue is that there are lots of frequently read data blocks in /home, /tmp, /swap, etc. and there are lots of infrequently accessed data blocks in /boot, /bin, and /usr. Storing infrequently read data on a fast device and frequently read data on a slow device is inefficient. I want a system which puts the frequently read data on a fast device, and the infrequently read data on a slow device.
The idea is that I want to automate the management of which data are stored on the SSD. Entire files need not be cached, only their hot sectors. By using a SSD directly, you lose the benefits of keeping infrequently accessed bits of data out of the SSD, reserving it only for the most commonly accessed data.
Doing it this way makes the majority of the filesystem perform better, whereas using a normal SSD+HDD configuration requires you to actively manage where your most frequently used data are.
It'd sure be nice if you knew what you were talking about.
Power supplies do not fail randomly. They fail as a function of wear and abuse. Heat is the primary determining factor, as with most electronics.
Raid has no beneficial effect on SSDs. The failure mode of an SSD is FAR different from that of an HDD. Because SSDs fail to a read-only mode, there is little point in running SSD RAID for data security.
SSD's DO NOT use battery backed RAM. They use capacitor backed RAM. (I've opened one up, and there were two 4.7F Aerogel capacitors, no batteries). This drastically changes your battery failure claim.
Your concept of "reasonable size" and the OP's are different. Remember, his original drive which has been in operation for *15 years* is only just now filling up. Potentially, a 1GB drive would last another 15 years. 32GB will be completely suitable and "reasonable."
Rewrite can be far less of an issue than you think. Intel's ssd (admittedly, this is the most expensive one on the market) is rated for 100GB/day of continuous writes for 5 years. XP or Vista will work just fine in this environment. Much like a previous comment, I would suggest underclocking a processor, which makes this machine fundamentally incompatible with Vista. XP or Linux would both be good options. DOS emulation on both platforms is well established.
Switching gears now, to the OP:
For a processor, you should stick to media-center processors. These processors are designed to be very low power in order to keep the noise level from fans down. If you couple a low power processor with a passive cooling solution such as thermalright cooling towers and a 120mm fan duct, you can keep the processor fan out of the equation.
Avoid moving parts wherever possible. There are a few power supplies available that use heatpipes to bring the heat out of the supply, to a radiator grid that protrudes from the back. There are not, unfortunately, equivalent solutions for the CPU fan. You also need air circulation over your motherboard. This means that you need to be very careful about what kind of case you buy. The case needs to have dust management because dust is the primary cause of failure in fans. Try to avoid cheap sleeve bearing fans, and buy either ball bearing or hydro-wave bearing fans.
To summarize:
Processor: low power, underclocked/undervolted processor, AMD used to have some 35W processors, but those should be available from intel as well now.
Heatsink: Use a heatpipe cooler with a duct to the rear exhaust fan
Motherboard: No electrolytic caps, use IGP only if there is a heatpiped cooling solution.
RAM: use heatsinked RAM, underclock & undervolt if possible.
HDD: Use an SSD with a big write tolerance (intel's 100GB/day is good). Consider creating a ramdisk for intensive activities, get the OS to store the ramdisk to the drive on shutdown, and restore it on startup.
Power Supply: Try for a passive cooling solution, but do not go over a factor of 5 above your average load (e.g. your computer draws 100W, do not go over 500W). Underloading supplies can lead to early failures.
OS: You're stuck with an emulated solution regardless, since this is a DOS application. Might as well go with Linux, since you have better control over reads/writes.
Here's one I haven't seen mentioned yet:
Put it on a UPS and configure it to initiate immediate, safe, shutdown on power loss. This will cut down on failures due to power loss.
The obvious answer is traffic shaping. They'll let you store as much as you want! And you transfer as much to them or from them as the connection can handle! Too bad you only get a 56k.
On top of the FUD above, CNET has likely confused the Window Manager with the OS. Beauty and intuition absolutely should take a back seat to functionality in an OS. Not so in a Window Manager, there it is important for beauty, intuition and usability to come to the forefront, which is what projects like compiz-fusion are all about.
This is a bit of a simplification, but here's how the low-voltage thing actually works:
First, a little background. The majority of power consumption of a digital device is the power consumed as it passes between the "on" (or saturated) state and the "off" state. When a transistor (or in this case, a MOSFET) is "on", it has a low resistance, and thus a low power consumption due to I^2R. When a transistor is off, it has a high resistance, and thus little current flows, which means it has a low power consumption. It's that in between stage that sucks up all the juice.
The point of getting to lower voltage is that less current flows during these transient conditions. V^2/R dictates that dropping the voltage has a large effect on power consumption.
Doing a die shrink seems not to make any sense based on this information. Lowering the "on" resistance would seem to increase the current which flows during a transition. The die shrink generally means that lower voltages can be used. In addition to this, it brings about lower gate capacitance, which is where most current flows during non-transition stages. These lower gate capacitances also serve to shorten the time that the MOSFETs are "on", and that reduces power consumption.
The problem I have with the OP is that
The N95 post-processed the image, by CNet's own admission. Then they didn't post-process the rest of the images. If vibrancy is the top measure of quality, they should at least be running a batch auto-levels on the images afterwards.
But there's another problem. Vibrancy isn't the top measure of quality for digital cameras. With digital photography, taking the picture is just the first step in a process. That's when the photo-editing begins.
If I had the option of implementing QoS at the ISP end on my connection, that would be3 my own choice, and should keep them safe. They could just make it part of the sign up process. "Check this box if you want us not to run QoS on your connection."
True enough. I'm not opposed to traffic shaping in the pursuit of low latency for games/voip/other time sensitive apps, but when the telecom companies decide that it's a good plan to charge me for bandwidth, the provider for bandwidth, and then cahrge the provider for delivery to me, it's starting to get ridiculous.
Next thing, they'll charge me extra for high speed delivery of certain content. It'll be just like a satellite TV company... you pay $4/mo for youtube, $4/mo for google... etc. etc. etc.
Traffic shaping is ok for QoS purposes, but source-based delivery restrictions are, frankly, just plain bad for everyone but the telecoms.