A part of the problem is the amount of time most Americans spend at work, and how little vacation time people get in this country. Two weeks of vacation a year isn't much, and people burn out as a result.
That pretty much sums it up, IMHO.
I'm a network admin and I usually put in at least 50 hours per week, though I'm usually only in the office 40 or so. If you can do the math you can figure that I work from home a lot. Even when I'm not on call I am expected to be available to help if the on-call guy gets stuck on something (being the only network admin in a team of five IT people). None of that bothers me too much, because I knew it going into this position and made sure that my salary took that into account. Vacation time could be better, but it's 3-4 weeks per year (my employer lumps sick and vacation time together as PTO, which is a horrible thing to do). Unfortunately, I've only gone on vacation once in the past couple of years that I haven't been interrupted by work, and only then because it was my honeymoon, I told them that I would not be available, I left the country, and didn't take a mobile phone with international access.
I think that I have a good job, but I definitely spend part of it slacking off. Usually when I am slacking off, it's surfing some tech sites so that I can keep up on the latest technology/tech news. So maybe my slacking time qualifies as professional development time, who knows? All I know is that I don't feel bad about it (especially when I see the web sites that other people are surfing in their slack time).
I could replace those two servers with a friggen 486 running Linux with Samba, IMAP and some sort of web based calendaring software. The total software cost on that solution would be zero and the only loss of functionality would be the integration of Outlook.
If you could have, I'm sure that you would have, yet you didn't.
BTW, there's nothing wrong with having Exchange running on an AD box. There are a limited number of potential complications with installing Exchange 2000 and later on a domain controller, but all of them apply to much larger networks. You could have saved yourself a fortune by just going with a single server and MS Small Business Server suite.
If I were to give an honest assesment of what information you provided in your post, it sounds like you didn't know the products, their capabilities, or how to best leverage them. Salespeople love it when someone like that comes to them because they can sell them an extra server and more software licenses without even trying. I have noticed that this is a common problem with people who blast MS products...typically they either don't know/use them or haven't used them since the days of Windows 95. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of free (speech) software, and especially free (beer) software. But if you actually know how to use Microsoft software (as opposed to trying to pass yourself off as an MS Systems Admin) then you will have relatively few problems.
Re:Good old detective work for a chance?
on
Spammers on the Run
·
· Score: 2, Funny
It's amazing, isn't it? You're connected to the Internet, the world's single largest source of information on nearly every conceivable topic, and you couldn't be bothered to take 2 minutes to actually look up the topic being discussed before commenting on it.
The mafia wouldnt beat a person to death, they'd simple make the person vanish off the face of the earth. You'd think the mafia would do a professional hit.
No they wouldn't. When organized crime wants to send a message, they don't do it quietly. Who knows what this guy was into, but if he was Russia's most profitable spammer then he was either heavily involved in organized crime or competing with organized crime. Either way, it would be awfully easy to piss off someone who might decide to make an example out of you.
What I find far more interesting is that he was Russia's most successful spammer and he still lived in an apartment.
I suspect that the biggest portion of spam these days is sent via broadband-connected Zombie PCs. That makes it a lot harder to track the source to a particular ISP (or do you just penalize all ISPs, since many of them will have unsecured users?).
I personally like the SURBLs. They list spamvertised web sites, not the originating hosts of spam messages. If you block those then you're one step closer to cutting down on their profits.
Instead of unsubscribing thousands of emails, how about subscribing thousands of fake emails... which in turn would lower their return ratio and might even result in fail delivery messages, using up more resources.
Not sure who modded this insightful, but it probably wasn't someone with much insight. Most spammers use a list of millions of email addresses. Adding thousands of fake emails isn't going to register as a blip, especially when many of the millions of addresses on their lists are already bad addresses, filtered addresses, or otherwise undeliverable.
Using up "more resources" is a non-issue for spammers, since usually the "resources" that they are using are not their own. Spammers don't set up their own email servers to send spam messages, they use someone else's server that is an open relay or they use trojan-comprised PCs connected via broadband.
Basically, spammers don't care if addresses are valid or not. They send millions of messages, it costs them next to nothing to send the messages, and if they get a sale out of 1/10th of a percent of recipients then they've made a substantial profit. Adding small inefficiencies that would affect a legitimate business' bottom line is not a deterrent because the effect is so small with spammers. The only way to deter them is to a) take away their capability to spam or b) take away their incentive to spam (aka, confiscate their money and property).
Generally speaking I found the lightsaber duels too cluttered, without much definition in each move sequence.
