I wonder which gives them the highest electric bill, the servers themselves or the airconditioner required to do it?
You know, you raise a funny point. When relocating our company, we looked at the cost of bandwidth and electricity, knowing that it was a cost of business. But when you've got 8,000 servers, you've got to think that electricity becomes a huge issue in picking your location. You almost want to move further up North, just to cut your air conditioning bills.
what in gods name do you need 8000 linux servers for? quake? I cant figure out what google could possibly use all that power for... if they really *need* all that power, they're obviously doing something wrong with their code.
Well, when was the last time you searched on Google? It has a stunning amount of servers indexed. I can search for just about anything, and Google always finds more accurate hits, faster, than any other search engine. (Don't turn this into a search engine flame war, either.) They have to constantly refresh their indexes, and they have to turn around fast answers.
Yahoo even uses them for their search engine. I can't imagine being able to service Yahoo's search needs with anything less than a full-fledged data center split across two cities.
What I would like to see is cooler chips so I don't toast my lap on the train. If new chips can do that, well, then it may be time to pick up some Big Blue stock...
You mean like Transmeta chips? They don't even need CPU fans. You *DO* own some Transmeta stock, don't you? Surely you're not just shooting off at the mouth about buying IBM's stock?
Sorry to be grumpy about this, but I can't believe how far Transmeta has fallen, and how much geeks like us have let them down. They built exactly what they said they were going to build - a cooler, lower-power CPU that's 100% Intel-compatible, and nobody seems to be buying the product that we all got so excited about. Everybody says they want cooler chips, lower-power chips, but then it's the ridiculously hot, power-sucking Athlons that get all the press. Wonder why that is?
Any experience with getting these working in *nix?
No, the driver gives new meaning to closed source. You can't even download it - you have to call Logitech to get another copy of the CD sent to you if you lose yours. It's not because it's big, either - the drivers aren't that sizable. Logitech loses points for that one. That's the only driver CD I actually keep.
As a guy who plays Black & White with a Logitech iFeel mouse, I've gotta say your initial take on mice needs to be revisited. Having the mouse kick back when you do something right, wrong, powerful, whatever, that means a lot, and it helps you get used to doing things the right way.
The only drawback is that it's too tiring for day-to-day use. I usually leave the feedback turned off when surfing the web, for example, because it just beats your wrists to death as you glide over a zillion links. I've got carpal tunnel, and the buzz that it makes when jumping over hyperlinks makes my wrists feel like they've been typing for hours.
It's remarkably cheap, too - it was $45 on the shelf the last time I looked.
Here's the really funny part: LinuxToday is already Slashdotted, but Stormix is doing fine. I'm not sure what that says about each company's web servers, or their business model, but I find it hilarious that the dead company has better web staying power.
If all devices were optical, there'd be no reason for electrical current other than to light up the fiber strands in the first place. Therefore, power to expansion cards wouldn't be needed at all and your PC would consume 3% of the energy it is using at this instant.
Huh? How do I spin the hard drives and CD's? How do I power the laser to burn CDR's? You're losing me.
PCI is 32 bit at 33MHz. This is 1000 Mbits per second. The only interface device that needs or ever will need more than that is Graphics cards, and they have AGP slots. Most of the devices we use can even be run over USB.
Is that like Bill Gates saying no one will ever need more than 640kb? Frankly, I use two graphics cards in my desktop, and the only reason I don't have three is that the cost of another LCD panel is ludicrous. As soon as they come down more, I want one more panel, and then I'll be happy. I hate having to settle for a differently-branded (and usually more expensive) PCI card just because I don't have more AGP ports available. Usually the cutting edge stuff only comes out on AGP.
Granted, I'm not playing Quake on all three at once, but the only reason I'm not is because I can't. I'd love to be able to play my driving games on all 3, with the left monitor being a left view, and the right being a right view. Or a view of my nearest competitor. Or even just a big rear view mirror. The possibilities are endless.
The next thing up is storage area networking. PCI cards can't handle the biggest SAN loads, like our DVD jukeboxes at work. We can only use one 300-DVD jukebox per server, because the bus load can't handle more. Think in terms of quad Xeon servers, and it'll make sense - you can indeed shuffle a lot of load across the bus and off the fiber network if you need it. (And no, it's not a single reader per jukebox, there's lots of readers in each jukebox.)
where simple devices like the mouse and keyboard will only take a little bit.
