I have hundreds of audiobook CDs sitting on a shelf, wasting space and plastic. I don't own a CD player, so I run them all past grip first and then they're something I can use. But that added step reduces their value to me, and increases their cost to the producer.
One DVD is a whole lot cheaper to make, package, ship, and shelve than ten CDs. So why not spend the extra money on a second DVD that includes high- and low-bitrate MP3s and FLAC files of the book? I know DVD-audio isn't something a lot of people can deal with, but DVD-audio on one disc and MP3s on the other would cover a lot of the listening public. And you can always sell the CDs for more to those who need them.
The LotR trilogy is 46 CDs. Stephen King's Dark Tower series is over 100. That's a lot of plastic to be carting around the world. I'd love to be able to get that data in a format that's not older than I am.
To argue that because your iTMS purchase went well and you have subsequently enjoyed the song(s) you purchased, the original purchase was a good idea, is logically false. When you gave Apple your money, you made a bet. For you it turned out well. For many others it turns out poorly. The advisability of making the purchase can only be judged in light of the gamble you took, not the outcome. Suppose you played Russian Roulette with a mortal enemy. And won. Does that make the original decision any less stupid? I should think not.
Read the EULA. In general, if anything goes wrong, it's you that's SOL, not Apple. They do address the issue of content being pulled from their servers between the time you pay for it and the time you download it (full refund), but the blanket statements elsewhere cover all other problems you might encounter, whether technical or legal, as in the cases, past and future, of Apple changing the license terms.
When you purchase a song off iTMS, you get something that will probably play. On Apple hardware. That you specifically authorize. Burning that song to a CD probably technically violates the DMCA, but as a practical matter that's not an issue. Even if you have no intention (and don't subsequently change your mind) of using the music on non-Apple-blessed hardware, there are plenty of ways to lose your music wholesale. Ever had a computer stolen with iTMS music on it? Or a flood, fire, etc.? Tried contacting your insurance company to replace the "property" you "purchased" and lost in said event? I could go on. You give up a lot buying DRM'd music, and if you un-DRM it, then from a legal point of view you might as well have just gotten it off limewire, or whatever the kids are using these days. If you don't un-DRM it and back it up offsite, you're just waiting for it to die in one of a plethora of ways. From my perspective, that's a foolish bet to make.
Except that buying DRM'd music is, objectively, a poor value proposition. So either a purchaser doesn't understand the agreement he/she is agreeing to, and is thus ignorant, or he/she does agree and believes he/she is getting something in return for the money. Which is not the case, thus an idiot.
To call someone an idiot for not believing in a god is bigotry.
To call someone an idiot for not believing in gravity is not.
The attitute you espouse is responsible for the decline of news reporting in the USA (and probably elsewhere). Some things really are true (or false) with no room for debate, and to say so speaks well of a person, not poorly.
I'm sure this makes me unpopular, but I'm going to say it anyway. Anyone who buys DRM'd music is either an idiot or ignorant, and it's a shame so few of them have learned their lesson yet. In this case, you're paying for a vague not-a-promise that you can probably listen to the music now and if you're really lucky you'll be able to listen in the future.
If music really needed DRM to be a profitable business, I wouldn't still be able to buy CDs. So the only reason I can buy a CD and turn it into MP3s yet can't buy those MP3s to start with is because some jackass in a skyscraper either doesn't understand his own business or is trying really hard to pretend not to.
That's only half the story. It's equally correct to say that the Gimp is not a drawing program, and that the Gimp developers should not duplicate the work of a drawing program's developers. Unix has been successful with a large array of small tools that do one thing and do it well (and play well with others). Microsoft has been successful throwing more features onto the fire when the flames burn low. To say that Microsoft's success with their method invalidates the Unix way is shortsighted.
It would be nice to have one app that has excellent drawing tools, excellent retouching tools, excellent compositing tools, costs nothing, and makes toast. But even Adobe splits these tools into multiple apps, and they don't have to do it for free. So while "use Inkscape" isn't the answer you want, and it isn't the ideal answer, it's also not an unreasonable answer.
If good software (often this is reduced to good UI design, which really ought to make the problem easier) were easy to write, don't you think somewhere during the past 50 or so years, someone would have figured it out and started a company to do it? And yet I have a hard time coming up with more than a half-dozen applications to which I'd give a score in the top 5-10% for satisfaction. No, I don't mean "more satisfying than 90% of software". I mean "90% satisfying". As in "less than 10% of things I try to do are harder than they should be".