A Darth Maul vs Qui-Gon Jinn style of fight choreography should have been used... IMO it's the best lightsaber duel of them all.
Yup, me too. And the reason why is that those two duels were done entirely with real people really fighting it out (well, mock-fighting it out). They didn't have tons of CG-animated bodies flipping nad flopping and twirling around and doing super-impossible "only mad Jedi skillz could accomplish this" feats.
Don't get me wrong, the CGI Yoda duels obviously have to be done digitally, but for everything else you're just upping the cheese and distraction factor.
Don't forget the Frankenstein shuffle that he does when he first wakes up. It's the epitome of not only bad acting and dialogue, but bad directing as well.
Don't get me wrong, I've seen great CG/live integration pieces. However, they were great because they were subtle and supported the concepts and ideas.
I agree. My biggest beef with the CGI is that IMHO, VFX needs to be used to enhance the story or draw attention to important details. In this movie there is so much CGI/VFX that in many scenes it is distracting from the main story. The giant space battle looked awesome, and it would be fun to watch if the space battle were the story. But the story was Obi-Wan and Anakin trying to get to Grevious's spaceship, and that kept getting overshadowed. There are countless other instances in the first three movies. Someone should teach Lucas that making a movie that "looks great" does not make a "good movie".
Did George Lucas provide a scene (in "Revenge of the Sith") where Darth Vader's own right hand was sliced off? If the answer is "yes", then Lucas has remained true to the original trilogy.
No. But he did in Episode II (the duel with Count Dooku at the end). I don't think that it's much of a spoiler to say that Anakin/Vader definitely gets messed up at the end of Episode III, losing all sorts of parts and eventually requiring the Big Black Suit.
It's not clear how long the time lapse is between the creation of the black-suited vader and the end of the film. But more likely it was just a visual to try to tie things together. If you're looking for truly tight script continuity then you've come to the wrong movie.
What he can't do is write decent dialogue, or direct properly.
I gotta agree with this 100%. The overall story arc was interesting. The universe was interesting. The effects were good. The acting/directing was quuite poor, and the dialogue sucked. Some of the lines were so bad that the audience was actually laughing at them. And I'm not talking about laughing like you would at a Han Solo line, either. And that's another pet peeve of mine, this movie has no great lines. Or if it did then the delivery was so weak as to make them unmemorable. Episides IV-VI had plenty of memorable lines of the sort that many of us can quote in our sleep.
I was talking to someone about this last night, and my comment was "This movie looks like it was directed by someone with Asperger's syndrome." I think back to the first trilogy, and while IV was a little hokey in a space-opera kinda way, the emotional content and it's portrayal in episodes V and VI were very well done. After watching Episode III, I keep thinking of all of these scenes that should be charged with powerful emotions and they're just simply flat. Even the Anakin/Obi Wan duel at the end is weak (I keep comparing it to the Luke/Vader duel in ROTJ and it doesn't come close). For someone who is supposed to be embracing their emotions and feeding off of them for his slide to the darkside, Anakin displays all the emotional depth of a log.
My other major beef with the way he's done things are with all of the special effects. Used judiciously they can greatly enhance a movie. But I think that he definitely overuses them. Many of his action scenes end up having so much action that it's difficult to follow them. IMHO, special effects should emphasize the storyline and enhance or draw attention to key events. But in many of the scenes from the prequels they just end up distracting you from what is important. Maybe he's trying to cover up the fact that the "important" bits just aren't that interesting, or maybe he's lost focus. But I know that the original Episodes IV-VI worked much better because they had fewer effects, and the ones that they did have emphasized the story elements. Even the re-released IV-VI now suffer from a little effects overload, or at least effects that are distracting.
I don't know if there's going to be any more episodes, but if there are then Lucas needs to step back and let someone talented write and direct. It may be his baby, but he's pretty much smothered it.
Two points:
1. Your math is way off.
2. You don't know what you're talking about.
First, the math. We're not talking about diamonds, we're talking about finsihed diamonds. Diamonds that have been cut and polished, and those are rare. But if you want to do the math based on my figures, it goes like this:
1 mine = roughly.88 kilograms of cut and polished stones per week.
.88kg X 52 weeks = 45.76kg/year
45.76 kg/year x 24 mines (ballpark number, probably lowballing it) = 1098.24 kg/year total of cut and polished diamonds
1 kg = 2.2 lbs, so 1098.24 kg/year = 2416.128 pounds of cut and polished diamonds a year, or roughly 1.2 tons, not the.5 tons that you claim.
