we already have that for the first two. a social security card.
Which supports implicitly my point as to the futility. No ID system is going to be entirely foolproof. IDs can be faked, and security for them can be hacked, so restricting rights even further is a futile measure with no endgame other than a police state.
as for crossing state lines, i doubt there will ever be an ID necessary for that unless the government wants to put checkpoints on every crossing. which would never happen.
If we go too much further down this road, it will become a financial issue for the states and will place pressure on the states to "secure" their borders, so don't count on it not happening.
Modern politics is just too bizarre. The Republicans used to be the ones who were for less government involvement in an individuals life, then the Democrats appeared to have taken up that flag, but now with the National ID card (papers please), both parties seem to be endorsing this movement.
For all you extreme left wing whakos start hollering, think about this: How much longer will it be until we have to present a National ID card to take out a loan, open a bank account, cross state lines, and more? Already it is being proposed that you will not be able to board a plane unless you have a National ID card. So, what about those who can afford their own planes? Will they be allowed more anonymity than those with fewer resources? What about purchasing items like automobiles? Those who can afford to pay cash for an automobile in its entirety would be able to do so while those who have to take out a loan are again restricted to using a bank and thus the National ID card again. How about healthcare? Those that can afford to pay for services completely will not have to worry about health care insurance and therefore will not be tracked.
Before any of you ultra-right wing neocon folks start bashing me for this, how about realizing that a National ID card will essentially enable all sorts of purchase related tracking to take place. You can now welcome federally mandated and controlled tracking and access to guns. For example, when other states decide to buy into the fear and make.50 cal rifles illegal, they will be able to track purchases of ammunition and deliver jack-booted thugs to your door to take you away, or at the very least, prohibit you from doing any business across state lines or within states that ban those rifles if politicians decide to play that game against individuals. You can also kiss any anonymity away when dealing with private corporations as the National ID card will enable any and all transactions through banks, individuals and more to be closely monitored.
What happened to common sense and the political middle road?
What are hard core scientists - persumably people doing work - doing making such frequent presentations and running high traffic websites on their desktop workstations?
Presentations are part of the process of communicating your science and in fact, if you are unable to do this, you are hobbling your own work. I have presented data and our work at conferences and invited talks around the world.
Shouldn't they be doing research (aside from grant requuests, I suppose) and not tying up a desktop running a web server?
Thanks for telling me what I should be doing with my career and how astute of you to be able to comment on what scientists *should* be doing. However, I will let you know that running the server is part of the process of communication for our work. As to my blog, it is a means to communicate with family and friends around the world, share my photography and that is done on my own time, thanks.
I think most IT folks would cringe at every employee running their own webserver in their organization.
Perhaps they might. I'd like to think that I am valuable enough to my organization that they not only permit, but encourage my blogging. The fact that I also maintain servers for education and scientific work and collaboration also tends to be helpful to my organization.
I presume you found far more efficient applications to run on your Macs, and the switch of OS made the switch of applications automatic.
Some applications we are writing/creating/coding to better suit our purposes. Other applications actually appear to be working better on OS X and integrate in with our work flow quite nicely. We still run a few Windows machines, but I have them running headless and behind my MacPro so they never see the outside world, security issues and all.
Since MacPros use the same processors available to Windows and Linux Oses, one must presume that the new applications you chose are the things running better, as calculations are calculations to a processor.
There is also the system architecture to consider as most compute platforms are more than their CPUs. Given that the MacPro has completely independent data busses, one can run calculations and occupy the CPU completely while saturating the IO bus, never touching the CPU. It's pretty nice actually.
I guess I'm a little skepticle of your fanboi wording.
1. This one Mac is truly, stupendously, orgasmically amazing as you describe, and Google are _idiots_ for building Linux server farms or
Actually those three links went to two systems, but yes... they are stupendously, orgasmically amazing machines that can dish it out. The Webvision link used to point to the site when it was hosted on a little 233Mhz G3 iMac that at it's peak, served up to 200,000 graphically intensive pages to unique users without even a hiccup. It has since migrated to a Mac Mini where it continues to serve it up. As to Google..... those guys are hardly idiots. I know more than one uber smart PhD in computer science that has been recruited by them. In fact, Google is now competing head on with the previous largest employer of mathematicians on the planet for talent, the National Security Agency. In addition to hiring the best talent, they can also ship a product as evidenced by their tremendous productivity of high quality products. It would be safe to say that I am just about a big a fan of Google as I am of Apple.
