breaks backwards compatibility with all of my old stuff
Whine whine whine. Have you looked at a modern system? Unless you have specialized needs you probably have one card - the video card. Everything else - sound, USB, firewire, network, HD, other I/O - is on the motherboard. The most common add-ons are a TV encoder/decoder (although increasingly becoming part of the video card) or a SCSI controller - which will certainly be available for PCI-X (and you'd want to move anyway to get the additional bandwidth).
Oh, you have a specialized card available only on <insert ancient standard here>? Guess what - specialized means costs more. Get over it. And I bet you'll still pay less than anything else on the market.
I bet it still can't outperform the mainframe I program on now in terms of raw MIPS
I bet you're wrong. A top line PC often outperforms everything else on MIPS per CPU basis. The issue is that the bus sucks and it can't do anywhere near as many transactions or I/Os as a high-end workstation (Sun, MIPS, etc), much less a mainframe.
Of course, PCI-X helps address this bus issue - it doesn't solve it, but it'll go a long way toward improving the problem. And will narrow the gap between PC and mini/mainframe performance even further.
Why did we ever move to PC's from thin clients in the first place?
Besides, not every problem needs the throughput of a mainframe or even a Sun class box. Why spend several hundred thousand or a couple million on a box when you can get the job done with a $1000 PC? What was that you were babbling on about regarding an economic downturn?
There's much more to it than just SDI -- there's also parity in conventional arms and capabilities.
Allegedly one of the huge expenditures in the early 80's was on a super-sub... one that could do 60 knots+ and manuever far better than anything else out there. If the US had a sub that could do this, then the Soviet's would have to respond in kind -- a sub that can run at 60 knots and do loops around another sub would be deadly. You can't hit it with a torpedo (it would outrun them) and it could evade detection simply through manuevering. At which point it can park itself off your coast and launch a complement of short range conventional or nuclear missiles with no warning possible.
Supposably they did build a single titanium hulled sub that could operate at very high speed... but do you have any idea how much a titanium hulled sub cost? Back in the early 80s?
That, plus other conventional arms (tanks, planes, etc), communications, and the threat of SDI (the issues can be overcome, with enough money and time) almost certainly had a hand in fall of the iron curtain. Of course, it's probable that the curtain would've fallen anyway - one of the key issues the Soviets and their allies had were a lack of investment in infrastructure (roads, communications, etc). But the military spending most likely accelerated the decline.
Did you watch Babylon5? It had a set story arc - 5 seasons.
Unfortunately the last season and 1/4 got mangled into crap because TNT didn't make a decision on renewing the series for the 5th season. As such the 4th season got compressed and the 5th season wandered around aimlessly looking for a purpose. But Season 3 and most of Season 4 are some of the best storytelling I've ever seen. Realistically, S4 doesn't suck except for the last few episodes (excepting the last ep of S4, which is one of my favorites).
Not many networks have the guts to do something like this though. Committing, in advance, to X many seasons of a show? Getting the actors to commit for the same time period? That's one helluva gamble. It's very much akin to New Line risking the entire studio on LOTR -- if they had failed it probably would've destroyed the studio. Fortunately it's been a big win, for both the studio and the fans. Unfortunately while B5 had a rabid following, it still didn't do well enough in the ratings to inspire similar attempts by others.
Downloading the latest printer driver lets them know a computer out there has a printer. Wow. They were going to know that in any case.
Uploading them all the data on installed programs lets them record not only that I have a printer, but also what office suites I have, what drawing packages I have, what browsers I have, and a ton of other stuff that they have no need to know.
The list of patches that Microsoft must have is HUGE
Yes, as it is for any OS vendor. But so what? How much data to you actually have to send? Not a whole lot - just enough to identify what piece of software it's for and what version it is. If you can't store all of that in, oh say, 20 bytes, then you're screwed in oh-so-many ways. Hint - encode the software identifier in a 32-bit or 64-bit number, and the version string in the remaining bytes.