Somehow, I don't think fiber is the answer for mouse and keyboard, and the reason you just expressed is one of them. The other one is cost: do you really want to build a fiber transceiver into a mouse, and then pay for a fiber cable? When I can get a USB mouse for $12 at the corner store, I'm going to resist fiber mice pretty hard.
Whoa, slow down partner. USB and Firewire have something that optical will never have, and that is power. You will never be able to send electricity down an optical cable.
Nah, that's not hard at all. You just combine power along with the optical cable. 2.5" hard drive cables have been doing this for decades. It's just another wire in the bundle.
Interesting. Would you still want to plug the cards directly into the motherboards? If not, then remember, you're going to need a new case. It's not as simple as just running fiber, either - there's power issues, so the cable would need to include DC power. Or else, you're going to need a new power supply as well.
And even still, you're talking about standards city - you'd have to get everybody to agree on a physical card size, card placement in these new cases, and so on.
On the plus side, this would finally allow overclockers to put the video card wherever they dang well pleased, far away from the hot CPU, hard drive, and out of the way of mammoth fans. This is sounding better and better all the time. Hmmm. It'll never work. Hahah.
Slightly bad move, what they should do is make cheap games say uner $10.00 US. Lets face it the thought of free my sound inspiring, but it won't you you far, however it will make you broke really fast. Create a pay pal account and have users of their games give what they can under $10.00 (US)
Reread their site - they're not planning on doing game development, so the revenue stream wouldn't actually help them. Your business model would require game developers to charge $10, something more akin to shareware. While id Games may have started that way, I don't think it's a model that most of us aspire to. I can make more money at my day job.
why not approach some of the game developers with an idea of porting all games to their box, and a small price
That was the tack Sega took: the Dreamcast was based on CE, so it was actually really easy to port Windows DirectX games over. That project was a beautiful failure, but a failure nonetheless.
Think about it Zelda X on this machine would rock, and everyone would enjoy it
And it wouldn't rock on the Xbox or PS2 or Nintendo cube? This box is going to cost $350, so why would I invest in it over a platform that has tons of games?
A soccer mom would look at the box and go, hey I can get this one with 30 games or an Xbox or PS2 with maybe 1 if your lucky
Oh, yeah, right, soccer moms make video game purchases based on cost. They pay no attention to their screaming kids that demand Brand X because it's so heavily marketed on TV. Riiiight. If that was the case, we'd be seeing huge sales numbers on Atari 2600's that go for $25 on Ebay with tons of games, and the Sony Playstation never would have sold a single copy. All school kids would be wearing generic clothes from Wal-Mart and cheap shoes from Payless.
Don't kid yourself, this is a very brand-conscious market. Advertising makes a world of difference in consoles. That's precisely why MS is boosting the hype now, long before their console will even see the light of day.
If TuxBox doesn't plan lots of in-house game development, where do they think the profits will come from? They can't license third-party developers, because an open-sourced development platform will be wide open to any developers.
I'm sure they're looking at RedHat and licking their chops. RedHat doesn't necessarily make the apps - they just put a little dev time into the platform itself and package it. However, RedHat had the edge in that their boxed product had next to zero cost! You can't say that about a game console, costs are huge.
Linux games pretty well lack the development effort thrown into Windows games, and my (lame) business sense tells me that it's because there just aren't enough Linux boxes out there.
Now, bear with me here, but wouldn't the same logic hold through if a Linux console ever made it to the shelves? The game support would be close to nonexistent, compared with even the few games available for PS2 at its release. Nobody would buy it, and nobody would develop for it because of the missing audience.
Sega, a company with a lot more than a foothold in the console business, is smart enough to get out before Microsoft and Nintendo both jump back in with full force. Sega had huge resources (well, not compared to Microsoft, but certainly compared to any open source console project) and couldn't make it work. Any new open source console could only dream (no pun intended) of the market penetration that Dreamcast got, but it still wasn't enough to ensure success. Why would it work for someone else without funding?
What am I missing here? Why would anyone think yet another console would succeed? Even worse, why do we get excited at the thought of it?
Pretend for just a minute that Sega was going to open-source the Dreamcast platform tomorrow. Would you start working on developing games for it? Are you more qualified than the leading developers? Do you think you could save it? Do you think anyone could? Then why start a whole new project from scratch without funding?
