I'll give it a go, then. The trailers looked _dreadful_, and a program having a five minute taster the previous week stank of desperation.
Not quite SF, but `Life on Mars' was very good (although it spent a lot of time feeling like that Comic Strip Presents thing `The Seventies Detectives').
Father's Day. It's good enough to transcend genre and stand as emotionally powerful drama in its own right. It's always hard to predict peoples' future careers, but Piper is only in her mid-twenties and she's acting up a storm. The non-Who things she's done on the BBC have been excellent, and I think she has a rosy (ho ho) future ahead of her.
I'm not quite sure what `parents' has to do with it. A huge proportion of the population, with or without children, falls into one of three categories:
They don't know spyware or viruses from a hole in the ground, and they either re-install or buy a new computer every time their machine gets too slow
OR they believe their firewall and/or AV product is total protection, and they convince themselves that their machine isn't slow and isn't behaving badly, even when it it
OR they simply accept that computers are shit and tolerate it running badly.
A certain sort of quasi-autistic geek then makes snotty comments and plays ``blame the victim'' by pointing out all the measures that the victim could have taken. The real solutions are:
For operating system vendors to sort out their problems. Oh, OK, for one particular OS vendor to sort out its problems.
For law enforcement to stop treating the perpetrators as cute kids, and actually do something serious about the issue.
Blaming the victim just isn't on. `We' (ie people who provide computer and telecommunication services) sold them a machine. It's up to us to make sure it behaves reasonably. There's an ``Unsafe at Any Speed'' brewing, if but we could see it.
Microsoft aren't Toyota. Toyota's quality is the highest you can imagine. I drove a Yaris last week: astounding build quality. Clever design. Lovely to drive. Even the cheapest Toyota (no electric windows, no air con, no CD player) used as a garage hack was a little jewel of perfection, with everything thought through and done as well as if were a car costing ten times as much. I've never owned a Toyota, but I was seriously, seriously impressed.
Random points.
You don't really want a DVD recorder, you want a hard disk + DVD recorder. But most of the ones of the market lack a Freeview decoder, which renders them essentially useless. I've got a complex tool chain involving a Pace Twin (yeah, mine works) and an A->D converter I run into an iBook for archiving. But by having 80GB (40 hours) in the Twin we rarely bother archiving.
Secondly, HDTC inherently has a smaller market in the UK (a) because fewer people have rooms large enough to make it beneficial and (b) because PAL isn't as rough as NSTC. On a 26" TV (still large in UK terms) using PAL HDTV is a marginal benefit. CD didn't kill cassette and LP on quality grounds, it killed them on functionality.
He resigned, late in his second term. As a two-term president, he couldn't stand for election again. Any crimes he committed, which he never admitted to, were pardoned by his hand-picked, unelected vice president (his elected VP having resigned in disgrace). He served no jail time, paid no fines, made a fortune as a speaker and general purpose pundit, and later came to be seen as a great statesman over China. Indeed, how many US presidents get operas written about them (Assassins aside)?
From here over the Atlantic, Nixon looks like a prime example of the US naivity over politicians. He was a crook. His first VP was a crook. Many of his staff were crooks. He did a deal to get a hand-picked VP on the understanding that a pardon would be forthcoming were it to be needed. He waged a secret and illegal war, he engaged in hideous illegality internally and he lied, lied, lied to you.
And the US people let him go into affluent, unpunished retirement. His funeral was well-attended by politicians, who presumably saws nothing wrong with his actions.
Why would Bush be frightened of Nixon's fate? The USA rewarded Nixon handsomely.
This may come as a surprise to you, but webhosting pretty much defines hobbyist. If something's running on a platform supplied and managed by a webhosting company, it's going to be a sole trader at best. Real enterprise applications are running on company-owned platforms either in colo or the company's own datacentre. And in that space, it's Oracle on Solaris as the default position.
