Business Judgement Rule
on
Gmail vs Pine
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· Score: 1
The other poster already mentioned it, but I'll also chime in with a prior post of mine
---
The Board of Directors, and Management, DO have a responsibility to act in the best interests of shareholders, see Fiduciary Duty.
However, NOT to the extent that they must pursue every market in every industry in the world, at the expense of everything else.
The Business Judgement Rule normally protects the Board and Management from lawsuits about normal business decisions, such as:
Hypo_Director: "should we go into China knowing the upside for immediate growth and the potential downside for long-term corporate image problems? No, I don't think we should."
No way you a shareholder could sue over that. You certainly could try to vote in a new Board of Directors who are committed to expansion in China, but that is not the same as suing the Board for violating their duty.
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Generally, the BJR says that as long as directors are informed and don't have conflicts of interest, theay are not civilly liable for business decisions that shareholders make disagree with. Of course, this does not apply to fraud, criminal acts, civil torts, etc.
As the other poster already said, it does turn into a paperweight if you don't pay the fees.
My bad - the one I have (early Series 1) does work without a subscription (the other poster indicated this only works for early Series 1's). Sorry for the bad info.
The fees are not $10/month like you said, but $13/month subject to go up any time TiVo has a whim.
Apologies, again. I threw that in as something close, and didn't figure most people who could afford a TiVo ($) to watch cable television ($50+/month) would care about $36/yr.
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$13/month is total BS for the service of letting me download TV listings. It's more than having a print TV guide mailed to me every week...Before you [say it is] a wonderful service well worth the price, consider this...[strained example about the value of TiVo vs. the value of water/sewer]
TiVo is the same thing. You might say the convenience is worth the $13 monthly fee...
Precisely - I might say that, and so do TiVo's 4.5 million subscribers. You don't. So you don't subscribe. That doesn't mean no one else sees value in the deal. "You" don't equal "Everyone".
I just wish they'd die faster so the market would be more open for a real set top DVR.
I think you just proved my point - they have a big piece of the market (and somehow are preventing competitors from gaining traction as quick as you'd like) precisely because people see value in their offerings. That certainly may change in the future, but that doesn't mean it's not true now.
---
Before you spew some garbage about...
Even if you're happy paying your addiction money...
Jeez, easy there, fella.
(1) I have a TiVo that I didn't buy, never used, nor paid a subscription for.
(2) Ever hear of disagreeing without being disagreeable? It's only a discussion about Tivo, for fuck's sake. I realize you are awfully passionate about a company that seems to do you no harm, but how about not insulting anyone who has a different point of view?
(1) How on earth do I convince [my dad] that it's worth his while to pay a monthly charge to use TIVO when he can use his VCR all he wants for no monthly charge?
(2) My understanding of TIVO is that it is unusable if you don't pay the monthly fee.
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Tell him it is a $200 VCR that stores 60 hours without tapes. Fast forward and rewind are incredibly fast.
If he wishes, for $10/month, he can subscribe to a very detailed and feature-rich TV guide service that allows him to program the device in very useful ways, in a manner that "VCR+Plus" could only dream of. Maybe he's interested in that, maybe not.
A TiVo works like a VCR if you don't have a subscription - you need to tell it what channel to records, and when to start and stop. But it doesn't stop working altogether and turn into a paperweight.
---
Offtopic-for sale: If you or anyone is interested, I have a TiVo Series 1 (30hr?) sitting in a closet for low price + shipping. No IR blaster or remote, but it works.
My guess is that there are a LOT more people who would want to download a movie and watch it in their living room, than would want to buy a DVD and rip it to their computer harddrive.
Those 2 populations are definitely not the same, so that fact that people will buy DVD's with DRM (which most people never even know about) doesn't mean they'll necessarily accept downloaded movies with DRM (which would quickly be known, and a problem, to many people).
The Board of Directors, and Management, DO have a responsibility to act in the best interests of shareholders, see Fiduciary Duty.
However, NOT to the extent that they must pursue every market in every industry in the world.
The Business Judgement Rule protects the Board and Management from lawsuits about normal business decisions, such as:
Hypo_Google_Director/CEO: "should we go into China knowing the upside for immediate growth and the potential downside for long-term corporate image problems? No, I don't think so."
No way you a shareholder could sue over that. You cenrtainly could try to vote in a new Board of Directors who are committed to expansion in China, but that is not the same as suing the Board.
Others have said good things in general (XFS,JFS,ext3).
I looked into filesystem comparisons in setting up a MythTV box.
My issues were:
(1) efficient use of hard drive space, and
(2) performance.
Efficient use = filesystem settings have a big effect on amount of usable space.
