You are right about the at-a-time. I know that (did about 15/mo myself for a while) and just mis-spoke. Actually, Blockbuster offers 8 at a time for $40.
There seems to be a lot of confusion in this thread with some people talking about Blockbuster's unlimited in-store plan and some of us talking about their (new) by-mail plan.
I agree the selection isn't great, but I figure twice a month I can find something to rent at the store and can be spur of the moment instead of planning something. Since I have no idea what LOEG is, I can't comment on if that's a screwed up ratio or not.
I was happy with Netflix, but it got really expensive for me, so I'm going to try BB for a while and see if it is anywhere near as good.
Hmmm. My prices are for BB's new by-mail service. Is yours maybe for a store walk-in service? I thought they offered that too. It's been a while since I've been in one.
1. Netflix is actually a few bucks cheaper than Blockbuster and Blockbuster certainly doesn't have the same inventory.
How's that? Netflix for the 3/month plan is $23, BB is $20. For my previous plan (5/mo.), NF was $35, I think, BB would be $30. But, with the 2 coupons/month at the local store, I'm actually shifting from Netflix's 5/mo. plan to the BB 3/mo. plan.
I was with Netflix for three years. When they changed my old, sweetheart deal ($28/six movies/month) to $35/five movies and Blockbuster came on the scene, I jumped ship. But, I just signed up for BB yesterday, so no real experience yet. So far, I can say the web site is not quite as slick, generally (not that Netflix was especially good) and the selection isn't quite as good either. (They are missing Futurama seaons 1&2 for some reason).
With being gone for a while and a two week BB test period, I figured I can't lose. Also, I like the idea of two in-store coupons/month from BB. (It was always the selection that kept me with Netflix, not the pain of a local store.)
Not quite. The Higgs and SSM particles are expected to be less than 1 TeV in mass. With a proton collider, you need a lot of extra energy because you produce many, many, other particles. But, because they are easier to build and have higher collision rates, they are ideal discovery machines.
With an electron-positron collider, you can make these new particles singly or in pairs and use up all the energy, so they are great for doing detailed studies of the particle in question.
I believe it's the accleration cavities that are superconducting in this design, which is not the case with the Tevatron or the LHC (I think). Yes, this fundamentally different technology.
Your concerns on waiting to build this are shared by a number of physicists. But, in 6 years we should know about the Higgs if it is where most theories place it. It's important to do the R&D now so the LC when it's needed.
Magnet's don't boost the energy, they only bend the particles. The RF cavities boost the energy. So, with better magnets, you can build a smaller, more powerful proton accelerator, but they don't help you with an electron accelerator.
The problem with an electron accelerator is that energy is lost due to the bend radius and unless you have a very large accelerator, you quickly get to the point where energy is coming out just as fast as you can put it in. Solution: an infinite-bend-radius (linear accelerator).
What I haven't seen mentioned here yet is that we use both types of accelerators (proton and electron) for different reasons. Protons colliding give the highest energies and the collisions produce a wide variety of particles and interactions at a variety of interaction energies. Electron collisions are much cleaner, but tend to be at lower energies and rates. (This is because electrons are fundamental particles but protons are made of 3 quarks each and it's really the quarks colliding.) But, if you know the energy (mass) of the particle you want to study, you can produce them reliably and in a very clean environment so you can study them more precisely.
That's not a low-carb diet, that's a healthy diet (well, depending on how much meat and fat you eat). Every nutritionalist I've ever heard will tell you to replace refined sugars and grains with whole grain. Maybe "standard" nutrition won't tell you to never eat a potato, but what you're doing isn't the Atkins diet.
No way that much will change in ten years. Let's look at this: What's different about the technology in my life than it was 10 years ago? I have an HDTV DVR instead of a crappy VCR. I have a cell phone and a PDA, and I have a cable modem instead of dial-up.
Aside from the HD-DVR, all of that stuff existed (not quite as advanced) 10 years ago. I just didn't have it. So, where are the early adopters of urine analyzing toilets or seamless video conferencing on video walls or kitchens that can make a complete meal, set and clean the table.
Sorry, this may be Bill Gates' life in 10 years, but it won't be mine, and probably won't be anyone I know.
The latency on Ethernet is too high for many tightly coupled applications (lattice QCD for example). This is why people who need better networking use something like Myrinet. I would assume that these Cray machines have very high band-width, low-latency communications. This is where super-computers distinguish themselves from clusters.
Acutally, as I recall, the definition did include oral sex or manual sex designed to give pleasure, or something like that, but talked about doing these things, not receiving them.
Clinton's defense was that he was only on the receiving end and therefor she had sexual relations with him, but he didn't with her.
Funny, but on old Palms, there was a program called Proxy-web (it may still exist) where an intermediate server would download the pages you were interested in and convert the graphics to something small and 4-bit grayscale, then send it on to your device. Maybe these "high-speed" versions of AOL and NetZero do the same thing.