Sure, there's MySQL in production environments. If the task at hand is the configuration data for your cacti SNMP graphers, MySQL is perfectly fine. But for real, transactable data? If you're young, keen and besotted by OSS, Postgres might help you not get sacked. Not MySQL. Outside the OSS space, you'll find a lot of people who say ``why do we spend all that money on Oracle, I can knock it up in Access''. It's the same problem: a lack of understanding of what really defines an enterprise DBMS.
In August, I switched from Solaris to OSX for my desktop.
In September, I bought an iBook for home and switched the kids over from Windows.
Last week I bought a Mac Mini and switched my wife over.
Once I'd pointed out that the menu bar was at the top of the screen, rather than the top of the application, and the window-control buttons were at the top left rather than the top right, she was fine. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where the man in the street's interest in operating systems begins and ends.
I simply stopped buying from virgin-wine.com, and mailed them to say their IE-only policy was the entire reason. I also spoke to a developer, who seemed pretty switched on, who had made the point to management that not-IE may only be 4% of the market (this was some years ago) but it wasn't only 4% of _their_ market. If your target audience is high net worth, under 40, urban drinkers of mostly new-world and non-traditional-appelation French wine, then Macs are rather more than 4%!
I got a thirty quid voucher and an invitation to return last month, and lo it works with Safari now.
However, the particular case of locking out Mac users appears especially stupid in the case of Gap. One cannot help thinking of Boo.com, whose pitch for niche high-cost clothing ran only on Windows, around the time the original iMac came out. Sure, it wasn't their only botch (not by a long chalk) but it can't have helped. Mac users are going to be higher net worth than Windows users, as a bloc, and more likely to be urban and neophile. It'd be like a company deciding to lock out Saab drivers, on the grounds that more of their customers drive Chevys. Fine for Billy Bob's Rib Bar, less fine for Belgian Cotton Sheets R Us.
The problem with RAID 1 is that the write performance is only that of a single spindle, while the read performance is at best that of a two spindle stripe.
RAID 5 has read performance of an N disk stripe, and write performance that is complex to model but, with a decent battery-backed cache on the controller, approaches that of a stripe of half as many disks. However, read is horrid in degraded (one drive failed) mode.
The second poster's point about ''practicing recovery'' is strange: RAID controllers do all that for you.
These days, I keep data I care about on two disk arrays, with independent RAID controllers. Inside the array it's RAID 5 with a hot spare or three, then it's a mirror over the two arrays. RAID 1+5, but using two arrays. EMC AX100s are so cheap it's almost a no-brainer.
If I can't do that, the mid-range EMC arrays have rapid enough re-syncing of hot spare that RAID5 isn't too nerve wracking. Very large spindles might make things a little more unpleasant, because the time to spin in a hot spare starts to become significant, providing a wide window during which another failure will kill you.
If your objective is to shift emissions from place to place, hybrids work. You charge the battery by running the diesel outside town, and then operate in town on battery. My guess is that the overall efficiency is horrid, because you've got the weight of the battery, the weight of the traction motors and the weight of the generator. But it does move emissions from congested areas to the countryside, which may be a desirable outcome.
5) For emissions a steam engine is highly desirable - ICE needs to provide peak energy and burn efficiently at the same time while steam can leisurely build up power and apply it at different time.
That's charitable, to say the least. Yes, steam engines can produce power greater than the boiler's continuous steaming capacity by drawing on the thermal storage. However, the emissions profile is horrendous, because the very best steam locomotives have an efficiency, in their optimum performance zone, of about 16%. The boilers are efficient, the cylinders and valve gear aren't. Chapelon compounding improves matters, but then the soft blast reduces boiler efficiency.
Cox, who worked on the BR Standard Locomotives, analysed various means of improving the capabilities of steam in both his book on the Standard locomotives and in the second volume of his memoirs, Locomotive Panorama. Exotic blast pipes and the Franco-Crosti pre-heater attacked boiler efficiency, which wasn't the problem anyway. Mechanical stoking attacked labour costs, which might be worthwhile, at the expense of fuel efficiency. About the only thing that was a real win was Caprioti valve-gear, as fitted to the later Class 5s and to the sole 8P. And we're not talking huge gains: a few percentage points.