For ext2/3:
-m 0 = setting 'reserved space for root' to 0%. Default is 5%, which can be 10-20 GB these days, all unusable to non-root users
-T ____ = can tell ext2/3 to optimize inodes and byte-per-inode for different size average files. Largefile versus news spools (tons of small files). Because of the way that a file can be spread out and mapped across the filesystem, this has an effect on 'wasted' space, and maybe performance (# of inode entries per file to lookup).
-b, -i - can set total # of inodes and bytes-per-inode directly. Advanced control over filesystem creation
I never got around to looking into this detail for XFS/JFS - they seem have fewer such options.
Performance
I'll leave it to others to talk about filesystem performance with largefiles in general.
MythTV takes a lot of writing, and as it turns out, deleting, of large temporary files for the TV features (records, pause, FF/RR). After some reading online, I've found MythTV performance is drastically impacted by filesystem choice due to all of the deleting.
> My last reply to myself. Based on a Googled reference, I was able to
> break my XFS 4G file size barrier by formatting the partition 'mkfs.xfs
> -dagsize=4g'. So, here are the complete results:
>
> Time to delete a 10G file, fastest to slowest:
>
> JFS: 0.9s, 0.9s
> XFS: 1.3s
> EXT3: 1.4s, 2.3s
> EXT2: 1.6s
> REISERFS: 6.2s
> EXT3 -T largefile4: 5.9s, 10.2s
>
> After running the XFS test, there didn't seem to be any point in
> reformatting the partition again, so I left it on XFS, but I think I
> would be happy with JFS, XFS, or EXT3 w/o '-T largefile4'.
>>>>
wepprop at sbcglobal
Feb 8, 2004, 2:33 AM
Post #21 of 22 (4121 views)
Re: Changing filesystems? [In reply to]
Robert Kulagowski wrote:
> Interesting. If others care to weigh in, I can either re-write the
> "Advanced Partitioning" section in the HOWTO, or whack it completely.
>
> William, can you give some background on the hardware used for your
> tests? I'd be curious if this data holds up across various drive types,
> LVM, etc. (Without trying to exhaustively test all the possibilities,
> that is)
It appears, based on my personal experience alone, that file deletes are
the only system operations that can stress the hard drive enough to
produce dropped frames. Unfortunately, as others have pointed out,
recordings and deletions go together in Myth. So, unusual as it may be,
it does make at least some sense to take file deletion performance into
account when deciding which filesystem to use for a video partition,
especially for people with multiple tuners.
The really ironic result from my personal perspective is that it would
appear that using the '-T largefile4' setting for ext3, which I was so
pleased with because it give me an extra 2G of storage, may well have
been responsible for all those recordings I had ruined by frame drops.
Assuming it works out, though, I could really get to like this XFS
filesystem because it appears to give me slightly more storage space
than ext3 w/ '-T largefile4' did and it has pretty fast deletes as well.
---SNIP---
Gotta love having to pay forever to get something.. and never own anything.
The ultimate dream of big business.. perpetual income.
Well, it has seemed to work well for cable TV companies.
You can go buy TV/video programming (DVD,VHS) of most of the shows you want to watch. Play them 'til your heart's content. Have a library of 200 shows. And watch nothing but those shows, until you buy new shows. Like buying music CDs
Or, you can pay a monthly fee, and have access to 1000s of hours of new video content every day. However, unless you buy extra equipment, and have some patience for making the effort, all of those 1000's of hours of content are only available as long as you are "online", and when you stop paying the subscription fees, most of that content ceases to be available to you. Like paying a subscription to an online music service.
Now, why won't people be willing to pay a reasonable reccuring price to have access to a huge library of ondemand content, instead of "owning" a much smaller amount of content ? Oh, that's right - Cable TV is doomed! No one will EVER subscribe - why when you can just buy DVDs of the shows?
Linked below is a cool Sci-Fi short story about a crash landing on the moon, and the survivor has to walk/run around the moon at a high latitude, in order to stay in the sun to keep warm, until a rescue craft can come get her 30 days later.
Another good short story about an astronaut on the moon being pulled into different possible same-Earths, and his life when he returned to 1950's Earth from Moon #6 (the sixth different Moon he had been warped onto)
DA Form 6 form does not answer his question on HOW to allocate the schedule. It is just a pre-printed sheet to write down a schedule once it has been established.
Leave it to the government to turn what is essentially a sheet of lined paper in to a formal, named and itemized military-spec piece of equipment.
Total Inventory Shrinkage $31.3 billion, or $440 in higher prices as a result, per family per year.
Source.
I am also a fraud investigator, and overall, the vast, vast majority of all white collar crime is by insiders. While this includes managerial fraud (financial statement fraud), nonetheless this is the fraud, and the dollar amounts of loss invovled are always much higher than from fraud perpetrated from people external to the company.
The "about:mozilla" quote in Netscape/Mozilla is "from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31 (Red Letter Edition)", and appears on a red page.