So, let's say you have 1000 patches available for the OS in question -- and, yes, patches are OS specific and MS has that much info from you already. That's a 20,000 byte download. Even at 14.4k it's only 20 seconds. Big deal.
The system then has to process the list and figure out what it may need, then request additional data for each potential patch... but you're going to have to download that information anyway, and there is minimal additional overhead.
It might take slightly longer, particularly over slow links, but it's a hell of a lot more user and security friendly.
it seems reasonably likely to me that 'Google' is constructed from 'go ogle'
Except that it's not. Although I question the spelling of the source word "googol -- it apparantly has a mathematical background, but I was aware of the terms "google" and "googleplex" for "an absurdly large number" long before Google came about. I suspect my source is indeed HHGTG, since I read it at an early age. Repeatedly.
Google is between a rock and a hard place, as Xerox, Kleenex, and many others have been. Part of the danger of becoming immensely successful is the loss of trademark if it becomes a household term. And while they may be able to succeed in the courts here, the reality is that it is a household term now and is being used as such.
Their attitude is to grant patents left right and center, and let the courts sort it out. The have no real incentive to try and find prior art.
The problem is that in the time between the dumb patent being granted, and the courts sorting it out, severe damage can be done to people's freedom to innovate.
Actually, it's a bit worse than that.
The patent office receives its income from patent applications - not directly from granting patents. So it's disputable that they have no incentive to not grant patents... but certainly there's no downside to granting bad patents, at least not directly to the patent office or its clerks. And, in their defense, was there to be a harsh penalty then we'd end up with a system where nothing gets approved because of fear of reprisal.
The real issue, however, is that the courts assume that the PTO knows what it's doing and only grants valid patents. Despite the multitude of bad patents that we know get through. And since patent infringment is carried on in civil court the defendant is generally considered guilty - again, because presumably the PTO didn't screw up in the first place. Which is also part of why defending yourself against infringement is so insanely expensive.
Most good IP lawyers will recommend agreeing to the settlement rather than going to court -- mostly because the lawyers on the other side set the settlement cost to be just below the cost of having the patent overturned.
Does Excell handle CSV in any kind of reasonable way?
Define reasonable. I've always found Excel's handling of CSV to be pretty damn good, although a bit overbearing for simple CSV import/export. But at least it allows you to be complex enough to do tough CSV import/export.
when I input 01234 does excell still want to format it as 1234, and when I change it to text (or whatever) does it keep my original entry?
If you change it to the proper "whatever" then it will keep leading 0's. It won't automagically restore the zero if you change a field back to text, but there's a large number of Special and Custom fields that will retain leading 0's, whitespace, and whatnot. It's not Excel's fault if you can't be bothered to find them. (Although, honestly, it would be nice if it detected input of leading 0's and changed the field format appropriately).
Do dates work properly in excell yet?
Define properly. Excel has been a bit whacky with dates. So is a lot of other software - including minor databases like Oracle. As with anything, if you know what the hell you're doing it's not an issue though.
Can I uninstall stuff without the CD.
Pet peeve, and good question.
Does fastfind sit in the background and hammer my pc from time to time?
Doubt it... it's part of XP now! Woohoo. Get thee to Services and disable it.
Can I use non-mdi
Office 97 was the last Intel version of Office with MDI.
I copy using ye-oldie ctrl+instert instead of having to use ctrl+c (which sfaik is a break signal)
Works in every Windows app I know of (except terminal emulators - which generally don't like Ctrl-Ins either). Just a helluva lot less convienent than Ctrl-C.
What about that horrible auto-crap, is that still on by default?
Probably. Why? Any modern system can certainly handle it - what else is your GHz+ CPU going to do while waiting for you to type the next character? Maybe if you're running on a Pentium... but even a P2 has plenty of spare cycles for this kind of thing.
And, frankly, after reading your post I'd highly recommend you leave it enabled. Honestly. You need the help.
The classic (and largely true) answer is - because everyone else has it.
Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and Powerpoint documents are de facto standards. This is a pretty bad thing, but that doesn't change the fact that it's true. If you're going to send a document to someone else, and they need edit capability, then a.doc,.xls, or.ppa (or whatever Power Point's extention is - I don't use the thing) is your best bet. (No, text or RTF don't cut it. Table of contents, links between sections, general markup, footnotes, comments, revision markup, etc.)
That said, OpenOffice.org can read/write most Office docs now, which is a wonderful thing. It's missing some needed functionality though, like macros (if you don't think Excel macros are needed, go work in the financial industry for a few weeks).
On the workgroup front, there's very little out there to replace Outlook and Exchange. The calendering and integration with email and other tasks is what makes it king of the hill. Most of the other solutions are either too slow and cumbersome (Notes) or too lacking in features (pretty much everything else). Open Source software like Ximian's Evolution is making strides on the client front, and there are several efforts to replace Exchange as the backend, but none of them have borne fruit yet.
So why should you buy MS Office? Unless you know a specific reason that OO.org doesn't handle what you need to do, you probably don't. The caveat is that you'll be playing Russian Roulette with files - never knowing when you'll run across a file you can't open, or generate a file Office users can't open. But if you're just doing light-duty word processing, spreadsheets, etc. then it's unlikely you'll run into this issue.
Or, alternately, UD Cancer Research -- pretty much the same as Folding@Home, but with an emphasis on cancer cures.
Not that Folding@Home isn't after equally noble goals. Just giving options.
One major downside of UD is that they don't have non-Windows clients, so if that's an issue go with Folding.
Grid appears to be running a few other... interesting... projects as well. There's the Smallpox Project, designed to find a Smallpox counteragent, and the PatriotGrid, which is hopes to find counteragents/vaccines/whatever against a wide variety of bioterrorist agents.
The biggest problem with whitelisting is that you don't always know the email address of automatons that are trying to email you.
For instance, when you buy something online most companies will send you a confirmation email. If I haven't bought from that store before I have absolutely no idea what addrss that's going to come from, and thus have no way to whitelist it. And it's impossible for the automailer to respond and whitelist itself, since any method that's auto-parseable will simply be co-opted by spammers.
Sure, you can have an alternate mailbox for this kind of mail that isn't behind a whitelist, but it doesn't really solve the problem then.
The 2-5% he guesstimated was total usage of bandwidth by SMTP. I say guesstimate because I've searched for bandwidth usages by protocol and haven't been able to find (recent) data. Unless we can have reasonably accurate numbers from backbone segments it's going to be difficult to estimate just how much Spam really does cost.
I mean, if the OP is correct and SMTP only chews up 2-5% of the backbone, then it's not nearly as big of a problem as if it's chewing up 20% or more.
Even so, if SMTP only takes up 5% of the bandwidth and 80% of that usage is Spam, consider just how much cost savings could be realized from dropping SMTP from 5% to 1%.
Yamhill was killed back in September. It's highly unlikely that Intel is still actively working on it, what with the need for disclosure to investors and whatnot.
I doubt Intel trashed the work done on the project to date, but it's not like it could be integrated into a CPU core and produced in a short period of time. Lead out time on silicon can be huge, especially for newly developed stuff. Half a year of processing on a single wafer is not unheard of during intial development and fabbing. While Intel is renown for it's top notch fabs and processes, you still have to retrofit an entire new section of core onto an existing design and then start testing production - a 90 day leadtime for alpha silicon would be insanely optimistic.
The pump isn't the problem... that's pretty trivial.
But where the heck are you going to store all the fuel? The average gas station already has three huge tanks - regular unleaded, plus, and premium. Some have a fourth for diesel. You want to add two or more? One for natural gas, one for hydrogen, and maybe one for bio-diesel? The cost to add them to even a small number of gas stations is immense... and that's what keeps killing any attempts to switch to an alternate fuel... well, that and the problems with a lot of the alternate fuel sources (especially fuel cells).
