Just wanted to mention that Marshall-Fields, Target and Mervyn's are all the same company - Target Corp (Formerly the Dayton-Hudson Corp until Mark Dayton became a senator).
Also, Target Corp and Toys R Us are working together with Amazon.com for online sales, so really it's only two groups - Target-ToysRUs-Amazon and Wal-Mart.
I welcome sales tax for these merchants as it will probably encourage shopping in the local economy, which is better for small business and lesser municipalities (though perhaps bad for my home city, since Target Corp is based here).
Phone service runs at 90V 60Hz A/C here in the US.
The amperage is enough to ring your phones - there's no circuit breakers inside the customer's house, so they'll suck as much current as they need. The lack of a breaker is because it's really typically not needed for residential use - phone lines only have high voltage during the short burst of each ring. The rest of the time there's just low signal voltage and extreme low current.
US electrical code requires 14GA cable for 15A and 12GA for 20A power, but phone service typically should never even reach 1A so 24GA cable is allowed - it's considered low-voltage even though it gets brief spikes of mid-voltage.
BTW, the reason the phone company uses 90V power is that originally the US power grid was also 90V, so the phone company could use the same power generation equipment as the electrical companies. But house voltage has slowly crept up, first to 100, then 110, 115, and now finally 120. I've even seen some places in the US that use 125. THe phone company sticks with 90 anyway.
We should support this kind of project
on
Starshine 3 is Toast
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This is a very cool project, as it allows normal people to use classical measurement techniques to determine essential characteristics of the atmosphere and orbit, use readily-available equipment and (relatively) simple math. It makes science real for a whole group of people who might be bored by purely theoretical studies. I hope NASA , the ESA, or some other launch group can find time/space to hurl the next one up for them.
Also, I would point out that their dispenser is made out of Schedule 40 DWV PVC pipe - non-potable Drain, Waste, and Vent only pipe. They could have gotten potable CPVC pipe for just a few dollars more and then every drink wouldn't taste like chemicals.
Of course, I guess that DWV PVC pipe is probably no worse than the windshield washer pumps...
Still, I'd love to have their design and build one for my home bar.
BTW, the brand is adi and you can find info about it at www.adiusa.com, though the direct link to the model is gone now... their taiwanese page still links to it directly.
When I got my DVI-D flat panel, I went out and bought myself a Radeon 7500 with DVI for $79. I'm not sure I'd say that's a big sacrifice or expense; most non-integrated video cards these days have DVI or offer it as a no-cost feature.
Of course, "non-integrated" is probably the operative word; the e-machine that joe six-pack owns won't have DVI so the flat-screen he buys also won't need it...
harddriveoutlet.com
on
DVI Flat Panels?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I recently bought myself a 18" flat panel with DVI-D support for $500 from harddriveoutlet.com. It's an off-brand discontinued model, so if you're worried excessively about support then it's a bad choice, but these things are *really* sweet, and they are actually under warranty for another year. I use Sun 18" flats at work and have coworkers with Dell 18" DVI flats - both are good - but the cheapo offbrand that harddriveoutlet is clearing out is better and cheaper (unless the pixels die in two months).
Disclaimer: I'm not in any way connected with harddriveoutlet, and I'm also going to say anything more than "sorry" if you buy one and it breaks...
Is it just me, or was the writing for this submission so bad as to obfuscate meaning? For god's sake, why do we have editors if they can't even do us the courtesy of making the stories readable?
If I guessed at its meaning correctly, this does make for a very interesting theory. Of course, it's hard to tell with the poor writing...
I'm a sysadmin and not an electrical engineer, so I may be far afield here. But why does everybody talk about ternary as being 0 voltage, full voltage, and some random number in between? Why do both non-zero values have to be on the same side of zero? Wouldn't it make more sense to have zero for one state, and then the same voltage for each of the other two states, just with opposite polarity? That way, there would be no reduction in signal-to-noise level, and trits could be determined by separate presence-or-absence of voltage on either side of zero (+- of course). There's probably some obvious reason why this wouldn't work, but the whole point of digital circuitry is to not have to measure the exact voltage of the current to work (as analog equipment does). This would then be a simple two-step process - absence or presence of voltage, and polarity. No reliance on measure amount of voltage.
