Rubbish. How many 10year old devices are you using?
Gadget-scale, very few (an ancient Palm, an few graphing calculators,
a watch, a GPSr... Not much more).
On the appliance scale, however (which better matches the concept
of alternative energy sources)... Fridge, washer, dryer, water heater, furnace,
two TVs, my car (almost), stove, microwave, a handful of fans (from ceiling to
box)... I could probably come up with a few more.
The things we take for granted around the house, that we just expect
to work when we press the button, tend to have real lifespans
over ten years.
For the type of portable devices in TFA, the chances of them being still in use
in 10 years is minimal.
What does the device itself have to do with anything? TFA talks about powering those
devices, the devices themselves don't particularly matter. For an analogous situation,
I have rechargeable AA batteries older than some of my current gadgets - Does that
make rechargeable AAs not a viable source of portable power?
The CO2 produced by making those things is more than you'll ever get back from using them.
That myth really needs to die, once and for all.
You've phrased it one layer of indirection more than the standard claim (it takes more
energy to make them than they will produce over the useful lifetime), but they reduce
to the same concept (since virtually all of the CO2 "produced" during manufacture comes
from the energy input).
A trivial economic proof should demonstrate this fact - The payback period for
wind or solar runs around 10 years on average (a lot less in ideal climates,
somewhat more in suboptimal ones).
The expected lifetime of such devices averages around 20-30 years (most importantly,
more than the payback period).
It follows, then, that in order for it to take more energy to produce the device
than it will generate over its useful lifetime, the manufacturer would effectively
need to spend twice as much on electricity as they sell the finished product for... And
that ignores other overhead such as labor and raw materials.
How many companies do you know of that sell at a massive loss and stay in business?
Though I generally like Libertarian policies, Barr makes Bush look like a
bleeding heart by comparison. So let me qualify my former statement - "a
sane fiscal conservative".
Again, cite it. The last I recall federal highway dollars being threatened
by an Administration was under Clinton. He was gunning for a unified drinking
age of 21.
You've provided your own example.
And I mentioned the rest that I had in mind (or do you really want cites for the
ban on federal funds for stem cell research, the costs of noncompliance with NCLB
and abstinence-based sex-ed)?
All you're saying is that you're going to bash anything any conservative says.
Sorry, not a democrat. I simply prefer (only slightly - and yes, Palin may well
have pushed me over the edge on this one) Obama to McCain this round.
Though, in fairness, we can't really call modern republicans "conservative"... They've
abandoned just about every virtue the party once had in favor of pandering to the
bible belt. I'd love the chance to vote for a true fiscal conservative
this election, but alas, we have none on the ballot.
What does any of this have to do with evolution?
Let me connect the dots: If the executive branch believes X, then the education system
will slowly approach teaching X to the greatest extent possible using federal
funds as the carrot-and-stick.
Only those pesky ol' "activist judges" on the appellate circuit have kept evolution
out of school curricula. Give the religious right another decade, and a few more
members of the federal judiciary, and you'll get to see us approach the United
States of Christendom.
those matters are mostly decided on the state level.
States have the right to choose a lot of policies unpopular with the administration,
just as long as they don't hope to get any of their taxpayers' money back into the state
for things like education, welfare, and infrastructure (roads). Few to no states
can actually afford to do so on more than a handful of token issues.
Let's be honest here. Unless Palin is actually teaching the class her
outlook on evolution has zero to do with her relation to education.
Just like the president's self-serving view that dumb kids don't exist didn't
lead to the abomination called "No Child Left Behind", aka "No Child Gets Ahead"?
Just like we haven't had a decade of abstinence-only sex education thanks to
the relidiotic right in power?
And don't forget, "education" goes beyond high school... Why do you think the US
has fallen behind several countries we normally consider 3rd-world (or
at least 2nd) in stem cell research? Hint: a ban on using federal funding for
something amounts to the death of that topic in academia.
Yes, we most certainly need to consider the views of the executive branch,
including their preferred imaginary friend, as all too relevant to the US
education climate.