Also note that I am speaking not of the quantitiy of diamonds mined, but the quantity of cut and polished stones. As stated previously, 50-60% of the rough is lost in cutting. So now you're looking at 2.4 tons of rough, gemstone quality diamonds.
I also pointed out that only about 20% of mined diamonds are of gemstone quality. So if we multiply 2.4 tons x 5 = 12 tons of diamonds mined per year. So you were only off by a factor of 24 when you were going off of my figures. Trying to make your argument look better?
Now regarding the rarity of diamonds: why is heavy water so much more uncommon than regular water? It's all just hydrogen and oxygen. The answer is that the conditions required to get the extra water molecule to accept a second oxygen atom are very rare.
In the same sense, the conditions under which diamonds are formed are also rare. Diamonds are not just simple collections of carbon atoms. They are crystalized forms of carbon molecules, and the levels of pressure that are required to cause carbon to crystalize into a diamond only occur in the earth's mantle. If you recall from geology 101, the earth's mantle starts at approximately 35km below the earth's surface and extends down another 3000km. Scientists estimate that minimum depth required to create a diamond is actually closer to 150km. Coal and graphite formations are created at much lower pressure levels than diamonds, and consequently are widely abundant in the earth's crust. That's why diamonds are so much more rare than other natural forms of carbon.
But wait you say? Diamonds are formed over 150km below the earth's surface, and yet they can be mined from the surface. And since we don't tunnel 150km below the earth's surface I must be wrong, right? Wrong. Diamonds are brought to the earth's surface from the mantle by magma flows through kimberlite structures called "pipes" in active volcanos. Long after the volcano has gone extinct the kimberlite and diamond deposits are left on or just below the earth's surface, where they can be (relatively) easily mined. However, since these are secondary deposits (i.e., the diamonds are not found where they were formed), they are found in much lower quantities than they would be if they were primary deposits (like the deposits where coal and graphite are found).
Now none of this is top secret information closely guarded by the evil DeBeers conspiracy. In fact, if you had taken half as much time to research diamonds as your did coal and graphite production, you would have found that out. Heck, here's a nice link to the American Museum of Natural History that explains it all quite nicely.
It'd be interesting if there was a certain amount of imperfections that were desirable in a diamond. Say, if there were too many, it would obviously be low quality, and if there were too few, it'd obviously be from a lab.
What a brilliant idea! Now if only someone had come up with a system to rate the number and type of imperfections in a diamond...maybe they'd call it "clarity". And maybe they'd make a scale to rate the "clarity" of the diamond so that you could tell by it's grade how many imperfections there were without having to look at it under a microscope. And if they did, maybe it would look like this:
Hey! And then after we "graded" a diamond, we could issue a certificate that is tied to that diamond that records all of the imperfections, their location, color, weight, and how close it is to an ideal cut as well! That way people who weren't gemologists could tell what is what when they were buying it! Dude!
You've obviously not been doing your homework, have you?
Diamonds aren't really that rare, it's just that De Beers has a virtual monopoly on them and carefully controls how many of them enter the market.
Yeah, that's it. Nobody really wanted diamonds for thousands of years, it's all a DeBeers conspiracy.
But seriously folks, DeBeers does control about 80% of the world diamond trade, so while it's not a true monopoly they certainly are influential (you know, like Microsoft). One of the benefits to that is that they have been able to keep the prices of diamonds stable. Whether they are also artificially inflating the prices is debatable, as there is certainly a great deal of demand for diamonds (which DeBeers certainly encourages) that accounts for the pricing. But I think that you have a very peculiar definition of rare.
A decent sized diamond mine will produce about 30,000-40,000 carats of diamonds per week. This is a diamond mine that moves earth by the dumptruck load, mind you. Now 5 carats equals 1 gram, so that's 6-8 kilograms of uncut diamonds per week, which would fit very nicely in a household bucket. Of those, only about 20% are going to be of gemstone quality. The rest are used for industrial purposes. That's about 6,000-8,000 carats of uncut gemstone quality diamonds per week from an average mine. Now when you take a rough diamond and make a typical modern cut and polished gem, you will generally lose 50-60% of the rough material. On larger stones you may lose even more material. So after all of that work has been done, your weeks worth of diamond mine production that started with moving thousands of truckloads of earth and stone has netted you somewhere between 3300-4400 carats (660-880 grams) of cut and polished gemstone quality diamonds. You could probably carry that much in your own two hands.
Of course not all of those diamonds are going to be the highest quality gemstones. Some of them will be yellower than others. Some of them will be fairly included. Most of them will be much smaller than 1 carat. Some of them won't be as well cut. All of the above will lower their value, and thereby make more clear, large, well-cut, white diamonds significantly more rare, and even more valuable.