Steam in the UK reached its apotheosis with the 2-10-0 9F and the 4-6-2 8P `Duke of Gloucester'. Yes, they were the most efficient steam engines ever designed. Yes, it was insane to scrap them virtually as they were being built. But their efficiency was just a farce compared to diesels.
My car has the DSG on a turbo diesel. It's stunning. I'm _averaging_ >50mpg (UK gallon, 4.54l) on an urban/motorway/urban commute of 22 miles. Even with only 105bhp it's quick enough, even with four people and four bikes on the bike. The low-speed smoothness isn't yet up to to torque-converter standards, but the software upgrade that appeared to be put on at the last service has helped.
Why would a diesel electric be more efficient? You've got losses in the generator and losses in the traction motor, not to mention the need to link the two. Unless you need the massive low-speed torque of an electric motor, what's the up side?
Why on earth would a car or lorry need to use diesel electric transmission?
I realise that the US is a different world, but there are parts of Europe where about fifty percent of cars sold are diesel (France) and it's getting on for that here in the UK. My last three have been diesels. They're exactly the same as the equivalent petrol car, except the red line is a bit lower, you can roll onto the power from 1500rpm and they're slightly harder to get as autos. My current car has the awesome VW DSG twin-clutch gearbox, which hooked to a turbo-diesel engine is wonderful.
Railway locomotives use diesel electric transmission because they need to generate immense starting torque to get an 800 tonne (or far more in the US) train moving from stationary. And because of the low coefficient of friction between wheel and rail, they need to power most or all of the wheels, so bogie-hung traction motors are a lot easier than somehow delivering a cardan shaft to every axle.
None of this applies to road vehicles. Either a clutch or a torque converter is perfectly suitable for getting a car or a lorry moving, and drive is easy to deliver to axles because they aren't mouted on pivoted bogies.
Before someone says it, there are diesel rail locomotives with mechanical transmission (early LMS shunters, say, which because the BR Class 08) and a lot with hydraulic transmission (DB stock of the 50s, and the whole sorry saga of the Western Region of BR). But diesel electric wins out.
What killed steam, by the way, was the fact that the thermal efficiency of the typical locomotive, even with fall Chappelon compounding, was about 18%. Boilers got up to about 85% efficiency on things like the BR Class 7 `Brittania'. Attempts to use more efficient mechanisms to convert steam into power --- condensing and non-condensing turbines, generators, etc --- fell victim to either loading gauge issues or the technology of the day.
I've convinced my children that Fonts Matter. That, aged 7 and 9, they can spot Gill Sans (God's Own Font, let's face it) is nice. Of course, they think that the London Underground is Gill Sans, but it's an easy mistake to make.
Gill Sans is lovely in print and (especially) on signs and labels. I use Verdana for both Mail.app and Safari because Gill doesn't seem to render terribly cleanly at small sizes on my Macs.
Dumb people want dumb interfaces. Smart people want smart interfaces.
Is that true? I've got 20 years of Unix use behind me, and I've used the whole gamut from Suntools through NeWS through a variety of X options (olwm, olvwm, twm, fvwm) and then Gnome (on Linux and Solaris) and KDE (on Linux). I don't think I ever used Motif for more than a day or so, and I never used Nextstep.
I've recently switched to a Mac, and I find the UI rather fine. Indeed, I've started using Mail.app, having never found a GUI mailer I liked (I used MH for about fifteen years, then five years of Mutt).
My seven year old also likes Macs. She's found switching the dock to the left and changing her wallpaper easy, and she's very fond of Dashboard.
I think it's quite possible to have a GUI that suits all needs.
