So the summary is in all but 3% of the time, Yahoo finds less pages than Google and that 18 bi1110nz Mayer claimed are a number
he pulled right out of his own arse.
Honestly, when I first heard the news over the weekend I thought "rubbish, they must be ignoring requests for spiders to go no further or
something." I guess NCSA can either 1) Expect no gifts from Yahoo OR 2) Report significantly different results after a sizable gift to NCSA.
Considering the Viking landers were digging around Martain soil back in 1976, 'we figured the place would be necklaced with orbiters and cris-crossed by rovers by now. Maybe there'd even be astronauts (or cosmonauts or taikonauts) tracing the courses of unimaginably ancient rivers.' Instead, we get a mission whose highlights were 'a) it came back; and b) an astronaut pulled bits of cloth out from between tiles.'
Sadly, it appears most sci-fi writers and buffs were somewhat lacking in the taste of reality department. Economics, i.e. business potential are more likely to drive space exploration than scientific interest. While we're seeing fledgling efforts, it's still a pretty iffy thing to leave a perfectly good planet behind to build a house on the Moon or Mars.
Seems much of the Sci-fi I've read was more a vehicle for another story, i.e. it's not about the lasers stupid, it's the exploration of man's inhumanity to man, sorta thing.
Looking at how ultimately fragile our space crafts are, and the terrific amount of stored energy it takes to escape the Earth's surface, the one thing that should come home to people who expect Buck Rogers is this isn't as easy as putting pen to paper and scribbling up interplantetary travel.
Sadly, the real drama of what has transpired to get this far isn't as entertaining (although The Right Stuff and Apollo 11 took a stab at it) as Star Wars.
The irony is... Back in the day (when BBS were most popular), one interview would have taken weeks to download. The comp geeks were runnin on Amiga's or Vic-20's with a 300baud Hayes modem.
I recall my younger brother filching a 14.4K USR modem I had borrowed from work for a weekend of downloading Amiga stuff from various websites in FL and LA. It was way faster than the ones his friends living in a trailer had for their BBS so he figured they could use it. When I threatened to send the sherriff's deputies over the thing returned pronto. I couldn't figure why someone living in a trailer had several PCs and phone lines for BBS's. Some people had grand visions, of what I don't know, but they sure threw money away on something that made them temporarily important.
I participated in the BBS "scene" for awhile, and one thing that I truly miss is the sense of community. I got to know several fellow BBS'ers, and many would hang out regularly outside of the computer realm. We even had a yearly cookout at a local park where dozens would show up from around the area.... to the good'ol days......
I remember back in the late 70's to mid 80's we ran something called The Message System on a system at the college. Every behavioural trait you would see on USENET, BBS's and Blogs would reveal itself at some point or other. It was entertaining and I thought I'd seen the last of it when they hauled the PDP 11 out the doors.
Then came BBS's, Fido et al, and I participated in GEnie and CompuServe online chats, even unwittingly telling Jerry Pournelle's wife (who asked me a question) that he was a crack-pot. Many of the FASA people (BattleTech) hung out on GEnie, including Mike Stackpole whom I corresponded with regularly (even brought him back some british editions of his books from the UK) I thought of those as the good old days, though people were wider spread than with the local BBS's. My brother was very tied into the local BBS's and it became his social circle and a pool for potential dates.
Now with the internet it's global, millions of people you'll never meet may see your words, participate in your blog or visit your web page. The sense of community is considerably strained to almost indifference. I did travel around the northeast several years ago to meet up with a bunch of mudders and it was pretty cool, but that was about it. Now people seem to congregate at various Cons.
"The situation is similar to pressures that auto makers faced as higher oil prices spurred demand for more-efficient engines."
What is it about computers that makes people draw analogies to automobiles?
Maybe because Intel are now driven to innovate, to keep up with AMD?