So really, this entire FP amounts to throwing a firecracker in a crowd. We have a
choice between a pair of well-educated-well-spoken academic types; or a man who supports
the status quo from the current village idiot, with Miss Wassala as his running-mate.
he told us to stay away from open source because(shortened version) if we wanted
to be well-known in the open source world then we'd have to slog it out full-time,
fighting amongst other egos working for free just trying to get our names known.
That makes one seriously incorrect assumption - That, in the capacity of doing your
9-to-5 job, you care about fame (outside the local food chain).
I've used open source extensively, and made a few contributions back to the community.
You've almost certainly never heard of me, but you can bet the farm that I, my employers
and customers, and even the open source community, have all benefited from my use
of open source.
If you do FOSS as a way to keep your skill set updated while underemployed, perhaps fame
matters. If you just want to use FOSS to make your life better, occasionally giving
something back, fame means nothing - I get paid whether I roll my own or use open source
to solve the problem; and if I solve a two-month problem in a week by using something
that already exists that I can quickly modify to my needs, I look pretty damned good
to everyone that matters (ie, my boss or customer)
But how is that different from working on proprietary software? Working on
proprietary software earns a paycheck.
Not a real difference, since working on FOSS doesn't preclude earning a paycheck.
Why is this shit on/.? Is this really stuff that matters? You can find a good
number of music videos on Youtube, Break, Liveleak, and many others.
Because unlike 99% of videos on YouTube, MTV has offered them legally. And
most likely, they've encoded them correctly rather than as stuttering captures
from a 3rd-gen VHS copy-from-broadcast.
Hey, I'll agree with you completely that I don't the "legal" distinction doesn't matter
from a practical standpoint, but why would anyone prefer the illegal versions (given
comparable or better quality)?
The proof, however, is not very elegant. Unfortunately, brute force
is the best tool we have for certain "hard" problems.
I find a certain irony in that, however...
If you submitted an exhaustive proof (excluding pigeonholing) for an
exam in a number/proof theory class, you'd most likely receive a rather
poor grade for the lack of elegance, even if technically a valid proof.
Yet, the entire concept of a mathematical "proof" has no more noble underpinning
than the more common meaning of the word - "An argument designed to convince
someone else of the validity of my conclusion". We generally accept that, as
long as you obey certain trivial and nearly-mechanical steps along the way,
you have constructed a valid proof an any reader will accept it.
Yet, with some of the more complex proofs from the past few decades (particularly
computer generated ones), a reasonable person can look at the 690 page printout
of accepted operations and still not feel comfortable accepting the validity of the
proof. OTOH, even an amateur can glance at an exhaustive proof and decide "yes, I
accept this reasoning"
So overall, I'd have to call the idea of "elegance" (as applied to a specific proof)
a load of donkey biscuits.
True, the previous gen of ED/HDTVs with supposedly PC-compatible input connectors
tended to fail miserably at actually dealing with signals from any actual PC (on my
old TV, I could barely get 720p over component to work, and it would scale it down
to only take up about half the screen). That no longer holds true, however. Most newer
TVs have VGA, DVI, or HDMI connectors that really do work like they should.
Instead people seem to treat Guinness as some kind of stand-out because
it's the only dark-colored beer available in many places.
Bingo... Yeah, I can think of a few hundred microbrewed stouts and porters I'd
take over Guinness, but good luck walking into an arbitrary bar or restaurant
and ordering "the house stout from that little family-owned brewpub on South
street in Halifax".
So, Guinness gives us a sort of palatable standby. You can almost always get at
least a Guinness on tap.
Sub 30C? During the Summer my ambient room temp is barely sub 30C (~28-28.5C) how does even rapid airflow get the drive that close to ambient when it's using a couple Watts in a fairly small volume?
Well, for one, I keep my house around 70F (21C) year-round.