So unless you've come up with a breakthrough in software or UI design (hint: you haven't), please stop killing trees to spread your words around. Thank you.
Let's see. If Microsoft made an ipod without the godawful itunes tie-in, and with better build quality, I'd be interested. Hell, I'd pay more than what an ipod costs for it. But they won't. Their aim is, apparently, "natural and seamless". But this is Microsoft we're talking about, who for all their UI research can't get it through their skulls that more is not better. Even Apple has been seduced by the dark side, and has photo and video and PIM crap and such clogging up their interface. And yet, they still can't play audiobooks decently without some fancy software hack.
Microsoft is going to look at the ipod and figure it out completely wrong but they'll charge forward boldly in the wrong direction with a bag full of Microsoft 1st generation product goo. Then the second generation will fix some of the problems of the first while continuing not to get the point. Call me in 2010 when maybe someone will be making an audio player that plays audio just right. It can be done. I have faith. I've used software where features that I think should exist do, and they're readily findable. It's wonderful. Someone fetch me this piece of the future and I will pay. Please.
Disk drive motors use 12V. Laptop drives (2.5" drives) use 5V exclusively, but standard desktop and server drives use 5V and 12V. SATA drives get 3.3V, 5V, and 12V. The VRMs that power your CPU and video card probably take their power off the 12V rail, as do many other components.
The reason you wouldn't want to power a machine off 5V is because you would need huge busses. Suppose you've got 40 svelte 1U servers in a rack, each drawing 100W. That's 4kW. Assuming that's a purely resistive load (hint: it's not), you'd need 800A at 5V for the whole rack. Are you familiar with the big connectors on car batteries? They're designed to pass less than half the 800A you'd need to run a rack off 5V, and your car battery only has to handle that for a few seconds while the engine is starting up; a rack would need to deal with that continuously. And that's for a pretty low-power rack.
Using 12V instead of 5V lets you get away with busses about 40% the size. Also, and probably more importantly, 12V DC is (IIRC - correct me if you're a PSU designer) easier to get efficiently than 5V DC. Once you split the 12V off into a few dozen servers, you can drop it down with small, fairly efficient CMOS regulators.
Er, yes. You're right. I meant the free not-Player app, but the wrong word came out of my mouth. Server lacks some of the new features of Workstation, in particular the USB toys, but is otherwise quite useful.
Also note EMC gives away quite a few Workstation copies at their various gigs, if you happen to be in or near a big enough city to cheaply attend.
Virtual machines are your friend. VMware Workstation is free, and it's pretty easy to set up a vanilla Windows install that will roll back to a snapshot when you're done using it, ready for its next dose of abuse. Perfect for doing dangerous or stupid things, whether in IE or not.
In MANY devices, the real problem is that the batteries drain. This doesn't help that in the least bit. This will not make your electric car go farther. This only helps the situation with ultra-high-drain requirements, where a normal battery just wouldn't work.
And in many devices (camera flashes, high-power or small-size flashlights, etc.) normal batteries just don't work well because the power requirements beat the hell out of them and they only deliver a small fraction of their nominal capacity (usually reported at C/20). For these devices, we have NiMH batteries. A NiMH AA cell will cheerfully discharge at 1A and still deliver its nearly-3WHr nominal capacity. Sure, they self-discharge in a few months and aren't suitable for all applications, but they're perfect for a lot of high-power applications.
Their table doesn't seem to include some important information. For example, is the wifi run by idiots (*cauatlantagh*) and blocks only outgoing traffic to port 80?
If the Anchorage AK airport can give away free wifi (and you know Ted Stevens personally trucked all those bits up to the frigid north), I'm sure as hell not paying some git $10 a day for it. Not when (s)he can't be bothered to block IMAP and SSH. HINT: If I don't even/notice/ you're trying to get me to pay for access until I've been using it for 20 minutes, you're doing something wrong.
People trust people (groups, companies, whatever) that they like. It's hard not to like the USPS. The post office is fast, cheap, courteous, and otherwise well run. Its website is well managed and contains more than enough information to efficiently use their services. The biggest downside I can find is that it's so popular that the lines are frequently long at the branch offices. This is what carrier pickup is for.