The auto analogy fails because with the recent discounting SUV's and big pickup trucks are selling as fast as ever. (Ford in the last month sold more F-series pickups than in any other month in the long production run of these vehicles)
For me, I did jump to the AMD Venice core because it cut the power consumption on my desktop in half (CPU anyway) and when you run a PC for hours at a time it does add up, besides electrical power translating into more heat energy, requiring more cooling, isn't desirable. I'll leave that to the liquid nitrogen cooling overclocker crowd.
1. Intel often comes out with new processors which run HOT, pushing the chip to extremes of physics.
2. The old architecture is a dinosaur, harkening back to the 8088 and rather inefficient in many respects, where RISC processors were supposed to trump it. Which is still around? It seems you can come up with all the technological advances you like, so long as it is still a pumped up 8088.
'technology foundation designed from scratch to improve energy efficiency and make it easier to add more than two processors.'
Not overheard anywhere: "We are peeking through a knothole in AMD's fence and seeing what they are up to.
Nitpick: "The company isn'tdiscussed details yet"
The proper word is ain't.
Seagate drives carry a 5 year warranty. I'm willing to bet those drives are better assembled than the 1-year warranty crap that's currently being shipped out.
Oh, could be...
Could also be a betting game.
How many drives, if they had a 10 year warrantee do you think would actually make it back on a warrantee return
Within 1 year
2 years
3 years
...
10 years
Could be Seagate knows and just tossed that out there. I mean, geez who's still buying 40 GB drives and those were only a couple years ago, right? People upgrade their systems on average every 18 months, no? (and I include businesses in on that figure)
5 years? That's an eternity and probably a very, very safe bet.
Expecting anyone to actually keep records of their computer part purchases over on year (let alone 5 minutes after the drive was pulled from it's carton) is another study I'd like to see. I bet drive manufactures (or anyone who makes anything warranteed) has a pretty good idea on the liability expense they can expect to incur.
A warranty provides a (strong) financial incentive for the manufacturer to make sure that very, very few die in that first few years. With a one year warranty there's no incentive to push the death curve out much beyond 18 months.
That doesn't mean that a short warrantied drive will die quickly, but it's likely that a drive with a longer warranty has had more attention paid to expected lifespan.
True, but when a drive dies, which is your major concern, the cost of replacement or the amount of time you'll spend recovering from its death (restoring files, etc., or simply kissing them all good-bye.)
I like Seagate myself, as they tend to be quieter and cooler.
I've got two different HD's (Seagate and WD) in my home system and one is mewing, like the motor is beginning to fail. I need to figure out which drive it is. It's probably going to be the WD as the system continues to boot and the WD is just storage of videos which I don't often access.
A look at the evaluation (from my humble pointy head):
Pros:
Fastest SATA-150 drive tested to date
No issue with speed, it's good.
Several capacities available, with 300GB being the highest
Not unexpected from and industry leader.
Quiet operation
Weighty consideration for the home or office, a brace of noisy drives is unwelcome while trying to watch video or listen to music on the computer.
Supports Native Command Queuing
Fine.
Excellent value, only 48 cents per GB
Really this is a minor concern, unless you're building a storage rack and only care bang/buck. If I want cool and quiet, I'll pay extra for it.
16 MB of cache memory provides a nice performance boost
The bottleneck isn't likely to be your cache it's your MB and OS, but always nice to have more cache.
Cons:
Runs a bit warmer than other drives
Might warrant an extra fan if running a brace or more, potentially negating and quiet running. I've got an old Quantum drive you could fry an egg on and the heat effectively is killing the bearing lubricant.
Three year warranty is good, but not the best
Really, what good is a warranty, other than it's DOA? Does anyone do backups anymore? How's that MTBF? A warranty is
the least of my concerns if my drive dies in the first year.
No kidding. At some point "we need more data" turns into "Manhattan is under a foot of water." There's real stuff happening out there, and it ain't lookin' good.