Ideas? I've always been intrigued with digital (non-analog) techniques at determining ternary states...
There is a fair amount of Commercial (proprietary) software for Solaris/sparc, which unfortunately we can't recompile for solaris/intel. Also, if you recompile then you've lost binary compatibility and hence new bugs or problems may creep in, or bugs that exist for the sparc version will disappear. If you write code for solaris/intel there's no guarantee it will work on solaris/sparc.
As my office runs enterprise sparc servers, I hope to talk my boss into one of these.
My Intellistation MPro blows the doors off of the Sun Blade 1000 machines
Are you aware that the aluminum UltraSparcIII chips were broken? The Blade 1000s were discontinued without ever receiving the fixed copper-core chips. The BIOS-level workaround for the aluminum chips horribly crippled them; they perform about 40% under a same-clock copper UltraSparc III. Hence, your IBM "blowing the doors off" your Blade 1000 just shows how serious the problems were with the Blade 1000. Get yourself a Blade 2000 with a 900MHz Copper-core chip, and it will perform at least 50% better than your Blade 1000, for about $12,000. Get yourself a Blade 2000 with dual 1.05GHz copper-core chips and you've got a hell of a machine. You can probably even persuade Sun to sell you that for under $20K if you negotiate...
Now imagine how much it sucks that my 8-CPU SunFire 3800 has the 750MHz aluminum processors...
It depends entirely on what you're doing with the degree. I can tell you right now that as a PhD student at a big school, it's not the type of degree but the institution that granted it. In other words, somebody with a BA from a good school is more regarded in academia than someone with an MA from a bad school.
The unfortunate thing is, none of the correspondence/online degrees are from highly regarded schools yet. This is changing slowly - some good schools are beginning to teach online and correspondence courses, but none of them allow an entire degree program that way.
If you're a working stiff looking for a degree for pay/promotion reasons, then probably any would be good but Kaplan is probably the least desirable. However, if you plan ever to go on in academia or really expect your degree to be worth more than just a one-time pay raise, you may consider the investment of a traditional degree.
That's an interesting insight. As an historian I do believe the politics and power-balance in many of these countries is the largest problem, but I'm sure you're right that even when the grain does get to the people, they are unfamiliar with it and cannot make the best potential use of it. Think of how much work is involved in making wheat into bread, versus the work involved in making cornbread or rice.
Yes, I was going to say that too. It's amazing how common this mistake is - I teach college Freshmen and I don't think more than one in ten realize that Juliet is asking why Romeo has to be from the rival family - they all think she's trying to find him.
I really would have hoped slashdot editors would know what "wherefore" means...
Even in 1848, Karl Marx already recognized that the problem isn't supply but rather distribution. This is more true now than ever before. It's not because our prices for grain are high - believe me, my wife's family are all farmers. The US burns enough grain every year as a result of overproduction to feed the entire world many times over. This is only one small part of the planet with high-efficiency fields. There is plenty of food currently being destroyed for nothing or nearly nothing.
The problem is distribution: all this destoyed grain is being destroyed so that it doesn't rot and simultaneously bring prices down. Now, if they could sell this grain instead of burning it, even if they were selling it at a loss, then the farmers and hence the US economy would be better offf than it currently is. The problem is that countries like Somalia (I have Somali neighbors so I know) get huge shipments of US grain that rot on the docks because the Somali "government" (I use the word loosely) lets the grain rot on the pier instead of distributing it, because it suits their political interests. So, if we stopped eating meat here in America and let all that grain we're currently feeding to animals go to other countries, guess what? The pile of grain rotting on piers in Somalia would be twice as big, the Somali people would still be starving, and US farmers would be in an even worse state, and the current agricultural depression would accelerate. Great...
I've been a member of the Nature Conservancy for some time (though I just let my membership lapse - need to renew). When I was facing the same question as the poster about seven years ago, I looked around. Groups like the Sierra Club and (gasp) Greenpeace annoy me because (1) They are beligerent, and (2) They use the money to hire lawyers and lobbyists. The money doesn't actually go to environmental protection in either case. I don't want my $100 to pay some greasy mercenary lobbyist - I want it to preserve land and protect our world.