There are only a couple of dozen diamond mines in the world right now, and some of them are smaller than my example. But if you truly believe that diamonds "aren't that rare," and that the current situation is the result of a DeBeers conspiracy to make people think that they are, then you obviously haven't spent much time studying the industry.
If this will end up producing indistinguishable diamonds , then the market will collapse. IIRC, the artificial rubies made always contain a peice of metal embedded to make sure they are not sold as the real one - it's a question of business ethics for the people who make them (also good old plain advertisement).
Artificial or lab-creted rubies (like most lab-creted gemstones) can be identified by the number and types of inclusions. These occur during the manufacturing process and are not intentionally implanted to allow you to distinguish between the natural and lab rubies. Think about it, if the intention is to create a stone indistinguishable from the real thing, why would they intentionally ruin it like that?
Also, most lab-creted rubies transmit shortwave ultraviolet light, while natural rubies do not.
I thought yellow diamonds (depending on their exact colour) could be worth much more than normal ones. At least, that's what the Antiques Roadshow said on Sunday...
It depends. Yellow tinted diamonds tend to be worth less than the whiter diamonds, but if the coloration is fairly strong then it is considetred a "fancy" diamond and can be worth more money, especially if it is of significant size. Diamonds also can be found in pink, green, blue, yellow, orange-ish, and even a "champagne" sort of variety. There are probably even more shades than that, but those are just the ones that I have seen.
That's not exactly true. "Impurities" typically refers to so-called "flaws", usually inclusions or other marks that affect the clarity of the diamond. An inclusion can be a mineral deposit that looks like a speck or even other gemstones. But inclusions can also be twinning marks (where two diamond crystals have grown together), feather marks, or other optical deficiencies that do not relate to the chemical purity of the stone.
There are a couple problems with what you propose. Firstly, most applications requiring 16 GB or more of memory usually require (or at least benefit from) multiple CPUs. Such applications would be databases, sophisticated modelling systems, etc.
The next problem is the electronic signaling. Getting 4 memory slots to work together at today's speeds can be tricky. That's why in the past couple of years it has become increasingly important to use memory modules that are listed as supported by your motherboard manufacturer. Wiring together more than four slots and getting the signalling/timing down right is much more difficult. This isn't as big of an issue on SMP Opteron systems because each CPU has it's own memory interface and dedicated memory, so 8 slots on a 2-way equals 4 slots per CPU, still with easily achieveable goals.
That leaves you with having to fit larger memory modules into your four memory slots. The largest that I have seen generally available are the 2GB modules. I wouldn't be suprised if someone were selling 4GB modules, but they will be very hard to come by and very expensive. Right now you can buy 1GB ECC modules for around $280-$300 each. The 2GB ECC modules are about $800 each. I can't imagine what 4GB modules would cost, but I know that I wouldn't want to pay for them.
Since you were talking about using it as a RAMdisk a better option might be a solid state hard disk.
Just last week we were all ment to assume that Dell (oops, I mean Intel) wasn't ready to ship dual core until Q1 of next year...
Only if you were living under a rock. The tech sites have been talking about the upcoming dual core launches for weeks, and the theme of those articles has been that Intel and AMD are vying to be the first to announce the product, leapfrogging each other week after week. You obviously haven't been paying attention.
Now all of a sudden -- out of nowhere -- they launch a surprise attack and shipped the cores early, even before AMD's announced launch date. Sounds like some VERY hefty competition for AMD. They had been claiming all along that they would be the first with dual cores an it was even used as an "excuse" for Dell to talk about starting to sell AMD chips specifically because of this feature.
Out of nowhere? Suprise attack? See my point above. There's nothing suprising about it, we knew this was coming. So Intel has announced dual-core CPUs. Are they shipping in volume? Nope. Where can you buy them and not have a two-week shipping delay? Nowhere. This is just another PR ploy to steal AMD's thunder because Intel keeps getting it's ass handed to it in the areas that matter.
AMD had better look out! Their stock price will probably take a plunge due to this surprise announcement.
I doubt it. AMD is ready to ship dual-core Opterons in volume to the server and workstation market. Intel is ready to ship a trickle of dual-core Pentium 4s as high-end gaming CPUs. Gaming sees negligible benefit from dual-core, but servers can get a hefty performance boost from dual core. Servers are where the money is at, and I'm sure that will be reflected in AMD's stock price.
Slashdot Mirror
A part of the problem is the amount of time most Americans spend at work, and how little vacation time people get in this country. Two weeks of vacation a year isn't much, and people burn out as a result.