The USPS has, by far, the best package delivery service, in my opinion, for the small business or ebayer.
Parcel Post is cheap; Priority Mail only slightly less so. Carrier pick-up is the best thing ever. Send at least one priority or express mail package, and your mail carrier will pick up whatever else you happen to have that needs shipping at the same time, for free. I live fairly close to the nearest post office, about 5 miles round trip, yet even with that proximity it's nearly always cheaper to upgrade to priority mail so they'll pickup for free than it is to drive to the post office. Add in the value of my time and it's a no-brainer.
And when I do go to the post office, the people there are invariably (at least at the 3 post offices I frequent) well-informed. I have asked some rather difficult questions and the employees there know the answers to most of them off the top of their heads; the rest require some brief looking-up or asking a colleague. I have yet to stump them.
Contrast this with UPS, which told me with a straight face that although they would cheerfully take my money for insurance, they would deny any claim for damage to a $200 computer packed in the manufacturer's original box and styrofoam. But for an extra $70, they'd do a worse job packing it for me but might not blame me for dropping it off a shelf.
I don't have much experience with FedEx, but my impression is that they fall somewhere in the middle. The actual package delivery seems to be fairly competent (less damage than UPS, though to be fair I've only shipped lighter and therefore harder-to-damage packages with FedEx). Their service personnel can't hold a candle to the USPS though.
I don't know what the relative volumes for ebay versus Amazon and the like are, but ebay's certainly no slouch in terms of package volume, and parcel post and priority mail are quite popular because they're so easy to use. Even first class mail is useful because so many small technology items come in under the weight limits, and it's even cheaper than the package services.
I was curious to see if TFA mentioned ClearPlay, a company we heard about on/. a while ago that markets custom DVD players that read not only the DVD but also a database that categorizes the content on popular movies, allowing you to program the player to skip scenes of sex or violence or whatever bothers you. The company seems to still be in business, but apparently they're not popular enough to keep these custom DVDs out of the market. The effect is the same, but without the copyright concerns.
I seem to recall the/. comments at the time being fairly negative, but to me it seemed like a pretty good idea. I don't really like censorship in any form, but it's hard to argue with something as voluntary as buying a whole separate DVD player to keep your kids from seeing the naughty bits, if that's what gets your goat.
But any external gravitational forces will act very nearly identically upon both the tungsten 'sun' and the test sphere.
The net force exerted by nearby (distance to test system less than, say, 1000 times the distance between the test sphere and the 'sun') objects can be fairly trivially determined by measuring movement of the test sphere relative to some fixed point. After that, the effect of local gravitational attraction can be readily eliminated. Some measurement or calculation of gravitational noise caused by such things as orbiting satellites, people moving about, etc. would provide a baseline for how strong an effect would have to manifest to even be considered as evidence of some unknown phenomenon.
Things farther away won't interfere with the test much at all. The magnitude of interference is not proportional to the mass of the interfering object, since any force which acts equally on both the 'sun' and test sphere will have no impact on the results. The farther away an interfering object is, the smaller the difference in gravitational attraction between the 'sun' and test sphere would be. It is that difference, rather than the absolute magnitude of attraction, which would interfere with results.
The four SATA ports provided by the southbridge do not go through the PCI bus. They are part of the chipset, and connect to the CPU via hypertransport. The PCI SATA controller is onboard as well, but is a separate ASIC, connected to the southbridge via the PCI bus. On my particular board, there is an extra PCIe lane available which would have been a better choice for the extra SATA ports (250MB/sec each way theoretical bandwidth), except that Silicon Image currently makes only a 2-port PCIe chip, whereas the Sil3114 is a 4-port PCI part.
I just built a new file server for home use, using 4 300GB SATA drives and the slowest socket-939 CPU I could get (1.8Ghz Athlon 64) in a RAID5. I'm getting pretty close to the limits of the individual drives during testing, with just over 100MB/sec writes and just under 200MB/sec reads. CPU usage remains comfortably under 50% (that's the spikes; average is more like 20%) in that configuration, and dmesg reports my RAID6 checksumming speed at over 4GB/sec.