You need to be more specific. According to the document you linked to:
SUMMARY: This document contains proposed regulations under
section 41 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 describing
when computer software which is developed by (or for the
benefit of) a taxpayer primarily for the taxpayer's internal
use can qualify for the credit for increasing research
activities.
Just because it's open source doesn't mean you developed it. Open source usually means you're using someone else's work as well. Furthermore, I'd doubt you'd be able to pass the test of saying it's for your internal use - especially if you work collaboratively on it, and upload your source code to external trees frequently.
As I read it, this is for companies/individuals who develop their own software, so that they can take advantage of the R&D credits. The government smiles on those who do their own R&D.
So, going by what you asked, if you're simply using Linux and expecting a tax credit, that's ridiculous, because it's not developed primarily by you, for your internal use. (Unless your name is Linux Torvalds or Alan Cox.) If you're rolling your own code that you use for your own internal use (logically speaking, that could even be batch programming) then you might be able to use this.
The background information was totally unnecessary, and makes this question feel like spam. Even further, this question is totally irrelevant here at Ask Slashdot. Come on - do you really want PR information from the folks here? This isn't a marketing forum. This whole thing reeks of advertising to geeks.
this "cool stuff" you speak of is designed to justify the federal government in taking your money, and to kill people.
Yeah, well, if it prevents incidents like the Chinese holding 24 of our soldiers captive, I'm all for it. In case you didn't notice, everybody's got nukes now, and we need a different edge. Our economy won't be bulletproof forever, and we need to do this kind of R&D work while the money is available.
Oddly, this will really, really increase sales of this particular CD, and the music industry will say it's because people can't pirate it. But they'll have it backwards.
Tons of us will race out and buy a Charlie Pride CD (even though we abhor country music) simply because we want to try to break it. We want to see whether or not it's really burnproof, and whether we can be the first to figure out the easy way around it.
The industry will hail the huge sales of this CD as demonstrable proof that non-copyable CD's enjoy higher revenues because us nasty mean hackers can't make copies of Charlie Pride's wonderful stuff, and thus we have to buy several copies for our car, our office, etc. They'll show this fact to other recording artists and say, "See, you too could be enjoying this kind of royalty," and the artists will lick their chops in anticipation. I guarantee they'll be a long line of artists willing to be the second burn-proof CD.
Don't forget that it's not your company; you are an employee, and it's their way or the highway. You can indicate to them that you will not do this, and that if that means you lose your job, that's fine. Or you can simply say 'no' and quit. That's your call.
For some reason, this sounds like an episode of the Sopranos. Somebody decides they no longer want to do the family business, and when they try to get out, boom, they get whacked. Leaving a job over something like this would really put a dent in your resume. Non-savvy bosses are going to say, "Hmmm, this fella doesn't do what he's told," and that will be the end of that interview.
I'm in the same boat. My employer actually does b2b spam. Their clients contract us to do web-based guest satisfaction surveys, and we have to spam our clients' customer lists to ask for them to fill out a survey. At least we're only spamming customers, but it's still heartbreaking.
I'm in a worse position, though, because we're actually getting paid to do it. No matter how much I complain, it still brings money directly in the door, and it's not like I can bite the hand that feeds me.
Spam really is a moneymaker, just like snail mail spam is, and in these dark days of dot-com deadpools, you can't afford to pick your customers. I can't exactly point at any other profitable web-based business and say, "See, this is how you're supposed to do it."
Sick thing is, I was on cnn.com earlier today and the poll asking if libraries should be required to censor porn had 70% saying yes...what the hell is wrong with the people in this country?!?
You have to consider the viewership of CNN. CNN is inherently Democrat-biased, and they tend to attract the liberal left. I saw that particular poll myself and clicked No, but I wasn't at all surprised by the results. Two words for you: Ted Turner.
During the presidential race, a friend of mine and I had a running bet. Every morning, CNN showed a picture of Gore and Bush: Gore was always smiling, and Bush was always frowning. This went on for 17 days in a row. It was hilarious. I won $170 on it, $10 per day. The friend of mine wouldn't give up until he won once. And of course, Bush ended up winning, and I'd have loved to have seen Turner's face that day.
Slashdot Mirror
Ask and ye shall receive. Click on FAQ on the left side of your screen, and you will discover the hardware behind the dot.
I wonder which gives them the highest electric bill, the servers themselves or the airconditioner required to do it?