That pretty much sums it up, IMHO.
I'm a network admin and I usually put in at least 50 hours per week, though I'm usually only in the office 40 or so. If you can do the math you can figure that I work from home a lot. Even when I'm not on call I am expected to be available to help if the on-call guy gets stuck on something (being the only network admin in a team of five IT people). None of that bothers me too much, because I knew it going into this position and made sure that my salary took that into account. Vacation time could be better, but it's 3-4 weeks per year (my employer lumps sick and vacation time together as PTO, which is a horrible thing to do). Unfortunately, I've only gone on vacation once in the past couple of years that I haven't been interrupted by work, and only then because it was my honeymoon, I told them that I would not be available, I left the country, and didn't take a mobile phone with international access.
I think that I have a good job, but I definitely spend part of it slacking off. Usually when I am slacking off, it's surfing some tech sites so that I can keep up on the latest technology/tech news. So maybe my slacking time qualifies as professional development time, who knows? All I know is that I don't feel bad about it (especially when I see the web sites that other people are surfing in their slack time).
I could replace those two servers with a friggen 486 running Linux with Samba, IMAP and some sort of web based calendaring software. The total software cost on that solution would be zero and the only loss of functionality would be the integration of Outlook.
If you could have, I'm sure that you would have, yet you didn't.
BTW, there's nothing wrong with having Exchange running on an AD box. There are a limited number of potential complications with installing Exchange 2000 and later on a domain controller, but all of them apply to much larger networks. You could have saved yourself a fortune by just going with a single server and MS Small Business Server suite.
If I were to give an honest assesment of what information you provided in your post, it sounds like you didn't know the products, their capabilities, or how to best leverage them. Salespeople love it when someone like that comes to them because they can sell them an extra server and more software licenses without even trying. I have noticed that this is a common problem with people who blast MS products...typically they either don't know/use them or haven't used them since the days of Windows 95. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of free (speech) software, and especially free (beer) software. But if you actually know how to use Microsoft software (as opposed to trying to pass yourself off as an MS Systems Admin) then you will have relatively few problems.
It's amazing, isn't it? You're connected to the Internet, the world's single largest source of information on nearly every conceivable topic, and you couldn't be bothered to take 2 minutes to actually look up the topic being discussed before commenting on it.
See, I told you that it was far more interesting (from an American who is used to the suburbs point of view).
The mafia wouldnt beat a person to death, they'd simple make the person vanish off the face of the earth. You'd think the mafia would do a professional hit.
No they wouldn't. When organized crime wants to send a message, they don't do it quietly. Who knows what this guy was into, but if he was Russia's most profitable spammer then he was either heavily involved in organized crime or competing with organized crime. Either way, it would be awfully easy to piss off someone who might decide to make an example out of you.
What I find far more interesting is that he was Russia's most successful spammer and he still lived in an apartment.
I suspect that the biggest portion of spam these days is sent via broadband-connected Zombie PCs. That makes it a lot harder to track the source to a particular ISP (or do you just penalize all ISPs, since many of them will have unsecured users?).
I personally like the SURBLs. They list spamvertised web sites, not the originating hosts of spam messages. If you block those then you're one step closer to cutting down on their profits.
Instead of unsubscribing thousands of emails, how about subscribing thousands of fake emails ... which in turn would lower their return ratio and might even result in fail delivery messages, using up more resources.
Not sure who modded this insightful, but it probably wasn't someone with much insight. Most spammers use a list of millions of email addresses. Adding thousands of fake emails isn't going to register as a blip, especially when many of the millions of addresses on their lists are already bad addresses, filtered addresses, or otherwise undeliverable.
Using up "more resources" is a non-issue for spammers, since usually the "resources" that they are using are not their own. Spammers don't set up their own email servers to send spam messages, they use someone else's server that is an open relay or they use trojan-comprised PCs connected via broadband.
Basically, spammers don't care if addresses are valid or not. They send millions of messages, it costs them next to nothing to send the messages, and if they get a sale out of 1/10th of a percent of recipients then they've made a substantial profit. Adding small inefficiencies that would affect a legitimate business' bottom line is not a deterrent because the effect is so small with spammers. The only way to deter them is to a) take away their capability to spam or b) take away their incentive to spam (aka, confiscate their money and property).
The Empire should look into using firewalls.
I'm willing to at least give them credit for not using WEP though.
Generally speaking I found the lightsaber duels too cluttered, without much definition in each move sequence.
A Darth Maul vs Qui-Gon Jinn style of fight choreography should have been used... IMO it's the best lightsaber duel of them all.