With the drives on the PCI SATA controller, I'm bus-limited (writes much faster to a degraded array, because only 3/4 as much data is actually being written to disk). With the drives on the chipset controller, I seem to be limited by the drives themselves. Hopefully later this summer I will be building a larger array and will be able to do more tests, but even with 8 drives I doubt I will be bottlenecking on the CPU.
Raid 0+1 and raid 1+0 are subtly different. And raid6 is completely different. There is no mirroring at all in raid6. Raid5 is a special case of an m+n parity scheme where n=1. Raid6 is a special case where n=2. It allows for the simultaneous failure of any 2 drives in the array without data loss. The raid6 algorithm is somewhat more computationally intensive than the raid5 algorithm, but this is typically only of practical importance to embedded systems and software raid arrays running applications as well.
Re:And this is indeed a serious problem with EBay.
on
How to Win on Ebay: Snipe
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· Score: 1, Interesting
As a seller on ebay, sniping is a bit annoying because I essentially spend a week with my auctions out there as an ad, hoping to attract enough watchers who actually care so there'll be a brief bidding war in the last minute of that 7-day period. I've sold enough, and do enough research before listing an item, that I'm usually pretty good at estimating what an auction is worth, but some classes of items have considerable variability in sale price which makes it hard to know where I stand.
Interestingly, as a bidder I usually don't bother sniping. It requires that I wastefully schedule my day so I can be around in the last few minutes of an auction for something I want, and it's not worth my time. Instead, I look at the range of sale prices for equivalent items and bid at the low end of the range on all the items currently for sale. Usually things I buy on ebay are things I kind of want sometime soonish, so I don't care if I lose 20 auctions over a 3-week span before winning one. The best case is that I get a lowball auction sometime soon. Worst case is that I get nothing, but that rarely happens. Middle case is that I win several auctions, at which point I pick the best item to keep and resell the others. The usually-higher sale price covers ebay's fees, so the extras I sometimes pick up don't cost me anything.
Mining the data for this type of bidder behavior in order to compare its effectiveness versus sniping would probably be difficult, and I see no evidence in the linked article that the researchers studied it. But from my limited perspective, it seems like a great strategy.
Encryption is one component of DRM, yet DRM is not the end. DRM itself is an implementation of the idea that centralized control is good. Sure, monopoly money has purchased lobbying which has generated laws strengthening IP protections and allowing DRM to have status above that of a click-through licence/"contract" which it would otherwhise have, for the explicit purpose of perpetuating corporate entities which gained power during a time when the services they provide were of critical importance. But that too is only a side effect. In American culture certainly, and my impression is that this is true elsewhere in the world as well, the idea that centralized control is possible and indeed beneficial (at least to the powerful few) is gaining traction. Whether that is implemented via DRM schemes which control the dissemenation and use of media, via increasingly powerful police and judicial mechanisms, or is expressed in some other form, the very idea is not just incompatible with Free Software, but with democracy as well.
You can achieve the same effect, albeit in a slightly different way.
For example, rather than define a variable and use it in style declarations throughout the document, you simply define one property of multiple selectors at once.
So rather than
H1 {color: col1; other-styles-here} PRE {background-color: col1; other-styles-here}
you would, instead, write
H1, PRE {color: blah} H1 {other-styles-here} PRE {other-styles-here}
Now, it's not quite as elegant since it would separate logically-related style groups by forcing together selectors that happen to share some property, rather than keeping selectors together based on semantic usage (say, all your navigation bar-related styles in one big group). But it does work.
If you read Lie and Bos, it's clear they've put a lot of thought into why things are the way they are, and if it's difficult in some ways there's a good reason for it somewhere else. At least, that's been my experience.
SMB has issues. You're right about that. Netatalk has issues. Whether netatalk is a step above SMB is probably a matter of taste. I've used netatalk with about 100 macs for 7 years or so, and it worked just well enough to convince me not to buy an xserve until this past year. Much better, though netatalk was a huge step above the Apple not-even-remotely-servers you could buy when I started.
That said, the naming issues that SMB exposes aren't really a problem if you're storing audio, video, or stills. Besides, there's always nfs if that's an appropriate fit with your architecture. And OSX can mount directories over FTP if you'd rather go that route.
And if you absolutely MUST use SMB and MUST back up wacky OS files, use a disk image with a boring filename and store your mac files in that.