"about:mozilla" in Internet Explorer is a blank blue page.
Get it?
Red vs. Blue - not true color opposites, but close enough, and Red vs. Blue is used in a lot of "opposition" contexts (e.g. miltary war games, paintball, board games)
What's interesting is that "about:FOO" in IE for any other word just returns FOO on a blank white page with an "about:FOO" title, while "about:mozilla" actually is a formatted HTML page that calls from "res://mshtml.dll/about.moz"
I would be very surprised if the author of that article shouldn't have written: "Gateway had to put a MS OS on every PC to qualify for the market development fund licensing agreement, which requires PC makers to pay a Windows royalty on every PC shipped, even if it didn't include Windows."
i.e. the *market development funds agreement* mandated the royalty for every PC, but NOT the overall Windows licensing agreement.
Very slight difference to be sure, but the 1994 consent decree (evilpenguin's post about MS-DOS is probably correct given the 1994 date) prevented MS from demanding a royalty for every PC sold in exchange for the ability to sell MS licenses AT ALL.
I wouldn't think MS would/could go back to this sort of behavior.
Of course, in reality, *the effect is virtually the same.* With a price to small and/or disloyal OEMs of, $60/seat (guess) for consumer OSes, and the "market development funds" of $10 per seat, plus other assorted allowances for produyct loyalty, it might not be economically feasible for a large company like Gateway to NOT agree to those trems, especially if Dell and its other main competitors do get the discounts.
However, I would think that a small OEM that wants to sell some MS OSes along with other OSes *CAN* get a MS license, as opposed to MS being able to say "go screw". Albeit without the discounts, etc.
If MS says "no licenses AT ALL if you dare sell other OSes", then I think that MS would quickly wind up back in court.
Microsoft site licenses usually require companies to pay for machines which don't have Windows on them.
Depends on the license that companies have, but not generally true.
----- -----
I can only imagine that Microsoft makes the same requirements on computer vendors when they sell machines without Windows, or with some other OS. So even if you buy a new machine without Windows, you will probably still be lining Microsoft's pockets buying such a machine.
Not true anymore. Microsoft USED to force OEMs to pay OS licenses for every PC shipped, regardless of whether every PC actually has Windows installed on it.
Microsoft and the U.S. DOJ signed a consent decree in 1994 that halted this 'per processor' license fee (among other practices alleged to be improper).
OEMs pay licenses only for machines shipped.
Now, between volume rates, advertising allowances, joint marketing & partnering arrangements, licenses for other products, etc, etc,. MS still has incredible licensing flexibiliy, and due to its market control, massive power over those OEMs. But no licenses for every machine shipped.
Just a guess, but I don't think that most of the satellites (save a few) are the property of NASA.
Launch service:
NASA launches some, the military does some of their own, and commercial lauch providers do the majority.
Actual satellites:
The satellites themselves are owned by the entities that wanted them up there.
- Commercial (consortiums of telcoms, TV)
- Military (DOD, NRO)
- Other non-NASA governmental entities (NOAA, climate).
Only a few would be NASA's (astrophysics, comsology, etc.)
Any more information on the physics?
on
Columbia Coverage
·
· Score: 1
Q: Does anyone have more on the physics of a space elevator tether?
If the attachment point at the Earth's equator is rotating around the Earth's axis at 1,000 miles/hour, how fast would the space end of the tether be moving? (Depends on how far out the tether goes)
What sort of tension would the tether be under? Both unloaded and loaded, which would change as the loaded move up (out)?
How would the elevator platform climb the tether?
Any FAQs on similar points (I've seen the HighLift FAQ)
Is that the data is only as secure as the OS it is on - at some point, the OS' protections become the only thing protecting the data from being decrypted.
Data encrypted with secure methods does NOT depend on the underlying OS. Why encrypt anything, if you can just crack the OS?
Oh, wait, I forgot that encrypted data gets sent plain through emails, and is posted publically, and is used on public, non-secure systems. Doesn't dnet post the encrypted message, and offer rewards for cracking?
It doesn't matter is you crack the OS because properly secured data is not dependent on anything else.
This means that running it on anything but Linux is a bad idea, b/c you cannot read the source...
Human have the ability to, in a pinch, come up with solutions to problems that no machine technically can. When they had to build a CO2 scrubber from spare parts on Apollo 13, do you think a robot with the same computational power available in those days could have done the same? Of course not
===== =====
Well, had humans not been required to be on the craft in the first place, there wouldn't have been CO2 scrubbers that needed fixing. Right?
While there are roles for manned space missions, the problem is that we've gotten ourselves conditioned to think that most missions require human presence. That simply isn't true these days.