2. The Slashdot Effect ain't what it used to be.
This is also true. The biggest contributor of traffic to my blog is Google image search while the largest spikes of traffic I've seen on my blog come not from Slashdot anymore, but more from BoingBoing and Digg. In fact, I've been seeing a larger increase in traffic from places like multiply.com and traffic falling off from Slashdot, perhaps indicating that Slashdot is in decline. If I were in charge, I'd start using the Slashdot clout to start buffing up capacity and presence like Multiply and other sources to stay out ahead. In fact, if I had advertising on my site (which I voluntarily do not), I'd move some of my resources/presence from Slashdot to other services to maximize profit. I hope this changes as I've been on Slashdot for quite some time and have benefitted greatly from some of the discussions and friendships gained over the years. I'd love to see a resurgent Slashdot!
Yeah, I'm not too worried about this as I've been moving mission critical functions off of this server and it is now principally hosting the low traffic lab site and my (much higher traffic) blog. The performance is also actually pretty good and I've had a bit of fun watching loads in the past when an article has been linked on BoingBoing or one of the other higher volume sites. It also turns out that available bandwidth is the biggest factor in performance as the graphics intensive Webvision site used to be hosted on an old 233 Mhz G3 iMac and it could sustain loads of up to 200k visits from unique visitors per day. At least that was the highest load I ever saw on that machine. It is now being hosted on a Mac Mini and the content is being made freely available to any and all interested parties, so traffic on that can only do Webvision and our lab site good in terms of ranking and such, especially given our move into certain scientific areas like metabolomics.
What I got irritated about was the DOS attack that appeared to start quickly on a couple of the servers, only to terminate soon after my posting about the attack. It was not terribly well coordinated and appeared to be coming from two IPs only, but it still gets under ones skin a bit. No real damage was done and the machines were able to continue serving up their goodness, so it will likely not be escalated.
Thanks for the feedback though and best regards,
Bryan aka BWJones
Re:What can a Mac do that a Win/Linux machine cant
on
Windows Expert Jumps Ship
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's how you use it son! LOL
Seriously though, it is in the implementation mostly and the ethos secondarily. These things are harder to quantify and you essentially just have to experience it first person rather than trying to academically pick apart the differences, because then you would simply be arguing about interface design, code design, and aesthetics. Basically, the OS simply does not get in your way to perform actions, like supporting USB drives or external peripherals. On OS X, they simply work and with Windows, it's always popping up messages saying "I see you are trying to add new hardware" or something like that. We've simply found that productivity is much higher with OS X than it is with Windows because of all the little stuff like this. The hardware itself is actually pretty good (windows generally runs faster on Mac hardware than it does commodity and the thought that goes into its design is stunning. I still think that the G4 case design is one of the best computer case designs in history, but the same holds true for the OS as well. It is good to see NeXTstep fully mature in OS X and I look forward to what productivity gains 10.5 is going to bring.
To the little assholes that are attempting a DOS attack on my servers..... You are being monitored and given that these servers are also being used in and for federally funded work, you have attracted the attention of a number of people who are taking this pretty seriously.
There are some issues certainly of migrating from one platform to any other platform, but it has been interesting to see a number of long time Windows users in hard core sciences with entrenched work flows that made them very dependent upon Windows to make the switch. When I joined the current group I was in, I essentially catalyzed a complete switch of our lab that is now percolating to many other labs in the group. These switchers have not and are not switching because I kept hitting them over the head with how great the platform is. Rather, they kept seeing the amazing presentations I gave with the help of apps like Keynote, or how easy it was to host a number of high traffic websites from a single OS X machine (including my blog), our lab site, and Webvision among a number of others. Or even how easy it was for me to replace an SGI, a Windows machine and a older Mac with a single incredibly powerful workstation running OS X. The new MacPros are one of the most amazingly powerful systems for the dollar that I've ever used making scientific calculations quick and easy.