Your specs for the IBM and the Seagate are incorrect
Which ones did they test then? The fastest IBM IDE drive is, indeed, 7200 rpm on a ATA/100 bus(it's 180 GB drive though - and the WD 200GB drive is faster anyway). The fastest Seagate Cheetah drive is the 15K.3, which is 15,000 rpm on a Ultra320 bus.
If they didn't test those drives, then they didn't test the fastest drives on the market.
And they still left out the solid state drive, which "if you are looking for pure unadulterated speed" wins hands down.
Anyone with half a brain can tell you the Seagate Cheetah is going to beat out the IDE drives, and by a wide margin. But, then again, those with half a brain don't read MaximumPC. It's merely a rehash of information that was online 6 months prior.
Wow! You mean a disk with twice the spindle speed (15k vs 7.2k) is faster? Amazing!
Of course, a 73GB Cheetah X15 runs about $650 or so.
The 80 GB IBM runs about $90.
Hell, if we want disproportionate comparisons, throw in the Quantum Rushmore solid state drives. They have access times that are 1/100 that of the Cheetah drives, and I/O throughputs in the 6000 range (Cheetah 15K.3 gets under 600). Of course they cost $28,000 for 3.6 GB, but who cares about cost, right?
No more ridiculus than looking back on Pearl Harbour or the Gettysburg Address
So, by that basis, we should be attacking Japan and burning the South to the ground again.
If you're going to examine historical statements then you must do so in the context of the time. Otherwise the Magna Carta looks like a horrible backwards slide in rights - when in fact it was a massive movement forward in those rights.
As it happens, Slashdot and other news outlets portrayed the interview as something happening now, and not as something that happened 7 years ago. That's called yellow journalism, and it's reprehensible.
which will calculate total area and subtract the inner area
er... yeah... which is what I was trying to do and failed at. Badly. Multiplication is not distributive across subtraction, back to 4th grade math for me.
I was looking through Buy.com's clearance items last week and came across this. Now there's a deal. 134MB for only $440. And that's at a whopping 86% off! Of course, 134 MB is a bit small... so instead you can buy a 3.2G version. For $28,000. Each. I suspect quantity discounts are available.
Solid state disk is a long ways off if you want anything even vaguely affordable - there simply isn't enough market demand to make prices reasonable.
No, but the IRS certainly would like you to declare that auction sale as taxable income... as would your state tax authority if applicable.
And the IRS isn't going to shake down the neighborhood kids for this same reason - unless they're selling cocaine-laced lemonade it's unlikely they'll have profit high enough to get above the minimum taxable income. (But if they do, then the IRS will happily go after the kids, and then go after the parents because the parents illegally declared the children as a deduction when they were clearly above the maximum allowable income for a child under the age of 19 (or 23 if in college) to be declared a dependant).
It sounds like the sales tax situation in Canada is much more simple than it is in the US.
In the US, sales taxes are levied at a state, county, and city level. Not all states, counties, or cities levy one though, and how much each levies varies.
To make it more fun, whether or not sales tax applies can be dependant on the item - a large number of states/etc. don't tax "basic needs" like food, and some non-food items (usually baby needs, such as diapers).
In theory you can figure out everything you need from zip codes. In reality, the zip code doesn't always give good enough granularity (zip+4 does I think).
As far as eBay, garage sales, etc go - yeah, you're supposed to charge taxes, declare them as income, etc. but nobody does. Unless it's an item worth tens of thousands of dollars it's just not worth the various tax authorities time... and even then, it's the income tax auditors that'll come after you, not the sales tax divisions.
Slashdot Mirror
there were pins on the slot1's?
Yes.
What, you didn't see the processor on the center of that board? With the pins soldered to the board?
Even so, the statment is incorrect, since there have been previous CPUs that were pinless - such as some revisions of the 80286.