At distances that impart time-delays on radio transmissions, humans might need to be present more often. But in Earth orbit? Why? We can currently build extremely robust and independent robotic systems, and we could always choose to manually direct actions from the ground if problems crop up.
Get rid of humans, and the complexity of launch systems goes down by large factors. Complexity = cost. No humans = disposable. The Easterbrook article everyone is mentioning asks "who cared when we lost several satellite launchs in the past year? No one except the insurance carriers."
10x as many missions on the same budget, failures cost smaller $ and no lives. More frequent and cost effective R&D paves the way for good results on the few human missions where human presence is required.
but believe me--there is no way that Sun is going to become irrelevant in the next five years.
Yes I said five years. Yes, I *do* know how huge five years is in IT. IBM will be gone before Sun.
===== =====
I agree that SUN is not anywhere near becoming irrelevant. Even without growht and new products, their installed userbase could carry them for years. However, they cannot rest for a second, or they will last ONLY those few years as a legacy vendor.
I realize you are probably joking about Sun outlasting IBM, but in case you're not:
..SUN.......IBM .$10.0B....$132.1B Market Cap .$12.2B....$ 81.2B Sales -$ 2.8B....$ 6.8B EBITDA -$ 2.4B....$ 5.3B Income .-19.4%......6.6% Profit Margin .-23.0%......8.4% Opert. Margin .$ 2.6B....$ 6.0B Total Cash
ps. - how do you do layout tables in with Slashdot-limitied html and no ?
The main reason why macs are so dominant in publishing and art is becasue of the old (true) cliche - it just works...if they can't figure out problems with DLL's, conflicts, registry problems and having to reinstall Windows every 9 months then what is the better system for them?
What are the productivity gains of perfect networking, great UI, better support for FireWire, BlueTooth, Wireless stuff etc etc etc.? It's not quantifiable but it is much more important than slightly faster processors, so lets just stop the whole thing there.
----- -----
I agree with your premise - that in the end, the result is what matters, and if you can save 10 hours of headaches with sacrificing a few seconds here and there, then you are probably better off.
He states that he continues to use Macs as his primary machines. However:
"In that vein, I think it's a mistake to let Apple continue to get away with saying their computers have an edge in the ease of setup and use department. Especially if you're a pro digital photographer.
In my own experience of the past year is any indication, Apple's got nothing on Windows XP currently. Yes, you read that correctly, and I'm not currently on medication of any kind as I write this."
"For a major project that ran through much of last year, I got up close and personal with Windows XP Professional running on the humble Dell box in the speed report. I connected a whole raft of pro digital SLR cameras, over a dozen card readers, plus several CD writers, several inkjet printers, a flatbed scanner and a film scanner. Every device connected and worked without a hitch, many of them sucking their own drivers from the ether and configuring themselves. Way, way cool."
"On the Mac, it was as it always has been for me dealing with pro digital photography peripherals, whether in OS X or earlier iterations of the operating system. Some devices worked fine, though many required the manual installation of drivers, while some devices, and especially USB and FireWire card readers didn't work at all. Or required a driver for OS X 10.1, then a different one for 10.1.2, then a driver change again in OS X 10.1.3. Ugh. I've had fairly serious ongoing fights with my film scanner, so much so that I only use it on the PC now, where it just works. Where's the true plug and play in that?"
"Part of this is just dumb luck of course, because with a different PC and different peripherals I could have been given a rougher ride by Windows XP, and an easier ride by the Mac. As it happens, however, life with Windows XP in 2002 was a breeze compared to the Mac. By OS X 10.2.3 things have settled down a lot on the Mac side, but for the speed report I experienced yet again an incompatibility between one card/reader combo that was not replicated on the two PCs. After awhile, these types of experiences make me think that Apple needs to spend more time delivering true plug and play for the pro digital photographer, and less time marketing the notion that they do."
"Keep in mind, my preference would be to remain on the Mac, and right now, two of the key applications I use everyday are Mac only, so I'll boot up my Mac first every day for a while yet. But I won't stay on the Mac because of what I now consider to be outdated notions about the Macs ease of setup and use, since my experience using the other platform is that life is okay over there, even preferable in certain, specific ways."
Slashdot Mirror
The other poster already mentioned it, but I'll also chime in with a prior post of mine
---
The Board of Directors, and Management, DO have a responsibility to act in the best interests of shareholders, see Fiduciary Duty.
However, NOT to the extent that they must pursue every market in every industry in the world, at the expense of everything else.
The Business Judgement Rule normally protects the Board and Management from lawsuits about normal business decisions, such as:
Hypo_Director: "should we go into China knowing the upside for immediate growth and the potential downside for long-term corporate image problems? No, I don't think we should."
No way you a shareholder could sue over that. You certainly could try to vote in a new Board of Directors who are committed to expansion in China, but that is not the same as suing the Board for violating their duty.