The Sober virus author can precalculate the URLs. We wanted to be able to do the same thing. So we cracked the algorithm. This enabled us to calculate the download URLs for any future date. In fact, we did this already in May 2005, and we informed the local police in Germany as well as the affected ISPs. But we didn't want to talk about it publically then - we didn't want to fill in the virus writer on this. But he must know this by now.
You may have read a lot of history, but you perhaps didn't get the nuances.
Most of the work done in `work' camps was of almost no value. There's a New Yorker review of Goldhagen's book which points out that `work' was often lifting a heavy object, taking it somewhere else, and bringing it back. The writer hypothesises that the Nazi position was that `lazy Jews' should be worked to death. The contribution to the war effort was minimal.
The USA was orders of magnitude more productive than Germany by using motivated, skilled, well-rewarded staff. Stalin was hardly an example of a benevolent leader, but the output from Tankograd was again far more effective than German manufacturing. Yes, there are other factors (the absurd pursuit of technical `excellence' in the face of diminishing returns) but the main reason the German production system worked apparent marvels under heavy bombing was because it was so inefficient prior to Speer's arrival. Output from factories using forced labour was generally minimal, and the few exceptions --- the V2 plant, for example, for which Von Braun should have stood charges at Nurrmburg --- made almost no difference to the war.
The experiments may have had some tangential value to the military, although high-altitude aviation and submarine escape were no more advanced in the German air force and navy than in the UK and USA forces. German soliders survived the cold no better than Russians. The biological weapons tested in the camps were unused and unusable. And so on.
It's a simple fact that the death camps were a drain on Germany's economy. They tied up man power, technology and resources that could have been better deployed elsewhere. By imposing a rule of fear, Hitler lost the magnificent flexibility and resourcefulness that made the USA the armoury of freedom. There are people in Europe who forget what the USA did between 1941 and 1948 to help us: not me.
What is it about religious nutcases and the UN? Several nutcases of my acquaintance pointedly refused to accept £1 book vouchers for their kids. Because the source was the UN books day. World government? International Jewish-Bolshevick conspiracy (the latter part not doing so well in 2005)?
I for one welcome our new £1 book token wielding overlords.
It applies to *everyone*. In the UK, it's considered perfectly harmless to show topless women on television.
The BBC/HBO `Rome' has penises, pudenda and sexual acts in regular doses. Reviews pointed out that the lead actresses pubic topiary may be anachronistic. It's being broadcast on BBC2 at 9pm. It's got complaints but no-one will care. ITV1, the main commercial channel, showed Don't Look Now uncut a couple of weeks ago, and it's been shown routinely unmutilated on mainstream TV since (to my certain knowledge) the early 1980s. Indeed, the former prime minister's daughter having a piss is now mainstream TV, too, for those that watch and read poor peoples' media.
Meanwhile, in America, a slightly tubby lass showing a nipple is a national scandal, and Christian film reviews now index naked male backs in a manner which would be amusingly camp if it weren't so nastily prurient.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite SF, but `Life on Mars' was very good (although it spent a lot of time feeling like that Comic Strip Presents thing `The Seventies Detectives').
ian
ian
-
They don't know spyware or viruses from a hole in the ground, and they either re-install or buy a new computer every time their machine gets too slow
-
OR they believe their firewall and/or AV product is total protection, and they convince themselves that their machine isn't slow and isn't behaving badly, even when it it
-
OR they simply accept that computers are shit and tolerate it running badly.
A certain sort of quasi-autistic geek then makes snotty comments and plays ``blame the victim'' by pointing out all the measures that the victim could have taken. The real solutions are:-
For operating system vendors to sort out their problems. Oh, OK, for one particular OS vendor to sort out its problems.
-
For law enforcement to stop treating the perpetrators as cute kids, and actually do something serious about the issue.