A CPU this complex without pins is a pretty nifty thing though.
breaks backwards compatibility with all of my old stuff
Whine whine whine. Have you looked at a modern system? Unless you have specialized needs you probably have one card - the video card. Everything else - sound, USB, firewire, network, HD, other I/O - is on the motherboard. The most common add-ons are a TV encoder/decoder (although increasingly becoming part of the video card) or a SCSI controller - which will certainly be available for PCI-X (and you'd want to move anyway to get the additional bandwidth).
Oh, you have a specialized card available only on <insert ancient standard here>? Guess what - specialized means costs more. Get over it. And I bet you'll still pay less than anything else on the market.
I bet it still can't outperform the mainframe I program on now in terms of raw MIPS
I bet you're wrong. A top line PC often outperforms everything else on MIPS per CPU basis. The issue is that the bus sucks and it can't do anywhere near as many transactions or I/Os as a high-end workstation (Sun, MIPS, etc), much less a mainframe.
Of course, PCI-X helps address this bus issue - it doesn't solve it, but it'll go a long way toward improving the problem. And will narrow the gap between PC and mini/mainframe performance even further.
Why did we ever move to PC's from thin clients in the first place?
Besides, not every problem needs the throughput of a mainframe or even a Sun class box. Why spend several hundred thousand or a couple million on a box when you can get the job done with a $1000 PC? What was that you were babbling on about regarding an economic downturn?
That's not entirely true.
There's much more to it than just SDI -- there's also parity in conventional arms and capabilities.
Allegedly one of the huge expenditures in the early 80's was on a super-sub... one that could do 60 knots+ and manuever far better than anything else out there. If the US had a sub that could do this, then the Soviet's would have to respond in kind -- a sub that can run at 60 knots and do loops around another sub would be deadly. You can't hit it with a torpedo (it would outrun them) and it could evade detection simply through manuevering. At which point it can park itself off your coast and launch a complement of short range conventional or nuclear missiles with no warning possible.
Supposably they did build a single titanium hulled sub that could operate at very high speed... but do you have any idea how much a titanium hulled sub cost? Back in the early 80s?
That, plus other conventional arms (tanks, planes, etc), communications, and the threat of SDI (the issues can be overcome, with enough money and time) almost certainly had a hand in fall of the iron curtain. Of course, it's probable that the curtain would've fallen anyway - one of the key issues the Soviets and their allies had were a lack of investment in infrastructure (roads, communications, etc). But the military spending most likely accelerated the decline.
Did you watch Babylon5? It had a set story arc - 5 seasons.
Unfortunately the last season and 1/4 got mangled into crap because TNT didn't make a decision on renewing the series for the 5th season. As such the 4th season got compressed and the 5th season wandered around aimlessly looking for a purpose. But Season 3 and most of Season 4 are some of the best storytelling I've ever seen. Realistically, S4 doesn't suck except for the last few episodes (excepting the last ep of S4, which is one of my favorites).
Not many networks have the guts to do something like this though. Committing, in advance, to X many seasons of a show? Getting the actors to commit for the same time period? That's one helluva gamble. It's very much akin to New Line risking the entire studio on LOTR -- if they had failed it probably would've destroyed the studio. Fortunately it's been a big win, for both the studio and the fans. Unfortunately while B5 had a rabid following, it still didn't do well enough in the ratings to inspire similar attempts by others.
No, it's not almost the same.
Downloading the latest printer driver lets them know a computer out there has a printer. Wow. They were going to know that in any case.
Uploading them all the data on installed programs lets them record not only that I have a printer, but also what office suites I have, what drawing packages I have, what browsers I have, and a ton of other stuff that they have no need to know.
The list of patches that Microsoft must have is HUGE
Yes, as it is for any OS vendor. But so what? How much data to you actually have to send? Not a whole lot - just enough to identify what piece of software it's for and what version it is. If you can't store all of that in, oh say, 20 bytes, then you're screwed in oh-so-many ways. Hint - encode the software identifier in a 32-bit or 64-bit number, and the version string in the remaining bytes.