---
Generally, the BJR says that as long as directors are informed and don't have conflicts of interest, theay are not civilly liable for business decisions that shareholders make disagree with. Of course, this does not apply to fraud, criminal acts, civil torts, etc.
As the other poster already said, it does turn into a paperweight if you don't pay the fees.
My bad - the one I have (early Series 1) does work without a subscription (the other poster indicated this only works for early Series 1's). Sorry for the bad info.
The fees are not $10/month like you said, but $13/month subject to go up any time TiVo has a whim.
Apologies, again. I threw that in as something close, and didn't figure most people who could afford a TiVo ($) to watch cable television ($50+/month) would care about $36/yr.
---
$13/month is total BS for the service of letting me download TV listings. It's more than having a print TV guide mailed to me every week...Before you [say it is] a wonderful service well worth the price, consider this...[strained example about the value of TiVo vs. the value of water/sewer]
TiVo is the same thing. You might say the convenience is worth the $13 monthly fee...
Precisely - I might say that, and so do TiVo's 4.5 million subscribers. You don't. So you don't subscribe. That doesn't mean no one else sees value in the deal. "You" don't equal "Everyone".
I just wish they'd die faster so the market would be more open for a real set top DVR.
I think you just proved my point - they have a big piece of the market (and somehow are preventing competitors from gaining traction as quick as you'd like) precisely because people see value in their offerings. That certainly may change in the future, but that doesn't mean it's not true now.
---
Before you spew some garbage about...
Even if you're happy paying your addiction money...
Jeez, easy there, fella.
(1) I have a TiVo that I didn't buy, never used, nor paid a subscription for.
(2) Ever hear of disagreeing without being disagreeable? It's only a discussion about Tivo, for fuck's sake. I realize you are awfully passionate about a company that seems to do you no harm, but how about not insulting anyone who has a different point of view?
(1) How on earth do I convince [my dad] that it's worth his while to pay a monthly charge to use TIVO when he can use his VCR all he wants for no monthly charge?
(2) My understanding of TIVO is that it is unusable if you don't pay the monthly fee.
---
Tell him it is a $200 VCR that stores 60 hours without tapes. Fast forward and rewind are incredibly fast.
If he wishes, for $10/month, he can subscribe to a very detailed and feature-rich TV guide service that allows him to program the device in very useful ways, in a manner that "VCR+Plus" could only dream of. Maybe he's interested in that, maybe not.
A TiVo works like a VCR if you don't have a subscription - you need to tell it what channel to records, and when to start and stop. But it doesn't stop working altogether and turn into a paperweight.
---
Offtopic-for sale: If you or anyone is interested, I have a TiVo Series 1 (30hr?) sitting in a closet for low price + shipping. No IR blaster or remote, but it works.
My guess is that there are a LOT more people who would want to download a movie and watch it in their living room, than would want to buy a DVD and rip it to their computer harddrive.
Those 2 populations are definitely not the same, so that fact that people will buy DVD's with DRM (which most people never even know about) doesn't mean they'll necessarily accept downloaded movies with DRM (which would quickly be known, and a problem, to many people).
Wikipedia:
Nvidia
Comparison_of_NVIDIA_Graphics_Processing_Units
GeForce_7_Series
ATI_Technologies
Comparison_of_ATI_Graphics_Processing_Units
Radeon_Series
Anandtech:
ATI's New Leader in Graphics Performance: The Radeon X1900 Series
X1900 XT/XTX Roundup: A Closer Look at the Performance Leader in Graphics
NVIDIA's Tiny 90nm G71 and G73: GeForce 7900 and 7600 Debut
The Board of Directors, and Management, DO have a responsibility to act in the best interests of shareholders, see Fiduciary Duty.
However, NOT to the extent that they must pursue every market in every industry in the world.
The Business Judgement Rule protects the Board and Management from lawsuits about normal business decisions, such as:
Hypo_Google_Director/CEO: "should we go into China knowing the upside for immediate growth and the potential downside for long-term corporate image problems? No, I don't think so."
No way you a shareholder could sue over that. You cenrtainly could try to vote in a new Board of Directors who are committed to expansion in China, but that is not the same as suing the Board.
Others have said good things in general (XFS,JFS,ext3).
I looked into filesystem comparisons in setting up a MythTV box.
My issues were:
(1) efficient use of hard drive space, and
(2) performance.
Efficient use = filesystem settings have a big effect on amount of usable space.
For ext2/3:
-m 0 = setting 'reserved space for root' to 0%. Default is 5%, which can be 10-20 GB these days, all unusable to non-root users
-T ____ = can tell ext2/3 to optimize inodes and byte-per-inode for different size average files. Largefile versus news spools (tons of small files). Because of the way that a file can be spread out and mapped across the filesystem, this has an effect on 'wasted' space, and maybe performance (# of inode entries per file to lookup).