"Ok, the data about the.. uh.. beachfront property in Austin is lookin like we have some extra water from somewhere. We're lookin into it and as soon as we have some good, hard data, we'll have some esplanations."
Not real science! Not like important sciencetists in my administration tell me!
La-la-la-la-la! MMMMM!!! I can't hear your!!! La-la-la-la-la!!
The war is going well, we plan to fix Social Security if the stubborn opponents would just see reason! I have political capital to spend and I'm going to spend it!
La-la-la-la-la! MMMMM!!! Hoo-Hah! Yellow rose of Texas.. HMMM MMM MMM MMM MMM MMMMMMM!!! La-la-la! (Dick see if we can round up some more troops and invade Siberberia, lookin' for weapons, setting up democracy sorta thing) La-la-la-la!!!
How about that president, eh? A sure case for unintelligent design.
The case for evolution would have it that he only survuved by the efforts of his parents and their supporters. Are we to believe the "Worst President Ever" label has been assigned to the product of evolution?
The summary misspells "confirmed observations" as "withholding this information".
Sure. Let's all have the hard work of people forced into the open before they get a chance to confirm it or examine it for flaws, just so they don't miss out on getting credit for all that work by some butt-pirate.
How'd you like to be plugging away on your end of term project and then get busted because someone at your school turned the exact results and report in the day before you did? Or maybe some shark in your company finds that once in a life time inspiration which would make you golden, on your computer and pilfers it, then shows it to the big cheeses and gets the window office and a company car, eh?
Yeah, by all means privacy should be dead. Long live the Patriot Act.
Probably all the best places to get artery clogging fatty foods. The guy needs to go biking with the pres or something. All he's missing is a curly tail.
Seriously, you don't think someone as intelligent as Karl Rove would do something incriminating and leave it on his...
Seems like for the first couple years they lost money, more money and more money still. They were predicted to go with the rest of the dot bombers.
$7 billion... Are they turning a profit? I suppose so. I'm sure I did my part, after my favorite tech bookstores (Computer Literacy) closed up shops to go on-line and became fathead or fatbrain whatever. Saving a couple bucks is OK, but I know I spent a ton on programming books when I had the chance to flip through them. Now I have only reviewers to trust and often they're not looking for the same things I am (good table of contents and a good comprehensive index are essential, along with clear code examples which are easy to follow from the discussion.)
Man... what went wrong?
BTW, how many of you have the gifts they used to send out to loyal customers? I've got a couple travel coffee cups, unopened (being a coffee drinker means always having too many things to drink it out of, as people give you them, they appear out of the ether, multiply in the backs of cupboards, etc. You'd think they were an alien species bent on world domination or were socks in their larval form.)
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, when I first heard the news over the weekend I thought "rubbish, they must be ignoring requests for spiders to go no further or something." I guess NCSA can either 1) Expect no gifts from Yahoo OR 2) Report significantly different results after a sizable gift to NCSA.
75% less truth than other leading brand
Sadly, it appears most sci-fi writers and buffs were somewhat lacking in the taste of reality department. Economics, i.e. business potential are more likely to drive space exploration than scientific interest. While we're seeing fledgling efforts, it's still a pretty iffy thing to leave a perfectly good planet behind to build a house on the Moon or Mars.
Seems much of the Sci-fi I've read was more a vehicle for another story, i.e. it's not about the lasers stupid, it's the exploration of man's inhumanity to man, sorta thing.
Looking at how ultimately fragile our space crafts are, and the terrific amount of stored energy it takes to escape the Earth's surface, the one thing that should come home to people who expect Buck Rogers is this isn't as easy as putting pen to paper and scribbling up interplantetary travel.
Sadly, the real drama of what has transpired to get this far isn't as entertaining (although The Right Stuff and Apollo 11 took a stab at it) as Star Wars.