But fair enough, in the interest of accuracy, I should have said "around 10C above ambient"
rather than an absolute temperature. I should also qualify that further with the fact that
I only refer to mostly-idle (but not spun-down... I never spin my drives down) temps, not
under heavy load.
Has anyone else noticed that a large number of the Seagate
1T drives fail on you in 30 days
No, not really... And though not a statistically significant sample size,
I currently have four (three different brands) in use, with a single failure
that came DOA due to shipping damage.
I have noticed, however, that the 750+GB drives run a good bit hotter than
their smaller counterparts, with the 7200RPM models even worse.
Once upon a time,
I would merely mount HDDs in such as way as to passively encourage decent air flow,
and that did the job. Now, I always mount them with a (slow and quiet) 120mm fan
actively moving a decent volume of air directly over them, making sure to never
mount them in adjacent bays (ie, leave some room for the air to flow completely
around them). That makes all the difference, bringing them back down to
a comfy sub-30C.
Of course, I also use to swear by DiamondMaxes, which most people considered
garbage... So I have to suspect that paying attention to temperature makes all
the difference between my experience and yours.
Well good grief, the two exact entities who are supposed to take care
of this kind of thing refuse, then just what is going on in this country?
"Business as usual".
Extended warranty telemarketers, scum of the Earth or not, help keep the economy
flowing; little old ladies do not. Extended warranty telemarketers pay HUGE
monthly phone bills; little old ladies do not.
The phone company cares about one thing only - Making as much money any way they
can. Dealing with complaints from small potatoes takes money, and won't
make them any more in return.
The FBI also cares about one thing only - protecting corporate interests. They only
deign to deal with non-property crimes like murder and rape because those have the
potential to lower property values and reduce commerce (and thus, tax revenue) in
the area. If you rob a bank and get away with $50, they'll hunt you to the ends
of the Earth, because the sheep might get spooked; If you can't plug in your phone
because it never stops ringing with either telemarketers or (in this case)
people pissed at telemarketers who've faked their ID, well, who cares except you?
Are there any foreseeable applications for the consumer world?
Connect your new keyboard and mouse via ethernet.
Connect your new HDD* via ethernet.
Connect your new video card via ethernet.
Connect your new scanner via ethernet.
Connect your new CD/DVD/BR via ethernet.
Connect your new printer* via ethernet.
Connect your new webcam* via ethernet.
No more USB cables with a million different connector types. No more PATA or SATA cables.
No more serial or parallel cables. No more trying to figure out where to plug a given device
in on a motherboard or looking for spare PCI/whatever slots - Just one type of cable and
they all plug into a switch-like section of the motherboard.
Now, some devices (video cards as the most obvious) will still require extra power, but
most devices could probably manage with a variant on PoE, meaning the inside of your case
goes from rats-nets of assorted cable types, to a half-dozen or so tidy round cables.
* Yes, you can already get network enabled versions of these, but they count as a real
full-fledged network endpoint, not as a slave device "local" to a particular computer.
OK so if you have a PUE of 1.2 then five-sixths of the input energy is used to power the computer equipment. But that doesn't say how energy efficient the machines themselves are. You could be running 150W Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processors, or whatever, and still get a higher 'efficiency' than someone using Atom processors giving the same computational speed with lower power usage.
True - But it still means that 5/6ths of the power goes to adding computational resources
rather than pure-waste overhead. Depending on the task, you might want as much horsepower as
possible, or the highest reliability possible, or a massive storage or I/O node. But
it doesn't really matter what you want in the box - lowering the overhead always
counts as a win.
What good does the container do at that point? You're just compartmentalizing
the warehouse, with really unwieldy compartments
Unwieldy for us, thinking in terms of fixing broken machines on a per-server
or even a per-component basis.
For the likes of Microsoft and Google, they don't troubleshoot and repair broken HDDs,
or even servers, they just roll out one whole rack and roll in another.
Changing the granularity to shipping containers just reflects the next
step up - They won't bother troubleshooting a "mere" rack (at least, not
on-site) - when some unacceptable percent of the container has failed,
They'll just drive in a replacement, swap it for the old one, and drive the
old one off for a refurb.