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I have hundreds of audiobook CDs sitting on a shelf, wasting space and plastic. I don't own a CD player, so I run them all past grip first and then they're something I can use. But that added step reduces their value to me, and increases their cost to the producer.
One DVD is a whole lot cheaper to make, package, ship, and shelve than ten CDs. So why not spend the extra money on a second DVD that includes high- and low-bitrate MP3s and FLAC files of the book? I know DVD-audio isn't something a lot of people can deal with, but DVD-audio on one disc and MP3s on the other would cover a lot of the listening public. And you can always sell the CDs for more to those who need them.
The LotR trilogy is 46 CDs. Stephen King's Dark Tower series is over 100. That's a lot of plastic to be carting around the world. I'd love to be able to get that data in a format that's not older than I am.
To argue that because your iTMS purchase went well and you have subsequently enjoyed the song(s) you purchased, the original purchase was a good idea, is logically false. When you gave Apple your money, you made a bet. For you it turned out well. For many others it turns out poorly. The advisability of making the purchase can only be judged in light of the gamble you took, not the outcome. Suppose you played Russian Roulette with a mortal enemy. And won. Does that make the original decision any less stupid? I should think not.
Read the EULA. In general, if anything goes wrong, it's you that's SOL, not Apple. They do address the issue of content being pulled from their servers between the time you pay for it and the time you download it (full refund), but the blanket statements elsewhere cover all other problems you might encounter, whether technical or legal, as in the cases, past and future, of Apple changing the license terms.
When you purchase a song off iTMS, you get something that will probably play. On Apple hardware. That you specifically authorize. Burning that song to a CD probably technically violates the DMCA, but as a practical matter that's not an issue. Even if you have no intention (and don't subsequently change your mind) of using the music on non-Apple-blessed hardware, there are plenty of ways to lose your music wholesale. Ever had a computer stolen with iTMS music on it? Or a flood, fire, etc.? Tried contacting your insurance company to replace the "property" you "purchased" and lost in said event? I could go on. You give up a lot buying DRM'd music, and if you un-DRM it, then from a legal point of view you might as well have just gotten it off limewire, or whatever the kids are using these days. If you don't un-DRM it and back it up offsite, you're just waiting for it to die in one of a plethora of ways. From my perspective, that's a foolish bet to make.
Except that buying DRM'd music is, objectively, a poor value proposition. So either a purchaser doesn't understand the agreement he/she is agreeing to, and is thus ignorant, or he/she does agree and believes he/she is getting something in return for the money. Which is not the case, thus an idiot.
To call someone an idiot for not believing in a god is bigotry.
To call someone an idiot for not believing in gravity is not.
The attitute you espouse is responsible for the decline of news reporting in the USA (and probably elsewhere). Some things really are true (or false) with no room for debate, and to say so speaks well of a person, not poorly.
I'm sure this makes me unpopular, but I'm going to say it anyway. Anyone who buys DRM'd music is either an idiot or ignorant, and it's a shame so few of them have learned their lesson yet. In this case, you're paying for a vague not-a-promise that you can probably listen to the music now and if you're really lucky you'll be able to listen in the future.
If music really needed DRM to be a profitable business, I wouldn't still be able to buy CDs. So the only reason I can buy a CD and turn it into MP3s yet can't buy those MP3s to start with is because some jackass in a skyscraper either doesn't understand his own business or is trying really hard to pretend not to.
That should get some discussion going.
Not "would" forget us?
:)
Does this man know something the rest of us don't?
Does he, perhaps, have some mad scientist aspirations his fellow planet-mates might like to know about before we read about it in our obituaries?
Originally? They're still widely used. Pagemaker, Matlab; these aren't exactly fly-by-night outfits.
That's only half the story. It's equally correct to say that the Gimp is not a drawing program, and that the Gimp developers should not duplicate the work of a drawing program's developers. Unix has been successful with a large array of small tools that do one thing and do it well (and play well with others). Microsoft has been successful throwing more features onto the fire when the flames burn low. To say that Microsoft's success with their method invalidates the Unix way is shortsighted.
It would be nice to have one app that has excellent drawing tools, excellent retouching tools, excellent compositing tools, costs nothing, and makes toast. But even Adobe splits these tools into multiple apps, and they don't have to do it for free. So while "use Inkscape" isn't the answer you want, and it isn't the ideal answer, it's also not an unreasonable answer.