This is where the Nature Conservancy comes in - they own the most land of any private organization in the US (I assume that excludes the Catholic Church). Instead of wasting members' money on politics, they use it to buy and protect land, setting up privately-held nature preserves. Rather than battling in court about a highway going through a swamp, they just buy a similar swamp and guarantee its ongoing protection.
Sure, I understand that the political aspect of environmentalism is also important, but I'd rather support something directly. Also, as a Nature Conservancy member, you're allowed on the preserves to enjoy nature. Much cooler than a bunch of left-wing extremist Greenpeace idiots letting diseased lab rats out of cages into the environment, or a bunch of overpaid Sierra Club suits paying off senators.
Of course, they could be doing this like conventional home AC wiring, in which case, 4 voltages would need six wires: the four voltages, a neutral (commonly mistaken as "negative" in home wiring - it carries no potential difference from gound when things are working correctly) and ground.
Now, in a properly wired system, neutral and ground should both be the same, but both wires are there so that, in the event something goes wrong, excess potential can bleed off along the ground wire while the neutral wire remains neutral vis-a-vis the voltage (ie, the potential difference between the +5V wire and the neutral wire will always be 5.0V, even if excess potential has caused the ground wire to be bleeding off voltage).
It's also possible that Tom's Hardware is essentially correct, however poorly it's worded - I don't know anything about Serial ATA, but I do know that by having a "positive" and "negative" wire on opposite sides of neutral at a given voltage, one can get twice the voltage. This is how home 240V works here in the US. A house has four wires going in to the mains - a ground, a neutral, and two 120V lines on opposite sides of neutral (commonly referred to as +120 and -120, though this isn't really quite right). The point is that by using either 120 feed with the neutral wire, one gets a potential difference of 120, but by using the two 120s without the neutral, one has a potential difference of 240. So, if they're providing a (to adopt conventional terminology) +5, -5, +3, -3, +2, -2, +12, and -12, (somewhat random number selection)then you have 2V, 3V, 4V, 5V, 6V, 10V, 12V, and 24V available.In this case there would be only four voltages supplied (2, 3, 5, and 12), each in two forms, but ten wires (+2, -2, +3, -3, +5, -5, +12, -12, 0, and ground). Again, the net result could be reduced to nine wires if they chose to abandon an independent ground and neutral.
Right. Copying/dev/zero into a file is not a fair test of performance since (depending on how you're doing it) it's almost nothing like regular day-to-day operations. Are you using dd? You'll see very different results on random read/write performance by users in various tasks - I'm talking sustained performance on randomly sized reads and writes from random types of user data.
Ahem "Mad Quacker" but ATA/133 has a theoretical burst limit of 133 MB/sec. That is extremely theoretical, and since most consumer boards are not built to maximize performance on the interface, the problems are compounded. A consumer-grade 7200RPM disk connected to a consumer-grade controller built in to a consumer-grade motherboard on a home-built computer with regular ribbons is extremely unlikely to be capable of reaching a sustained rate above 15MB/sec, even if only one disk is connected to the controller and the controller is entirely alone on its PCI bus (not a likely situation).
Besides, the ST318452LW disk that you quote is a Ultra-160 disk with a 15,000RPM spindle - it's not even roughly comparable to a 7200 RPM IDE disk. Even there you'd have to have everything tuned to perfection, with a very capable SCSI card and good distribution of devices on your PCI bus to get 61MB/sec in realistic random writes of varying sizes in a linux or windoze OS.
Remember, there's a huge gap between the theoretical limits and the realistic expectations of hardware.
I know I'll get modded down, but then my karma is "excellent" so what've I got to lose?
The article states that Freecraft is now available on "the three major platforms" meaning of course MacOS, Windoze, and... linux, what else? This is slashdot, all right. I love linux - I'm a linux/solaris systems admin - but I'm sorry, when we're talking about games, it's *extremely* presumptious to casually refer to Linux along with Windoze and MacOS as one of "the three major platforms" - so far as I know, less than one percent of all commercial video games are launched on linux.
