a) Launch reliability, as other posters have pointed out.
b) We might want that waste, one day - like if we finally get over our fears of breeder reactors.
c) Space is already getting quite cluttered with debris from previous missions. We need to keep things relatively tidy up there for i) future missions ii) so our comms satellites can carry on operating without being destroyed by a paint chip travelling at a significant fraction of c.
You can replace dark roof shingles with dark solar cells. They'll both be black, but the solar cells will capture useful energy.
Remember that manufacturing the solar cells will probably use more energy than quarrying some slate (or whatever) and, if they're photovoltaic cells, require some pretty nasty chemicals during the manufacturing process (though I gather from a discussion a short while ago that this is getting better).
I believe there is an ethical problem with taking advantage of price matching. Just go buy it at the better price. If you doon't want to deal with the person making the lower price, pay the higher price. Don't punish the person competing and thus keeping prices low.
Alternatively, get a credit card that offers price matching (e.g. Barclaycard) and buy from the higher-priced store (i.e. hopefully the one that has better customer service) without forcing them to lose their fairly-won margin.
Of course, to be strictly ethical, you probably shouldn't attempt to shop around for the best price before purchase...
IMHO, the root cause of the problem with Microsoft's coders is arrogance.
First of all, they seem to be very susceptible to 'Not Invented Here' (NIH) which leads to them re-inventing solutions to problems that have long been solved by UNIX and in the academic community (and usually better, too).
Secondly, they have a lot of smart designers and programmers - the problem is that they know this and are arrogant to assume that they can therefore develop better and more perfect software than anything that's gone before. This leads to over-complex designs that are too hard to implement in robust ways.
Depressing though it is, it really does seem as though 'worse is better' is one of the most reliable ways of getting robust software (even if it just gives up and aborts without even attempting the job asked of it, sometimes).
1) Why do you think research is going on the reduce or eliminate hazardous chemicals (since the '70s)?
Good. But we're not there yet, and anyone who believes Solar is Magic All-Natural Fluffy Goodness is sadly mistaken.
1a) What makes you think all the other present means of energy production don't have hazardous chemicals involved (especially oil).
See above.
1b) All the others take energy to make energy, even nuclear.
I'm pretty sure Fission breaks even relatively quickly, though, at least in terms of energy (even if not so quickly in monetary terms). I gather the payback for a photovoltaic cell is the order of 70-80 years, by which time, there's a good chance it'll be broken.
2) And just what do you think energy plants are made out of?
Correct, but see above re. energy breakeven (except this time, it's energy output vs. CO2 emitted).
Don't get me wrong - I want the future to be based around renewables, and they deserve far greater investment so we can get to that point sooner, rather than later. But we know how to build relatively safe Fission plants *now* and they'll serve as a stop-gap until a) we can build more worthwhile renewable converters and b) we can get consumption down.
Neither option will dig us out of a looming energy hole. Solar and wind can do it, but only if you start while you still have the energy needed to get them running.
I'm largely with you, but note that even those two energy sources come with negative environmental consequences - energy requirements and hazardous chemicals in the case of photovoltaic solar cells, and Carbon Dioxide emissions for wind (assuming the windmill bases are built using concrete).
I learned something interesting just yesterday about making DIMMs. There are companies out there that specialize in recovering failed DRAM chips. They buy them as factory rejects for pennies, and use some trickery to mask off the bad bits and re-use the recovered DRAM as a smaller density.
This has been going on for ages; The original Sinclair ZX Spectrum came in two models - one with 16KB RAM and the other with 48KB. The memory was implemented as 8*4116 16kbitx1 chips and 8*half-faulty 4164 32kbitx2 chips. See here for more details.
Eventually, yields on 4164 DRAMs went up and it became hard to find half-faulty devices, so eventually it was cheaper to fit 8*fully-working 4164 devices and just ignore the extra 32KB.
You do realize that [...] much of the 'bunch of crap' on recent motherboards is actually rather good hardware? I used to be a snob like you, but then I realized that the onboard stuff really isn't always dog poo. There's a reason it's on there.
I take a slightly different view; back when I started dealing with PC hardware in '95, much of the on-board hardware was "dog poo" and was also poorly supported by Linux. Things started improving a few years ago (about '98/'99 ish) and my last two motherboards have onboard RAID, Ethernet and sound. On a machine that isn't intended for games, I'd even give on-board video a try (though I do have some reservations with the quality of the components used on the analogue side, and their effect on picture sharpness as resolutions tend towards 1600x1200 and greater).
Hard drives have spare sectors set aside for sectors that die, and they are automatically remapped. If software RAID is detecting errors, just REPLACE THE DRIVE. The entire drive will die soon anyways.