You know, you raise a funny point. When relocating our company, we looked at the cost of bandwidth and electricity, knowing that it was a cost of business. But when you've got 8,000 servers, you've got to think that electricity becomes a huge issue in picking your location. You almost want to move further up North, just to cut your air conditioning bills.
what in gods name do you need 8000 linux servers for? quake? I cant figure out what google could possibly use all that power for... if they really *need* all that power, they're obviously doing something wrong with their code.
Well, when was the last time you searched on Google? It has a stunning amount of servers indexed. I can search for just about anything, and Google always finds more accurate hits, faster, than any other search engine. (Don't turn this into a search engine flame war, either.) They have to constantly refresh their indexes, and they have to turn around fast answers.
Yahoo even uses them for their search engine. I can't imagine being able to service Yahoo's search needs with anything less than a full-fledged data center split across two cities.
What I would like to see is cooler chips so I don't toast my lap on the train. If new chips can do that, well, then it may be time to pick up some Big Blue stock...
You mean like Transmeta chips? They don't even need CPU fans. You *DO* own some Transmeta stock, don't you? Surely you're not just shooting off at the mouth about buying IBM's stock?
Sorry to be grumpy about this, but I can't believe how far Transmeta has fallen, and how much geeks like us have let them down. They built exactly what they said they were going to build - a cooler, lower-power CPU that's 100% Intel-compatible, and nobody seems to be buying the product that we all got so excited about. Everybody says they want cooler chips, lower-power chips, but then it's the ridiculously hot, power-sucking Athlons that get all the press. Wonder why that is?
Any experience with getting these working in *nix?
No, the driver gives new meaning to closed source. You can't even download it - you have to call Logitech to get another copy of the CD sent to you if you lose yours. It's not because it's big, either - the drivers aren't that sizable. Logitech loses points for that one. That's the only driver CD I actually keep.
As a guy who plays Black & White with a Logitech iFeel mouse, I've gotta say your initial take on mice needs to be revisited. Having the mouse kick back when you do something right, wrong, powerful, whatever, that means a lot, and it helps you get used to doing things the right way.
The only drawback is that it's too tiring for day-to-day use. I usually leave the feedback turned off when surfing the web, for example, because it just beats your wrists to death as you glide over a zillion links. I've got carpal tunnel, and the buzz that it makes when jumping over hyperlinks makes my wrists feel like they've been typing for hours.
It's remarkably cheap, too - it was $45 on the shelf the last time I looked.
I think you are mistaking being slashdotted for ordinary downtime. linuxtoday ought to be used to the load caused by slashdot.
If they ought to be used to it, then why the downtime? Sounds like a contradiction there.
Here's the really funny part: LinuxToday is already Slashdotted, but Stormix is doing fine. I'm not sure what that says about each company's web servers, or their business model, but I find it hilarious that the dead company has better web staying power.
If all devices were optical, there'd be no reason for electrical current other than to light up the fiber strands in the first place. Therefore, power to expansion cards wouldn't be needed at all and your PC would consume 3% of the energy it is using at this instant.
Huh? How do I spin the hard drives and CD's? How do I power the laser to burn CDR's? You're losing me.
PCI is 32 bit at 33MHz. This is 1000 Mbits per second. The only interface device that needs or ever will need more than that is Graphics cards, and they have AGP slots. Most of the devices we use can even be run over USB.
Is that like Bill Gates saying no one will ever need more than 640kb? Frankly, I use two graphics cards in my desktop, and the only reason I don't have three is that the cost of another LCD panel is ludicrous. As soon as they come down more, I want one more panel, and then I'll be happy. I hate having to settle for a differently-branded (and usually more expensive) PCI card just because I don't have more AGP ports available. Usually the cutting edge stuff only comes out on AGP.
Granted, I'm not playing Quake on all three at once, but the only reason I'm not is because I can't. I'd love to be able to play my driving games on all 3, with the left monitor being a left view, and the right being a right view. Or a view of my nearest competitor. Or even just a big rear view mirror. The possibilities are endless.
The next thing up is storage area networking. PCI cards can't handle the biggest SAN loads, like our DVD jukeboxes at work. We can only use one 300-DVD jukebox per server, because the bus load can't handle more. Think in terms of quad Xeon servers, and it'll make sense - you can indeed shuffle a lot of load across the bus and off the fiber network if you need it. (And no, it's not a single reader per jukebox, there's lots of readers in each jukebox.)
where simple devices like the mouse and keyboard will only take a little bit.