-b, -i - can set total # of inodes and bytes-per-inode directly. Advanced control over filesystem creation
I never got around to looking into this detail for XFS/JFS - they seem have fewer such options.
Performance I'll leave it to others to talk about filesystem performance with largefiles in general.
MythTV takes a lot of writing, and as it turns out, deleting, of large temporary files for the TV features (records, pause, FF/RR). After some reading online, I've found MythTV performance is drastically impacted by filesystem choice due to all of the deleting.
http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-24.html#ss 24.2
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users /52672
---SNIP---
> My last reply to myself. Based on a Googled reference, I was able to
> break my XFS 4G file size barrier by formatting the partition 'mkfs.xfs
> -dagsize=4g'. So, here are the complete results:
>
> Time to delete a 10G file, fastest to slowest:
>
> JFS: 0.9s, 0.9s
> XFS: 1.3s
> EXT3: 1.4s, 2.3s
> EXT2: 1.6s
> REISERFS: 6.2s
> EXT3 -T largefile4: 5.9s, 10.2s
>
> After running the XFS test, there didn't seem to be any point in
> reformatting the partition again, so I left it on XFS, but I think I
> would be happy with JFS, XFS, or EXT3 w/o '-T largefile4'.
>>>>
wepprop at sbcglobal
Feb 8, 2004, 2:33 AM
Post #21 of 22 (4121 views)
Re: Changing filesystems? [In reply to]
Robert Kulagowski wrote:
> Interesting. If others care to weigh in, I can either re-write the
> "Advanced Partitioning" section in the HOWTO, or whack it completely.
>
> William, can you give some background on the hardware used for your
> tests? I'd be curious if this data holds up across various drive types,
> LVM, etc. (Without trying to exhaustively test all the possibilities,
> that is)
It appears, based on my personal experience alone, that file deletes are
the only system operations that can stress the hard drive enough to
produce dropped frames. Unfortunately, as others have pointed out,
recordings and deletions go together in Myth. So, unusual as it may be,
it does make at least some sense to take file deletion performance into
account when deciding which filesystem to use for a video partition,
especially for people with multiple tuners.
The really ironic result from my personal perspective is that it would
appear that using the '-T largefile4' setting for ext3, which I was so
pleased with because it give me an extra 2G of storage, may well have
been responsible for all those recordings I had ruined by frame drops.
Assuming it works out, though, I could really get to like this XFS
filesystem because it appears to give me slightly more storage space
than ext3 w/ '-T largefile4' did and it has pretty fast deletes as well.
---SNIP---
65536 processors = 64K processors. damn that IBM, they take geekiness to just a whole different place.
The number of of nodes is 2^16 is not just because it is '1337, but because of the binary exponential way that the compute nodes are put together.
See how Blue Gene/L is put together.
Yes
In some states a spouse can have a recognizable legal claim against the "other person" with whom the the other spouse had an affair.
The claim, like the Microsoft's claim, is call"tortious interference".
Gotta love having to pay forever to get something.. and never own anything.
The ultimate dream of big business.. perpetual income.
Well, it has seemed to work well for cable TV companies.
You can go buy TV/video programming (DVD,VHS) of most of the shows you want to watch. Play them 'til your heart's content. Have a library of 200 shows. And watch nothing but those shows, until you buy new shows. Like buying music CDs
Or, you can pay a monthly fee, and have access to 1000s of hours of new video content every day. However, unless you buy extra equipment, and have some patience for making the effort, all of those 1000's of hours of content are only available as long as you are "online", and when you stop paying the subscription fees, most of that content ceases to be available to you. Like paying a subscription to an online music service.
Now, why won't people be willing to pay a reasonable reccuring price to have access to a huge library of ondemand content, instead of "owning" a much smaller amount of content ? Oh, that's right - Cable TV is doomed! No one will EVER subscribe - why when you can just buy DVDs of the shows?
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Linked below is a cool Sci-Fi short story about a crash landing on the moon, and the survivor has to walk/run around the moon at a high latitude, in order to stay in the sun to keep warm, until a rescue craft can come get her 30 days later.
A Walk in the Sun by Geoffrey A. Landis.
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Another good short story about an astronaut on the moon being pulled into different possible same-Earths, and his life when he returned to 1950's Earth from Moon #6 (the sixth different Moon he had been warped onto)
Moon Six by Stephen Baxter
DA Form 6 form does not answer his question on HOW to allocate the schedule. It is just a pre-printed sheet to write down a schedule once it has been established.
Leave it to the government to turn what is essentially a sheet of lined paper in to a formal, named and itemized military-spec piece of equipment.
How much you think a pad of those costs?
Most of retail theft is by employees.
>Nope. You don't mean that.
Yes, he DOES mean that.