Umm, 2e72 seconds is 6.3e64 years, some 1e54 times the lifetime of the universe. And 6 millenia is the same (roughly) as 62 centuries.
In any case, a truly random 8 character password is nearly impossible to guess. The problem is, most people don't pick passwords that just look like line noise. To crack yours, I might try 8 letter passwords, then 7 letters plus one symbol, etc. Still a daunting problem, but not *that* daunting.
This reminds me of the old story about a man who lost his keys and was seen by another man searching for them, first under one street light, then under the next, etc. The second man asked the first "Why are you only looking under street lights? What if you dropped your keys somewhere else?" The answer was, "Because under the street light is the only place I can see."
It's no accident the first star systems found looked very unlike ours; we didn't have the capability to detect anything else.
My experience is the opposite. Linux (Mandrake) installs perfectly, it auto-configures the printer and the scanner. You reboot, get all the updates, reboot again, and keep on sailing. XP takes two reboots for the install, then about 3 more for the updates (and several of those have to be installed seperately). Granted, that's a lot better than Win 98 where I lost count after 8 or 9 reboots to get all the drivers installed and updated on a machine I built.
Now of course, there are some machines where a linux install is a REAL pain, but most on "desktop" hardware sail right along.
Isn't this the opposite of the argument that Linux users have always made. That because it is so hard to get a PC (as opposed to parts) without Windows, that the number of linux installs running was higher than the shipments?
I mean, really, what evidence do they have that hordes of people are buying machines with Linux pre-installed just to go through the pain of installing XP in order to save, what, $40?
Granted, a lot of machines shipped with Linux aren't running the version of Linux they shipped with, but I find their statement hard to believe.
One might wonder why we never had laws like this during the cold war when it was possible the entire country could be under attack, and millions die, during an election, but we need laws like this now when there is the possibility a few thousand people in a city or two could be under attack.
in that context a one percent shift is really a one percent shift, not one percent plus or minus something.
No, you still have a statistical effect if you want to draw any conclusions. Maybe no one switched and mozilla people clicked more and IE people clicked less. In any kind of counting experiment, the error on the number of counts is the square root of the number of counts. So, if you have a million page clicks, you can measure the share of browsers down to about 0.1%. For the 0.01% accuracy they seem to claim, it's 100 million hits.
Obviously, collecting a million browser clicks is pretty easy. Polling a million people on which deodorant they prefer is a lot more difficult, so these guys can have a small margin of error. But it can never actually be zero.
Video games are amazing. If I were a kid now, I might never emerge from the computer room. When I was a kid, games like pong were cool but couldn't hold your attention forever.
Are you kidding me? The first time I went over to the house of a friend who had an Atari 2600, I stayed for a few minutes (I thought). My mother was worried I hadn't made it home for dinner. I think I was there for 3 hours and lost all concept of time.
Sure, games now are amazing compared to what's come before. But the ones back then were too. Probably in 10 years, people will be talking about todays games as "cool, but not really interactive and photo realistic, so who wants to play them?"
Software will be the same. There may be a thousand websites, but they will all use Apache and MySQL.
That's a great analogy, but to me, it proves my point.:-)
Delivering 50 chickens and some brocolli to a restaurant doesn't put a meal on the table for a customer. In the same way, if I bring up a computer with Apache and MySQL, what do I have? A computer that says "Welcome to localhost. This computer is running Apache." A lot more is required if I want to get the computer to do something specific for me as it relates to my business or personal needs.
Are there 600 companies that are going to be the size of Microsoft or Oracle out there? No, there may not even be 5. But there is plenty of room for people to take existing platforms (Windows, Linux, Apache, databases, PHP, ASP,.....) and write new software to accomplish new tasks the big guys aren't interested in.
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There seems to be a lot of confusion in this thread with some people talking about Blockbuster's unlimited in-store plan and some of us talking about their (new) by-mail plan.
I agree the selection isn't great, but I figure twice a month I can find something to rent at the store and can be spur of the moment instead of planning something. Since I have no idea what LOEG is, I can't comment on if that's a screwed up ratio or not.
I was happy with Netflix, but it got really expensive for me, so I'm going to try BB for a while and see if it is anywhere near as good.
We're not talking about unlimited rental from a BB store, but from their by-mail service.
Hmmm. My prices are for BB's new by-mail service. Is yours maybe for a store walk-in service? I thought they offered that too. It's been a while since I've been in one.
How's that? Netflix for the 3/month plan is $23, BB is $20. For my previous plan (5/mo.), NF was $35, I think, BB would be $30. But, with the 2 coupons/month at the local store, I'm actually shifting from Netflix's 5/mo. plan to the BB 3/mo. plan.