If good software (often this is reduced to good UI design, which really ought to make the problem easier) were easy to write, don't you think somewhere during the past 50 or so years, someone would have figured it out and started a company to do it? And yet I have a hard time coming up with more than a half-dozen applications to which I'd give a score in the top 5-10% for satisfaction. No, I don't mean "more satisfying than 90% of software". I mean "90% satisfying". As in "less than 10% of things I try to do are harder than they should be".
So unless you've come up with a breakthrough in software or UI design (hint: you haven't), please stop killing trees to spread your words around. Thank you.
Let's see. If Microsoft made an ipod without the godawful itunes tie-in, and with better build quality, I'd be interested. Hell, I'd pay more than what an ipod costs for it. But they won't. Their aim is, apparently, "natural and seamless". But this is Microsoft we're talking about, who for all their UI research can't get it through their skulls that more is not better. Even Apple has been seduced by the dark side, and has photo and video and PIM crap and such clogging up their interface. And yet, they still can't play audiobooks decently without some fancy software hack.
Microsoft is going to look at the ipod and figure it out completely wrong but they'll charge forward boldly in the wrong direction with a bag full of Microsoft 1st generation product goo. Then the second generation will fix some of the problems of the first while continuing not to get the point. Call me in 2010 when maybe someone will be making an audio player that plays audio just right. It can be done. I have faith. I've used software where features that I think should exist do, and they're readily findable. It's wonderful. Someone fetch me this piece of the future and I will pay. Please.
Disk drive motors use 12V. Laptop drives (2.5" drives) use 5V exclusively, but standard desktop and server drives use 5V and 12V. SATA drives get 3.3V, 5V, and 12V. The VRMs that power your CPU and video card probably take their power off the 12V rail, as do many other components.
The reason you wouldn't want to power a machine off 5V is because you would need huge busses. Suppose you've got 40 svelte 1U servers in a rack, each drawing 100W. That's 4kW. Assuming that's a purely resistive load (hint: it's not), you'd need 800A at 5V for the whole rack. Are you familiar with the big connectors on car batteries? They're designed to pass less than half the 800A you'd need to run a rack off 5V, and your car battery only has to handle that for a few seconds while the engine is starting up; a rack would need to deal with that continuously. And that's for a pretty low-power rack.
Using 12V instead of 5V lets you get away with busses about 40% the size. Also, and probably more importantly, 12V DC is (IIRC - correct me if you're a PSU designer) easier to get efficiently than 5V DC. Once you split the 12V off into a few dozen servers, you can drop it down with small, fairly efficient CMOS regulators.
Er, yes. You're right. I meant the free not-Player app, but the wrong word came out of my mouth. Server lacks some of the new features of Workstation, in particular the USB toys, but is otherwise quite useful.
Also note EMC gives away quite a few Workstation copies at their various gigs, if you happen to be in or near a big enough city to cheaply attend.
Virtual machines are your friend. VMware Workstation is free, and it's pretty easy to set up a vanilla Windows install that will roll back to a snapshot when you're done using it, ready for its next dose of abuse. Perfect for doing dangerous or stupid things, whether in IE or not.
And in many devices (camera flashes, high-power or small-size flashlights, etc.) normal batteries just don't work well because the power requirements beat the hell out of them and they only deliver a small fraction of their nominal capacity (usually reported at C/20). For these devices, we have NiMH batteries. A NiMH AA cell will cheerfully discharge at 1A and still deliver its nearly-3WHr nominal capacity. Sure, they self-discharge in a few months and aren't suitable for all applications, but they're perfect for a lot of high-power applications.
Their table doesn't seem to include some important information. For example, is the wifi run by idiots (*cauatlantagh*) and blocks only outgoing traffic to port 80?
/notice/ you're trying to get me to pay for access until I've been using it for 20 minutes, you're doing something wrong.
If the Anchorage AK airport can give away free wifi (and you know Ted Stevens personally trucked all those bits up to the frigid north), I'm sure as hell not paying some git $10 a day for it. Not when (s)he can't be bothered to block IMAP and SSH. HINT: If I don't even
People trust people (groups, companies, whatever) that they like. It's hard not to like the USPS. The post office is fast, cheap, courteous, and otherwise well run. Its website is well managed and contains more than enough information to efficiently use their services. The biggest downside I can find is that it's so popular that the lines are frequently long at the branch offices. This is what carrier pickup is for.