According to the National Retail Security Survey, November 2002 conducted by the University of Florida:
Retail Shrinkage:
48.5% Employee Theft
31.7% Shoplifting
15.3% Administrative Error
05.4% Vendor Fraud
Total Inventory Shrinkage $31.3 billion, or $440 in higher prices as a result, per family per year. Source.
I am also a fraud investigator, and overall, the vast, vast majority of all white collar crime is by insiders. While this includes managerial fraud (financial statement fraud), nonetheless this is the fraud, and the dollar amounts of loss invovled are always much higher than from fraud perpetrated from people external to the company.
The "about:mozilla" quote in Netscape/Mozilla is "from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31 (Red Letter Edition)", and appears on a red page.
"about:mozilla" in Internet Explorer is a blank blue page.
Get it?
Red vs. Blue - not true color opposites, but close enough, and Red vs. Blue is used in a lot of "opposition" contexts (e.g. miltary war games, paintball, board games)
What's interesting is that "about:FOO" in IE for any other word just returns FOO on a blank white page with an "about:FOO" title, while "about:mozilla" actually is a formatted HTML page that calls from "res://mshtml.dll/about.moz"
Vinyl still has a reasonably big fan base, especially for music like Daft Punk that is mixed live by DJs spinning.
Vinyl records make it easy to speed up /slow down tracks to sync up beats and do a manual crossfade for an uninterrupted set. Vinyl still has its uses!
In Galeon, there is an option to turn off [close boxes on each individual tab].
After that, the tabs are clean with no buttons, and you close each tab with ctrl-w or file:close tab.
Wonders of configurability :)
I would be very surprised if the author of that article shouldn't have written: "Gateway had to put a MS OS on every PC to qualify for the market development fund licensing agreement, which requires PC makers to pay a Windows royalty on every PC shipped, even if it didn't include Windows."
i.e. the *market development funds agreement* mandated the royalty for every PC, but NOT the overall Windows licensing agreement.
Very slight difference to be sure, but the 1994 consent decree (evilpenguin's post about MS-DOS is probably correct given the 1994 date) prevented MS from demanding a royalty for every PC sold in exchange for the ability to sell MS licenses AT ALL.
I wouldn't think MS would/could go back to this sort of behavior.
Of course, in reality, *the effect is virtually the same.* With a price to small and/or disloyal OEMs of, $60/seat (guess) for consumer OSes, and the "market development funds" of $10 per seat, plus other assorted allowances for produyct loyalty, it might not be economically feasible for a large company like Gateway to NOT agree to those trems, especially if Dell and its other main competitors do get the discounts.
However, I would think that a small OEM that wants to sell some MS OSes along with other OSes *CAN* get a MS license, as opposed to MS being able to say "go screw". Albeit without the discounts, etc.
If MS says "no licenses AT ALL if you dare sell other OSes", then I think that MS would quickly wind up back in court.
Microsoft site licenses usually require companies to pay for machines which don't have Windows on them.
Depends on the license that companies have, but not generally true.
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I can only imagine that Microsoft makes the same requirements on computer vendors when they sell machines without Windows, or with some other OS. So even if you buy a new machine without Windows, you will probably still be lining Microsoft's pockets buying such a machine.
Not true anymore. Microsoft USED to force OEMs to pay OS licenses for every PC shipped, regardless of whether every PC actually has Windows installed on it.
Microsoft and the U.S. DOJ signed a consent decree in 1994 that halted this 'per processor' license fee (among other practices alleged to be improper).
OEMs pay licenses only for machines shipped.
Now, between volume rates, advertising allowances, joint marketing & partnering arrangements, licenses for other products, etc, etc,. MS still has incredible licensing flexibiliy, and due to its market control, massive power over those OEMs. But no licenses for every machine shipped.
Just a guess, but I don't think that most of the satellites (save a few) are the property of NASA.
Launch service:
NASA launches some, the military does some of their own, and commercial lauch providers do the majority.
Actual satellites:
The satellites themselves are owned by the entities that wanted them up there.
- Commercial (consortiums of telcoms, TV)
- Military (DOD, NRO)
- Other non-NASA governmental entities (NOAA, climate).
Only a few would be NASA's (astrophysics, comsology, etc.)
Q: Does anyone have more on the physics of a space elevator tether?
If the attachment point at the Earth's equator is rotating around the Earth's axis at 1,000 miles/hour, how fast would the space end of the tether be moving? (Depends on how far out the tether goes)
What sort of tension would the tether be under? Both unloaded and loaded, which would change as the loaded move up (out)?
How would the elevator platform climb the tether?
Any FAQs on similar points (I've seen the HighLift FAQ)
Is that the data is only as secure as the OS it is on - at some point, the OS' protections become the only thing protecting the data from being decrypted.