This is such a stupid story, because it relies on the stupidity of the audience to completely misunderstand what it's all about.
Completely misunderstand? Did you read TFA? You don't need to misunderstand it to find the situation absurd:
the team published a treatise on "the moral consideration of plants for their own sake." The treatise established that vegetation has innate value and that it is morally wrong to partake in activities such as the "decapitation of wildflowers at the roadside without rational reason."
So yeah, the jokes about potatoes may go a tad bit outside the scope of this law, but they actually don't miss the point. Why shouldn't I decapitate a roadside flower for the hell of it? Attributing ideas such as "dignity" to literally brainless creatures sounds just as absurd as the inevitable jokes about all our least-favorite veggies.
I suppose you could invoke vague and largely-religious issues such as the "sanctity of all life" in defense of this (part of the) law, but don't pretend it has merit on its own
Even 1% false positives or negatives in a huge application will lead to lots of problems
More importantly, where can I buy an incredibly realistic Osama Bin Laden mask?
They want to play games, we can play right back. Good luck tracking Joe Sixpack
when your fancy automated system starts reporting that it has found Terrorist-X
20 times a minute from all over the globe...
What's stupid about thinking that would be sufficient?
Because things like this story happen.
If you have something irreplaceable, you make copies, and lots of them... Code
I've written, even "hello world" quality crap made 20 years ago, I have
reproduced across no fewer than four machines at three physical sites, not
to mention at least a dozen backups on DVD over the years (I try to burn my
important files at least once a month).
Now, my ripped CD collection, I have only one extra copy (it lives on two
machines) because I could re-rip it (even if doing so would take a few weeks).
Downloaded software, I keep only a single copy, because most of it I'll never
need again, and I could re-download what I needed within a few hours, in a
worst-case scenario. But for anything that matters to me - Copies, copies,
and more copies.
you cannot rebuild the file with your chunks without guiding information [...]
on a routing line with a hundred users on one end, it's thousands of hash-checks to be
made for every stupid rebuilt file - both processes of course painfully CPU-eating
Ah, you've missed the obvious next step - Just force the end-users themselves to run the
scanner.... Either as a new standalone scanner (with a hefty penalty for nocompliance),
or incorporated into standard AV software (why not, it already scans everything
anyway), or even hidden somewhere such as your NIC's firmware where it sees all and can
easily tell on you.
to avoid being sued by the U.S. Justice Department, Google is negotiating with them
Okay, Google has 71% of the search engine market... Which itself makes up what, less than 5%
of the total world of advertising?
Oh, boo-hoo, Google can actually tell you how much you have to pay to share their sandbox.
Sorry advertisers, but we don't want your "product" in the first place. Go bitch to someone
who carres.
And, advertisers-of-the-world (and other search engines), do you know why Google
has 71% of the search engine market? Because Google doesn't piss us off with banners
and flash ads and hiding sponsored links as results. Get the hint?
Remember to do that every time you get in the car do you
Why not just leave it in vibrate mode (at least during the day)?
In the office (or any quiet environment), or in my pocket, a vibrating
phone works just as well as the ungodly loud klaxon most people set as
their ringtones.
As soon as you start moving your phone won't interrupt you, as soon as you stop it lets you know
about the calls you missed, and in the meantime it let the people trying to contact you know what's
going on.
Or, I could just put it in silent/vibrate mode, which I can't hear over the car, and it will
still list all the calls I missed the next time I look at it.
Really, people... Serious case of a solution in need of a problem. If you don't want to take calls
for some reason - Don't!. Simple as that. You don't need magic speed-sensing software to
let you ignore your phone.
You can generate that pretty easily, just build a database of
names and words for different concepts in the scenario
That uses the template based approach, with a fairly narrow template. In your
specific case, a simple tagged grammar engine could solve it... Although the number
of possible nouns, relations, and fluff words might at first seem exponential, you
really only have a linear relation on each of them.