Somehow, I don't think fiber is the answer for mouse and keyboard, and the reason you just expressed is one of them. The other one is cost: do you really want to build a fiber transceiver into a mouse, and then pay for a fiber cable? When I can get a USB mouse for $12 at the corner store, I'm going to resist fiber mice pretty hard.
Whoa, slow down partner. USB and Firewire have something that optical will never have, and that is power. You will never be able to send electricity down an optical cable.
Nah, that's not hard at all. You just combine power along with the optical cable. 2.5" hard drive cables have been doing this for decades. It's just another wire in the bundle.
So when can I get a fully optical bus on my PC?
Interesting. Would you still want to plug the cards directly into the motherboards? If not, then remember, you're going to need a new case. It's not as simple as just running fiber, either - there's power issues, so the cable would need to include DC power. Or else, you're going to need a new power supply as well.
And even still, you're talking about standards city - you'd have to get everybody to agree on a physical card size, card placement in these new cases, and so on.
On the plus side, this would finally allow overclockers to put the video card wherever they dang well pleased, far away from the hot CPU, hard drive, and out of the way of mammoth fans. This is sounding better and better all the time. Hmmm. It'll never work. Hahah.
Slightly bad move, what they should do is make cheap games say uner $10.00 US. Lets face it the thought of free my sound inspiring, but it won't you you far, however it will make you broke really fast. Create a pay pal account and have users of their games give what they can under $10.00 (US)
Reread their site - they're not planning on doing game development, so the revenue stream wouldn't actually help them. Your business model would require game developers to charge $10, something more akin to shareware. While id Games may have started that way, I don't think it's a model that most of us aspire to. I can make more money at my day job.
why not approach some of the game developers with an idea of porting all games to their box, and a small price
That was the tack Sega took: the Dreamcast was based on CE, so it was actually really easy to port Windows DirectX games over. That project was a beautiful failure, but a failure nonetheless.
Think about it Zelda X on this machine would rock, and everyone would enjoy it
And it wouldn't rock on the Xbox or PS2 or Nintendo cube? This box is going to cost $350, so why would I invest in it over a platform that has tons of games?
A soccer mom would look at the box and go, hey I can get this one with 30 games or an Xbox or PS2 with maybe 1 if your lucky
Oh, yeah, right, soccer moms make video game purchases based on cost. They pay no attention to their screaming kids that demand Brand X because it's so heavily marketed on TV. Riiiight. If that was the case, we'd be seeing huge sales numbers on Atari 2600's that go for $25 on Ebay with tons of games, and the Sony Playstation never would have sold a single copy. All school kids would be wearing generic clothes from Wal-Mart and cheap shoes from Payless.
Don't kid yourself, this is a very brand-conscious market. Advertising makes a world of difference in consoles. That's precisely why MS is boosting the hype now, long before their console will even see the light of day.
If TuxBox doesn't plan lots of in-house game development, where do they think the profits will come from? They can't license third-party developers, because an open-sourced development platform will be wide open to any developers.
I'm sure they're looking at RedHat and licking their chops. RedHat doesn't necessarily make the apps - they just put a little dev time into the platform itself and package it. However, RedHat had the edge in that their boxed product had next to zero cost! You can't say that about a game console, costs are huge.
Linux games pretty well lack the development effort thrown into Windows games, and my (lame) business sense tells me that it's because there just aren't enough Linux boxes out there.
Now, bear with me here, but wouldn't the same logic hold through if a Linux console ever made it to the shelves? The game support would be close to nonexistent, compared with even the few games available for PS2 at its release. Nobody would buy it, and nobody would develop for it because of the missing audience.
Sega, a company with a lot more than a foothold in the console business, is smart enough to get out before Microsoft and Nintendo both jump back in with full force. Sega had huge resources (well, not compared to Microsoft, but certainly compared to any open source console project) and couldn't make it work. Any new open source console could only dream (no pun intended) of the market penetration that Dreamcast got, but it still wasn't enough to ensure success. Why would it work for someone else without funding?
What am I missing here? Why would anyone think yet another console would succeed? Even worse, why do we get excited at the thought of it?