Yup, me too. And the reason why is that those two duels were done entirely with real people really fighting it out (well, mock-fighting it out). They didn't have tons of CG-animated bodies flipping nad flopping and twirling around and doing super-impossible "only mad Jedi skillz could accomplish this" feats.
Don't get me wrong, the CGI Yoda duels obviously have to be done digitally, but for everything else you're just upping the cheese and distraction factor.
Don't forget the Frankenstein shuffle that he does when he first wakes up. It's the epitome of not only bad acting and dialogue, but bad directing as well.
Don't get me wrong, I've seen great CG/live integration pieces. However, they were great because they were subtle and supported the concepts and ideas.
I agree. My biggest beef with the CGI is that IMHO, VFX needs to be used to enhance the story or draw attention to important details. In this movie there is so much CGI/VFX that in many scenes it is distracting from the main story. The giant space battle looked awesome, and it would be fun to watch if the space battle were the story. But the story was Obi-Wan and Anakin trying to get to Grevious's spaceship, and that kept getting overshadowed. There are countless other instances in the first three movies. Someone should teach Lucas that making a movie that "looks great" does not make a "good movie".
Did George Lucas provide a scene (in "Revenge of the Sith") where Darth Vader's own right hand was sliced off? If the answer is "yes", then Lucas has remained true to the original trilogy.
No. But he did in Episode II (the duel with Count Dooku at the end). I don't think that it's much of a spoiler to say that Anakin/Vader definitely gets messed up at the end of Episode III, losing all sorts of parts and eventually requiring the Big Black Suit.
It's not clear how long the time lapse is between the creation of the black-suited vader and the end of the film. But more likely it was just a visual to try to tie things together. If you're looking for truly tight script continuity then you've come to the wrong movie.
What he can't do is write decent dialogue, or direct properly.
I gotta agree with this 100%. The overall story arc was interesting. The universe was interesting. The effects were good. The acting/directing was quuite poor, and the dialogue sucked. Some of the lines were so bad that the audience was actually laughing at them. And I'm not talking about laughing like you would at a Han Solo line, either. And that's another pet peeve of mine, this movie has no great lines. Or if it did then the delivery was so weak as to make them unmemorable. Episides IV-VI had plenty of memorable lines of the sort that many of us can quote in our sleep.
I was talking to someone about this last night, and my comment was "This movie looks like it was directed by someone with Asperger's syndrome." I think back to the first trilogy, and while IV was a little hokey in a space-opera kinda way, the emotional content and it's portrayal in episodes V and VI were very well done. After watching Episode III, I keep thinking of all of these scenes that should be charged with powerful emotions and they're just simply flat. Even the Anakin/Obi Wan duel at the end is weak (I keep comparing it to the Luke/Vader duel in ROTJ and it doesn't come close). For someone who is supposed to be embracing their emotions and feeding off of them for his slide to the darkside, Anakin displays all the emotional depth of a log.
My other major beef with the way he's done things are with all of the special effects. Used judiciously they can greatly enhance a movie. But I think that he definitely overuses them. Many of his action scenes end up having so much action that it's difficult to follow them. IMHO, special effects should emphasize the storyline and enhance or draw attention to key events. But in many of the scenes from the prequels they just end up distracting you from what is important. Maybe he's trying to cover up the fact that the "important" bits just aren't that interesting, or maybe he's lost focus. But I know that the original Episodes IV-VI worked much better because they had fewer effects, and the ones that they did have emphasized the story elements. Even the re-released IV-VI now suffer from a little effects overload, or at least effects that are distracting.
I don't know if there's going to be any more episodes, but if there are then Lucas needs to step back and let someone talented write and direct. It may be his baby, but he's pretty much smothered it.
It sucks being bitchslapped in public, doesn't it?
Diamond: 0.5 Tonnes p.a
.88 kilograms of cut and polished stones per week.
.88kg X 52 weeks = 45.76kg/year
.5 tons that you claim.
-Your figures given above
I call shenanigans!
Two points:
1. Your math is way off.
2. You don't know what you're talking about.
First, the math. We're not talking about diamonds, we're talking about finsihed diamonds. Diamonds that have been cut and polished, and those are rare. But if you want to do the math based on my figures, it goes like this:
1 mine = roughly
45.76 kg/year x 24 mines (ballpark number, probably lowballing it) = 1098.24 kg/year total of cut and polished diamonds
1 kg = 2.2 lbs, so 1098.24 kg/year = 2416.128 pounds of cut and polished diamonds a year, or roughly 1.2 tons, not the
Also note that I am speaking not of the quantitiy of diamonds mined, but the quantity of cut and polished stones. As stated previously, 50-60% of the rough is lost in cutting. So now you're looking at 2.4 tons of rough, gemstone quality diamonds.