Funny (not as in ha ha) because as I recall back in 1983 the record companies acknowledging that CDs *were* expensive but that the price would come down as the number of CD sales went up. Back then a record album ran around $7 US and CDs were anywhere from $13-18 US and I could as a 13 year not afford many CDs, but did I ever load up on all those punk 45s, likely outspending what I would have on CDs over time. What the record companies can not apparently figure out is that if priced affordably, some sales are money in the pocket versus no sales and no money in the pocket. Judging from the precipitous fall in music sales and revenues over the past few years from lousy music, over priced music, DRM and bad will from the RIAA, they obviously just don't get it. Now, if they were smart.... record companies would *give away* music from bands just starting out and from the biggest bands out there and make money from tours. Bands in the middle of the spectrum could be the "middle-class" of the record companies that could provide the most profit after small bands graduate into the middle class and start selling their music, touring as they want.
Current depth limitations of say the Seawolf class subs are classified, but the HY-100 steel that comprises their hulls provides for operational depths of between 300 to 533 meters although, Jane's quotes the depth of about 2000 feet. Smaller experimental hulls using HY-100 can allow for deeper dives, for instance Sea Cliff and Turtle were reportedly capable of reaching 10,000 feet.
I mean, I can still see where there are questions to be raised, but the write-up here is completely dishonest.
The O'Reilly link timed out on me (twice), so admittedly I took the article/Slashdot post at face value (and prior experience) before responding. Thanks for the clarification and I'll be happy to take my moderation lumps now...:-) Of course this is another example of Slashdot's poor editorial policy and why I've been spending less time here than in the past.
This is not new behavior. Remember when Microsoft tried to hire "individuals" to perform "grassroots" work including writing letters to the Department of Justice and letters to the editors of papers around the country concerning the anti-trust trial? Look, I have friends at Microsoft and there are truly some brilliant folks up there, but what the hell is the marketing department doing? Are they *that* ethically challenged? Or is it that they are *that* desperate to be cool and loved? How about a policy of honesty and if there is something that you want, then why not have your Microsoft PR department make the edits? Is that too obvious? It would certainly present other ethical dilemmas, but at least it would be more honest than hiring supposed "impartial" third parties to do your work for you.
The issue here is that Apple's patch can be construed as "new functionality" as there is significantly increased network performance in products that have been shipping for months, whereas most of the patches from MS are attempting to fix existing, yet broken functionality.
I also have to agree that this has been going on for quite some time in the process of performing background checks on those individuals who are applying for clearances through DISCO. I remember back in my undergraduate days being stunned to be told that one of the principal indicators of whether or not I would receive clearance is "good credit". The reasoning is sound enough on a number of levels including your level of vulnerability, your honesty, sense of honor and duty etc...etc...etc...
As much of a critic as I am of this administration, the individuals cited in this article are persons with clearance who are being investigated as part of the process of revoking clearance at the very minimum. Remember, that when you agree to hold a clearance, you are now in the same club as many of the armed services with respect to Constitutional rights and you voluntarily agree to be so when signing up for armed service or agree to hold a clearance.
Fundamentally, I do agree with you and have seen third world conditions that make you simply want to sit down and shake your head at the overwhelming issues driving these situations. If you read my other comment in this thread, you would see that I maintain that the sense of desperation in many cases (especially here in the US) is artificially generated.
What I objected to is the glib statement "Our poor, are materially richer than many other country's middle class.", which does not really take into account all of the issues and minimizes the issues facing many poor and disenfranchised.
Well certainly if you're talking about homeless and the poorest of the poor in any country that is true.
I actually *was* talking about the homeless and the poorest of the poor who have on average, very few options or resources available to them. As to your other points, I do agree with you that the "statistical" definition, rather than the procedural definition supports your statement.
Our poor, are materially richer than many other country's middle class.
Holy $#!^ dude...... Have you ever spent any time in a major urban center? Have you ever worked in a soup kitchen or helped provide services to the poor and indigent? Comments like this are born out of a fundamental ignorance of reality brought on by steep economic pyramids that encourage cultural isolation.