So, you end up with a complex-looking sentence reducing to |{noun1} [set operation] {noun2}| .
The substitution of pronouns and synonyms doesn't really change the complexity all that
much unless you make the referents so vague that even an English professor would
struggle to figure out what you meant.
Slashdot Mirror
Rubbish. How many 10year old devices are you using?
Gadget-scale, very few (an ancient Palm, an few graphing calculators, a watch, a GPSr... Not much more).
On the appliance scale, however (which better matches the concept of alternative energy sources)... Fridge, washer, dryer, water heater, furnace, two TVs, my car (almost), stove, microwave, a handful of fans (from ceiling to box)... I could probably come up with a few more.
The things we take for granted around the house, that we just expect to work when we press the button, tend to have real lifespans over ten years.
For the type of portable devices in TFA, the chances of them being still in use in 10 years is minimal.
What does the device itself have to do with anything? TFA talks about powering those devices, the devices themselves don't particularly matter. For an analogous situation, I have rechargeable AA batteries older than some of my current gadgets - Does that make rechargeable AAs not a viable source of portable power?
The CO2 produced by making those things is more than you'll ever get back from using them.
That myth really needs to die, once and for all.
You've phrased it one layer of indirection more than the standard claim (it takes more energy to make them than they will produce over the useful lifetime), but they reduce to the same concept (since virtually all of the CO2 "produced" during manufacture comes from the energy input).
A trivial economic proof should demonstrate this fact - The payback period for wind or solar runs around 10 years on average (a lot less in ideal climates, somewhat more in suboptimal ones).
The expected lifetime of such devices averages around 20-30 years (most importantly, more than the payback period).
It follows, then, that in order for it to take more energy to produce the device than it will generate over its useful lifetime, the manufacturer would effectively need to spend twice as much on electricity as they sell the finished product for... And that ignores other overhead such as labor and raw materials.
How many companies do you know of that sell at a massive loss and stay in business?
Bob Barr
Though I generally like Libertarian policies, Barr makes Bush look like a bleeding heart by comparison. So let me qualify my former statement - "a sane fiscal conservative".
Again, cite it. The last I recall federal highway dollars being threatened by an Administration was under Clinton. He was gunning for a unified drinking age of 21.
You've provided your own example.
And I mentioned the rest that I had in mind (or do you really want cites for the ban on federal funds for stem cell research, the costs of noncompliance with NCLB and abstinence-based sex-ed)?
All you're saying is that you're going to bash anything any conservative says.
Sorry, not a democrat. I simply prefer (only slightly - and yes, Palin may well have pushed me over the edge on this one) Obama to McCain this round.
Though, in fairness, we can't really call modern republicans "conservative"... They've abandoned just about every virtue the party once had in favor of pandering to the bible belt. I'd love the chance to vote for a true fiscal conservative this election, but alas, we have none on the ballot.
What does any of this have to do with evolution?
Let me connect the dots: If the executive branch believes X, then the education system will slowly approach teaching X to the greatest extent possible using federal funds as the carrot-and-stick.
Only those pesky ol' "activist judges" on the appellate circuit have kept evolution out of school curricula. Give the religious right another decade, and a few more members of the federal judiciary, and you'll get to see us approach the United States of Christendom.
those matters are mostly decided on the state level.
States have the right to choose a lot of policies unpopular with the administration, just as long as they don't hope to get any of their taxpayers' money back into the state for things like education, welfare, and infrastructure (roads). Few to no states can actually afford to do so on more than a handful of token issues.
Let's be honest here. Unless Palin is actually teaching the class her outlook on evolution has zero to do with her relation to education.
Just like the president's self-serving view that dumb kids don't exist didn't lead to the abomination called "No Child Left Behind", aka "No Child Gets Ahead"?
Just like we haven't had a decade of abstinence-only sex education thanks to the relidiotic right in power?
And don't forget, "education" goes beyond high school... Why do you think the US has fallen behind several countries we normally consider 3rd-world (or at least 2nd) in stem cell research? Hint: a ban on using federal funding for something amounts to the death of that topic in academia.