Just a small, perhaps pendantic complaint. Of course, I'm excited to see it now available on both of the major desktop systems, as well as one of the many server operating systems... go linux.
That sounds very fancy and nice, but when I jumped out of a plane in Green Bay, WI in 1996 there was no such device. Of course we were a bunch of amateurs so our main chutes had their ripcords attached to the plane anyway - automatically opened as soon as we left the plane - but the reserve chutes would just stay closed indefinitely unless the cord was pulled. Much jumping is done on low-cost outdated equipment. Of course, in the case of Rocket Guy's jumpers, if they could afford a rocket launch then they'd probably have such fancy devices as you described...
Of all the related star wars marketing, the Christmas Special was one of the worst, because it actually had the REAL ACTORS in it. Why any actor would agree to do something like that is beyond me. Perhaps because Lucas thought then, and still thinks today, that his main market is and should be little kids under ten. Sometimes one must wonder if he misses the grandeur of his own stories...
Further proof that the Shuttles are dying and their time has passed. They're unnecessarily big, wasteful, and difficult to maintain. That's not to say that I have a replacement or that I'm smug enough to believe I know better than the rocket scientists though...
NASA has been crippled by budget cuts and the deadweight of maintaining technology that was designed 25 years ago (remember, the Enterprise test flights were in and around 1980, and by then the design was mainly done). Perhaps it's time for us to revisit Chuck Yeager's opinion that we should not use deadlift rockets but should instead fly into space. I've heard that the shuttle uses up more fuel to go the first 100 feet than a packed 747 uses for its entire flight. Now, if we could use a graceful system like horizontal launch to first break the inertia, then a rocket boost up in the 10K-30K feet range (3KM-10KM roughly) would be much more efficient and allow heavier cargo and more people in the same space as our current shuttles.
The rumor is that Chuck Yeager was struck down in the first place because of the political reality that rockets were more impressive and seemed a radical break with past technology, not because of superior lifting ability. I don't know that to be true however...
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, you are a karma whore. You pasted my message (SID #5242181) and posted it as your own. WHORE!!!!
If I had mod points I'd have modded you down.
My comment was posted at 11:49.
Just wanted to mention that Marshall-Fields, Target and Mervyn's are all the same company - Target Corp (Formerly the Dayton-Hudson Corp until Mark Dayton became a senator).
Also, Target Corp and Toys R Us are working together with Amazon.com for online sales, so really it's only two groups - Target-ToysRUs-Amazon and Wal-Mart.
I welcome sales tax for these merchants as it will probably encourage shopping in the local economy, which is better for small business and lesser municipalities (though perhaps bad for my home city, since Target Corp is based here).
Phone service runs at 90V 60Hz A/C here in the US.
The amperage is enough to ring your phones - there's no circuit breakers inside the customer's house, so they'll suck as much current as they need. The lack of a breaker is because it's really typically not needed for residential use - phone lines only have high voltage during the short burst of each ring. The rest of the time there's just low signal voltage and extreme low current.
US electrical code requires 14GA cable for 15A and 12GA for 20A power, but phone service typically should never even reach 1A so 24GA cable is allowed - it's considered low-voltage even though it gets brief spikes of mid-voltage.
BTW, the reason the phone company uses 90V power is that originally the US power grid was also 90V, so the phone company could use the same power generation equipment as the electrical companies. But house voltage has slowly crept up, first to 100, then 110, 115, and now finally 120. I've even seen some places in the US that use 125. THe phone company sticks with 90 anyway.
This is a very cool project, as it allows normal people to use classical measurement techniques to determine essential characteristics of the atmosphere and orbit, use readily-available equipment and (relatively) simple math. It makes science real for a whole group of people who might be bored by purely theoretical studies. I hope NASA , the ESA, or some other launch group can find time/space to hurl the next one up for them.
Also, I would point out that their dispenser is made out of Schedule 40 DWV PVC pipe - non-potable Drain, Waste, and Vent only pipe. They could have gotten potable CPVC pipe for just a few dollars more and then every drink wouldn't taste like chemicals.
Of course, I guess that DWV PVC pipe is probably no worse than the windshield washer pumps...