I agree with you completely with respect to capitalism as a model and am in no way against capitalism. However, in the US, while there are possibilities for many to achieve great economic prosperity, there is also the possibility of losing *everything* including health care coverage and the roof over your head and this in many cases drives desperation. I would argue further that endemic violence arises more from a sense of desperation than anything else and in more and more cultures exposed to banal media that glorifies prosperity above all else, a sense of artificial desperation drives violent acts and petty crime.
What are the solutions? Social engineering arising out of more education and a focus on education at all levels from grade school to graduate school is certainly a major component to help drive priorities combined with some reform of systems to provide a fundamental level of health care coverage combined with more resources geared towards public housing and support of small to mid-size business. Other than that, I'd like to see less government in our lives with respect to politically and religiously motivated agendas.
It certainly can be argued that there are a number of factors contributing to higher rates of violence in cultures including steeper economic pyramids, loss of access to human services and disenfranchisement. For instance, in cultures that have a relatively high average wage and flatter economic pyramid, combined with services including universal health care, countries such as New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, Norway, the Netherlands, and Canada among many others, there is a significantly lower rate of violence. Granted in all of those countries there are poor and those with fantastically extensive portfolios, but the statistical disparity is not as extensive as it is among countries like Brazil and the US.
It helps if you heed the prominently displayed signs and take your laptop out of the bag as instructed before you present it for inspection.
Not if you are rushed off of the plane to care for another passenger (turns out was VIP and foreign national) who is having a medical emergency. We did not even get to the gate where you are officially supposed to present your materials, yet you are still told that you have to endure an inspection of belongings and documentation even when trying to obtain medical care for someone. Kind of absurd if you ask me.....
According to Sandisk themselves at best you will get 2,000,000 erase cycles per sector.
Is that substantially different from magnetic media? This is not my area of expertise, but I seem to remember reading that magnetic media (hard drives) has similar duty cycles.
Yup, people eager to line up to pay over the odds for flashy underpowered trinkets are the ideal market for the initial release of this technology.
Ha ha ha. Seriously though, the ideal market for this technology has been defense related work for a number of years now. However, costs are decreasing to a point where we can now start putting these drives in Toughbooks (to make 'em even tougher), or portable devices that do tend to get bumped and thrown around a fair bit more. Just witness my last passage through customs here in the US where a "Homeland Security" officer inverted my laptop bag, dumping out the contents onto a desk from over a foot high. Laptop, point and shoot camera, cell phone and a portable hard drive loaded with photos all came crashing down. If there were flash discs instead of hard drives, I would have been perhaps less pissed off.
The other category where flash drives are absolutely critical is for lots of remotely control data gathering devices. One of my friends who has been working on remotely piloted vehicles has been clamoring for just this sort of technology as it is much more rugged than hard drives for their applications (hard landings).
Hrmmmm..... just in time for Macworld? Oh please, oh please, oh please.....
I've written about this before in a number of places, but most recently here on my last trip to Argentina, but I am hoping that we will see a revised 12in Powerbook nee MacBook Pro (or smaller) in the next Macworld because I really do miss the smaller form factor. It would be tremendously useful for travelers and photographers as well as giving us better battery life.
I am currently using a 15in Powerbook that I traded up from when the 12in Powerbook was cancelled, but a smaller footprint would help tremendously with travel. With the 15in Powerbook/Macbook Pro, I love the illuminated keyboard and the performance, but would be willing to pay a premium to carry a smaller laptop, subnotebook or tablet running OS X. It does not even have to have an optical drive as I rip movies I purchase or rent to the hard drive for long airline flights and in fact, if we could get flash drives down a bit in price (or get a sweet deal on bulk purchases for the manufacturer), it would be possible to even get rid of the hard drive provided we could still pack 30-40 GBs of storage space in the device. Battery life would be improved and if you combine it with a 10in diagonal new technology LED display (or OLED), we may even be able to get away with seven or eight hours of honest full on battery life. So Steve, come on dude. We've talked about this before several times. The technology currently exists or is damn close and I am sure there is a market for such a device, so please, please, please.
Slashdot Mirror
we already have that for the first two. a social security card.