The USPS has, by far, the best package delivery service, in my opinion, for the small business or ebayer.
Parcel Post is cheap; Priority Mail only slightly less so. Carrier pick-up is the best thing ever. Send at least one priority or express mail package, and your mail carrier will pick up whatever else you happen to have that needs shipping at the same time, for free. I live fairly close to the nearest post office, about 5 miles round trip, yet even with that proximity it's nearly always cheaper to upgrade to priority mail so they'll pickup for free than it is to drive to the post office. Add in the value of my time and it's a no-brainer.
And when I do go to the post office, the people there are invariably (at least at the 3 post offices I frequent) well-informed. I have asked some rather difficult questions and the employees there know the answers to most of them off the top of their heads; the rest require some brief looking-up or asking a colleague. I have yet to stump them.
Contrast this with UPS, which told me with a straight face that although they would cheerfully take my money for insurance, they would deny any claim for damage to a $200 computer packed in the manufacturer's original box and styrofoam. But for an extra $70, they'd do a worse job packing it for me but might not blame me for dropping it off a shelf.
I don't have much experience with FedEx, but my impression is that they fall somewhere in the middle. The actual package delivery seems to be fairly competent (less damage than UPS, though to be fair I've only shipped lighter and therefore harder-to-damage packages with FedEx). Their service personnel can't hold a candle to the USPS though.
I don't know what the relative volumes for ebay versus Amazon and the like are, but ebay's certainly no slouch in terms of package volume, and parcel post and priority mail are quite popular because they're so easy to use. Even first class mail is useful because so many small technology items come in under the weight limits, and it's even cheaper than the package services.
I was curious to see if TFA mentioned ClearPlay, a company we heard about on /. a while ago that markets custom DVD players that read not only the DVD but also a database that categorizes the content on popular movies, allowing you to program the player to skip scenes of sex or violence or whatever bothers you. The company seems to still be in business, but apparently they're not popular enough to keep these custom DVDs out of the market. The effect is the same, but without the copyright concerns.
/. comments at the time being fairly negative, but to me it seemed like a pretty good idea. I don't really like censorship in any form, but it's hard to argue with something as voluntary as buying a whole separate DVD player to keep your kids from seeing the naughty bits, if that's what gets your goat.
I seem to recall the
But any external gravitational forces will act very nearly identically upon both the tungsten 'sun' and the test sphere.
The net force exerted by nearby (distance to test system less than, say, 1000 times the distance between the test sphere and the 'sun') objects can be fairly trivially determined by measuring movement of the test sphere relative to some fixed point. After that, the effect of local gravitational attraction can be readily eliminated. Some measurement or calculation of gravitational noise caused by such things as orbiting satellites, people moving about, etc. would provide a baseline for how strong an effect would have to manifest to even be considered as evidence of some unknown phenomenon.
Things farther away won't interfere with the test much at all. The magnitude of interference is not proportional to the mass of the interfering object, since any force which acts equally on both the 'sun' and test sphere will have no impact on the results. The farther away an interfering object is, the smaller the difference in gravitational attraction between the 'sun' and test sphere would be. It is that difference, rather than the absolute magnitude of attraction, which would interfere with results.
The four SATA ports provided by the southbridge do not go through the PCI bus. They are part of the chipset, and connect to the CPU via hypertransport. The PCI SATA controller is onboard as well, but is a separate ASIC, connected to the southbridge via the PCI bus. On my particular board, there is an extra PCIe lane available which would have been a better choice for the extra SATA ports (250MB/sec each way theoretical bandwidth), except that Silicon Image currently makes only a 2-port PCIe chip, whereas the Sil3114 is a 4-port PCI part.
I just built a new file server for home use, using 4 300GB SATA drives and the slowest socket-939 CPU I could get (1.8Ghz Athlon 64) in a RAID5. I'm getting pretty close to the limits of the individual drives during testing, with just over 100MB/sec writes and just under 200MB/sec reads. CPU usage remains comfortably under 50% (that's the spikes; average is more like 20%) in that configuration, and dmesg reports my RAID6 checksumming speed at over 4GB/sec.