Still, I'd love to have their design and build one for my home bar.
BTW, the brand is adi and you can find info about it at www.adiusa.com, though the direct link to the model is gone now... their taiwanese page still links to it directly.
When I got my DVI-D flat panel, I went out and bought myself a Radeon 7500 with DVI for $79. I'm not sure I'd say that's a big sacrifice or expense; most non-integrated video cards these days have DVI or offer it as a no-cost feature.
Of course, "non-integrated" is probably the operative word; the e-machine that joe six-pack owns won't have DVI so the flat-screen he buys also won't need it...
I recently bought myself a 18" flat panel with DVI-D support for $500 from harddriveoutlet.com. It's an off-brand discontinued model, so if you're worried excessively about support then it's a bad choice, but these things are *really* sweet, and they are actually under warranty for another year. I use Sun 18" flats at work and have coworkers with Dell 18" DVI flats - both are good - but the cheapo offbrand that harddriveoutlet is clearing out is better and cheaper (unless the pixels die in two months).
Disclaimer: I'm not in any way connected with harddriveoutlet, and I'm also going to say anything more than "sorry" if you buy one and it breaks...
The correct quote is "If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck then it's probably a duck."
it's = it is
its = possessive form of the word it
People shouldn't correct others unless they're sure their own post is correct...
Is it just me, or was the writing for this submission so bad as to obfuscate meaning? For god's sake, why do we have editors if they can't even do us the courtesy of making the stories readable?
If I guessed at its meaning correctly, this does make for a very interesting theory. Of course, it's hard to tell with the poor writing...
I'm a sysadmin and not an electrical engineer, so I may be far afield here. But why does everybody talk about ternary as being 0 voltage, full voltage, and some random number in between? Why do both non-zero values have to be on the same side of zero? Wouldn't it make more sense to have zero for one state, and then the same voltage for each of the other two states, just with opposite polarity? That way, there would be no reduction in signal-to-noise level, and trits could be determined by separate presence-or-absence of voltage on either side of zero (+- of course). There's probably some obvious reason why this wouldn't work, but the whole point of digital circuitry is to not have to measure the exact voltage of the current to work (as analog equipment does). This would then be a simple two-step process - absence or presence of voltage, and polarity. No reliance on measure amount of voltage.
Ideas? I've always been intrigued with digital (non-analog) techniques at determining ternary states...
There is a fair amount of Commercial (proprietary) software for Solaris/sparc, which unfortunately we can't recompile for solaris/intel. Also, if you recompile then you've lost binary compatibility and hence new bugs or problems may creep in, or bugs that exist for the sparc version will disappear. If you write code for solaris/intel there's no guarantee it will work on solaris/sparc.
As my office runs enterprise sparc servers, I hope to talk my boss into one of these.
My Intellistation MPro blows the doors off of the Sun Blade 1000 machines
Are you aware that the aluminum UltraSparcIII chips were broken? The Blade 1000s were discontinued without ever receiving the fixed copper-core chips. The BIOS-level workaround for the aluminum chips horribly crippled them; they perform about 40% under a same-clock copper UltraSparc III. Hence, your IBM "blowing the doors off" your Blade 1000 just shows how serious the problems were with the Blade 1000. Get yourself a Blade 2000 with a 900MHz Copper-core chip, and it will perform at least 50% better than your Blade 1000, for about $12,000. Get yourself a Blade 2000 with dual 1.05GHz copper-core chips and you've got a hell of a machine. You can probably even persuade Sun to sell you that for under $20K if you negotiate...
Now imagine how much it sucks that my 8-CPU SunFire 3800 has the 750MHz aluminum processors...
It depends entirely on what you're doing with the degree. I can tell you right now that as a PhD student at a big school, it's not the type of degree but the institution that granted it. In other words, somebody with a BA from a good school is more regarded in academia than someone with an MA from a bad school.
The unfortunate thing is, none of the correspondence/online degrees are from highly regarded schools yet. This is changing slowly - some good schools are beginning to teach online and correspondence courses, but none of them allow an entire degree program that way.