Which supports implicitly my point as to the futility. No ID system is going to be entirely foolproof. IDs can be faked, and security for them can be hacked, so restricting rights even further is a futile measure with no endgame other than a police state.
as for crossing state lines, i doubt there will ever be an ID necessary for that unless the government wants to put checkpoints on every crossing. which would never happen.
If we go too much further down this road, it will become a financial issue for the states and will place pressure on the states to "secure" their borders, so don't count on it not happening.
Modern politics is just too bizarre. The Republicans used to be the ones who were for less government involvement in an individuals life, then the Democrats appeared to have taken up that flag, but now with the National ID card (papers please), both parties seem to be endorsing this movement.
.50 cal rifles illegal, they will be able to track purchases of ammunition and deliver jack-booted thugs to your door to take you away, or at the very least, prohibit you from doing any business across state lines or within states that ban those rifles if politicians decide to play that game against individuals. You can also kiss any anonymity away when dealing with private corporations as the National ID card will enable any and all transactions through banks, individuals and more to be closely monitored.
For all you extreme left wing whakos start hollering, think about this: How much longer will it be until we have to present a National ID card to take out a loan, open a bank account, cross state lines, and more? Already it is being proposed that you will not be able to board a plane unless you have a National ID card. So, what about those who can afford their own planes? Will they be allowed more anonymity than those with fewer resources? What about purchasing items like automobiles? Those who can afford to pay cash for an automobile in its entirety would be able to do so while those who have to take out a loan are again restricted to using a bank and thus the National ID card again. How about healthcare? Those that can afford to pay for services completely will not have to worry about health care insurance and therefore will not be tracked.
Before any of you ultra-right wing neocon folks start bashing me for this, how about realizing that a National ID card will essentially enable all sorts of purchase related tracking to take place. You can now welcome federally mandated and controlled tracking and access to guns. For example, when other states decide to buy into the fear and make
What happened to common sense and the political middle road?
What are hard core scientists - persumably people doing work - doing making such frequent presentations and running high traffic websites on their desktop workstations?
;-)
Presentations are part of the process of communicating your science and in fact, if you are unable to do this, you are hobbling your own work. I have presented data and our work at conferences and invited talks around the world.
Shouldn't they be doing research (aside from grant requuests, I suppose) and not tying up a desktop running a web server?
Thanks for telling me what I should be doing with my career and how astute of you to be able to comment on what scientists *should* be doing. However, I will let you know that running the server is part of the process of communication for our work. As to my blog, it is a means to communicate with family and friends around the world, share my photography and that is done on my own time, thanks.
I think most IT folks would cringe at every employee running their own webserver in their organization.
Perhaps they might. I'd like to think that I am valuable enough to my organization that they not only permit, but encourage my blogging. The fact that I also maintain servers for education and scientific work and collaboration also tends to be helpful to my organization.
I presume you found far more efficient applications to run on your Macs, and the switch of OS made the switch of applications automatic.
Some applications we are writing/creating/coding to better suit our purposes. Other applications actually appear to be working better on OS X and integrate in with our work flow quite nicely. We still run a few Windows machines, but I have them running headless and behind my MacPro so they never see the outside world, security issues and all.
Since MacPros use the same processors available to Windows and Linux Oses, one must presume that the new applications you chose are the things running better, as calculations are calculations to a processor.
There is also the system architecture to consider as most compute platforms are more than their CPUs. Given that the MacPro has completely independent data busses, one can run calculations and occupy the CPU completely while saturating the IO bus, never touching the CPU. It's pretty nice actually.
I guess I'm a little skepticle of your fanboi wording.
As am I of your spelling....
*waves*
Thanks Ed!
1. This one Mac is truly, stupendously, orgasmically amazing as you describe, and Google are _idiots_ for building Linux server farms or
Actually those three links went to two systems, but yes... they are stupendously, orgasmically amazing machines that can dish it out. The Webvision link used to point to the site when it was hosted on a little 233Mhz G3 iMac that at it's peak, served up to 200,000 graphically intensive pages to unique users without even a hiccup. It has since migrated to a Mac Mini where it continues to serve it up. As to Google..... those guys are hardly idiots. I know more than one uber smart PhD in computer science that has been recruited by them. In fact, Google is now competing head on with the previous largest employer of mathematicians on the planet for talent, the National Security Agency. In addition to hiring the best talent, they can also ship a product as evidenced by their tremendous productivity of high quality products. It would be safe to say that I am just about a big a fan of Google as I am of Apple.