With being gone for a while and a two week BB test period, I figured I can't lose. Also, I like the idea of two in-store coupons/month from BB. (It was always the selection that kept me with Netflix, not the pain of a local store.)
With an electron-positron collider, you can make these new particles singly or in pairs and use up all the energy, so they are great for doing detailed studies of the particle in question.
Your concerns on waiting to build this are shared by a number of physicists. But, in 6 years we should know about the Higgs if it is where most theories place it. It's important to do the R&D now so the LC when it's needed.
The problem with an electron accelerator is that energy is lost due to the bend radius and unless you have a very large accelerator, you quickly get to the point where energy is coming out just as fast as you can put it in. Solution: an infinite-bend-radius (linear accelerator).
What I haven't seen mentioned here yet is that we use both types of accelerators (proton and electron) for different reasons. Protons colliding give the highest energies and the collisions produce a wide variety of particles and interactions at a variety of interaction energies. Electron collisions are much cleaner, but tend to be at lower energies and rates. (This is because electrons are fundamental particles but protons are made of 3 quarks each and it's really the quarks colliding.) But, if you know the energy (mass) of the particle you want to study, you can produce them reliably and in a very clean environment so you can study them more precisely.
Congratulations, BTW.
Aside from the HD-DVR, all of that stuff existed (not quite as advanced) 10 years ago. I just didn't have it. So, where are the early adopters of urine analyzing toilets or seamless video conferencing on video walls or kitchens that can make a complete meal, set and clean the table.
Sorry, this may be Bill Gates' life in 10 years, but it won't be mine, and probably won't be anyone I know.
The latency on Ethernet is too high for many tightly coupled applications (lattice QCD for example). This is why people who need better networking use something like Myrinet. I would assume that these Cray machines have very high band-width, low-latency communications. This is where super-computers distinguish themselves from clusters.
Clinton's defense was that he was only on the receiving end and therefor she had sexual relations with him, but he didn't with her.
But that's just my recollection of it.
I heard a feature on this on NPR yesterday, and yes, the scientist they interviewed who was studying this was doing it for exactly this reason.
I meant the machine rather than the program, but yeah. I assume the 3 day average comes from patching and rebooting.
Currently running IIS and an average uptime of about three days. See here.
In any case, a truly random 8 character password is nearly impossible to guess. The problem is, most people don't pick passwords that just look like line noise. To crack yours, I might try 8 letter passwords, then 7 letters plus one symbol, etc. Still a daunting problem, but not *that* daunting.
It's no accident the first star systems found looked very unlike ours; we didn't have the capability to detect anything else.
More specific, but says it runs a real time OS from "Wind River." This is vxWorks, not linux. The page never mentions the word "linx"
Now of course, there are some machines where a linux install is a REAL pain, but most on "desktop" hardware sail right along.
I mean, really, what evidence do they have that hordes of people are buying machines with Linux pre-installed just to go through the pain of installing XP in order to save, what, $40?
Granted, a lot of machines shipped with Linux aren't running the version of Linux they shipped with, but I find their statement hard to believe.
One might wonder why we never had laws like this during the cold war when it was possible the entire country could be under attack, and millions die, during an election, but we need laws like this now when there is the possibility a few thousand people in a city or two could be under attack.
No, you still have a statistical effect if you want to draw any conclusions. Maybe no one switched and mozilla people clicked more and IE people clicked less. In any kind of counting experiment, the error on the number of counts is the square root of the number of counts. So, if you have a million page clicks, you can measure the share of browsers down to about 0.1%. For the 0.01% accuracy they seem to claim, it's 100 million hits.
Obviously, collecting a million browser clicks is pretty easy. Polling a million people on which deodorant they prefer is a lot more difficult, so these guys can have a small margin of error. But it can never actually be zero.
Are you kidding me? The first time I went over to the house of a friend who had an Atari 2600, I stayed for a few minutes (I thought). My mother was worried I hadn't made it home for dinner. I think I was there for 3 hours and lost all concept of time.
Sure, games now are amazing compared to what's come before. But the ones back then were too. Probably in 10 years, people will be talking about todays games as "cool, but not really interactive and photo realistic, so who wants to play them?"
That's a great analogy, but to me, it proves my point. :-)
Delivering 50 chickens and some brocolli to a restaurant doesn't put a meal on the table for a customer. In the same way, if I bring up a computer with Apache and MySQL, what do I have? A computer that says "Welcome to localhost. This computer is running Apache." A lot more is required if I want to get the computer to do something specific for me as it relates to my business or personal needs.
Are there 600 companies that are going to be the size of Microsoft or Oracle out there? No, there may not even be 5. But there is plenty of room for people to take existing platforms (Windows, Linux, Apache, databases, PHP, ASP, .....) and write new software to accomplish new tasks the big guys aren't interested in.