If you're a working stiff looking for a degree for pay/promotion reasons, then probably any would be good but Kaplan is probably the least desirable. However, if you plan ever to go on in academia or really expect your degree to be worth more than just a one-time pay raise, you may consider the investment of a traditional degree.
That's an interesting insight. As an historian I do believe the politics and power-balance in many of these countries is the largest problem, but I'm sure you're right that even when the grain does get to the people, they are unfamiliar with it and cannot make the best potential use of it. Think of how much work is involved in making wheat into bread, versus the work involved in making cornbread or rice.
Yes, I was going to say that too. It's amazing how common this mistake is - I teach college Freshmen and I don't think more than one in ten realize that Juliet is asking why Romeo has to be from the rival family - they all think she's trying to find him.
I really would have hoped slashdot editors would know what "wherefore" means...
Even in 1848, Karl Marx already recognized that the problem isn't supply but rather distribution. This is more true now than ever before. It's not because our prices for grain are high - believe me, my wife's family are all farmers. The US burns enough grain every year as a result of overproduction to feed the entire world many times over. This is only one small part of the planet with high-efficiency fields. There is plenty of food currently being destroyed for nothing or nearly nothing.
The problem is distribution: all this destoyed grain is being destroyed so that it doesn't rot and simultaneously bring prices down. Now, if they could sell this grain instead of burning it, even if they were selling it at a loss, then the farmers and hence the US economy would be better offf than it currently is. The problem is that countries like Somalia (I have Somali neighbors so I know) get huge shipments of US grain that rot on the docks because the Somali "government" (I use the word loosely) lets the grain rot on the pier instead of distributing it, because it suits their political interests. So, if we stopped eating meat here in America and let all that grain we're currently feeding to animals go to other countries, guess what? The pile of grain rotting on piers in Somalia would be twice as big, the Somali people would still be starving, and US farmers would be in an even worse state, and the current agricultural depression would accelerate. Great...
I've been a member of the Nature Conservancy for some time (though I just let my membership lapse - need to renew). When I was facing the same question as the poster about seven years ago, I looked around. Groups like the Sierra Club and (gasp) Greenpeace annoy me because (1) They are beligerent, and (2) They use the money to hire lawyers and lobbyists. The money doesn't actually go to environmental protection in either case. I don't want my $100 to pay some greasy mercenary lobbyist - I want it to preserve land and protect our world.
This is where the Nature Conservancy comes in - they own the most land of any private organization in the US (I assume that excludes the Catholic Church). Instead of wasting members' money on politics, they use it to buy and protect land, setting up privately-held nature preserves. Rather than battling in court about a highway going through a swamp, they just buy a similar swamp and guarantee its ongoing protection.
Sure, I understand that the political aspect of environmentalism is also important, but I'd rather support something directly. Also, as a Nature Conservancy member, you're allowed on the preserves to enjoy nature. Much cooler than a bunch of left-wing extremist Greenpeace idiots letting diseased lab rats out of cages into the environment, or a bunch of overpaid Sierra Club suits paying off senators.
Of course, they could be doing this like conventional home AC wiring, in which case, 4 voltages would need six wires: the four voltages, a neutral (commonly mistaken as "negative" in home wiring - it carries no potential difference from gound when things are working correctly) and ground.
Now, in a properly wired system, neutral and ground should both be the same, but both wires are there so that, in the event something goes wrong, excess potential can bleed off along the ground wire while the neutral wire remains neutral vis-a-vis the voltage (ie, the potential difference between the +5V wire and the neutral wire will always be 5.0V, even if excess potential has caused the ground wire to be bleeding off voltage).
It's also possible that Tom's Hardware is essentially correct, however poorly it's worded - I don't know anything about Serial ATA, but I do know that by having a "positive" and "negative" wire on opposite sides of neutral at a given voltage, one can get twice the voltage. This is how home 240V works here in the US. A house has four wires going in to the mains - a ground, a neutral, and two 120V lines on opposite sides of neutral (commonly referred to as +120 and -120, though this isn't really quite right). The point is that by using either 120 feed with the neutral wire, one gets a potential difference of 120, but by using the two 120s without the neutral, one has a potential difference of 240. So, if they're providing a (to adopt conventional terminology) +5, -5, +3, -3, +2, -2, +12, and -12, (somewhat random number selection)then you have 2V, 3V, 4V, 5V, 6V, 10V, 12V, and 24V available.In this case there would be only four voltages supplied (2, 3, 5, and 12), each in two forms, but ten wires (+2, -2, +3, -3, +5, -5, +12, -12, 0, and ground). Again, the net result could be reduced to nine wires if they chose to abandon an independent ground and neutral.