2. The Slashdot Effect ain't what it used to be.
This is also true. The biggest contributor of traffic to my blog is Google image search while the largest spikes of traffic I've seen on my blog come not from Slashdot anymore, but more from BoingBoing and Digg. In fact, I've been seeing a larger increase in traffic from places like multiply.com and traffic falling off from Slashdot, perhaps indicating that Slashdot is in decline. If I were in charge, I'd start using the Slashdot clout to start buffing up capacity and presence like Multiply and other sources to stay out ahead. In fact, if I had advertising on my site (which I voluntarily do not), I'd move some of my resources/presence from Slashdot to other services to maximize profit. I hope this changes as I've been on Slashdot for quite some time and have benefitted greatly from some of the discussions and friendships gained over the years. I'd love to see a resurgent Slashdot!
It appears to have stopped and the IP addresses have been logged. The nice thing is that traffic out never really got stepped on.
Thanks though.
Thanks Nerftoe,
Yeah, I'm not too worried about this as I've been moving mission critical functions off of this server and it is now principally hosting the low traffic lab site and my (much higher traffic) blog. The performance is also actually pretty good and I've had a bit of fun watching loads in the past when an article has been linked on BoingBoing or one of the other higher volume sites. It also turns out that available bandwidth is the biggest factor in performance as the graphics intensive Webvision site used to be hosted on an old 233 Mhz G3 iMac and it could sustain loads of up to 200k visits from unique visitors per day. At least that was the highest load I ever saw on that machine. It is now being hosted on a Mac Mini and the content is being made freely available to any and all interested parties, so traffic on that can only do Webvision and our lab site good in terms of ranking and such, especially given our move into certain scientific areas like metabolomics.
What I got irritated about was the DOS attack that appeared to start quickly on a couple of the servers, only to terminate soon after my posting about the attack. It was not terribly well coordinated and appeared to be coming from two IPs only, but it still gets under ones skin a bit. No real damage was done and the machines were able to continue serving up their goodness, so it will likely not be escalated.
Thanks for the feedback though and best regards,
Bryan aka BWJones
It's how you use it son! LOL
Seriously though, it is in the implementation mostly and the ethos secondarily. These things are harder to quantify and you essentially just have to experience it first person rather than trying to academically pick apart the differences, because then you would simply be arguing about interface design, code design, and aesthetics. Basically, the OS simply does not get in your way to perform actions, like supporting USB drives or external peripherals. On OS X, they simply work and with Windows, it's always popping up messages saying "I see you are trying to add new hardware" or something like that. We've simply found that productivity is much higher with OS X than it is with Windows because of all the little stuff like this. The hardware itself is actually pretty good (windows generally runs faster on Mac hardware than it does commodity and the thought that goes into its design is stunning. I still think that the G4 case design is one of the best computer case designs in history, but the same holds true for the OS as well. It is good to see NeXTstep fully mature in OS X and I look forward to what productivity gains 10.5 is going to bring.
To the little assholes that are attempting a DOS attack on my servers..... You are being monitored and given that these servers are also being used in and for federally funded work, you have attracted the attention of a number of people who are taking this pretty seriously.
There are some issues certainly of migrating from one platform to any other platform, but it has been interesting to see a number of long time Windows users in hard core sciences with entrenched work flows that made them very dependent upon Windows to make the switch. When I joined the current group I was in, I essentially catalyzed a complete switch of our lab that is now percolating to many other labs in the group. These switchers have not and are not switching because I kept hitting them over the head with how great the platform is. Rather, they kept seeing the amazing presentations I gave with the help of apps like Keynote, or how easy it was to host a number of high traffic websites from a single OS X machine (including my blog), our lab site, and Webvision among a number of others. Or even how easy it was for me to replace an SGI, a Windows machine and a older Mac with a single incredibly powerful workstation running OS X. The new MacPros are one of the most amazingly powerful systems for the dollar that I've ever used making scientific calculations quick and easy.