I also pointed out that only about 20% of mined diamonds are of gemstone quality. So if we multiply 2.4 tons x 5 = 12 tons of diamonds mined per year. So you were only off by a factor of 24 when you were going off of my figures. Trying to make your argument look better?
Now regarding the rarity of diamonds: why is heavy water so much more uncommon than regular water? It's all just hydrogen and oxygen. The answer is that the conditions required to get the extra water molecule to accept a second oxygen atom are very rare.
In the same sense, the conditions under which diamonds are formed are also rare. Diamonds are not just simple collections of carbon atoms. They are crystalized forms of carbon molecules, and the levels of pressure that are required to cause carbon to crystalize into a diamond only occur in the earth's mantle. If you recall from geology 101, the earth's mantle starts at approximately 35km below the earth's surface and extends down another 3000km. Scientists estimate that minimum depth required to create a diamond is actually closer to 150km. Coal and graphite formations are created at much lower pressure levels than diamonds, and consequently are widely abundant in the earth's crust. That's why diamonds are so much more rare than other natural forms of carbon.
But wait you say? Diamonds are formed over 150km below the earth's surface, and yet they can be mined from the surface. And since we don't tunnel 150km below the earth's surface I must be wrong, right? Wrong. Diamonds are brought to the earth's surface from the mantle by magma flows through kimberlite structures called "pipes" in active volcanos. Long after the volcano has gone extinct the kimberlite and diamond deposits are left on or just below the earth's surface, where they can be (relatively) easily mined. However, since these are secondary deposits (i.e., the diamonds are not found where they were formed), they are found in much lower quantities than they would be if they were primary deposits (like the deposits where coal and graphite are found).
Now none of this is top secret information closely guarded by the evil DeBeers conspiracy. In fact, if you had taken half as much time to research diamonds as your did coal and graphite production, you would have found that out. Heck, here's a nice link to the American Museum of Natural History that explains it all quite nicely.
It'd be interesting if there was a certain amount of imperfections that were desirable in a diamond. Say, if there were too many, it would obviously be low quality, and if there were too few, it'd obviously be from a lab.
What a brilliant idea! Now if only someone had come up with a system to rate the number and type of imperfections in a diamond...maybe they'd call it "clarity". And maybe they'd make a scale to rate the "clarity" of the diamond so that you could tell by it's grade how many imperfections there were without having to look at it under a microscope. And if they did, maybe it would look like this:
Diamond Clarity
Hey! And then after we "graded" a diamond, we could issue a certificate that is tied to that diamond that records all of the imperfections, their location, color, weight, and how close it is to an ideal cut as well! That way people who weren't gemologists could tell what is what when they were buying it! Dude!
You've obviously not been doing your homework, have you?
Diamonds aren't really that rare, it's just that De Beers has a virtual monopoly on them and carefully controls how many of them enter the market.
Yeah, that's it. Nobody really wanted diamonds for thousands of years, it's all a DeBeers conspiracy.
But seriously folks, DeBeers does control about 80% of the world diamond trade, so while it's not a true monopoly they certainly are influential (you know, like Microsoft). One of the benefits to that is that they have been able to keep the prices of diamonds stable. Whether they are also artificially inflating the prices is debatable, as there is certainly a great deal of demand for diamonds (which DeBeers certainly encourages) that accounts for the pricing. But I think that you have a very peculiar definition of rare.
A decent sized diamond mine will produce about 30,000-40,000 carats of diamonds per week. This is a diamond mine that moves earth by the dumptruck load, mind you. Now 5 carats equals 1 gram, so that's 6-8 kilograms of uncut diamonds per week, which would fit very nicely in a household bucket. Of those, only about 20% are going to be of gemstone quality. The rest are used for industrial purposes. That's about 6,000-8,000 carats of uncut gemstone quality diamonds per week from an average mine. Now when you take a rough diamond and make a typical modern cut and polished gem, you will generally lose 50-60% of the rough material. On larger stones you may lose even more material. So after all of that work has been done, your weeks worth of diamond mine production that started with moving thousands of truckloads of earth and stone has netted you somewhere between 3300-4400 carats (660-880 grams) of cut and polished gemstone quality diamonds. You could probably carry that much in your own two hands.
Of course not all of those diamonds are going to be the highest quality gemstones. Some of them will be yellower than others. Some of them will be fairly included. Most of them will be much smaller than 1 carat. Some of them won't be as well cut. All of the above will lower their value, and thereby make more clear, large, well-cut, white diamonds significantly more rare, and even more valuable.