Blaming the victim just isn't on. `We' (ie people who provide computer and telecommunication services) sold them a machine. It's up to us to make sure it behaves reasonably. There's an ``Unsafe at Any Speed'' brewing, if but we could see it.ian
ian
Thanks, I'm here all week, tip the waitresses, etc, etc.
ian
ian
Secondly, HDTC inherently has a smaller market in the UK (a) because fewer people have rooms large enough to make it beneficial and (b) because PAL isn't as rough as NSTC. On a 26" TV (still large in UK terms) using PAL HDTV is a marginal benefit. CD didn't kill cassette and LP on quality grounds, it killed them on functionality.
ian
From here over the Atlantic, Nixon looks like a prime example of the US naivity over politicians. He was a crook. His first VP was a crook. Many of his staff were crooks. He did a deal to get a hand-picked VP on the understanding that a pardon would be forthcoming were it to be needed. He waged a secret and illegal war, he engaged in hideous illegality internally and he lied, lied, lied to you.
And the US people let him go into affluent, unpunished retirement. His funeral was well-attended by politicians, who presumably saws nothing wrong with his actions.
Why would Bush be frightened of Nixon's fate? The USA rewarded Nixon handsomely.
ian
Sure, there's MySQL in production environments. If the task at hand is the configuration data for your cacti SNMP graphers, MySQL is perfectly fine. But for real, transactable data? If you're young, keen and besotted by OSS, Postgres might help you not get sacked. Not MySQL. Outside the OSS space, you'll find a lot of people who say ``why do we spend all that money on Oracle, I can knock it up in Access''. It's the same problem: a lack of understanding of what really defines an enterprise DBMS.
ian
In September, I bought an iBook for home and switched the kids over from Windows.
Last week I bought a Mac Mini and switched my wife over.
Once I'd pointed out that the menu bar was at the top of the screen, rather than the top of the application, and the window-control buttons were at the top left rather than the top right, she was fine. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where the man in the street's interest in operating systems begins and ends.
ian
I got a thirty quid voucher and an invitation to return last month, and lo it works with Safari now.
ian
ian
The problem with RAID 1 is that the write performance is only that of a single spindle, while the read performance is at best that of a two spindle stripe.
RAID 5 has read performance of an N disk stripe, and write performance that is complex to model but, with a decent battery-backed cache on the controller, approaches that of a stripe of half as many disks. However, read is horrid in degraded (one drive failed) mode.
The second poster's point about ''practicing recovery'' is strange: RAID controllers do all that for you.
These days, I keep data I care about on two disk arrays, with independent RAID controllers. Inside the array it's RAID 5 with a hot spare or three, then it's a mirror over the two arrays. RAID 1+5, but using two arrays. EMC AX100s are so cheap it's almost a no-brainer.
If I can't do that, the mid-range EMC arrays have rapid enough re-syncing of hot spare that RAID5 isn't too nerve wracking. Very large spindles might make things a little more unpleasant, because the time to spin in a hot spare starts to become significant, providing a wide window during which another failure will kill you.
ian
ian
Cox, who worked on the BR Standard Locomotives, analysed various means of improving the capabilities of steam in both his book on the Standard locomotives and in the second volume of his memoirs, Locomotive Panorama. Exotic blast pipes and the Franco-Crosti pre-heater attacked boiler efficiency, which wasn't the problem anyway. Mechanical stoking attacked labour costs, which might be worthwhile, at the expense of fuel efficiency. About the only thing that was a real win was Caprioti valve-gear, as fitted to the later Class 5s and to the sole 8P. And we're not talking huge gains: a few percentage points.
Steam in the UK reached its apotheosis with the 2-10-0 9F and the 4-6-2 8P `Duke of Gloucester'. Yes, they were the most efficient steam engines ever designed. Yes, it was insane to scrap them virtually as they were being built. But their efficiency was just a farce compared to diesels.
ian
ian
ian
I realise that the US is a different world, but there are parts of Europe where about fifty percent of cars sold are diesel (France) and it's getting on for that here in the UK. My last three have been diesels. They're exactly the same as the equivalent petrol car, except the red line is a bit lower, you can roll onto the power from 1500rpm and they're slightly harder to get as autos. My current car has the awesome VW DSG twin-clutch gearbox, which hooked to a turbo-diesel engine is wonderful.