Yes, we most certainly need to consider the views of the executive branch, including their preferred imaginary friend, as all too relevant to the US education climate.
So really, this entire FP amounts to throwing a firecracker in a crowd. We have a choice between a pair of well-educated-well-spoken academic types; or a man who supports the status quo from the current village idiot, with Miss Wassala as his running-mate.
he told us to stay away from open source because(shortened version) if we wanted to be well-known in the open source world then we'd have to slog it out full-time, fighting amongst other egos working for free just trying to get our names known.
That makes one seriously incorrect assumption - That, in the capacity of doing your 9-to-5 job, you care about fame (outside the local food chain).
I've used open source extensively, and made a few contributions back to the community. You've almost certainly never heard of me, but you can bet the farm that I, my employers and customers, and even the open source community, have all benefited from my use of open source.
If you do FOSS as a way to keep your skill set updated while underemployed, perhaps fame matters. If you just want to use FOSS to make your life better, occasionally giving something back, fame means nothing - I get paid whether I roll my own or use open source to solve the problem; and if I solve a two-month problem in a week by using something that already exists that I can quickly modify to my needs, I look pretty damned good to everyone that matters (ie, my boss or customer)
But how is that different from working on proprietary software? Working on proprietary software earns a paycheck.
Not a real difference, since working on FOSS doesn't preclude earning a paycheck.
Why is this shit on /.? Is this really stuff that matters? You can find a good
number of music videos on Youtube, Break, Liveleak, and many others.
Because unlike 99% of videos on YouTube, MTV has offered them legally. And most likely, they've encoded them correctly rather than as stuttering captures from a 3rd-gen VHS copy-from-broadcast.
Hey, I'll agree with you completely that I don't the "legal" distinction doesn't matter from a practical standpoint, but why would anyone prefer the illegal versions (given comparable or better quality)?
The proof, however, is not very elegant. Unfortunately, brute force is the best tool we have for certain "hard" problems.
I find a certain irony in that, however...
If you submitted an exhaustive proof (excluding pigeonholing) for an exam in a number/proof theory class, you'd most likely receive a rather poor grade for the lack of elegance, even if technically a valid proof.
Yet, the entire concept of a mathematical "proof" has no more noble underpinning than the more common meaning of the word - "An argument designed to convince someone else of the validity of my conclusion". We generally accept that, as long as you obey certain trivial and nearly-mechanical steps along the way, you have constructed a valid proof an any reader will accept it.
Yet, with some of the more complex proofs from the past few decades (particularly computer generated ones), a reasonable person can look at the 690 page printout of accepted operations and still not feel comfortable accepting the validity of the proof. OTOH, even an amateur can glance at an exhaustive proof and decide "yes, I accept this reasoning"
So overall, I'd have to call the idea of "elegance" (as applied to a specific proof) a load of donkey biscuits.
That all makes sense until you try it
True, the previous gen of ED/HDTVs with supposedly PC-compatible input connectors tended to fail miserably at actually dealing with signals from any actual PC (on my old TV, I could barely get 720p over component to work, and it would scale it down to only take up about half the screen). That no longer holds true, however. Most newer TVs have VGA, DVI, or HDMI connectors that really do work like they should.
Instead people seem to treat Guinness as some kind of stand-out because it's the only dark-colored beer available in many places.
Bingo... Yeah, I can think of a few hundred microbrewed stouts and porters I'd take over Guinness, but good luck walking into an arbitrary bar or restaurant and ordering "the house stout from that little family-owned brewpub on South street in Halifax".
So, Guinness gives us a sort of palatable standby. You can almost always get at least a Guinness on tap.
Sub 30C? During the Summer my ambient room temp is barely sub 30C (~28-28.5C) how does even rapid airflow get the drive that close to ambient when it's using a couple Watts in a fairly small volume?
Well, for one, I keep my house around 70F (21C) year-round.