Not quite. In my experience, bad sectors are only remapped by the drive firmware on write. Attempts to read bad sectors will return errors. This makes sense if you think about it; you might be trying to recover data, and the sector might be readable once in a hundred tries, but if you're writing to the sector, then obviously, you don't care about the data that's there already, so it's an opportune time to remap it.
In France, it is compulsory to carry ID at all time; yet, France is seen as a beacon of Liberty and Freedom throughout the world, and if you tell a frenchman that his liberty is severely curtailed by that, he'll scratch his head and maybe ask for some explanation...
Carrying an ID card isn't something I particularly object to. I already carry a number of them for various purposes (e.g. my employee ID card).
The main things I object to are:
Using the legislation as a backdoor to establish a national ID database
Using the national ID number as a primary key to join your records between many databases. I like the idea of there being no 100% reliable way of doing this right now, and more importantly, that everyone knows that all present ways of doing this are imperfect.
The assumption by the state that the cards and associated database will be 100% reliable, when in reality, they will not. Biometrics are still very immature technology, and all generate false acceptances AND false rejections
Being asked to pay for the dubious privilege of being compelled to opt-in to such a system
Concerns over what will be recorded on the embedded memory in the card (SmartCards are the proposed system), how I as a citizen can gain access to and verify the accuracy of that information, and who else has access to which parts
Concerns over how the system can be misused in the event of a less benign government being in power. I don't like the assumption that all future UK governments will be basically-decent, especially with the rise of the extreme-authoritarian and racist parties, due to (IMHO, misplaced) concern over immigration and asylum
I think I qualify for an irish passport on account of a grandparent. So I can get that and let my uk one lapse.
Only if the parent through whom you (wish to) derive your Irish citizenship was entered on the Irish 'Foreign Births Register' before you were born. See for more details.
I've just done it again (shopping list) and the parts come to 170.90GBP inc. tax and delivery. Swapping an AMD Sempron 2200+ for the Celeron D 320 saves 14GBP+VAT (a Jetway-branded KM266P with built-in audio, video, LAN is the same price as the ASRock i845GV-based board).
Wow! That's pretty cool. I tried to do something similar - here in the UK - a while back, and I couldn't find *new* CPUs slower/cheaper than a Celeron 1.7GHz[1], *new* hard discs smaller/cheaper than 40GB and so on - all the obsolete stuff that would still be perfectly adequate if it were new had been discontinued and was out of the supply chain.
I think the best price I managed was about 240GBP, but that included a mouse and keyboard.
[1] Before the AMD crowd starts crowing about the Duron - yes, it was possible to get a Duron for less than the Celeron, but the motherboard to run it was more expensive than the Celeron's, and, IIRC, it also used older, more expensive memory. So the Celeron *system cost* came out about 10GBP cheaper all-in-all.
...weren't interested in the original story that I highlighted to them back on February 5 2004.
Wilful "Hear no Evil, See no Evil", or just an arrogant lack of compassion for anything that doesn't directly affect geeks (like, say, the differences between different releases of the Star Wars films)?
You decide.
The original reports and campaign from CAFOD can be found around here.
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Re:Except Animals are more likely to be right.
on
Good Bad Attitude
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· Score: 2, Informative
Yeah. It was a good thing that the hackers picked up on that Nazi thing early, wasn't it?
I expect that at least one or two of the exiles from Nazi-controlled states would be classed as 'hackers' by the modern definition.
Seagate (I think... or was it WD?) recently raised the warranty period for all their hard drives to five years.
Seagate's ATA drives now have 5 years warranty (recent change in policy). Western Digital's 'Special Edition' ATA models (i.e. those with -JB model numbers) have 3 years. Everyone else's, AFAIK, are 1 year or less.
The last drives I purchased were WD SE models. My next will probably be Seagate - their 200GB models are faster than WD's equivalent SE model, come with a longer warranty and are only slightly more expensive.
OTOH, Seagate don't seem to do a 250GB PATA drive. WD have a 250GB SE model.
England--home of the Magna Carta, birthplace of modern civil liberties, cradle of the freedom of the press--does not allow a citizen to so much as own a television unless he pays £112 per year for a license.
Actually, that's completely wrong. A friend of mine has a TV he uses solely with his retro console collection. All he had to do when the inspector came round was demonstrate that none of the channels were tuned into broadcast TV stations. No license fee payable.
Drivers are only maintained as long as the developer is around. And unless you have the skills to write your own drivers (and most of us, including large numbers of application developers, *don't*)
I do get frustrated with this "poor helpless me" attitude. I didn't know what I was doing when I first ported a piece of kernel code from one kernel API to another. But I learnt by doing it. It's not like the process is shrouded in secrecy; you have the source of a driver that used to work, the specs, and mailing lists that'll help if you can post coherent and well-researched queries. What more do you want, for Pete's sake?! And, as other posters point out, there's also nothing stopping you from finding a developer who'll port the driver for you for money - perhaps raised by putting up a donations webpage where other owners of the same hardware can contribute.