There are only a couple of dozen diamond mines in the world right now, and some of them are smaller than my example. But if you truly believe that diamonds "aren't that rare," and that the current situation is the result of a DeBeers conspiracy to make people think that they are, then you obviously haven't spent much time studying the industry.
If this will end up producing indistinguishable diamonds , then the market will collapse. IIRC, the artificial rubies made always contain a peice of metal embedded to make sure they are not sold as the real one - it's a question of business ethics for the people who make them (also good old plain advertisement).
Artificial or lab-creted rubies (like most lab-creted gemstones) can be identified by the number and types of inclusions. These occur during the manufacturing process and are not intentionally implanted to allow you to distinguish between the natural and lab rubies. Think about it, if the intention is to create a stone indistinguishable from the real thing, why would they intentionally ruin it like that?
Also, most lab-creted rubies transmit shortwave ultraviolet light, while natural rubies do not.
I thought yellow diamonds (depending on their exact colour) could be worth much more than normal ones. At least, that's what the Antiques Roadshow said on Sunday...
It depends. Yellow tinted diamonds tend to be worth less than the whiter diamonds, but if the coloration is fairly strong then it is considetred a "fancy" diamond and can be worth more money, especially if it is of significant size. Diamonds also can be found in pink, green, blue, yellow, orange-ish, and even a "champagne" sort of variety. There are probably even more shades than that, but those are just the ones that I have seen.
That's not exactly true. "Impurities" typically refers to so-called "flaws", usually inclusions or other marks that affect the clarity of the diamond. An inclusion can be a mineral deposit that looks like a speck or even other gemstones. But inclusions can also be twinning marks (where two diamond crystals have grown together), feather marks, or other optical deficiencies that do not relate to the chemical purity of the stone.
How odd. The INQ ran an article that addresses this very issue today:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22589
There are a couple problems with what you propose. Firstly, most applications requiring 16 GB or more of memory usually require (or at least benefit from) multiple CPUs. Such applications would be databases, sophisticated modelling systems, etc.
The next problem is the electronic signaling. Getting 4 memory slots to work together at today's speeds can be tricky. That's why in the past couple of years it has become increasingly important to use memory modules that are listed as supported by your motherboard manufacturer. Wiring together more than four slots and getting the signalling/timing down right is much more difficult. This isn't as big of an issue on SMP Opteron systems because each CPU has it's own memory interface and dedicated memory, so 8 slots on a 2-way equals 4 slots per CPU, still with easily achieveable goals.
That leaves you with having to fit larger memory modules into your four memory slots. The largest that I have seen generally available are the 2GB modules. I wouldn't be suprised if someone were selling 4GB modules, but they will be very hard to come by and very expensive. Right now you can buy 1GB ECC modules for around $280-$300 each. The 2GB ECC modules are about $800 each. I can't imagine what 4GB modules would cost, but I know that I wouldn't want to pay for them.
Since you were talking about using it as a RAMdisk a better option might be a solid state hard disk.
Just last week we were all ment to assume that Dell (oops, I mean Intel) wasn't ready to ship dual core until Q1 of next year...
Only if you were living under a rock. The tech sites have been talking about the upcoming dual core launches for weeks, and the theme of those articles has been that Intel and AMD are vying to be the first to announce the product, leapfrogging each other week after week. You obviously haven't been paying attention.
Now all of a sudden -- out of nowhere -- they launch a surprise attack and shipped the cores early, even before AMD's announced launch date. Sounds like some VERY hefty competition for AMD. They had been claiming all along that they would be the first with dual cores an it was even used as an "excuse" for Dell to talk about starting to sell AMD chips specifically because of this feature.
Out of nowhere? Suprise attack? See my point above. There's nothing suprising about it, we knew this was coming. So Intel has announced dual-core CPUs. Are they shipping in volume? Nope. Where can you buy them and not have a two-week shipping delay? Nowhere. This is just another PR ploy to steal AMD's thunder because Intel keeps getting it's ass handed to it in the areas that matter.
AMD had better look out! Their stock price will probably take a plunge due to this surprise announcement.
I doubt it. AMD is ready to ship dual-core Opterons in volume to the server and workstation market. Intel is ready to ship a trickle of dual-core Pentium 4s as high-end gaming CPUs. Gaming sees negligible benefit from dual-core, but servers can get a hefty performance boost from dual core. Servers are where the money is at, and I'm sure that will be reflected in AMD's stock price.