But fair enough, in the interest of accuracy, I should have said "around 10C above ambient" rather than an absolute temperature. I should also qualify that further with the fact that I only refer to mostly-idle (but not spun-down... I never spin my drives down) temps, not under heavy load.
Has anyone else noticed that a large number of the Seagate 1T drives fail on you in 30 days
No, not really... And though not a statistically significant sample size, I currently have four (three different brands) in use, with a single failure that came DOA due to shipping damage.
I have noticed, however, that the 750+GB drives run a good bit hotter than their smaller counterparts, with the 7200RPM models even worse.
Once upon a time, I would merely mount HDDs in such as way as to passively encourage decent air flow, and that did the job. Now, I always mount them with a (slow and quiet) 120mm fan actively moving a decent volume of air directly over them, making sure to never mount them in adjacent bays (ie, leave some room for the air to flow completely around them). That makes all the difference, bringing them back down to a comfy sub-30C.
Of course, I also use to swear by DiamondMaxes, which most people considered garbage... So I have to suspect that paying attention to temperature makes all the difference between my experience and yours.
Well good grief, the two exact entities who are supposed to take care of this kind of thing refuse, then just what is going on in this country?
"Business as usual".
Extended warranty telemarketers, scum of the Earth or not, help keep the economy flowing; little old ladies do not. Extended warranty telemarketers pay HUGE monthly phone bills; little old ladies do not.
The phone company cares about one thing only - Making as much money any way they can. Dealing with complaints from small potatoes takes money, and won't make them any more in return.
The FBI also cares about one thing only - protecting corporate interests. They only deign to deal with non-property crimes like murder and rape because those have the potential to lower property values and reduce commerce (and thus, tax revenue) in the area. If you rob a bank and get away with $50, they'll hunt you to the ends of the Earth, because the sheep might get spooked; If you can't plug in your phone because it never stops ringing with either telemarketers or (in this case) people pissed at telemarketers who've faked their ID, well, who cares except you?
Are there any foreseeable applications for the consumer world?
Connect your new keyboard and mouse via ethernet.
Connect your new HDD* via ethernet.
Connect your new video card via ethernet.
Connect your new scanner via ethernet.
Connect your new CD/DVD/BR via ethernet.
Connect your new printer* via ethernet.
Connect your new webcam* via ethernet.
No more USB cables with a million different connector types. No more PATA or SATA cables. No more serial or parallel cables. No more trying to figure out where to plug a given device in on a motherboard or looking for spare PCI/whatever slots - Just one type of cable and they all plug into a switch-like section of the motherboard.
Now, some devices (video cards as the most obvious) will still require extra power, but most devices could probably manage with a variant on PoE, meaning the inside of your case goes from rats-nets of assorted cable types, to a half-dozen or so tidy round cables.
* Yes, you can already get network enabled versions of these, but they count as a real full-fledged network endpoint, not as a slave device "local" to a particular computer.
OK so if you have a PUE of 1.2 then five-sixths of the input energy is used to power the computer equipment. But that doesn't say how energy efficient the machines themselves are. You could be running 150W Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processors, or whatever, and still get a higher 'efficiency' than someone using Atom processors giving the same computational speed with lower power usage.
True - But it still means that 5/6ths of the power goes to adding computational resources rather than pure-waste overhead. Depending on the task, you might want as much horsepower as possible, or the highest reliability possible, or a massive storage or I/O node. But it doesn't really matter what you want in the box - lowering the overhead always counts as a win.
What good does the container do at that point? You're just compartmentalizing the warehouse, with really unwieldy compartments
Unwieldy for us, thinking in terms of fixing broken machines on a per-server or even a per-component basis.
For the likes of Microsoft and Google, they don't troubleshoot and repair broken HDDs, or even servers, they just roll out one whole rack and roll in another.
Changing the granularity to shipping containers just reflects the next step up - They won't bother troubleshooting a "mere" rack (at least, not on-site) - when some unacceptable percent of the container has failed, They'll just drive in a replacement, swap it for the old one, and drive the old one off for a refurb.