I recall my younger brother filching a 14.4K USR modem I had borrowed from work for a weekend of downloading Amiga stuff from various websites in FL and LA. It was way faster than the ones his friends living in a trailer had for their BBS so he figured they could use it. When I threatened to send the sherriff's deputies over the thing returned pronto. I couldn't figure why someone living in a trailer had several PCs and phone lines for BBS's. Some people had grand visions, of what I don't know, but they sure threw money away on something that made them temporarily important.
I remember back in the late 70's to mid 80's we ran something called The Message System on a system at the college. Every behavioural trait you would see on USENET, BBS's and Blogs would reveal itself at some point or other. It was entertaining and I thought I'd seen the last of it when they hauled the PDP 11 out the doors.
Then came BBS's, Fido et al, and I participated in GEnie and CompuServe online chats, even unwittingly telling Jerry Pournelle's wife (who asked me a question) that he was a crack-pot. Many of the FASA people (BattleTech) hung out on GEnie, including Mike Stackpole whom I corresponded with regularly (even brought him back some british editions of his books from the UK) I thought of those as the good old days, though people were wider spread than with the local BBS's. My brother was very tied into the local BBS's and it became his social circle and a pool for potential dates.
Now with the internet it's global, millions of people you'll never meet may see your words, participate in your blog or visit your web page. The sense of community is considerably strained to almost indifference. I did travel around the northeast several years ago to meet up with a bunch of mudders and it was pretty cool, but that was about it. Now people seem to congregate at various Cons.
The world goes on...
"ever run a dupe story?"
"oh, a few hundred give or take"
Right. And the ARM architecture is primarily employed in what devices? There may be convergence in several years, but we're not there by any means.
What? This is a page out of the SCO play-book? Rambus play-book?
"Hello, Bernie Ebbers? You busy? We'd like some ideas on how to run our business."
Maybe because Intel are now driven to innovate, to keep up with AMD?
The auto analogy fails because with the recent discounting SUV's and big pickup trucks are selling as fast as ever. (Ford in the last month sold more F-series pickups than in any other month in the long production run of these vehicles)
For me, I did jump to the AMD Venice core because it cut the power consumption on my desktop in half (CPU anyway) and when you run a PC for hours at a time it does add up, besides electrical power translating into more heat energy, requiring more cooling, isn't desirable. I'll leave that to the liquid nitrogen cooling overclocker crowd.
This is kinda funny in two ways..
'technology foundation designed from scratch to improve energy efficiency and make it easier to add more than two processors.'
Not overheard anywhere: "We are peeking through a knothole in AMD's fence and seeing what they are up to.
Nitpick: "The company isn't discussed details yet"
The proper word is ain't.
Oh, could be...
Could also be a betting game.
How many drives, if they had a 10 year warrantee do you think would actually make it back on a warrantee return
- Within 1 year
- 2 years
- 3 years
- ...
- 10 years
Could be Seagate knows and just tossed that out there. I mean, geez who's still buying 40 GB drives and those were only a couple years ago, right? People upgrade their systems on average every 18 months, no? (and I include businesses in on that figure)5 years? That's an eternity and probably a very, very safe bet.
Expecting anyone to actually keep records of their computer part purchases over on year (let alone 5 minutes after the drive was pulled from it's carton) is another study I'd like to see. I bet drive manufactures (or anyone who makes anything warranteed) has a pretty good idea on the liability expense they can expect to incur.
That doesn't mean that a short warrantied drive will die quickly, but it's likely that a drive with a longer warranty has had more attention paid to expected lifespan.
True, but when a drive dies, which is your major concern, the cost of replacement or the amount of time you'll spend recovering from its death (restoring files, etc., or simply kissing them all good-bye.)
I've got two different HD's (Seagate and WD) in my home system and one is mewing, like the motor is beginning to fail. I need to figure out which drive it is. It's probably going to be the WD as the system continues to boot and the WD is just storage of videos which I don't often access.