Railway locomotives use diesel electric transmission because they need to generate immense starting torque to get an 800 tonne (or far more in the US) train moving from stationary. And because of the low coefficient of friction between wheel and rail, they need to power most or all of the wheels, so bogie-hung traction motors are a lot easier than somehow delivering a cardan shaft to every axle.
None of this applies to road vehicles. Either a clutch or a torque converter is perfectly suitable for getting a car or a lorry moving, and drive is easy to deliver to axles because they aren't mouted on pivoted bogies.
Before someone says it, there are diesel rail locomotives with mechanical transmission (early LMS shunters, say, which because the BR Class 08) and a lot with hydraulic transmission (DB stock of the 50s, and the whole sorry saga of the Western Region of BR). But diesel electric wins out.
What killed steam, by the way, was the fact that the thermal efficiency of the typical locomotive, even with fall Chappelon compounding, was about 18%. Boilers got up to about 85% efficiency on things like the BR Class 7 `Brittania'. Attempts to use more efficient mechanisms to convert steam into power --- condensing and non-condensing turbines, generators, etc --- fell victim to either loading gauge issues or the technology of the day.
ian
Gill Sans is lovely in print and (especially) on signs and labels. I use Verdana for both Mail.app and Safari because Gill doesn't seem to render terribly cleanly at small sizes on my Macs.
ian
ian
I've recently switched to a Mac, and I find the UI rather fine. Indeed, I've started using Mail.app, having never found a GUI mailer I liked (I used MH for about fifteen years, then five years of Mutt).
My seven year old also likes Macs. She's found switching the dock to the left and changing her wallpaper easy, and she's very fond of Dashboard.
I think it's quite possible to have a GUI that suits all needs.
ian
The Sober virus author can precalculate the URLs. We wanted to be able to do the same thing. So we cracked the algorithm. This enabled us to calculate the download URLs for any future date. In fact, we did this already in May 2005, and we informed the local police in Germany as well as the affected ISPs. But we didn't want to talk about it publically then - we didn't want to fill in the virus writer on this. But he must know this by now.
Most of the work done in `work' camps was of almost no value. There's a New Yorker review of Goldhagen's book which points out that `work' was often lifting a heavy object, taking it somewhere else, and bringing it back. The writer hypothesises that the Nazi position was that `lazy Jews' should be worked to death. The contribution to the war effort was minimal.
The USA was orders of magnitude more productive than Germany by using motivated, skilled, well-rewarded staff. Stalin was hardly an example of a benevolent leader, but the output from Tankograd was again far more effective than German manufacturing. Yes, there are other factors (the absurd pursuit of technical `excellence' in the face of diminishing returns) but the main reason the German production system worked apparent marvels under heavy bombing was because it was so inefficient prior to Speer's arrival. Output from factories using forced labour was generally minimal, and the few exceptions --- the V2 plant, for example, for which Von Braun should have stood charges at Nurrmburg --- made almost no difference to the war.
The experiments may have had some tangential value to the military, although high-altitude aviation and submarine escape were no more advanced in the German air force and navy than in the UK and USA forces. German soliders survived the cold no better than Russians. The biological weapons tested in the camps were unused and unusable. And so on.
It's a simple fact that the death camps were a drain on Germany's economy. They tied up man power, technology and resources that could have been better deployed elsewhere. By imposing a rule of fear, Hitler lost the magnificent flexibility and resourcefulness that made the USA the armoury of freedom. There are people in Europe who forget what the USA did between 1941 and 1948 to help us: not me.
ian
I for one welcome our new £1 book token wielding overlords.
ian
Meanwhile, in America, a slightly tubby lass showing a nipple is a national scandal, and Christian film reviews now index naked male backs in a manner which would be amusingly camp if it weren't so nastily prurient.
ian