Right. Copying /dev/zero into a file is not a fair test of performance since (depending on how you're doing it) it's almost nothing like regular day-to-day operations. Are you using dd? You'll see very different results on random read/write performance by users in various tasks - I'm talking sustained performance on randomly sized reads and writes from random types of user data.
Ahem "Mad Quacker" but ATA/133 has a theoretical burst limit of 133 MB/sec. That is extremely theoretical, and since most consumer boards are not built to maximize performance on the interface, the problems are compounded. A consumer-grade 7200RPM disk connected to a consumer-grade controller built in to a consumer-grade motherboard on a home-built computer with regular ribbons is extremely unlikely to be capable of reaching a sustained rate above 15MB/sec, even if only one disk is connected to the controller and the controller is entirely alone on its PCI bus (not a likely situation).
Besides, the ST318452LW disk that you quote is a Ultra-160 disk with a 15,000RPM spindle - it's not even roughly comparable to a 7200 RPM IDE disk. Even there you'd have to have everything tuned to perfection, with a very capable SCSI card and good distribution of devices on your PCI bus to get 61MB/sec in realistic random writes of varying sizes in a linux or windoze OS.
Remember, there's a huge gap between the theoretical limits and the realistic expectations of hardware.
I know I'll get modded down, but then my karma is "excellent" so what've I got to lose?
The article states that Freecraft is now available on "the three major platforms" meaning of course MacOS, Windoze, and... linux, what else? This is slashdot, all right. I love linux - I'm a linux/solaris systems admin - but I'm sorry, when we're talking about games, it's *extremely* presumptious to casually refer to Linux along with Windoze and MacOS as one of "the three major platforms" - so far as I know, less than one percent of all commercial video games are launched on linux.
Just a small, perhaps pendantic complaint. Of course, I'm excited to see it now available on both of the major desktop systems, as well as one of the many server operating systems... go linux.
That sounds very fancy and nice, but when I jumped out of a plane in Green Bay, WI in 1996 there was no such device. Of course we were a bunch of amateurs so our main chutes had their ripcords attached to the plane anyway - automatically opened as soon as we left the plane - but the reserve chutes would just stay closed indefinitely unless the cord was pulled. Much jumping is done on low-cost outdated equipment. Of course, in the case of Rocket Guy's jumpers, if they could afford a rocket launch then they'd probably have such fancy devices as you described...
Of all the related star wars marketing, the Christmas Special was one of the worst, because it actually had the REAL ACTORS in it. Why any actor would agree to do something like that is beyond me. Perhaps because Lucas thought then, and still thinks today, that his main market is and should be little kids under ten. Sometimes one must wonder if he misses the grandeur of his own stories...
Further proof that the Shuttles are dying and their time has passed. They're unnecessarily big, wasteful, and difficult to maintain. That's not to say that I have a replacement or that I'm smug enough to believe I know better than the rocket scientists though...
NASA has been crippled by budget cuts and the deadweight of maintaining technology that was designed 25 years ago (remember, the Enterprise test flights were in and around 1980, and by then the design was mainly done). Perhaps it's time for us to revisit Chuck Yeager's opinion that we should not use deadlift rockets but should instead fly into space. I've heard that the shuttle uses up more fuel to go the first 100 feet than a packed 747 uses for its entire flight. Now, if we could use a graceful system like horizontal launch to first break the inertia, then a rocket boost up in the 10K-30K feet range (3KM-10KM roughly) would be much more efficient and allow heavier cargo and more people in the same space as our current shuttles.
The rumor is that Chuck Yeager was struck down in the first place because of the political reality that rockets were more impressive and seemed a radical break with past technology, not because of superior lifting ability. I don't know that to be true however...