Pretend for just a minute that Sega was going to open-source the Dreamcast platform tomorrow. Would you start working on developing games for it? Are you more qualified than the leading developers? Do you think you could save it? Do you think anyone could? Then why start a whole new project from scratch without funding?
You need to be more specific. According to the document you linked to:
SUMMARY: This document contains proposed regulations under section 41 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 describing when computer software which is developed by (or for the benefit of) a taxpayer primarily for the taxpayer's internal use can qualify for the credit for increasing research activities.
Just because it's open source doesn't mean you developed it. Open source usually means you're using someone else's work as well. Furthermore, I'd doubt you'd be able to pass the test of saying it's for your internal use - especially if you work collaboratively on it, and upload your source code to external trees frequently.
As I read it, this is for companies/individuals who develop their own software, so that they can take advantage of the R&D credits. The government smiles on those who do their own R&D.
So, going by what you asked, if you're simply using Linux and expecting a tax credit, that's ridiculous, because it's not developed primarily by you, for your internal use. (Unless your name is Linux Torvalds or Alan Cox.) If you're rolling your own code that you use for your own internal use (logically speaking, that could even be batch programming) then you might be able to use this.
The background information was totally unnecessary, and makes this question feel like spam. Even further, this question is totally irrelevant here at Ask Slashdot. Come on - do you really want PR information from the folks here? This isn't a marketing forum. This whole thing reeks of advertising to geeks.
this "cool stuff" you speak of is designed to justify the federal government in taking your money, and to kill people.
Yeah, well, if it prevents incidents like the Chinese holding 24 of our soldiers captive, I'm all for it. In case you didn't notice, everybody's got nukes now, and we need a different edge. Our economy won't be bulletproof forever, and we need to do this kind of R&D work while the money is available.
Oddly, this will really, really increase sales of this particular CD, and the music industry will say it's because people can't pirate it. But they'll have it backwards.
Tons of us will race out and buy a Charlie Pride CD (even though we abhor country music) simply because we want to try to break it. We want to see whether or not it's really burnproof, and whether we can be the first to figure out the easy way around it.
The industry will hail the huge sales of this CD as demonstrable proof that non-copyable CD's enjoy higher revenues because us nasty mean hackers can't make copies of Charlie Pride's wonderful stuff, and thus we have to buy several copies for our car, our office, etc. They'll show this fact to other recording artists and say, "See, you too could be enjoying this kind of royalty," and the artists will lick their chops in anticipation. I guarantee they'll be a long line of artists willing to be the second burn-proof CD.
Don't forget that it's not your company; you are an employee, and it's their way or the highway. You can indicate to them that you will not do this, and that if that means you lose your job, that's fine. Or you can simply say 'no' and quit. That's your call.
For some reason, this sounds like an episode of the Sopranos. Somebody decides they no longer want to do the family business, and when they try to get out, boom, they get whacked. Leaving a job over something like this would really put a dent in your resume. Non-savvy bosses are going to say, "Hmmm, this fella doesn't do what he's told," and that will be the end of that interview.
I'm in the same boat. My employer actually does b2b spam. Their clients contract us to do web-based guest satisfaction surveys, and we have to spam our clients' customer lists to ask for them to fill out a survey. At least we're only spamming customers, but it's still heartbreaking.
I'm in a worse position, though, because we're actually getting paid to do it. No matter how much I complain, it still brings money directly in the door, and it's not like I can bite the hand that feeds me.
Spam really is a moneymaker, just like snail mail spam is, and in these dark days of dot-com deadpools, you can't afford to pick your customers. I can't exactly point at any other profitable web-based business and say, "See, this is how you're supposed to do it."
It was missing a slash. Here's the real link:
http://project.honeynet.org/challenge/results/
Sick thing is, I was on cnn.com earlier today and the poll asking if libraries should be required to censor porn had 70% saying yes...what the hell is wrong with the people in this country?!?
You have to consider the viewership of CNN. CNN is inherently Democrat-biased, and they tend to attract the liberal left. I saw that particular poll myself and clicked No, but I wasn't at all surprised by the results. Two words for you: Ted Turner.
During the presidential race, a friend of mine and I had a running bet. Every morning, CNN showed a picture of Gore and Bush: Gore was always smiling, and Bush was always frowning. This went on for 17 days in a row. It was hilarious. I won $170 on it, $10 per day. The friend of mine wouldn't give up until he won once. And of course, Bush ended up winning, and I'd have loved to have seen Turner's face that day.