Completely misunderstand? Did you read TFA? You don't need to misunderstand it to find the situation absurd:
So yeah, the jokes about potatoes may go a tad bit outside the scope of this law, but they actually don't miss the point. Why shouldn't I decapitate a roadside flower for the hell of it? Attributing ideas such as "dignity" to literally brainless creatures sounds just as absurd as the inevitable jokes about all our least-favorite veggies.
I suppose you could invoke vague and largely-religious issues such as the "sanctity of all life" in defense of this (part of the) law, but don't pretend it has merit on its own
Even 1% false positives or negatives in a huge application will lead to lots of problems
More importantly, where can I buy an incredibly realistic Osama Bin Laden mask?
They want to play games, we can play right back. Good luck tracking Joe Sixpack when your fancy automated system starts reporting that it has found Terrorist-X 20 times a minute from all over the globe...
What's stupid about thinking that would be sufficient?
Because things like this story happen.
If you have something irreplaceable, you make copies, and lots of them... Code I've written, even "hello world" quality crap made 20 years ago, I have reproduced across no fewer than four machines at three physical sites, not to mention at least a dozen backups on DVD over the years (I try to burn my important files at least once a month).
Now, my ripped CD collection, I have only one extra copy (it lives on two machines) because I could re-rip it (even if doing so would take a few weeks). Downloaded software, I keep only a single copy, because most of it I'll never need again, and I could re-download what I needed within a few hours, in a worst-case scenario. But for anything that matters to me - Copies, copies, and more copies.
you cannot rebuild the file with your chunks without guiding information [...] on a routing line with a hundred users on one end, it's thousands of hash-checks to be made for every stupid rebuilt file - both processes of course painfully CPU-eating
Ah, you've missed the obvious next step - Just force the end-users themselves to run the scanner.... Either as a new standalone scanner (with a hefty penalty for nocompliance), or incorporated into standard AV software (why not, it already scans everything anyway), or even hidden somewhere such as your NIC's firmware where it sees all and can easily tell on you.
to avoid being sued by the U.S. Justice Department, Google is negotiating with them
Okay, Google has 71% of the search engine market... Which itself makes up what, less than 5% of the total world of advertising?
Oh, boo-hoo, Google can actually tell you how much you have to pay to share their sandbox. Sorry advertisers, but we don't want your "product" in the first place. Go bitch to someone who carres.
And, advertisers-of-the-world (and other search engines), do you know why Google has 71% of the search engine market? Because Google doesn't piss us off with banners and flash ads and hiding sponsored links as results. Get the hint?
Remember to do that every time you get in the car do you
Why not just leave it in vibrate mode (at least during the day)? In the office (or any quiet environment), or in my pocket, a vibrating phone works just as well as the ungodly loud klaxon most people set as their ringtones.
As soon as you start moving your phone won't interrupt you, as soon as you stop it lets you know about the calls you missed, and in the meantime it let the people trying to contact you know what's going on.
Or, I could just put it in silent/vibrate mode, which I can't hear over the car, and it will still list all the calls I missed the next time I look at it.
Really, people... Serious case of a solution in need of a problem. If you don't want to take calls for some reason - Don't!. Simple as that. You don't need magic speed-sensing software to let you ignore your phone.
All right, look, ladies.
<Chirp chirp>
<Chirp chirp>
<Chirp chirp>
You don't really know your audience very well, do you?
You can generate that pretty easily, just build a database of names and words for different concepts in the scenario
That uses the template based approach, with a fairly narrow template. In your specific case, a simple tagged grammar engine could solve it... Although the number of possible nouns, relations, and fluff words might at first seem exponential, you really only have a linear relation on each of them.
So, you end up with a complex-looking sentence reducing to |{noun1} [set operation] {noun2}| . The substitution of pronouns and synonyms doesn't really change the complexity all that much unless you make the referents so vague that even an English professor would struggle to figure out what you meant.