Funny (not as in ha ha) because as I recall back in 1983 the record companies acknowledging that CDs *were* expensive but that the price would come down as the number of CD sales went up. Back then a record album ran around $7 US and CDs were anywhere from $13-18 US and I could as a 13 year not afford many CDs, but did I ever load up on all those punk 45s, likely outspending what I would have on CDs over time. What the record companies can not apparently figure out is that if priced affordably, some sales are money in the pocket versus no sales and no money in the pocket. Judging from the precipitous fall in music sales and revenues over the past few years from lousy music, over priced music, DRM and bad will from the RIAA, they obviously just don't get it. Now, if they were smart.... record companies would *give away* music from bands just starting out and from the biggest bands out there and make money from tours. Bands in the middle of the spectrum could be the "middle-class" of the record companies that could provide the most profit after small bands graduate into the middle class and start selling their music, touring as they want.
Current depth limitations of say the Seawolf class subs are classified, but the HY-100 steel that comprises their hulls provides for operational depths of between 300 to 533 meters although, Jane's quotes the depth of about 2000 feet. Smaller experimental hulls using HY-100 can allow for deeper dives, for instance Sea Cliff and Turtle were reportedly capable of reaching 10,000 feet.
I mean, I can still see where there are questions to be raised, but the write-up here is completely dishonest.
:-) Of course this is another example of Slashdot's poor editorial policy and why I've been spending less time here than in the past.
The O'Reilly link timed out on me (twice), so admittedly I took the article/Slashdot post at face value (and prior experience) before responding. Thanks for the clarification and I'll be happy to take my moderation lumps now...
This is not new behavior. Remember when Microsoft tried to hire "individuals" to perform "grassroots" work including writing letters to the Department of Justice and letters to the editors of papers around the country concerning the anti-trust trial? Look, I have friends at Microsoft and there are truly some brilliant folks up there, but what the hell is the marketing department doing? Are they *that* ethically challenged? Or is it that they are *that* desperate to be cool and loved? How about a policy of honesty and if there is something that you want, then why not have your Microsoft PR department make the edits? Is that too obvious? It would certainly present other ethical dilemmas, but at least it would be more honest than hiring supposed "impartial" third parties to do your work for you.
The issue here is that Apple's patch can be construed as "new functionality" as there is significantly increased network performance in products that have been shipping for months, whereas most of the patches from MS are attempting to fix existing, yet broken functionality.
I also have to agree that this has been going on for quite some time in the process of performing background checks on those individuals who are applying for clearances through DISCO. I remember back in my undergraduate days being stunned to be told that one of the principal indicators of whether or not I would receive clearance is "good credit". The reasoning is sound enough on a number of levels including your level of vulnerability, your honesty, sense of honor and duty etc...etc...etc...
As much of a critic as I am of this administration, the individuals cited in this article are persons with clearance who are being investigated as part of the process of revoking clearance at the very minimum. Remember, that when you agree to hold a clearance, you are now in the same club as many of the armed services with respect to Constitutional rights and you voluntarily agree to be so when signing up for armed service or agree to hold a clearance.
Fundamentally, I do agree with you and have seen third world conditions that make you simply want to sit down and shake your head at the overwhelming issues driving these situations. If you read my other comment in this thread, you would see that I maintain that the sense of desperation in many cases (especially here in the US) is artificially generated.
What I objected to is the glib statement "Our poor, are materially richer than many other country's middle class.", which does not really take into account all of the issues and minimizes the issues facing many poor and disenfranchised.
Well certainly if you're talking about homeless and the poorest of the poor in any country that is true.
I actually *was* talking about the homeless and the poorest of the poor who have on average, very few options or resources available to them. As to your other points, I do agree with you that the "statistical" definition, rather than the procedural definition supports your statement.
Our poor, are materially richer than many other country's middle class.
Holy $#!^ dude...... Have you ever spent any time in a major urban center? Have you ever worked in a soup kitchen or helped provide services to the poor and indigent? Comments like this are born out of a fundamental ignorance of reality brought on by steep economic pyramids that encourage cultural isolation.