So, let's say you have 1000 patches available for the OS in question -- and, yes, patches are OS specific and MS has that much info from you already. That's a 20,000 byte download. Even at 14.4k it's only 20 seconds. Big deal.
The system then has to process the list and figure out what it may need, then request additional data for each potential patch... but you're going to have to download that information anyway, and there is minimal additional overhead.
It might take slightly longer, particularly over slow links, but it's a hell of a lot more user and security friendly.
I get it... instead of reminding everyone weekly that the patent system is screwed, we're going to do it daily.
Don't forget:
5. Master of Orion 3 is finally released.
I'm going to avoid MOO3... at least until it comes down in price.
I dunno if I can dodge Nethack so easily.
it seems reasonably likely to me that 'Google' is constructed from 'go ogle'
Except that it's not. Although I question the spelling of the source word "googol -- it apparantly has a mathematical background, but I was aware of the terms "google" and "googleplex" for "an absurdly large number" long before Google came about. I suspect my source is indeed HHGTG, since I read it at an early age. Repeatedly.
Google is between a rock and a hard place, as Xerox, Kleenex, and many others have been. Part of the danger of becoming immensely successful is the loss of trademark if it becomes a household term. And while they may be able to succeed in the courts here, the reality is that it is a household term now and is being used as such.
Their attitude is to grant patents left right and center, and let the courts sort it out. The have no real incentive to try and find prior art.
The problem is that in the time between the dumb patent being granted, and the courts sorting it out, severe damage can be done to people's freedom to innovate.
Actually, it's a bit worse than that.
The patent office receives its income from patent applications - not directly from granting patents. So it's disputable that they have no incentive to not grant patents... but certainly there's no downside to granting bad patents, at least not directly to the patent office or its clerks. And, in their defense, was there to be a harsh penalty then we'd end up with a system where nothing gets approved because of fear of reprisal.
The real issue, however, is that the courts assume that the PTO knows what it's doing and only grants valid patents. Despite the multitude of bad patents that we know get through. And since patent infringment is carried on in civil court the defendant is generally considered guilty - again, because presumably the PTO didn't screw up in the first place. Which is also part of why defending yourself against infringement is so insanely expensive.
Most good IP lawyers will recommend agreeing to the settlement rather than going to court -- mostly because the lawyers on the other side set the settlement cost to be just below the cost of having the patent overturned.
Does Excell handle CSV in any kind of reasonable way?
Define reasonable. I've always found Excel's handling of CSV to be pretty damn good, although a bit overbearing for simple CSV import/export. But at least it allows you to be complex enough to do tough CSV import/export.
when I input 01234 does excell still want to format it as 1234, and when I change it to text (or whatever) does it keep my original entry?
If you change it to the proper "whatever" then it will keep leading 0's. It won't automagically restore the zero if you change a field back to text, but there's a large number of Special and Custom fields that will retain leading 0's, whitespace, and whatnot. It's not Excel's fault if you can't be bothered to find them. (Although, honestly, it would be nice if it detected input of leading 0's and changed the field format appropriately).
Do dates work properly in excell yet?
Define properly. Excel has been a bit whacky with dates. So is a lot of other software - including minor databases like Oracle. As with anything, if you know what the hell you're doing it's not an issue though.
Can I uninstall stuff without the CD.
Pet peeve, and good question.
Does fastfind sit in the background and hammer my pc from time to time?
Doubt it... it's part of XP now! Woohoo. Get thee to Services and disable it.
Can I use non-mdi
Office 97 was the last Intel version of Office with MDI.
I copy using ye-oldie ctrl+instert instead of having to use ctrl+c (which sfaik is a break signal)
Works in every Windows app I know of (except terminal emulators - which generally don't like Ctrl-Ins either). Just a helluva lot less convienent than Ctrl-C.
What about that horrible auto-crap, is that still on by default?
Probably. Why? Any modern system can certainly handle it - what else is your GHz+ CPU going to do while waiting for you to type the next character? Maybe if you're running on a Pentium... but even a P2 has plenty of spare cycles for this kind of thing.