...like with the recent 4k stacks issue...
You mean the "issue" that nvidia had *working drivers* for within weeks after it was *even an option* in the kernel? You mean the "issue" that "open" drivers like *ahem* ATI have and NVidia does not?
Have you got a reference for that assertion? I'm still using 2.4, so I can't provide experience to the contrary, but it would surprise me if that's still true...
The lkml doesn't help debug problems in proprietary drivers for Windows. Funny thing, that.
If you'd have taken some effort to comprehend my point before attempting to flame me, you'd have realised I was talking about proprietary drivers in general not nVidia's or ATI's specifically.
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Re:ATI multi-monitor support a shocker
on
Linux GPU Performance
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· Score: 2, Informative
Even with my shiny new (-ish) Radeon 9800, I can only get around 80 fps in glxgears - because ATI's drivers don't support Xinerama, I'm stuck with the functional, but much slower, open-source drivers.
That's still poor; I'm using the Free ATI drivers from the 2.4 kernel and XFree86 4.3.0, and I get about 800fps with glxgears (lousy benchmark, BTW). On my two year old P4 2.4 and Radeon 7500.
Slashdot Mirror
a) Launch reliability, as other posters have pointed out.
b) We might want that waste, one day - like if we finally get over our fears of breeder reactors.
c) Space is already getting quite cluttered with debris from previous missions. We need to keep things relatively tidy up there for i) future missions ii) so our comms satellites can carry on operating without being destroyed by a paint chip travelling at a significant fraction of c.
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Remember that manufacturing the solar cells will probably use more energy than quarrying some slate (or whatever) and, if they're photovoltaic cells, require some pretty nasty chemicals during the manufacturing process (though I gather from a discussion a short while ago that this is getting better).
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Alternatively, get a credit card that offers price matching (e.g. Barclaycard) and buy from the higher-priced store (i.e. hopefully the one that has better customer service) without forcing them to lose their fairly-won margin.
Of course, to be strictly ethical, you probably shouldn't attempt to shop around for the best price before purchase...
--
First of all, they seem to be very susceptible to 'Not Invented Here' (NIH) which leads to them re-inventing solutions to problems that have long been solved by UNIX and in the academic community (and usually better, too).
Secondly, they have a lot of smart designers and programmers - the problem is that they know this and are arrogant to assume that they can therefore develop better and more perfect software than anything that's gone before. This leads to over-complex designs that are too hard to implement in robust ways.
Depressing though it is, it really does seem as though 'worse is better' is one of the most reliable ways of getting robust software (even if it just gives up and aborts without even attempting the job asked of it, sometimes).
--
Good. But we're not there yet, and anyone who believes Solar is Magic All-Natural Fluffy Goodness is sadly mistaken.
1a) What makes you think all the other present means of energy production don't have hazardous chemicals involved (especially oil).
See above.
1b) All the others take energy to make energy, even nuclear.
I'm pretty sure Fission breaks even relatively quickly, though, at least in terms of energy (even if not so quickly in monetary terms). I gather the payback for a photovoltaic cell is the order of 70-80 years, by which time, there's a good chance it'll be broken.
2) And just what do you think energy plants are made out of?
Correct, but see above re. energy breakeven (except this time, it's energy output vs. CO2 emitted).
Don't get me wrong - I want the future to be based around renewables, and they deserve far greater investment so we can get to that point sooner, rather than later. But we know how to build relatively safe Fission plants *now* and they'll serve as a stop-gap until a) we can build more worthwhile renewable converters and b) we can get consumption down.
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I'm largely with you, but note that even those two energy sources come with negative environmental consequences - energy requirements and hazardous chemicals in the case of photovoltaic solar cells, and Carbon Dioxide emissions for wind (assuming the windmill bases are built using concrete).
TANSTAAFL.
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I guess we'd better move out, then.
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This has been going on for ages; The original Sinclair ZX Spectrum came in two models - one with 16KB RAM and the other with 48KB. The memory was implemented as 8*4116 16kbitx1 chips and 8*half-faulty 4164 32kbitx2 chips. See here for more details.
Eventually, yields on 4164 DRAMs went up and it became hard to find half-faulty devices, so eventually it was cheaper to fit 8*fully-working 4164 devices and just ignore the extra 32KB.
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Independent Software Vendor.
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I take a slightly different view; back when I started dealing with PC hardware in '95, much of the on-board hardware was "dog poo" and was also poorly supported by Linux. Things started improving a few years ago (about '98/'99 ish) and my last two motherboards have onboard RAID, Ethernet and sound. On a machine that isn't intended for games, I'd even give on-board video a try (though I do have some reservations with the quality of the components used on the analogue side, and their effect on picture sharpness as resolutions tend towards 1600x1200 and greater).