I agree with you completely with respect to capitalism as a model and am in no way against capitalism. However, in the US, while there are possibilities for many to achieve great economic prosperity, there is also the possibility of losing *everything* including health care coverage and the roof over your head and this in many cases drives desperation. I would argue further that endemic violence arises more from a sense of desperation than anything else and in more and more cultures exposed to banal media that glorifies prosperity above all else, a sense of artificial desperation drives violent acts and petty crime.
What are the solutions? Social engineering arising out of more education and a focus on education at all levels from grade school to graduate school is certainly a major component to help drive priorities combined with some reform of systems to provide a fundamental level of health care coverage combined with more resources geared towards public housing and support of small to mid-size business. Other than that, I'd like to see less government in our lives with respect to politically and religiously motivated agendas.
It certainly can be argued that there are a number of factors contributing to higher rates of violence in cultures including steeper economic pyramids, loss of access to human services and disenfranchisement. For instance, in cultures that have a relatively high average wage and flatter economic pyramid, combined with services including universal health care, countries such as New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, Norway, the Netherlands, and Canada among many others, there is a significantly lower rate of violence. Granted in all of those countries there are poor and those with fantastically extensive portfolios, but the statistical disparity is not as extensive as it is among countries like Brazil and the US.
It helps if you heed the prominently displayed signs and take your laptop out of the bag as instructed before you present it for inspection.
Not if you are rushed off of the plane to care for another passenger (turns out was VIP and foreign national) who is having a medical emergency. We did not even get to the gate where you are officially supposed to present your materials, yet you are still told that you have to endure an inspection of belongings and documentation even when trying to obtain medical care for someone. Kind of absurd if you ask me.....
According to Sandisk themselves at best you will get 2,000,000 erase cycles per sector.
Is that substantially different from magnetic media? This is not my area of expertise, but I seem to remember reading that magnetic media (hard drives) has similar duty cycles.
Yup, people eager to line up to pay over the odds for flashy underpowered trinkets are the ideal market for the initial release of this technology.
Ha ha ha. Seriously though, the ideal market for this technology has been defense related work for a number of years now. However, costs are decreasing to a point where we can now start putting these drives in Toughbooks (to make 'em even tougher), or portable devices that do tend to get bumped and thrown around a fair bit more. Just witness my last passage through customs here in the US where a "Homeland Security" officer inverted my laptop bag, dumping out the contents onto a desk from over a foot high. Laptop, point and shoot camera, cell phone and a portable hard drive loaded with photos all came crashing down. If there were flash discs instead of hard drives, I would have been perhaps less pissed off.
The other category where flash drives are absolutely critical is for lots of remotely control data gathering devices. One of my friends who has been working on remotely piloted vehicles has been clamoring for just this sort of technology as it is much more rugged than hard drives for their applications (hard landings).
Hrmmmm..... just in time for Macworld? Oh please, oh please, oh please.....
I've written about this before in a number of places, but most recently here on my last trip to Argentina, but I am hoping that we will see a revised 12in Powerbook nee MacBook Pro (or smaller) in the next Macworld because I really do miss the smaller form factor. It would be tremendously useful for travelers and photographers as well as giving us better battery life.
I am currently using a 15in Powerbook that I traded up from when the 12in Powerbook was cancelled, but a smaller footprint would help tremendously with travel. With the 15in Powerbook/Macbook Pro, I love the illuminated keyboard and the performance, but would be willing to pay a premium to carry a smaller laptop, subnotebook or tablet running OS X. It does not even have to have an optical drive as I rip movies I purchase or rent to the hard drive for long airline flights and in fact, if we could get flash drives down a bit in price (or get a sweet deal on bulk purchases for the manufacturer), it would be possible to even get rid of the hard drive provided we could still pack 30-40 GBs of storage space in the device. Battery life would be improved and if you combine it with a 10in diagonal new technology LED display (or OLED), we may even be able to get away with seven or eight hours of honest full on battery life. So Steve, come on dude. We've talked about this before several times. The technology currently exists or is damn close and I am sure there is a market for such a device, so please, please, please.