With the drives on the PCI SATA controller, I'm bus-limited (writes much faster to a degraded array, because only 3/4 as much data is actually being written to disk). With the drives on the chipset controller, I seem to be limited by the drives themselves. Hopefully later this summer I will be building a larger array and will be able to do more tests, but even with 8 drives I doubt I will be bottlenecking on the CPU.
Raid 0+1 and raid 1+0 are subtly different. And raid6 is completely different. There is no mirroring at all in raid6. Raid5 is a special case of an m+n parity scheme where n=1. Raid6 is a special case where n=2. It allows for the simultaneous failure of any 2 drives in the array without data loss. The raid6 algorithm is somewhat more computationally intensive than the raid5 algorithm, but this is typically only of practical importance to embedded systems and software raid arrays running applications as well.
As a seller on ebay, sniping is a bit annoying because I essentially spend a week with my auctions out there as an ad, hoping to attract enough watchers who actually care so there'll be a brief bidding war in the last minute of that 7-day period. I've sold enough, and do enough research before listing an item, that I'm usually pretty good at estimating what an auction is worth, but some classes of items have considerable variability in sale price which makes it hard to know where I stand.
Interestingly, as a bidder I usually don't bother sniping. It requires that I wastefully schedule my day so I can be around in the last few minutes of an auction for something I want, and it's not worth my time. Instead, I look at the range of sale prices for equivalent items and bid at the low end of the range on all the items currently for sale. Usually things I buy on ebay are things I kind of want sometime soonish, so I don't care if I lose 20 auctions over a 3-week span before winning one. The best case is that I get a lowball auction sometime soon. Worst case is that I get nothing, but that rarely happens. Middle case is that I win several auctions, at which point I pick the best item to keep and resell the others. The usually-higher sale price covers ebay's fees, so the extras I sometimes pick up don't cost me anything.
Mining the data for this type of bidder behavior in order to compare its effectiveness versus sniping would probably be difficult, and I see no evidence in the linked article that the researchers studied it. But from my limited perspective, it seems like a great strategy.
No. You're mischaracterizing the issue.
Encryption is one component of DRM, yet DRM is not the end. DRM itself is an implementation of the idea that centralized control is good. Sure, monopoly money has purchased lobbying which has generated laws strengthening IP protections and allowing DRM to have status above that of a click-through licence/"contract" which it would otherwhise have, for the explicit purpose of perpetuating corporate entities which gained power during a time when the services they provide were of critical importance. But that too is only a side effect. In American culture certainly, and my impression is that this is true elsewhere in the world as well, the idea that centralized control is possible and indeed beneficial (at least to the powerful few) is gaining traction. Whether that is implemented via DRM schemes which control the dissemenation and use of media, via increasingly powerful police and judicial mechanisms, or is expressed in some other form, the very idea is not just incompatible with Free Software, but with democracy as well.
DRM is an implementation of fascism.
You can achieve the same effect, albeit in a slightly different way.
For example, rather than define a variable and use it in style declarations throughout the document, you simply define one property of multiple selectors at once.
So rather than
H1 {color: col1; other-styles-here}
PRE {background-color: col1; other-styles-here}
you would, instead, write
H1, PRE {color: blah}
H1 {other-styles-here}
PRE {other-styles-here}
Now, it's not quite as elegant since it would separate logically-related style groups by forcing together selectors that happen to share some property, rather than keeping selectors together based on semantic usage (say, all your navigation bar-related styles in one big group). But it does work.
If you read Lie and Bos, it's clear they've put a lot of thought into why things are the way they are, and if it's difficult in some ways there's a good reason for it somewhere else. At least, that's been my experience.
Ok, calm down.
SMB has issues. You're right about that. Netatalk has issues. Whether netatalk is a step above SMB is probably a matter of taste. I've used netatalk with about 100 macs for 7 years or so, and it worked just well enough to convince me not to buy an xserve until this past year. Much better, though netatalk was a huge step above the Apple not-even-remotely-servers you could buy when I started.
That said, the naming issues that SMB exposes aren't really a problem if you're storing audio, video, or stills. Besides, there's always nfs if that's an appropriate fit with your architecture. And OSX can mount directories over FTP if you'd rather go that route.
And if you absolutely MUST use SMB and MUST back up wacky OS files, use a disk image with a boring filename and store your mac files in that.