Pros:
- Fastest SATA-150 drive tested to date
No issue with speed, it's good.- Several capacities available, with 300GB being the highest
Not unexpected from and industry leader.- Quiet operation
Weighty consideration for the home or office, a brace of noisy drives is unwelcome while trying to watch video or listen to music on the computer.- Supports Native Command Queuing
Fine.- Excellent value, only 48 cents per GB
Really this is a minor concern, unless you're building a storage rack and only care bang/buck. If I want cool and quiet, I'll pay extra for it.- 16 MB of cache memory provides a nice performance boost
The bottleneck isn't likely to be your cache it's your MB and OS, but always nice to have more cache.Cons:
- Runs a bit warmer than other drives
Might warrant an extra fan if running a brace or more, potentially negating and quiet running. I've got an old Quantum drive you could fry an egg on and the heat effectively is killing the bearing lubricant.- Three year warranty is good, but not the best
Really, what good is a warranty, other than it's DOA? Does anyone do backups anymore? How's that MTBF? A warranty is the least of my concerns if my drive dies in the first year.You will if the ground turns to mud and their roads, houses, etc. begin to sink in it. Probably be about Avagadro's # of mosquitoes, too.
"Ok, the data about the .. uh .. beachfront property in Austin is lookin like we have some extra water from somewhere. We're lookin into it and as soon as we have some good, hard data, we'll have some esplanations."
What? Like, "Fred, Dino's at the door and he wants to disembowel you!"
La-la-la-la-la! MMMMM!!! I can't hear your!!! La-la-la-la-la!!
The war is going well, we plan to fix Social Security if the stubborn opponents would just see reason! I have political capital to spend and I'm going to spend it!
La-la-la-la-la! MMMMM!!! Hoo-Hah! Yellow rose of Texas .. HMMM MMM MMM MMM MMM MMMMMMM!!! La-la-la! (Dick see if we can round up some more troops and invade Siberberia, lookin' for weapons, setting up democracy sorta thing) La-la-la-la!!!
The case for evolution would have it that he only survuved by the efforts of his parents and their supporters. Are we to believe the "Worst President Ever" label has been assigned to the product of evolution?
Please, that is so 2002.
Ask the Whitehouse and No. 10 Downing Street.
Sure. Let's all have the hard work of people forced into the open before they get a chance to confirm it or examine it for flaws, just so they don't miss out on getting credit for all that work by some butt-pirate.
How'd you like to be plugging away on your end of term project and then get busted because someone at your school turned the exact results and report in the day before you did? Or maybe some shark in your company finds that once in a life time inspiration which would make you golden, on your computer and pilfers it, then shows it to the big cheeses and gets the window office and a company car, eh?
Yeah, by all means privacy should be dead. Long live the Patriot Act.
Probably all the best places to get artery clogging fatty foods. The guy needs to go biking with the pres or something. All he's missing is a curly tail.
Seriously, you don't think someone as intelligent as Karl Rove would do something incriminating and leave it on his...
Ok, you've got a point there.
How about cracking imdb and putting the endings to movies on line.
Get a life, fer Bobsake.
Maybe because it got such a good score with the eds.
So if we're supposed to be getting away from this, what's with the Friends thing on /. ??
$7 billion... Are they turning a profit? I suppose so. I'm sure I did my part, after my favorite tech bookstores (Computer Literacy) closed up shops to go on-line and became fathead or fatbrain whatever. Saving a couple bucks is OK, but I know I spent a ton on programming books when I had the chance to flip through them. Now I have only reviewers to trust and often they're not looking for the same things I am (good table of contents and a good comprehensive index are essential, along with clear code examples which are easy to follow from the discussion.)
Man... what went wrong?
BTW, how many of you have the gifts they used to send out to loyal customers? I've got a couple travel coffee cups, unopened (being a coffee drinker means always having too many things to drink it out of, as people give you them, they appear out of the ether, multiply in the backs of cupboards, etc. You'd think they were an alien species bent on world domination or were socks in their larval form.)