Data encrypted with secure methods does NOT depend on the underlying OS. Why encrypt anything, if you can just crack the OS?
Oh, wait, I forgot that encrypted data gets sent plain through emails, and is posted publically, and is used on public, non-secure systems. Doesn't dnet post the encrypted message, and offer rewards for cracking?
It doesn't matter is you crack the OS because properly secured data is not dependent on anything else.
This means that running it on anything but Linux is a bad idea, b/c you cannot read the source...
You realize Linux is just a kernel, right?
And not the only one?
(I realize I've probably been trolled, but...)
Human have the ability to, in a pinch, come up with solutions to problems that no machine technically can. When they had to build a CO2 scrubber from spare parts on Apollo 13, do you think a robot with the same computational power available in those days could have done the same? Of course not
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Well, had humans not been required to be on the craft in the first place, there wouldn't have been CO2 scrubbers that needed fixing. Right?
While there are roles for manned space missions, the problem is that we've gotten ourselves conditioned to think that most missions require human presence. That simply isn't true these days.
At distances that impart time-delays on radio transmissions, humans might need to be present more often. But in Earth orbit? Why? We can currently build extremely robust and independent robotic systems, and we could always choose to manually direct actions from the ground if problems crop up.
Get rid of humans, and the complexity of launch systems goes down by large factors. Complexity = cost. No humans = disposable. The Easterbrook article everyone is mentioning asks "who cared when we lost several satellite launchs in the past year? No one except the insurance carriers."
10x as many missions on the same budget, failures cost smaller $ and no lives. More frequent and cost effective R&D paves the way for good results on the few human missions where human presence is required.
It makes sense to me....
but believe me--there is no way that Sun is going to become irrelevant in the next five years.
Yes I said five years. Yes, I *do* know how huge five years is in IT. IBM will be gone before Sun.
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I agree that SUN is not anywhere near becoming irrelevant. Even without growht and new products, their installed userbase could carry them for years. However, they cannot rest for a second, or they will last ONLY those few years as a legacy vendor.
I realize you are probably joking about Sun outlasting IBM, but in case you're not:
ps. - how do you do layout tables in with Slashdot-limitied html and no ?
The main reason why macs are so dominant in publishing and art is becasue of the old (true) cliche - it just works...if they can't figure out problems with DLL's, conflicts, registry problems and having to reinstall Windows every 9 months then what is the better system for them?
What are the productivity gains of perfect networking, great UI, better support for FireWire, BlueTooth, Wireless stuff etc etc etc.? It's not quantifiable but it is much more important than slightly faster processors, so lets just stop the whole thing there.
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I agree with your premise - that in the end, the result is what matters, and if you can save 10 hours of headaches with sacrificing a few seconds here and there, then you are probably better off.
However, to your point above, please see Rob Galbraith's post about 10 down from the top of the discussion forum related to his comparison.
He states that he continues to use Macs as his primary machines. However:
"For a major project that ran through much of last year, I got up close and personal with Windows XP Professional running on the humble Dell box in the speed report. I connected a whole raft of pro digital SLR cameras, over a dozen card readers, plus several CD writers, several inkjet printers, a flatbed scanner and a film scanner. Every device connected and worked without a hitch, many of them sucking their own drivers from the ether and configuring themselves. Way, way cool."
"On the Mac, it was as it always has been for me dealing with pro digital photography peripherals, whether in OS X or earlier iterations of the operating system. Some devices worked fine, though many required the manual installation of drivers, while some devices, and especially USB and FireWire card readers didn't work at all. Or required a driver for OS X 10.1, then a different one for 10.1.2, then a driver change again in OS X 10.1.3. Ugh. I've had fairly serious ongoing fights with my film scanner, so much so that I only use it on the PC now, where it just works. Where's the true plug and play in that?"
"Part of this is just dumb luck of course, because with a different PC and different peripherals I could have been given a rougher ride by Windows XP, and an easier ride by the Mac. As it happens, however, life with Windows XP in 2002 was a breeze compared to the Mac. By OS X 10.2.3 things have settled down a lot on the Mac side, but for the speed report I experienced yet again an incompatibility between one card/reader combo that was not replicated on the two PCs. After awhile, these types of experiences make me think that Apple needs to spend more time delivering true plug and play for the pro digital photographer, and less time marketing the notion that they do."
"Keep in mind, my preference would be to remain on the Mac, and right now, two of the key applications I use everyday are Mac only, so I'll boot up my Mac first every day for a while yet. But I won't stay on the Mac because of what I now consider to be outdated notions about the Macs ease of setup and use, since my experience using the other platform is that life is okay over there, even preferable in certain, specific ways."
Dude, if you can get ahold of "snow" and "powder", and now "good clean shit" too,
relaxed is one thing you WON'T be.
Now "green"......