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Not quite. In my experience, bad sectors are only remapped by the drive firmware on write. Attempts to read bad sectors will return errors. This makes sense if you think about it; you might be trying to recover data, and the sector might be readable once in a hundred tries, but if you're writing to the sector, then obviously, you don't care about the data that's there already, so it's an opportune time to remap it.
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Carrying an ID card isn't something I particularly object to. I already carry a number of them for various purposes (e.g. my employee ID card).
The main things I object to are:
Using the legislation as a backdoor to establish a national ID database
Using the national ID number as a primary key to join your records between many databases. I like the idea of there being no 100% reliable way of doing this right now, and more importantly, that everyone knows that all present ways of doing this are imperfect.
The assumption by the state that the cards and associated database will be 100% reliable, when in reality, they will not. Biometrics are still very immature technology, and all generate false acceptances AND false rejections
Being asked to pay for the dubious privilege of being compelled to opt-in to such a system
Concerns over what will be recorded on the embedded memory in the card (SmartCards are the proposed system), how I as a citizen can gain access to and verify the accuracy of that information, and who else has access to which parts
Concerns over how the system can be misused in the event of a less benign government being in power. I don't like the assumption that all future UK governments will be basically-decent, especially with the rise of the extreme-authoritarian and racist parties, due to (IMHO, misplaced) concern over immigration and asylum
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Only if the parent through whom you (wish to) derive your Irish citizenship was entered on the Irish 'Foreign Births Register' before you were born. See for more details.
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I think the best price I managed was about 240GBP, but that included a mouse and keyboard.
[1] Before the AMD crowd starts crowing about the Duron - yes, it was possible to get a Duron for less than the Celeron, but the motherboard to run it was more expensive than the Celeron's, and, IIRC, it also used older, more expensive memory. So the Celeron *system cost* came out about 10GBP cheaper all-in-all.
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Wilful "Hear no Evil, See no Evil", or just an arrogant lack of compassion for anything that doesn't directly affect geeks (like, say, the differences between different releases of the Star Wars films)?
You decide.
The original reports and campaign from CAFOD can be found around here.
--
I expect that at least one or two of the exiles from Nazi-controlled states would be classed as 'hackers' by the modern definition.
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So was I, in my first para.
These really do reduce performance; I've found a 15-20% drop in memory bandwidth to be 'normal' with such a chipset.
Even when running with a text console (i.e. not X, or Win32, or even fbconsole)?
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Only if you're running in graphical mode and/or using hardware 3D. Neither of which is likely on a server (unless you're using Windows, I suppose).
Besides, there are plenty of motherboards out there with onboard 8MB ATI Rage3D and similar to counter the criticism you made.
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Seagate's ATA drives now have 5 years warranty (recent change in policy). Western Digital's 'Special Edition' ATA models (i.e. those with -JB model numbers) have 3 years. Everyone else's, AFAIK, are 1 year or less.
The last drives I purchased were WD SE models. My next will probably be Seagate - their 200GB models are faster than WD's equivalent SE model, come with a longer warranty and are only slightly more expensive.
OTOH, Seagate don't seem to do a 250GB PATA drive. WD have a 250GB SE model.
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Actually, that's completely wrong. A friend of mine has a TV he uses solely with his retro console collection. All he had to do when the inspector came round was demonstrate that none of the channels were tuned into broadcast TV stations. No license fee payable.
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Does this help? (found using google.
Drivers are only maintained as long as the developer is around. And unless you have the skills to write your own drivers (and most of us, including large numbers of application developers, *don't*)
I do get frustrated with this "poor helpless me" attitude. I didn't know what I was doing when I first ported a piece of kernel code from one kernel API to another. But I learnt by doing it. It's not like the process is shrouded in secrecy; you have the source of a driver that used to work, the specs, and mailing lists that'll help if you can post coherent and well-researched queries. What more do you want, for Pete's sake?! And, as other posters point out, there's also nothing stopping you from finding a developer who'll port the driver for you for money - perhaps raised by putting up a donations webpage where other owners of the same hardware can contribute.
You mean the "issue" that nvidia had *working drivers* for within weeks after it was *even an option* in the kernel? You mean the "issue" that "open" drivers like *ahem* ATI have and NVidia does not?
Have you got a reference for that assertion? I'm still using 2.4, so I can't provide experience to the contrary, but it would surprise me if that's still true...
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If you'd have taken some effort to comprehend my point before attempting to flame me, you'd have realised I was talking about proprietary drivers in general not nVidia's or ATI's specifically.
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That's still poor; I'm using the Free ATI drivers from the 2.4 kernel and XFree86 4.3.0, and I get about 800fps with glxgears (lousy benchmark, BTW). On my two year old P4 2.4 and Radeon 7500.
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