And, frankly, after reading your post I'd highly recommend you leave it enabled. Honestly. You need the help.
The classic (and largely true) answer is - because everyone else has it.
.doc, .xls, or .ppa (or whatever Power Point's extention is - I don't use the thing) is your best bet. (No, text or RTF don't cut it. Table of contents, links between sections, general markup, footnotes, comments, revision markup, etc.)
Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and Powerpoint documents are de facto standards. This is a pretty bad thing, but that doesn't change the fact that it's true. If you're going to send a document to someone else, and they need edit capability, then a
That said, OpenOffice.org can read/write most Office docs now, which is a wonderful thing. It's missing some needed functionality though, like macros (if you don't think Excel macros are needed, go work in the financial industry for a few weeks).
On the workgroup front, there's very little out there to replace Outlook and Exchange. The calendering and integration with email and other tasks is what makes it king of the hill. Most of the other solutions are either too slow and cumbersome (Notes) or too lacking in features (pretty much everything else). Open Source software like Ximian's Evolution is making strides on the client front, and there are several efforts to replace Exchange as the backend, but none of them have borne fruit yet.
So why should you buy MS Office? Unless you know a specific reason that OO.org doesn't handle what you need to do, you probably don't. The caveat is that you'll be playing Russian Roulette with files - never knowing when you'll run across a file you can't open, or generate a file Office users can't open. But if you're just doing light-duty word processing, spreadsheets, etc. then it's unlikely you'll run into this issue.
Or, alternately, UD Cancer Research -- pretty much the same as Folding@Home, but with an emphasis on cancer cures.
Not that Folding@Home isn't after equally noble goals. Just giving options.
One major downside of UD is that they don't have non-Windows clients, so if that's an issue go with Folding.
Grid appears to be running a few other... interesting... projects as well. There's the Smallpox Project, designed to find a Smallpox counteragent, and the PatriotGrid, which is hopes to find counteragents/vaccines/whatever against a wide variety of bioterrorist agents.
I think I'll stick with Cancer research.
The biggest problem with whitelisting is that you don't always know the email address of automatons that are trying to email you.
For instance, when you buy something online most companies will send you a confirmation email. If I haven't bought from that store before I have absolutely no idea what addrss that's going to come from, and thus have no way to whitelist it. And it's impossible for the automailer to respond and whitelist itself, since any method that's auto-parseable will simply be co-opted by spammers.
Sure, you can have an alternate mailbox for this kind of mail that isn't behind a whitelist, but it doesn't really solve the problem then.
I don't know where you saw 2-5% spam content
The 2-5% he guesstimated was total usage of bandwidth by SMTP. I say guesstimate because I've searched for bandwidth usages by protocol and haven't been able to find (recent) data. Unless we can have reasonably accurate numbers from backbone segments it's going to be difficult to estimate just how much Spam really does cost.
I mean, if the OP is correct and SMTP only chews up 2-5% of the backbone, then it's not nearly as big of a problem as if it's chewing up 20% or more.
Even so, if SMTP only takes up 5% of the bandwidth and 80% of that usage is Spam, consider just how much cost savings could be realized from dropping SMTP from 5% to 1%.
Yamhill was killed back in September. It's highly unlikely that Intel is still actively working on it, what with the need for disclosure to investors and whatnot.
I doubt Intel trashed the work done on the project to date, but it's not like it could be integrated into a CPU core and produced in a short period of time. Lead out time on silicon can be huge, especially for newly developed stuff. Half a year of processing on a single wafer is not unheard of during intial development and fabbing. While Intel is renown for it's top notch fabs and processes, you still have to retrofit an entire new section of core onto an existing design and then start testing production - a 90 day leadtime for alpha silicon would be insanely optimistic.
The pump isn't the problem... that's pretty trivial.
But where the heck are you going to store all the fuel? The average gas station already has three huge tanks - regular unleaded, plus, and premium. Some have a fourth for diesel. You want to add two or more? One for natural gas, one for hydrogen, and maybe one for bio-diesel? The cost to add them to even a small number of gas stations is immense... and that's what keeps killing any attempts to switch to an alternate fuel... well, that and the problems with a lot of the alternate fuel sources (especially fuel cells).
Your specs for the IBM and the Seagate are incorrect
Which ones did they test then? The fastest IBM IDE drive is, indeed, 7200 rpm on a ATA/100 bus(it's 180 GB drive though - and the WD 200GB drive is faster anyway). The fastest Seagate Cheetah drive is the 15K.3, which is 15,000 rpm on a Ultra320 bus.
If they didn't test those drives, then they didn't test the fastest drives on the market.
And they still left out the solid state drive, which "if you are looking for pure unadulterated speed" wins hands down.
Anyone with half a brain can tell you the Seagate Cheetah is going to beat out the IDE drives, and by a wide margin. But, then again, those with half a brain don't read MaximumPC. It's merely a rehash of information that was online 6 months prior.
Wow! You mean a disk with twice the spindle speed (15k vs 7.2k) is faster? Amazing!
Of course, a 73GB Cheetah X15 runs about $650 or so.
The 80 GB IBM runs about $90.
Hell, if we want disproportionate comparisons, throw in the Quantum Rushmore solid state drives. They have access times that are 1/100 that of the Cheetah drives, and I/O throughputs in the 6000 range (Cheetah 15K.3 gets under 600). Of course they cost $28,000 for 3.6 GB, but who cares about cost, right?
No more ridiculus than looking back on Pearl Harbour or the Gettysburg Address
So, by that basis, we should be attacking Japan and burning the South to the ground again.
If you're going to examine historical statements then you must do so in the context of the time. Otherwise the Magna Carta looks like a horrible backwards slide in rights - when in fact it was a massive movement forward in those rights.
As it happens, Slashdot and other news outlets portrayed the interview as something happening now, and not as something that happened 7 years ago. That's called yellow journalism, and it's reprehensible.
which will calculate total area and subtract the inner area
er... yeah... which is what I was trying to do and failed at. Badly. Multiplication is not distributive across subtraction, back to 4th grade math for me.
I was looking through Buy.com's clearance items last week and came across this. Now there's a deal. 134MB for only $440. And that's at a whopping 86% off! Of course, 134 MB is a bit small... so instead you can buy a 3.2G version. For $28,000. Each. I suspect quantity discounts are available.
Solid state disk is a long ways off if you want anything even vaguely affordable - there simply isn't enough market demand to make prices reasonable.
1x10^15 * ((5.25/2)^2 - 0.5^2) * pi
You can't exactly put data on the drive hub.
No, but the IRS certainly would like you to declare that auction sale as taxable income... as would your state tax authority if applicable.
And the IRS isn't going to shake down the neighborhood kids for this same reason - unless they're selling cocaine-laced lemonade it's unlikely they'll have profit high enough to get above the minimum taxable income. (But if they do, then the IRS will happily go after the kids, and then go after the parents because the parents illegally declared the children as a deduction when they were clearly above the maximum allowable income for a child under the age of 19 (or 23 if in college) to be declared a dependant).
It sounds like the sales tax situation in Canada is much more simple than it is in the US.
In the US, sales taxes are levied at a state, county, and city level. Not all states, counties, or cities levy one though, and how much each levies varies.
To make it more fun, whether or not sales tax applies can be dependant on the item - a large number of states/etc. don't tax "basic needs" like food, and some non-food items (usually baby needs, such as diapers).
In theory you can figure out everything you need from zip codes. In reality, the zip code doesn't always give good enough granularity (zip+4 does I think).
As far as eBay, garage sales, etc go - yeah, you're supposed to charge taxes, declare them as income, etc. but nobody does. Unless it's an item worth tens of thousands of dollars it's just not worth the various tax authorities time... and even then, it's the income tax auditors that'll come after you, not the sales tax divisions.